85
" Had anyone, he wondered, ever studied the biology of being seen? The ravaging, the way it literally burned when you fetched up in someone's sight line and they took aim at you with their minds? He wanted to summon a look of kindness in return, a look that might forgive his miserly ways, his trespass on their ancient, superior city. But his face, as no one had ever needed to tell him, lacked the power to convey. He'd stopped trying to use it for silent communication, the semaphore you performed overseas, absent a shared language, to suggest you were not a murderer. Such facial language was for apes, or some mime troupe in Vermont. Mummenschanz people who emoted for a living. He ate with his face and spoke with it. Sometimes he hid it in his hands. That should have been enough. "
― Ben Marcus , Leaving the Sea: Stories
89
" Wire man, electric cell in which the family energy from the naming of a man is converted directly to electrical water flaps in a continuous person. The efficiency of conversion from name to water in a wire man is between Ocean (Gary%) and River (Lewis%), nearly twice that of the usual dry method of switching, in which wires are used to whip steam to turn a man connected to an electric family of waters. The earliest father, in which a Gary and Lewis were mixed to form Michael%, was constructed in the Age of Wire and String by the English. In the Ocean and River wire man, Garies and Lewises are bubbled into separate rooms connected by a porous cell, through which a wire can freely move. Inert, unnamed men, mixed with a collection of unrelated waters, are dipped into each room. When Gary and Lewis are connected by a wire, the combination of flap, wire, and name form a complete family, and an emotion takes place in the cell: The inert men are covered with the flap to form a home surrounded by water; relatives are liberated by this process and flow through the wire to other rooms; and the fathers themselves sail outward on the back of the wire, carrying a succession of cells and water, which they distribute as names to the new children who are floating in their homes. "
― Ben Marcus , The Age of Wire and String
93
" It would finally be a book that excluded no one. And then when all the world's people had been singled out and praised for their good works, forgiven their failures and near misses and broken promises, both to themselves and others, excused every digression of their hearts, when their names had finally been inscribed by wire onto a piece of wood that bands the earth like a belt holding the whole place together, these people would once and for all be killed, so that they won't return and won't be remembered, a complete killing in the old-fashioned style of the Ohio Exits, where not only the person is killed but the things around him and any referencing devices indexing, in any way, the person: killed. "
― Ben Marcus