By February our apartment on the thirty-third floor of Gateway Plaza had settled into a kind of order. The boxes were mostly unpacked. Sofie’s toys had spread into the corners of the living room. My desk sat beside the bedroom window where I could look east toward the World Trade Center only two blocks away.

Part of me still felt like that ten-year-old boy lying in a hammock in Chepachet, Rhode Island, staring at his hands and realizing for the first time that he existed. Now, thirty years later, I found myself thirty-three floors above Manhattan, looking out at towers glowing above the city like something from the future. Below us the Winter Garden shimmered beside the water — glass walls, palm trees, polished stone, people speaking languages I couldn’t identify. New York felt connected to the entire world.

I had started spending long hours at the computer.

At first it was mostly exploration. I discovered Echo, one of the New York bulletin board systems, and became fascinated almost immediately. Artists, writers, strange intellectuals, insomniacs — all talking to each other through glowing text on black screens late into the night.

The technology itself was primitive.

A second 14.4 modem felt like advanced science.

Wires crossed the floor beside the desk. External drives hummed softly. The monitor filled the bedroom with pale blue light while everyone else slept. I became obsessed with a software package called ResNova that allowed images and text to exist together in ways that suddenly felt revolutionary to me.

Not just information.

Presence.

People entering a space I had built.

I started setting up my own bulletin board system, slowly turning our apartment into a tiny communications node floating high above Manhattan.

Late at night, lying in bed, I would hear the modem answer incoming calls.

The ritual always began the same way:

click…
hiss…
static…
whining tones rising and falling like machine birds speaking across enormous distances.

Then silence.

Someone had entered.

Sometimes I would get back out of bed just to look at the screen.

A new username glowing in the dark. Someone from the city. Another artist. Another curious stranger wandering through the electronic night.

Today it probably sounds quaint, but in 1993 it felt magical. Through a telephone line, another mind had suddenly appeared inside your private space.

Around that same time, the first World Trade Center bombing happened.

I remember standing at the bedroom window watching smoke rise from the towers while helicopters circled endlessly overhead. Sirens echoed through lower Manhattan for hours.

The city suddenly felt fragile.

So did my own life, though I couldn’t fully see why yet. There were tensions inside the apartment I didn’t understand, currents moving beneath the surface of things. Instead I buried myself deeper into the machines, the conversations, the strange new world forming inside the modem.

One night a user named Rob Murphy appeared.

At first he was simply another caller entering through the phone line. But soon there were others. Conversations deepened. Connections formed. Without realizing it, we were building the beginnings of a community that would remain part of my life for decades.

Some nights I would sit alone at the glowing monitor long after midnight, listening to the faint hum of the hard drives while Manhattan flickered thirty-three floors below.

The city roared outside the windows.

But inside the computer, another city was beginning to form.