The Mysterious Island Girl of Machine #36482.

A little over a week ago, my work laptop, a MacBook, had an unfortunate run-in with the twin forces of gravity and impact (in layman’s terms: it fell off a desk and landed badly). After a brief, brave attempt to continue running despite its injury, it collapsed into a heap of whirring noises and question-mark based icons.

After a trip to whatever magical land MacBooks go to when they’re convalescent, it came back with a reformatted hard drive, working faster than ever. It was unfortunate to lose the files that were on the hard drive, but I’m fairly certain that all of the truly important and hard-to-replace items had long ago been backed up to our server.

The strange and mysterious thing is this: The Island Girl you see above. She’s on the machine now. She popped up when I performed a spotlight search for a program that did not, incidentally, include any of the letters in the phrase “Island Girl.”

I considered that perhaps she was a default background image pre-installed in the OS as a possible desktop image, but that doesn’t make sense, since all such default images are more like this:

Stock imagery or patterns of innocuous nature, pretty and in no way offensive. Certainly, Apple would not pre-package an image of a real person who isn’t even legally able to grant the consent for use of her image. And certainly not so amateur and poorly lit a photo.

I don’t know who this girl is. The hard drive has just recently been clean-slated, so where did she come from? Why would she be placed in the machine and who placed her there?

I have several deeply scary theories that I will not share with you. But if you are or you happen to know who this girl is, please let me know. Thank you.