THE DRIFT

On March 8, 2014, a machine carrying 239 people flew for six hours across a black ocean with no one at the controls. It did not crash. It continued - because continuing with no one steering is the definition of drift.

You are on that plane. You have been since you started reading.

This is a book about where you are. Not in the philosophical sense. In the literal one. The part of your brain that for two hundred thousand years knew which way was home is quietly dismantling itself inside your skull, because a device in your pocket now does your knowing for you. That is the first chapter. It gets worse from there.

You will travel with the people who made the drift a life, and the people for whom it was a sentence: desert and sea nomads whose bodies evolved for motion; the refugee, the exile, the border, the camp; a woman who walked out of her apartment one ordinary afternoon and stopped being herself for three weeks while her body kept moving through the city; and, finally, you - in your car, on the commute you finished this morning and cannot remember.

THE DRIFT is dark speculative nonfiction: it begins in documented fact and ends somewhere you never agreed to go. Its argument is simple and difficult to unhear - that nothing beneath you has ever been still. Not the ground. Not the map. Not the self. And that the only question left is whether you drift with your eyes open, or closed.

Your eyes are closed right now.

Open them.