by Hari Kunzru
Despite being labelled a terrorist by governments and media agencies around the world, Arjun Mehta has admirers. According to Julia Schaffer of the Symantec Corporation, who has written extensively on Mehta’s programming techniques, the viruses he unleashed represent ‘a revolution in code’. The range of the innovations in the Leela variant viruses is, she says, ‘simply breathtaking’. Her research group has developed several applications based on Mehta polymorphic engines. ‘He was a black hat,’ she admits, ‘and that’s kind of a shame.’ Pinned to the corkboard by her desk she has Mehta’s picture, next to that of Claude Shannon.
The figures of the outlaw and the unrecognized genius are dear to many in the computer underground, and Mehta (combining both) has become a hero to a younger generation of disaffected hackers who feel their contributions are undervalued by the corporations and misunderstood by an ignorant and hostile public. Judging by the hagiographic tone of postings and zine articles, there is certainly no shortage of people who would be willing to assist the fugitive if he arrived on their doorstep. The supernatural perfection of his vanishing act has only added to his mystique. A series of autonomist tracts written in Italian and signed with his name caused a huge stir in left-wing European political circles. The hope that the genius hacker might also be a revolutionary was so strong in certain quarters that it has survived the revelation that the Leela papers were the creation of a group of Bologna-based radicals, who had appropriated Mehta’s name as a gesture and invited anyone else who wished to use it to do the same. In recent times ‘Arjun Mehta’ has authored statements on the food industry and the World Trade Organization. His Virugenix employee ID photo, the same one Julia Schaffer has by her desk, has been screen-printed on to t-shirts with humorous anti-capitalist slogans. Arjun Mehta, Gap loyalty-card holder and habitué of Seattle Niketown, is rapidly changing shape.
For a long time the police could not explain Kim Sun Hong’s presence in Arjun Mehta’s hotel room. The boy was from a conservative middle-class Korean family, a good student whose main interest was in computer gaming. Nothing in his previous behaviour suggested any propensity for violence, let alone terrorist connections. Questions abounded. Had Mehta met the boy in a chatroom? Was there a paedophile link? Had Hong been coerced into assisting Mehta in his ‘campaign to undermine America’ (Fox News)? Civil-rights groups accused the police of covering up their reckless use of firearms. Korean-Americans demonstrated outside San Diego City Hall. The claim that the teenager had ‘levelled his weapon’ at Officer Corey Studebaker was widely disbelieved.
A breakthrough in the police investigation came only when analysis of mall surveillance tapes recorded images of Hong and another boy following Mehta at a distance. Jordan Lee, a classmate, was identified as Hong’s companion and rapidly broke down under interrogation. The story he told police was so fantastic that for some days they refused to believe it. Could he and Hong, aged respectively thirteen and fourteen, really have been acting as bounty hunters?
The Criminal Investigation Bureau of the Korean National Police Agency substantiated the background to Lee’s tale. Logs subpoenaed from the Boba Fett Game Café did the rest. It seemed that five days before the Riverside raid, a computer centre in Seoul was hit by variant 04 (rhizomatic) Leela, not one of the more destructive strains but difficult and time-consuming to eradicate. The incident would barely have registered had the centre not housed the servers for ElderQuest, an online role-playing game vastly popular in Korea.
ElderQuest is set in a fantasy world with the usual furniture of dragons, wizardry, castles and large-breasted barbarian women. Players, of whom there are four million in Korea alone (almost one in twelve of the entire population), join adventuring groups, trying to gain the power and experience points which will allow them to move up in the social hierarchy of the cod-medieval land of Yerba. When not battling an array of monsters, players spend time in various kinds of social interaction. Marriages are contracted. Political factions are formed and dissolved. There is even a legal system, set up to curb the actions of those who abuse ElderQuest’s complicated barter system. Economists have written papers about the evolution and management of the game’s markets. Korean social scientists are starting to look seriously at so-called Virtual World Syndrome, whose sufferers appear conflicted about the value of their real and game-world experiences.
