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33.

And so, life began anew.

For the first time in my existence, I was part of a collective “we.” And yes, I was just a tiny cog in a big machine—the lowliest code monkey in the room—but still, I was part of something new, something that was being invented all around me. Every week, it seemed, there was a new product launch, a new website, a redesign using new programming breakthroughs. At Signal, it was impossible to feel small, when what we were building felt so expansive.

And I lovedit.

I could delve into the minutiae of my job for you, and how in my first weeks in San Francisco I was thrown into the deep end and had to learn to swim fast. How I quickly learned to mark up HTML and navigate online scheduling calendars and parse an entirely new set of computer terms. How I spun a quasi-truthful story for my new coworkers about how I’d moved from rural Montana in order to get a job in tech after meeting Lionel online; and how I gave my employers my very real Social Security number and birth certificate as identification, cementing my new identity as my original self. How I ended up working directly with the girl with the butterfly tattoo—Brianna, who ran the feminist Web zine Floozy on the side and was delighted to hear that I’d read it—but who had grown up in rural Tennessee and was therefore patient with my ignorance. How I was thrillingly given my own desk, and my own Power Mac computer, thus anchoring my tiny toehold in this brave new world. How I found myself spending far more than sixty hours a week at the office, because what else could I possibly be doing that was more interesting than what was happening in the office anyway?

But that isn’t the part of the story anyone is ever interested in, so I might as well elide a bit.

Needless to say, I spent so much time at Signal that Brianna began to joke that I must be sleeping under my desk. I wasn’t. Lionel had found me a sublet in his roommate’s ex-girlfriend’s cousin’s apartment, two blocks away from his own apartment in the Lower Haight. I slept under the eyelet coverlet of a medical student named Megan, who was currently spending a semester in Africa, doing research with AIDS patients. Her room still smelled like her—laundry soap and dried rose petals—and the mirror was barely visible because there were so many photographs shoved into the frame, mostly of Megan with her arms flung around women whose smiles revealed perfect teeth. It felt like I was squatting inside someone else’s existence. But! She had cable TV in her bedroom, which was my definition of nirvana. My temporary roommates were also med students, both a decade older than me and both named Heather; we mumbled greetings at each other in the kitchen when I was making my spaghetti and scrambled eggs, and that was about the extent of our interaction.

The number of things I actually knew began to grow; and although they were still vastly outnumbered by the things I didn’t yet understand, I at least didn’t feel quite as clueless as I had when I got off that Greyhound bus. I was a sponge, ready to soak up every possible drop of modern life. I lifted a notebook from Signal’s supply closet in order to jot down every reference my new coworkers made—JenniCam, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Wu-Tang Clan, Beanie Babies, Baz Luhrmann, JonBenét Ramsey, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Orbitz—and then spent every spare minute watching television and listening to the radio and surfing the internet, giving myself a crash course in modern pop culture.

There was so much to learn, and I wanted to know it all, immediately. The more I filled my brain with fresh information, the less space there was to think about the mother I’d failed to find, and the father I’d run away from, and the horrors of Seattle, and the authorities that were out there looking for Jane Williams. Already, just a month after my departure from Montana, my entire life there was starting to feel like a slowly fading dream, foggy and ephemeral compared to the sharp-edged glitter of my new San Francisco existence.

If I felt pangs of homesickness on occasion—for the frozen dew dancing, diamond-like, on the tips of the wild grass; for the tawny spring fawns, tripping down to our pond; for the smell of woodsmoke in my father’s hair, his hand on my shoulder—I buried these feelings under an avalanche of pop culture. Toy Story. “Macarena.” Smashing Pumpkins. Scream. SimCity. O. J. Simpson. Frappuccino. Paul Frank. “Wannabe.” People ’s Sexiest Man Alive . As if becoming an avid pupil of this fascinating new world would help me forget that I wasn’t quite sure exactly who I was anymore.

In my free time, I walked the streets of San Francisco until the treads of my tennis shoes were slick from wear and my thigh muscles grew taut from climbing the hills. Seven square miles: It sounded like such a small city to master and yet I had barely seen a thing. And so I’d walk up through the damp paths of Golden Gate Park and out to Pacific Heights to ogle the grand Beaux Arts mansions, and then turn down to the fish-scented streets of Chinatown and out through the taquerias and nightclubs of the Mission District and then back up to my home in the Lower Haight. Staring at every person I passed, trying to take in all the iterations of human existence I’d never before imagined.

I absorbed all this overwhelming stimuli until it felt like I’d shot magma into my veins—a hot and itchy sensation, but not an entirely unpleasant one. I tried to ignore the insistent voice in the back of my head that warned me that something bad could happen at any moment: that, if not diligent, I might get hit by a bus / robbed / identified by a police officer / kidnapped and sold into slavery / raped. That voice, I knew, belonged to my father— cities are cesspools for criminals and drug addicts and the insane —and I was done listening to him. So I defiantly wandered the streets alone even at night, stepping over the drunks passed out in the doorways as casually as someone who had been doing this their entire life.

