Jackpot trilogy

"“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."

"“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.”"

"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."

"“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."

"“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."

"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.”"

"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."

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

"“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."

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

"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."