Jackpot trilogy

"I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling."

"They didn’t think Flynne’s brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him…like phantom limb, ghosts of the tattoos he’d worn in the war, put there to tell him when to run, when to be still, when to do the bad-ass dance… So they allowed him some disability for that, and he lived in the trailer down by the creek."

"“You’re a publicist,” Rainey said. “She’s a celebrity. That’s interspecies.”"

"Nobody liked Luke 4:5, but Burton had a bad thing about them. They’d started out as a church, or in a church, not liking anyone being gay or getting abortions or using birth control. Protesting military funerals…and took it as the measure of God’s satisfaction with them that everybody else thought they were assholes."

"Netherton’s eyes widened, preparing to pitch something he hadn’t yet invented, none of what he’d said so far having been true. [Daedra's] head was perfectly still, eyes unblinking. He imagined her ego swimming up behind them, to peer at him suspiciously, something eel-like. …And then she smiled. Rainey’s sigil privacy-dimmed. “I’d want to have your baby now,” she said, from Toronto, “except I know it would always lie.”"

"He imagined her now, stretched on a couch in her elongated Toronto apartment…She’d be wearing a headband, to trick her nervous system into believing the rented peripheral’s movements were hers in a dream."

"“And they’re dead?” she’d asked. “Probably.” “A long time ago?” “Before the jackpot.” “But alive, in the past?…Why haven’t I heard of it before?” “It’s new. It’s quiet…Something to do with quantum tunneling.” “How far back can they go?” “2023, earliest. He thinks something changed, then; reached a certain level of complexity. Something nobody there had any reason to notice.”"

"He was watching one of Lev’s two thylacine analogs through the kitchen window.…Now it turned, in its uncanine fashion, its vertically striped flank quite heraldic, and seemed to stare at him. The regard of a mammalian predator neither canid nor felid was a peculiar thing."

"And it was like she could see herself there, on the gray gravel in front of Jimmy’s, and the tall old cottonwoods on either side of the lot, trees older than her mother, older than anybody, and she was talking to a boy who was half a machine, like a centaur made out of a motorcycle, and maybe he’d been just about to kill another boy, or a few of them, and maybe he still would."

"Actually seeing the polt had been surprisingly interesting...driving, eyes on whatever motorway, seventy-some years earlier, on the far side of the jackpot…Gloriously pre-posthuman. In a state of nature. And hustling, Netherton had soon seen, eye on the money. Improvising, and with utterly unfamiliar material."

""So Homes had Burton's phone overnight. What worries me is that they might have looked at mine while they had his.” “In that case,” Macon said, “they’d have looked at mine as well. Your brother and I pretty much in a way of business…Some bored Homes in a big white truck, looking for porn, I could probably tell. But some panoptic motherfucker federal AI? Fuck only knows.”"

"“You might begin by explaining this hobby of yours, Mr. Zubov…‘continua enthusiast.’” “You know about the server?” “The great mystery, yes. Assumed to be Chinese, and as with so many aspects of China today, quite beyond us. You use it to communicate with the past, or rather a past, since in our actual past, you didn’t. That rather hurts my head, Mr. Zubov." "The act of connection produces a fork in causality, the new branch causally unique. A stub, as we call them.” "But why do you call them that?" Lowbeer asked. "It sounds short. Nasty. Brutish.”"

"“Who called you?” Burton asked, seated behind Tommy, in the Faraday cage where they put prisoners. “State AI. Satellite noticed the vehicle hadn’t moved for two hours. Also flagged your property for unusual drone activity, but I told ’em that was you and your friends playing games.” “Appreciate it.” “How long you intend to be playing?” “Hard to say.” “Kind of a special tournament?” “Kind of.”"

"“Do you print your own? Drones?” “Does a bear shit in the woods?” Netherton looked blank, then up and to his right. Appeared to read something. “You…do.”"

