Rohan Quine, “The Beasts of Electra Drive”, 86 The underground server farm beyond LAX
Leaning in towards his monitor, Jaymi toggles his mapping apps’ photographic viewpoints between street-level, overhead and forty-five degrees, cycling through the compass points in each case, so as to zero in on a scrubby stretch of uninhabited land beyond the airport. Cutting across this deserted strip between the far end of LAX and the Pacific is the ghost-town street-plan of long-gone Surfridge, including the sweetly-named Sandpiper Street, lying close beneath the airport’s departure flight-paths.
Sandpiper’s fenced-off eastern end, at Pershing Drive, was where Jaymi observed Amber slow his car down when Ashley pulled over and parked there, apparently in the middle of nowhere. Beyond that chain-link fence, halfway along Sandpiper on the crest of the dunes, is the low-key entrance to Bang Dead’s brand-new server farm, which houses the hardware on which Ain’tTheyFreaky! runs.
It was only today, rediscovering another old PDF, that Jaymi was reminded of what the company has built in this out-of-the-way location: a dozen parallel aisles running the length of a warehouse-sized hall, each aisle an immaculate alley between high cabinets of metal and glass, dotted with blue-green lights and filled with dense racks of drives connected by a myriad electrical cords and data cables. It’s a quietly-purring power-house of technical marvels.
And then there is the digital content living inside those marvels—the ones and zeroes constituting Bang Dead’s game itself. Occupying some elusive, almost abstract location behind the squeaky-clean gleam of those arrays of mineral magic, he reflects, visuals of the ugliest cheapness find a cosy home. In one convenient location, infantile anti-intellectualism and unthinking stupidity conspire to nurture a terrified denial of the world’s complexities, then a simplistic reduction of them into degraded populism. On this philistine bedrock, many techniques for making a downbeat use of the opportunity of life are demonstrated; and an aesthetically hideous, often child-centric focus fosters instincts, horizons and tendencies of imagination that drag down and impoverish whatever and whoever may come into contact with them.
Remarkable what can be fitted under a slope of scratchy wasteland.
Now that Jaymi knows the exact physical location from which Ain’tTheyFreaky! pours out around the world, how best to attack it? This kind of behind-the-scenes information must surely enable him to assail Bang Dead on a deadlier level than so far. It challenges him to dream up an attack on the Dreary Ones that’ll make Amber’s stalking and terrorising of them look like little more than L.A.-noir capers by comparison. He must think of something that’ll make Amber’s and Evelyn’s sabotage of the Righteous Gun Cockpit, effective though it was, look like teenage hijinks. Something that will even make Shigem’s and Kim’s and Evelyn’s in-game intervention on behalf of the street queens of Violet Street look like a very localised success—the welcome removal of one storm-drain-shaped incineration, but dwarfed by the number of other such instances of suffering wrought by Ain’tTheyFreaky!’s casual cruelty, to which he and his Beasts will never have the resources to respond in a similar way.
No; this must be something that undermines Bang Dead’s output from within, in a more fundamental and comprehensive fashion than those attacks managed. He shuts his eyes and squeezes his thought processes: what the hell could that something be?…
Exasperated, he gives up, for the moment. He can sense the answer is in plain view, hiding in the texture of the landscape in his head.
He’ll spot it, soon, for sure—and then he’ll pounce, like the lone wolf he is.
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