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43.

Ross announced that Signal was going to have an IPO, and everyone on the digital side was buzzing with excitement. I was vague on the concept of “going public”—Frank hadn’t exactly offered me stock options with my minimum wage position, and I hadn’t known to ask—but around me, my coworkers were busily calculating how rich they might become.

“I’m going to buy a condo in the Mission,” Brianna announced. “I want to live inside my money. Like a warm, cozy blanket of cash.”

We were sitting on the damp grass in South Park, eating pizza slices as fast as we could before our fingers got numb. That was the night I was going to go meet my mother at her reading—our reunion no longer days away, but hours—and I was feeling manic and shaky, as though I’d drunk way too much coffee.

“I hate to break it to you, but five hundred stock options are not going to buy you a condo,” Lionel replied. “Signal is not Yahoo, don’t let Ross’s smoke and mirrors delude you. This IPO isn’t going to blow up. Whatever money we make isn’t going to be fuck-you money.”

“OK, then, just a small condo,” Brianna said. “An itty-bitty one. I don’t even need a parking space.”

My grasp on the value of objects was still tenuous. The duffel I’d retrieved from Desi still had eleven thousand dollars in it, which I hadn’t yet touched, and mostly thought of in terms of burritos. As in, I can eat 2,300 burritos with my remaining money. I had no idea what a condo might cost, but I was pretty sure it was more than what was in the bag. “What are you going to do with yours?” I asked Lionel.

“Gold bars,” he said dryly.

“The safe choice. But maybe you could also invest in a car that doesn’t smell like rotten milk?”

“Hey. Don’t complain, unless you don’t want me to drive you to Kepler’s tonight.”

“I’m not complaining. Believe me, I’ve smelled worse.” We smiled at each other and Brianna rolled her eyes.

Janus was approaching from the other end of the park, lunch bag clutched in a fist, his hair wild. He stopped where we were sitting. “You guys hear?”

Brianna shook her head. “Hear what?”

“A mail bomb went off at Harvard; it got some professor. They think it’s the Bombaster again.”

I could feel Lionel, sitting next to me, go rigid. “Got him? As in, he’s dead?”

Janus nodded. “Apparently a few others were injured, too. That’s all I know. I overhead someone talking about it just now when I was in line for my tacos. I’m headed back to the office; I figure they’ll need me to write something up about it.”

“Shit.” Brianna stood up, dusting off her jeans. “I’ll go with you.”

And with that, they were gone. Lionel turned to me. “Harvard? We didn’t reach out to anyone at Harvard, did we?”

“No.” I stared back at him, aghast. My father wasn’t targeting his former colleagues after all. Or maybe he was, but that wasn’t the extent of his ambitions. His former alma mater was clearly on the list, too; who else had we missed? 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. There must be thousands of “voices” that fit this criterion, I belatedly realized.

Lionel pulled a fistful of grass from the lawn and stared at it in the palm of his hand. “Shit. This is awful.” He flung the grass shreds and they fluttered impotently to the ground. He turned to look at me, with red and anguished eyes. “You need to go to the police. You need to tell them how to find your dad.”

The excitement I’d been feeling earlier had dissipated entirely, like dandelion fluff in a stiff wind. “I don’t know how to find him. All I have is an address for some guy in North Dakota. He’s probably not even there anymore, if he ever even was.”

“Then give them that.”

“I don’t know.” Panic was making it hard to think straight. “Don’t I need to be smart about this? I mean, I’m in trouble, too.”

“All I know is that what we did before didn’t work. And I know you hate this, but the fact is that your father needs to be stopped and you’re the only one with information that might help them do that.”

I closed my eyes and saw my father sitting in an electric chair, a metal helmet clamped to his head, wires snaking back to a machine, like something I’d seen once in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. “I’m meeting my mom in a few hours,” I demurred. “I want to wait and talk to her first. She must know people. She’ll have a better plan than just marching into a police station and giving myself up.”

Lionel clawed his fingers into the grass again and pulled out another tuft. I knew how much he hated to be dirty. I knew how upset he was. I wanted to pluck the grass from his hands, wipe the dirt from his fingers, but I was suddenly afraid to touch him.

