Text of short teasers for “THE BEASTS OF ELECTRA DRIVE” Video-Book
Text of short teasers for the Video-Book format of The Beasts of Electra Drive by Rohan Quine
On this page are the full texts of the teasers excerpted from The Beasts of Electra Drive’s video-book format. On this page is a list of the teasers’ headings only. On both pages, the headings are linked to the teasers on Vimeo.
Teaser 1(i), woodlands at dusk
Woodlands at dusk in the late summer, somewhere on the outskirts of Omaha, Nebraska.
In a clearing burns a bonfire, surrounded by a scattering of teenage girls and boys, sitting up or lying back on dry grassy earth. A joint glows red from time to time, then is passed through the smoky haze.
Nervous on the group’s edge, a sixteen-year-old Jaymi plays a violin, and the liquid magic of his music is delighting his audience. An end-of-summer hour, near the end of all their childhoods. And doubly endless: first, within its own enchanted brevity; then endless again, through infusing a dusk-shadow whisper of sweet fire-smoke through the very different later lives of all those present.
A noise cuts in, from the end of the clearing.
Jaymi’s eyes open on a hot blue haze above a Hollywood hillside. Lying here, he grins, with a glint in his eyes. Above him on the left, silhouetted like an asterisk upon the sky, a palm tree crest sways lazy in the heat; while cicadas chirp, hidden in the scratchy vegetation away down the slope beyond the boundary of his land.
What a palace this is, spread around him here! A palace of his own. And how blessed he is to have it, as he knows. To recline by the pool on this newly-won Electra Drive terrace has somehow become his ordinary world, strange to say—actual, everyday reality for that same nervous boy who used to carry his violin around, always somewhere at the edges of the group, and so often shy and blushing, who lives somewhere inside him still.
Teaser 2(ii), hiss-swirl-patter
The hiss-swirl-patter of the sprinkler on his lawn is carried to him, soft on a warm breeze up the hillside, while those lines of Italian cypresses on the far canyon slopes stand dark behind the heat-haze…
He really is restless, there’s no getting away from it. And it’s something to do with Bang Dead.
The hiss and swirl continue, but mixed with more patter than before: the wind must be veering the water-jets to one side, away from concentricity, to splatter onto the wider-leaved plants that push up through the rocky hillside earth around the edges of his artificially-planted lawn of springy turf.
Some scent of voltage—some transcendence or vengeance or fierce beauty, somehow—is absent or elsewhere.
Teaser 3(i), here come the Beasts
His game will be different. Sprawled here atop this sunny hillside, beneath the climb of Electra Drive beyond his front gates behind him, he decides: his game will mine truth, beauty and magic from the splendour and pain intertwined in the world’s design. In it, he will aim to push imagination and game language towards their extremes, in order to explore and illuminate the beauty, horror and mirth of this predicament called life, where we seem to have been dropped without sufficient consultation ahead of time. He will seek to illuminate the world, to the best of his finite abilities, using game language in new and old ways, and thereby leave the world infinitesimally better than it was beforehand. He will aim and attune his ears as clearly as possible to whatever the highest artistic potential may be, then bring down the richest results from that place, then give those results the truest and most beautiful form he can create. And he will seek to make an honest account of the darkness and pain in the world, while at the same time being a vote for life—maybe even an absolute blast of fun along the way.
What a liberation is just around the corner! Bye bye, Dud Guy. Bye bye, Dreary Ones. (Do keep in touch.)
For here come the Beasts, up the slopes of the canyons of the Hollywood Hills, through the scratching of the crickets in the shadows of the palms!
Oh yes. He can feel them in the distance, getting closer…
His thousand-metre stare through the study window is punctured by a dark speck hovering above the city ahead. Curious, he gets up and steps out onto the terrace. Standing at the railings, it’s hard to judge the object’s distance. Maybe half a mile? Some strange flying thing. It’s not moving fast, but it seems to be expanding … no, it’s just getting nearer here. What on earth is it?
Now it’s growing faster; he can even hear it whirring. Six legs come into view beneath its body, like those of a giant mosquito.
It’s a drone!
Ever closer it comes, until he can see its whirling propellers, one on each mosquito-leg. Nervous, he starts to edge back, as it approaches the promontory and rises over the end of his garden.
He edges back further, as it flies to within ten metres of this terrace, where it hovers over his swimming-pool on the level below. One of the mosquito-legs curls down and lifts something out from under the belly, then swings this around—it’s a camera!
Closer still the drone whirrs, adjusting the camera so as to aim straight at him, until it is a mere two metres ahead of where he’s standing. Sunlight glints off the metal focus-rings around the lens, within whose circle he can see the aperture opening, reacting to the reduced light within this new framing of him: reflected on the lens’s smooth surface, he can even see the dark squares of his study windows behind him, and in the centre of the lens his own face, looking terrified.
Teaser 6(i), first three Beasts
One of these will be the eponymous Platinum Raven herself. He knows few details about her as yet, beyond the shining, platinum-haired grandeur of her seeming transcendence of everyday life. He feels he might kill, however, if this were necessary to bag himself a ring-side seat from which to watch her upcoming emergence into being.
The second character will be a creature of his unrealisable desire to live life with an intensity flavoured by self-destruction. He names this character Scorpio, after his own Moon sign (a water sign, feminine and fixed), though as yet he knows even fewer details about Scorpio than about the Platinum Raven.
Subsidiary to those two, there will then be a creature of his desire to wreak vengeance where deserved. Most games have several such characters, after all—but The Platinum Raven will have the modest total of one, and Jaymi names him Amber. Amber will be off-centre, to say the least. But only the off-centre can supply a point of view that has any real interest, he reflects: the norm backs itself up without doing anything. Yes… Oh, and Amber will also be charming and lethal.
So there they are, it seems—his first three sexy Beasts!
Amber.
The Platinum Raven.
Scorpio.
As yet, he knows little more about them than their names. But he catches furtive whispers as their silhouettes scurry past—shadows on the gauze screens hung across his ballroom, flicking indistinct across the scrims and the curtains, red-lit and purple-lit behind where he sleeps, and their giggles and their shushing hidden just around the corner at the end of the corridor, far down there (though they’ve not dared peep around the plaster of the wall to find Jaymi with their eyes, so they don’t know what he looks like, not quite yet)!
Teaser 9(i), opossum skunk fox
Jaymi sips his cherry schnapps on ice, puts it down beside him with a clink of glass on the flagstones of his study terrace, and claps his hands together.
He gazes around him, through the colours and cool of the evening sky, then pauses at the sound of some unidentified little beast whose call is emanating from somewhere down in the foliage of Laurel Canyon. What can it be? No dog or cat, but a wilder thing. Raccoon? Opossum? Skunk? Fox?
It chuckles up a guttural gibber for a few seconds, then subsides into watchful silence, hidden out there in the undergrowth—awaiting whatever Jaymi creates, as if to judge him against some obscure set of harshly mocking standards.
Narrowing his eyes at the keyboard, he consults the general sketch of Amber in his design for The Platinum Raven. It reads: “The Platinum Raven’s conspirator, in this tower in the mountains, is named Amber, whose infernal nature and allure reflect the fact that he just happens to be the continuation of Rutger Hauer’s psychopathic character in the film The Hitcher.”
Well, OK then. Bring it on!
Teaser 9(ii), bank of controls
As he gears up to create this brand-new creature, triggering it from a point of singularity in zero-scented vacuum, out into one-scented being and presence, Jaymi feels as if he’s installing himself behind a complex bank of electronic controls comprising dozens of dials, switches, buttons, parallel rows of faders and small red or green lights set into matt or shiny surfaces of black metal and plastic. These imaginary decks, looming up before him on the terrace, are way bigger and more powerful than just the laptop computer sitting in front of him running games-programming software. That well-worn little keyboard is merely plugged into an extension lead coiling into the house behind him; whereas these darker Amber controls feel as if they are plugged into the unfathomable voltage of the expanse of Los Angeles ahead, spreading its electrical vastness in grid-lines of yellow and white through the night to the haze of the far horizon.
As he watches, the shadowy controls seem to hang in semi-transparent array over the lower third of the cityscape, while this new Beast’s first sparks of independent being and volition appear in the grain of the upper two-thirds. The elements of him flicker up, each new one joining those that came before, easing into its appointed position of harmony or disruption, until an interlocking array of Amber code leaps in vaunting stabs of light and sound, coalescing into an ever-enriching symphonic machinery.
Looking in through Amber’s cool blue eyes on his laptop screen, he has the sense of a dark submarine beneath the surface. In a human, that submarine might have suggested some great damage inside, either physical or emotional or both. This is not quite a human, however, despite looking just like one: it is Jaymi’s first Beast.
Added to which, just behind Amber’s lips there’s an infrequent fluid smile that’s like a knife being held against the pulse of somebody’s neck.
Oh, yes…
Teaser 14(i), a low susurration
And now it hits home, with something like the queasy feeling in a swimmer when they’re dragged sideways by an unexpected tide: this single key-stroke has dropped him somewhere he cannot retreat from. There is no way but forwards, into a flight he can’t predict.
Amber’s eyes on screen close for the first time, with a smile.
A moment’s stillness in the study.
Then a low susurration and chatter speckles up behind Jaymi, as of archetypes peeping out from hiding-places tucked behind the fabric of reality, ripping through that fabric and emerging through fissures in the air around the room, to reveal that every familiar 3D object is in reality just a curtain beyond which they’ve been hovering throughout his life, peering in at him. The whole study scene splits open as if it’s a painting cut by a knife-blade, while the air vibrates and hisses—and he catapults himself backwards into a corner, flesh tingling, as he watches Amber slither and squeeze out into meat-space, through the monitor, like a giant blond serpent-spider.
Looking online next morning, Jaymi sees it is just as Herb promised. Numerous sources announce that today Bang Dead has quietly rolled out a massive free offering to consumers everywhere. It’s the first major plank of Ain’tTheyFreaky!, and the company promises it’ll be a popular hit: it’s the “Gal Score: Babe or Gross?” Newsfeed!
This is a constant stream of images, videos or pieces of text uploaded from around the world, presenting individual women, who are rated for attractiveness by any member of the public using Ain’tTheyFreaky!’s Freakometer, from a highest score of 10 for Babest, down to a lowest score of 1 for Grossest.
Jaymi lets his gaze wander up and down this newsfeed stream, where new posts are popping up every few seconds, every one of them soon receiving scores and comments from multiple sources.
He reads a few posts, for half a minute or so.
Then he shuts off the Newsfeed, looks away from the screen and closes his eyes.
A wave of disgusted weariness breaks in him, with the intimation of a lifetime’s sadness that this is the kind of thing most humans genuinely want to see, to do, to buy, to think about, and even to use up their lives for—and always will be. The ugliness and meanness of what Ain’tTheyFreaky! represents feel like nothing less than an assault, going far beyond the Dreary Ones’ hostility towards him in particular.
What gigantic exhaustion!
What shortfall from all our potentials.
And what lovely freedom and ease there could have been, in some potential world that is not the one around him.
However, it has to be admitted Amber was also a creature of somewhat untextured gesturalness, as well as negativity. True, his facial appearance benefited from good casting—Rutger Hauer in Hitcher mode. But this, too, was an issue in itself: for it hardly constituted original creation, did it? It was an off-the-peg JPEG, to be nakedly frank. A low-hanging marzipan fruit, sweet to taste but of little nutrition; a sample in a music track, dropped in with savvy and impeccable respect but also with a low-crouching modicum of laziness; or a pop-tart reaction of flashy derivation, but masquerading as ore that was hammered out from Jaymi’s deeps by the clinking of a cursor before being winched up, blinking, onto a screen of blank white.
Moreover, Jaymi’s full response to Bang Dead Games is not expressed in Amber alone. For greater balance, richness and truth, perhaps a more benign, more human, more humane creation is needed, so as to complement the first one’s harsh edges?
Hmm. Maybe Amber didn’t quite add up to the sermon on the mount, after all. Maybe he’s a rung upon a ladder.
So again, who will this second Beast be?
Teaser 18(i), colonnaded passage
In the wide pane ahead of him, his own reflected face hangs indistinctly against the backdrop of an urban plaza of fountains and well-heeled vegetation, bounded by the high angles and curves of three glass buildings standing sharp against the dusk sky—one red, one green and one blue. Falling night reveals bright spaces sealed off on many storeys behind these façades. A piano cased in shiny hard ebonite stands high and tight upon the hot marble floor of a lobby, locked shut, under blue glass and silent. A chandelier hangs in the atrium above it, like the seed-head of a giant dandelion. Across the plaza is a space of electric beauty, empty of people, where a light-machine fires strobing flashes through a crisp white space.
Seeping into this, the ease of Evelyn flickers like a toy-town of candle-flame swaying in the echo of her laughter down the glass-and-metal corridors. Her mirth bubbles up from her code, ripples out of Jaymi’s screen, curls around him and pulls him through this whole glazed complex. And fanning out behind her, in her wake, softer things arise: high inside the green building, banks of factory shelves are home to myriads of lettuces, drinking in moisture and breathing all night with a huge susurration in black-green darkness; somewhere in the blue building, circular portraits climb up a stairwell where plaster heads stare out of shell-shaped panels; and underneath the red building, high upon a wall, sprouts an antique horse’s head with tragic blazing eyes.
Evelyn’s laugh runs ahead, pushing out an endless colonnaded passage lined in candles held aloft by disembodied hands whose fingers beckon Jaymi onward. This passageway of candle-light snakes up and swoops down and loops the loop—a tunnel like a dance through a coloured space of night that presses in from above and from below on every side.
Teaser 22(i), up the drainpipe
Soon the full dark of evening has descended. Seeing no further movement inside, Amber emerges from the shrubs and steps across the front garden and around the corner of the building. A light flicks on, down the pathway ahead, doubtless triggered by a movement sensor.
He stands for a moment, coiled in immobility. Then he turns to face the side of the house and starts to climb, as with the powerful legs of a big blond spider, up a vertical drainpipe attached to the exterior wall, holding the plastic bag between his teeth. Through brute agility and an almost metallic strength of muscle that Jaymi has never felt before, Amber’s left hand and his right hand grasp the pipe in turn, helped by the grip of his feet in an animal rhythm, supporting his own weight and carrying it at relentless speed, higher and higher up the pipe, until he clambers over the gutter onto the cottage roof. Peering down over the gutter, he sees Herb emerge from a door near the bottom of the drainpipe, look along the pathway in both directions as if checking for intruders, then set off towards the front garden.
Amber shimmies along the sloping roof-tiles to the back of the cottage, then drops quietly onto a wide balcony. Beside him, a door stands open.
Ashley locks her car and sets off through this place of blandest transience. She crosses the lot, to the motel entrance.
At a well-judged distance, Amber follows.
Inside is a wide, impersonal lobby. She sets off across it, heading not for the check-in desk but for a fast-food outlet in the far corner. Enough people are dotted about, to allow him to stand within earshot of her without attracting notice, while she waits in line at the food counter, clenching her jaw. At last she reaches the front of the queue, where she orders a salad to take away. He picks up a magazine from a seat and flips through it—cognisant, all the while, of the uptight clenching, clenching, clenching of Ashley Tweke’s jaw while she waits for her food.
Once equipped with her take-away bag, she re-crosses the lobby’s expanse and exits the motel, followed by him. She walks to her car—as he does, to his. She gets in, locks the doors and sits there chewing, while he watches her from behind the tinted windows of his car fifty metres away, whistling a tune between his teeth.
When she starts the car and exits the lot, Amber follows.
He then establishes Evelyn’s talisman in The Imagination Thief as being a golden band necklace, whose visuals will appear just once in the game-play but will never be forgotten by the man who sees them: “the second time he saw you, you were parked in your van with the door open, staring through the windscreen in thought. On your pale brown skin a simple golden band necklace hung and flashed in the sunlight, and when you saw him watching you, from some way away, you knew what he was thinking: Oh girl, he was thinking, how beautiful you are. You smiled through the windscreen and touched your golden band.”
Jaymi smiles too; for although she has no soundtrack yet, already he can see how she will light up the game. His eyes sink shut; and for a moment, inside himself, he floats upon the colours of her light.
Her girlness is so lovely.
Teaser 26(i), trembling cigarette
Kelly’s cheerily destructive attack happens to have landed in one of several scenes throughout The Imagination Thief where Jaymi has programmed Evelyn to visit a local bar called Downstairs, a place where she is well-known, loved and at ease. Discombobulated and dismayed by Kelly’s intrusion into her, however, she can now be seen standing in Downstairs uncharacteristically alone, while all her friends and acquaintances in the bar try to work out what it is about her that’s so unsettling, so wrong—all peering at her from alcoves and corners, and failing to be discreet enough for her not to notice they are doing so. Her physical appearance is unchanged from the Evelyn they know. So it must be her bearing that’s responsible for the way she now grabs their attention, triggering their shared but unspoken words, “Oh, poor girl, poor creature … but just what is it that’s so wrong with her, somehow?”
There is an unearthly calm, quietness, measure and control in all her movements, suggesting an unholy kind of self-consciousness whose presence prompts everyone to try to “catch it out” by identifying an instant when it’s not concealed enough. Never by a flicker does she reveal she knows that everyone is sneaking what glances they can at her; never does she catch an eye, as a radius of silence extends around her, pushed outward from her on painful struts through the air behind the chatter of the bar.
She lights a cigarette, and all her watchers are agog at every stage of this process. Is that a tremble in the end of the cigarette, or is it quite still? Hard to tell. Nobody’s cigarette is rock-steady, of course, nor is meant to be; but the oddity is that everyone in this bar is doing what they can to catch her out in a single unplanned tremble of the cigarette’s tip…
From away through the forest comes the sonorous bellow of a stag, with a kind of clang and moan fused together in its depths, as if it’s travelled through the wastes of Siberia to reach her. She turns to the hovering Jaymi viewpoint nearby, and informs him, “Throughout the far-off mountains of the Arctic, reindeer shy back from every electrical pylon they can see, because of their ability to see deep into the ultraviolet range of light beyond the visible spectrum. Ultraviolet frequencies flash and play in the ionised gases that build up around high-voltage power cables’ insulator cones, so the reindeer see these overhead cables as lines of ever-flickering lights, stretching across wooded mountains out of sight. Thus do their populations fragment, into wide but distinct islands between marches of pylons.”
Before Jaymi can decide how to reply, they reach an island of oak trees, oddly buried here among the pines, all bathed in ultraviolet; and there in the oak-shade, a clearing of red sunflowers of a colour so vibrant that they seem to be aflame. Distracted and wild-eyed, Jaymi falls behind, but sees her swooping up above the forests and the mountains and the tundra, then out across the frozen Arctic Ocean, where a permanent sunset hangs against the sea ahead. The last he can hear of her soundtrack is tubular bells clanging huge in the sky, and the shrieking of a storm, then a smooth fade to silence.
Ashley’s home is within easy walking distance of the Avenue of the Stars tower, in discreetly low-rise luxury at the top of a bank of greenery on Century Park East, between Galaxy Way and Empyrean Way.
Not that anyone normal would actually walk that commute, of course; they would drive.
Though tight-wound, Ashley is in some respects abnormal, however, and this is one such respect; so she walks it.
Amber therefore sets off tailing her on foot, at what he and his creator judge to be a prudent distance, down through the anodyne crispness of Century City, while Jaymi peers in voyeuristic excitement from behind his Beast’s eyes. Without warning she cuts skittishly across Avenue of the Stars, midway between two intersections, passing beside the little fountains in the Avenue’s median outside the fanfare-slick grandeur of the CAA Building. Traipsing on across the bridge over West Olympic Boulevard and past the towering sleekness of Fox Plaza, she turns left into the more human scale of Galaxy Way. Halfway down the block, the marathon ends, when she makes a right through the coiffed lushness of vegetation in the entrance drive of her residential complex.
Teaser 30(i), timeless timepieces
The smile in her voice floats down at him, slow and wide and mellow as a grin upon her sunny face, and yet it’s sad and haunting—indicating avenues unfolding into future joy, although the view back home will show a place that has died.
She beckons him aside, confiding in a whisper, “Thanks for my soundtrack, Jaymi!” Then she cocks her ear, as if to catch the last of a vanishing echo, murmuring, “Ah yes. Continuous relaxing favourites, not to mention soft classics. Timeless timepieces and timely information. A winning combination, coasting into a smooth finish. Yes ma’am. Mm-hm, mm-hm.”
A thrill runs through Jaymi. His new Beast’s audio is coming alive! But where is she getting these vocal stylings from, ominously strange as they are? It’s as if she has flitted around at ease through her creator while he wasn’t looking, snatching up evocative samples echoing down audio passageways that he’d forgotten about.
Jaymi hears the whisper of a sudden silverfish upon the tiles of her bathroom in the Metropolitan Hotel on Asbury Avenue, where he’ll be housing her in The Imagination Thief, and she scoops the silverfish up into a roll of paper and runs down to the Asbury Park boardwalk and lets it go, with a kiss to the paper, as this little creature of an ancient order slides away coiling into the moonlight. Sand-hornets cut the air. Glistening on the shore ahead, crustaceans of mud scuttle down over lugworms, into lapping wavelets. Further back and down, where the continental shelf ends, a rush and flap of species more exotic: black goldfish, peroxide-blond fish, then express-fish and sea-serpents—then (listening back to when the mountains were sea-beds) the mountainfish, now in fossil form upon the rock.
She reclines by the petrified mountainfish, Jaymi goes to join her and they sit, like bees on a rock-face waiting for the sun … ricochet of rabbits in the mountains, scampering; pebbles scatter; feathers ripping u through a yellow-grey sky, then a short-wave piping of peewits and curlews. White horses flow through her soundtrack now (where the art of the mouse is hidden too), for the mountain is bestial: sylphs and gnomes and manticores bound up its slopes, under Evelyn’s direction. At her whim, a stately sheep, a blond sheep—peevish, to be sure, but ceremonial, processional—passes by in front of her and Jaymi, then recedes to the left.
Out above the mountain-range ahead, a vision dances, with shafts of light, cloudscapes, horses’ heads and circles in the sky … then Jaymi feels Evelyn clap her hands with easy grace, and lands back down in the Melrose Avenue building, with her soundtrack completed and the feeling of a violin-flower open wide in him.
Teaser 32(i), Evelyn’s seven tracks
The first track features a voice above a minimalist but melodic electronic accompaniment. And what a voice: it’s flat, wistful, breathy and mesmeric, counting out a cycle of numbers forever, from one through to twelve, again and again, slow and measured. The eleven, in particular, is meltingly sensuous beyond belief … an eleven so charged with sensuous voltage, in fact, that it’s the perverse climax of the cycle, awaited like the hidden magic midnight on a clock-face … eleven, soft (and so alluring in its shyness of twelve), with its assonance of “e”s like a velvet caress…
Up go the tempo and the heat, when her second track bubbles in, supplanting the first. The polished control of this track channels so romantic an abandon to the world of the early-evening city, as to coruscate like champagne—such heart within its slickness, stepping out in pink and blue, in a yellow taxi-cab.
Her third track focuses her oncoming rush, from the stage to the sky, where her fingers flick stardust-clouds like a video effect, till she twinkles over Hollywood, high above the Hills.
Her fourth forges upward further still, culminating in a long solo flight of lead-guitar so virtuosic that it streaks, like a comet, into ecstasy—a starburst of glamour and perfection and passion.
For her fifth track, there’s nowhere higher up she can go. So she coasts, on a level, in the stratosphere, effortless—blown like a melancholy rose on the wind, borne along through the sky on a lush flight of red.
When her sixth track strolls in, she’s coasted down again, to a level where she floats among the people of the night. The night shade has deepened, disembodied voices call around her—whirl and flash of eyes (some warm and others cold). She is held under poisoned skies, stained by the sunset on the city: death behind the beauty of a warm breeze blowing on her face and on the lips she kisses, softest warmest urban lips…
Her seventh is the last track; and though she has descended from her third and fourth and fifth, her attaining those heights left a structure up there, where she now can send her notes just by glancing at its girders. And this she does, firing up a track with a march of majestic violins whose sweep and pace cannot be stopped—universally known, as it strides around the globe throughout eternity.
Jaymi stares at the depths in the dark of his screen, as the grandeur and whirl of her music spirals inward through his cells and recedes into distance and silence.
So she slows down yet more, and drives on, ever closer towards him.
Right at the point where she comes level with him, he turns around to face her without warning and bends down to peer into her car, in a sudden intrusive close-up with his face against the glass of her passenger-side window. Across the width of the car’s interior he smiles straight into her, with a knowingness in his eyes that is terrifying—and Jaymi’s eyes behind them, pinning Kelly down in her seat, so she squirms.
Then raising the inner ends of his eyebrows, Amber and Jaymi give a creepy, child-like wave at her, using just the fingers of one hand, as if waving down at a one-year-old lying chained inside a perambulator…
A chill of horror spreads through her body.
She swallows, yanks the steering-wheel to the right, just in time to prevent herself hitting the crash-barrier that’s the sole thing between her and a painful death far below, and drives on up Sunset Plaza Drive, shaking a little.
Teaser 34(i), desert border town
Alone at his desk in the Melrose Avenue building, Jaymi clutches the edge of his chair in panicked exhilaration, watching Evelyn slither and squeeze out into meat-space through the monitor in front of him.