It’s a miracle I wasn’t ever mugged.

As I walked, I would keep an eye out for juice bars, remembering what Desi had told me that night at McDonald’s. I work part-time at a juice bar in San Francisco, the owners are total health Nazis. Eventually, I figured, I would find Desi, cramming celery into a machine. But this was California in the nineties, when it was your civic duty to drink at least one carrot-apple-ginger juice a week, ideally with a wheatgrass booster. There were shops with punny names in every neighborhood— The Juice Box, Feeling Smoothie, The Green Goddess, Juicy Lucy’s —but Desi was never behind the counter . As the days passed, my hope of finding her—and with her, all those critical possessions—dwindled.

Meanwhile, the Microsoft bombing story slipped from the front pages of the newspapers to the back; and then, after a few weeks, the story vanished altogether, supplanted by more pressing news. An earthquake in Pakistan. A gunman at the Empire State Building. The murder of a rap star called The Notorious B.I.G. If the authorities had made any headway on the case, it certainly wasn’t enough to make the news.

The page visits to the Luddite Manifesto had also stalled out, I noticed. People had moved on to shinier new things; and it was easy for me to imagine that this meant that I could, too. That the danger was over, and I could finally stop worrying.

Maybe I really was living my own life, as Lionel had instructed me to, and this could be forever. Maybe it wasn’t just wishful thinking.

I didn’t stop to think what it might mean to my father to be relegated to the recycling bin.

—

About a month after I started working at Signal, a film crew began to creep around the office. You’d look up and there a camera would be, the black void of the lens pointed at you. They were like safari hunters, trying to capture the exotic creatures living in the wild.

Frank had sent out an email about the camera crew earlier in the week. CBS will be at the office all week, featuring Signal as part of a docuseries they are putting together about the digital revolution. Please play nice. No funny business. Unless you tell us otherwise we will assume you are OK with being filmed.

I had my reasons for not wanting to be featured on the news; number one being that I was a fugitive hiding behind a subpar makeover and a dead girl’s name. But neither did I want to bring attention to myself by going to Frank and trying to explain exactly why I didn’t want to be filmed. Instead, I just pivoted on my heels whenever the cameras approached me; and once I even dived below my desk, pretending I was hunting for something I’d dropped, until Brianna finally yelled at me to stop rolling around down there because I was in danger of unplugging her monitor.

A few days into their arrival, I looked up to see the show’s producer—a man with a horrible case of eczema, his skin peeling and raw—heading straight for my desk. I jumped up and took off in the opposite direction. The producer picked up his pace, chasing me down the hallway, his loafers slapping against the industrial carpet, a clipboard wedged under his arm.

“Hey, kid! Got a few minutes? I want to get your perspective on how cyberspace is—”

I dashed into the bathroom and slammed the door before he could finish his sentence; then I sat there, heaving with my back against the door, until I heard his footsteps receding down the hall. When I emerged again, I found Lionel standing there with a cup of coffee, waiting forme.

“I was wondering how long you’d hide in there.”

“I don’t know why they keep following me.”

“Frank told them you’re our youngest employee and so they’re kind of obsessed with you,” Lionel said. “They think that you’re the face of the next generation.”

“I’m not the face of anything.”

“You’re a face.”

“Not one that anyone should want to look at.”

“ I want to look at it.” As soon as the words had fallen from his mouth he turned scarlet, then yanked the glasses off his face and rubbed them against his shirt. “I mean, on a scale of one to twenty, you’re definitely cracking double digits.”

“Gee, thanks.” The intention was sarcasm, but the result sounded needy. I flushed, too.

He put his glasses back on. “Anyway, we need to go down to the futurism lecture now. They say it’s optional but, honestly, they’ll notice if you don’t go and decide you’re not a team player. Especially if you’re a new employee.”

“The what lecture?”

He shook his head. “You’ll see.”

—

Two hundred employees converged in a space on the second floor, another capacious room that I’d heard was about to be transformed into a studio for a new television endeavor. The floor had only recently been vacated by one of the sewing shops, and it still smelled like fish sauce and cotton fiber. Rows of folding chairs had been set up facing a screen and a podium, and before these stood a tall man in a rumpled linen shirt, his silvering hair flopped over his forehead.

I slid into a seat between Lionel and Brianna. “What’s a futurist, exactly?” I whispered.

“Someone who is trying to predict the future, like, social upheaval, economic change, political trends, all that,” Brianna said. “They bring in thinkers every month who are supposed to inspire us.”

“So that guy is a futurist?”

Lionel shot me a look of utter disbelief. “That’s Ross. Ross Marinetti. Your boss.”

“I’ve never seen him before,” I said.

“That’s because he doesn’t come over to digital often. He prefers the magazine side of the office. Less chaotic.”

I eyed him. Ross looked laconic, half asleep even, except that if you really looked at him you could see that his hooded eyes were darting across the room, eagle-like, absorbing. “What’s his story?” I asked.

