“All the secrets of the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight.”

“You know, I'm really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.”

“Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf.”

“This is Mat's secret weapon, his passport, his get-out-of-jail-free card: Mat makes things that are beautiful.”

“I feel a little whirl of dislocation -- the trademark sensation of the world being more closely knit together than you expected”

“Neel cuts in: "Where'd you grow up?""Palo Alto," she says. From there to Stanford to Google: for a girl obsessed with the outer limits of human potential, Kat has stayed pretty close to home. Neel nods knowingly. "The suburban mind cannot comprehend the emergent complexity of a New York sidewalk.""I don't know about that," Kat says, narrowing her eyes. "I'm pretty good with complexity.""See, I know what you're thinking," Neel says, shaking his head."You're thinking it's just an agent-based simulation, and everybody out here follows a pretty simple set of rules"-- Kat is nodding--"and if you can figure out those rules, you can model it. You can simulate the street, then the neighborhood, then the whole city. Right?""Exactly. I mean, sure, I don't know what the rules are yet, but I could experiment and figure them out, and then it would be trivial--" "Wrong," Neel says, honking like a game-show buzzer. "You can't do it. Even if you know the rules-- and by the way, there are no rules--but even if there were, you can't model it. You know why?"My best friend and my girlfriend are sparring over simulations. I can only sit back and listen. Kat frowns. "Why?""You don't have enough memory.""Oh, come on--""Nope. You could never hold it all in memory. No computer's big enough. Not even your what's-it-called--""The Big Box.""That's the one. It's not big enough. This box--" Neel stretches out his hands, encompasses the sidewalk, the park, the streets beyond--"is bigger."The snaking crowd surges forward.”

“... nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment - maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.”