This was a new kind of toaster, a toaster that took orders, rather than giving them. [...]

"The elevators work. They just give priority to the market-rent side. You'll get an elevator when none of these folks need one."

Salima grasped the system and its logic in an instant. The only reason she'd been able to rent in this building was that the developer had to promise that they'd make some low-income housing available in exchange for permission to build fifty stories instead of the thirty that the other buildings in this neighborhood rose to. There was a lot of this sort of thing, and she knew that there were rules about the low-income units, what the landlords had to provide and what she was forbidden from doing.

But now she saw an important truth: even the pettiest amenity would be spitefully denied to the subsidy apartments unless the landlord was forced by law to provide it [...] the logic of a mulish child who wanted to make their displeasure known.

Having a place to live that was truly hers made a huge difference in her life. Something about the stability, the confidence---hell, just having a reliable place to do laundry every night---it all added up to the sense that she was finally exiting the endless limbo she'd lived in all her life. Her earliest memories were of being on the move with her parents, one camp and then another, then an uncle's house for a while, then another camp, then temporary apartments, then the crossing to America, the camp, the shelter. All that time, she'd had the sense that her life was on hold, that she was floating around like a leaf in the breeze, sometimes snagged on a branch and sometimes lofted up to the clouds, but never touching down, never coming to rest. It meant that she never really thought about her life more than a few days in advance. Now, in her own home, she was thinking about what her future held.

[...] After years of spinning in place, she had finally started her life in earnest, with a place and a job and friends who were nearly family. This was a reminder that her current life was a tissue-thin surface covering the world she'd lived in before.

[...] It was pretty esoteric, this idea of bankruptcies by distant companies. What did these kids think about the appliances they jailbroke? Did they see them as just weirdly nonfunctional gadgets they had to work around, like the bad touchscreens at the shelter? Or did they see them as the enemy, something that they were at war with, the weapons of a distant adversary who wanted to subjugate them to its will?

[...] They've been watching the darknet boards, they know that everyone's been figuring out how to jailbreak their shit while we've been getting restarted, and they figure all those people could be customers, but instead of paying for food we sell them, they'd pay us to use food someone else sold them."

Salima almost laughed. It was a crime if she did it, a product if they sold it to her. Everything could be a product.

Salima had thought of Wye as her ally, every bit as offended by the locked-down world of Dorchester Towers as she was. But Wye had been working long hours for Boulangism and its new sister companies. She thought the problem was that Salima didn't want to get into trouble. Salima had been thinking that, too. But that wasn't the problem. The whole rotten business, that was the problem.

[...] a kid who'd learned to search the darknet for ways to control technology designed to control them. A kid who was outraged at being asked to forget how to do that and go back to being meekly controlled.

Would a kid like that ever work on commission, installing official unlocking codes in the poor-floor apartments of Dorchester Towers? Was there enough money in the world?

And if there was, did she want to be the one who used that money to convince a kid to give up on that uncompromising ferocity?

"[...] I understand your idea here, that you're selling us more freedom. but that's only because our appliances take away so much freedom to begin with, and then sell it back."

"But no one forced you to choose Boulangism. You chose a product that came with restrictions, and in return., you got a deal on your rent."

[...]

Salima managed a tight little smile. "You keep talking about choosing. This is the only place I could get into, and it took months. How is that a choice?"

"You were living somewhere before this place, right?"

"A refugee shelter."

"You could have chosen to stay there, right?"

She wanted these people gone. "I don't think that is much of a choice."

He shook his head. "The point is that you had a choice, and that's because appliances like ours made it economical for landlords to build subsidy units."

[...]

"We want to help you people, let you get more out of your lives, give you more choices."

What about the choice to jailbreak my things? She didn't ask it.

"You're also not white. You ever hear those heritage-not-hate types, that myth that the Irish were the first slaves in America? They're an interesting bunch. They're so close, you know, so close to understanding that whiteness is a thing that other people choose for you. People are white if whiteness is endowed by them by the wider whiteness. It starts before birth and carries on after you're dead. And what whiteness gives you, it can take away. You don't understand that, I bet, but you are only white by courtesy, Mr. Eagle, and you are really only a little green man clothed in whiteness. You won't believe how quickly you can be dewhitened. You're the original illegal alien."