Author's Note
Never Just Coincidence takes place between August 1997 and June 1998. For younger readers, or for those whose memories of the late twentieth century have gracefully softened, it is worth anchoring a few realities of the era before you dive into Katariina’s senior year.
This story is set in a world right on the precipice of a massive technological shift, but it hasn’t crossed the line yet. In 1997, a “running text-free friendship” wasn’t a choice; it was the baseline status quo. If you wanted to talk to a friend outside of school, you dialed a landline wired into a kitchen wall and prayed a parent didn’t answer the phone first. If a rumor started spreading through the hallways, you couldn’t check a group chat to debunk it; you had to look at people’s actual faces in the cafeteria to see if the weather in the room had shifted.
The internet of this era was an anarchic, agonizingly slow frontier. High-speed broadband didn’t exist for the average household, and downloading a single page of text meant tying up the family phone line on a 14.4k dial-up modem while the machine squealed its complaints to the room. Sifting through early web architecture—navigating IRC channels, Usenet groups, and Gopher sites—required a level of patient, stubborn pattern-seeking that modern search engines have largely rendered obsolete.
When you are seventeen, terrified, and trying to trace a pattern hidden in the dark, the lack of an immediate answer changes the math of survival. You can’t look up your symptoms on a smartphone in a gas station bathroom. You can’t search a database to find out if your gym teacher is dangerous. You have to rely entirely on your own improvised competence, the loyalty of a few people willing to stand next to you, and whatever pieces of the puzzle you can painstakingly gather by hand.
It was a strange, isolated, and profoundly beautiful time to find out the world was wider than you’d been told.
Welcome to Fort Collins, Colorado, 1997.
— The Author
