"Make haste slowly." Suetonius, "Lives of the Ceasars"
Some of you will maybe remember me mentioning a girl from
Slovenia by the name of Lucky Lady that contacted me about 18
months ago for the first time. She has occurred in various
installations of the ST NEWS virus column.
As you may recall, she had decided to contact me in a reaction
to my "Ultimate Virus Killer", which had in some way caused her
to start a kind of 'competition' with her designing and spreading
computer viruses and me trying to find and kill them. She sent me
each of her creations so that I could update the "Ultimate Virus
Killer" recognition algorithms. Although I certainly didnt't
approve of all these things she did nor the way she involved me
in it, all I could do was play along with the game. I couldn't
contact her in return, because she always sent her packages
anonymously.
As 1994 was coming to its close, it became apparent that she had
left the Atari community and was now concentrating more on the PC
side of things. Also, quite suddenly she contacted me via
electronic mail. Though I still didn't know her name, I could now
at least send messages back to her. Especially with her having
left the Atari virus creation scene, something happened which I
had not considered possible: Our email messages became more
casual and even personal.
Gradually I found our that her real name was Katja Kladnik, who
had lost her parents in the Yugoslavian war, though Slovenia was
now no longer a war zone. She now lived with foster parents and
studied pyschology at the University of Ljubljana, the capital of
Slovenia. She was - I know this may sound strange to some of you,
especially those struck by any of the viruses she has created - a
really fascinating person who had a lot of hidden depths to her
personality. We exchanged email messages with quite some
regularity, usually involving topics like music, culture and,
occasionally, viruses. I always wondered why she had found it so
challenging to create computer viruses and start this semi-
friendly "virus war" with me, a question that she could never
really reply to satisfactorily.
Around spring of this year I noticed her messages getting
increasingly gloomy and depressing. She even said, at several
occasions, that she wouldn't mind being dead or something. I
never knew what triggered this doom and gloom, though it might
have been her boyfriend leaving her some time earlier. There was
nothing I could do about it, either. Believe me, I tried.
When I emailed to her to ask how she was doing, somewhere around
the middle of June, I got a message back after a while from
someone else who said that, on June 3rd, 11:53 CET, Katja had
died at Ljubljana's main hospital of an Atropine and Scopolamine
overdose. Suicide, most likely. She was 22.
Despite the fact that, in theory, Katja "Lucky Lady" Kladnik had started off as something like an enemy, in the course of our correspondence she had become a kind of friend. Especially after she had left the Atari scene, we opened up to each other and I no longer felt that being in contact with her was in some way morally incorrect what with my being a virus killer programmer and her a (by then ex-) Atari virus coder. During the last one or two months she was to me not a virus coder at all, but instead a sad young woman that needed attention and love badly.
Katja, despite the fact that we started off on a really wrong foot, you will be on my mind always; not as a virus coder but as the enchanting and fascinating friend that you gradually became.
This issue of ST NEWS is dedicated to the memory of Katja Kladnik.