The webcam light on the Dell’s monitor bezel flickered to life. A new window opened: Windows Photo Gallery . And it was showing a live feed from his basement. But Leo wasn't in the frame. The frame was empty.

The BIOS recognized the disc. The familiar, throbbing gray Windows logo appeared, but the loading bar didn’t move like it should. It stuttered, hesitated, then lurched forward.

Mar 22, 2008: Aero Glass is showing me things. Reflections of a room that isn’t mine. A man in a gray coat standing behind me. I live alone.

Instead of the cheerful “Completing installation…” screen, the text flickered. “Please wait while Windows prepares to… remember.”

He just stared at the screen as the final line of the text file appended itself in real time: Dec 11, 2009 – 3:16 AM update: New user found. Indexing complete. Welcome home, Leo. The screen flickered. The Windows Vista logo pulsed once, like a heartbeat. And then the fan went silent. The hard drive spun down. The monitor displayed a single, perfect, black screen with a blinking white cursor.

The desktop loaded. The gadgets on the sidebar were wrong. The clock showed 3:15 AM—it was 11:47 PM. The CPU meter was pegged at 100%, but the processes list was empty. And the Recycle Bin icon was full, even though the drive was freshly formatted.

Leo found it on the last shelf of the last aisle of “E-waste & More,” a graveyard of beige plastic and tangled copper. Buried under a broken DVD-ROM drive and a stack of AOL Free Trial discs was a single, unmarked jewel case. Inside, no manual, no registration card. Just a disc that shimmered with an oily, silver-violet hue.