Her assignment had been to write a simple Sumerian code for preserving a jar of pickled eggs. (To the programming-inclined reader, this is the magical equivalent of “HELLO WORLD.”)

Behind the cool mask of bravado, past the one-way mirror of his mind, underneath the rock-solid layers of self-control, in the Zen garden that was Master Sewer’s soul, a high-pitched anxiety fart rustled through the still leaves. If farts could talk, this one would have said, “Damn coppers!

Tradition, thought Merkin, was not the most reliable thing in the world. Tradition had this nasty habit of asserting itself overnight. A new species of funny-shaped, bioluminescent invertebrate found sixteen thousand feet under the ocean might instantly become part of the Chinese traditional medicine, for instance. You never knew.

Simon did not solve problems, he just shamed them into going away.

He knew for a fact that he was so hopelessly bad at seeing through camouflage that, if left alone in the forest, he might even attempt to make fire by rubbing two snakes together.

The coding was anachronistic, kind of like bokeh in a renaissance painting.