"What I want to know," Laney says, "what I need to know, and right now, is what Harwood is up to. He's sitting at the cusp of some unprecedented potential for change. He appears to be instrumental in it. Rei Toei is in it too, and this freelance people-eraser of Harwood's, and an out-of-work rent-a-cop... These people are about to change human history in some entirely new way. There hasn't been a configuration like this since 1911—"