kindle book 34. The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. I loved this. These are specially loved:
"You heard it first as a kind of aggressive quiet. The whoosh and snarl of the desert all around us was still going on, but somehow it was subsumed by this deep, bass silence. Then you could feel it as a coldness in your knees and ankles, an unsteady, heart-attack feeling of weakness and vibration. A bit later it was audible, a thrumming gnognognogg which echoed in your lungs and let you know you were a prey animal today."
"the sounds you hear are the sounds of real people working hard on things they can hold, eat and use."
"Boardrooms are rooms to show how important you are. This is an operations room. It is a place where you do important things."
"You don't make strategy so that there's one path to victory; you make it so that as many paths as possible lead to something which isn't loss."