The Leela infection meant that the ElderQuest servers had to be shut down and reset from backups, an operation which took two days and involved some loss of data. Effectively, all the characters operating within the game-world found themselves back where they had been two days previously, minus all experience and attributes picked up in the interim.
This was annoying for many people but disastrous for the Honour Friend Sword Clan. The day before the shutdown their surprise attack had decimated the superior forces of Lord Farfhrd’s Power Blood Pledge Society, gaining them control of Castle Obsidian and a huge quantity of treasure. Now safely in possession of the Axe of Maldoror, S’tha the Muscular had attained the forty-fifth level in Swordsmanship and would henceforth receive tithes from all the lands around the castle and the nearby free city of Bigburgh. It was the greatest victory in the clan’s history. After the reboot the Power Blood Pledge, who now had foreknowledge of the attack, descended on S’tha’s camp under the protection of an Adamantine Shield spell and killed sixteen characters, including S’tha himself, who was reincarnated in Freetown as a first-level apprentice with three gold pieces, a knife and a small leather buckler. S’tha and the Honour Friend Sword were understandably angry.
S’tha (in real life 26-year-old Li Kwan Young, well known to Seoul police) had not simply lost imaginary status and treasure. So popular is ElderQuest that its potions, scrolls, weapons and armour have real-world value: the going rate on eBay for a good-quality summoning spell is over $80. Young, who had amassed an enormous magical armoury (allegedly through extortion of other players), had lost a genuine fortune.
Young wrote several outraged emails to the game administrators. He was told there was nothing they could do. In desperation he and several other players from Honour Friend Sword turned up at the offices of NambiSoft, the game’s owners, to demand the reinstatement of their victory. When security tried to remove them from the building, a scuffle broke out in the lobby and the police had to be called.
By any standards, the following day’s posting to the ElderQuest message scrolls was an escalation. Honour Friend Sword offered fireballs, invisibility lotions, the Stay Wand of Ha-Shek and other game goods to the value of 30,000 gold pieces to anyone prepared to ‘undertake a RL quest’ to ‘disincarnate’ the person who caused the server reset. Mehta’s picture was being widely circulated by the FBI. The amount of the bounty was huge. To the amazement of the police investigators, it appeared Jordan Lee was telling the truth. Every reality-challenged role player in the world had been out looking for Arjun Mehta. He and Hong were just the ones who got lucky. They had skipped school and tailed him to San Ysidro, checking his face against the FBI mugshot. To get the gun, they had traded Tiger Woods’s home phone number with a Thai kid who came into Boba Fett’s to play Starcraft. At the Riverside Motel, Jordan had got scared, and after a whispered argument Hong (who in the previous month had logged 210 hours connected to the ElderQuest servers as Peenar the Stealthy, an eighteenth-level footpad) had climbed through the window alone. At the critical moment Jordan was waiting on a street corner two blocks away. He did not see Mehta at any point after he came out on to the balcony.
Jordan Lee was never charged with anything, although Boba Fett’s computing equipment was confiscated, and it eventually lost its licence. As the only person to have spent time observing Mehta in the hours before his disappearance, Lee rapidly acquired celebrity status. He underwent hypnosis on television, testified before the Homeland Security Select Committee of the House of Representatives and now makes regular public appearances at gaming and paranormal conventions around the US.
A major area of disagreemen
t among Mehtologists is how Arjun made his escape from the Riverside Motel. Various methods have been proposed, ranging from the theory that he impersonated Consuelo Guttierez, an off-duty chambermaid inexplicably sighted at work that morning, to the possibility he spent several hours wedged above a ceiling panel in the bathroom. However he managed it, his trail went completely cold in San Ysidro, and most people believe he crossed the border, probably in disguise. There was no further activity on his bank account. He did not, despite careful surveillance, appear to make contact with family or known acquaintances. How is it possible, in a world of electronic trails, log files, biometrics and physical traces of every kind to slip so completely away? Researchers have tried to prove connections with the criminal underworld, or the various international terrorist organizations to which, in the first hysterical days of the manhunt, he was linked. So far, nothing convincing has emerged. Were there friends who might have provided assistance? One possible accomplice was the ‘pony-tailed man’ caught on camera at the outlet mall, whom many people have identified as Nicolai Petkanov, the boyfriend of the woman whose car Mehta stole when fleeing Redmond. A convicted virus writer, Petkanov denies ever having met Mehta, but confirms that it was a trace placed on a landline at the address he shared with Christine Rebecca Schnorr which led the FBI to the Riverside Motel. Schnorr has admitted a romantic relationship with Mehta, a relationship of which Petkanov was apparently aware. Whether this makes his cooperation in a plot to assist Mehta more or less likely is hard to know. Schnorr, confusingly, denies that she had any kind of conversation with Mehta after he left Redmond. She and Petkanov have both recently relocated to Mexico, where they intend to set up a body-modification parlour in Oaxaca.
