“History in the older sense was narrative, stories we told ourselves about where we’d come from and what it had been like, and those narratives were revised by each new generation, and indeed always had been. History was plastic, was a matter of interpretation. The digital had not so much changed that as made it too obvious to ignore. History was stored data, subject to manipulation and interpretation.”

“Laney’s progress through all the data in the world (or that data’s progress through him) has long since become what he is, rather than something he merely does.

“Do you believe in the forces of history?” ‘I believe in what brings us to the moment.”

“I seem to have come to believe in the moment myself. I believe we are approaching one, drawn to it by the gravity of its strangeness. It is a moment in which everything and nothing will change. I am seeking an outcome in which I will retain viability. […] If the world is to be reborn, I wish to be reborn in it, as something akin to what I am today.”