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17.

The snow that had carpeted the forest in white had already melted by the time my father drove back over the ridge, his truck jolting over the mud-stricken potholes. I could hear him coming from a half mile away. I arranged myself at the kitchen table with a book, my back to the front door so that I wouldn’t have to look up and greet him when he came in. I didn’t want my face to betray my relief that he was home, or my guilt about the hours I had wasted on the internet while he was gone, or my fury that I’d been left for so long in the first place.

And I was angry; I’d needed a stranger on the other side of the country to point that out to me. It felt like a curtain had been pulled aside, allowing me to see my life from the outside. And for the first time, instead of being proud of my self-sufficiency, I was righteously furious that my father hadn’t taken care ofme.

I heard the door swing open, felt a cold draft pierce through the heat of the cabin. My father swore softly under his breath as he scraped the mud off his boots. I didn’t turn around as he came up behind me and peered over my shoulder at my book. The outside air clung to him, a damp aura with an undertone of moss and dirty socks.

“You aren’t going to say hello?”

“Hello.” I turned a page in my book, stuck the pencil nub in my mouth and chewed it thoughtfully, pretending that I was absorbed in vector analysis.

“Are you not talking to me for some reason?”

I flipped another page in my book, not seeing a word. My father stood over my shoulder, waiting for me to turn around and greet him properly. I couldn’t make myself do it. Something critical in our dynamic had shifted; I could feel it in the charged air around us. For the first time, I realized that I had the power to piss him off.

Finally, he turned away and began unpacking his bags, methodically removing each item and stacking it on the floor. Books, sacks of beans and rice, a pyramid of cans, a box full of something metallic and rattling. “Well, all I can figure is you’re having some kind of hormonal fit. Just let me know when your period is over.”

I turned to watch him, my eyes hot and damp with a sudden rage. “Ten days,” I shot at him. “You were gone ten days, Dad. And it was snowing. What if I had run out of food? Or wood?”

“Did you?”

I remained stubbornly silent.

He came over to me and placed a reassuring hand on my head, ruffling my hair. “You know I checked the food stores before I left. We’re stocked. And there’s no way you were going to run through all that wood. Don’t be silly. There’s a phone for emergencies. Nothing was going to happen that doesn’t happen every day.”

“But what if—” I reached for something, anything, to thrust at him, and landed somewhere I hadn’t expected. “What if I was lonely?”

An odd expression passed over my father’s face, his brows knitting together with puzzled concern. As if loneliness were an emotion that had never occurred to him. And saying it out loud made me realize that it wasn’t an emotion that had ever occurred to me, either. At least not until I had a portal to the world outside, an awareness of everything that was happening that I was not a part of. Life was a party to which I had not received an invitation but hadn’t missed at all until I was made aware of the event.

“Companionship is a crutch. Learning to be alone is the most critical life skill of all—haven’t I taught you that? Because when you rely on other people, for emotional support or intellectual engagement or entertainment or just survival, you are weak. You are vulnerable. Because it means that you will suffer when it’s taken away—and it inevitably will be. You should never rely on anyone.”

“Not even you?” I shot at him.

“Not even me.” His face was stony.

I turned away, not wanting him to see how red my face was or the tears collecting in the corners of my eyes. I walked over to the table and opened the laptop, fired up the modem. We sat in silence, listening to it squawk and shriek like some sort of electronic pterodactyl.

“Here,” I said and shoved the laptop toward him. “Here’s your precious manifesto.”

By any standards, the website for The Luddite Manifesto was utterly unexceptional. I’d created it as a GeoCities home page, since it was free and foolproof; the address marked me as a newbie, but I was a newbie, and didn’t know any better yet. GeoCities was broken down into thematic categories, which they called “neighborhoods,” though I couldn’t imagine we were going to be meeting anyone camped out at the surrounding Web addresses, making small talk or throwing virtual block parties. I’d toyed with the idea of settling into Area 51, just because of Mulder; but ultimately landed on an address in Capitol Hill.

The page itself was as rudimentary as I could make it. Although in my most petulant moments I considered throwing in some blink tags or a few headlines in Comic Sans—just to see how my father might react—I’d ultimately done exactly what I knew he’d like best. Gray background, headlines in 36-point Arial, a front page with an introduction and then hyperlinks to each subsequent section. My father’s words, in dense blocks of black text. The only design liberty I’d taken was to slip in an occasional hyperlink to elucidate some of my father’s more grandiose terminology. Corporate overlords linked to a fan page devoted to Scrooge McDuck. Apocalyptic future to a website about the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Genetic engineering to a photograph of a square tomato. Digital pornography to a Star Trek fan fiction page with homoerotic stories featuring Kirk and Spock.

