Thank you to my friends and family who took time from their busy lives to read and debate this book in its early forms and make it better, especially Jared MacDonald for keeping me tech-honest (all mistakes and artistic licenses are mine), Ware Wendell for keeping me Austin-honest (even in my highly-invented Austin) and just generally honest (again, mea culpa), Atara Rich-Shea for spherical observations and collisions, Noam Weinstein for keeping me on waves and above the music, Martin Tobey for reading the very first draft and pointing me in the right direction—you have a storyteller’s eye. Thank you to Andrew Tobolowsky and Stephen Tobolowsky who gave me biblical insights and anecodotes—spiritual, historical, archeological, and literary (all theological conflations and departures mine). A tremendous debt of gratitude goes to my indomitable agent Jodi Reamer and my delightfully sublime or sublimely delightful editors Sara Goodman at St. Martin’s Press and Rachel Winterbottom at Gollancz, who bring scalpels and mallets and know when to use which. You challenged me always to dig deeper and reach farther, even when I didn’t know I could. Jodi, you are a force of nature, and I want you in any trench I find myself. Thank you to their incredible teams including Alec Shane and Jennie Conway—it takes a village to bring a book to life, and two to do it this nicely. Thank you to Dr. Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, whose whitepaper, “Remote Exploitation of an Unaltered Passenger Vehicle” was my research source for Charlie’s hilltop car hack by the reservoir. As to the sign hack, I don’t know who told a road sign in Dallas in May 2016 to comment that Donald Trump was a shape-shifting lizard, making national news, but it wasn’t the Vindicators. Their other message was “Work is Cancelled—Go Back Home,” which brought a smile to my face, even if it wasn’t true. Finally, my deepest thanks to my family. Writing a book is a lonely task that paradoxically can’t happen without the support of everyone around you. This is a book about parents and children, and I am eternally grateful for my own in both categories. And most of all, thank you to Jude, for more things than I have room to list or know how to say. You didn’t just read the book—you created the world that made the book worth existing in.