“And what if she doesn’t? What’s it going to take before you do what needs to be done? How many more people are you going to let your dad kill?”

I felt ill thinking of this. He was right. I knew he was right, that this liminal existence couldn’t go on for much longer, that too many people had already died. It was up to me to pull the brakes on this train. And yet I was paralyzed.

“Just give me a few hours,” I whispered.

He shrugged, not looking at me. “It’s your decision, not mine.”

We sat there for a long minute, each of us apparently waiting for the other person to say something that would make everything better, but nothing came. His silence was terrifying. Finally, I ventured: “Do you hate me?”

He gazed across the park, out toward the street, where the lunchtime traffic was cruising past. “No. I mostly feel sorry for you,” he said.

This almost hurt more. I had thought that maybe he loved me. But apparently I was a pathetic creature now, only worthy of his sympathy. “ Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests, ” I muttered, a bitter lemon taste in my mouth.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said quickly.

Even though he was looking away from me, I could still see the flash of white as he rolled his eyes. “Let me guess. Another nihilistic philosophy your dad made you memorize? All about how the world is bad and empathy is a sign of weakness?”

I flushed. “It’s Nietzsche.”

“Don’t confuse what you read in books with real life, Esme.”

“Books were my real life until just recently. Can you blame me for getting confused sometimes?”

He flung the grass aside and stood up, wiping his fingers on the napkin from his lunch. “I’m going back,” he announced.

I stood up and followed as he trudged across the lawn and out to the mouth of the park. When we finally made it to the sidewalk, he stopped abruptly and turned around to face me. “I can’t do this,” he said. “I thought I could, but I can’t. I like you, Esme. A lot. But this is too much for me.”

“Wait,” I said. Lunchtime stragglers navigated around us; they gave us a wide berth, sensing disaster. “Are you breaking up with me?”

“I don’t know.” He stared down at his hands, at the mud caked around his nail beds. “I guess I just need some space to think.”

Then he pivoted and walked straight out into the street, barely bothering to get out of the way of a bus that was pulling away from the curb. I watched him walk with stiff, despondent steps toward the corner, in the opposite direction from our office.

“Does this mean you’re not coming with me to meet my mom tonight?” I called after him. But my question was drowned out by the growl of the bus; and by the time it passed, he’d already disappeared around the corner.

My heart still breaks, looking back at that girl standing there, forlorn and confused, on the gum-speckled sidewalk. Overcome by experiencing, all at once, the myriad joys and disappointments of emerging adulthood: love and longing and rejection, emotional connections and risky decisions, the bridges we usually cross bit by bit as we come of age. But for me, emerging as a fully formed adult from my protective cocoon with none of those youthful experiences under my belt, feeling all these things at once was like jumping out of a plane without a parachute. I had no understanding of what lay below me, only that the fall was utterly disorienting and I’d never felt this particular kind of awfulness.

—

Back at my desk, I opened the website of The New York Times and read the cover story. My father had sent a mail bomb to the engineering department of Harvard University. A computer science professor had died, one whose name I didn’t recognize, and two students had been hospitalized. It was true: I’d failed.

Almost instinctively, I clicked over to the Luddite Manifesto, which I hadn’t looked at in weeks. The visitor counter had shot up again, and now stood just shy of a half-million views. What percentage of that number were people who had actually been converted by my father’s rhetoric? I wondered. It couldn’t have been high; but even a few acolytes felt like too many.

I thought of all the hours I’d spent meticulously transcribing my father’s words, cleaning up his grammar, uploading it all to the Web, and I was filled with burning hatred. At my father, yes; but mostly at myself. For allowing myself to be indoctrinated. For abetting him in his mad pursuit of prophecy. For letting him spend eighteen years filling my mind with ideas— nihilistic philosophies, as Lionel had so aptly put it—rather than anything that might be relevant to real life. For being too weak to stop him.

Before I could think much about what I was doing, I found myself logging into my GeoCities account. Three clicks later, and I was staring at a button on the lower-right-hand side of the screen: DELETE SITE.

I clicked the button. A window popped up. ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DELETE YOUR SITE? THIS ACTION CANNOT BE UNDONE.

I clicked YES.

Just like that, The Luddite Manifesto was gone.