Location 729 MONTREAL, 1947. LATE NOVEMBER, bleak winter, when every trip outdoors after five p.m. felt like suicide.
Location 1419 Late in the middle of a protracted slugfest one autumn evening at Ignatius, in the papery, chill dark that was five p.m. in a Chicago October, he stopped the chess clock and said, “Hold on. Can I ask you something?”
Location 1445 I GET VERTIGO REMEMBERING everything that happened to us in those years at Ignatius, as adulthood insinuated itself into our adolescent bodies. I see myself standing in front of those twenty-foot tall, massive oak front doors with the embossed lion’s head, hearing the teenage frenzy behind them waiting for me as I pulled them open. We were living that epic work in progress, watching it unfold in front of us, move by adolescent move. The mess of first sex, my timid experiments with pot, the free-for-all of social jockeying, all the changing games of prestige, self-invention, and group loyalty: life would never again be so saturated in possibility. But the teachers who formed me, the girls I thought I loved with such passion, the classmates whose respect I so desperately sought: they’re all like characters in a novel that I can barely remember and have no need to read again.
Location 1459 She plunged into the blue country, gliding through hillocks of staghorn and brain and fan corals while mobbed by snappers and soldierfish, grunts, rays, rock beauties, butterflies and angels, gobies and groupers, sergeant majors, blennies, turtles, triggerfish, sponges, tunicates, nudibranchs, and sea stars, too many to identify.
Location 1493 Her parents couldn’t grasp how the timid kid who chewed her lips and fretted her cardigans to spaghetti had become a felon of self-assertion in a few short years. But to Evie, the metamorphosis felt as simple as breathing. Taciturnity was just desire that hadn’t yet blossomed.
Location 1496 She had found the secret of liberty and of life: disguise yourself and do what you need to.
Location 1912 The open sea was a calendar consisting of one blank page—no days or weeks, not even months, really.
Location 1971 Memory should be vise-like in youth when the emerging navigator needed it most. But no one ever survived into old age who couldn’t open that vise and let much of their hard-gripped facts go free.
Location 2229 First in, last out, as it generally goes, even for brains that aren’t being eaten away from the inside by runaway proteins. The older the memory, the more textured. I can’t always tell how far away a door is or find my way to it without slamming into things. I’m losing governance over my body’s provinces. But I can remember the taste of ice cream when I was six—the precise flavor of blueberry cheesecake—a taste they don’t make anymore.
Location 2245 Every business beyond a certain size grows its own hive mind. The company itself will find a person who can implement its collective will. And the people at the helm will be convinced of their own agency, just as I was.
Location 2479 We joined up with five other Chess Club nerds to play Diplomacy—John Kennedy, Walter Cronkite, and Henry Kissinger’s favorite game. It unfolded over the course of a marathon ten-hour session one Saturday at the home of one of the club members, a Frank Lloyd Wright creation in Hyde Park. I later hired that guy to work for me as a lawyer for Playground, starting him at two hundred thousand a year, based in part on his conniving in that game.
Location 2516 Rafi was a computer games virgin. Games were coming into the world that had no precedent in human history. Shooters. Point-and-click adventures. Interactive fictions. Unscripted business sims that gave the user real agency. Puzzle pieces raining down from on high. Rafi tried them but didn’t like them. “Whoa. That’s just like beating off. Where’s the love, man? Where’s the other human?”
Location 2521 “You know what we are?” he said, sipping his favorite Life Savers soda. “Condemned to freedom. Sisyphus really is happy, brother. Give or take.”
Location 2538 ‘Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted.’ John Lennon.”
Location 3293 Neither Rafi nor I saw what was happening. No one did. That computers would take over our lives: Sure. But the way that they would turn us into different beings? The full flavor of our translated hearts and minds? Not even my most enlightened fellow programmers at CRIK foresaw that with any resolution.
Location 3388 Ina slugged her husband in his thin upper arm and petted her son. “Every human heart imagines God in a different way. A way just right for that imaginer.”
Location 4013 The people I worked alongside of at Illinois went on to create Netscape, JavaScript, Oracle, and YouTube. Huge empty continents were thrown open for homesteading. The world slipped from one age into the next.
Location 4273 But my father had told me once that a man’s worth was measured by how much money other people were willing to let him lose.
Location 4470 All Didier ever wanted from his stint in public life was to finish this job without reproach from anyone. He was beginning to understand how impossible that was.
Location 4597 “If two choices are impossible to choose between, it means they have equal merit. Either choice can have your belief. It doesn’t matter which you choose. You shed one chooser and grow into another.”
Location 4993 The need to solve an intricate puzzle and the need to quiet your brain are twin sons of different mothers. I was helping to build the next big way of being.
Location 5199 The editor knew that no one had ever lost a sale by underestimating the desire of the reading public to read at a simpler level.
Location 5643 The mayor shook his head, unable to believe the claim. “This man is a billionaire. He runs one of Earth’s largest companies. Is he really going to pour millions into this plan because . . . ?” He saw the answer to his own objection. The world was full of billionaire boys getting revenge.
