"“We’ve sourced something field-expedient,” Ash began, “from what little’s available there…She’s a surprisingly advanced product of the early militarization of machine intelligence…They saw it as cloning complexly specific skill sets.” Netherton nodded, hoping his eyes weren’t visibly glazing. “There were, for instance, individuals adroit at managing what were termed competitive control areas…complexly volatile environments, where you might easily lose prized field operators. Hence a project to replace such operators with autonomous AI, piped directly into the goggles of local recruits.”"
"“You should be a weatherman,” Leon said, “you’re in the future and you know the weather.” “You’re someone who only pretends to be unintelligent,” Netherton said. “It serves you simultaneously as protective coloration and a medium for passive aggression. It won’t work with me.” “Future’s fucking snippy.”"
"“You communicate with it?” “Her. Given the technological asymmetry, she’s been rather like an operative whose handlers are recurrent figures in a dream.”"
"Actually seeing the polt had been surprisingly interesting...driving, eyes on whatever motorway, seventy-some years earlier, on the far side of the jackpot…Gloriously pre-posthuman. In a state of nature. And hustling, Netherton had soon seen, eye on the money. Improvising, and with utterly unfamiliar material."
"They didn’t think Flynne’s brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him…like phantom limb, ghosts of the tattoos he’d worn in the war, put there to tell him when to run, when to be still, when to do the bad-ass dance… So they allowed him some disability for that, and he lived in the trailer down by the creek."
"Nobody liked Luke 4:5, but Burton had a bad thing about them. They’d started out as a church, or in a church, not liking anyone being gay or getting abortions or using birth control. Protesting military funerals…and took it as the measure of God’s satisfaction with them that everybody else thought they were assholes."
"“Ash imagines you a conservative,” Lowbeer said, “or a romantic, perhaps. She sees your distaste for the present rooted in the sense of a fall from grace. That some prior order, or perhaps the lack of one, afforded a more authentic existence.” “I simply imagine things were less tedious,” Netherton said. “I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,” she said. “Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp."