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15.

I woke up to discover that it had snowed in the night. My breath was visible in clouds above my bed as I lay there, under the quilts, shivering with the cold. The forest was deathly silent—the construction crews had finally moved on, their mission accomplished. When I went out to the kitchen to light the woodstove, I found a stack of papers sitting by the side of the closed laptop. I lifted the first page and read THE LUDDITE MANIFESTO by Saul Williams.

In 1812, British workers known as Luddites rose up against the new automated weaving machines that threatened their jobs, a bloody revolt that pitted impoverished artisans against greedy entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, the Luddites did not win their battle against their era’s technology, and the resulting industrial revolution led to centuries of inequity and suffering. Today, nearly 200 years later, we find ourselves in a nearly identical position, with new technologies threatening our very way of life. Once again, it’s time to take a stand. This time, we cannot lose.

I skimmed further. The material was familiar—he’d covered similar ground in his essays for Libertaire —and yet it seemed like he’d finally coalesced his disparate thoughts into one cohesive worldview. A call to arms. But who was he calling?

The world today has lost its mind, and it can all be traced back to the rise of technology. The consequence of the ever-forward march of “progress” has been a society whose citizens are greatly suffering and aren’t even aware of it. The more we continue to replace a life of value with the “virtual” life, the less satisfaction we derive from our existence, resulting in a world in which citizens are anesthetized by pharmaceuticals and entertainment, living entirely in their heads rather than in a tangible, physical world.

Reading this, I realized, with a spasm of guilt, that I hadn’t read a book since the internet arrived at our house. I hadn’t gone on a walk in the woods, or sketched the deer in the meadow, or played a game of chess with my father. I’d abandoned everything that we valued, seduced by the infinite delights of the Web. Photos of strangers’ children and webcams that showed the weather in Austin and all the news you could read for free. Less than a month, and it had already turned me into a zombie. I was living proof of my father’s prescience.

So maybe I was the one that my father was calling. His daughter, so quick to set aside everything he’d spent a lifetime carefully teaching me. I pushed away the laptop with a spasm of self-loathing.

Where was my father, anyway? I walked over to his bedroom, knocked, and then pushed the door open: His bed was neatly made, his slippers set at the end of the bed, a glass of water forgotten on the floor next to the stack of books he was currently reading. I checked the titles: Fundamentals of Industrial Problem Solving and The State and Revolution .

The truck wasn’t in the driveway. The tire impressions in the drive were already filled with snow, which meant that he must have left at some point in the middle of the night. I wondered what might have set him off at such a strange hour. It probably wasn’t good, whatever it was.

I wished he’d taken me with him.

I went back to the table and opened the laptop. Inside, I found a note scribbled on a piece of graph paper sitting on top of the keyboard. Please type up manifesto and put on internet. Back in a few days. Dad .

The stack of typed pages was dauntingly thick. A week’s worth of transcription alone, plus more for formatting for the internet. Why hadn’t my father just written it with the damn laptop, instead of his useless typewriter? Maybe this was why he had snuck out in the middle of the night: so that I wouldn’t be able to complain.

On the bright side, his departure meant that I would finally have the opportunity to break into his study and dig around in his desk. If I could just find something else with my mother’s name on it—her death certificate, perhaps, with the name of the town where she’d died, and a last name—I could look up her obituary and get more information about her.

With more information to plug into a search engine, I could stop torturing myself with the question of whether she might even be still alive.

I grabbed a paper clip and headed for the study door, then stopped abruptly, my breath sticking in my throat: My father had added a bolt to the door and padlockedit.

I hit the door with the flat of my hand. And again, and again, until my breath came fast and the flesh on my palm began to bleed. Had he figured out that I’d snooped in his desk? Maybe he didn’t know how much I knew, but one thing was for certain: I was being punished for something .

I picked up the phone and dialed Heidi. We hadn’t spoken since our last unsettling conversation, and I wasn’t sure if the silence was more about her or me; but I needed someone to talk to. She answered, breathless, on the first ring. “Jocelyn?”

“No. It’s Jane. Who’s Jocelyn?”

“Oh.” Was that disappointment that I heard in her voice? But whatever it was, she recovered with the next breath. “She’s a girl I met yesterday when we went in for a tour of Gallatin High. She drives a Mustang, isn’t that cool? She invited me to join the debate club when I start school after the new year.”

“Debate club?” I felt the gulf between us, already so daunting, opening up even further. “I wouldn’t think you’d be into arguing for the sake of arguing. Maybe you can take lessons from my dad.”

“I’m nothing like your father, Jane. That’s not even funny.”

The distaste in her words shut my mouth entirely. I could hear her breath, measured and tight, on the other end of the line. “How was your college visit?” I finally asked.

“It was awesome. I’m thinking I might rush when I get there.” I had no idea what this meant and was too embarrassed to ask. “Hey—did you ask your dad about the whole name thing?”

“I tried. It didn’t go well, and now I think he’s mad.”

“When isn’t he mad?” I listened for pity in her words but all I could hear was impatience. “Look, Jane, I have to go. Jocelyn was going to call me and I want to make sure the phone isn’t busy, OK? I’ll ring you later this week. Promise.”

The phone went dead. I thought about flinging the receiver across the room but if it broke I’d have no way to call anyone. Then again, who else was there to call if Heidi wasn’t particularly interested in answering? I’d never felt so alone.

With nothing else left to do, I sat down at the computer, pulled the first sheet of my father’s manifesto toward me, and dutifully started typing.