"When I was little, they took mommy away and put me with a new mommy in a smelly dark house. They said she was a real person, but I knew she wasn't. They had made her. Her face was made from pieces of animal. pig cheeks hairy goat jaw old horse eyes They sewed her together badly, and the seams were crusty. I hated her. Real mommy called me from underground. I opened the attic window at sundown and let the spring breeze flow in. I heard her song floating in on the cool air, soft singing from the grave."
"It was spring and it had been raining all day, but the rain stopped just before it was going to be sunset. So all the clouds were purply and the sky was really orange. And the grass was all wet with rain and there were fire flies around, like all in the sky, way up in the sky, big ones. And me and my grandma went out to these hills way out past the edge of town, and under the hills there were people sleeping. Not in caves. They were buried under the hills. The people were asleep but they were hugging each other. Families, like moms and dads and little kids. Just packed together, a few thousand. The hills were just blown up like balloons because they were so full of people. Like a pregnant woman's stomach. My grandma told me to lie down but I didn't want to. She laid down and got sucked into the ground. I heard her voice coming out of the ground telling me to come inside."
"In explaining our cruelty, which, I admit, was quite beyond scope of all humanity, I feel I must remind you of how we lost the war. We lost the war in the cruelest way imaginable. Island after island fell, and the enemy drew closer and closer. More and more bombs fell on our cities. Food grew more and more scarce. People starved. House burned, people burned, children burned. We were punished by our own sense of dignity, by our own inability to admit inevitable and total defeat. It was like watching a sword slowly being sunk into your chest, millimeter by millimeter, but you refuse to cry out, refuse to whimper or beg for mercy, and there is nothing you can do but watch the metal disappear into your weeping flesh."
"The world enslaved. Flesh networks spanning the globe. The blood of humanity moving through veins thousands of miles long, cavernous curving tubes as big as super highways. Biological superstructures. Bones the size of the Golden Gate Bridge. Living engineering. Hearts as big as mountains, pumping with tectonic force, chained in relays, moving blood across continents. Exotic neurochemical pestilence flowing from monstrous glandular ridges. Flesh encased nightmares. Farms of non-human tongues babbling blasphemous gibberish. A vast sea bed dotted with lonely eyes."
"I call it "coming back online." That moment when you first come out of drunken blackout. It's always frightening. Where am I? What is this neighborhood? What happened to my face? Where's my wallet? Some people, when they drink enough to disable their short term memory, immediately collapse into an immobile heap. This is nature's failsafe. But I lack this feature. I can walk and talk and carry a tune, yet have no idea of what's going on. I have never come back online to find myself up to any good. I have never emerged from a blackout to find that I have built a convenient spice rack or delivered a moving speech about women's rights. It's always been some fucking calamity."
"Enter the CIA. Their motto: "Where ethical approbation ends, our work begins.""
"The train arrived with the cries of its passengers blending into the squealing of the metal wheels. The blue units worked themselves into their usual frenzy, pulling the passengers out, shouting and clubbing and herding them toward the main gate. Amidst the crush of passengers, the limp bodies of children occasionally came spilling out onto the platform, and the blue units tossed them into a pile. Engel watched all of this impassively.
"A woman came out of the train clutching a child of perhaps three years. She looked about frantically, screaming for a doctor. I gave her a sympathetic look and held out my arms. She approached me, the handsome stolid-looking authority figure that I am. I took the child from her and tenderly examined it. It was still alive. I placed it gently on the ground and used my boot to reshape its skull. The woman I shot"