preface

My friend Asim and I were two nerds growing up in Taif, Saudi Arabia (we attended a Pakistani embassy school). In the fourth grade, we once tried to pick the lock on an abandoned cabinet in a storage space. We couldn’t open it with paper clips like we saw on TV, so I asked him to bring a Philips screwdriver the next day. I have wished countless times that I hadn’t. We took the lock off the cabinet and found a bunch of discarded documents inside. I wanted to leave, but Asim insisted on staying and screwing the lock back onto the cabinet. He got caught by a teacher. I took refuge inside a hiding spot in the school. I was soon located afterward as Asim was pressured to reveal who “helped" him break the cabinet lock. Asim’s family moved away soon after. I only spoke to or heard from him again once, when he dropped by before leaving town to return some Urdu novels we had exchanged. Urdu novels were our shared love. Neither of us had access to video games or computers, and being “Urdu-medium" kids, we had a minimal grasp of English. Since then, my life has taken many twists and turns, as I’m sure his did, too. Some five years after our great heist, I used my first computer, a transformative event in my life. Asim and I had pretended years earlier to know how computers worked. Now I had a real one to learn about.