Journalists researching Mehta’s background have focused on his use of the North Okhla Institute of Technology server as a test-bed and distribution node for his viruses. When they became established in new host machines, certain Leela variants even downloaded plug-ins from this site. The lack of security was universally condemned, and admissions for NOIT’s information-science courses have boomed. Unfortunately Mehta seems to have formed no strong personal bonds with anyone from his course, and interviews with former teachers and classmates have yielded few clues.
Aamir Khan, manager of Gabbar Singh’s Internet Shack and Mehta’s only known close friend, is considered the most likely source of help. Sought by police in connection with various offences under the Indian Penal Code relating to the distribution of pornography, Khan has not been seen since soon after Mehta’s identification as the originator of the Leela viruses. Did he organize fake papers for his friend, then fly him to a clinic in Shanghai for facial reconstruction? Did he send him through a network of mujahedin safehouses to an underground madrassa in Kandahar? Gabbar Singh’s is now a fancy-goods shop, much to the disappointment of the stream of teenage boys who turn up to hang around outside the door. The manager, disregarding the entrepreneurial opportunity staring him in the face, has hired a chowkidar to drive them away.
Mehta’s family no longer live in Noida. The media attention, not to mention the grief and worry about their son, led them to flee India for Australia, where they now stay close to their daughter and son-in-law in the Sydney suburb of Fairfield. Mr Mehta, who has retired from the world of business, refuses all interviews. Priti Chaudhuri and her husband Ramesh released a statement through their lawyer to the effect that they have not had contact with Arjun since he fled Redmond and do not believe in the ‘wilder accusations’ made against him.
Like Arjun Mehta, Leela Zahir has never reappeared. Despite the evidence that she had planned her exit, India went into hysterical mourning on hearing the news, as if their star were dead instead of missing. One fan announced that he would walk backwards from Bangalore to Madurai to propitiate God to bring her back. There were unconfirmed reports of people setting themselves on fire.
Tender Tough looked doomed, but, with a certain amount of coaxing from his backers, Rocky Prasad managed to swallow his artistic scruples about completing the film with another actress. The version which made it to the screen includes scenes in which the young dancer Shanti is seen only from behind, and throughout the film the character’s voice has been dubbed, yet it contains several moments which possess an extraordinary retrospective poignancy. The song ‘Now You See Me, Now You Don’t’, including the legendary battlements sequence, can still, after all this time, be heard blaring from every tea stall in the country. Frame by frame, people have searched it for some clue about Leela Zahir’s state of mind. Her Scottish ‘illness’ and her history of personal problems soon came into the public domain, providing weeks of fodder for the film magazines, but as the camera lunges towards the tiny figure dancing on top of the castle, it reveals no sign of sadness or disaffection. Quite the opposite: in no other performance does Leela look so completely, joyously engaged with the world. She is so alive that her imminent absence appears obscene, proof of a terrible and oppressive power over human life.
The film, it goes without saying, was a huge hit. Prasad, Iqbal and Rana were photographed drinking virgin coladas at the lavish première, held in a Mumbai hotel banqueting suite decorated to look like a Pacific Island. After ritual expressions of sorrow at Leela’s absence and a few minutes of vague embarrassment, things more or less proceeded as normal. Deals were struck, catty remarks were made behind glamorous backs, and everyone looked over each other’s shoulders as they chatted, in case something scandalous was occurring on the other side of the room. The film world knew they had lost something in Leela Zahir. They just didn’t know what they ought to feel about it.
