How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Where to spend his time? Ah! Atop Montjuïc. He turned down an alley. Where he emerged on the far side, the crowds were thin... and a tourist auto was just arriving for him. Alfred sat back in the single passenger cockpit and let his mind roam. The Montjuïc fortress was not the most impressive in Europe, and yet he had not seen it in some time. Like its brethren, it marked the bygone time when revolutions in destruction technology took decades to unfold, and mass murder could not be committed with the press of a button. (1.76)
The book doesn't make much of this, but Alfred is also kind of old (17.1); so when he goes to see an old fortress that marks a "bygone time," we should consider that Alfred might have known—well, okay, the Montjuïc fortress is from the 1600s, so Alfred isn't that old. But is it possible that his desire to get the world back to an old order has to do with his elderliness?
Quote #2
He just sat there, slumped to the side. His right hand rubbed again and again at the wrist of his left. And yet, this was a big improvement. Robert Gu, Sr, had been down to eighty pounds, a barely living vegetable, when UCSF Medical School took him on for their new treatment. It turned out the UCSF Alzheimer's cure worked where the years of conventional treatment had failed. (2.37)
This is Bob Jr.'s view of his dad and a reminder that Robert Gu nearly bought the farm. Not that we need a reminder: the first time we see Robert, we're told that he "should be dead" and we hear all about how badly off he is—or was. As Bob Gu notes here, Robert doesn't look good, just sitting there and rubbing his wrist, but this is "a big improvement." As we'll see, there's some different ways to get old in the future.
Quote #3
But the light was so bright that Robert saw fiery color even in the shadows. "It's all still a blur, but I haven't seen this well in..." he didn't know how long; time itself had been a darkness "...in years."
A woman spoke from right behind his shoulder. "You've been on the retinal meds for about a week, Robert. Today we felt we had a working population of cells present, so we decided to turn them on." (3.3-4)
The only reason we get Robert Gu as a protagonist in this book is because they have "technology" to combat the symptoms of old age. (Though as we'll see later, not every symptom and disease can be fixed.) We could here sympathize with the weirdness that Robert must be experiencing: here he had lost his marbles and his eyesight and now it's all coming back. (He describes the feeling of his eyeballs as "fizzing." Yeesh.) But let's also note that Robert will have to get used to all this new tech too. In other words: what are "retinal meds"?