"“They won’t say what it is. Like we’re beta-testing something. Said they’re in Colombia." “Colombia was a drug place before there were builders,” said Edward. “Now it’s a money place. Like Switzerland…The files they sent. We’re being asked to fab something that we can’t find any record of having been built before.” “Could be corporate espionage,” said Macon. “That would be interesting. Haven’t gone there before. That has our attention.”"

"Leon had to come into town to do contractually obligated promo media with a crew from the lottery, with, he said, the douchebag he’d bought the ticket from. “If he’s a douchebag,” Flynne asked, “why’d you buy the ticket from him?” “’Cause I knew it would burn his ass so bad, when I won,” Leon said."

"“Too much like asymmetric warfare.” "Terrorism.” “We prefer not to use that term,” said Lowbeer, "if only because terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state.”"

"Flynne pictured the stuff in Conner’s yard, humped over with morning glory vines, and imagined him never joining the Marines. So that he’d stayed here, found some unfunny way to make a living, met a girl, gotten married. Had kids. And his wife getting all the morning glory cleared away, and everything hauled off, and planting grass for a real front yard. But she couldn’t make it stick, couldn’t quite believe it, and she wished she could."

"“Password?” “Easy Ice, lowercase, no space.” “That’s such a shit password, it’s not even a password.” “I’m a just normal fucking person, Macon.” “Normal fucking people never do whatever it is you’re about to.” He smiled."

"“I used to play in a game, because I needed the money…It was a hobby for them. Rich fucks. They bet on who’d win.” She was staring at Netherton. All his glibness, all his faithful machinery of convincing language, somehow spun silently against this, finding no traction whatever. “But if it’s a game, why did someone send those men to kill us? How’d you know the winning number in the lottery, Mr. Netherton?" “This isn’t…your world.” “So what is it?” “The future,” said Netherton, feeling utterly ridiculous. On impulse, he added the year. “No way.”"

""Their stuff’s all seventy years faster than ours,” Flynne said. “Okay,” he said, and she wondered if what she was seeing in his eyes was the Corps’ speed, intensity, violence of action, or his right way of seeing. Because he just got it. Ignored the crazy, went tactically forward. "Just lock everything down, really tight," she said. "We don’t know enough now to make any kind of move at all.” Burton looked at her. “Easy Ice,” he said, and she saw the shiver run through him in the moonlight, the haptic thing."

"“You’re used to telepresence, then,” Lev said. “We call it getting a haircut,” Flynne said, giving him a look as she got to her feet, “back in frontier days.”"

"The peripheral’s eyes opened wide. “Christ on a corndog,” it said, raising large hands until it could see them. It wiggled the fingers of both. "Goddamn. Look at all these fingers.”"

"“It’s not a dream,” Flynne said. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a dream. Don’t know that any of us are okay.” “Never sprained anything in a dream,” Conner said."

"“Lead the way then, Mr. Netherton,” said Lowbeer. Netherton did, imagining, as he climbed the stairs, a better world, one in which a relaxing drink would be waiting in the sitting room."

"“Why’re you here?” “Thing is,” Tommy said, “strangers keep getting killed out this way.” Flynne looked at him, stuck for what to say. “Why, if you don’t mind my asking, have you been sleeping, if that was sleeping, with some kind of sugarloaf cake on your head? And what, and this is what I’ve really been wanting to ask somebody for the last little while, the actual fuck is going on out here? Out here, in town, over in Clanton, at the statehouse.” “We aren’t builders.” “The basic flow of cash in the county’s changed, Flynne, and I mean overnight. So pardon my jumping to conclusions.”"

"“Ash imagines you a conservative,” Lowbeer said, “or a romantic, perhaps. She sees your distaste for the present rooted in the sense of a fall from grace. That some prior order, or perhaps the lack of one, afforded a more authentic existence.” “I simply imagine things were less tedious,” Netherton said. “I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,” she said. “Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp.""

"So Flynne sat with Wilf (in the Wheelie Boy), and started to explain what he called the jackpot…That it was multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event. And in fact the actual climate…had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and now it was too late."

"So now they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn’t happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming anyway."

"Wilf told her it killed 80 percent of every last person alive, over about forty years…droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves."

"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.""