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filled with newspaper clippings, letters, and other evidence that some serious mental illness flowed through the females on her mother’s side of the family.
    Her great-great grandmother Alice lost her husband not to the Great War, but to the influenza pandemic that swept through the ranks of the newly mobilized as they geared up for the battlefields of Europe. He died on Armistice Day as the rest of the country celebrated, breathing his last to a first year medical student in a tent city near Boston Harbor, still waiting to ship out.
    Alice checked into the honeymoon suite of the Waldorf Astoria in New York City on Christmas Eve, threw wide the casement windows and lay down on the bed to await her wintry dissolution, which came mercifully quickly. Her infant child was found under a coat in the closet by a chambermaid several hours after her mother’s body had been removed, the baby girl still sleeping and warm as toast.
    That baby grew up to birth sixteen children, seven of whom were killed in a fire their mother was suspected of setting; nothing was ever proved, and she lived to the ripe old age of ninety-seven, as dotty as a shithouse rat to the end.
    Sarah’s grandmother was also long-lived, and the only one of the ancients Sarah met personally. She was also the sanest, and Sarah loved her dearly. As a child she spent several summers at the old woman’s house, which smelled of oatmeal cookies and baby oil, and Granny Slaton would regale her with stories of her days with Sarah’s grandfather after World War II.
    Sarah loved the old woman so much that she became terrified her grandmother would die right under her nose, and so used to sneak into her bedroom after she’d gone to sleep and listen in the doorway until she made sure the old woman was still breathing. Sometimes she’d wait for hours until she was absolutely certain, and then trudge back to bed as the sun rose.
    She didn’t find out until much later that Granny Slaton almost never slept through the night, and had very likely been wide-awake as her granddaughter worried over her.
    Perhaps the old woman wasn’t as sane as all that.
    By the time Granny Slaton actually got a good night’s sleep, she never woke up, and while Sarah could never be sure if she had actually been standing in her grandmother’s doorway just watching the woman at the moment of her death, she certainly blamed herself as if she had.
    It was the summer of her sixth year, the summer all her nightmares and obsessions were born. The summer of ideas, ideas that would eventually impact the world.
    After that first sexual relationship, Sarah forgot all about boys and focused on computer science, then coding, and then hacking, which is why her father was constantly risking his career to try and keep his daughter out of jail. She started small, poking around into various state agencies’ email systems to see what people were saying about her father (he was almost universally liked and respected) and finally branching out into the lives and bank accounts of her neighbors.
    She stole passport numbers and sold them to Ukrainians, dabbled in hardware virtualization, and even traveled to Europe for the weekend at the age of sixteen for a Black Hat security conference on the county dime, not that the county knew about it. Most of the time she left no traces of her work, but it was always with the neighbors that she got sloppy.
    Even so, none of this really engaged her; Sarah had developed the attention span of a five year-old with ADHD.
    Speaking of which, she also sold Oxycontin prescriptions for a while.
    Not all of her pastimes were illegal. She took to trolling the Internet to embarrass guys who preyed on vulnerable women, allowing them to do most of the work as she watched with bemusement.
    Sarah idolized her father, who was incredibly busy except for when she was in trouble, and she resented her mother those crazy and often suicidal ancestors who she couldn’t seem to rid from her mind. She