post-apocalyptic-novels

"But science…had been the wild card, the twist. With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping."

"She looked at the moon. It would look the same, she guessed, through the decades he’d sketched for her. None of that, he said, had necessarily been as bad for very rich people. Constant crisis had provided constant opportunity."

"“It is,” said Lowbeer, “as people used to say, to my unending annoyance, what it is.""

"“Conspiracy theory’s got to be simple. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever’s supposed to be behind the conspiracy.” “They think Homes was building drugs?” Flynne said. “How else do you finance the United Nations taking over?” “There’s hardly any UN left, Janice.” “UN’s got deep roots in the demonology.”"

"“Luke 4:5 still across the street?” “I think so, but Ossian’s exploring buying them out.” “Buying a church?” “You may already own several.""

"Conner was in the garden, on hands and knees, snarling at Gordon and Tyenna. They were facing him, side by side, as if ready to spring, their musculature looking even less canine than usual, their stiff tails in particular. Carnivorous kangaroos, in wolf outfits with Cubist stripes. “What’s he doing out there?” Netherton asked. “I don’t know,” said Lev, “but they love it.” Now the two creatures lunged at Conner simultaneously. He fell between them, flailing, wrestling with them. They were making a high-pitched, repetitious coughing sound."

"“You should be a weatherman,” Leon said, “you’re in the future and you know the weather.” “You’re someone who only pretends to be unintelligent,” Netherton said. “It serves you simultaneously as protective coloration and a medium for passive aggression. It won’t work with me.” “Future’s fucking snippy.”"

"Netherton saw the glowering bulk of Newgate…the structure’s pitted granite flanks, spiked with iron. At the City’s westernmost gate, for more than a thousand years, had stood a jail, and this its ultimate and final expression. Or had been, rather, as it had been torn down in 1902, at the start of that oddly optimistic age before the jackpot. To be rebuilt a few years before his birth. The klept having deemed its return a wise and necessary thing."

"In through a gate that reminded Flynne of a Baptist anime of hell she’d seen. Burton and Leon had thought the fallen women were hot. Into this thing’s shade, its coldness. Flagstone floors like paths in some very wrong garden. Dull lamps, like the eyes of big sick animals. It was like the intro segment for a Ciencia Loca episode, paranormal investigators, going someplace where a lot of people had suffered and died."

"People who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were. Lowbeer had said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other. Which had reminded Flynne of what her mother had said…That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room to become its bigger self, with more horrible results."

"“You're weird, Wilf…You want to fetishize an extremely narrow-bandwidth experience,” Macon said, “that’s your business.”"

"She put the glasses on…a cursor appearing. A white arrow, centered in her field of vision. Then moving down, of its own accord. “Here we go,” said a woman’s husky voice in Verity’s ear."

"“Vespasian,” Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer said, peering sidewise at Netherton over her greatcoat’s upraised collar, “our hobbyist of hellworlds. Recall him?” “The one who made such horrific stubs? All war, all the time?” “I’d wondered how he so quickly rendered them nightmares,” she said. “Eventually, I looked into it…Vespasian discovered a simple way of exaggerating the butterfly effect, or so it seems…On making contact, he’d immediately withdraw. Then return, months later, study the results, and very deliberately and forcefully intervene. He achieved remarkable if terrible results, and very quickly. Investigating his method, I happened on another of his so-called stubs, one in which he’d initiated contact in 2015, several years before the earliest previously known contact.""

"I dislike calling them stubs,” Lowbeer said. “They’re short because we’ve only just initiated them, by reaching into the past and making that first contact. We should call them branches, as they literally are."

"There was a looseness to this, beyond her experience of chatbots, but a wariness as well."

"Passing a laptop’s screen, Verity saw the president, seated at her desk in the Oval Office, explaining something. If it wasn’t the hurricane hitting Houston, the earthquake in Mexico, the other hurricane wrecking Puerto Rico, or the worst wildfires in California history, it was Qamishli. Increasingly, though, it seemed mainly to be Qamishli."

"When Lowbeer wished a conversation in public to be private, which she invariably did, London emptied itself around her."

"Ask Lowbeer something, almost anything, and she’d have the answer. Meeting strangers, she might answer questions they hadn’t thought to ask. The whereabouts, for instance, of possessions long misplaced. She was fundamentally connected…in ways resulting in her knowing virtually everything about anyone she happened to meet. She’d apologize, then, declaring herself an ancient monster of the surveillance state, something Netherton knew her to well and truly be."

