At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person's job. So I managed the team, and it was a full-time job; like most Silicon Valley programmers, my team seemed to live in a perpetual crisis of crashed Porsches, infidelities, bad love affairs, parental hassles, and drug reactions, all superimposed on a forced-march work schedule with all-night marathons fueled by cases of Diet Coke and Sun chips.

But the work was exciting, in a cutting-edge field. We wrote what are called distributed parallel processing or agent-based programs. These programs model biological processes by creating virtual agents inside the computer and then letting the agents interact to solve real-world problems. It sounds strange, but it works fine. For example, one of our programs imitated ant foraging-how ants find the shortest path to food-to route traffic through a big telephone network. Other programs mimicked the behavior of termites, swarming bees, and stalking lions. It was fun, and I would probably still be there if I hadn't taken on some additional responsibilities. In my last few months there, I'd been put in charge of security, replacing an outside tech consultant who'd had the job for two years but had failed to detect the theft of company source code, until it turned up in a program being marketed out of Taiwan. Actually, it was my division's source code-software for distributed processing. That was the code that had been stolen.

We knew it was the same code, because the Easter eggs hadn't been touched. Programmers always insert Easter eggs into their code, little nuggets that don't serve any useful purpose and are just put there for fun. The Taiwanese company hadn't changed any of them; they used our code wholesale. So the keystrokes Alt-Shift-M-9 would open up a window giving the date of one of our programmers' marriage. Clear theft.

Of course we sued, but Don Gross, the head of the company, wanted to make sure it didn't happen again.