I thought it was really interesting how DeLillo explicity connects Sister Edgar and J. Edgar Hoover as "Sister and Brother. A fantasy in cyberspace and a way of seeing the other side and a settling of differences that have less to do with gender than with difference itself, all argument, all conflict programmed out." Both characters exist in insular worlds without outside contact, yet cyberspace ultimately links them together albeit as only a "single fluctuating impulse now, a piece of coded information" (826). I'm not entirely sure as to what DeLillo means, but the ending seems very ambivalent, maybe intentionally so in order to mirror the increasing lack of a divide between what he calls cyberspace and the world. Is melding everything together and elminating difference improving things by eliminating conflict or does it reduce our multidimensional selves into catalogued pieces of data?
I was reminded of "the push-button city" when I read this passage on page 825:
"There is no space or time out here, or in here, or wherever she is. There are only connections. Everything is connected. All human knowedge gathered and linked, hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact referenced to that, a keystroke, a mouse-click, a password--world without end, amen."
In the twenty pages before this quote, there is a part where it says "Keystroke 1" and has Esmerelda's death and then "Keystroke 2" which explains Sister Edgar's death. I thought this quote above tied in the book really weel, because the book makes the argument that all of our lives are connected (Think Nick to Marvin Lundy to Charlie Wainwright to Manx Martin...). But all of these connections are electronic, like the connections that cause an entire city to have a blackout. They aren't full of human emotion, they are instead attached by links and keystrokes.