“There were times, and this was one of them, when Rebecca quietly yearned for twentieth-century definitions of civility, when commonly shared air was meant to be filled with words generally agreed to be suitable for all. But in the years after Rebecca’s travels through the silent world, the exodus of its former citizens was nearly complete – the only people who remained were the ones who could not afford to leave. Each person now lived in his own handpicked society with its own rules for behavior, and so the world they left behind had no rules at all. If you entered a public space without the electronic means to escape elsewhere while machines ferried your body from one place to another, then you knew what you were getting into.”

Version Control by Dexter Palmer