She lands, as if through sun-glare in a desert border town where blue agaves curve along a wall that’s alive with competing tags of spray-paint. Inside a bar-room door, in the slow-turning shadow of a ceiling-fan, a deck of cards is splayed on the bar, with the bright cartoon of a different sexy girl printed proudly on the back of every card. Fire-crackers burst in the distance, and a smiling-eyed Evelyn with golden-hooped earrings swings through the doorway from the sunlight, a belt of bullets slung across her shoulder and down around her bared midriff, wearing a wide black belt over a short scarlet dress, with scarlet high heels, a gun holstered at her right side and a switchblade knife in her left hand. A lush yellow rose is tucked behind her ear, beside cascading black hair.
Beside that rose, her attention comes to rest on her electrified creator—her very first look at him, since her incarnation.
She stares. Then slowly, she smiles; and Jaymi smiles back.
So … there she is. His second Beast.
Evelyn!
He loves her.
Teaser 35(i), mezzanine perception
The two sharks have seen them approaching, and are both devouring Evelyn with eyes that are filled first with simple curiosity, then with surmise, then apprehension, and then an ominous seepage of awestruck understanding.
That seepage is mirrored in real time within Jaymi himself, as he finds he can perceive the oncoming faces of Dud and Ashley through Evelyn’s eyes, as well as through his own accustomed gaze.
This is way more strange than the excitement of voyeurism he felt when he directed his own perception out through the eyes of the incarnated Amber. They were simpler times; for on none of those occasions was he himself there, in the flesh, alongside his own Beast.
Now by contrast he feels himself borne aloft for the first time, with a vertiginous ballooning of knowledge and experience, to some secret mezzanine storey of perception where he can choose how to view his former colleagues and the whole café scene—either as himself, or as the freshly-incarnated Evelyn. And for a moment he flounders in fear. Fear at the precarious new dimension of freedom in this situation he’s thrown himself into. Fear at the sheer spooky freakiness of being able to see the same scene through these two eyes, or those two eyes of hers, or all four eyes together.
Teaser 35(ii), Death and Evelyn
Death turns to face her and speaks to her alone: You’re cold meat! he winks. Life is destructive—a vile show of meat-puppets. Every puppet’s end is a nameless collapse into dead flesh, a twitch of faceless anguish. Death is just a dead end, though—revealing nothing, leading nowhere, curing only pain. You’re all just a falling of drips in the night. And the gods (when we think to turn an eye upon you crawling atoms) only laugh and hate!
Then within an instant, Death is gone—leaving just the brittle spider-ticking of the second hand around an empty clock-face beside the proscenium. Covering the stage now, multitudes of tiny people mill around, dying, being born, scurrying, gesticulating, killing, loving, laughing and jabbering at once, while the brittle second hand ticks on … then a blast from the speakers: guns vomit in the sky, while a giant roar of fire and blood fills the horizon like a war.
At a cue from the sound-booth, silence slams in again. High upon a deep-black back-cloth above the stage, a little cold Pluto hangs in a spotlight, revealed to possess an unexpected pale heart-shape spread across its surface. And very far beyond it, the unknown tenth one, Persephone, shadowy and quiet, sails dark on an alien orbit among black comets.
As her internal sound and fury subside, Evelyn finds herself standing once again in the Hollywood café, while her creator observes her with concealed anguish.
Teaser 37(i), favourite creature angelfish
Jaymi sips his peach schnapps on ice, puts it back down beside him on the flagstones of his study terrace here on Electra Drive, and claps his hands together. Glimpsing flickers of those control decks spread across the sky, he gets to work summoning up the code for his third Beast: the warmth and the openness that should have ruled the world…
To start at the simplest level, Shigem’s favourite colour is amber, as being bright and sharp and rich in its beauty. His favourite creature is an angelfish, for fluttering so sensuously, and for pairing for life. (Shigem’s inchoate ones and zeroes look up at Jaymi with an alignment that’s the foreshadow of a proto-curiosity, upon hearing those words “pairing for life”; but Jaymi maintains a poker-face in response.)
As a character of flamboyant love, Shigem Adele instantiates all the passionate liveliness Jaymi can muster in himself. Central to him is that he never felt quite like a boy, being half a gender to the left. He will love from the feminine inside him, his thinking will be effeminate, and he will light up his surroundings with a joy and a beauty that most of those around him will scarcely deserve. This code of his hasn’t yet risen to a level where he can speak, but Jaymi furnishes him with a central statement of truth, ready for speech as soon as it coalesces in him: “I could climb into a female life, and flower in pleasure. I love the girl inside me. She’s the best I have within me. I love her best of all. I shall always love her, deeply, till the day I chance to die.”
Teaser 38(i), multi-CCTV’d cascade
A mere few hours after these musings, Amber is back on Sunset Plaza Drive, coasting the car to a halt beside that flimsy crash-barrier once again. He gets out and straightens up, with that mild smile of his, steps around the car and scans the view for a leisurely moment. Then he raises binoculars to his face, points them somewhat downwards off the promontory, and fine-tunes the focus. Dud’s home is one of those structures just down there, half-hidden behind trees…
It’s always difficult for a stalker to get an accurate handle on the exact configuration of properties in the Hollywood Hills, so narrow and winding are the streets as they hug the flanks of the canyons and curve around the hill-spurs, and so anonymous is the aspect presented to the street by many a home whose multi-storeyed luxury extends in multi-CCTV’d cascade down the slopes on its far side, invisible to any outsider who may drive past its modest-looking front-door and garage-door, however much this interloper may slow down to peer through their windscreen.
But Dud’s home cannot long elude such a scrutiny as Amber’s.
And yes, there it is—just there, hiding beyond those bits of scrub, about level with the tops of those skinny-trunked trees growing further down.
Back in the house on Electra Drive, a glow of warmth suffuses Jaymi as he resumes work at the point where Shigem and his unidentified interlocutor are ascending the nightclub stairwell. Jaymi finds his own viewpoint swooping in close to a doorman’s ear, as Shigem air-kisses the man who’s standing at the top of the stairs with a guest-list. The two clubbers step into a smaller bar area that leads to a terrace overlooking the main dance-floor.
Shigem’s own visual art is still indistinct, at this point in his creation cycle. The artwork for the other people around him has been pre-populated, however, at least to the standard of a brisk commercial illustration, as in a storyboard for a high-end movie production. These figures are off-the-peg “types”, in essence, being royalty-free stock imagery pasted in by Jaymi earlier, as a kind of provisional wallpaper or background against which he hopes Shigem’s unique appearance will develop its own organic authenticity—for no actual Beast of Jaymi’s will partake of off-the-peg stock components or repetitions of game language, it should go without saying.
Hovering his fingers over those banks of faders floating there on the sky above L.A., he psychs himself up to create the emergence of this new creation from the basic code achieved in the last session. But before Jaymi can hit a single key to kick-start Shigem, the latter just starts talking to him from the laptop screen, or perhaps at him. “I could climb into a female life, and flower in pleasure,” Shigem announces. “I love the girl inside me. She’s the best I have within me. I love her best of all. I shall always love her, deeply, till the day I chance to die.”
Jaymi smiles, remembering his incorporation of this. “I’m happy she’s there,” he replies. “I can see her very clearly.”
This hack strikes without warning and is felt as existential violence, flavoured by the nature of the Beast in question. It happens to hit him a few moments after the unmistakably Shigem-flavoured and aforementioned electric slenderness and untouchably exquisite androgyny of his physicality has passed across the threshold of the club’s main entrance into the smoking area outside, so that his unidentified companion can have a cigarette. “We’ll just be stepping outside for a moment,” Shigem informs the woman guarding the door.
“…Excellent,” she drawls, through her chewing-gum.
Shigem stops and turns. “Are you being sarcastic?”
“Who, me?” she asks. Her affectless gaze comes to rest on the infinity point at the end of the club’s main hallway, along which a dozen podiums are spaced out in a line into the distance, each podium occupied by a muscular, almost naked go-go boy performing drugged-out gyrations to the music in an endless twirl of narcissistic horniness.
Once outside, a smiling Shigem murmurs into his unidentified companion’s ear: “That door-whore is more superficial than she seems; I’ve always said so.”
—Then it hits.
Teaser 40(ii), Krueger appears
He hears the scrape of cold steel fingernail-blades along the railings behind him. The scrape gets closer to him, rising to a screech. It’s a sound to make knives curl—the sound a blade would make if it were tortured. Shigem shrieks and twitches, wheels around and sees a man is stalking nearer through the lamp-light, his hand upon the railings, his head somewhat lowered and his eyes brimful of evil humour. The man wears a fedora hat, a top coloured with red and green horizontal stripes, and on one hand a dirty leather glove whose fingers end in lethal knife-blades. He’s not burly but emanates a grating, slashing, gut-nauseous flavour of perverted violence, with a subterranean chuckle and a grin raging with slaughter on a face that’s burned to disfigurement.
A slow cackle echoes around the smoking area, with the plink of drips and hiss of steam, as in a cavernous power-station boiler-room, while he proffers his gloved right hand to Shigem. “FANCY A BUMP OF COKE?… COME AND GET IT, BITCH!” he grates, flexing back his bladed fingers, one by one, to reveal a heap of crystalline white powder in his palm, with a dozen human eyes leering up salaciously out of the powder at Shigem. Then he bellows with demonic laughter, crooning “Come to Freddy!” as Shigem scampers back through the door into the nightclub. Krueger’s arm extends through the air after him, down the hallway between the dozen go-go boys’ podiums, shooting along just behind the nape of Shigem’s neck, which it scratches flirtatiously with the sharp end of a pinkie-blade, drawing drips of blood as Shigem sprints away down the never-ending hallway, screaming and crying…
Teaser 40(iii), nightclub tumbleweed
After a few minutes, he edges out of his hiding-place, shivering. He crawls on his knees along the side of the podium, then pushes his face slowly closer to the front corner of it, to peer in fearful anguish around the angle of splintery wood.
No human being is in sight. A fitful wind blows dust and tumbleweed down the empty hallway past the unoccupied podiums, in a monochrome befitting an abandoned saloon bar in a deserted town in a Western movie. At the far end of the hallway, the club’s main double doors swing towards each other by themselves, then slam dead-shut with a sliding of bolts.
Hunched on the floor like a bug, Shigem listens hard for a full minute, but can hear nothing through the sound of the desert breeze. He gets to his feet, feels the blade-cuts on the back of his neck, inspects the blood on his fingers, and wipes it off on the side of the podium.
He tiptoes through an archway into the deserted main room of the club. Here, everything is still, except for the bobbing reflections from a huge mirrored disco-ball suspended from high rafters above the centre of the dance-floor, which turns in the stillness.
He steps across the floor, his gaze burrowing into all the dark corners of the room … and then he hears it: from somewhere buried in the bowels of this sprawling club, Krueger’s time-biding chuckle chugs softly in the shadows, as if promising him a dark game with pale ropes in a night-maze forest.
Teaser 40(iv), Krueger hatches
The disco-ball above him bursts open and Krueger hatches from it, diving his hands down and slashing at Shigem. The ball’s mirror mosaics explode and shatter and rain down—screeching fragments of glass slicing into him from all angles, while those lethal finger-blades swing ever closer to his face.
“Can I have this dance?” Krueger grates. The hands catch hold of Shigem, grab him by the neck and lift him high, pulling him up at high speed to the warehouse’s ceiling, as high as an aircraft hangar’s, where they drape him over a wooden rafter. Shigem grasps the rafter in vertiginous panic, sweating freely and dripping blood where he’s been stuck with splinters of mirror across his body. He glimpses the dance-floor far below, which seems to have come alive again, with revellers’ heads milling about like sand-grains down there—though neither music nor voices are audible up here in this dirty roof-skin.
Teaser 40(v), nightclub ladder
The rafter creaks, slips and starts to fall apart, revealing tendon-like cables inside it. Coming loose from the building’s skeleton, it now hangs from mere strands of sticky wood, which are rooted beside pulsing water-pipes, leaving Shigem to dangle into a terrifying void. He scrabbles up the rafter, it slips further, and just as it falls away he flails to one side and grabs hold of a metal fire-ladder mounted on a wall. The top end of the ladder, near above him, is a blanked-off ceiling: the only way is down. He scuttles down the rungs, which are encased in a curved girdle of bones like a distended ribcage—but then this girdle stops, leaving just the rungs descending through open air—then even these naked rungs peter out altogether for a couple of metres. So he is going to have to drop off the ladder, through the air, aiming to grab the continuation of the ladder below … at the risk of missing it and dropping the height of the entire building, or impaling himself as he tries to catch hold of the topmost rungs, which he can see will welcome him like jagged finger-blades. He no longer has enough strength to climb back up, nor will he have enough to hang here much longer; so he clings on, frozen just for now, wailing and in tears.
And now Krueger reappears, three rungs above him, and breaks the ladder on one side, so Shigem is swung sideways, dangling by a single thread of ladder-bone…
Teaser 42(i), dissolute by implication
OK, here come those visuals! Airbrushed twinkly photo-studio image. Full lips, parted, with points of gloss shining on the surface of their fullness. A spark of light on each eye, soft-squeezed outwards into subtle white starbursts—each with just two rays, almost imperceptible yet evoking a hint of Shigem’s enchantment. On either side of his face, which he’s made up with a melting perfection, hangs a big golden hoop earring that’s been starbursted with greater boldness: still with only two rays at a hundred and eighty degrees, but much more extravagant than those emanating from his eyes—and not white rays, but pale gold ones, as from the hoops. So enchanted is this starburst that it even seems to be the source of light for his long black hair, which catches the faint illumination in snaking down to his shoulders before becoming lost in the pure black of his top.
The next image is a live shot, showing Shigem working the decks in the DJ box, not posed in the studio. In this, his hair is revealed to be more street, more dirty-sexy-casual; his eyes, being so lidded as to appear almost closed, owing to his downward focus on the decks, are revealed as being bigger than expected within his face, providing much gorgeous room for the eye-shadow that’s still visible from down there on the dance-floor in front of him; and his nose is revealed as being somewhat more petite and higher than expected, with an achingly attractive snub-nose shape whereby its front outline, in profile or even half-profile, has the gentlest of concave curves from bridge to tip. This vision never needs to speak, but just to do. He’s cool and untouchable, though commanding that we touch him, ensconced in his social world, privileged and welcome there, where numerous unseen players wish him to remain, wish for his talent to continue having free rein, and wish for Shigem himself. (Does he know this? He must know it, right?)
In the next image he’s a jewelled prince, delicate and languid in profile, his slim neck hung with silver necklaces set with gems of many colours—purple and red and yellow and on fire—while his gaze rests easy on the distance out of frame. Cross-legged on the floor, he rests a hand upon a handsome stuffed bichon frisé sitting at his side. From his right ear a drop-earring of ruby hangs like a drop of blood, while scattered feather boas fill the room on every side. Lit through stained-glass, he’s exquisite and impeccable, yet surely dissolute by implication, forever frozen here inside one instant in his flamboyant apartment.
Teaser 43(i), rooting the tongue
Climbing through a window into the Blue Jay Way house, Amber finds himself in a lounge at the back of the building. The room is deserted, but open double-doors lead outside onto the terrace where Dud is still lounging in his deck-chair, intent on his laptop computer. Occasional flying insects dip down onto the infinity pool beside Dud, disturbing its glassy-smooth surface with concentric rings, which soon dissipate to leave its sheen again impeccable, all the way to where its far edge bleeds out into the sky above the grand L.A. cityscape that’s hidden just out of sight from Amber’s and Jaymi’s viewpoint here in the lounge.
Surrounding Amber, the expensive tackiness of the decor is everywhere themed with the ugliness of football-related memorabilia. There’s a wall-mounted photo of Dud bellowing cretinously on a pitch, dressed in some kind of ugly sport uniform. Amber wanders over to the photo, and picks up a football that’s been placed on a shelf beneath it. From his right pocket he takes out a flick-knife and carves a gash in the football, then from his left pocket he takes out a bulky severed tongue, heavy and grey and pre-drained of blood, perhaps from an ox; and he forces the tongue into the gash, with a squeezy-scraping sound as each rough taste-bud flicks its way in over the jagged edge of the cut on the ball’s surface.
Twirling the ball atop his left hand at increasing speed, so that the gash-rooted tongue flails greyly and meatily around through the air, scattering the odd fleck of remaining spittle as it swings, Amber steps through the double-doors and strolls across the terrace towards the infinity pool.
Teaser 43(ii), staining the water
Amber stoops, brings his right hand down with a muscular force like metal, pressing Dud back into the seat, and stays there staring into his target’s terrified face, with charismatic twinkling menace and no words.
Panic flashes in Dud’s face—it’s that blond psychopath who came barging into his office in the Avenue of the Stars tower!—while the tongue continues swinging around in flappy orbit of the ball, still twirling aloft on those deft fingers beside both their heads.
Amber’s right hand reaches forward and forces Dud’s jaws open, while his left hand darts forward too, pushing the football-tongue hard between Dud’s teeth and into his slobbering mouth. Then Amber is walking back up the garden and through the double-doors, and he’s vanished before Dud has managed to squeeze the cold grey ox-meat back out through his lips, spluttering in fury and terror. The spat-out tongue and ball land in the infinity pool, where they proceed to sink slowly to the bottom, staining the water as they go.
Teaser 44(i), Shigem’s loving light
Yes; although Shigem has no soundtrack yet, his visuals are starting to fill his creator with warm joy at what sort of Beast he will be in his game. After all, little singing cupcakes are appearing, without Jaymi’s even having to program them, as wallpaper on the screen of Shigem’s phone, including some cakes whose frosting tops are modelled with a profusion of coloured decorations such as small birds (one of which slides off its cupcake while Jaymi watches) and a rasher of streaky bacon, all realistically modelled in marzipan.
Now that Shigem is sitting there with his own longed-for visuals alive, filing his coloured finger-nails as if playing the violin, Jaymi looks into his eyes, causing Shigem to smile back up at him in sweet surprise; and in this pre-soundtrack silence between them, Jaymi sees something he has never quite seen before. This “something” is simply the way in which, through the grime and tar of life and surviving it, Shigem’s gentle magic innocence peeps out, as always: through fatigue, through the work of being alive and still on course, through his never having money, through his never having time, through the dreary noise of Bang Dead, through insults and threats, through the mask of acne craters that cover his entire face with such relentless prominence from years of attack, still Jaymi sees in those lovely made-up eyes, so big and brown and bright, the freshest and most loving light he’s ever seen inside a person anywhere, held pure and channelled cleanly out between those lashes—shining up at Jaymi, so he’s buoyed up and carried on the beauty of Shigem, while his mouth hangs open and his feet can’t feel the floor.
Seeing this inside Shigem without warning, Jaymi is lost for words that he might use as commentary upon it, in his own head; so he gives up seeking them.
…Yes. What he’s just seen. That matchless thing, greater in those eyes than he’ll ever see elsewhere, most likely.
That is all that matters.
That is all we really need.
That’s the only game in town.
And Shigem knows those things, just as clear as mountain sunlight, through being them; while billions around him do not know and never will.
On the phone there flickers up the very start of a black and white movie. He finds his attention sucked into it, as its opening title, Pippa, unfurls in an old-fashioned typeface. From across a street, the camera zooms towards a woman standing on a plinth two metres above the pavement. With a shock of premonition, Shigem recognises her as the very same reclusive Pippa whom he’ll know in the world of The Imagination Thief, of whom he’s already started to learn inklings from Jaymi—and here she is, staring at Shigem, immobile and terrified.
As the movie camera sways closer, it becomes clear there is a lot “wrong” with her: her black face is too circular, her skin too blotchy and lurid and grainy, her eyes too wide, empty, feral… The camera is nearing Pippa too quickly now. Before it reaches the horror she’s becoming, it veers queasily to the right, leaving most of her still within the frame but positioned at the left-hand edge of it (and how disturbing that she’s still visible there), while the rest of the frame shows the slow approach of an open window beyond her.
The depth of field is maintained as sufficient to include both this oncoming window and her rotting face, which continues to approach the camera too, much closer than the window; until the aperture is widened and the shutter-speed increased, reducing depth of field and nudging her face too close for focus, at just the moment when chunks of face begin slipping off her cheekbones.
Now that she’s just behind him, Shigem and the camera lurch onward, with a sick dread, towards the window, then through it—to the over-lit scene of an operation—an experiment, in fact, that he wishes he’d never glimpsed, because this glimpse will leave a stain in him for the rest of his life.
Teaser 46(i), boyfriend for Shigem
Well, alright then, what dimension is Shigem lacking, that Jaymi should now add? Thinking back to when he started creating Shigem’s code, he recalls that one reason for Shigem’s favourite creature being an angelfish was this animal’s tendency to pair for life; at which point, from somewhere among Shigem’s inchoate ones and zeroes, the foreshadow of a capacity for curiosity looked up at Jaymi, as if it were struck by this pairing-for-life concept…
And the answer is clear. In real life, Shigem would have a boyfriend, of course: how would he not have one, being him? Clearly he was born for that, and Jaymi can sense he needs it very much, at the level of his cells, for many reasons: to anchor his emotions; for physical release, of course; for loneliness-reduction; and for somebody to give to. Very well then; he shall have a boyfriend for life.
So again, beyond filling such a role for Shigem, who will this fourth Beast be?
Someone who’ll embody not just Jaymi’s pointed response to the “Trivia Score: Wacky or Boring?” Newsfeed, but something wider—his whole instinctive urge to think more deeply than would ever be allowed by the toxic “simplicity” espoused in every glyph and pixel of Ain’tTheyFreaky!.
Now Kim starts to be conscious of a great sea inside himself, a fluid composition of—what? Imagination, instinct, spirit? He cannot tell what, but feels himself hanging in the fabric of time; feels the weight and ghostly beauty of duration itself…
“Alright, enough already with the philosophising, for today at least,” Jaymi murmurs. “You’re giving me a headache. Something a little more concrete, please? There, off you go.”
And Jaymi nudges Kim down along a floorboard-creaking servants’ passageway below stairs, past an alcove of gas-jets and mild tea, where a passerine lady wearing spectacles pops up without warning and presents him with a little blank notebook of the kind sold in a village store, before hopping brightly off to wherever she came from. Kim thanks her retreating figure, then creeps further down the passage, trying not to creak the floorboards, clutching his pristine notebook, in a glow of excited happiness at receiving his first present and at the prospect of all he may write in it!
Jaymi nods. That’s more like it. A little more reassuring than all that metaphysical stuff.
Soon Kim comes to another alcove, where a wardrobe-mistress is installed, cosy as a Bagpuss, just inside the door of a walk-in closet so densely hung with old stage costumes that she must have quite a squeeze to get herself far enough inside to reach out the costumes she must be called on to fetch. Stage props are heaped on a shelf behind her, too: among them, Kim sees a deck of playing-cards and a jug of wine, flanking a plate of wax muffins.
Jaymi rubs his hands together. Wax muffins—very good. Those will doubtless come in handy, somewhere in The Imagination Thief.
Teaser 48(i), Spindle Wood murderer
Inside Kim—beneath the skin of his civilisation, and despite his language and rationality, his intellect and tolerance, scepticism, self-awareness and humour—there is a lonely savage from the caves, bent on pure first-degree survival, blown by chance and the primal drives of instinct and emotion, alone and uncertain on a dart from birth to death. It grunts, howls and gibbers, under his surface, throughout the brief warm span of his existence. And beyond those noises there is silence. Kim’s Olympian compassion is apt to obscure this savage in him, but it must still be there somewhere, even in him; which is enough to make Herb want to lay it bare.
Herb lands a hook into Kim’s deep-buried savage, wrenches Kim out of Jaymi’s grasp, whisks him off and lands him in an ancient sliver of primeval woodland hidden in the depths of an English moor, marked on no maps but called Spindle Wood, where the rasp and caw of rooks in pink-fruited spindle trees is the same as it was a thousand years ago. I know this place, thinks Kim’s savage in the wood. Ages ago, with the tree-snakes. Back when the screech-owls, black upon the sky, sat hunched on the branches above me in the dusk.
He finds a girl in a clearing, with long black hair and the warmest eyes of brown. As her eyes take him in, her smile fades. “I can see myself in your eyes,” she says with growing paranoia.
Night sinks around them.
She looks at him more, then in sharp terror cries “Oh my god”—then recovers, but refuses to explain why she cried out.
She stares … then she sees it in him. “You’re a closet murderer,” she whispers.
There’s no one else here in Spindle Wood except him and her. But out beyond that fearful gap of two or three metres that always surrounds him, separating him from the rest of the human race, he can almost sense a multitude of figures gathered as far as he can see, up the banks of a grand bowl of moorland beyond the wood, arrayed in muttering quiet while their eyes all chant at him, accusatory: “Murderer… Murderer… Murderer…”
Teaser 48(ii), unhinged performance
Wanting so much to be close to the girl in the wood, this long-ago savage in Kim realises that now she has seen this thing in him, and now she knows about it more than he ever will (for he’ll always remain uncertain what it is about him that’s at issue), she will never again approach him from across the clearing. He becomes paranoid and anguished, and then more paranoid because his anguish is visible, about what she is thinking and what he is supposed to have done—so that at last he begins jumping up and down in fear and impatience, sneering and snarling at her, “What is that meant to mean?”
