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1 " Neel cuts in: " Where'd you grow up?" " Palo Alto," she says. From there to Stanford to Google: for a girl obsessed with the outer limits of human potential, Kat has stayed pretty close to home. Neel nods knowingly. " The suburban mind cannot comprehend the emergent complexity of a New York sidewalk." " I don't know about that," Kat says, narrowing her eyes. " I'm pretty good with complexity." " See, I know what you're thinking," Neel says, shaking his head." You're thinking it's just an agent-based simulation, and everybody out here follows a pretty simple set of rules" -- Kat is nodding--" and if you can figure out those rules, you can model it. You can simulate the street, then the neighborhood, then the whole city. Right?" " Exactly. I mean, sure, I don't know what the rules are yet, but I could experiment and figure them out, and then it would be trivial--" " Wrong," Neel says, honking like a game-show buzzer. " You can't do it. Even if you know the rules-- and by the way, there are no rules--but even if there were, you can't model it. You know why?" My best friend and my girlfriend are sparring over simulations. I can only sit back and listen. Kat frowns. " Why?" " You don't have enough memory." " Oh, come on--" " Nope. You could never hold it all in memory. No computer's big enough. Not even your what's-it-called--" " The Big Box." " That's the one. It's not big enough. This box--" Neel stretches out his hands, encompasses the sidewalk, the park, the streets beyond--" is bigger." The snaking crowd surges forward. "
2 " They arrived home again to a most peculiar sight. The small garden at the front of the Banana House had been transformed. A tidal wave of cushions, beanbags, quilts, hearth rugs, and sleeping bags appeared to have swept up the lawn and broken at the wall. From Indigo's window a multicolored rope of knotted bedsheets came snaking out and ended among the cushions. As Micheal and Caddy watched, a mattress emerged and fell to the ground, followed by a rain of pillows." Indigo!" shouted Caddy, jumping out of the car.Indigo's and Rose's heads appeared in the window above." It's all right, Caddy!" Indigo called cheerfully. " We've been doing it all the time you've been gone." " We keep finding more stuff to land on!" added Rose. " Look! "
3 " As one of the little streams starts snaking my way, inching closer to the toe of my shoe, I hop over the spreading puddle and out of its reach. I don’t look back to see if it’s going to follow me. I’m already three blocks away and still gaining speed "
― M.A. George , Aqua
4 " I knew it wouldn't last, that the reality would come snaking back in, but for a moment I saw it, the futility of trying to mold love into an expected shape. The foolishness of whining when it didn't fit. "
5 " She felt invisible shackles snaking around her wrists and ankles, took a deep breath and said.............. "
― Taylor Stevens , The Informationist (Vanessa Michael Munroe, #1)
6 " That—this—is Orion’s secret. It’s not that the ship isn’t working, that we’re never going to make it.It’s that the ship has already arrived.We’re already here! There—there—is the planet that will be our home!It floats, so bright that it hurts my eyes. Giant green landmasses spread out across blue water, with swirls and wisps of clouds twirling over top. At the edge of the planet, where it turns away from the suns and starts to darken, I can see bright flashes of light—bursts of whiteness in the darkness—and I think: Is that lightning? In the center, where the light of the suns makes the planet seem to glow from within, I can see, very distinctly, a continent. A continent. On one edge, it’s cracked and broken like an egg, dark lines snaking deep into the landmass. Rivers. Lots of them. Maybe something too big to be rivers if I can see it from here. Fingers of land stretch out into the sea, and dots of islands are just out of their grasp. That area will be cool all the time, I think. Boats can go along the rivers, up and down. We can swim in the water.Because already, I can see myself living there. Being there.On a planet that looks up at a million suns every night, and at two every day.I want to scream, shout with joy. But the air is so thin now.Too thin.I’ve spent too long looking at Orion’s secret.The boop . . . boop . . . boop . . . fades away. There’s nothing to warn about now.Because there’s no air left.My sight is rimmed with black. My head pulses with my heartbeat, which sounds as loud to me as the alarm once did. I turn from the planet—my planet—and start pulling, hand over hand, against the tether, toward the hatch. The ship bobs in and out of my vision as my whole body jerks. I’m panicked now and fighting to stay awake. I try to suck in air, but there’s nothing there to suck. I’m drowning in nothing. "
7 " This was worse than a coke binge. Worse than black tar or the thrill of E. This was the devil himself snaking his way inside of my heart and bending me to his will. This was addiction, quickly morphing into obsession. And somewhere in the clouded fog that was my brain, I knew this was a game I was going to lose. "
― A. Zavarelli , Echo (Bleeding Hearts, #1)
8 " Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again. "
― Emma Jane Unsworth , Animals
9 " One of my most vivid memories from 1974 was the gas station at the foot of the hill below my Southern California high school - car lines snaking out into the street, heralding the failure of the government's price controls and lame ideas such as odd-even rationing. "