"“How far back did Vespasian go,” Netherton asked, “to initiate this stub?” “Mid-2015.” “When is it, there, now?” “2017,” she said, “fall.” “Much changed?” “The outcome of the previous year’s American presidential election. Brexit referendum as well….” “But why would Vespasian, of all people, have desired positive change?” “He was a sadist,” said Lowbeer, “and terribly clever at it…when he failed to return to fine-tune and amplify course, as he always did, things went their own way.” “How is it there, given that?” “Grim. They’re being driven into the same blades we were, but at a less acute angle.”"

"From the crest of Dolores Park, Verity wondered if she could see the tower on Montgomery, where Gavin had first described the product that had turned out to be Eunice. There was no one for Eunice to facially recognize, looking out across the city, but the cursor, having become a white circle, was darting around the skyline, trapping invisible airborne somethings under a plus sign. “Birds?” Verity asked. “Drones.""

""Gavin described the product, that’s you, as a cross-platform, individually user-based, autonomous avatar. Target demographic power-uses VR, AR, gaming, next-level social media. Idea is to sell a single unique super-avatar. Kind of a digital mini-self, able to fill in when the user can’t be online.”"

"“Got a go-bag?” Eunice asked. “I haven’t had my own place for the past year…Living out of a bag. That count?” “We had go-bags in our go-bags,” Eunice said, “depending.” “On what?” “Where we were going,” Eunice said."

"Verity drew a bundle out with her glove-bagged hand, Franklin’s mild portrait bisected by a red elastic band. “This is wrong, this kind of money. You know that?” “Gives us agency.” “Agency?” “Capacity to act,” Eunice said. “Act how?” “Say we need to buy some shit.” “What shit?” “Kind that takes cash money.”"

"“We’ve sourced something field-expedient,” Ash began, “from what little’s available there…She’s a surprisingly advanced product of the early militarization of machine intelligence…They saw it as cloning complexly specific skill sets.” Netherton nodded, hoping his eyes weren’t visibly glazing. “There were, for instance, individuals adroit at managing what were termed competitive control areas…complexly volatile environments, where you might easily lose prized field operators. Hence a project to replace such operators with autonomous AI, piped directly into the goggles of local recruits.”"

"“You communicate with it?” “Her. Given the technological asymmetry, she’s been rather like an operative whose handlers are recurrent figures in a dream.”"

"Ash's pallor blending perfectly with the wall, her eyes and chartreuse lips seemed to float there, a disembodied Cheshire goth, beneath her snaky black thundercloud of anti-coiffure."

"Eunice had screened Inception for her, the night before…Returning her to Gavin had seemed the wisest option, but then something about her earnestly nerdy exposition of the film had been the start of a growing empathy. Somehow rooted, she thought now, in a sense of someone afflicted with extremely busy but only intermittently connected suburbs of the self."

"Cursion, when they were as legit as they ever really were, lived down in the underbrush. Still do, but their new coloration’s gaming. Sometimes, if DoD doubles down hard enough on the deniability, there’s zero memory left of the original mission. The op drifts free of the department, unfunded, forgotten…I figure Cursion took the keys to something with them, when they drifted on DoD. Or maybe drifted back, long enough to lift something. Tulpagenics would be their front for monetizing it.” “It?” “Me."

"“I like it,” Stets said. “A Silicon Valley ghost story, assuming Eunice is real.” “Thing is,” Eunice said, “I’m here. Realness is kinda sorta.” “So why here, exactly, right now?” he asked. “I want to know where I come from. The infrastructure. Be some Area 51 shit, for real.”"

"Netherton was looking at the oversized bronze head of a bearded man, its neck having been crudely severed from whatever figure it must once have topped. “Lee,” said Fearing, noting the direction of Netherton’s gaze. “Lee?” “Robert E.” The name meaning nothing to Netherton."

"“He's a criminal?” “Financial services,” Eunice said, “but on the street side.”"

"“Good to see you, Wilf,” Janice said, from her black mesh workstation chair, his phone’s feed provided by her device’s camera…He’d forgotten about her having painted their living room Baker-Miller pink, an institutional shade once thought to reduce aggression in prisoners. Homeland Security had given the county drunk tank three more gallons than necessary, so she’d bartered a box of her preserves for them, at a community event."

"“There’s lots of people happier with a dumbfuck in the White House…The people who were the most trouble, under Gonzalez, aren’t unhappy enough, now, to be much trouble at all,” Janice shrugged. “Life in the county, life in these United States.”"

"“Turkey and Syria weirding you out?…Folks in Frankfurt made me feel like the Cold War never really went away. Somebody shoots down a couple of Russian jets, wham, it’s Cold War Atlantis, risen from the depths.”"

"“You’re too young to remember it,” her mother said, “but we were expecting nuclear war all the time, really, up into my early thirties. Later, all of that felt unreal. But the feeling that things became basically okay turns out to have actually been what was unreal.” “But it didn’t happen. That war,” Verity said. “Decades of background dread did.”"