His leaps soon attain a supernatural height and violence, as high as three metres off the ground, and he feels his Kim-savage face contorting into a grimace of ferocious terror as he shouts at her, “What is that meant to MEAN?” again and again—his shouts becoming more anguished with every repetition, growing ever more painfully shrill, twisting up inside itself into a bestial wail, then higher still, to a whine like a wounded animal’s shriek.
Staring at this unhinged performance, the girl with long black hair and the warmest brown eyes becomes ever more terrified of Kim, her perception and estimation of him forever damaged by these convulsions he’s subject to—whereas in reality he hadn’t wanted to frighten her at all, of course he hadn’t, despite this uncontrollable savage snarl erupting out of him without relent—and now those warm brown eyes are irredeemably alienated while he snarls on in anger and pain, when all he’d wanted was to draw her towards him in gentleness, in sweetness, in peace.
…And what a helpless, hopeless, sad and permanent fuck-up this is, that’ll have stained both his life and her life forever.
Teaser 49(i), glint of emerging eyes
Contemplating his growing fellowship, he sees that his original urge to wreak some sort of simple vengeance by creating Amber has grown in refinement. It has morphed into a tougher, healthier, ongoing struggle, which is central to his creating and releasing Beasts, first in these expanding missions into meat-space, and then in their permanent in-game lives in future: it’s the struggle over how much of himself he can build into them, while still plugging them squarely into the real world around him.
This refined struggle powers the whole creation cycle of each Beast, from the creation of their code, appearance and soundtrack, through his test-driving them and incarnating them into meat-space, to his further refinement of them with a million tiny hammer-blows. Throughout each Beast’s creation cycle, there is battle and change, negotiated beauty, flying sparks of metal on stone, and the smooth wet glint of emerging eyes…
After a few moments he hears her footsteps beyond the door, which she opens. “Hi!” she says, licking a red lollipop and smiling sweetly at him. “Can I help you?”
He clears his throat. “Evelyn. Yes, you can. Now you’ve had time to settle in, there’s a mission I need to send you on.”
“A mission? That sounds exhausting. I was hoping to take it easy today.” She beckons him through the door, which opens into her kitchen.
He advances a couple of steps inside. “Yes, a mission. You have been incarnated so that I can send you out to do things, you know. Not just so that you can lounge around here and eat.”
“Thanks for reminding me I’m hungry,” she yawns, crossing the kitchen to the refrigerator. “I’m feeling that reckless, I might just open the grapefruit juice.” She opens the fridge door and peers inside. “I don’t want much for lunch—just a liverwurst and Miracle Whip sandwich should be enough.”
“I’m serious,” he says. “Now you’re here in meat-space, I’ll be sending you out into the wider world. So get ready for some action scenes, please.”
“OK Jaymi, but I should warn you I’m feeling blowsy and fractious today, so let’s make those scenes snappy, please.”
Teaser 49(iii), focus and dynamism
“Evelyn, listen. The first thing I’ll be sending you off to do, in the next day or two, is to meet Amber and introduce yourself to him. He has the details of your joint mission, which he’ll fill you in on.”
She looks thoughtful. “I don’t know. On second thoughts, maybe a sandwich won’t be enough. You know, I once prepared a meal for myself—and I should add, this was something a bit more labour-intensive than just heating the contents of a tin. It was at least cheese-on-toast. So, I’m standing there looking forward to eating it, but then what do I do?… OK, I’ll tell you. I absent-mindedly slid the whole thing off the plate, into the bin. Oh yes I did! It was very simple: there was my carefully-made meal down there in the bin, mewing with rejection at being thrown away for no reason whatsoever. It was doing more than mewing, in fact. It was weeping… But what could I do? I couldn’t eat it now. Sigh. A modern tragedy.”
“Right,” says Jaymi, stepping back through the open doorway into the main house. “Please listen. When mission time arrives, today or tomorrow, then I am going to come back again to fetch you. And I’m going to need a little more focus and dynamism here. OK?”
“OK! See you soon. Keep in touch!” And she closes the door on him.
He stands there a moment with his mouth hanging open, resisting the urge to remonstrate through the door. Then he turns and steams back up the hallway, filled with a sudden and furious need to calm down.
This is a boy inclined to ponder the world while he travels it alone at night, his face reflected close upon the window of the train while the lights in the night slide by him outside—coloured points on the land, squinting in at him between the drops of rain on the glass.
See ahead through his life, to a night when he sits in a parked car, lit by a candle in the ashtray, in silence.
Further on, another time, somewhat stoned and near to sleep, Kim hears a car pass fast on the street beyond the window, as if along a lonely road cut through a forest. The car’s sound is warningless and shocking, like a burst of sealed metal laughter—eerie, as of children locked in a tank—and it’s gone.
Then white balustrades underneath grey sky, yellow light somewhere, threat of rain, silver birches blowing in a sudden wind … and walking, always walking somewhere, walking on alone. Luxury of solitude; figure in the distance, fit for a painting.
—But now, other people start appearing in his visuals. First, there he is, still alone at night but on city streets instead, with car-tyres hushing over wet black tarmac. Music plays grand and lush across the rainy city, where a voice sings the track’s title question “Do I Have To?”, borne aloft on a wash of sound that hollows out around these words a space of yearning solitude solely his own.
Teaser 51(i), unhealthy orange-ochre
Jaymi has been shaking the digital bars of his railing up in the gods, trying to catch Kim’s attention so as to warn him away from Kelly’s treacherous blandishments … but in vain.
At last Jaymi abandons these analogue gesticulations, realising there’s a better mode of communication with his Beast. Kim’s mobile phone flashes and vibrates on the office chair beside him. His eyes flick to its screen and see an incoming text from his creator. The text reads: “PEEL THEM BACK.”
Kim glances up at Kelly, whose bland face is distracted with reading something on her computer screen.
He looks down at Jaymi’s text again: yes, it comprises that three-word instruction and nothing more.
He focuses on the brochure in his hands. He closes it, examining its stapled spine, and frowns at the square cover picture of himself staring up at the skyscraper. At the very bottom-left corner of this photo, the topmost layer of ultra-glossy photographic paper has come loose and sprung back upon itself, so a tiny triangle of thin translucent plastic is curled over to point towards the centre of the image.
Jaymi has told him what to do next.
He peels the tiny triangle back, pulling the plastic easily off the entire photo, and he can smell the blood that fills his skin in that skyscraper scene. He can feel the pressure where that eager young face oozes tears inside itself, ready to squeeze out from his tear-ducts into the aspirational sunlight. Within his wholesome-popstar physiognomy is a sharp, fearful face, with green around its blazing eyes and red around its mouth. Its outside colours are just a wrapping, and even they have changed, as the truth of him is laid ever barer: the skin around his eyes is now a rubbery ultramarine, his irises a sexily unhealthy orange-ochre; and the whites of his eyes stand out bright against that ultramarine convexity of skin, like egg-yolks in an outspread dark-blue fried-egg blubber.
Teaser 52(i), hoover the floor
The door opens. “Hey!” Evelyn twinkles at him, chowing down hungrily on a banana as she stands there in a yellow bikini.
“Evelyn. Hi. So, mission time approaches. I just wanted to give you a heads-up that I’ll be coming back late this afternoon, when I’ll need you to be ready to go meet Amber and shoot down to South Central with him.”
She looks crestfallen. “Jaymi, I was planning to do busy-work this afternoon. Does the trip have to happen today?”
“Yes, it does. Look, I can promise, your mission with Amber will be way more fun than just fudging around miserably at home all day. I mean, what on earth do you have to do here?”
She looks around the room behind her. “Oh, I don’t know, but so many things. You know, hoover the floor, pay the milkman … I can’t remember what else, but you name it, and it has to be done.”
“Sod all that! You’re an incarnated Beast of Electra Drive, who’s meant to be jetting glamorously around L.A.”
“I don’t know whether I’m such a fan of this meat-space you’ve brought me into,” she says. “It’s felt a bit like making my first parachute jump for charity, only to fall straight into the whirling blades of a helicopter.”
“Now you’re being a drama queen. Surely real life isn’t quite that bad?”
“Well, maybe not,” she concedes. “Still, it’s a bit of a schlep, isn’t it?”
“It is that, I do admit,” says Jaymi. “But this mission is important, Evelyn. It’ll make the world a little bit better. Would that be OK with you?”
She heaves a sigh, nods tragically and gives a “brave” smile. “OK then, Jaymi, I’ll be ready. See you later.”
He stands there, watching her door swing shut. Then he strides up the hallway, fuming with exasperation, tense with uncertainty and filled up with love.
Teaser 53(i), behind the skin of night
There’s a rustle and a whisper behind the skin of night, with a scent of limonene, as his knowledge coalesces: shrill girls giggle, then they shush one another, as he hears them and looks around in vain to see who’s there … and Jaymi smiles, for this kerfuffle is the opening of the soundtrack he’s about to reveal.
Next comes the chuckle of an Arcadian brook, on whose idealised bank Kim is reclining in the garb of a shepherd, blond and Classical, contemplating how nothing lasts, nothing can be grasped forever, everybody passes and decays at last.
Dawn glows pale at the side of the heavens, his flock is scattered peaceably around the field behind him, and blue through the air comes a call from that heifer lowing at the skies—an echo of a footnote of stone via song.
Before this eclogue can wilt into too etiolated an idyll, Jaymi electrifies it by touching Kim’s shoulders with a jolt of something new to him. Almost pre-physical, certainly pre-sexual, it’s nonetheless an ecstatic ripple that runs through his body like a touch of the divine, as if from a figure leaning down from behind—a young female figure, he senses (for thus has Jaymi shown himself, on this unique occasion). And THIS exists also! she seems to be informing Kim.
Into his pastoral aloneness comes her touch, an intimation of her smile, and a promise that before too long (oh soon, very soon) he will know about things he doesn’t yet know about. Until then, she’ll watch to check he’s still on track to know them. And she’ll love him unseen, while he nears that knowledge—so he may feel her breath upon his neck, while she watches. She knows Kim will have to see horrors on his journey. She’s sorry in advance: so sorry he will have to see that, so sorry that the other one will do that, so sorry they will leave him such an echo and a stain… But she’d hate it even more if he were not to break through, to his arrival and completion.
An electronic pulse floats down into the soundtrack—the sexiest music Kim has ever heard, though he wouldn’t yet know to call it such. That Greek Golden-Age paradise of Arcadia slides down the hill-slopes, into the town on the island. His unseen protector leads him through its narrow whitewashed alleyways to the entrance of a little club called City Bar. Standing close to him in the alleyway outside it, she attends with sweetness to Kim’s appearance, straightening and smoothing down his shepherd garb, during which their eyes hardly meet, until he lays his head on her shoulder. She puts her finger to her mouth, bidding silence, whispers something indistinct and kisses him on the lips, soft and warm. Then she turns away to leave. He keeps hold of her hand for a moment, then lets it drop. She slips off into the gathering crowd, around a whitewashed angle of wall, and is gone.
Jaymi’s attention departs in her—but then it reconsiders this, eases up and out of her, and floats around and down again unseen, where Kim walks into City Bar.
Inside the venue, Kim’s and Jaymi’s eyes take a moment to adjust to the dark. Under the spotlights, a skinny sexy boy is dancing manically, feminine and ash-blond, and Kim hears his own voice asking in his head, “Am I silver who needs gold, or am I gold who needs silver, or am I either silver or gold who needs more of the same?” The androgynous stranger catches his eye for an instant, without expression … and this whole soundtrack clicks one step closer to full orchestration, as the half-created Kim achieves his first realisation that the object of his own inchoate yearning will be another individual Beast.
Obvious perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight. But no Beast is coded with all such knowledge ahead of time—not even one who likes to think.
“Perhaps, when I find him, he’ll have green eyes,” Kim murmurs to himself.
Teaser 55(i), stairwell chandeliers
Shigem takes hold of both their drinks, Kim kneels down, Shigem climbs onto his shoulders, and they rise as a pair and set off down the stairs, overtaking other duos with a whoop and a whinny, like a pair of unicorns who have discovered each other in a herd of horses.
Kim prances on down the outside lane of the second landing; Shigem lifts both their cocktail glasses in slow motion, spilling only a drop or two as he tinkles them through the tear-drop stalactites of the stairwell chandeliers; then they reach the ballroom below and he raises the drinks up all the way, spreading his arms wide in exultation with his face upraised to the painted clouds on the ceiling.
Back in human mode, they stand there laughing, regaining breath. Brown flame licks in Shigem’s eyes, like a kiss, Kim observes … brown eyes, not green as Kim had pictured; though this very shortfall is sexy in itself. Jaymi glows inside himself, somewhere above, to see Kim registering an impression of what was coded into Shigem for Kim’s sake in particular, namely the electric slenderness and untouchably exquisite androgyny and glamour of his physicality. In fact, Kim is about to utter this precise description out loud—but stops himself doing so, being already half-equipped with a sense that this isn’t quite the sort of thing one Beast says to another when they’ve only just met. Another phrase drops into his mind with all the eureka! aptness of a toffee-apple falling from an apple-tree onto his head, to describe Shigem, which is “my enchanted flask of honey”—but no, on reflection this would sound even sillier than the first description, so he mustn’t say it either.
In any case, Kim, vertiginous, leaning forward to see further into Shigem’s depths, cannot make out the end of them, just more depths, as he falls forward further…
Teaser 57(i), Jewel’s Catch One
First, here’s Shigem lighting up the dance-floor of Jewel’s Catch One, now a creature of flame and flesh, perspiring and aglow within the spotlit booming of the bass-bins. So joyfully charismatic and flamboyant are his movements, he’s surrounded by a wide circle of admiring fellow revellers—while Kim watches hidden in the shadows of the sidelines, filled with admiration and desire.
They leave not so late, stepping out into the cool night on Pico Boulevard, where they kiss each other, lightly, for the very first time.
During a firework display of conversation back at home later that night, Kim finds, on returning from the bathroom to the sitting-room, that Shigem is about to put some music on—and for a few seconds Kim is exasperated at this, because he has so many threads of their ongoing conversation loose in his mind that the very last thing he wants is the addition of any further new element entering the arena. Are there not so many unfinished exchanges of shared experience still to be completed, which would only be derailed by any musical accompaniment? Can Shigem not see this obvious fact? Serious thought is surely our highest attainment and greatest pleasure, especially on precious occasions such as this, when it decides to allow two co-explorers along its nocturnal paths and arbours, hand in hand! But then Kim finds himself feeling a faint surprise of relief that Shigem should be revealing this small mismatch or disjunction between them, because if their conversational echoes had instead continued to escalate upwards into the night without any such mismatch, then all this would probably have risen so high as to become a little too vertiginous…
Then, when that firework display has plateaued out at last and is gliding on around the curve of the stratosphere in silence, the contrasting simplicity and concreteness of Shigem’s question to Kim in intimate quietness: “Are you real? Can I blow smoke through your hair?”
Teaser 57(ii), rain across the pool
Out on the lower terrace they stand beside each other in the humid air, an electric crackle between them … then Kim takes Shigem in his arms, and both of them are silent as a rising breeze mixes their hair together.
The humid air bursts with a warm rain at last—and Shigem and Kim kiss for the second time, passionate and deep, while splodgy drops of water spatter all across the swimming-pool, here on the terrace on Electra Drive, with L.A.’s grid of lights spread below them in the night.
Ten minutes later, the warm rain has soaked their clothes, so they both strip naked. Glancing up as the downpour intensifies, they set off around the curves of this terrace on two different trajectories, keeping each other in view with a leisurely intentness, half-feral, half-smiling through the sparkle of the rain across the pool.
As Kim drinks in Shigem’s slim brown form, standing over there on the opposite edge of these few metres of under-lit blue water with its rain-dancing surface, that slender animal body is so deeply desired by Kim, with a fierce and beautiful desire of a kind that he never felt in his pre-incarnated life. It’s a physical desire that’s at once hungry and bursting, and Kim fears it is something that lacks any hope whatsoever, for what on earth can he be expected to do with this brand-new variety of desire down inside himself, so urgent, hot and hard?…
Ways forward do suggest themselves to Kim in due course, however, once the sexy vulnerability of Shigem’s still-wet body is lying beside him indoors, shivering in the cool of the post-rain air but also sweating with exhilaration already—one horny blond-haired mesomorph, one hungry dark-haired ectomorph.
Seeing Kim’s face from so close, while they’re kissing on the bed, Shigem takes in an unfocused close-up flash of Kim’s beautiful slanting eyes and fine bone structure: earnest, blond, exotic white boy, here with him, forever…
“And now,” says Shigem, “I’d like a nice girly chat with my creator, please. So do settle down, begin at the beginning, and tell me everything: just what is this all about?”
Jaymi sits on the pool edge, dangling his feet in the water, and smiles at him. “You know what? We’ll have plenty of time for girly chats. But as you’ll soon discover about meat-space, there are never any gentle or logical explanations, time always presses, and there are no digital structures or templates to rely on. Here, we’re just thrown into the deep end of random contingency and practicalities, and we work it out on the hoof. So with that in mind, I have a project already lined up for you and me this afternoon: allow me to take you to the Hollywood café!”
“Sure,” says Shigem, open-eyed with curiosity. “Will I like it?”
Jaymi hesitates. “I can’t promise that, no. But we do need to start somewhere.” He checks the time. “OK, it’s nearly one. We have work to do, so let’s chop-chop. Pop indoors, and cover that beautiful body in a bit more clothing—a T-shirt and shorts will be fine. There’s a couple of ex-colleagues of mine you need to meet, who are very likely having lunch there as we speak. Come on. I’ll meet you in five minutes, out front, by the car.”
Teaser 58(ii), straightening out Shigem
His ex-colleagues’ scrutiny of this third Beast, whom Jaymi introduces with as genial a breeze of small-talk as when he introduced Evelyn, is filled first with quiet awe, and then with the gleam of a beady-eyed mission to reproduce Jaymi’s breakthrough Shigem-creation, but repurposing him instead into an enhancement for Ain’tTheyFreaky!.
Yes, the ugly ambition in Dud’s face is clear: he would like nothing better than to incorporate a dumbed-down version of Shigem into his own tabloid product, so as to entertain customers of the “Guy Score: Hunk or Gross?” Newsfeed, no doubt setting up Bang Dead’s cartoony Shigem as a kind of reference target for a world full of Guy-scorers to mock and take aim at…
While Dud contemplates all this commercial potential in Jaymi’s Beast, it’s clear, too, that he’s looking at him through the eyes and expectations of an average consumer of Ain’tTheyFreaky!. And as soon as Dud looks at him in this way, the main problem becomes apparent: Shigem is just too gay.
To speak plain, as Dud so prides himself on doing, it will need a bit of straightening-out, for normal people. Just as soon as Herb’s team have worked out how he was created and have found a way to reverse-engineer him, then that excessive gayness will be the first thing to fix.
Jaymi pulls his own attention out of Dud, and returns it to Shigem. Doing so, he is distraught to observe that Shigem’s apprehension of the Bang Dead duo’s avid intentions is spreading through him like a seepage of pain. Although Shigem manages to maintain his external composure, the mere prospect of being repurposed comes at him like an assault, threatening not just to down-convert him into a form that feels cheaper, but to do violence to his own gay self and truth—to use his precious life for something other than he wants and needs.
Within this prospect, it’s as if he can see down a highway where the drifters are lined up, looking back at him through faces of pain. Among those spent lives is a wailing, agonised human frame with a face of sadness and defeat, huddled in filth against a wall at the north corner of East Sixth and South San Pedro Streets, who has spent most of the last nine years in this state.
Much further east down this highway, a man in an Istanbul slum pours petrol on his head, sets it burning and walks on. As the liquid blazes up, he walks more jerkily, like a stick figure. When he falls, cabbies beat him up for scaring off customers, which happens to smother the flames—so he lives after all, for a little while.
Far further on down the same cruel highway is a country whose essence has been mutilation, torture and starvation for decades, as recordings of dictators play on endless loops from speakers mounted high above barbed-wire fences. Emaciated men are hunched in cells and freezing pits in Hoeryong, cruelly sad: sad meat in waves of worm despair. Every thought or action is a different stab of pain, so the stabs run together in a lifelong pattern. Each incarnated consciousness in this place is dead meat, trapped beneath a mountain’s weight of stone. Their words are grunting, straining sounds, through the ground, unseen—buried alive, unable to move, beyond rescue. And in that emaciated man grows madness, strapped to a stump in a waste, for a lifetime: writhing hands and fixed eyes, horrifying misery and pain, weird nauseating evil; tortured and destroyed in a bleak, brutal place where he can’t control anything. And staring up inside him with tragic eyes, a horse-head, accusatory and huge, holding all the weight of history and shot through with suffering.
Teaser 60(i), standard-issue sadness
This ominous prospect acts as a natural trigger for Kim’s first incarnated apprehension of the innate separateness of all human beings from one another. What unbridgeable separateness it is, too, involving such unmerciful magnitudes of distance. Even when in company with one another, it seems every incarnated human is just as alone as that far-future astronaut who will fly back home at such warp speed that they’ll find the earth has aged a million years during the course of their own mere few years flying—returned now to a planet where only they themselves must remain, alone until their death.
But that’s just the standard-issue sadness of distance. Whereas Dud’s and Ashley’s attack incorporates a still greater assault, he feels: it seems they want to morph Kim into a form where he’s no longer inclined to take account of the suffering caused in people by their incarnations.
People would be more than they are, Kim can see, if they weren’t so powerfully targeted by the likes of Ashley and Dud and Bang Dead and their soul-dead trivia. Then how much more would people be inclined to think, and to look into others around them, searching not for their own littleness but for what to build, onwards and upwards together…
For how many of the most beautiful feelings in the world are born only to be crushed, frustrated, overridden by lesser feelings, lesser forces. How huge a proportion of the world’s population is hungry, and how many more in misery. The vulnerability and frequent defeat of the finest feelings and achievements, the fact that finer aspirations are so regularly broken—that such breakage passes so often unnoticed, and that this unnoticing prevails unpunished—these are perpetual tragedies.
Since his own incarnation, Kim has known that humans are each alone, yet united as parts of the larger mass of them. When he’s frightened, Kim lets his own compassion for the pain and fear in Jaymi flow upwards into his creator; and Jaymi’s fear tends then to diminish.
Jaymi sees one more thing about Kim, which is something this Beast will do in future—a more flesh-and-blood thing than the rest of what Jaymi has seen inside him. Into the apartment he shares with Shigem, Kim will introduce Clytemnestra, the velvety-nosed rabbit, who will live with them both. When Clytemnestra sits in comfort, her legs hidden from sight underneath her, she will look a bit like a wide furry oval, with ears that sometimes turn in different directions to hear different things. She will also be wont to stand up on her hind-legs, and periscope…
Jaymi breathes out, opens his eyes, thinks for a moment, then speaks aloud to his Beast on the canyon slope: “You don’t need refining at all, do you? At least not by me.”
Kim gives a faint smile, unspeaking, then returns his attention to the rocky canyon slope.
Teaser 62(i), Dud on motel walkway
He peers across the street, at the sad little motel by the liquor store. Its pale façade is almost featureless, except for two irregular rows of tiny bathroom windows. He gets out, presses his key-fob and hears the car’s lock beep behind him. Rounding the corner of Vermont, he comes to the building’s front gateway.
He starts, in recognition: is that the girl he saw in the photograph, ahead of him right now, flitting up the steps to the open walkway of the motel’s upper level, glancing back down at him with laughing eyes full of sassy flirtation and sunlight? She disappears from his view as she crests the top step and runs on along the walkway, triggering his memory of that other gaze stabbing into him from behind her face…
(And along with this advent of Evelyn, Jaymi’s perceptions come swinging down from the house on Electra Drive, to here in Westmont. So distracted has he been by Kim’s inner life, he’s been forgetting to attend to her and Amber.)
Ignoring the opaque grilled windows of the motel’s ground-floor office on his left, Dud starts barrelling up the flight of steps, in pursuit of her.
By the time he has heaved himself up to the upper walkway, it’s deserted. One of the blue-grey doors on the left appears to be open just a crack, though. He runs along to the door, grabs its handle and pushes it inwards.
Hanging from the ceiling is a pig’s ribcage. A photo of his own face is stuck atop the ribcage, wearing a Righteous Gun Cockpit cap. Hanging off the whole contraption is a dark, squeezy bag of blood, by the look of it, while a lighted altar candle is stuck onto the floor on each side.
(Up on Electra Drive, seeing through the echo of Evelyn’s presence here, Jaymi’s eyes widen with almost as great a surprise as Dud’s.)
Dud staggers back and tries to leave the motel room, but the door has been locked.
He gives up wrenching at the door handle. On the verge of panic, he spots a dusty landline telephone on a shelf near the door, dives for it and jabs the zero button. He holds the old plastic handset to his ear, but can hear no ringing sound at the other end, so slams it back down onto the cradle.
He tugs at the window-bars in vain, while darting his eyes about the room, hunting for any kind of key. He bangs on the door and shouts.
No answer.
Nobody appears.
And the squeezy bag of blood turns slowly in the air, spun around by the heat from the candles underneath.
So Jaymi rises from his desk, crosses his study terrace, peers down over the railings to where Shigem is sunning his slender body beside the swimming-pool, and summons him up the exterior flight of steps.
Once inside his creator’s study, Shigem is at first apprehensive at being informed he must now return through the monitor he emerged from. Luckily, however, he is the most trusting of the Beasts and Jaymi loves him with a particularly protective love—which two facts conspire to reassure Shigem into biting the bullet and just doing it.
