What Kind of Paradise

The bus stops in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Esme will have to transfer. Desi suggests that they head to McDonalds. She has no money and plans to panhandle. Esme tells her that she’ll cover their food. When they get to the register, however, she realizes that she only has a couple dollars in her pocket. She must reach into her bag to get more money. There is $23,000, in bundles, at the bottom of the bag—all her father’s money. Trying not to reveal the cash, she randomly pulls out one bill, a hundred. She hopes that Desi doesn’t notice.

On the next bus, Desi gives Esme a sleeping pill. Reluctantly, she takes it. She wakes up in Las Vegas, Nevada, the next transfer point. Her bag and Desi are gone.

At the bus station, Esme asks a woman for directions to Atherton, the suburb listed as her mother’s home address on her birth certificate. She learns that she doesn’t quite have enough money to take public transportation there. With no idea what to do, she wanders around the city. She asks someone on the street for directions to Signal, Lionel’s workplace, and he has to explain to her what a phone book is. She finds one, locates Signal, and asks someone else for directions there.

She finds Lionel in his office, and he is stunned to see her in person. She explains that he said he would help her if she needed it and begins to tear up. He tells her that she can stay at his place and offers to buy her a hamburger.

Lionel takes Esme to a diner. She explains her situation to him, leaving out the parts where her father bombed a building and she shot a security guard. The two talk further about technology and the burgeoning internet. Lionel argues that the technology is actually equalizing, claiming that it gives voice to anyone and everyone. It might represent a kind of socialist revolution of ideas. Esme considers this. Perhaps her father was wrong, and technology could actually help ordinary people break free from societal and governmental oppression.

Lionel tells her that they can sleep in his office (his apartment is crowded, and since it’s Friday, there will surely be a party). He will drive her to Atherton to see her mother tomorrow. They sleep in a small room that Lionel and his co-workers have fitted with bunk beds in case of all-nighters.

The next morning, Esme reads another article about her and her father online. The feds tracked them to the cabin because of their computer’s IP address, but they do not know Esme’s real name.

Esme and Lionel drive out through Silicon Valley and into a residential area. Esme pictures what it would have been like to grow up there and realizes how much her father actually took away from her.

When they get to Theresa’s house, they find an empty lot. A neighbor tells them that she has never heard of the Nowak family and that she’s been living on the block for 10 years. The family that owned the empty lot is named Trevante. Esme feels foolish for having thought that her mother would still be there, waiting with open arms.

Esme and Lionel head back to San Francisco. The colorful, gingerbread houses are familiar to her from having read John Steinbeck and Jack London. Lionel lives in one of them, and Esme instantly falls in love with it. He shows her his tiny bedroom, helps her get a Hotmail account, and then notices that she is looking at the “Luddite Manifesto.” He scoffs and derides it as having been written by a “psychopath.” Esme tries to point out that some of the ideas make sense, but then she quickly backpedals and starts to cry. She has no idea what she is going to do.

Lionel and Esme sleep in the office again. Lionel’s boss, Frank, wakes them the next morning. He is angry that Lionel let someone sleep in the spare room, but Esme quickly blurts out that she knows HTML and needs a job. Lionel had told her that Signal would hire anyone who knew HTML, and she has no other options. Since he has a soft spot for Lionel, Frank agrees. She will make minimum wage, there will be no benefits, and she is likely to work unpaid overtime. She’s thrilled.

Esme loves working at Signal. It began as a magazine, but once it expanded online, its horizons broadened even further. Signal hosts chat rooms, is developing a search engine, and provides information about all areas of the burgeoning tech boom.

At a “futurism” talk held for Signal’s employees, its founder gives a rousing speech about the power of the internet to revolutionize the world and put information in everyone’s hands in an egalitarian manner. The internet, he argues, is a “revolution.” Esme is moved by his words and, although she misses her father, decides that he must have been wrong about technology.

Esme spends long days at work and wanders the city at night. Lionel found her a sublet, and the room even has cable television. She writes down every pop-culture reference that anyone makes so that she can catch up on everything she missed growing up in the woods. The only issue is that there is a media company covering Signal’s rise to prominence for a docuseries, and Esme does not want to appear in any of its videos. She has to dodge the cameras all day at work, and it worries her.

Esme has only been in San Francisco for six weeks when she learns from the news that her father has killed someone else: Baron Macomber, another tech executive. Esme knows that she could turn her father in, but it will take years to figure out why she didn’t. As an adult, she will look back and understand that she loved her father in spite of everything. She will also realize that she did not trust law enforcement or “the system” because her father had been criticizing it for her entire life. She was terrified that turning her father in would cause harm to him, so she chose to remain silent.

After she watches the news report, Esme scans the photographs she’d shoved in her jeans’ pocket when leaving the cabin. Macomber is in one—her father is targeting his former colleagues. She holds one photograph taken of her father and a group of other men. She wonders if Ross Marinetti, Signal’s founder, could help her identify them.

Ross is indeed helpful. Esme fabricates a story about being tasked with doing background research to explain the old photo. Ross tells her that it was likely taken at Peninsula Research Institute, a non-profit that does scientific research and development. He recognizes one of the men as Nicholas Redkin. Esme thanks him, sure that she is one step closer to her mother.

Later that day, a Friday, everyone starts drinking at work. When the day is officially over, they head to the beach for an all-night party. Esme takes E for the first time. She and Lionel kiss. She is euphorically happy to have shed her old life and to be building something new.

The next morning, Esme wakes up with her first hangover. She is nervous around Lionel, not sure what their kiss meant. The two talk about the internet as they walk to get ice cream. Lionel again voices how sure he is that it will change society for the better. He argues that it was created by social misfits and that it has the power to decrease the amount of social control that traditional institutions like school, family, and the media have on culture. Again, Esme is struck by the gulf between this way of looking at technology and her father’s.

On the way back to Lionel’s, Esme stops at a juice bar. Desi said that she worked at a juice bar in San Francisco, and she is still hoping to recover her bag. It contains the hard drive that her father stole and his ramblings. She is sure that the money is gone, but she wants those two items. Lionel suggests calling all the local juice bars instead, and when she does, she finds Desi. She decides to stake her out instead of confronting her. Lionel is excited to help.

Esme and Lionel follow Desi home after her shift at the juice bar. When she gets to the door, Esme lunges at her and demands her bag back. Desi claims that she no longer has it, but Esme and Lionel push her inside. They find her room and the duffel bag. She has clearly spent some of the money, but not all of it is gone. The hard drive and Esme’s father’s papers are still there. They take the bag and leave.

Lionel asks if there is anything more that Esme wants to tell him, and she tells him that she needs more time. The two kiss again. Neither has been in a relationship before, and they are thrilled to have found a partner.

Back in her sublet, Esme pulls the papers from her duffel bag. There is a message to her from her father, written in the cypher that he taught her. In it, he details his life. He grew up in a California suburb. His father wanted a more athletic son and was unkind to him. His mother was emotionally checked out of her marriage and parenting. He skipped a grade in school, did well, and put himself through Harvard while triple majoring in engineering, applied math, and philosophy. He worked on some of the earliest computers during the Vietnam War and finally felt like he was surrounded by people who understood him.

However, he hated the city and began hiking in his free time. He met a grizzled old conservationist who taught him basic survival skills. After college, he got a job with a research company back in California. Personal computers were on the horizon, and he had no idea yet how astray the burgeoning tech world would go.