The night he found the body behind the loquat tree in his yard, John had driven home from work like on any other evening, weighed down by the usual worries. These troubles had become so familiar that he never questioned them anymore, and because he never shared them with anyone, they would forever go unchallenged. It was his misery after all.

These days his concerns hinged on the apocalyptic flavor of the moment—Y2K, or the Millennium Bug—like a futuristic disease or a line dance at a wedding. How could John protect his two children from something he didn’t understand? Asteroids and floods, all that biblical stuff, made more sense than technology, this internet, which was spooky, invisible, and everywhere at once.

But they weren’t even children anymore. His daughter Ana was already an adult, a college graduate living in Berkeley—leafy streets crunching underfoot like granola in the fall and dimly lit coffee shops with dogs snoozing at people’s feet—less than four hundred miles away, but much too far in his mind. And his son Ronald had already finished half his senior year in high school.

The house was quiet with them no longer on the phone, vaporized by this thing called email and AOL. After John had spent over a year saving up for the Packard Bell PC tower, all he could hear now from his son’s bedroom were the robotic chirps and static fuzz of the dial-up, an occasional burst of laughter, his fingers chicken-pecking the keys. Their thoughts and feelings now traveled in wires, through air, like ghosts.