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40.

In the end, it was remarkably simple to find my mother once I knew her current name. Back at my desk, I typed it into AltaVista with jittery fingers— Tess Trevante —and this time a flood of results came back.

Futurist Tess Trevante interviewed by The Economist.

Yale Daily News profile of alumna Tess Trevante.

Tess Trevante to be guest speaker at the Commonwealth Club.

“We are all cyborgs,” says author Tess Trevante.

She had a Web page of course, with her very own domain name: http://www.tesstrevante.com. When I clicked on it, her photo filled my screen. It was an artsy black-and-white portrait, like something you’d find on the back cover of a fat autobiography. She wore a black turtleneck under a blazer and she had one hand pressed up against her cheek as she gazed intently at the camera, really considering the person who might be looking back at her. Her blond hair didn’t resemble the long waves from my childhood snapshot, nor the eighties coif from the I Hate Mondays photo. Now it was short and slick, cut tight to her head like armor, its blond threaded with defiant silver.

She’d been there all along, my mother, just a click away, if I’d only known how to search for her.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d waited a year or two before starting my journey. In 1997, the internet was still a present-tense medium: Information was wide but not deep, going back only a few years in history, as if nothing had existed before the world started to go online in the mid-nineties. Within a few years, though—as archives and databases everywhere were digitized and uploaded and made searchable—it would have taken only a few clicks to connect the Theresa Nowak of a tragic accident in 1983 to the Tess Trevante of current internet fame.

How much trauma would I have saved myself if, during my very first search in my father’s desk, I’d been able to identify my mother and her current location? If I had discovered my father’s deception and confronted him; if I had fled months earlier? Certainly I would have avoided my own involvement in my father’s first crime. But could I have stopped the Bombaster altogether? Would my departure have disrupted his agenda entirely?

But speculation is a fool’s game, like pressing on a bruise to see if it still hurts. Imagining how things might have been, had you made a different chess move, simply perpetuates the pain of how things actually are . Better to move on and accept the inevitable now.

After staring at my mother’s photo for a long time, I scrolled down to read her bio.

Tess Trevante is a world-renowned sociologist, computer scientist, and the author of CodeBrain and Digital Selves 1.0: How to Exist in the New Computer Age. A faculty member of the MIT Media Lab, founder of the Transhumanist Project, and a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant,” she is one of the first futurists to explore how emerging technology is changing human potential, and how new social movements will be unlocked by the embrace of our digital future.

So. It was true. My mother wasn’t a kindergarten teacher who my father had met at a restaurant. She was my father’s peer . She’d come out of the same world as him but had apparently not turned her back on it. I recalled, now, the conversation we had when my father first came home with the modem, when he explained to me why he’d left the tech industry. And my mother, did she feel that way, too? Was she…one of the good guys? I’d asked him. Only now did I realize that he never actually answered my question.

Only now did I wonder who the “good guys” actually were.

I clicked on every link on that website. I skimmed a scholarly article she’d written for the American Sociological Review and an interview with CNET and even an essay she’d contributed to Signal, but the words blew right through me because what she thought wasn’t nearly as interesting to me as who she was. I hunted for any tiny detail that might reveal the person my mother had become: What did she like? Did she have a family? How did she live? What did she do for fun?

Did she ever talk about me ?

But there was nothing. Her website was strictly professional, and the interviews with her never delved into her personal life at all, just her ideas—a motley collection of science fiction statements like we have no choice but to embrace our machine future and human potential is about to be fully unleashed thanks to digital enhancement . The only telling personal detail I could glean came from a line at the end of a profile in The New York Times: Tess Trevante is married to the investment banker Frederick Trevante, and splits her time between Silicon Valley and Boston.

That was it. No mention of children, past or present; no mention of a former husband; no mention of the tragedy that must have reshaped her entire life, fourteen years earlier.

“Tess Trevante?” I jolted, realizing that Brianna was standing behind me. “She’s an icon. A pioneer. One of the first respected female thinkers in this stupidly sexist industry. I went into tech because of her. I read her first book, CodeBrain, when I was in college, and it changed my life. Convinced me to major in computer science.”

It pleased me to hear my mother spoken of like this. My mother, an icon and a pioneer and a genius? “Do you know her?”

Brianna laughed. “Hardly. She came through here last year, gave one of the futurist lectures, all about how computers are evolving the human brain. I introduced myself afterward and told her how much she inspired me. I wanted to interview her for Floozy, but I think the name of the site put her off because she said she was too busy. I guess it’s not surprising that she had more important things to do than chitchat with some nobody zine editor.”

“I want to meet her,” I blurted. “Do you know how I’d do that?”

Brianna pointed to a link on the top corner of my mother’s website. BOOK TOUR SCHEDULE OF EVENTS, it read.

“Seems like you could start there,” she said.

—

My mother had embarked on an eighteen-city tour for her new book, Digital Selves 1.0. According to her events page, she was currently on the East Coast, but in just seven days, she would be back in the Bay Area, reading from her new book at Kepler’s in Menlo Park. An Intimate Evening with Tess Trevante, the bookstore’s website promised. Come meet this compelling tech guru.

I would, I told myself, my throat growing tight, my chest cavity aflutter with flowers and butterflies. In just one week I would finally meet her. I would I would I would.

I looked up from my computer and found myself staring at my father’s image on the wall just across from me, the feathered dart still dangling from one ear. BOMBASTARD . Behind those mirrored sunglasses, I could have sworn he was smirking at me. Like he knew something that I didn’t yet.

Like he knew something that I was about to learn, the hard way.

I stood and walked over to the dartboard. Quickly, furtively, I tugged the mangled portrait from the wall. I folded it into quarters and shoved it into the pocket of my jeans, hoping that no one had noticed me doingit.

But when I turned around, and my eyes naturally drifted over to the same spot they had gravitated to all day, I found someone looking straight back. Lionel was peering over his monitor at me, his face a mask of confused consternation, the smile slowly fading from his lips.