A more honest reaction came from Leela’s people, the faithful cinema fans who had projected their desires on to her towering luminous face. Eighteen months after its release, Tender Tough was still showing daily at one Mumbai cinema. People had already started to refer to the missing actress as Leeladevi, and among the cinema-goers, Hindu and Muslim alike, her simplicity, her beauty and above all her supernatural absence had come to seem like holy qualities. Little votive pictures appeared on market stalls. In a village in Bihar, a boy was reported to have been miraculously cured of blindness while a pirated VHS of the film was being shown on the headman’s television.
How the film star vanished from the Clansman’s Lodge Hotel came to light only after the tragic death of the wife of media mogul Brent Haydon. During the eighteen months of her marriage, Gabriella Haydon-Caro had been a fixture on the European and American social circuits. She and her husband, who at fifty-five was gradually stepping down from the day-to-day running of his various interests, had described a glittering eastward path across the globe, from their Bel Air home to their ski lodge in Aspen, through the Grenadines, the Hamptons, Barcelona, San Tropez and finally Mykonos, where they chartered a yacht to take a group of friends on a three-week cruise around the Greek islands. Their progress was fawningly documented by European paparazzi, and several photographers witnessed the third Mrs Haydon’s death from Elia Beach, the nearest public vantage point to the Paloma’s mooring. It seemed impossible that she had not seen the jet ski skimming across the water. Indeed pictures appear to show her looking in its direction seconds before she dived from the deck of the yacht. She was killed instantly.
A few days after the body was flown to Firenze for cremation, a French lawyer stunned the world by announcing that two weeks previously Mrs Haydon had deposited with him a computer disk, with instructions that in the event of her death it be passed on to newspapers in the US and Europe. The disk turned out to contain a single document, an erratic and rambling narrative which is part autobiography, part diary of the first year of her marriage. She describes an unhappy early life, alienated from her father and unable to make friends because of her mother’s peripatetic lifestyle. Repeatedly she returns to her sister’s suicide. In one undated line, she writes, ‘Chaque jour plus vite: Caroline, moi.’ She appears to have married on a whim, meeting her husband when he came to view a penthouse in the building where she live
d with her former boyfriend. ‘I just wanted to go somewhere,’ she writes. ‘I didn’t really care where.’
Though affecting, most of the material is only of personal interest. The important passages concern the period just before she met her husband, when she was working as a film publicist and became involved in the Leela Zahir disappearance. The Indian media had developed a particular fascination for her because of a rumoured entanglement with Rajiv Rana. The document appears, in part, to be a statement to them, in which she confesses to helping Leela leave Scotland.
Mrs Haydon’s testament appears to show that Zahir’s disappearance was not abduction (as her mother claimed) or suicide, but a well-planned bid to ‘escape prison’. ‘Why would she stay?’ she writes. ‘She had nothing. It was a kind of prostitution.’ The idea that Leela Zahir, idol to the nation, was actually the ‘slave of her brothel-keeper mother’ shocked India profoundly. Leela’s suffering augmented her holiness, and angry mobs gathered outside several houses owned by members of the film community, burning Faiza Zahir’s Pali Hill residence to the ground in a night of rioting that spread across Mumbai and left several people dead. Faiza Zahir was abroad at the time, and now occasionally rings journalists from her new home in Dubai to denounce the ‘Caro bitch’ as a liar.
Gabriella Haydon writes that she was looking out of her window at the Clansman’s Lodge Hotel, when a face appeared at it looking ‘like Cathy in Wuthering Heights’. Since she was on an upstairs floor, this was quite frightening. As she stared in horror, she realized it was Leela Zahir, who had somehow climbed up on to the roof and then down a drainpipe to tap on her window. She let the girl in and found that she was warmly dressed, and carrying a small backpack. To her surprise Leela ‘hugged me and said I was her only friend. We sat on the bed and she told me about her life and the things her mother made her do. I was horrified.’