“It was nearly 4 o'clock, and while most people were done for the day, William was just heading to work. Most of the time he worked from home but would come in several times a week to do testing with other programmers and meet with managers.”

“Where before fascism could be easily identified as it had a uniform and a leader, in William's world it was much more defuse. It always came in the form of something else, something appropriated, borrowed, stolen.”

“She wondered what it would be like to be an adult. She wondered if it would even happen. She didn't really want it to. She didn't want to be in danger like William, or silent like her mother. She didn't want to have an anti-tribe. She wanted to feel as she did now; just another person, small and insignificant and barely heavy enough to leave an imprint in the soil beneath her feet.“

In the biographies of those whose lives preceded his, the relationship between their work and their demise was frequently omitted.

He looked at the symbols as he typed—they functioned like tiny machines. They accepted an input—a value—which changed their output. Ana said this output was a voice, a time when these tiny constructions spoke.

Wasi'chu (the Fat-takers)

Branden had no intention of pursuing physics as a career. He had researched and learned that the investment bank where he wanted to work frequently hired physics majors. And he was correct.

An anomaly appears at harvest. 

Vernacular languages, like the languages of machines had a shelf-life. William knew he should never forget this. And when he chose to program, he did so without a commitment to the specific symbols or their syntax.