tant, he was able to send some of it back home, to sponsor kids at the same missionary school that had given him a pathway out of his village.

A thousand miles apart, Tumpati and Schultz had no sense that their worlds were now connected. They were merely nodes on a vast network of another man's creation, each unable to see beyond the limits of his own attachment point. Neither paid any special notice to a request transmitted across that network on August 27, 2008. It arrived first to Tumpati: an order from a customer named "Sarah Johnson," placed on a website called cheaprxmeds.net, then bounced through RX Limited's systems to Tumpati's screen. The order was for ninety pills of Fioricet, retail price $170. On the medical questionnaire Tumpati glanced at for no more than a few seconds, Johnson had listed the reason for her purchase as "mi- graine," the condition for which Fioricet was usually prescribed. Tumpati marked it approved and moved on as it was uploaded back into the digital ether. Hours later, after a virtual trip from Canada to Israel to the Philippines and back, the order arrived on a computer at Charles Schultz's Medicine Mart, in Monroe, Wis- consin. There a technician saw the prescription and queued it for filling. A white-coated pharmacist pulled down a green bottle, smoothed on a label bearing Tumpati's name, slid the exact num- ber of oblong pills inside, and dropped the bottle into a FedEx envelope. The preprinted label was addressed to a FedEx office mailbox in Minneapolis, down the street from the DEA.