Rohan Quine, “The Host in the Attic”, II Portrait captures first corruption

[…]

“Looks like you’re on, Ms Deon,” says Jaymi and heads back to set.

“At last. Let’s see if they can get it right this time. Celine, bronze me.”

“Er, pardon me, Ms Deon,” says Celine, “but I think perhaps you’re bronzed sufficiently already.”

“Bronze me some more. And Robin, get me another bottle of water please.”

“Close your eyes a moment,” says Celine, powder-puff poised beside Angel’s face.

[…]

Little does he hear of the words Marc murmurs near the ear of their silent conduit, those quiet but irresistibly eloquent panegyrics delivered close at Jaymi’s side, concerning the sublime beauty and power of the awesome level of visibility Jaymi will establish for himself through this single camera lens: “That mob cannot see, in fact, because—you may not know this, Jaymi, but your presence is somewhat like a mirror, so when they look at you, then I’m afraid they cannot but see their own selves mixed in with you…”

And so Marc Albright warms to his theme, observing in Jaymi’s eyes the glow of machines, and with pleasure hears his own honeyed words imprint his own wry love-bite on humankind’s future, at fifty frames a second, through this hologram-destined and fatally iconic moving Picture of Jaymi Peek.

[…]

Around the globe in jagged staccato there rises a worldful of HOST-related still images from websites, TV technology reportage, TV news, magazines and books—a kind of planetary spume embodying the cumulative global momentum of HOST’s universal spread, during the two years following Marc’s and Rik’s encounter in Golden Square, until HOST does indeed become the Google-Windows-Amazon-iTunes among that small handful of other holographic operating systems that have arisen in its wake and tried in vain to compete. This spume coalesces into a smooth wave, swirls high above the continents, accelerates with a whirl of sound, diminishes and vanishes into what looks like a black hole but is revealed, as we zoom back out of it, to be the pupil of one of Jaymi’s eyes in a single still photograph.

In tandem with this, the simultaneous spread of Jaymi imagery around the world is embodied likewise, by a smooth wave of multitudinous iconic stills of him, crowding densely in from billboards and screens of every size. For as HOST’s skin, he has automatically become the Google-Windows-Amazon-iTunes among Web-guides’ skins. His simulacrum has swelled into a great ballooning presence, often silent but operating at a new and unholy level of visibility as an unassailable brand serving almost everyone, such that wherever he looks in the media it is difficult to avoid seeing the mainstream global power of his own image—an image universally trusted to mine the Web for each user, to show them the results of this mining, to track their digital footprints and preferences and keystrokes, and to present them with intelligent options based on their interests and personalities. By the end of those initial months, images of him are floating in the sky above the cities of the earth, incorporeal and ambiguous, like gigantic posters rippling in a breeze, so high up that sound itself has fallen away into nothing, leaving just the majestic silence of a solo trajectory through space…

Every minute, everywhere, these abstracted still-images and freeze-frames burst into motion, the resultant montage being sound-tracked by an exhausting, exhilarating, fractured audio comprising shards of human chatter and snatches of violent hard-edged dance music. These moving pictures show Jaymi at the apex of the high life, across five continents: lionised by all who can gain access to him, he finds no door closed to him or to his constant good-time companion, that indefatigable voluptuary, Champagne Marc. And the heat-lamps irradiate the rooftop terraces, the cocktails flow, the private jets and private nightclub rooms are his, the sex is easy (though never with the still-smitten Rik) and the ecstasy and coke and methamphetamines swirl. But all these moving images have a kind of “cut-off” unreality to them: whether they are glimpses through mobile phone cameras, CCTV cameras and binoculars, or reflections in casino mirrors, limousine windows and cocktail-bar optics, or solarised or negative video images, they are always somehow as if behind a pane of glass…

For more about "The Host in the Attic" by Rohan Quine, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/the-host-in-the-attic/

For some great reviews of it, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-novellas-reviews-media/

And to pick it up from whichever retailer you may prefer, the retailers’ links for the audiobook are at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-host-in-the-attic-novella-audiobook/

and for the ebook at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-host-in-the-attic-novella-ebook/

and for the paperback at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-platinum-raven-and-other-novellas-paperback/