Excerpt from The Beasts of Electra Drive, a novel by Rohan Quine
From Hollywood Hills mansions and Century City towers, to South Central motels and the oceanside refinery, The Beasts of Electra Drive by Rohan Quine spans a mythic L.A., following seven spectacular characters (or Beasts) from games designer Jaymi’s game-worlds. The intensity of those Beasts’ creation cycles leads to their release into real life in seemingly human forms, and to their combative protection of him from destructive rivals at mainstream company Bang Dead Games. Grand spaces of beauty interlock with narrow rooms of terror, both in the real world and in the incorporeal world of cyberspace. A prequel to Quine’s otherfive tales, The Beasts of Electra Drive is a unique explosion of glamour and beauty, horror and enchantment, exploring the mechanisms and magic of creativity itself.
[The following excerpt is mini-chapter 68 “Jaymi creates the Platinum Raven’s code”.]
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. Jaymi is aware of this, and he’s aware that her audience of gamers, at whom he’ll be aiming her, do all have warm blood, being human. Those gamers will therefore be challenged by her. The freelance game-testers he’ll employ—those editorial professionals through whose scrutiny he’ll be passing her and the other Beasts before he releases his finished games—may suggest that in her particular case Jaymi has told more than he has shown.
He’s aware of these dangers, regarding her coolness of temperature. Yet this just is her nature, on her outside at least. Implicit in her role will be to test his testers’ patience, to challenge the expectations of her audience—an audience who’d expect nothing less than this of her, after all, in the long run. Although he hasn’t yet typed a single glyph of her, he can sense her approach, like a grand music barrelling towards him through the night behind an oncoming storm…
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 both 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…
Her charisma will derive from emotional self-containment and unpredictability, as charisma tends to, but will also come from an intelligence that’s primal, defeating analysis. The question “Has the Platinum Raven got it?” will be answered “Yes.” It—that quality that’ll make her stand out from the sphere of other Beasts.
She’ll be isolated in the middle of things, but will contrive to make it feel an honour for another Beast to know her. Such other Beast will know she could bite them worse than they could bite her, while believing correctly that she won’t, unprompted. The trust they’ll place in her will feel all the more rewarded for their having contemplated the danger in its potential breakage.
Her power to make others love her will rest on an essential innocence on her part, in being fascinated by herself as a character rather than as a set of interests to be furthered—a self-celebration with nothing heavy or solipsistic in it. Simple though this will feel from her viewpoint, nonetheless for others it will tend to cause everything about her to be a denial of expectations that everything else about her has already raised.
For instance, she’ll combine extravagance and carefulness, complexity and clarity. Passion and acceptingness will merge in her. Her nature will comprise normal elements endowed with abnormal intensity and self-awareness. Naturalness and unnaturalness will coexist in an uncanny balance, as if her intellect were a nozzle through which the fluid of her emotion is controlled. And looking downwards here, she’ll be such that, if her characteristics had been arranged in a somewhat different pattern, then she could have been monstrous and dangerous indeed. For she won’t be an innately good Beast as such, but will use genuine kindness and decency as almost constant garments—to the extent that when she takes those garments off for a moment, people will be startled, though not surprised, at what they sense is revealed.
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-boy 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!
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.
Sitting there attentive, he senses her unfolding at high speed, towards her design as a Beast who will awe with her beauty and her power. Her charisma, he notes, has a claustrophobic vastness. As she comes into focus, he’s struck by the clearness of channel from her intellect to her willpower, and her readiness to plumb depths and scale heights with an expectation of impunity: she will not be someone to mess with. Such ascendant glee and deadly restraint will tend to isolate her, he suspects; and her own alienness will unsettle her with the suspicion that it causes her to miss out on things other people feel, with a shiver of uncertainty as to what those things may be.
One could say this is a Beast who is built from and out of a grand isolation.
An isolation, both in her nature and in his manner of creating her here behind the house on Zeus Drive, that will nonetheless constitute the richest communication he could have with the world.
Rising off his laptop and up across the city, Jaymi’s gaze comes to rest at a point on the horizon, beyond that little tower-clump of Century City.
Yes. That’s what he needs.