Rachel knew she could free herself in seconds if she could have access to the Internet, but the...

Rachel knew she could free herself in seconds if she could have access to the Internet, but the yearning was more than that. She was raised with machinery, raised with unlimited information at her fingertips, and to not have that freedom was almost worse than her physical captivity.

Rachel started realizing things about her psyche in the absence of the Internet. Her thought patters relied on the information that should be available to her. When she thought about a movie or an old television show, she never wondered about a plot line or an actor’s name or a funny line she couldn’t remember. She just looked it up. When she thought of something that needed to be communicated to a work partner or a friend or a relative, she did it seamlessly, as if they were standing right in front of her, though they might be in Alaska, Moscow, Bangalore. Even her own memories were not as clear without the Internet. Her parents had started a blog when Rachel was a baby so that her grandparents who lived three hours away could see pictures and videos when they couldn’t visit. Rachel had started using this blog as her own personal journal when she was six years old. Her entire life was on this webpage and she realized in the darkness of her cell that it had replaced her memory. She couldn’t access these thoughts through her mind, she was dependent on the pictures and words she and her parents had spent her entire life uploading.