Excerpt: ..."since adolescence, you have been running your intimate life on this operating system, and the fact that civilisation has finally adopted the Scorpio model should give you pause rather than satisfaction. When an entire culture starts treating intimacy as a security risk, it might be worth considering whether the hyper-vigilance was ever wisdom against trauma and change, or whether it has become the condition it was supposed to prevent..."

Excerpt: "You're someone who's been practising 'fairness' with the discipline of a concert pianist since roughly the age of six, holding the scales steady while the room fills with people who treat balance as a slogan rather than a practice. Something has shifted, though. The corrections you keep making; a little more grace here, a further round of accommodation there; seem to have stopped restoring the equilibrium. And the person on the other side of the scale seems to be getting heavier and heavier, and may have completely stopped noticing you're the one holding the whole apparatus up..."

Excerpt: "The thing about wet concrete is that it looks stable while it's setting. You only discover the flaw when the full weight arrives. And you, who learned early that complaint is a luxury reserved for people with someone else to catch them, may be approaching the point where the efficiency itself has become the liability..."