In through his creator’s monitor he climbs, therefore; and within moments Jaymi has switched into code view, displaying all Shigem’s ones and zeroes in their quite paralysing beauty of digital dryness, there once again upon the same screen where he first started shimmering into existence.
Only now does Jaymi realise that he hasn’t planned what this refinement is going to be. Perhaps he should have done! Oh well, he’d better wing it. OK then, so first: ascending a forest path, Shigem is the only one to see a magically beautiful and unexpected bird, away to the left amid the undergrowth. Fluffy in the sunlight, it looks across at him—
No, hold on.
Well, alright, the bird can remain in him now and fly wherever its pleasures may take it. However, wasn’t the whole point of this refinement to strengthen Shigem, by equipping him with resources of a different kind from those he possesses already?
He’s not sure what effect that trio of memories will have on Shigem, but the truth and seriousness of them can’t do too much harm and may do right. So be it: job done.
But things never do coast in to quite such a smooth finish, when it comes to this particular Beast, as Jaymi has already experienced. For now Shigem pipes up with one more thing: “Oh and Jaymi, as a nightclub DJ I can quite understand that you don’t ‘do requests’, as it were—but I would just like to say there was such an annoying bellowing cow in the supermarket today, who I could have so done without. Could we maybe get rid of her, d’you think, just while we’re down here at code level? She gave me a headache.”
His creator smiles in relief: there’s the innocence in Shigem’s self-love, still intact! “Sorry, Shigem, but the bellowing cow remains; she’s part of the deal. ’Cos you know, honey-buns, it’s not all about you. Most of it’s about you, I admit, but not quite all of it.”
Shigem’s code pouts back petulantly from the text editor window.
“Yeah yeah, you’ll get over it,” says Jaymi. “So, we’re done now, with all this code-refining business. Time to slither back out here into the study, please, out into meat-space again. You’ll love it when you get here, I promise.” He taps out a volley of incarnation commands into the keyboard, then he sits there, waiting, until his fingers start tapping the desk. “Out you come then,” he coaxes. “Come on… Well get on with it! I don’t have all evening.”
Standing at the railings around the highest of his three terraces, Jaymi spots a dark speck far away, low in the warm haze of afternoon, half-obscured among the tiny writhing shreds of heat that crawl across the panorama of low-slung buildings, freeway ramps and grimy palm trees.
He shields his eyes and squints at the speck. Swelling slowly, it reveals itself to be something like a giant arachnid with thick legs outstretched. It continues to swell, but without shifting much to right or left; it must therefore be approaching directly…
It’s another drone!
He would guess it has reached somewhere around Santa Monica Boulevard, more or less.
He peers at it, in gathering unease. By this point it must be pretty much above Sunset, and still it swells; he can count eight little whirring propellers, one on each spider-leg.
He grips the railings. Now it’s over Hollywood Boulevard, no more than four hundred metres ahead!
On an instinct he crouches down on the terrace, watching the drone through the railings, while two of its spider-legs curl down and lift something out from beneath its belly—some dark, stick-like object.
Fifty metres away from him, the drone swings this object around, and Jaymi cries out in growing surmise and alarm. He drops further, onto his hands and knees, so that more of him is protected behind the low parapet on which the railings are mounted.
A gunshot cracks out.
The bullet hits a sun-bed behind him and ricochets towards his bedroom windows, where it strikes something with a sharp crack.
Another gunshot, which zings off one of the railings just above him. He flinches down lower still, lying flat upon the terrace, so as to be hidden altogether by the parapet.
A third shot, which he can hear bouncing off the wide circular roof of his top-floor bedroom suite.
Teaser 66(ii), dead monkey-arms
In such desolation the land is silent, scrubbed, dead … and the texture of the sun’s disc, glimpsed through a cloud for an instant, is like the grain of meat.
Growing claustrophobia in a vast flat land, as if the isolation is shrinking the air. A glum palace looms from the steppes, then it morphs in the night, to the psychiatric centre on the island in the East River, hedged in with cameras and barbed-wire, hiding there in plain view of civilisation.
Onward and down, to the island in the Aral Sea, poisoned with the stains of bio-weapon tests on monkeys: dead hands and eyes in charge throughout the decades, in a rotting sea. Now the sea is shrinking, scum builds up around the island, like a crust. The sides of the boats weep tar into mud, while the winds across the salt-flat are mournful and endless, and the ghosts of a thousand dead monkey-arms climb onto shore like a school of shadow-limbs.
Onward and down again, to satellite images of twelve death-camps in Korea, overlaid with script and arrows that identify the torture chambers, cellblocks and sullen smudge of mine-mouths. Cores, rubble, fluids; human meat and bones, broken there and mixed together; acid sludge in acid pits.
Inside a torture block, an empty room, lacking any door—just four square walls around a square floor, underneath a ceiling with a bare black light-bulb shedding only shadow.
Beyond one wall, an alarm-bell is fixed above a never-used stairwell, permanently ringing, for a purpose unexplained.
And just through another wall, a hidden horror-place—a suite of human-farming and human vivisection and medical experiments, whose unknown status only adds to its enormity.
Teaser 67(i), dance-floor as cat-walk
After a moment he consults the general sketch of the Platinum Raven in his design for the game The Platinum Raven. Ah yes—as he now recalls, this sketch refers to the fact that, within the world of the game, this Platinum Raven character happens to originate from the imagination of another character called the Chocolate Raven. He polishes the sketch, so it reads: “The Chocolate Raven dreams up (or perhaps just observes) a more powerful and magical version of herself called the Platinum Raven, the platinum-blonde ruler of a nightclub tower of shadows, which springs up in the Hajar Mountains across the desert, where events of the brightest darkness, decadence and beauty occur. The dance-floor is a cat-walk where every night those anorexic models float past her, beautifully drugged-out and weak and untouchable, forever down the runways of their airport lanes, expressionless in damage through the night-lit clouds with their make-up flashing soft in the lights, like perfection, clad in shreds of lightest silk that conceal the needle-marks. Steeped in this heightened feeling of darkness beneath legendary nightclub fabulousness, the Platinum Raven’s transcendence is instinct with the longing that enriches even the wildest pleasures and highest achievements we are capable of while alive.”
Well, OK then. Bring it on!
Jaymi thinks for a moment longer, then he renames this new project “The Platinum Raven”…
So here comes a new Beast, born into beauty and complexity, a creature of his own love and pain.
Teaser 68(i), white-blonde flavour
From this seat on the rear terrace, he looks across at the semi-circular colonnade beyond the swimming-pool, at the lower sun-deck supported on its struts from the precipitous slopes below, and over at the tall thin cypresses ranged across the canyon. This hillside’s angle causes his view of the city ahead to be restricted to the west and south only, in contrast with the hundred-and-eighty-degree panorama that’s visible from the terrace on Electra Drive, although the visuals here are otherwise just as glorious. He therefore cannot see the Downtown skyscrapers, but the smaller clump of towers over there in Century City is clear, including Bang Dead’s headquarters in the Avenue of the Stars tower, rising highest in the clump.
As when he created Amber, Evelyn, Shigem and Kim, there comes a flash of those grand decks of controls, spread across the L.A. sky.
—OK. So here comes the code of this in-game Beast who personifies transcendence in a white-blonde flavour, but treacle-black and blood-orange inside herself. A transcendence that should have ruled the world…
Throughout her creation cycle—from within her first sticks of code, up through the creation of her appearance, her soundtrack and her coming-alive, to her slithering incarnate through Jaymi’s monitor into his study—and even after that, emanating from her skin and up through those swooping angles of semi-profiled cheekbones that she’ll be shafting and slicing out through the sky above the Hollywood Hills, the coolness of this upcoming Beast’s temperature will constitute an implicit challenge for any warm-blooded audience.
Teaser 68(ii), the secret monkey
She will allow Jaymi to lob one tiny Easter egg of unique sweetness from the shadows here where he stands, into the empty circle of spotlight awaiting her there on her creation floor, before he must get down to uncompromising business with her transcendence. OK then, so there goes the little chocolate egg, curving up in slow motion through the air in his study, twirling end-on-end as it levels off in mid-arc, gliding in through the spotlight-cone’s soft perimeter and landing in the white-lit circle on the floor of the darkness, where it spins to a foil-wrapped halt. The egg-foil opens busily, as if in speeded-up footage, and out hatches a flash-forward memory of a lost time in the Platinum Raven’s notional childhood, hidden there recessively in her otherwise blank history, when her five-year-old self is standing beside Jaymi’s five-year-old self in an elementary-school playground. They hardly know each other and will never get around to speaking with each other again, as it happens. But just for this one moment, they share something that he will never forget: both standing on tiptoes to peer through the frosted window of a locked shed in the corner of the playground, they agree in loud whispers that the face they think they can see in the darkness of the shed’s cluttered interior is the face of a secret monkey living inside, which nobody else knows about! They giggle together at this, shushing each other in gleeful surprise at this shared monkey secret. Then they skip away across the playground in opposite directions, into separate lives, smiling still, never to exchange a single further word.
The cone of spotlight flicks off and slams away, sucked into blackness and silence. There—that’s all the Platinum Raven will allow Jaymi, in the chocolate egg department.
Now: the business of transcendence please. From his insides, to hers…
Teaser 68(iii), Pacific Coast Highway
Further down, there’ll be an element or two of the dictator or murderer, somewhere in her (as in him). Yes, those twin shadows will be there, where fantasy will sometimes clamour to become reality, cool and ferocious; yet luckily that pair of spectres will loom small enough, within her landscape, to be sublimated.
And so it will be, when inspiration strikes her, that she’ll plant a platinum kiss upon the game-skin of her universe.
Then without warning, Jaymi reaches into this cold theoretical code and unleashes an extravagant death-wish at the heart of her: hot and red inside, where she lounges on the driver’s seat, her foot upon the pedal as the car flashes scarlet under headlands of rock around Pacific Coast Highway curves at ninety miles an hour, with the crackle of the cables in the sweaty air of night above, ecstatic to be leaving life any second now, beneath the stars, with the bottle in her hand and her unseen lover-girl sitting right beside her…
Jaymi hits the Enter key before her car can crash, sealing up within the coolness of her code a red-hot death-by-the-ocean whose voltage will strain against the inside of her ribcage, never to be earthed.
He sinks back, exhaling aloud in exertion, as the driver’s seat melts back into his seat upon the terrace behind the house on Zeus Drive. He saves his work, and backs it up.
The code of this brand-new Beast now exists!
Teaser 68(iv), where the big music plays
He prepares to take a quick break—but no such luck, because her code is emerging into life already, behind the sky up ahead, where he can feel her half-sensing him. She has no visuals of her own yet, so he can’t see her, but she may already have some proto-sight of him sitting down here in the Hollywood Hills.
Unformed as she is, his sense of her has only bursts of clarity, like a voice floating in and out of an intermittent radio signal. Her bursts have the style of an altogether grander scale, however: with a yearning, charismatic flash that shoots around the world, she announces her birth on this planet full of wonder, whose inhabitants must crawl in mud and pain while envisioning perfection, it would seem.
Unimpressed with the mud and pain, already she has flickers of transcendence in the grandeur of her floating just beyond Jaymi’s sight, and fore-echoes of her top-notes ringing in the caverns of the night above the city, where the big music plays.
Teaser 69(i), Rust Belt heartland
For a hack into a Beast’s code is felt as existential violence, flavoured by the nature of the Beast. Through her insides, lightning rips a rust-coloured sky above a flat road somewhere in the Rust Belt heartland of America, but alien-industrial: these colour tones are artificially pale, reverse-processed, fucked-up, cool and sickly-mineral and blasted, so this road between these factories points down inside, not to petrol-station neon but to horror-film road-movie sick-and-twisted hell.
On the tracks by the road, train-wheels gather speed along splintered rails beneath her feet. Beside the railroad tracks comes a boom of dry thunder on the left. In answer a wolf howls alone across a desert where the dust prowls; crows surge tired over brownfield, and white sun skewers black-and-yellow through a squint-inducing light.
As Herb hacks away, the Platinum Raven fades. Filled with the Black Slab, she feels like dying and her guts are made of stone: though a diamond-pipe runs through the rock between the salt-caverns, no one knows it’s there in her, and nobody will ever know… She shuts her eyes, craving rest (she never asked to be born)—but even there behind her eyelids, a yellow-orange bomb-blast fireball swells up, gigantic in the distance, poisoning the far horizon, glimpsed through railings in front of her.
Teaser 69(ii), sky hangs spongy
Before she can fade to death, however, Jaymi causes Amber and Evelyn to spawn up ahead of her, standing on a bridge across the railroad tracks, and she knows them as her own kind. As she draws nearer, they see not her rust but rather a giant ship of platinum and black, like an oil tanker, gliding down a channel in the night-time towards them … for she’s the Platinum Raven in development, no less, as they can sense already. They reach off the bridge and scoop her up to them, with tenderness. Inchoate, her code lies draped in their arms: two Beasts in wonder at this symphony of zeroes and ones they have scooped up, and conscious of discerning their own selves afresh.
Underneath their feet, dense scrubland in shadow coats the Hollywood canyons, sloping up ahead toward the crest of the hills, where an ultramarine sky hangs spongy with the glimmer of the city spread beyond.
Up on the Zeus Drive terrace, Jaymi breathes deep with relief.
Teaser 71(i), smooth black silk
He re-opens his eyes, consults his growing design for The Platinum Raven, and checks his sketch for her visuals. Its first description of her physical appearance reads: “Standing at the far left end of the bar is a glamorous young woman, facing right and thus in profile from this point of view. Her face is half-obscured by the long platinum-blonde hair falling dead-straight and splashing softly off her shoulder where it burns dead white against smooth black silk, like a burnt-out exposure in a photographic print, or a photographic negative of raven-coloured hair. She half-turns her head in this direction, and the Chocolate Raven blinks to see the face is like her own face. So similar is the woman’s build to her own, moreover, and so cleanly dramatic and unique is the opposition of her hair colour to the Chocolate Raven’s own dark brunette version of the same style, that she thinks of the woman straight away as the Platinum Raven.”
There is then one further little artwork-oriented description of her, a bit later on: “she sees her own reflection growing clearer against it: blonde hair platinum, splashed over brown eyes, cheekbones top-lit, lips curving up together, sensual as lovers.”
OK then. He nods and gets to work.
She incarnates élan, with a glamour and perfection of finish that conspire to make her seem somehow laminated by them. She is over-exquisite—or possessed of an exquisiteness whose focus is barbaric.
One of her qualities is that her platinum-blonde hair and palest brown eyes make Jaymi feel he is watching a negative image. Those pale irises make her seem to be wearing coloured contact-lenses, though she’s not. That almost-white hair is stunning in the context of her somewhat darker skin, her bronze eye-shadow, brunette eyebrows and bitter-chocolate mascara’d lashes. From each ear hangs a smooth, amber-coloured tear-drop of an earring, which swings in slow-motion, sometimes touching the elegant curve of her neck.
Almost always in The Platinum Raven’s game-play, she will be observed looking away from the viewer—for only thrice will she turn her bloodless gaze in silence on the Chocolate Raven, thereby breaking the “fourth wall” in the game, breaking through the screen towards the gamer. First, she will do so when she stares, cutting clear and cool through the desert miles, directly at her chocolate-lashed double’s own eyes; then secondly she’ll do so in the tower when she points her binoculars straight at the Chocolate Raven, mouths at her “I SEE YOU!” and winks and turns away; then thirdly she will do so when she winks at the Chocolate Raven, down across the desert with the calm of divinity, mouthing “Catch you later!”
“Oh, you will,” Jaymi murmurs at the screen.
Teaser 71(iii), ghost in machine
This line is perhaps a centimetre and a half long, vertical but curving inward towards the nose as it rises.
The sole line on her face (there being none on her forehead or around her eyes), it is an exquisite suggestion and embodiment of experience, of course. But in addition, as soon as this faint line has been noticed and registered, the viewer can never again but feel she has the ghost of a smile behind her face, whose sole physical emanation is this. Without this line, that ghost would be invisible: the ghost in the machine.
“The design of your cheekbones, and of your single line, is one of the creator’s better jobs,” Jaymi whispers at her but receives no response beyond that ghost-smile.
And somewhere in the ghost-smile is her perfect self-destruction on the highway by the ocean at a hundred miles an hour: the fizzing of the wires on the pylons in the night sky, a kiss of splintered metal stabbing in through her ribs, and the slow drip of bourbon in the streaming of her blood down her belly and her legs…
The glint in Jaymi’s eyes burns black behind his eyelids.
Teaser 73(i), that subtle sheen
Jaymi settles himself in the shade behind the house on Zeus Drive, near the swimming-pool colonnade—a white neo-Classical pastiche that encloses the far end of the pool in a semi-circle. As a Beast whose incarnation will constitute the richest communication he could have with the world, the Platinum Raven deserves to have her appearance equipped with three final accoutrements, to give it that subtle sheen of three-dimensionality.
“You know that sheen?” he calls aloud, addressing the hill-slopes below him. “Sure you do!”
Swaying in a sudden breeze, the tall green fingers of Italian cypress wave across the canyon at him, like Amber’s fingers waving at Kelly in close-up through her car window…
Frowning, Jaymi rubs his eyes, then refocuses them on his screen.
Teaser 73(ii), round brown windows
First, he establishes his new Beast’s gleaming detail in The Platinum Raven as being a particular pair of windows, whose visuals will scan the game-world: “high upon the turret of the mad-faced tower there are two round windows, tinted with swirls of brown inside the glass itself. In one of these the Platinum Raven stands, looking down from the hills and out across the desert plains […] she returns to the circular window […] She gazes through the deep squirly brown of the glass, out across the desert, to the city and the ocean. She eases her feet further forward on the wide sill, onward through the thickness of the high turret’s walls, and extends her limbs to touch the round embrasure’s edges all at once […] her name squirling through the condensation (independent of the squirls in the brown itself) […] Floorboards run away from her face, from out-of-focus close-up, across the turret room to the pair of round brown windows, through which she can see it’s still dark outside […] just below the two brown turret-windows, silver mist belches out, flows across the terrace past the pair at the parapet, billows through the balustrade.”
Echoing the opera-glasses he established earlier as a talisman for Kim, but doubling those, Jaymi next establishes the Platinum Raven’s talisman in The Platinum Raven as being two pairs of binoculars, whose visuals will fracture the game-world: “the Chocolate Raven braces both her elbows on the railing, holds up a pair of binoculars and trains them on the tower. As she fine-tunes the focus, an unexpected seahorse shimmers in from the haze and stands sharp […] Easing the sight-line upwards minutely, she almost drops the glasses in shock, for there’s the Platinum Raven in one of the round brown windows, holding up binoculars directed straight at her. I SEE YOU! the latter mouths in silence, across the desert miles, then she winks and turns away. The Chocolate Raven flicks the glasses down, alarmed and guilty: they aren’t allowed, as very well she knew.”
Teaser 73(iii), blow-torch or switchblade
When he stares at her eyes on screen, it’s as if a cooling system inside her causes them to ice, their pupils turning glacially clear. Peering further in through this cold clarity, Jaymi discerns a landscape of inexhaustible flatness, like a vast plain—dark and cold and fiery, all at once. And striding across this plain is the unmistakable outline of himself, designing and building her. How isolated he looks, there inside her platinum exquisiteness, within that vertiginous isolation of hers!
But something else about this spectre of himself strikes him, too: truly, there is something demonic in the Beast-building energy he’s exhibiting, here in his creation of her. Cutting through her night, he is like a blow-torch or a switchblade…
Teaser 74(i), American Perpendicular
His outrage is put on hold for a moment, while he stands there enraptured by her. How enormous is this projection of her platinum transcendence, up there on the unwindowed side façade of a seven-storey building—a structure in the American Perpendicular style, grimy and handsome in the functional elegance of the high grid of windows on its front façade. She is painted bright and pale onto a height of three full storeys above the lower adjoining building. She’s expressionlessly serious in close-up, caught in a simulacrum of spontaneity. With pale brown eyes, luxuriant eyelashes, black eye-liner and dark-chocolate eye-shadow blended into the curves of her cheekbones and temples, she’s waiting, expectant, blank, as her creator stares up at her and she stares down at him. The longer she dangles him inside her affectless stare, the more surreal it is, too—even spooky. She is immensely alluring. So much so, that Jaymi has to force himself to look elsewhere within this field of view he has: at the other buildings, at the red traffic-light, at the top of the cab with its illuminated number … but all these things seem just to shrug his gaze off them straight away, whereupon it zings back onto her.
Teaser 74(ii), barrels and hides
As soon as he’s broken through, he rips her off the building, whisks her out of this perfidious image of Hope Street, east and then down the flume of the L.A. River and past the end of Violet Street, where the sky is pale brown.
Pursued by Kelly, Jaymi spirits the Platinum Raven through the limits of the industrial city of Vernon and down the concrete river’s curves to the docks at Long Beach, veiling his creation amidst barrels and hides, in scents of pulp and seaweed, rum granules, coffee grounds and ships’ tar. He shakes Kelly off when he doubles back from the docks, then way north, beyond the Inland Empire to the San Gabriel Mountains. There, up a stone-edged ledge of grass a mile long, backed by a thin straight wall of trees, she and Jaymi reach a hidden country house—a pastiche of many eras, raised into being through a huge reclusive wealth from the early days of film. Glancing off the mountains to verify her smudger is gone, they sneak across a peaceful terrace, slip through the door of an elegant rotunda, and step into a candle-lit ballroom inside.
Waltzing underneath the chandeliers, hand in hand and toe to toe with this Beast he created, while the strains of a long-gone string quintet fill the little dome above the dance-floor, Jaymi Peek feels he is dancing with his very own transcendence…
Teaser 75(i), Evelyn’s open-top cars
Next, Evelyn bubbles over at how many opportunities there seem to have been, and how pleasurable it has felt, to drape herself suggestively over retro-style, open-top cars; to twirl loaded guns in her red-nailed fingers, while flaunting a generous amount of cleavage at the viewer; and to pose with sultry arrogance beside dangerous, alluring men whose faces are never quite visible. All of these things were guilty-feeling pleasures, somehow, but real ones nonetheless, oh fuck yeah, baby…
Then Kim, serious-eyed, slants the mood altogether. He tells Shigem and Evelyn they should follow him out of the café, walk a kilometre across town to the L.A. River, and he will show them something they need to see.
—Well, now the other two are curious about that, of course they are. How can they not want to follow him, pronto, out through the café door?
And so they do.
Teaser 76(i), power and enormous love
But as he takes up his laptop, he wonders: what on earth would be the sound of a Beast whose incarnation constitutes the most isolated, yet richest, communication he could have with the world?
Whatever it turns out to be, he feels he’s about to fire it upwards through a speaker aimed out into space. Based on her visual art, this song here could be the sound of enamelled steel—a mix of hard and soft allure as never heard, sung by a Beast who reaches out across the roof of the entire world, her claws and snout and gleaming eyes dangerous with power and enormous love. Or else (since she’s no saint), her voice could purr like velvet rubbed the wrong way, rise from the land and gather boundary-less and huge across the sky and then pump in a violent raping force above our heads, as she wails out a lurid black fantasy of fire, her compassion shot with hatred.
It could go either way.
By the end of this session, with just a bit of luck, she’ll be talking to him, live! So Jaymi sits quiet, gazing down through the tops of those finger-thin cypresses ranged on the hillside, and waits for her to show herself and let him in, to hear what her sound will be…
No signal from her yet. (Is she looking at him now?)
Cicadas scrape dryly in the scrub beyond his swimming-pool colonnade, hidden in the scratchy grass and jagged hairy trunks of palms—never glimpsed but ever heard, chewing like saws at one another as they watch him.
It’s possible she has better things to do than let him in, he reflects. She is an Icon of Platinum Perfection, after all. And that must, by any standards, be a busy line of work—but is this her now?
Yes! It must be her. Here she comes … and (oddly for a soundtrack) the first note she lets him hear is silent. Not a note, but a quiver of her beauty—smooth and hard and breakable, a light-bulb’s beauty—and colder than the moon, with a mix of icy sharpness and soft sensuality.
Sun-pillars ripple up to frame the sky’s entire width in shards of light, a grand proscenium arch. Then cool sun in bright air. Paler air fills the space, and washes of mist, smooth light and smoke, as twilight grows. Although the play-out of her day continues rolling at this fast-forward speed, a single raindrop plummets in slow motion and in close-up: around the droplet’s outline, a tiny rim of light parenthesises it in white.
Her night has fallen, lush and glinting in a moon-drench of pale moist stars. Scent of violets in the dark—and he sees she’s unfurling all the senses in her soundtrack. Sure enough, the tastes of blood-orange and of caramel are rich on his tongue, from the moisture in her night-air. Still in fast-forward as dawn starts glimmering, her sky is soft-cracked as the sugar-glazed dome of a donut, vanilla-smooth and mushroom-gold; and Jaymi smiles.
Before the dawn gathers, she is running through the colour-field, but not in any way he’s ever known. There are no simple rainbows at night, for this is her own journey. Yes, she transports him from low hot scarlet up to cool dark purple, but look: from a pre-dawn sky of red crystal, via amber embers where the clouds glow golden, she leads Jaymi Peek through a pink land of coloured smoke and steam, beneath a blond sky. A pale-green sun bathes an oil-blue sea … but it must be a faster clock than ever, as the sun now sets once again across the sea, a liquid sunset—death in pink.
