"I’m sorry," she said, and prostrated herself before him. "My grandmother and mother spoke to me in Uchinaaguchi when I was a small girl." She remembered the stories that her mother had told her, about how when her mother was a schoolgirl in Okinawa the teacher would make her wear a batsu fuda around her neck, a placard that announced that she was a bad student for speaking Okinawan instead of Japanese. Her mother had come from a long line of yuta, women skilled in communicating with the spirits of the dead. The mainlanders had said that yuta and nuuru priestesses were primitive superstitions dangerous to national unity, practices that had to be stamped out so that Okinawans could be cleansed of their impure taint and become full members of the Japanese nation. Those who spoke Uchinaaguchi were traitors, spies. It was a forbidden language. - P33
She drifted closer to it. She would imbue herself into its fibers, its red, white, and blue threads. She would lie among its stars and embrace its stripes. The flag would be taken back to America, and she would go with it. "Nmarijima," she said to herself. "I’m going home." - P47
"In 1871, James Clerk Maxwell devised an ingenious engine," - P37
"That heat differential can be used to produce useful work," Takako said, "like a dam holding back water." Akiba nodded. "The demon has simply allowed the molecules to sort themselves based on information about their pre-existing qualities, but in that separation he has converted information into energy and bypassed the Second Law of Thermodynamics. We must build this engine." - P37
Takako imagined the uranium atoms, vaporized in some compound form. The molecules bounce about, like the air in her metal box. The molecules with the heavier uranium-238 will move, on average, just a bit slower than the molecules with the lighter uranium-235. She imagined the molecules bouncing inside a tube, and the spirits waiting near the top, opening a door to let the faster molecules through but closing it to keep the slow ones inside. - P39
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