Hayalet Program 'Daemon'

For average working folks, America was becoming a puzzle. Who was buying all these two-hundred-dollar copper saucepans, anyway? And how was everyone paying for these BMWs? Were people shrewd or just stupefyingly irresponsible?

"Perfect replication is the enemy of any robust system... Lacking a central nervous system—much less a brain—the parasite is a simple system designed to compromise a very specific target host. The more uniform the host, the more effective the infestation."

"But if they're so successful, why haven't parasites taken over the world? The answer is simple: they have. We just haven't noticed. That's because successful parasites don't kill us; they become part of us, making us perform all the work to keep them alive and help them reproduce..."