The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Goes upstairs to see what needs to be done, and a big cartoon hammer of sheer exhaustion comes down on her, slamming her into the waiting softness of the futon.

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

She closes her eyes but it has nothing to do with sleep. It only makes her aware that they currently seem to be a size too large for their sockets.

Keiko/Judy is simultaneously pubescent and agressively womanly, her shapely yet slender legs spilling out of a tiny tartan schoolgirl kilt, to vanish, mid-calf, into shoved down, bunched up cotton kneesocks of an unusually heavy knit. […] The big socks go into retro faux-Converse canvas, but with platform soles to balance the very sizable bulk of sock-scrunch around the ankles, giving Keiko/Judy a knees down look recalling a baby Clydesdale.

…drapes drawing quickly aside to reveal a remarkably virtual-looking-skyline, a floating jumble of electric Lego, studded with odd shapes you somehow wouldn't see elsewhere, as if you'd need special Tokyo add-ons to build this at home.

The idea that Neal Stephenson or Bruce Sterling are somehow superior to [William] Gibson because they write about more technical detail is absurd. That's like saying Tom Clancy is a better writer than Hemingway because Clancy would describe a submariner's watch for three paragraphs, when Hemingway would just say, “He glanced at his watch. 4:30.”

[she was] lying more or less happily, or at least pleasantly abstracted, beneath a boyfriend named Donny.

Nothing at all in the German fridge, so new that its interior smells only of cold and long-chain monomers.

There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F, and some much larger and uncounted number of lurkers. And right now there are three people in Chat, but there's no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. The hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counter-purposes, deter her.