There, black and yellow in the belly of a storm-cloud, it lightens: coloured lightning flickers down through a lime-green silence, and then at long last comes—sound! It’s the very first sound in the Platinum Raven’s soundtrack.
And what is it? She half-smiles at Jaymi for the first time (or maybe it is just that ghost of a smile in her machine, as he saw before, behind the single line upon her face), because she’s aware this may throw him for a loop, being surely not the soundtrack he’ll expect in a Beast. It’s the truth, nonetheless, so here it comes; she will see if her creator can handle it or not.
The sound he is hearing, now that she has led him through her best truth to hear it, is pink noise—defined as noise with a frequency spectrum such that the power spectral density is inversely proportional to the frequency of the signal. He once heard it defined as a mains hum, but he has a shadowy awareness it is something much subtler and more beautiful than just that. It is true: unlike the other Beasts, the Platinum Raven has no words. Pink noise is her sound—no more and no less.
As Jaymi realises she will never speak words with him, he pictures this realisation itself as a sound of black snow falling through grey light, down between pillars of silence.
But then he shuts his eyes and listens, long and gentle, while a cold fire licks up and down within the length of him. Hers is an unexpected soundtrack indeed, but it’s one that he cannot merely handle: he loves it in her. Though it is beyond his understanding, it runs through this Beast like a gong of black and gold, as her very own music.
Within their view, it happens that a dozen street queens have made a home in a section of storm-drain leading to the Los Angeles River—a wide concrete cylinder two metres in diameter, issuing somewhere beyond the far east end of Violet Street. Along the bottom of the cylinder runs a permanent trickle of rain-water from elsewhere in the city, which these residents have covered over with long boards where they sleep as best they can. It’s only half a mile from Skid Row, but an altogether classier choice, they all agree.
They live as cleanly as they can in the circumstances. Some have boyfriends who visit them. They sell what they can, where they can, to survive. There are physical, mental and emotional dangers and squalor aplenty, but these are accommodated and decked in as fiery a glamour as can be mustered. Conflict is a feature of everyday life outside the storm-drain, but not inside it. For this is a family, albeit one whose peripheral members are apt to come and go without warning or explanation; so most of the queens at the core of the group look out for one another, with a fierce unsentimental protective sister-love that runs so deeply beautiful that it’s seldom expressed in words.
Each one’s story is different in its colours of magic and pain; and all these stories are a little hazy around the edges, for it’s not often appropriate to recount them out loud in any coherent detail, and in many cases the bare facts are best forgotten anyway.
They’re an unusual family, but here they are, beside the concrete runnel of the Los Angeles River, lighting up the industrial margins of Downtown, beyond the end of Violet Street.
Teaser 78(i), cultural atom bomb
Opening the laptop, he is startled to see her pale brown desert eyes in close-up, almost filling the entire screen. They are overlaid with a chrome sheen suggestive of a gleaming engine driven by the night in their depths. The rhythm of the revving of this engine is colossally barbaric, within its visual polish and sophistication. Zooming out slowly, he reveals what’s behind her. And it’s not just any old backdrop: she’s planted at the base of a vast dam, her feet a yard apart and her hands clasped behind her head, her eyes still fixed on Jaymi through his screen. He zooms further out in a panoramic view, to show the dam’s smooth concrete as tall as three cathedrals. From one mile back, she is now just a pinprick in the centre of his screen; but she stares at him still, from within her single pixel.
In zooming back down towards her, he effects a transition in time-scale, like the Ancient of Days wielding his dividers, so he lands at a point in her life that occurs after her game The Platinum Raven has ended, somewhere in that hidden future of hers that’ll chance to be sung in no game at all.
By now, through this fast-forward testing by Jaymi, she has risen to a worldwide fame that culminates here in a concert she’s about to perform, seen by hundreds of millions, complete with a huge flame dancing up to lick the sky at stage-left and stage-right—the whole event powered by a wattage fit to melt an ice-cap, plus a wide-screen projection above the stage, fed from a camera that swings along beneath her. Her show constitutes a quintessence of triumphant energy, an authentic mass ecstasy, achieved jointly by her and by countless skilled technicians behind the scenes. Her music sells across the globe, her art is worth a fortune, she stars in a blockbuster film every year, and everything she touches is gold: the Platinum Raven’s unparalleled ascent and explosive apotheosis constitute the single instance of a human destiny whose cultural power is that of an atom bomb.
Eyes wide at his laptop screen, Jaymi has become unaware of anything but her. Leaning forward within himself, to see further and further into her depths, he feels vertiginous. With every new depth apprehended, he can make out a grander depth in her distance, then a still greater depth beyond … and he feels as if he’s falling forward, down, ever down … snatched by her presence, out of time, into eternity…
Teaser 79(i), storm-drain blow-torched
To which end, he forms an intention that this home in the storm-drain will be systematically blow-torched in the small hours of an imminent summer night, as an act of social cleansing.
Subcontracted by the Trust, the resultant blow-torching is efficient, professional and anonymous. No person is burned: the dozen or so people who happen to be in the storm-drain when justice descends, most of these being resident queens along with one or two guests, are simply overpowered without warning by a well-planned posse of experienced manpower with half-concealed faces. The dozen or so are then forced outside, while this home and all its residents’ belongings are incinerated.
The posse’s departure is as fast and clean as its arrival. It is spirited away in an unmarked van whose speeding engine noise disappears inside a minute, westwards and away through the quiet streets of Downtown.
The victims of the crime huddle at the top of the dry concrete slope of the River’s channel, unspeaking, some crying in silence, some staring in shock. Two blocks up the channel, cars move across the Seventh Street bridge, from right to left or from left to right, spanning the River and the railroad tracks on either side of it, indifferent and bland, as if nothing has happened.
While the group watches, smouldering containers of make-up, of many hues and consistencies, pop open in succession and flare alight inside the storm-drain’s newly-blackened circle, as the oil content in the lipstick or eye-shadow or eye-liner catches fire, shooting puffs of multi-coloured smoke into the warm night air. From outside her head, the anger or despair in each member of the group may only be guessed at; but it’s likely that in her own particular way, there by the River, she’ll be having one of her life’s clearest perceptions of the cruelty and stupidity that fill the design of the world.
At the parapet of his balcony in the gods, high on the uppermost of the three terraces that wrap around the house on Electra Drive, Jaymi catches the pain that flowers in the dozen perceptions huddled down there on the concrete river. And just for a moment, he feels he can almost hear an answer to it, flowing in somehow like a grand, endless echo through the silence of the night air: a chorus of other pain, in other people targeted as “freaky” round the world…
Teaser 80(i), lambent alien flame-like
Her desert eyes are in close-up again, filling the screen, as they did before the zoom-out from her dam and the zoom-back-in to her concert. This time, however, she is facing not at him but over his left shoulder. He glances around, to identify what she is looking at, but it’s just a view across the terrace towards the swimming-pool colonnade.
He looks back at her, and this time she’s facing resolutely over his right shoulder instead. He shoots a glance in that direction too; but there is nothing much there either, except the end of the terrace where bird of paradise flowers fleck a dark bank of foliage with sap-dripping plumages of orange.
“Do bend that lambent, alien, flame-like attention in this direction, would you?” he asks her aloud.
She complies, with the faintest flash of irony.
Teaser 80(ii), Girl at railing
“OK babes, now before we let you loose in L.A., we’re going to test you,” he says. “You are, after all, the richest communication I could have with the world, from this position of peculiar isolation within it. We therefore need to equip you as best we can. So let’s give you a little back-story, in the form of memories of another city, as depicted on that postcard you’re holding”—and rather to her surprise, there in the photo on the postcard, is herself. She’s leaning at a metal balcony railing above the lower tip of Manhattan, looking down on it from two or three miles’ height, with the calm of a winking satellite on a cool summer evening, but welling up with enormous love for the familiar form of this unique and electrically powerful little island. It’s long and thin, yet hard as nails and concrete, its Lower West Side and furthest Lower East Side bristling with piers—which tells her she’s looking at its past, not at its present. The East Village spreads out sunlit, beneath her left elbow. The Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge soars over the slim line of Roosevelt Island, as if the latter is a ship gliding down the East River beneath the bridge’s span. Hunts Point is at the top of the image, dim and flat, with Rikers Island and the Brother Islands just beneath it. Her dark skirt billows behind her, perhaps in a slight breeze on the balcony, in echo of the flow of her hair down the back of her white T-shirt (this being a monochrome image, she cannot tell what colours her actual skirt and hair were). She flips the postcard over: “Copyright David Lombard / Girl at railing / Reproduction prohibited”, says the caption of her image, which she has to uncover by peeling off a black self-adhesive sticker she’d affixed to the card in some intervening year.
“Remember?” Jaymi asks her. “’Cos I sure remember! I had that on the wall beside my desk, throughout the time I lived in New York.”
Pink noise whirrs through his laptop speakers.
Teaser 80(iii), pair of mineral eyes
“OK, cut to later in your early life in New York City,” he continues, “and the monochrome has deepened into colour (but the colours of the night, of course)”—and now she’s looking sideways across the matchless allure of the Manhattan cityscape after sunset, from just above the skyscrapers’ tops. The three or four most iconic structures are all where they should be, as if her framing them like this were easy, and there’s a subtle perfection of lighting: above the myriad illuminated windows (in buildings whose shapes will remain discernible for only another half-minute in this sinking dusk) there’s a soft-edged band of orange, merging flawlessly into yellow right above it, merging further through nameless subtleties into pink, at last hitting the upper frame as a cool dim lilac, all these being darker and tinged with russet at the left end of the image.
Here, thirty floors above Fifty-Third and Lexington, she turns to the left where the east grows dimmer, taking in the expanse of Queens and Brooklyn in the dusk. Above the soft flicker of the very furthest beds of lights, an aeroplane hangs still, sinks through a brown glow down into purple, and disappears behind the dark horizon. A charcoal layer presses down, far beneath high clouds under-lit from low sun setting in the west behind her head. One lone skyscraper stands on the East River’s other bank, across from her, topped by scarlet beacons like a pair of mineral eyes.
Teaser 80(iv), printed in reverse
From his lips to his fingers Jaymi sends the lightest kiss, then lays it upon the screen at a point beneath her feet. “And then you went to Hollywood, remember?” he tells her. “You drove to this city from the east, all alone; and on the edges of this city, all alone, you parked the car upon a bridge at night and stared down onto the freeway beneath, and you held up your camera and snapped the shot you’re holding, which was printed in reverse a year later. Remember? ’Cos I sure do!”
She gazes at the print in her hands, and remembers: in the lanes on the right half, headlights have made electric streams while a slow camera-shutter opened wide, being fused into white-molten strings since frozen into dry ink; while on the left, a lonely pair of red-molten rear-light strings might suggest that this image of a moment in her past had been snapped in a country that drives on the left, had the image not been printed in reverse a year later…
“And boom! You are ready for your incarnation,” he tells her, “in all your luscious platinum transcendence. What d’you say to that?”
His laptop’s speakers purr pink noise, louder than before.
He turns the screen around to face L.A. for a moment, to show this Beast a flash of where she’ll soon be released.
As if on cue, fiery puffballs burst in the sky—a firework display, somewhere down in Laurel Canyon. The embers of the puffballs twinkle in the silence as they fall across the hills: chemical sunset, dancing city, darkness in the canyons.
Teaser 82(i), a beautiful ghost
He gets to his feet, and gazes at her, as if at a beautiful ghost. Flaming orange in the bank of dark foliage beside them, the bird of paradise flowers ooze thick sweet sap, as they do all night—drips of nectar spilling down their bulbous orange petal-bases, side-lit by the terrace lamps.
Of all his five Beasts, she is not here for conversation, he’s aware—at least, not for the kind that tends to be recognised as such. Rather she looks and breathes a grander, cleaner colloquy above the level of spoken words or personal identities. So it’s to this level that Jaymi fires up his hearing and his sight, holding those senses there as lightly as he can, while she binds him into the spell of a story whose beginning is intimate, spoken straight at him through her eyes, without words: “A woman was once distraught, on waking, to find that the diamond ring she had placed in a saucer of oatmeal by her bedside as usual (so as to keep the stone clear, following the old superstition) had vanished. By and by, she died. Ten years later, while her children were making improvements to the house, they found the ring under the floor, around the neck of a mouse’s skeleton.”
Her gaze disengages from Jaymi’s and swings to the right, coming to rest over his shoulder at the Pacific, as if at a sunset in the past. Strange to say, he cannot remember whether a sliver of the ocean is in fact visible from here (he should surely know); but he’s not inclined to turn around and verify this when instead he can watch, reflected tiny in her eyes, the waves of a sea bulging and shrinking like muscles in the curve of the hydrosphere. Amid the waves, a hole in the ocean opens—an inverse waterspout—and thus she funnels his attention back to when the Tethys Sea was caught between colliding Eurasian and Indian plates and squeezed up into the Himalayan Mountains. She gives a gentle shrug. Seas change, after all.
Teaser 82(ii), billboards in space
For a moment she closes her eyes, like a moon-blink. Her pink noise (more than a mains hum, he reminds himself) resolves, to a music of atom and planet; and onward she draws him and flings him out further, through a sound of darkness singing. You’re what Saturn’s rings enclose and I’m the rings of Earth, he thinks he hears within her pink noise, in a voice like the twanging of a string ten metres thick—its other end tethered somewhere in between the stars, and its near end tethered on this Zeus Drive terrace where she stands statuesque.
Concluding her emergence, she telescopes Jaymi and herself to a height several stars away, flying through a special sky that’s all her own, where giant billboards drift in space, her face depicted on them where they billow through the vacuum, as ships pass in silence. Her eye on one such billboard gives a slow wink; and there within this wink her grandest view tunnels out, fans wide, spans and hovers for an instant: an infinite series of Bang—Crunch—Bang—Crunch, destined to be done by the universe forever … and the terror, the enslaving futility and cosmic enormity of this.
Underneath the wink on the giant billboard, her lips part with a burst of ultra-violet shadow, mouthing Catch you later!
Her eyes close, both up there and down here on this terrace.
Jaymi drops his gaze from her face and bows his head—while west of L.A., above the highway up the coast, the cables on the pylons crackle in the night sky.
Teaser 83(i), advertising agency
Within a few hours after receiving Shigem’s phone call, Herb has given a heavy sigh, has opened Ain’tTheyFreaky!’s code, has painstakingly removed every aspect of the game’s option to blow-torch the homes and belongings of the street queens of Violet Street, and has smoothed over all the rough edges of code resulting from this removal.
To judge from his expression, these actions have felt right. He sits there with a tired, wise smile, looking anew at the rest of his slick but somewhat generic evocation of this street-grid. Then, in an access of unHerb-like friskiness and flamboyance, he tap-dances off and away through the code around him, adding what amounts to a grand, twirly unicorn’s-horn of his own invention: this version of Downtown L.A., he decrees, will be graced by an advertising agency that’ll ensure beautiful images of all the street queens of Violet Street are posted on every block. Some of these will be advertising things; while others won’t be advertising anything but will just be there anyway, for the simple reason that every one of them makes the city so much lovelier for her presence, injecting a flash of transcendence and a foreshadow of fierce beauty into the face of dreariness, laziness and smallness. See them up there now, from Figueroa Street across to Alameda Street, and from Chinatown down to the Fashion District! See them mounted high on every billboard in the sun; or at dusk projected huge upon the blank façades of warehouses; or crisp against the night above the skyscrapers’ tops…
Teaser 85(i), cheap plastic gnome
From Dud’s and Ashley’s points of view, everything around the Platinum Raven fades in brightness and volume. Her stature’s growth is shocking: soon she is twice the size of either of them, eyeing them with a terrible understanding, like a Cyclops glaring down in monstrous singularity over a bank of rocks and vegetation.
They would be still more shocked, if they knew how she is seeing them. For whenever she looks at humans in this way, she sees them as organisms or growths on the floor of a valley, in the form of tentacles, roots, legs or branches, each of an appropriate texture, colour, shape, length, flexibility and opacity. Some of these people-organisms are huge, some at ease; some are weak, or alluring in their delicacy; while it’s evident that others are pitiful, painful structures to inhabit, with all their spines facing inward. The strongest, most intelligent and sensitive ones often have a tough skeleton beneath their tentacles, but a surface coated with hair-like processes that convey minute sensations too. Others seem little more than fluff or bone.
Dud she therefore sees as a creature reminiscent of a cheap plastic gnome—something from which to evolve, in theory, but whose misplaced self-satisfaction has short-circuited any desire for evolution and thus any capacity for it.
Ashley, on the other hand, she sees as a lazy and frightened little fool of a figurine, albeit a polished one, huddling behind the gnome.
(Jaymi slaps the steering-wheel in pleasure, sitting in the car on Blue Jay Way: oh, he knows how she feels!)
Teaser 87(i), waving of flower-heads
Once Jaymi has kissed her goodbye, leaving her alone and self-sufficient at last, the Platinum Raven lies listless in the heavy heat, sprawled among the long grasses in a sickly-sweet-scented corner of the garden, on a stretch of earth that’s so far down the steep slopes below her terrace, she may never quite clamber this far down again.
He has not, of course, really left her alone: in fact he’s slanting his attention back up and over the Mount Olympus hillsides towards her now, while he drives back down to the house on Electra Drive, only just noticing the fatigue she feels in her brand-new body as a result of her convulsive meat-space debut in the Blue Jay Way house. “Rest, my dear, rest,” he murmurs aloud.
Gazing sideways, the Platinum Raven becomes aware of something bulky behind a clump of tall grass, nearby but just beyond her reach, where wasps are hovering and dipping in the air. Wondering at it, she rolls herself a little closer and reaches out to part the clump, half-fearing to reveal a corpse in lush decay—but no, it’s a sizeable feast of rotting fruits that have fallen from her various fruit-trees and must have been heaped up by some gardener she’s not yet aware of.
She cocks her ears beyond the wasps, towards the house itself, up the hill, where she pictures fluted columns and ruined balustrades above abandoned palace rooms: on a ballroom stage, a calliope exhales sad intervals, seeping through the terrace doors and down the garden into her.
She thinks she hears a soft chime emanating from even lower down the slope, where her property ends in a thicket of vegetation that is such an awkward scramble to access, she knows she will never go there. She sits up, peers in that direction and sees a stirring of leaves and a restless waving of dead flower-heads, although there’s no breeze, as if an unseen attention is stalking her…
Teaser 87(ii), a whisky horizon
Now that the sun’s disc has vanished over the horizon, an automatic illumination scheme flicks on, into its evening mode. She downs the brandy in one gulp, then looks around, seeing an array of sumptuously atmospheric pools of light that have just welled up, the length and width of her land—all for her sake alone, it seems. Many kinds of vegetation are lit from underneath or within, in yellow, orange or red; while the ground is illuminated in numerous soft-edged circles of white from low-rise cylindrical or conical light-fittings planted in the earth, of different heights and diameters but all with downward-slanting louvred sides, like insulator cones from a power station roof, or exotic metal pine-cones.
She returns to the kitchen, where she takes out a new glass and bottle from the cabinet. When she re-emerges, pausing at the open terrace doors, she is holding a different drink from before—a drink more in tune with those night-time grid-lights spread out ahead, and with the cigarette smouldering in her other hand. A tumbler of bourbon on the rocks, as befits an L.A. cityscape above which the opening of “The End” should be heard striking up across the sky over those silhouetted palms on the ridges of the canyons.
Bourbon on the rocks—making her the first Beast who has intuited the drink that her creator was drinking when he set about creating her.
She draws on the cigarette, tilts her head back and puffs smoke out into the lamp-light. She leans on the balustrade and savours a long swig of drink. A faint trace of heat from the land beneath the terrace is still perceptible, rising up behind the growing cool of the evening air.
She raises the tumbler to eye-level, feeling the condensation on the glass against her forehead, and peers inside it, through bourbon and ice. The lights of Los Angeles are distorted into squeaky lines and smudgy points, and the bones of the moon’s disc flip and swing high to the west, where a crawling sea stretches to a whisky horizon.
Teaser 87(iii), ethereal and carnal
But there will be no such absolution for her soon-to-be-created housemate, whose imminence she can also now sense, almost better than Jaymi can sense it—Scorpio, the sole Beast who will be cast to play a part in both games, as she has intuited from half-murmurs by their mutual creator. (She knows as much as I do! Jaymi thinks, down the Hills.) So Scorpio will have to get used to, and bear responsibility for, twice as much darkness as she or any other Beast will.
What will Scorpio be like? she wonders aloud, in pink noise.
“Take a look,” Jaymi whispers back, up the night-time canyons from Electra Drive.
OK, she will. So she presses the tumbler to her forehead once again … and seen through the bourbon, the landscape assumes a tint of bitumen. A line of pylons march across a black field of kerosene. Rivers of shadow wash the feet of rust-coloured stalagmites, across which is draped a pale-brown organic form that’s at once ethereal and carnal.
Teaser 89(i), cancelled in committee
It is time to break out the home nuclear fusion kit. In the code he’s about to create, one nucleus from Amber’s vengeance and another from the Platinum Raven’s transcendence will be fused into the fierce beauty of his final Beast, Scorpio.
Scorpio’s beauty will be of a kind that would never be permitted to emerge from the antiseptic gates of Bang Dead Games—the beauty of a creature so feral and so sexual, so delicate and dark, that he’d surely have been cancelled in a Bang Dead committee meeting.
Beauty of a different stripe, that should have ruled the world…
OK, here goes. Jaymi picks up his shot-glass of cherry schnapps, downs it in one, bangs the empty glass back onto the table beside him, and claps his hands together.
When he created Shigem’s code, he sprinkled in the seeds of a couple of possibilities designed not for actual germination in that Beast but rather for recessive residence within him, with the potential to emerge in the progeny Shigem would never have, and colouring the cells of his beauty, in the form of two statements he would never quite utter aloud.
In the case of this new Beast, it seems the best preparation for the rigours of his two allotted games will be for Scorpio to be likewise implanted with the wisdom and watermarks of an upbringing that he won’t in fact undergo in those two game-worlds but that is nonetheless down there in the bloodstream of his code.
Those decks and banks of faders flicker up in neon-red and black across the sky, then flick to F-sharp minor.
Dropped into life in this way, Scorpio chances to land on the south-west fringes of Belle Glade, where his upbringing unfolds in a manner centred on his meeting resistance. Out here in the cane fields of Florida, this is a place where lucky breaks are few. As shown in both games, it also chances that his nature flowers with so transgender a beauty, that by the time he’s in his teens he has lost count of how often he’s escaped physical destruction at the hands of those around him, to match the verbal destruction they’ve wrought on him every day of his life since he could understand words.
As soon as he can slip away out of Belle Glade forever, he does so. With two brief stop-overs along the way, he hitches rides that take him eastwards further than he’s ever been, across Florida to West Palm Beach. Here, for the first time in his life, through a cluster of jagged social breakthroughs interspersed by setbacks, he meets a loose crowd of others who have escaped the same sort of isolation he has just broken out of; and in a messy rush of apprehension and euphoria, he falls in with them.
(In The Imagination Thief, he’ll remember a time when he considered escaping to New York City but decided not to—scared off by a premonition of himself working the traffic jams on the expressway ramps by the Macombs Dam Bridge in the freezing New York winter. How warm, by contrast, are these West Palm Beach nights in this fictional Florida coming-of-age that Jaymi’s sprinkling into him, never to germinate.)
Teaser 89(iii), smash-and-grabs
Back down in West Palm Beach again, a flurry of drug-fuelled club-nights at one particular venue prompts the gang to up their game, just to net the money required for their ever-wilder social life, by staging a further series of even more audacious smash-and-grabs—no longer targeting just high-street outlets but tony boutique fashion stores too. In this project they achieve outrageous success over the next few weeks, evading the police again and again, for the queens have developed skills and moves they never used to have. The whole gang is now rolling in money, all clad in designer fashions—and to cap it all, their ride is now a pimped-out Jeep with the word “Playgirl” painted large on it in glamour-girl calligraphy.
It’s all too good to last, of course. It’s only a matter of time before there’s a slip-up, through complacency or bad luck. One night the cops arrive more quickly than usual after one of the gang’s break-ins, and catch sight of the Playgirl Jeep before it has had time to roar off and away to safety. The police car gives chase, closes in on the queens and addresses them through a loudspeaker, demanding they halt the vehicle. (Hearing this from where he’s hunkered down in the back of the Jeep, Scorpio pictures his boyfriend swerving out in front of the police car on a silver motorbike, reaching casually out and discharging several rifle shots into the car’s tyres and engine, thus immobilising it and allowing the queens to escape into the night with a classic screech of tyres on warm asphalt… Alas, this doesn’t happen—mostly because, as Scorpio then remembers, he is in fact in a period “between boyfriends” at the moment.)
The gang is apprehended, alas. The party lifestyle they’ve all enjoyed over the last few months is terminated with rude abruptness; and the law runs its leaden-footed course, leading to custodial sentences for several of them, including a three-year sentence in Florida state prison for Scorpio.
