The Prologue to 102 Minutes introduces the routines of the 14,154 people who worked in the World Trade Center towers—about 64 people per floor—and their actions on the morning of September 11, 2001. The Prologue names the workers, along with the people dining at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of the north tower. Dwyer and Flynn begin on the 89th of the north tower, where receptionist Dianne DeFontes arrives first each morning at the law firm of Drinker Biddle & Reath:

Defontes’ sense of solitude, while an illusion, should hardly count as a delusion. This small city of people was spread across more than 220 vertical acres: each of the 110 floors per tower was its own acre of space […] Vast as the whole physical place seemed from afar, people inside naturally experienced it on a far more human scale (Prologue).

The Prologue introduces workers like Frank and Nicole De Martini, who, after dropping off their children at a new school and driving from Brooklyn, sipped coffee on the 88th floor. Frank works for the Port Authority, “which built and owned the trade center [and] just completed a deal to lease the entire complex to Larry Silverstein, a private real estate operator” (Prologue).