What did I think I was doing, tinkering with my father’s text like that? Was I trying to undermine him? It would be convenient to think so now—and it’s true, that some of my winking references undermined the serious intent of his manifesto (Scrooge McDuck, I knew, would particularly irk him)—but the truth was that I was still in awe of him. I wanted to believe that this document was the apotheosis of his years of careful study, that he knew something that I did not, and that his philosophy was finally going to be embraced by the world at large. I didn’t want to mock him.

Despite the nagging voices in my head, I still wanted him to be right. Because if he wasn’t, what had so many years of my life been all about? Why had I just obligingly spent a week of my existence uploading his words to the internet, sentence by painstaking sentence? If he wasn’t right, what else did I have to clingto?

And yet. I had never before seen all of my father’s ideas strung together quite like this; and reading through the manifesto had filled me with a lingering unease. Parts of it read more like science fiction than plausible reality— the hubris of technologists is driving us toward a future of artificial intelligence in which humans themselves will become utterly irrelevant, reduced to grunt work while our computer overlords do all the jobs we once held —and others read, alarmingly, like a call to arms. We must rise together and fight back against the march of technology, even if it requires violence, to eradicate the voices that are blindly leading us toward our own inevitable destruction.

Whose voices, exactly, did my father think needed to be “eradicated”? It’s just hyperbole, I had reassured myself, as I typed up these last few paragraphs. It’s not like he wants technologists to die.

Didhe?

My father skimmed through the pages of the site, clicking on a few of the links to see where they led. He hesitated when he saw that I’d linked educational system brainwashing to the home page of Harvard University, and he threw me a look. Then he laughed, almost begrudgingly, and I knew he approved.

“How do we know when people start to read it?” he asked.

I pointed to the lower corner of the website, where I’d installed a hit counter. You are visitor 0001. Don’t forget to sign our guest book! “That counts the number of visitors. And they can leave a message if they like it.”

“Can you tell if it’s been seen by government officials? Figure it out from the IP addresses?”

“That’s way beyond my skill set, Dad.”

“Well. I guess we’ll know the feds saw it when they show up at our door to arrest me.” This prospect seemed to delight him, although I was pretty sure you couldn’t get arrested for what he’d written in the manifesto, no matter how anti-government it was. As far as I was aware, the Constitution still contained the First Amendment.

He patted me on the shoulder. “Good work,” he said and picked up the laptop. He walked over to the door to his study and began fiddling with the new padlock. My stomach knotted up as I realized what he was doing.

“Wait, where are you going with the laptop?”

He stopped and turned back to look at me. “I’m putting it in a safe place. No need for you to be messing around with it anymore, is there? Your work here is done.”

“But—” I could hear my own voice: needling, whiny, pathetic. I shut up before I could say anything that would further implicate myself. I couldn’t exactly tell him about the hours I’d been spending reading feminist Web zines with names like Maxi and Floozy; or scrolling through fan sites for TV shows I’d never even watched, like The Smurfs and Battlestar Galactica; or picking my way—titillated and nauseated—through the smutty posts on alt.sex.stories. I couldn’t possibly reveal that instead of studying my Marxist theory while he’d been gone, I had instead been killing the hours chatting with a total stranger in San Francisco whose name might or might not be Lionel. I couldn’t explain the endorphin hit that I got from just surfing the Web and witnessing the weirdness of human interests in all their myriad forms.

I couldn’t explain how much I craved my newly minted connection with the outside world.

From under his wild eyebrows, my father’s eyes were coolly studying me, as if I were a mouse who’d crept into his lair and he was waiting to see in which direction I’d run. I realized, with a sudden sinking recognition, that he knew exactly what was going through my mind. Of course he did. Wasn’t that what his manifesto was all about? How technology was enabling our worst, basest impulses; suppressing our intellect; causing our disconnection from nature and the “real world”? Eliminating our humanity and replacing it with compulsive consumption and empty connection. Touché, Dad. He’d left me alone with internet access for ten days; he had known from the start exactly what would happen. It had been a test, to see if I was strong enough to resist temptation. I failedit.

“You see why I need to take it away, don’t you?” His words were soft, girded with empathy and disappointment.

I said nothing. I knew he was right.

And yet, even as he vanished into his study with the laptop under his arm, my next thought was, He’s going to leave again soon. He always did. And the minute he drove out of the driveway, I would somehow find a way to break into his office and get right back online.