Teaser 90(i), flight of ten steps
Jaymi wanders along the railing past the kidney-shaped pool behind the house on Jupiter Drive. He reaches the well-swept but seldom-used flight of ten steps leading down off this terrace to the precipitous slope beneath. He descends the flight, sits on the eighth step and places his feet down on the tenth one, with the ends of his bare toes at the lowest rind of manicured civilisation before that other realm begins—the original realm of untamed earth and scrub, steep and scratchy, where the savage scraping of hidden bugs emanates from spiny clumps of grass, evidencing an alien but atavistically familiar world of mandibled murder, kept at bay by artificial means.
His first response to seeing Bang Dead’s new “Cosy Score: Normal-Comfy or Strange-Scary?” Newsfeed was to start creating Scorpio’s code out of thin air, beginning with nothing but a fore-echo of this Beast’s fierce beauty. If the ones and zeroes behave themselves, Scorpio will soon emerge from his code. He’ll be painted with his own visuals, which will animate him; he’ll be scored with his own soundtrack, which will come alive; and he’ll be tested. Then within a few days he’ll be electrified into incarnated form, in all his beauty, like a burst of love.
Teaser 90(ii), blonde seriousness
His phone rings. “Hallo?” he answers, gazing down at that circle of hairy-trunked palm trees with the long-ago bonfire traces in the clearing at their centre.
“Jaymi, this is Kim. I’m sure you’re super-busy, so I’ll keep this quick. I just wanted to say that I’ve found myself becoming quite attracted, in a platonic way of course, to a certain quality in Ashley. A quality that I can only describe as a certain blonde seriousness.”
“Oh Jeez,” says Jaymi, resting his head in his hand. He may have to think fast here, to stop something going off the rails. This Beast has clearly become a loose cannon. (Is incarnation making the Beasts too independent?)
“No, hear me out,” says Kim. “I’m a serious-minded blond myself, as you’ll know from creating me, so it was natural for me to give her a call and go round to visit her at the Century Park East apartment. In fact, I’m there now—”
“Oh Jeez. This is all we need. Kim, please. It’ll only make for unforeseen complications. Not to mention loose variables.”
Teaser 90(iii), cheeks burning
Jaymi laughs out loud. “Yes, of course. He’s welcome to come over. He is, after all, the embodiment of my own blond seriousness of mind, despite my not even being blond. In fact, what am I saying—Kim even lives there on Electra Drive, with Shigem and Evelyn in the guest wing, so he’ll already be around when you arrive! Though I am careful to allow the three of them their privacy, so I don’t tend to go knocking on the guest wing door to visit them.”
“Oh, what an absurdly exciting-but-cosy arrangement that sounds like!” bubbles Ashley, emitting a high-strung, frisky giggle down the phone line.
“Well, yeah. You know, we all muddle through,” says Jaymi, then without warning he becomes aware that he’s blushing, just as Shigem and he so prominently blushed throughout their teens, almost every time another person stared at them—but this time he’s alone, at the bottom of this furthest flight of steps down and out into the untamed canyon, sitting by himself while his cheeks burn hot and bright and pink beyond control.
“OK then, see you tomorrow night,” says Ashley.
“Great. Let’s say half-past eight. Give me a call from outside the gates, and I’ll let you in.” He terminates the call, then punches the air in triumphal satisfaction, proclaiming aloud to himself, “Yay! Two Dreary Ones converted—two to go. Ace!”
Subsiding from this vocal bravado, he puts the phone away. His gaze melts into the distant haze of the city. He raises both hands to his face, and with the lightest of pressure he lays his fingers against both his cheeks, barely touching the skin … and through all eight fingertips, he can feel the relentless lifelong throb of Shigem’s teenage vulnerability, pressing pink and warm and shy, just beneath the surface.
However, now that Scorpio’s code has been sweetly discoloured with the watermarks of a Belle Glade childhood and a West Palm Beach criminal coming-of-age that are not life-chapters he’ll end up living in reality—either in the game-world of The Platinum Raven or (as Angel) in the game-world of The Imagination Thief—it just so happens that this morning he will be granted release after two years of incarceration.
For it’s time for a higher-level destiny to unfold for him, in which he’s been cast to play a better part than this back-story role as cell-meat down here, with a better soundtrack than this sad prison-song. Like Amber, Evelyn, Shigem, Kim and the Platinum Raven before him, he will soon find himself no longer confined within this laptop screen, but running free through the mythic meat-space of Los Angeles.
Apprehending his upcoming transition with excitement, Scorpio’s code begins by slithering out of the bunk’s lower level in silence. Then it slinks on cat’s feet across the floor, towards the shower unit in the corner.
Teaser 91(ii), packed-earth tunnel
In fact, no less than Jaymi Peek himself has been prevailed upon to construct an escape tunnel from the outside world to the floor of this very shower unit, in the style of El Chapo. So, down a short ladder to a packed-earth tunnel-floor scuttles Scorpio’s code, pauses a moment to adjust to the gloom, and sets off at a run.
Every twenty metres is a pool of light cast by a bulb hanging down from above, which he reaches up and smashes as he passes underneath, to hinder the pursuers he’s afraid to hear behind him. With the smash of every bulb, he’s pursued by a spill of shadow lapping at his feet and welling up around him, conjuring a bestiary that’s all his own. Ghost-moths flap through the tunnel’s upper air, above a hatching of reptiles flexing dragons’ muscles. From the darkness, the face of a baboon starts out, alone and shocking. Lower down, ghost-carp swim; lower still, a great squid’s pale eyes peer up at him; and lower yet, gulper-eels writhe about his toes. And down beyond those, acrid eyes on a face of grinning evil—its mirth frozen hard as a mask.
Onward scampers Scorpio’s code, through unwholesome gloom, watched by a series of sharp-faced portraits hung upon the walls…
Teaser 91(iii), gives him an ear
A figure looms ahead, through a shambles of bloodied sound cut with stabs of ancient language. It’s a kind of hooded death, with a voice of charred black glowing red, and a yellow light glowing in its eyes, demon-fashion. A music of Satan arises in a black burst of hissing fire and flames of blood. The figure reaches out at him, grabs his hand, and gives him an ear. It’s a human ear, pressed into his palm, so his fingers close tight on it, his fingernails scraping in the curves of the ear-coils—
A dog barks, far across the canyon from this window. The emergent code and its Scorpionic bestiary are rising up with force behind the plastic surface of Jaymi’s screen, as if they are pressing against the glass of an aquarium.
And on down the tunnel slithers Scorpio’s code, from the prison to the Hollywood Hills, ever nearer: a piece of luscious darkness, on its way to being flesh!
Jaymi leans closer in towards his screen, and closer … then recoils, smiling wide, as his Beast’s code springs into view at last. It presses at the silvered underside of the glass—a proto-form of his own fierce beauty, like a darkness of tentacles surging up a well-shaft, straight at his face.
Teaser 92(i), horror-movie door-hinge
The door of his head slams shut. All the bodies caught in his head-chamber stop dead, frozen in the postures they occupied when the door slammed.
Normal sound dies, leaving paralysed silence.
A creak cuts in, slow and deafening—the sound of a horror-movie door-hinge. Everybody here in his head-chamber turns around, with abnormal slowness, to face him. By degrees, all their eyes swivel round to face Scorpio, and lock themselves onto him, demonically knowing; and the creak gets ever louder, as if the bodies’ frameworks are thirsty for oil.
With a sense of sliding down into someone else’s nightmare, he happens to incline his head at a particular angle, from which his surroundings appear the same as from other angles except that a single freakish thing is visible, almost hidden among the rest—a horrific face on one body standing just over there in his head-chamber. Suppressing an urge to wail, he sets about the task of verifying this phenomenon: first, he returns his head to its former angle of inclination, whereupon the face resumes its earlier unexceptional appearance … and then he reproduces the angle of his head’s inclination to what it was a few moments ago when he glimpsed … and yes, sure enough, the face on that body over there in his head-chamber is once again quite horrific. He jerks his own head’s angle away from this again, so as to conceal that face for ever, he fervently hopes—and squints and flicks his eyes back at the face for a split-second, of course, just to check—and mercifully it’s normal again (but for how long?).
He swallows.
Teaser 92(ii), another horrific expression
Fortunately he is diverted from this, when another of the bodies standing around his little head-chamber makes another horrific expression at him—in silence, without warning, for no reason, different from the first one but just as distressing—and seemingly unnoticed by the other bodies in the room.
His mouth goes dry and sticky inside. He knows that if he were to question each horrific expression-maker, in mounting alarm, as to what the hell they were trying to do to him, then they would deny everything, feigning not to understand; so he bites the question back down his throat, where it hangs, never to be asked.
He knows that if he were to question the other bodies, in his growing panic and queasiness, as to whether any of them noticed two among their own number making such horrific faces at him, then they would all deny seeing any such thing; so he clamps this question tightly back down into his own voice-box, never to be uttered.
With escalating nausea, he wonders whether another of these scattered bodies in his head-chamber will next start to emanate a feeling of alien evil and fuck-up, some unaccountable repulsiveness, despite not changing visibly, as yet…
Teaser 94(i), dragon with scorpion’s sting
Then he re-opens his eyes, consults his ever-growing design for The Platinum Raven and checks his sketch for Scorpio’s visuals. Its first description of Scorpio’s physical appearance reads: “a young Armenian man of maybe twenty-one, of a dark and delicate beauty in keeping with the silver scorpion pendant hanging at his neck […] the Armenian boy dressed in black, a Scorpio pendant at his neck. No smile there at all, too much tension and exquisiteness and fierce vulnerability. For him it wasn’t easy, no one-two-three. But here he is—just as if in some club, deep in a city. A sudden smile leaks through, a flush of light across his face, for an instant. Then once again, no smile. Fem in black, for this is realness. So waltz darling, deep in vogue […] he turns his dainty head to one side and slightly up.”
He turns to his design for the game The Imagination Thief, to check his sketch for the visual artwork there. Its first description of Angel’s physical appearance reads: “a dark-eyed Armenian boy of maybe twenty-one, whose spiteful sleek depraved face radiates decadence and damage from its sharp beauty. […] He is shadowy, effete, both unhealthy and luminous: I picture him a pirate-queen scuttling up the masts of a slave-ship, to keep watch. Aside from a silver earring in his right ear, a shiny black vinyl brassiere is all that he wears above the waist, above black leggings and pointed black boots. Through his smooth brown skin I can sense the charge of nerves around his ribs beneath the faint swell of his breasts. His smooth little torso is built like a whip, thin and supple. Beautifully tattooed down the length of his back is a stark, emblematic pair of angel’s wings, cross-cut with faint lash-marks. Half the time his mouth, with its lips painted cinnabar, is sulky; and half the time his teeth are bared, jaws tense and snapping like a starved baby she-wolf. His voice is intersexual, with a degenerate breathiness underlying a fluid steel edge and a slight lisp on every s. A clean but musky sexual scent coils about him, even through the smoke. When his eyes fix mine for the first time, I have to make an effort not to flick my gaze away, so potent is the damage and so luscious is the blackness of fever within them. Hard excitement and the pulsing of attraction to the beauty of the dark spills out of him, as if his sweetest wish is for a violent revenge against life and all who live it. […] And he turns away and slinks to the corridor’s mouth, like a little black dragon with a scorpion’s sting.”
Teaser 94(ii), those killer eyes
There is then one further little artwork-oriented description of Angel, a bit later on in The Imagination Thief: “he seemed to you, Lucan, like a sexy little fly. You saw him as a creature whose natural habitat would be hovering above a steaming-hot pool of blood and honey, sending his feelers down into it like the snouts of a voracious alien. And those killer eyes on him—so startling in close-up! Those big, brown, vital eyes, so dark and alive and dangerous and watchful, beneath long black eyelashes; the curve of the eyes echoed and magnified underneath by the fuller convexity of pale brown-olive skin curving outward over his cheekbones, then quickly back in and down in slanting arcs to the reticent mouth and smooth sharp chin; and the delicate jaw-line rising around behind, past small ears to the flame of black hair above a round intelligent forehead. That animal immediacy, that play of flesh and electricity combined, that scything sharpness and tang within a wrapping of organic yield and warmth, which knew that it grabbed your own gaze and licked it back.”
Well, alright then. That’s the brief, for this final Beast’s visuals. Jaymi glances up for a moment, taking in the canyon ahead; then he fires his attention back into those lines of code, homing in on Scorpio, swooping in towards him like a bird of prey…
This Beast is camera-ready for his very own manga, a cocktail of essences from many places and eras: dark angel of all genders; Roman pathic from the time of Nero, feral and consumed, at the edges of the palace feast; the mystic priestess-boy Heliogabalus, anointed as emperor; and an alien idol fallen to earth from the future, with a tail like a snake’s.
Jaymi zooms in and fills up his screen with the full-length snapshot that’s been circulated to the production crew’s costume department to ensure continuity in Scorpio’s manga-like styling: in his little black pixy-boots, black leather mini-skirt over black tights, slinky black polo-neck and silver crucifix pendant, hooped earring and silver rings (not to mention the sulky mouth and the luscious darkness of obsession that were both touched upon in Jaymi’s initial sketches), this Beast’s femininity is of the dragon-diva type, evenly fused with the rest of him.
Teaser 94(iii), picturesque crucifixion
Brown eyes, in simple fact. But in greater truth, when the sidelight hits, they are indigo eyes.
And yet, when his darkness melts into sleekness, the simple allure of his slender body, with its smooth little breasts and gentle curves, is topped by the prettiest of androgyne faces—delicate and vulnerable, and even almost innocent.
Thus it is that Scorpio inhabits his own slinky black melodrama, in his own manga-bubble of neon-red and silver: an electrified fusion of self-love and self-hate, flickering between hungry self-pollination and picturesque crucifixion.
It’s a living, for a Beast.
Jaymi hits save, sinks back into his seat and gazes out across the canyons at the haze above L.A.—a mythic city-span like a grand dance-floor, where the sweet fierce beauty of his own little Scorpio will soon dance naked in the sight of the world!
Teaser 95(i), little silver crucifix
As established in Scorpio’s code, throughout The Imagination Thief he will be called by his boy name, Angel. This is because all the events to be depicted in that particular game occurred before the time when everyone started calling him by his girl name, Scorpio. His transition of names will be remembered in an episode called “Santa Monica Boulevard” in The Platinum Raven—a game whose events will occur a couple of years later, after he’s become Scorpio for all purposes.
In which context Jaymi first establishes Scorpio’s gleaming detail in The Imagination Thief as being his little silver crucifix pendant, whose visuals will glint through the game-play, most often offset by black: “upon his tight black T-shirt, just above the gentle undulation of his breasts, hangs a little silver crucifix […] the little silver crucifix dangles in mid-air beside your black vinyl brassiere […] he heads for the door, stopping on the way to pick up from the dressing-table your crucifix pendant, whose thin chain he gently fixes high upon your chest in a delicate silver echo of the large golden one hanging halfway down his own.”
He then establishes Scorpio’s talisman in The Imagination Thief as being his mirrored sunglasses, whose visuals will reflect his surroundings at three moments of high-tension game-play: “he pulls out a flick-knife and deftly slices the blade up through the air to rest against the other, who sits coquettishly posed on the divan beside him, naked except for mirrored sunglasses and a whip around his neck […] half-running after him, breathing onto and polishing the lenses of the mirrored sunglasses you’ve just snatched […] wearing mirrored sunglasses. Sunglasses at night.”
Teaser 95(ii), big golden crucifix
He concludes by establishing Scorpio’s additional motif in The Imagination Thief as being a big golden crucifix pendant, which will be worn by his boyfriend Lucan rather than by him, but which will nonetheless flash across the landscape of Scorpio’s game-play like a search-light: “a big, flat, golden crucifix hangs from his chest, whose bulk quite dominates my field of vision […] your eyes stay closed, but your hand reaches up to feel the big golden crucifix hanging at his chest, where his muscles are so close that you can feel their heat, here upon your face […] a miniature blaze of golden light in your midst, emanating from where a dedicated beam of sun strikes Lucan’s crucifix pendant […] you see yourself fixed on that golden crucifix like a little twist of crackling, howling in religious ecstasy forever […] his spiritual enrichment on the crucifix […] ‘Bad girl!’ voices chant, ‘so like a woman’ in your tight red leather skirt and cherry lipstick and angel’s wings, holding the big dangerous hand of your man with his crucifix pendant, strong and golden on his chest.”
Although Scorpio has no soundtrack yet, Jaymi is starting to feel what sort of Beast he will be in his two games—the only Beast who’ll appear in two. Seen as two halves of a whole, Scorpio’s central roles in that pair of game-worlds will come together in pleasure to make a smoothly-contoured creature. In his multiple close-ups along the way, however, he may appear a Cubist, fractured Beast, as befits a being who incorporates and celebrates the fractures in his maker, embodying the urges of a self-destructive voltage.
Teaser 95(iii), he’s delicate and cruel
For instance, Scorpio remembers feeling in his adolescence that he had always, somehow, worn beautiful make-up throughout his life: whenever he’d been about to swim at that idyllic open-air pool in the woods, in the palace gardens of his head, it had been indigo eye-shadow, a little below the eyes and more above them; or whenever he’d been curled up like an elf in one of his palace turrets, it had been a dark and luscious colour on his lips, to match the burgundy-black flowers in the wreath on his hair; or whenever he’d been aboard that pirate ship, it had been a streamlined version of the parrots’ colouration in the jungles he’d been sailing past. It was as if he’d always known he had an inner make-up, visible across a freeway—such that when he did at last apply some actual colours from physical phials, in his teens growing up on the south-west margins of Belle Glade or the west edge of Asbury Park, then he felt as if he were painting a lily whose colours had already been there since birth.
But later in the underworld, deep in a city, there’s a woman who observes him across a crowded room, while he talks with a score of people over several hours; and it seems she must be looking so far into the nervy Scorpio as to see him full of electric nerves and vulnerability. At last she comes to speak to him, saying she can see both a young girl and also a likely mass-murderer living there inside him, depending on the light. (And Jaymi squirms.) The boy-girl is looking very pixy-ish tonight, she says, but really she can tell that he’s delicate and cruel, so she’d better pack some heat while she’s with him, she’s decided… Scorpio’s eyebrows jump up nervily, as often, and he hiccups in reply, because the truth is more mundane than the woman is describing: he is just tipsy, after much champagne. A drunken angel, once again—of a sultry and sluttish disposition, to be sure, but liquored-up, in essence.
Teaser 96(i), more louvred lights
Soon after eight-thirty in the evening, Ashley’s and Herb’s cars roll up to the house on Electra Drive, less than a minute apart. Standing at the grand picture-window on his upper landing, with his hands clasped behind his back and his forehead resting against the inside of the central pane, Jaymi watches his front gates swing open. The two vehicles sweep into the width of his driveway, curve around the central fountain, and scrunch to a halt on the gravel in front of the house.
He watches his gates close again, sealing both cars and drivers into his property. His very own two Dreary Ones! Converted to the side of light and right and joyful darkness…
As soon as his guests have stepped indoors, he equips them with drinks. Then to put them at their ease, he takes them straight through the house and out across the ground-floor terrace, for a wander around the garden on the promontory over the city, where dusk is still falling. As they wander the paths and lawns, their six passing shoes are starkly lit, here and there, by cylindrical lights with downward-slanting louvred sides, like insulator cones, of the same kind that sprouted from the earth on Zeus Drive and spilled pools of red and orange and yellow around the Platinum Raven—but this time spilling pools of crisp white and blue instead.
Jaymi brings his guests by leisurely degrees back to the main sitting-room, where a quiet roar of L.A. night drifts in through the open terrace doors.
Teaser 96(ii), reality distortion field
“Now, the next question is for you, Herb. You know how your Downtown design has some game trappings but isn’t in fact gamified behind the surface? I mean it’s really just an all-purpose, somewhat sparse evocation of a semi-mythical ‘Downtown L.A.’, to gussy up the Newsfeeds?”
Herb pushes his glasses up his nose. “Well, I don’t know if I’d quite call it sparse, as such. But yeah, sure, I know what you’re saying.”
“Oh indeed, I don’t mean sparse as such—no, of course not. But maybe just a tad … thin, in places, let’s say?”
Herb grunts assent.
“OK then,” resumes Jaymi. “Well, that pop-art-type thinness is just the effect I’d like to see replicated in the Platinum Raven’s upcoming mission through LAX. To be nakedly frank, it’s questionable whether we even need her jaunting through the airport. But this very shortfall in strict necessity should be owned and inhabited with appropriate visual styling, and I reckon the aforementioned thinness would fit well. I mean, how could I not send her through LAX? The sexy minerality of an airfield full of shrieking turbines and great expanses of marginal land made of concrete and metal, with all those liminal spaces that are so dead, yet so highly charged that no one’s allowed to access them … you should both know that this is all very Platinum Raven, with her alien beauty and her cool transcendence and her pink noise. Am I making sense?” Herb nods, then Ashley too, both with a sort of shining concentration on their faces. “Plus, the server farm is located just beyond the airport’s western perimeter, and the refinery pumps tank-loads of jet-fuel into the airport every day: these two facts are like a pair of columns, each sending up half an arch to support the airport as the visual keystone between server farm and refinery.”
Ashley’s concentration breaks into a smile that fuses understanding with befuddlement. She shares another glance with Herb, then the three of them laugh. “This is all outrageously kooky, Jaymi, and I’m unsure how much you can see that yourself, but you have enough of a reality distortion field around you to ensure that I do, somehow, get it.”
Teaser 97(i), ramp up his anguish
As Jaymi recalls from having met her, Kelly Kandy is a fun-loving party animal with an easy manner and a reassuring smile. The simple truth of this impression makes it perhaps surprising, at first, that she’s also someone who will hate this latest Beast on sight, with a chemical hatred. Her horizons are so shaken by Scorpio, in fact, that she forms an immediate intention to fuck him up for good. Confronted by a creature so gorgeously anguished—so cross-cut with sex addiction, of a gender identity so complex and a self-esteem so fractured—how can Kelly wish otherwise than to ramp up his anguish still further? Concerning the reasons for this, she is incurious by nature; though Jaymi has little difficulty in recognising that behind her general hipness, she’s really very “Cosy Score”.
Well then, Scorpio was made for her, Jaymi reflects.
In any case, as soon as this Beast’s delicate Scorpionic beauty, sleek depraved face, sulky mouth and luscious darkness of obsession appear on her screen for the first time, all as aforementioned and in one package, Kelly applies her skilled fingers, state-of-the-art software and well-used keyboard to the task of smudging his visuals as painfully as possible.
There he is on the monitor right in front of her, clinking champagne glasses with some woman in a busy nightclub. Kelly pounds her keys, clicks her mouse, and sends her cursor curving and flicking all across her screen’s image of the nightclub.
As she does so, Scorpio senses the air in the room being flicked and whisked by a slicing of damage that has yet to gain ingress. His little silver cross swings flashing through the space between his nipples, sweats and glints in the candle-light and lands at a slant on his chest, while he glances around him … and then she breaks through.
Teaser 97(ii), chefs and long pigs
An attempt to smudge a Beast’s visuals is felt as a visceral distaste, flavoured by the nature of the Beast, at what the smudger would presume to impose. And so he slides down, from a diva on a champagne-high of club chic, to a fey little fly buzzing drunk above a sleaze-pit. Kelly sees the barbed-wire coiled around him, ramps it up and rams it through the cells of all the others in this room—self-mutilation as the darker side of narcissism, flowing through these clubbers gathered here—a perverted, delirium-obsessed scent of visuals, gleaming in their eyes and revealed as the engine of a nightmare of culinary events.
By queasy degrees, he understands what is flowing through the room.
He fears, in other words, that he may be eaten by these people, in a literal sense: chefs and long pigs…
In shock, he sets off at a run, across the room and down a passage—then halts as he sees a girl of five, just ahead, playing with a high-fashion doll whose legs are so exaggeratedly long and elegant as almost to suggest grasshoppers’ thighs. The girl is practising ballerina moves, while talking in a cute, flirtatious, young-adult way, very “Hollywood” and precocious for a five-year-old. She turns to face him. “Hi! I’m Nutmeg,” she grates in a different voice, a voice of guttural harshness—and through her veil, Scorpio sees that this five-year-old’s face is much older than he thought. It even has lines around its eyes…
Black light blazes and her head rears up, a mass of pulp with several eyes pushing out at odd places. Shrieks cut the air.
He turns and sprints back down the passage, knowing she’ll be watching as he runs—but after fifty metres, the barbed-wire around his torso catches on a nail in a door-frame, so he has to turn back in her direction and scrabble at the wire, in a frantic bid to unhook it before she can reach him.
While he fumbles, with tears pricking the backs of his eyes, he feels the tickle of a drip of blood running down his chest beneath his black clothes, behind his crucifix.
The girl scuttles sideways up the length of the passageway, towards him. “I like to have my eyeballs licked!” she grates; and a black steel worm curls out from inside the eyeball nearest to Scorpio, as if to invite his tongue to dip down and lick it.
Without any warning, Nutmeg starts scalpelling herself, with her own smiling consent to the process—and inside a moment, a full operation is in progress, performed by Nutmeg using a single deft hand. “When I’m with you alone, late tonight,” she grates sweetly at Scorpio, “I’ll let you see me rip my face off, leaving just a slab of flesh—”
What would be the soundtrack that could live up to this Beast’s aforementioned visuals—namely the delicate Scorpionic beauty, sleek depraved face, sulky mouth and luscious darkness of obsession that Jaymi has established in him? What sound would most help the Dreary Ones to hear their own dreariness, through starkest comparison with him?
