Even after those innovations had been made and the community had mostly 
joined up with the First Distributed Republic, Carl and his father and 
grandfather had continued to do things in the old way, hunting elk and heating 
their houses with wood-burning stoves and sitting behind their computer screens 
in dark rooms late into the night hand-tooling code in assembly language. It 
was a purely male household (Carl's mother had died when he was nine years old, 
in a rafting accident), and Carl had fled the place as soon as he'd found a 
way, going to San Francisco, then New York, then London, and making himself 
useful in theatrical productions. But the older he got, the more he understood 
in how many ways he was rooted in the place where he grew up, and he never felt 
it more purely than he did striding down a crowded street in a Shanghai 
thunderstorm, puffing on a thick cigar and watching the rain dribble from the 
rim of his hat. The most intense and clear sensations of his life had flooded 
into his young and defenseless mind during his first dawn patrol, knowing the 
desperadoes were out there somewhere. He kept returning to these memories in 
later life, trying to recapture the same purity and intensity of sensation, or 
trying to get his ractors to feel it. Now for the first time in thirty years he 
felt the same thing, this time on the streets of Shanghai, hot and pulsing on 
the edge of a dynastic rebellion, like the arteries of an old man about to have 
his first orgasm in years.