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… […] 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.” Nor has this code of Shigem’s yet risen to having specific visuals; but in anticipation of those, Jaymi sprinkles in the seeds of two visual possibilities. Neither of these will germinate into Shigem’s own actual visuals, but they’ll reside in him recessively, colouring the cells of his beauty, in the form of two statements he will never quite utter aloud, describing distant pasts: “I love that freckled redhead girl who’s also inside me, standing in the glade so long ago”; and “Inside me too, the Polynesian girl from aeons back, looking out to sea through the trees by the sandy bay, guarding her man while he sleeps at her side, with her hand resting easy on the warmth and the strength of his shoulders, so very long ago…” Jaymi pulls Shigem’s code back across millennia to the present era, and shoots it down into the kind of in-game reality where he’ll be appointed to strut in The Imagination Thief—and the thrill that Shigem will get when he first walks into a club, sees people he knows in the coat-check line, and hears a thumping bass from down the hallways in the main room, which gives him butterflies and makes him strain to get on the dance-floor and light it up! For this will be the arena where he’ll find he’s a natural monarch, as it happens. But let him now be halted there a moment in freeze-frame—right there beside the coat-check line, where those dim little light-fittings are vibrating from the speakers down on the main floor—because this future monarchic status of Shigem should be underpinned by an accurate coding of the emotions inside him. First, beneath the electric slenderness and untouchably exquisite androgyny and glamour of his physicality, there’s an intense feeling of being at the nerve-end of his own dreams, of processing every thought according to how his guts and his loins respond to it, and of having something forever young-adult at the centre of him, never to age further and never having been any younger. […] Jaymi allows Shigem’s code to re-animate, from its freeze-frame beside the coat-check line. OK then, so there’s the foundation of feeling beneath this Beast’s imminent monarch status in the nightclub corridor; now back to the status itself. Enough of that spectre blushing painfully—it’s time for this one to blush becomingly. This will be a long and brilliant night, Shigem reflects, draping his arm around his clubbing companion’s shoulders. “Sweetness before fierceness,” he murmurs to that unidentified companion, with a smile. “You know, this party’s become a circus these days. It used to be fun because it was small and you could come and dance, meet major DJs, get fucked up and discover a ton of great new music to play further downstream, but nowadays it’s all about long lines, ten after-parties in one night, steroids, silicon tits and bad drugs. Oh well! The VIP room will have air-conditioning, champagne and the best drugs to keep us fresh throughout the night. Follow me.” And they both turn up a stairwell on the left. Jaymi rubs his hands, in a wicked joy of love. Yes. That’s what he needs. For more about "The Beasts of Electra Drive" by Rohan Quine, see https://www.rohanquine.com/the-beasts-of-electra-drive/ For some great reviews of it, see https://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-beasts-of-electra-drive-reviews-media/ And to pick it up from whichever retailer you prefer, the retailers’ links for the audiobook format are at https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-beasts-of-electra-drive-novel-audiobook/ and for the paperback format and the ebook format are at https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/
