[...] Bruce was one of the richest men who'd ever lived, a contractor on both the white and black sides of the Pentagon's budget, with clearances to match the Joint Chiefs. He owned his own covert armor, and an overt armory, and corporations he had majority stakes in provided intelligence contracting to the entire roster of federal espionage and policing agencies, not to mention most major metros' police forces. He almost certainly got a paycheck every time the cops in Staten Island were advised by a machine-learning algorithm to go to the brown side of the Mason-Dixon line and starting making Black people turn out their pockets and drop their pants.

[...] The Eagle called several of his State Department contacts that night, hoping one of them would find a channel to the prosecutors on Robinson's case. It pained him to do it, because he wanted the system to just be right, not to make an exception. [...]

"[...] All the data they feed this system to predict crime comes from the cops, who are assumed to have some kind of bias, first because they're human and all humans have bias, and second because NYPD has a long history of getting caught in racial discrimination, which is why they're buying this stuff in the first place.

"Because cops only find crime where they look for it. If you make every Black person you see turn out their pockets, you will find every knife and every dime-baggie that any Black person carries, but that doesn't tell you anything about whether Black people are especially prone to carrying knives or drugs, especially when cops make quota by carrying around a little something to plant if need be.

[...] "If I could explain one thing to the American Eagle, it would be that: he should be hanging city officials by their ankles out of their office windows until they can explain how this fucked-up, ridiculous situation came to pass on their watch. Then he can move on to the police union. Then the software developers. I understand how a guy like that can end up feeling like he's just tinkering in the margins of the problem and wants to draw a line in the sand, but drawing it in front of Wilbur Robinson is a no-win situation."

"For that son-of-a-bitch to be doing what he's doing, there have to be a lot of people in on it: the DA, the judge, his commanding officer, the other cops in the cruiser with him. Bianchi isn't any rotten apple, he's a prototype, Mr. Eagle, the very model of a modern major bushwhacker, and you can tell because very time he did it, he got promoted. He's how things are supposed to work, so you'll forgive me if I'm just not all that interested in how you feel about the injustice of seeing me lying out on the ground while Sergeant Bianchi and his pals beat me nearly to death for no reason at all."

Watching these devices get wheeled into position for use on New Yorkers did something to the American Eagle [...] He'd seen New Yorkers scared, brave, defiant, beaten, noble, and cowardly, and he'd never once wondered which side he was on. Now he had to choose a side between New York and New Yorkers.

More sobbing. Then a deep breath. "I saw the doctor." A long pause. Joe wanted to hang up. More than anything. Because he knew that he was about to go through a door that led out of his life as it was and into a new, worse life. It was a door that only swung one way and once you went through it, you could never go back. There was a split second when he actually almost hung up on Lacey, but of course he didn't.

[...] Ostensibly, it was for fathers whose wives were dying of breast cancer [...] but actually it was for fathers whose wives were dying of treatable breast cancer who had been denied coverage by their insurers.

Work was never the same for Joe after Lacey got sick. He never rescheduled that meeting with the VP. He just couldn't muster the fucks needed to give it his all for on-demand wholesale distribution. People he'd started with left to work for experimental divisions doing partnerships with self-driving forklift companies, or diving into cloud-based self-serve platforms for ecommerce dropshippers, or all that other stuff that helped people get their Squatty Pottys and strobing LED USB chargers delivered to their doors with five nines of reliability.

[...] "My insurance won't pay for me to go to a shrink to talk about how screwed up my insurance is."