Michael

“in a surveillance state it was vital to reserve the ability to turn a blind eye to certain people at certain times.”
― Ramez Naam, Apex

“Linc didn't know if it was his imagination, but the streets seemed to have gotten older and dirtier - more so, surely, then was possible in the time that had gone by. What he remembered as the center of where the action was, and where all of life happened had turned into tired and shabby remnants of an age that was running down.

Had the store fronts always been so grubby with their cloudy windows, half hearted displays, the paint around the doors dulled and peeling like the once-high hopes of some forgotten opening day long ago? Had trash always stunk like this, piled in alleys and strewn along the gutters?

Above it all, high-rental buildings that had once thrust proudly toward the sky crumbled silently amid the winds, the rain, and the corrosive fames eating into them. They had degenerated into cheap hotels and apartments while business fled the cities for manicured office parks by the interstates.

But the people no longer stopped to gaze at these buildings, in any case. The figures on the sidewalks hurried on, avoiding each other's eyes, enwrapped in their own isolation.

Even those who stood or walked together aimed words at each other from behind facades that had become so second nature that even they themselves now mistook them for the persons atrophying within.

A city of brooding shells, inhabited by beings who hid inside shells.”
― James P. Hogan, Outward Bound

“We think of ourselves as individuals, but all that we have accomplished, and all that we will accomplish, is the result of groups of humans cooperating. Those groups are organisms in their own rights.”
― Ramez Naam, Nexus

“The first rule of hurricane coverage is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind.”
― Carl Hiaasen