Cyber Crime

She picked up the four packs of sleeping pills from her bedside table. Instead of crushing them and
mixing them with water, she decided to take them one by one, because there is always a gap between
intention and action, and she wanted to feel free to turn back half way. However, with each pill she
swallowed, she felt more convinced: after five minutes the packs were empty.

Since she didn’t know exactly how long it would take her to lose consciousness, she had placed on the
bed that month’s issue of a French magazine,Homme , which had just arrived in the library where she
worked. She had no particular interest in computer science, but, as she leafed through the magazine, she
came across an article about a computer game (one of those CD-Roms), created by Paulo Coelho, a
Brazilian writer she had happened to meet at a lecture in the caf? at the Grand Union Hotel. They had
exchanged a few words and she had ended up being invited by his publisher to join them for supper.
There were a lot of people there, though, and they hadn’t had a chance to talk in depth about anything.

The fact that she had met the author, however, led her to think that he was part of her world, and that
reading an article about his work could help pass the time. While she was waiting for death, Veronika
started reading about computer science, a subject in which she was not in the least bit interested, but then
that was in keeping with what she had done all her life, always looking for the easy option, for whatever
was nearest to hand. Like that magazine, for example.

To her surprise, though, the first line of text shook her out of her natural passivity (the tranquillizers had
not yet dissolved in her stomach, but Veronika was, by nature, passive), and, for the first time in her life,
it made her ponder the truth of a saying that was very fashionable amongst her friends: ‘nothing in this

Underneath an illustration of the computer game, the journalist...