Rohan Quine, “The Host in the Attic”, III Addicted to the image

[…]

He positions the laptop’s hologram and his own head in front of the wall-mirror, such that the hologram’s head appears, in his current sphere of vision, to be only somewhat smaller than his own.

Each of the two faces is spotlit bright against the background of the dim room. Each of these is staring at the other in the mirror.

The effect is gigantically disconcerting.

Silence reigns, while the sole movement to be seen is that of Jaymi’s own eyes, flicking minutely from left to right, from right to left, scouring the two twins hard, seeking any differences…

However, whether zooming in to each face in turn or panning between them, he has to conclude he can find no difference.

[…]

Jaymi is spotlit before the immaculate wall-mirror in his dim bathroom, attired as sleekly as ever, eyes stark and cold, staring dead-still in dead silence.

With his right hand he raises into view a long, red-handled carving-knife, brings it to a gradual halt pointing up at his face, and holds it there a long time.

The explosive and protracted convulsion of deafening violence in which he stabs and stabs his face—including numerous horrific images of a growing bloodbath of facial injury and then ever-larger chunks of his face cut away until only a neck-stump is left—is brutally terminated and revealed as a fantasy, leaving him still intact, beautiful and spotlit in silence as before.

He raises the carving-knife again, presses its point by degrees into his throat, presses more and twists … drawing one drop of blood, with three spotlights reflected like pinpricks on its surface.

He keeps the knife-point there, uncomfortably long.

His stark cold stare softens into an innocent little ghost of a smile, and for the first time in the scene he blinks.

[…]

The gate opens, the car draws up in Jaymi’s parking bay, and the hacker and Jaymi’s chauffeur get out and walk into the empty waiting lift, whose doors close after them.

Throughout the day, other unidentified vehicles and individuals come and go through the car-park, seen in fast motion.

Late in the evening, the hacker and Jaymi’s chauffeur emerge from the lift, walk to the car, get into it and pull out of his parking bay. The gate opens, then closes again as the car emerges from under the Ontario Tower and drives off.

Through such unusual circumstances does it come to pass that Jaymi Peek becomes equipped with a file-searching engine empowered to cut through firewalls globally.

*

Jaymi stands alone in the yellow-white light on his balcony, overlooking the Thames. With close-creeping insistence, behind his face, coil the echoes of Marc’s effusions spoken to him in the club or over there across the river on the Rotherhithe waterfront, or murmured from nearby on the Soho soundstage. These echoes gain in volume, speed and intensity, to an overwhelming crescendo, from Marc’s having repeated them like spells throughout Jaymi’s rise, easing up their heat a little higher every time he spoke them, then mercilessly a little higher still: “Your appearance, as the skin of HOST, is about to become not merely recognisable, as other faces on the Web are, but in many ways the face of the Web itself… Your face will become the face of computing—adviser, mentor, companion, friend and alter ego for an entire generation… To play a part in shaping humankind’s next leap in digital evolution—and to embody the accompanying leap in the possibilities of fame too… Accept it with the grace it deserves—and step up onto the stage that’s about to open itself to you here!… 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… They are poised to see your image multiplied more than anybody else’s image ever has been, throughout the ages… You should hold aloft and savour the sublime beauty and power of the awesome visibility that you’ll soon establish for yourself through that little lens, when that camera rolls… What bleeds out through the air from your eyes, just from their being open, is light and intelligence, sweetness and charm and open thinking. In short, the highest evolution, quite simply… Straightaway we see the self-justifying beauty and power of your level of visibility everywhere, and its status as genuine contemporary Divinity…”

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/