No sky, no neighboring houses, no trees, no mountains. The fog had clamped it all off. It muffled sound too...She and Enoch were existing in a bubble… - Neal Stephenson

And Türing answered another,” Rudy said.
“Who’s that?”
“It’s me,” Alan said. “But Rudy’s joking. ‘Turing’ doesn’t really have an umlaut in it.”
“He’s going to have an umlaut in him later tonight,” Rudy said, looking at Alan in a way that, in retrospect, years later, Lawrence would understand to have been smoldering.

Sorry,” she said, “I got out as fast as I could, but I had to stay and socialize. Protocol, you know.”
“Explain protocol,” Nell said. This was how she always talked to the Primer.
“At the place we’re going, you need to watch your manners. Don’t say ‘explain this’ or ‘explain that.’”
“Would it impose on your time unduly to provide me with a concise explanation of the term protocol?” Nell said.
Again Rita made that nervous laugh and looked at Nell with an expression that looked like poorly concealed alarm.

“One of Enoch’s ancestors was, like, the great-great-granddad of fractal geometry,” Julian reported. “In 1791—”
“Oh, god, please don’t read the Wikipedia entry,” Enoch said, showing more emotion than when he had been literally crucified.
“I have an edit overlay that filters out most of the garbage,” said Julian, mildly offended that Enoch had taken him for the kind of person who would actually take Wikipedia at face value.
“But, Julian, I am sitting right next to you and so you don’t have to consult an online source.”