Kraken

Any moment called now is always full of possibles.

We should have just killed him, that's a lesson, don't get creative with revenge

Someone came in all Starfleet badges today. Not on my shift, sadly.' 'Fascist,' Leon had said. 'Why are you so prejudiced against nerds?' 'Please,' Billy said. 'That would be a bit self-hating, wouldn't it?' 'Yeah, but you pass. You're like, you're in deep cover,' Leon said. 'You can sneak out of the nerd ghetto and hide the badge and bring back food and clothes and word of the outside world.

Subby Subby Subby," whispered Goss. "Keep those little bells on your slippers as quiet as you can. Sparklehorse and Starpink have managed to creep out of Apple Palace past all the monkeyfish, but if we're silent as tiny goblins we can surprise them and then all frolic off together in the Meadow of Happy Kites.

We cannot see the universe. We are in the darkness of a trench, a deep cut, dark water heavier than earth, presences lit by our own blood, little biolumes, heroic and pathetic Promethei too afraid or weak to steal fire but able still to love. Gods are among us and they care nothing and are nothing like us. This is how we are brave: we worship them anyway.

He knows religion is bollocks," Collingswood said. "He just wishes he didn't.

Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.

The light was going: some cloud cover arriving, as if summoned by drama.

Virgina Woolf versus Edward Lear." "Christ Alive," said Billy. "Are those my only choices?" "I went for Lear," said Leon. "Partly out of fidelity to the letter L. Partly because given the choice between nonsense and boojy wittering you blatantly have to choose nonsense.

As he got older, Billy suspected, he would, Dicaprio-like, simply become like an increasingly wizened child.

Dane discarded his speargun with visible relief. As a paladin of the Church of God Kraken, he had few options. Like many groups devoid of real power and realpolitik, the church was actually constrained by its aesthetics. Its operatives could not have guns, simply, because guns were not squiddy enough. It was a common moan. Drunk new soldiers of the Cathedral of the Bees might whine: “It’s not that I don’t think sting-tipped blowpipes aren’t cool, it’s just…” “I’ve gotten rally good with the steam-cudgel,” a disaffected Pistonpunk might ask her elders “but wouldn’t it be useful to…?” Oh for a carbine, devout assassins pined.

You got to be worried when they're agreeing about anything," she said. "Prophets. That's the last bloody thing you want prophets to do.

Fortune-telling was quantum betting, a competitive scrying of variably likely outcomes.

Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children.

But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse.

Just her, three men, a fidgety pig and lawful intent.

Of all the skills necessary for her work, what she was perhaps worst at was being polite to inanimate things.

When he had first started at the center, he had liked to think that he was unexpectedly cool-looking for such a job. Now he knew that he surprised no one, that no one expected scientists to look like scientists anymore.

How do you...? What is it you're doing?" he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutitive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense. Vardy even smiled. "Paranoid," he said. "Theology.

A few mad exaggerations, alright, within a couple of days: swear to fucking god, they were like throwing grenades and pulling out all kinds of crazy knackery, it was out of control. Whatever. As if the story, if big enough, reflected glory on the teller.

Some midnight-of-all or other [apocalypse] was predicted every few days or nights. Most came to nothing, leaving relevant prophets cringing with a unique embarrassment as the sum rose. It was a very particular shame, that of now ex-worshippers avoiding each other's eyes in the unexpected aftermath of 'final' acts -- crimes, admissions, debaucheries and abandon.

And the continual non-up-turnance of so valuable a commodity as a giant squid—the thought of getting their alembics on which made the city’s alchemists whine like dogs—was provoking more and more interest from London’s repo-men and -women.

Your job is to get villains. Right? You'll have to know what to do. If you don't know, you have to find out. If you can't find out you bloody well make it up and then you make it so.

It ain't that he's not interested in, like, persuasiveness, get me? He's interested in it. Like something in a jar.