The answer to this question is a soundtrack sung not in Scorpio’s own lisping-snake voice, but in a flat seductive female one—a voice whose sultriness is so dry, whose unimpressibility so effortless, and whose underground presence so privileged in access and enigmatic in aura, as to add up to an icon of quite unreachable cool.
This unnamed vocalist radiates a majesty of downbeat ecstasy, carrying the torch of the whole city’s underground, burning with her own laconic magic for a single moment, right here … and then she fades, forever.
Synth-pop morphs into gothic, and a gloomy glamour slides up and flowers in the knowledge there is something alluring in Death, with his princely mien, scythe and spooky fashion sense. Heralding his imminence, clumps of staghorn fungus push their yellow fingers up between the flagstones of the terrace under Jaymi’s bow window. Around the kidney-shaped pool on the terrace, kidneys sprout up, ringed by monster-blooms of red rafflesia, the rotting-flesh-scented parasitic meat flower.
The music grows creepier, to keep up with the vegetation. Horror, fat and hungry through the wall of the room, peers in at Jaymi Peek, its sharp little eyes like pinheads.
Peering forward and down, he sees the space on the terrace appears enclosed in walls that swell and breathe, yellow-lit and windowless. Steam coils up from the water in the pool, around a bundle of blood wrapped in velvet that hangs in the air, side-lit through the open glass doors from the lounge directly underneath Jaymi’s chair.
In the corner of the lounge, stubble is breaking slowly through the television screen. The image on the screen is zooming in towards a pair of eyes in place of nipples, each one dripping out an icicle of blood.
A chess-board is set upon the glass coffee-table nearby, in mid-game, the chess-pieces modelled out of raw meat: the mitre on the bishop is a shrew’s-nose of peering eyes. Beside the board is a contraption of severed shrews’ noses; and a hundred baboons’ noses fill a sack by the table-leg. Underneath the table, on the wood-effect laminate, a worm-coloured windpipe lies at an angle to a mangled corpse with babbling heart and twitching bones.
In patriotic colour scheme on the dining-table, a cheese’s interior is traditionally flavoured with blue veins of mould, red arteries of chilli pepper and white bones. For dessert a bitter jelly has set, like a moat, around the base of a blood-filled sponge-cake; while inside a pineapple, kidney-like and intestinal elements are in evidence. As an entree there’s a stew of battered eyelids, in a range of bacon and citrus tints, around a pale brain-stem. All is carefully laid out beneath a hairy ceiling.
A woman’s head peers down from an attic casement at the end of a row of terraced houses on this block, which rear up in giddy shapes with a kind of fish-eye lens effect, so the casement and her head start out at him in shocking prominence. The night-sky is yellow, the houses red and the gardens an ill green. Around the side of the woman’s house, fearful faces peer out of windows into a dim courtyard where drips fall through spotlit steam. The face of Mr Punch pokes through a window crack, and something scuttles in the shadows at the courtyard’s far end.
He slips through a door into a hallway, to find Punch now sitting inside a windowed box, eyeing Scorpio sharply. Blood is spilling through the ceiling, in quantities that increase in tandem with the anguish arising in Scorpio at his own fear of light-bulbs falling out. “Why is there blood pouring through the ceiling?” he asks the figure in the box.
“Nothing to do with me,” squawks Punch, “because I live at an eighty-degree angle!” and convulses in manic laughter.
On the staircase ahead, one rabbit is stroking a second rabbit, with paw-movements that are fully as knowing as those of a human hand. Above them is a girl of about ten, who shrieks in fear and horror at Scorpio’s approach. He freezes, not knowing whether to turn tail, to stay still, to dash past her as fast as possible, or (perhaps the least promising option) to “act natural” and try sneaking past her unnoticed. Yet before he can stop himself, he has chosen none of these but instead rushes straight at her, contorting his face so as to cause maximum revulsion between them both, leaping up, up, and over her head, with sudden superhuman buoyancy, leaving her crying far beneath.
Teaser 100(i), the Shrill Cows
“Well, that sounds like an unforgiving schedule, I must say,” opines Shigem. “Then again, how afraid one is of being forgiven, especially in profile. I warn you, Jaymi, I’m going to be so tired after this repurposing business, I may just have to be carried off in a heap.”
“All right, a little focus, please,” says Jaymi, clapping his hands to regain his Beasts’ attention.
“Ooh!” says Kim as a sudden thought occurs to him, and he taps Shigem on the arm: “D’you remember that club we went to in Downtown, where that wannabe girl-band was playing?”
“Yes,” says Shigem. “What was their name? The Shrill Cows, was it? The Soggy Effusions? Something like that, anyway.”
“Er, not sure, I forget their name,” says Kim. “Anyway, do you remember the boy who was running the coat-check?”
“Hm, not really. Oh, yes I do. A snippety little thing, he was, right?”
“Yeah, some twee little queen. Anyway, the reason why I’m mentioning him is—”
“He was so off-his-face, on something or other,” Shigem interrupts, “that he kept mixing up everyone’s coats, so every single interaction with every single person in the line became this huge ridiculous drama. It was hilarious. I was just soggy with laughter. Collapsing onto the floor into a puddle of limp semen, I was. I mean, really! Oh yes, it was, er—yeah, it was pretty funny.”
“Yup,” says Kim, chuckling at the memory. “That’s true, it wasn’t exactly a Socratic dialogue.”
“Anyhoo, yes,” says Shigem. “Why did you mention him?”
Kim’s smile fades away while he reflects on this question, until, several blank moments later, he replies, “I have to admit, I can’t actually remember. I’m going to have to come back to you on that one.”
“Well then! I’m glad we’ve established something, at any rate,” says Evelyn dryly.
Jaymi claps his hands again. “Please. A little focus here. We have important work to do.”
Teaser 101(i), stillness in Lucan
Now that he’s standing here in physical space, quivering in this newly-incarnated body for the very first time, Scorpio picks up other snippets of his future life in the two games he’s cast for, as if he were a radio tuner catching fragments of sound from ahead through the ether.
Looming large among those fragments are a trio of intimations of when he’ll be going by the name Angel in The Imagination Thief—a time when he’ll be trapped in a fierce love affair with a gangster named Lucan.
The first such fragment happens to be from a moment when the latter’s face looks almost gentle. This impression is a deceptive one, as it happens, being caused by nothing more than a momentary stillness in Lucan, who is sitting lost in thought with his eyelids lowered a little. An unlit cigarette waits in his mouth, while the lighter sits in his hand, which rests on his lap. His big golden crucifix pendant lies against the ever-gleaming tautness of his chest, winking quiet in the sunlight at the movement of his breathing—while Angel’s thinner silver cross winks back, lying on the curves of his own little chest over here across the room. The planes of Lucan’s face, from his eyebrows and eyes, down his cheeks and nose, to his lips, are so powerful, so beautiful, so effortlessly strong! He’s staring into the distance, planning or reflecting on something undiscernible; while Angel stares at Lucan, hot and hard as always, and yet quite tranquil; both lovers balanced in a still minute, sitting here…
Teaser 101(ii), empowered prison-cell
“I wish I knew why some Beasts are destined to go through the wringer more than others,” says Jaymi aloud, addressing Scorpio. “But you’ll come through triumphant, in dignity and beauty. You’re the only one in both games, apart from me.”
Jaymi tails off, realising he is not being heard. For Scorpio is distracted, being gobsmacked, more than any other Beast so far, by his brand-new condition of incarnation—a condition that’ll require some serious getting used to, it seems. So aware is he of this newfound buzz and flow of his own body’s cells, that he wonders how he’ll be able, from now on, to concentrate on thinking about anything very much beyond the lifelong sentence of his own physicality.
There’s pleasure in it too, though: looking into a hand-mirror at the full-length wardrobe-mirror behind him, he delights in the stark and elegantly streamlined angel’s wings tattooed across the length and width of his back. “Beautiful wings,” Scorpio murmurs aloud to himself. “Stay with me forever. See what I do, through the years ahead. See what we do. We’re on an enchanted adventure together—”
He falls silent, startled to identify the sound of his own voice, which has a degenerate breathiness underlying a fluid steel edge and a slight lisp on every s. This is the first time he’s ever heard it out loud in the world, he realises … and straightaway feels an anguish of self-consciousness about the breathiness and the degeneracy and the steel, and his lisp, and the whole dark voltage of self-cutting gay narcissistic corrosion and jaggedness, within which he’s locked up for life, it would seem, in a grand empowered prison-cell … and then decides to love this body-prison-cell in any case, forever.
Teaser 101(iii), internal temperature gauges
Another issue for him, he realises, will be temperature. He finds himself equipped with the advance knowledge that there are varied seasons, but is uncertain how his own internal heating system will work in relation to them, sensing already that his internal temperature gauges are a little messed-up. He has an intimation he will feel permanently overheated throughout summer, no matter how few layers he wears, and permanently too cold throughout winter, no matter he how many layers he wears.
Well then, if temperature is out to get him whatever he does, he will just wear the same styling all the time—and damn well make the most of the equinoxes, when (with a bit of luck) he’ll hope to be neither shivering nor sweating, for a day or two at least.
A more specific feature of his incarnation will be perspiration, it seems, which is not quite excessive but certainly constant. That’s fine, he’ll just shower twice a day. And wear a lot of black. (Never pastels.) At the instant he decides this, he notices the full-length snapshot that’s been taped onto his wardrobe-mirror by the production crew’s costume department in order to ensure continuity in his manga-like styling; and relief suffuses him, to see what it is.
Not only is he destined to wear the same kind of outfit every day, as he just decided to do by himself. In addition, his entire allotted outfit is black, as he also decided! And accessorised with tastefully simple bits of cool silver jewelry…
He flits across the room to inspect this designated costume from closer, with a fierce attentiveness; and a grin of joy and pleasure lights his face.
He swirls around the bedroom, in a twirly dance of pride.
Then he drops to his knees in prayer, raises up his hands to his creator Jaymi Peek, and lets his eyes close with a quiet seraphic smile.
Teaser 102(i), Vista Del Mar Boulevard
On the inland side of the fenced-in corridor of Vista Del Mar Boulevard in El Segundo is the edge of a thousand-acre refinery, looking west through the night to the nearby ocean. Beyond the chain-link fence, a bank of shrubs and palms rises to a line of pale green oil-tanks, each a cylinder some fifty metres in diameter. Across the empty road, Amber’s muscular body stands immobile in silhouette, looking away from the refinery across the grand expanse of a concrete field that’s lined, like an industrial orchard, with tall metal forms whose cross-bars and finials are strung with a complex vegetation of wires, coils and insulator cones. To his right and beneath him the great bulk of a power station rises on this strip of land, where yellow-white lights illuminate a jet of steam between giant chimneys, with the edge of the Pacific lapping at the beach just beyond.
Amber glances up and sniffs, catching a scent of something burnt and mineral. Thick electric cables sizzle in the humid air above, slanting down across the road towards him from a pylon on the refinery bank, and splaying out to rest upon two frames built below him on the concrete field to his right and left.
He turns and cuts across the deserted road. He is at the dim midpoint between two widely-spaced street-lamps, and the chain-link fence is not too much higher than head-height; so it’s the work of an agile minute for his athletic limbs to clamber over the refinery’s limits and drop down onto the earth beside the pylon’s base, where he springs back upright before vanishing into the shadowy shrubs.
Teaser 102(ii), in the refinery
Among the rocks half-buried at the crest of the bank, his shoe stumbles against the fossil of some small sea creature, now on dry land since the ocean-bed rose long ago: a little ammonite-spiral rock whose blood was once the sea. He looks up and onward—and there just ahead of him is a high steel fence. He stakes out its length, finding the point most shadowed by foliage and most adjacent to branches; and with that giant blond spider’s metal strength of his, he powers himself up between fence and branches, and over the top.
From here on, the refinery is Amber’s. Fizz-lights and gaslights dot the dark shine of a building of black steel, high upon his left. Keeping in the shadows, he stalks along the low-lit aisles in between rows of tanks on metal fields, stepping over rails and under pipes—a sensuous embodiment of Jaymi’s exploration of this brand-new West Side.
The figure of a security guard in the distance stops and stares, down an alleyway of girders. The man calls out, blows a whistle—sets off at a run, coming closer.
Amber ducks from view, jumps up to grab a girder, swings his weight around and upwards, and lands upon a walkway. The man passes underneath, glancing all around, but fails to look above him. Treading softly, Amber runs along this raised level for several hundred metres. He curves up around a chimney base, via a spiral stairway, then curves down again. In the middle distance ahead, he can see the refinery complex’s northern edge. He climbs back down from the walkway down a ladder to the ground and sprints towards that boundary, and through a car-park and a gate to the outside world.
Glancing back up at those metal towers behind him, as he trots across the quiet of El Segundo Boulevard and turns into Arena Street, he hears the air-horns of the refinery’s alarm system strike up with a long blare and then a short one, four times in succession. Each of the five high flare-stacks emits a roaring tongue of flame at the same time, licking and swaying sky-high into the night, before dying back down into a roil of ultramarine heat-haze around a tiny pilot-light: the first flare-stack’s flame is black and blue; the second’s flame is mauve and platinum; the third’s flame is brown and green; the fourth’s flame is apricot and blue; and the fifth’s flame is blackcurrant and black.
Teaser 103(i), jet fuel inflow points
Thus garbed, she stalks unchallenged through the corridors and hangars and alleyways, and at last succeeds in finding what she’s been looking for: the exact whereabouts of the inflow points where all those tons of jet fuel are pumped into the airport, every hour, from the refinery not far down the coast.
She has fantasised about diverting some of that fuel through the airport’s western perimeter, across Pershing Drive and into the server farm one weekend night, so as to flood the underground facility with the fuel before lighting a single match with a gesture of imperious, platinum sass…
But now that those inflow points are right there in front of her, how will she be able to divert any fuel from them? The knowledge of how that pipeline hardware works, and the luck in being able to put that knowledge into practice before being interrupted by some busybody: it’s rare enough to find just one of those two things in anyone, let alone to find them both together in someone. And she, alas, happens not to be one of the few people with either or both. So her plan to flood the facility is blocked.
—Hold on. Why would Jaymi have equipped her with an intention to take a particular action, but not with the ability to fulfil the intention? she wonders. Was he being perverse there, or just incompetent?
Teaser 103(ii), her real mission
At the bleep of an incoming text, she checks her mobile phone. It’s Jaymi, sending her the coordinates of the server farm! She’d almost forgotten why she is really here…
And with this memory comes the further understanding that she is way too transcendent a Beast to be wasted on standard chase scenes through meat-space—and ersatz meat-space, at that. Such staple devices are not her style at all. She was built for subtler things, surely.
OK then. She’s done with acting like nothing more than a sensuous embodiment of her maker’s unfocused explorations around this new West Side landscape. Jaymi’s heart was never quite in this LAX mission despite his best intentions for it, as the Platinum Raven now perceives. It is time to graduate into being a more bloodlessly conceptual weapon, thank you. It is time for her real mission.
So she flits across LAX’s western half, through those liminal, mineral spaces that so become her; and slips out through its perimeter, across Pershing Drive and up the lonely bare slope of Sandpiper Street.
Just beyond the top of the slope, two little El Segundo Blue Butterflies dart up out of the wild buckwheat and dance about her, one blue and one a golden-brown. She blows them a kiss.
Ahead of her is a low structure with a single closed door. She gives the door a gentle push. It swings open to reveal a small lobby, at the end of which she sees Amber standing in contemplation of the downward-pointing arrow on a button beside a pair of lift doors.
Moving down the aisle, Shigem sees the only available seat is next to a surly old man, whose bag is half-occupying the seat. “May I?” Shigem asks, indicating the bag.
The old man moves the bag off, after a second. Shigem nods thanks and sits down, emitting a sigh of fatigue as he does so, since it happens he’s been on his feet for quite a while today.
The man mumbles something not quite audible.
“I’m sorry?” Shigem asks, inclining his head towards him.
The old man growls in reply, as he repeats himself: “Is there going to be a lot of sighing?”
Shigem looks at him for a few moments, then realises he must be referring to Shigem’s sigh of fatigue upon sitting down just now. The evident assumption, that this sigh was caused by the man’s slowness in moving his bag, is so silly that Shigem just speaks aloud his own reflex, “Oh please…”
Like a shot, the man rasps back “Lady—cool it.”
Shigem’s mouth falls open. How even more ridiculously silly!… It’s clear, however, that the situation is quite unsalvageable already, after no more than a couple of exchanges each.
Reflecting on this unsalvageability, Shigem is bored, irritated and amused in such equal measures that he finds his urge to express each of these three emotions is precisely cancelled out. The only thing to do is to whip out a book from his shoulder-bag and stare into it with a furious cool—which he proceeds to do.
So little is he focusing on the book’s pages, however (what with all this ridiculousness, not to mention the flustered indignation beneath his furious cool), that several more seconds elapse before it occurs to Shigem that he should perhaps check whether he is holding the book the right way up … but too late, alas: “You may want to hold the book the right way up,” growls the man dryly.
“Oh, that does it,” says Shigem, standing up again. “I didn’t want to sit down anyway.”
“Great, I’ll take your seat,” says Kim, and sits in his place. “Thanks for warming it up.”
Teaser 104(ii), Shigem’s hiccups
The five Beasts all high-five. Then they step back in a line, all in character—hands on hips or by their side, or arms folded—heroes on a mission. Amber steps forward, presses the lift button, then turns to the others with his forefinger to his lips. “From now until we get downstairs into the server farm, let’s stay silent,” he instructs. “There may be security guards.”
“Oh boy. No, in that case I think I’d better wait here,” says Shigem.
“Why?” asks Evelyn.
“Because whenever I have to be silent, I get hiccups. It doesn’t happen straight away, but as soon as the need for silence arrives, so do the hiccups. I feel them forming an orderly queue, until they’re all bunched up in the upper part of my trunk. That’s a little traumatic in itself, because I have quite a sensitive trunk, as you’d imagine—but the main danger is even worse: just when the room is dead quiet, a violent hiccup pops up, and I have to take aim and stifle it with the right timing, or else it’s super-loud. OK, so that’s all very well, so far, but then all I can do is count the seconds until the next one. And soon enough, I just know that some hiccup is gonna manage to get past me—and everyone’ll turn round and stare, and I’ll go all pink and have to run out of the room and find upside-down water before it happens again. Oh god, being me is such a constant trauma, you’ve no idea. So no, I’d better be brave and wait here.”
“It’s true,” chips in Kim.
“Er, OK,” says Evelyn. “Sorry, I had no idea you have to go through all that. Well … oh, Jesus wept. For fuck’s sake, get down there with the rest of us and stop being such a wuss.”
“The pain, the anguish—the endless poetry,” says Kim.
“Shh!” warns Amber fiercely. “Get it together please.”
Teaser 104(iii), each take an aisle
The lift arrives and the doors open. “OK then—let’s hit it!”
In bold-stepping unison they stride forward into the lift, halt, and swivel in formation, so as to face back towards the open lift-doors. Amber presses the down button on the wall of the lift, then stands with his feet planted wide, braced for whatever fast-moving action may be just about to happen…
The lift-doors remain immobile, for several long seconds.
Then slowly, very slowly, they slide to a close.
The lift descends, and coasts to a standstill. The doors re-open to reveal the enormity of the Bang Dead server farm in the hall ahead, thus bringing the five of them to the hilltop crest, as it were, where they’re on the tipping-point before sliding down from being Beasts in a decorative landscape, into being programmed embodiments of Jaymi’s repurposing the stuff of the Newsfeeds. As that forward-down-sliding takes control of their feet at the threshold of the lift, they feel Herb’s code running through them like electricity, along with Jaymi’s words when he prophesied this very feeling: “Let it happen! Dance with it, in grace, if you please…”
So they each take an aisle up the warehouse-sized hall, where they stalk and swagger, flaunt and prowl, along between the stacks—still able to feel the weight of their own sexy-Beast physicality on the polished concrete floor, but increasingly able to perceive the dance of billions of glyphs and pixels filling up the servers around them, where the full horror of the Ain’tTheyFreaky! Newsfeeds lives enwrapped in Kelly’s crude visuals, held aloft in infinitesimal galaxies of impassive ones and zeroes.
Teaser 104(iv), ironic limp-sassiness
They emerge from the far ends of their chosen aisles and converge in the space beyond. “OK, gather round,” says Shigem in a stage-whisper; and for want of any competing instructions, the others all obey. “Now brace yourselves for the following suggestion, because it’s just a girlish whim and we don’t have to do it, but wouldn’t this be the ideal venue for a club night? I think this is the ideal opportunity for such a night, and I’m about to tell you why you should too. We’re sliding into code here, as Jaymi promised. I can feel it happening—can you?” His companions nod, looking more spacey every minute. “We are about to nuke out some hardcore poison from these servers and channel it all along those artwork cyber-pipes and pipelines, into tanks of clean raw stuff. It’ll be dirty work, so let’s spice it up into a club night, what d’you say? OK, so it’ll probably devolve into a scenario of bitchy faggy ironic limp-sassiness, but it’s worth a shot. Or we could all just plough on miserably instead, if you prefer? Oh, I just can’t decide which. You choose.”
“Club night!” shouts Evelyn.
“OK, you’ve persuaded me,” says Shigem, “I tell you, it’ll be so fierce: I’ll float around the club with a constant pout like a kiss, and you’ll be all tarted-up like a dyed Chihuahua.”
“That’s not quite the look I was planning,” she says, “but I’m right behind you on the club night idea.”
“So, my fellow Beasts,” announces Shigem, leaning nonchalantly against a server stack. “The next hour will contain all the fabulousness of an entire jagged weekend. What’s a jagged weekend, you ask? Well I’m glad you did, and I’ll tell you. It’s a weekend containing spurts of sociability or solitude that are intense and unrelated to one another, all juxtaposed with no time in between them, so one feels not quite in charge of one’s vehicle, despite appearances and the lack of any mishap as such. OK? So one more time, as Jaymi said, feel that code inside you, like a current. Let it flow! Amber, music please—let’s make this server farm sound like the hardest electronic dance music club there’s ever been. Platinum Raven, lights please—let’s give this server farm a slamming light-show. Then with music and lights, we can frame the next hour as a fantasy invoking the stylised decadence of a whole subculture that never quite was: its flamboyant postures, its eroticism, its utopia of endless nightlife and music and fashion; its extravagant choreography between ambiguous performers, mirroring the artifice of its own behind-the-scenes narratives; and those frenetically-shot and -edited segments, all intercut with fractured footage and colourised images, white-balance cards and onscreen colour-bars. Any questions?”
“I don’t know if simple people would understand all that,” says Kim. “I mean, of course, very simple people. Unlike Bertha.”
“Who’s Bertha?” asks Evelyn.
Kim pauses. “Um, I can’t actually remember,” he admits. “She is someone, but I forget who. Anyway, the point is that I know she’s not simple.”
“I’m glad we’ve established that,” says Evelyn. “It’s good to have something to hold onto.”
Teaser 105(ii), lick my fridge-handle
In an unexpected moment of calm and lucidity amid the general hurly-burly of repurposing, Shigem finds himself shimmering up beside Evelyn. “Hi Lambchop,” he says.
“Hi girlfriend.”
Somewhere during the course of all this craziness, she must have found a spare minute in which to restyle her hair, he observes. “So, what happened here?” he asks, indicating her coiffure.
“What d’you mean, ‘what happened here’?” she retorts. “It’s meant to be like this.”
Shigem raises his eyebrows and emits a slow, audible exhalation of breath, shaking his head gently.
She raises her eyes to the ceiling, then tilts her head to one side and indicates Shigem’s lips, which he must have found a spare minute to make up, somewhere during all this repurposing. “So is this lipstick a permanent thing, or are you just trying it out for someone else?” she asks.
Kim drifts up to join them, from somewhere. “Evelyn,” says Shigem, patiently, “don’t fuck with the eagles unless you’ve got the wingspan—and you don’t qualify, baby.” He turns to Kim: “I don’t know, did that sound convincing? Don’t answer that. But there is another thing about Evelyn, while we’re on the subject: she always looks like she’s preening…”
“Yeah right,” she says. “You know, Shigem—you can just lick my fridge-handle, baby, ’cos that’s the closest you’re gonna get.”
“Thanx, sugar.”
“Luv you babes.”
Shigem looks around him, tipsily authoritative. “Girls, places,” he instructs, claps his hands and drifts off, back into the club night.
Without warning, Kelly’s cursor whisks through the air above the servers, as it did when she smudged Scorpio’s visuals in the club where he realised he was surrounded by people who might eat him, just before Nutmeg… The cursor swoops down, scraping pins across the flesh of all five Beasts at once, so they yelp or squeak or bellow out in shock and pain, clamping their hands to their faces in instinctive protection.
Teaser 105(iii), incandescent pair
In due course, the repurposing of all six Newsfeeds is complete, with every glyph and pixel drawn out into an isolated stream of raw material and dispatched up the cyber-pipes and through the pipelines, to the refinery.
On dance the Beasts a little longer then, for joy, down the aisles of the server farm beyond LAX—the Platinum Raven, Evelyn, Kim, Shigem and Amber—while high above their heads, over Sandpiper Street, a cloud of El Segundo Blue Butterflies are starlit in the shrieking of the jet-planes.