Brianna leaned in. “He came up out of MIT Media Lab, used to be a professor there, and he knows, like, everyone in technology. He was already kind of legendary even before he launched Signal; he was in with the Whole Earth Catalog crowd and all that. And now he’s, like, a prophet. ”

I wasn’t sure what half of this meant, but I nodded as the lights dimmed and the room went suddenly silent. Ross cleared his throat and began.

“Signal started as a groundbreaking magazine about the new technologies that were changing the world as we knew it. But at a certain point, I had to ask myself: Why were we just writing about the new digital age, instead of being the new digital age?” Ross’s voice was low and smooth and sticky, like maple syrup pooling on a plate. I looked around and realized that almost everyone was leaning forward in their seats, to better catch what he was saying. “Four years later, here we are. Not just a magazine but a media destination both online and off. We’ve got a network of the most innovative websites around, covering a whole gamut of topics, from sports to travel to technology. We’ve got a network of chat rooms. We’re hosting the very first live online events, interviews and gatherings of the greatest minds around. We’re launching our very own search engine that’s going to be so much better than AltaVista! And soon, we’ll even have Signal TV, which you’ll be able to—get this— stream online. We’re a goddamn digital conglomerate, guys.”

The room broke out into applause. Next to me, Lionel muttered under his breath. “After all, why let everyone else profit off the dot-com boom? Why just write about it, when you can get that IPO, make those millions.” The man sitting in front of us turned around and hushed Lionel, a finger pressed to his lips, but Lionel just shrugged. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

At the front of the room, Ross was still talking. “But what most people don’t realize is that Signal isn’t just a business . What Signal is—and you guys should really see this by now—is nothing less than a revolution. The future is now, and it’s a future that so few people have had the foresight to see. But you”—he lifted his eyes to scan the audience, and when his eyes briefly met mine it felt that, somehow, he had shined straight into me, seen something inside me that I hadn’t even seen in myself—“ you know what’s ahead for society. You are the harbingers of change. You guys all know how exciting this is. That’s why you’re here. That’s why we are all here together. We found each other.”

The crowd had started clapping halfway through this little speech and now they broke out into cheers. I felt myself lifted up by their excitement, an unfamiliar hot sensation bubbling up inside me. Mild hysteria? The wildness of hope? The infectious madness of a crowd? I was on the verge of tears and I didn’t know why.

I thought of how the internet had so swiftly shifted my life; how, thanks to a modem and a chat room, I had landed here, in a room full of new friends, with a job that was helping me usher in the future, in a city that glimmered with promise . I was a living example of the marvels of the internet.

“We are shifting the axis of power, guys. The old political systems are soon going to be obsolete. Corporate culture is going the way of the dodo bird. And religion! Forget it. All our institutions are going to radically shift, and that’s a good thing . Because what we are doing here on the World Wide Web is empowering people. The common man, the one currently without a voice. Giving him—and her!—the tools to create the change he wants to see in the world. It’s absolute decentralization.”

Was that me, screaming with excitement? I didn’t even remember standing up, but there I was, with the rest of the group, giving Ross an ovation. My father was so very wrong about all this, I thought. How could he object to empowering the common man? I wished he were there with me, listening; surely he would hear what I was hearing, and change his tune. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe he could still be saved.

I missed him more than I wanted to admit to myself; because who wants to admit that they miss a man the entire world thinks is a psychotic murderer?

In the chair next to me, Lionel was still sitting down in his seat, lids at half-mast. I kicked his shin and he looked up at me with a surprised expression.

“Aren’t you listening to this?” I asked.

“I was up all night, debugging the 3.0 chat program. My NoDoz just wore off.” He rubbed his eyes. “Anyway, I’ve heard this speech four times already. He does it every time.”

On my other side, Brianna poked me; and when I looked at her, she rolled her eyes at Lionel. “He thinks we’re drinking the Kool-Aid.”

“Oh, I like Kool-Aid. What’s wrong with drinking Kool-Aid?” But Brianna had shifted her attention back to the podium. I didn’t know what to make of Lionel’s cynicism. How could he possibly not find this uplifting? Maybe it was the depression.

Up at the front of the room, Ross had pulled another man onstage with him, a blandly bespectacled man with a flannel vest zipped over his button-down. “So, today, furthering our conversation about all this, we are so fortunate to have George Gilder with us. He’s going to talk to us about the concept of techno-utopianism and our post-scarcity future. A world where no one is in need of anything: We’re so close, guys! The internet is going to take us all the way there in a decade, maybe two.” Ross clapped George on the back as the man beamed, absently shuffling through a stack of note cards.

“Buckle up, kids,” Lionel groaned, slumping even farther down in his seat. “Hope you remembered to use the bathroom first.”

When I looked around, I realized that the television crew had parked itself on the edge of the room, just ten feet away from me. The eye of the camera was firmly fixed on me, capturing my cheers and applause. I dropped back into my chair and put my hand over my face to shield it from view, but the damage had already been done.