"A coldness had come over Blaine in the hot, windy, smoky air. It was a chill that never quite left you after it had gotten inside you, he would find out later, but sometimes welled up again from nowhere, leaving you not afraid exactly, but believing that nothing could ever work out for the better in this world."

“As it was, deformed and made mad by his hellish life, he had become what prophets had probably always been: not frauds, for they themselves believed what they had seen, but pitiful creatures, dreaming some salvation from this crushing world in their malfunctioning brains. Yaum ed din, the crazy little man, the prophet Aida’s John the Baptist, had said: the Day of Religion, the Muslim’s term for Judgment Day. Yaum ed din, the last consolation of the crazy and the weak.”

“Ridiculous to trust your life to these senseless AI things, he thought as he uploaded it to the net; but nowadays it was the only way you could find out anything, search through the massive information overload on the net and everywhere else.”

“Blaine sometimes wished he lived in a culture where everything wasn’t everybody’s business.”

“But that was only half the story, he reminded himself wearily. What about the government corruption and endless red tape, the heedless economic policies, the lavish life-styles of graft-taking officials, the bloated bureaucracies, the mismanaged state industries? Surely no victim of colonial plunder had ever participated more enthusiastically in its own rape than Egypt.”