"Picture this: you work at a plant that makes Halloween stuff — you know, like, rubber severed heads. And you’re all like: Americans decorate their h… - Daniel Suarez

For average working folks, America was becoming a puzzle. Who was buying all these two-hundred-dollar copper saucepans, anyway? And how was everyone paying for these BMWs? Were people shrewd or just stupefyingly irresponsible?

Perfect replication is the enemy of any robust system... Lacking a central nervous system — much less a brain — the parasite is a simple system designed to compromise a very specific target host. The more uniform the host, the more effective the infestation.

Look, let’s not turn this into a blamestorming session. There’ll be plenty of time for that if we fail.