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The electronic lock deactivated with a mechanical thwonk.
“When I was a kid, there were more than fifty thousand burger places in this country,” Gaddis said. “Every corner, every airport, every ballpark. Burgers, burgers, burgers. As American as apple pie. Now you hardly see them anymore, and it makes me angry and sad. Which is idiotic. I couldn’t tell you the last time I had one. So why do I care so much? Why is it that the more I change, the more I need everything around me to stay the same? It’s a perverse design flaw in our species. That even something as inconsequential as a cheeseburger, which doesn’t affect my life one iota, still threatens my
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“You did invent cloning.” “Well, your aunt did the inventing, but I sure sold it. I suppose that makes me the Ray Kroc of cloning.
“Because no one makes movies about the Tim Cooks of this world.”
She stood there on the threshold, apologizing for all the names she’d called people in horror movies who had done what she was about to do.
Up close, Con saw there were more like thirty of them, a mixture of races and ages. She thought it was nice how hatred could bring people together.
Humans are very good at inventing solutions and very, very bad at anticipating consequences.”
“In this country, power doesn’t derive from defeating a threat; true power comes from the fear of the threat. And maintaining power requires a continuing threat.
“The anthill doesn’t exist without the ant. But if a human builds a house, according to you, that is unnatural? It’s nothing more than a semantic contrivance to make us feel special.
Most of life is lived to be forgotten. That was the way of things, cruel though it felt when it was your life that would be lost.