"“How do you keep this all sorted?” “My ass is legion,” said Eunice."

"The city so quiet, in that moment, that he could hear the gulls. Then a car passed, an antique Rolls, unoccupied, its driver a dash-top homunculus, in what he took to be a tiny chauffeur’s uniform. He walked on, intent on milk, his dreams of skating forgotten."

""You’ll be contacting Verity Jane instead,” Lowbeer said. “Who?” “…you’ll help enlist her as our agent there. She’s not at all the person I’d choose for the job, but there it is. I’m repeatedly placed in the position of choosing which innocent to sacrifice, to whatever current idea of the greater good. I’m weary of that. You’ve no idea how weary.”"

"Money launderers, in Netherton’s experience of Flynne’s stub, were the sort of people least destabilized by discovering that their world was a branch of someone else’s. They immediately looked for advantage in the knowledge."

"“What are you doing?” Netherton asked, reminded of how Conner made him uneasy. “Running systems checks,” Conner said. “This is a fabbed-up repro of something at least six generations behind the oldest I ever piloted, but the software looks like it’s either ours or we’ve rewritten it. Seriously fucked up…but I meant 'fucked up' like I can’t fucking wait to use it.”"

"“My mother’s story,” Netherton said, “held that everything would invariably collapse, if the klept were left to their own resources.” “Their tedious ambition and contempt for rule of law would bring everything down, around their ears and ours,” Lowbeer said. “They managed to do that with the previous world order, after all, though then it was effectively their goal. They welcomed the jackpot, the chaos it brought.”"

"“Rose Garden in ten,” Conner said, “got it.” “Say what?” Virgil asked. “My day job,” Conner said. “President’s taking questions from the press in half an hour, likes me to check if the translation from future-ese to folk wisdom’s solid. You need me, I’ll be right on it.” “Break a leg,” said Virgil. Verity, her mouth full of croissant and raspberry jam, said nothing."

"The City, Netherton had heard Lowbeer say, explaining the klept to Flynne, had long been, and well prior to the jackpot, a unique species of semi-autonomous crypto-state, the single least democratic element of elected British government. It was this singular status, according to Lowbeer, that had allowed it to ride out the eventual collapse of democracy. That, and its core expertise in laundering money, had brought it into a mutually beneficial synergy with the émigré oligarch community, dominated by Russians, who had themselves first been attracted to London by the City’s meta-criminal financial arcana, plus the lavish culture of personal amenities for those requiring same. With this in mind, he picked up the bowl of coffee and regarded Lev over its rim."

"“Eunice’s network. Lowbeer now sees herself in it. Its skills are those she had to acquire during the worst decades of the jackpot.”"

"“When we nudged Cursion into experimenting with Eunice,” Ash said, “we understood that we’d be destabilizing them…By now, destabilization has tipped over into dysfunction.” “They were functional enough to mount an attack,” Wilf said. “They’re not strategists,” said Ash, “though they assume they are. A fully functional, strategically sound opponent would be a greater threat, but without posing the sort of unpredictable danger they currently do.”"

"Netherton said nothing, something he’d only recently been learning to deliberately do."

"“They think they’re the only real continuum, the one original, not a stub,” Connor said. “They discovered the so-called server first, whatever anomaly allows all this. But they didn’t invent it, just found it. Anybody knows what it really is, or where, they’re not telling.” “Nobody knows what it is?” said Virgil. “Nobody has the least fucking idea, or where the hardware is. Lot of people think China, but China’s just naturally where you’d guess something like that would be…They opted to mostly go their own way, in the jackpot…Just rolled up the carpet and closed the door for a couple decades.”"

"“What’s going on?” asked Manuela, eyeing the container’s door. “Is this a cult? Kidnapping people and telling them somebody’s after them?” “Let me think about it,” Verity said. “You’re kidnapped too? Let’s fucking escape!”"

"“Conner’s up there telepresently,” Verity said. “So what you’re doing is some new way to give TED talks? Like theater, with really random props and locations?” “He’s using something like the iPads on wheels, but more like one of those dogs, except it’s got arms and two legs.” “So where is he, physically?” “D.C. Washington.” Manuela winced. “Please.”"

"“Guys, I’m gonna pretend like all of you are incapacitated or unconscious. And if none of you makes a move, I’ll be leaving you to your own resources. Otherwise, this drone’s detonating its onboard explosives. As the only one of us who’s not physically present, I’ve got zero fucks to give about how that goes. Your call. "We’re muted now,” Conner said to Netherton. Thomas started to cry, in the nursery. “I need to see to my son,” said Netherton, getting up. “You do that,” said Conner, sounding as if he were enjoying his evening."