The Beasts of Electra Drive by Rohan Quine

Author:Rohan Quine [Quine, Rohan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: EC1 Digital
Published: 2017-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

69 HERB HACKS THE PLATINUM RAVEN’S CODE

Click here to watch the video-book version of this mini-chapter 69

With a sudden fury that’s undiminished by his lack of surprise, Jaymi observes that this first hatching of the Platinum Raven’s code is triggering an attempt by Herb to hack into it. Yes, here comes Mr Shrim, using the devious, grey-toned skill with which he can be relied upon to locate the interstices in whatever new firewalls Jaymi may erect. Here is the familiar Herb effect, creeping into Jaymi’s text-editor in real time now, puncturing the skin of her ones and zeroes with its scuttling claws, and sniffing around with little grey shrews’-noses of neediness and curiosity as to her potential for being subverted, simplified and dumbed down into an aesthetically debased tabloid flavour. Jaymi can picture Herb in the Sunset Boulevard building or the Westwood Village cottage, tapping away at his keyboard in soft, deadly concentration so as to achieve those scuttling claws and shrews’-noses.

According to plan, Jaymi is already holding three little Beasts in readiness, all furled up and primed to be unleashed into Herb’s computer… But first he must respond to a voltage of pain in the Platinum Raven, from Herb’s hacking. 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.

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.

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