My name is Bill. I spent fifteen years as an intelligence officer with the Australian Federal Police. I built the world's first computer forensics capability. I caught hackers before the world knew they existed.
Then I wrote four books. Not a series. Something stranger.
A true crime memoir. A children's story. A literary decrypt of a song that has haunted millions of listeners for nearly fifty years. And a reckoning with what AI is doing to power itself.
They are all connected by the same thread: I live in the world others only visit.
When I joined the AFP, the organisation was new. The laws were new. There were so many of them, it was like reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Most people skimmed. I studied. I read what the law actually said, not what everyone assumed it said.
But that was only the beginning.
I could see into the future. I knew hackers would exist — even though they were not yet born. And when they arrived, they were ghosts. They had identities within the digital world, but nothing in the real world. No Birth Certificate. No Social Security number. No address. They were invisible to law enforcement.
So I did something nobody had done before. I used my training from Monash University Computer Science to infiltrate the digital world. I became a ghost among ghosts.
That is where the Twilight Zone comes in.
People say Glenn Frey and I were fans of The Twilight Zone. That is true — but it is not the whole truth. We did not just watch it. We lived in it. We could not just see alternate worlds — we could inhabit them. We could step into a reality where the rules were different, where identity was fluid, where the thing you assumed was solid turned out to be a mask.
That is what I did with hackers. That is what Frey did with Hotel California. He built a world inside a song. I read it the way I read the digital world — as a place where nothing is what it seems.
And I was the one who watched my daughter Liza look into a dark tablet and refuse to look away. She taught me that courage does not begin with knowledge. It begins with curiosity. That is where The Computer Ghost came from — a fairy tale based on true events, seen through the eyes of a child who asked "why?" and did not stop until she got an answer.
You can start anywhere. But if you read one, you will read them all.