Twirling in her punky spikes, Evelyn has the instinctive movements and lost-in-it-ness of the coolest girl on any club-floor, anywhere in the world; while up behind her, floating in a deadness of serious style in the strobe-lights, the Platinum Raven stares out opaquely at the lens and gives a flat, sinister wink without a smile. Incandescent pair…
Teaser 106(i), crest of joy and magic
As the club night nears its climactic moment, it coasts at leisure up the last few metres to that summit, resting easy on the climb that’s lifted it there.
The music ascends to a long crest of joy and magic, calling down the spirits to the server farm … then it falls, echoing away, down and back into the past.
The underground warehouse is plunged into darkness; the last little red and green lights go dim on the servers; and just at the instant when the dull flatness of the house-lights comes on, Herb pulls the Beasts deftly out of the West Side environment of Bang Dead’s game, propelling them back up into real life. As they streak upwards, the Beasts catch a final glimpse of the server stacks standing dark and inert down the length of every aisle. Then barrelling up into the house on Electra Drive, they proceed to emerge, one by one, through Jaymi’s computer monitor, and clamber out into meat-space.
On screens across the world, the six Newsfeeds constituting the bulk of Ain’tTheyFreaky! all grind to a halt, within the same minute. Millions of users on every continent tap hyperlinks and refresh pages, with mounting impatience but no success; while a deluge of error messages swells around the world, like a giant tide of deadness laid on deadness.
Teaser 110(i), spindly little quail
Within this prospect, just to kick things off, Scorpio watches in horror to see his own tongue extend across the width of a street, like a meaty baguette, wrap itself around a young man’s neck and push its tip into his mouth. There are a couple of further tongues, too: a wagging one, hanging off a doorstep; and then a huge tongue protruding from the upper level of a packed stadium, and curving down to ground-level.
There is a wriggling sack that pursues him up a stairwell. There are disembodied hands, walking down a corridor behind him. And there’s a paralysing fear that chokes and nestles on him, grained and grey as dead meat.
He buries his face in a pillow-skin … and there beside his drowsy head lies a second pillow, made of human flesh. There it is, yes: warm, soft, downy, breathing gently.
Next there is a menagerie of animals. First there are worms, of various kinds: tiny blind worms; worms with hair; worms that mate with him in the grave; and the furry bacon-worm that shoots out of nowhere and bites his arm.
Secondly there are spiders, in diverse situations: lung-spiders; camel-spiders that scream; buying a cactus that starts to move because it’s full of tarantulas; a dead pot-plant that sprouts a wriggling horror of legs; the smoking of dead spiders’ legs in a joint; and waking up as a purple tarantula.
Continuing on the animal front, he veers into cuisine, with a crème-caramel in a freshly-opened plastic pot. It looks normal, but tastes as if it might wriggle. And sure enough, through the smooth surface of the crème, there twitches up a thin stiff gristly worm with teeth upon its end, champing hard at the air.
For his last animal, there is a scuttling black thing, walking upright but shaped more like a small leggy bag or a spindly little quail. It pursues another organism, before destroying this in a splatter of blood-like fluid—only to mutate into a soft grey-brown snail, whose gnarly little face comes into startling close-up, blazes its bug eyes and bares its teeth in hissing hatred and venom at Scorpio.
Teaser 110(ii), cinema washroom
He dwells upon the less-than-impressive design feature whereby some pigs’ tusks, if left to grow naturally, will curve back and puncture their skulls before pushing into their brains by slow degrees.
And he concludes his session with a late-night screening in a cinema, where he feels an incipient panic attack arising in him. He goes to the washroom, stares in the mirror over the basins, and would swear he can see a great evil grinning out of one side of his face and down that side of his entire body. He gets out a knife … then a man enters the washroom and comes straight to the basins in order to wash his hands. The man fails to see the knife or anything else untoward; and on the way to dry his hands, he accidentally brushes against Scorpio, on the side where the latter saw the grinning evil—and is stabbed in the heart.
Scorpio jolts awake, then sees his own hands holding a stake of wood at arm’s length above the organs of his abdomen, trembling, ready at any moment to plunge it down into them—and flings the stake away in terror.
Teaser 110(iii), miniature Versailles
Landing back in clear reality, he finds he is lying alone on the floor of a kitchen. A drone of low conversation drifts in through the open kitchen door, from what sounds like a couple of rooms away: Dud’s and Ashley’s voices, too far off for Scorpio to make out what they are saying. He must still be in the Blue Jay Way house.
Near him is a back door leading outside. It’s closed and probably locked, but he’d be silly not to try the handle. He hauls himself up and tries it. Unlocked!
It’s unlocked because, as he cannot know, Ashley has left it unlocked for him. (Later, she will apologise to Dud for her carelessness in doing so.)
Scorpio creeps outside. An alleyway on his left leads to the end of an infinity pool with the cityscape in the distance beyond; while a path ahead leads to an open formal garden with long rectangular ponds and fountains like a miniature Versailles, bordered by low box hedges interspersed with a topiary of tall shrubs shaped into onion-domes, teardrops and twirly cones.
He plumps instead for the greater concealment of a narrower pathway on his right, which he’s glad to find leads him away from the house and out of visibility, along the very edge of Dud’s land. Along this he flits, between two crisp white stone balustrades that stand in harsh geometric precision against the organic invasion they fend off on either side: the balusters on his right mark the furthest boundary of manicured civilisation, beyond which a thorny scrub of barrel cacti and yucca falls steeply down a rock slope croaking with hidden insect talons; while the balusters on his left forfend a lush overgrowth of ferns and magnolias kept artificially alive with sprinklers.
He reaches a narrow gate—unlocked also! (Ashley’s prudent preparations again, as he cannot know.) Shooting hunted glances behind him, he slinks through it and finds himself back out on Blue Jay Way, some way below the main entrance to the house.
Teaser 111(i), Scorpio as Sadako
For a long time, Scorpio lies prone on the polished wooden floorboards underneath the bottom end of Amber’s bed.
Then by slow degrees, he crawls out from his hatching-place, like Sadako in Ring—his palms and nails pressing into the floor. His animal gaze darts about him, through the strands of his black hair hanging down before his face. He freezes, hearing Amber’s faint breathing above.
He slinks across the floor along the bottom of the bed, then stops at one corner of it, breathing hard himself. Once he’s allowed his breathing to subside a little, he moves just his head, turning it very slowly to look out from between the strands of his own hair, up the length of the bed to Amber’s head, which is an indistinct shape against the paler pillow.
Remaining on his hands and knees, Scorpio listens again to the breathing from the other end of the bed. Is Amber asleep? Or is he lying there awake in rigid silence, planning what reaction he will give to the tiny shreds of sound he can hear from Scorpio’s movements down at the foot of his bed—planning what sudden violent movement he will make towards that unknown intruder down there?
Scorpio waits immobile, for another half-minute.
Then he slinks onwards, around the corner of the bed, and starts his crawling journey along the side of it, with the wall on his other side, towards the bedside table ahead, prowling ever closer alongside that blond Beast’s powerful body lying up there on its back, all uncovered in the hot sticky night, whose electric charge of warmth Scorpio can even feel down here.
In a single bound, he springs up like a cat, lands on top of Amber’s chest, plants his claws around the wide muscular heat of it, and crouches there quivering.
Amber jolts awake to see a naked feline succubus, with haunches raised, legs splayed, bottom poised directly over Amber’s crotch—and eyes bright and feral in the dark of the room, fixed hungry and murderous on Amber’s eyes, inches from his face. But as Amber stares back into their depths, in this first extraordinary meeting between the pair of them, those Scorpio eyes soften, for Amber alone forever, into the dark submissive gazelle-eyes of a houri…
Teaser 112(i), violence in Amber
Jaymi’s eyes glint, as if the surface of the swimming-pool around his head were crackling with voltage, vermilion flame licking at the glassy-black water…
From that very first time Scorpio saw Amber, after crawling out from under the bed, Scorpio has always had the impression of colossal violence in Amber. The physical power of his presence derives from three elements: Amber’s movements, which are quick, unadorned and deadly efficient, as if every parcel of his energy is allotted; his stillness, bespeaking latent force; and his gaze, which sees into whomever it lands upon.
Scorpio has always been aware of this power, to an overwhelming degree; and yet, unlike most others who feel it too, he has never quite been afraid of Amber. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t be afraid, except that Scorpio knows another truth, too: the sound of the pair of them together, shouting out to the whole world from a shared stage, both emanating an infernally beautiful music wherein the yelps of Scorpio’s alto voice spurt up in glee and pride, coiling around the charismatic growl of Amber’s bass… No one else has yet heard that music, Jaymi reminds himself—but oh, they will!
Soon: there is machinery in Amber’s eyes, glancing back at Scorpio from there in the doorway; and after he walks out, Scorpio has Amber’s smile burned into his mind.
Soon after that, Scorpio’s delicate head lies in Amber’s lap, at peace, with eyes closed: softest touch and after-quiver of desire.
Teaser 113(i), Dionysus and Cybele
First comes Apricot Eyes. Throughout this game, the Jaymi Beast will become familiar with Scorpio’s being garbed in his modern visual styling, which has been established as if for a Scorpio manga: the little black pixy-boots, the silver rings on all his fingers, the black leather mini-skirt over black tights, and the slinky black polo-neck, always with a plain and delicate silver crucifix pendant, hanging either high at his neck or lower on his chest, depending on the length of thin silver chain he’s chosen on a given day; and one big hooped silver earring, swinging and swaying from his right ear.
But once only in that entire game, the Jaymi Beast will also glimpse an incarnation of Scorpio from long ago—an ancient incarnation as a boy named Phaon, who was dancing on a precipice on the Palatine Hill in Nero’s Rome, at sunset, enrapturing a crowd. By the time the Jaymi Beast glimpses him, this Phaon from Classical times will already be long dead, but his dance to Dionysus and song to Cybele will so bewitch, that they will fall sideways through the centuries like a teardrop, to land in the Jaymi Beast’s eyes in that game, with the booming of a vast bell…
Next comes Hallucination in Hong Kong, in which game the Jaymi Beast will be cast as “I”. In a view of Hong Kong from the Peak, the skyscrapers will rise beneath him to the north, with a blackcurrant colouration in the image, and his own eyes reflected back at him where they hang upon the sky above the city.
Also in this game, Scorpio-as-Angel, cast as “you”, will be lying on a bench for enormously too long … or will seem to.
What glacial elevation in the position of “I” in Hallucination in Hong Kong—a monstrous elevation, of the kind where all beauty appears as if colourised in post-production. Whereas “you” will be sensual, erotic, fresh—and destroyed by the touch of that glacially elevated, colourised “I”.
Jaymi Peek stares up with closed eyes, feeling those continental plates come together down inside him once again, locking tighter than before, with a clang like the asterisk above him on the sky.
Teaser 115(i), three camera lenses
He concludes by establishing the Jaymi Beast’s additional motif in The Imagination Thief as being three powerful camera lenses, whose visuals will be conduits for much of the game itself: “‘Jaymi, let’s have you right there in front of the three cameras, on the mark’ […] My outer gaze descends from the minuscule stars, to alight upon the central of the three camera lenses ahead of me […] Ahead are three cameras; over there, a bank of faders […] This time the three lenses are angled in relation to one another—one straight ahead of me and one on each side at forty-five degrees to that, like the mirrored panels of a vanity mirror on a dressing-table […] the lights around the three angled cameras are already shining straight at my face […] I can thus see little of what is in front of me, beyond the light that fills the air itself and picks up tiny dust motes. On a level with my eyes I can just about make out those three all-important black circles […] The aperture in each of the three lenses shrinks to a pinpoint, then disappears.”
And now the incarnation in this study, for the last time: the Jaymi Beast slithers into meat-space and squeezes through the monitor in front of his creator, whose fingers clutch the chair in a horror of delight to feel his own beat rush away around the world in silence like a mirror-crack fissuring the upper atmosphere.
Teaser 116(i), purrs like a rattlesnake
He climbs into the passenger’s seat, glances over his shoulder, and lets the menacing fluidity of that smile flicker back at the figure in the rear seat. In response Scorpio bares his teeth at Amber and licks his lips, while a faint glow of perspiration breaks out afresh across his upper lip, soft in the light through the car’s side windows.
“Let’s hit it!” whoops the Jaymi Beast, banging the wheel, and Scorpio purrs like a rattlesnake behind him.
So down through the exclusive peace of the Bird Streets they filter, emerging from Sunset Plaza Drive onto the raucousness of the Sunset Strip. Half an hour later they have traversed Hollywood and are climbing the slope of Beachwood Drive, with the far-off Hollywood Sign straight ahead, creeping ever nearer to them as they ascend. The Sign swings out of sight while they curve up through the narrower, leafier streets near below it, until they emerge from Ledgewood Drive into the highest cul-de-sac of Mulholland Highway.
Teaser 116(ii), dried-out watercourses
Scorpio changes out of his little pointy boots into tough hiking boots; then he pulls his hand-gun out of his shoulder-bag and passes it to the Jaymi Beast, who grabs another coil of rope and a pair of cable-cutting pliers from the back seat and locks the car. The three of them set off uphill on foot.
A good three hundred metres up the rough hillside of earth and scrub ahead of them, the nine white letters of the Hollywood Sign stand in a wavy array near the skyline. Just above those, and a little to the right, rises the main tower of the transmitter complex on the levelled-off summit of Mount Lee.
The Jaymi Beast leads the way, avoiding the reaches of thicker scrub by steering his companions up the irregular pathways of dried-out watercourses that have been carved by occasional chutes of rainfall.
Amber brings up the rear, bearing with apparent ease the weight of a tied-up Dud in a fireman’s lift.
And midway between the two of them, Scorpio climbs with electrified purpose, alert as a fox among the scratchy grass and aloes.
Teaser 116(iii), the tower’s base
After twenty minutes of focused climbing, the “D” of the Hollywood Sign comes level with them on their left. The Jaymi Beast bears right and onwards up a further thirty metres, bringing them to the chain-link fence of the complex. He wields the cable-cutting pliers from the ground up, until ten minutes later he has cut a hole big enough to admit them. The three of them clamber in, pulling the fourth, onto the edge of Mount Lee’s flat top, levelled off so long ago; and stand there for a moment, panting with exertion.
A few metres across the concrete surface of the compound is the tower: a tapering, metal framework about a hundred metres tall, starting with a red-painted lowest section, then a white section, then again red, white, red, white, and a small further height of red at the top, all sporadically ornamented with dishes, saucers and drums, and bristling with small vertical masts.
As the Beasts step through the evening shadows to the tower’s base, sporadic raindrops swing down and splatter onto the red metal beside them, and then fall faster, heralding a storm. They turn and take in the panorama of Los Angeles spread beneath them to the south. Far to their right along the Santa Monica Mountains, a pin of lightning flickers, followed by distant thunder after a few seconds.
The next lightning burst is followed by a boom of thunder, sooner afterwards.
The next flash brings a thunder-clap sooner still.
Teaser 116(iv), zigzagging outwards
Meanwhile, Scorpio scuttles up the tower after him, with the agility of a lemur; then perches in a nearby angle of metal, staring at Amber and baring his teeth, with that delicate silver cross gleaming upon the curve of his breasts, his body streaming with fresh perspiration and rain, and his little tough boots swinging daintily over the void.
Setting off up the base of the tower to join them, the Jaymi Beast hears a faint muffled scream trying to force its way through a gag, weak and tiny in the sky.
Down in the house on Electra Drive, pounding at the keys in the high-tech gleam of his study, Jaymi Peek hears this scream, through the ears of the Jaymi Beast … and for the first time, he identifies within himself the sense of having truly become one apart.
One apart from normality, from society, from the rest, on a journey of his own that no one else could take. It feels as if something jagged and electrical emanates from him, across the grand span of Los Angeles spread out ahead through the glass beyond his computer monitors. And far in the distance, at this panorama’s right edge, the five flare-stacks burn high for a moment in the sky above the oceanside refinery, with different-coloured tongues of flame.
Teaser 117(i), game-worlds unfold
As soon as each game has coiled and convulsed up the shaft of its stack to the flare at the top, it catches aflame from the small pilot light that burns there day and night. Whenever one of the games surges out too fiercely from its stack, through the force of its unfurling, steam is injected as a coolant. Even as far away as here on Mount Lee, the hiss of the steam-jets may just be heard, beneath the audio of the game itself. At the start of each game’s play-out, the air-horns in the refinery’s alarm system emit their warning signal, one long and one short horn blown four times; and at the end of each game’s play-out, they emit their all-clear, one long blast…
First, Herb’s lightning script fashions a game-wrapper out of black and blue pixels, and wraps it around The Imagination Thief. This game-world unfolds, told in both the first and the second person, as seen by the Jaymi Beast. It stars the Jaymi Beast, and it co-stars Evelyn, Shigem, Kim, and Scorpio in his boy-drag as Angel.
Next, the script fashions a game-wrapper out of mauve and platinum pixels, and wraps it around The Platinum Raven. This game-world unfolds in the third person. It stars the Platinum Raven, Amber and Scorpio, with a couple of walk-on appearances by the Jaymi Beast.
Next, the script fashions a game-wrapper out of brown and green pixels, and wraps it around The Host in the Attic (whose concept encloses The Imagination Thief, as it happens, like a brown and green ring surrounding a black and blue circle). This game-world unfolds in the third person. It stars the Jaymi Beast, and co-stars Scorpio in the guise of Angel.
Next, the script fashions a game-wrapper out of apricot and blue pixels, and wraps it around Apricot Eyes. This game-world unfolds in the first person, as seen by the Jaymi Beast. It stars the Jaymi Beast and Scorpio.
And finally the script fashions a game-wrapper out of blackcurrant and black pixels, and wraps it around Hallucination in Hong Kong. This game-world unfolds in the first person, as seen by the Jaymi Beast. It stars the Jaymi Beast, and Scorpio in the guise of Angel.
The refinery’s alarm system sounds the all-clear once more, with a single long blast.
Teaser 118(i), knowledge of Downstairs
He felt it once before, from a glossy photograph of a motel by a liquor store, where Evelyn was firing out murderous challenge from inside her sunny printed smile at him … and he felt it in Westmont just ahead of him, flitting up the steps to the motel’s upper level, was that her? but then the walkway was deserted. Glancing somehow down at him now, her challenge from that photo has become more murderous, seemingly equipped with a terrible new knowledge of Bang Dead’s attempt to warp her sunlight into brassy, sleazy cartoon-simpleness. And visible in her eyes, despite Jaymi’s consigning this to the category of Evelyn’s avoided destinies, is the watermark of her standing alone in the bar Downstairs, while her friends all peeped at her from alcoves and corners in search of the girl they used to love before Bang Dead’s smudging wrought a weird mutilation of her presence, which none of them could pin down but made them all think “Oh, poor creature, and what has gone so wrong with her?”
Teaser 119(i), faces like cones
Amber’s eyes hiss back in silence, as the Jaymi Beast clambers onward up the metal girders, absorbing this infusion from his maker’s first Beast. Amber is unbalanced, yes, driven by the night from lust to bloodlust—compassion and contempt, like red and white blood cells. Amber is alive to the power of inanimate things to hurt and damage living ones: hard to see a knife without feeling its unused potential. Even just his signature is sinister to witness on a page, so suggestive of a split inside—both halves equipped to identify human limitations. From Amber’s point of view, the mutability of his own flesh causes his sense of physical reality to be somewhat tenuous; he feels he can create horrors just by thinking of them. (His favourite early nightmare: visitors arriving to blow down on him with shockingly elongated faces like cones, on an altar-like construction, swooping down at Amber’s face to champ and coo and nestle…)
Climbing on upward, the Jaymi Beast turns his face to gaze across the city’s span, and feels the Platinum Raven turn her own face inside his, shafting up his image in the way that she alone can do. Rising transcendent through the angles of her face in semi-profile, she floats upon the sky above the hills in his mind. She waits until he reckons she has floated to a finish, then she fires off a last trick: glowing like a vaporous angel of light, she clasps her hands in prayer and emanates a saintly halo, Virgin-Mary-hued in a blue of flaming methane and a white of frozen moonbeams.
Teaser 119(ii), uncanny valley
The Jaymi Beast centres the prey in his sights. He contemplates his own and that monkey’s respective positions and resources here … and power flows through his insides, rich and smooth and mineral, like petrol pumping through him.
How quiet this moment is.
How exhilarating are his own capacities.
How delicious to be the Jaymi Beast at this moment, so far outside that monkey’s narrow world!
How infernally beautiful, to inhabit this particular destiny, outside the limitations of the Dreary Ones…
Once he dreamed of a book whose cover depicted a close-up human eye. There was nothing wrong with this eye at first glance. After a few moments, however, it became clear that its stare was somehow too open, too hard and assaulting, its surrounding flesh too used-up from within, for it to be an eye capable of humanity. In his dream the book’s cover stayed shut; but now, as he pictures it here on this mast, it opens at last. And what he sees next, on the pages inside, is his own rising-up from the uncanny valley.
While the Jaymi Beast looks, his left hand strokes his torso unconsciously. His right hand rests upon his forehead, as if to stop damage to a third eye sleeping in its fontanelle. What he sees on those book pages is the pit of horror sinking from the basement of his psyche, through the sump underneath it, and down the well-shaft beneath that. The pit is a perpetual hunger and void, with the vertiginous churn of a whirlpool. It is life-staining, casting a shadow and a sick heat, up through his guts, further up into his brain and down the corridors of his limbs, with an exhilarating shudder of some overpowering forbidden awfulness that will never go away. Somehow his flesh remembers terrible evenings and nights of blood, which he can’t quite pull into conscious memory … and while he moves up the final metal rung of the mast tower beneath his prey, it’s as if stains of dark blood are seeping out through his clothing.
Teaser 120(i), upside-down cake
Shigem approaches the monitor, the last remaining Beast in the room. He turns with affection to look at his creator. “You’ve been a bit ignored, haven’t you, sitting over there?” he asks, and Jaymi nods. “Oh well,” continues Shigem, “I’ll leave you with this, in case it helps: whenever life gets a bit much and I’m in danger of coming over all unnecessary, I just think of pineapple upside-down cake. As soon as I think about it, all is well with the world. I mean, isn’t it the coolest, how it tells you all about itself, in its actual name? And how adorably sweet and lovely, back in those caveman days or whenever it was, that while everyone else from the cave was out somewhere killing other people from other caves, there was one little queen like me who decided it was so much more important to stay back home alone in the cave and invent pineapple upside-down cake instead. I know just why she did that.” He climbs gracefully up to the monitor, grabs its edges with a flourish of strength that causes his bangles to jangle in the quiet of the study, and glances back at his maker, one last time. “I’d also like to point out that when it comes to fruitcakes, being heavily fruited is not the same thing as being over-fruited. Bye-bye, Jaymi!” Shigem’s warm brown eyes flash the most beautiful smile his creator has ever seen, and perhaps will ever see. Then he’s gone, like his companions before him—all sealed into their allotted games forever, never again to run wild through the danger and mess of meat-space.
Teaser 120(ii), memory of woodlands
He sniffs, becoming aware of the scent of a bonfire drifting in through his terrace doors from somewhere across the Hollywood canyons, most likely tended by a gardener at the edge of some hillside estate like this one; and a memory floats back to him. He closes his eyes, trying to grasp it.
Yes: years ago, woodlands at dusk in the late summer, somewhere on the outskirts of Omaha, Nebraska. Nervous on the group’s edge, a sixteen-year-old Jaymi plays a violin, and the liquid magic of his music is delighting his audience. An end-of-summer hour, near the end of all their childhoods.
This moving image of him and his audience flickers and slows, as flames from the bonfire flare high, roaring up soundless to obscure the scene. Then they die back down to reveal him anew. An hour after his audience was banished, there he remains in the dark of the clearing: a lone violinist, playing music in the woodlands, as if for all time…
The above teasers for The Beasts of Electra Drive‘s Video-Book are here too:
And in the Vimeo showcase “Teasers for THE BEASTS OF ELECTRA DRIVE by Rohan Quine”.
And in the YouTube playlist “Teasers for THE BEASTS OF ELECTRA DRIVE by Rohan Quine”.
Here are the basics of what the novel is all about.
Here are some great reviews of it.
Buy The Beasts of Electra Drive in paperback or ebook or audiobook format.
To watch any of the 120 complete and unabridged mini-chapters of the novel’s video-book format (for which the above little video snippets on this page are just short teasers), see:
here for Part I (comprising unabridged mini-chapters 1–14);
here for Part II (comprising unabridged mini-chapters 15–35);
here for Part III (comprising unabridged mini-chapters 36–66);
here for Part IV (comprising unabridged mini-chapters 67–85);
here for Part V (comprising unabridged mini-chapters 86–107); and
here for Part VI (comprising unabridged mini-chapters 108–120).
Buy The Beasts of Electra Drive in paperback or ebook or audiobook format.
Add Rohan Quine’s The Beasts of Electra Drive paperback or Mobi or ePub format to Goodreads.
Rohan Quine, The Beasts of Electra Drive, literary fiction, litfic, magical realism, horror, dark fantasy, cyberpunk, contemporary, science fiction, gay, transgender, LGBTQ+, Los Angeles, L.A., Hollywood Hills, Mount Lee, game designer, video game, mansion, motel, refinery
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