DIGITALIS REX

The impossible paradox of being alive.

Two years before.

The driver headed north on the I-405, the sun hanging like a burnt effigy at the edge of existence, the sky lowering, drawing down evil into this man’s world. Rey Freya Goodwin sat in the backseat, lost in time, watching her reflection as her Uber merged right onto the off-ramp towards Downtown. She was twenty-eight, the last of the Millennials, and she hated being labelled.

Rey’s iPhone buzzed. She squeezed the phone tight in her left hand but didn’t look. Out of the window, the traffic on Santa Monica Freeway was heavy, a shower of hard rain refracting lights off the asphalt. ‘We’re in for a bitch of a night,’ she said.

Her driver nodded, his eyes catching hers in his mirror. He looked up into the darkening sky. ‘Damn, looks nasty.’

She opened her phone and clicked the Bloomberg TV app. Jonathan Mercer, head anchor at Bloomberg, was live. Rey stared into the screen, blue light shimmering against the back window of her Uber.

Jonathan Mercer:We’re here live with Julia Adams, Chief Technical Officer of Neo Virtual Technology Labs. Julia, hello.

Julia Adams: Thank you, Jonathan. Great to be here.

Julia smiles.

Mercer: Julia, it’s been quite a year for you and Neo Virtual. And congratulations. I just checked the Bloomberg and folks this is history. Neo Virtual Technology Labs, ticker NVTL, closed today at $1,276 and that makes you the world’s first $4 trillion company.

Adams: Thank you Jonathan. It’s the focused dedication of the entire team at Neo Virtual. We are all working hard every day to develop systems that will change the world, make it safer and more energy secure, while at the same time, reversing the effects of climate change.

Mercer: A noble cause. But, tell me, Julia, how does it feel to be added to the canon? Do you think about how history will remember you?

Under the bright studio lighting, Julia blushed and for a microsecond paused and looked down to her left.

Rey looked on, staring into her iPhone, blue light saturating her face. Julia lifted her head, a coordinated move, learned from a lifetime of privilege. Kappa Alpha Theta, now high priestess.

Adams: We knew, Neo Virtual, that is, the limiting factor was scale. It’s a brick wall, the laws of nature. You’ve simply got to push. Take the knocks, the buffering, it’s a wild ride. But then you break through. Like Yeager. And it’s calm air. And freedom. And it’s scale.

Mercer: The transition from serial to parallel processing, from CPU to GPU. The energy demands...

Adams: Yes, exactly. That is the scale factor. The brick wall. The 2020s have been the decade of AI but history will show this is just the beginning. Every year, companies will have to build more and more data centers to meet demand. They’re everywhere. Just ask anyone who lives in West Texas, Central Arizona, or Northern Indiana.

Mercer: Your critics say that while data centers do create jobs during their construction phase, once built they use more energy than cities but employ fewer people than your local health club.

Julia pauses and nods.

Adams: That’s true. But data centers aren’t factories and while they don’t employ people directly in a traditional sense, they do something much more valuable─

Mercer cuts her off.

Mercer: But, your critics are saying data centers drain the power grid. Just ask folks in West Texas about power cuts in the dog days. In Arizona, they drain underground aquifers while locals have to ration water.

Adams: You’re talking about scale. This is what corporate terms like ‘scale factor’ actually mean in the real world. And solving this problem is what drives us at Neo Virtual.

Julia’s body language changed.

Rey looked down into her phone. Jesus Christ, is that a swagger?

Adams: Yes, data centers use resources, and yes data centers do not create thousands of jobs in the same way a motor vehicle plant would. They don’t hire thousands.

The camera zoomed in on Julia.

She’s playing with him.

Adams: They empower billions.

Rey clicked off her phone and threw it into the backseat.

The driver looked over his right shoulder. ‘They say those things can change your life.’

He smiled.

Kind eyes.

‘I just use it to find traffic.’

Rey ignored him. She turned the ring on her left thumb. White gold, white magic. It had always felt like part of her. But tonight it was cold. Enough now.

The Uber merged right off US 101 into North Hollywood. Rey looked out onto the rain soaked street, cascading colours inside orange light, chaos scrambling her senses. This is my cue to get into character. I hate the work, but my dealer insists on cash.

People walked on the sidewalk. Arms bent at ninety degrees, staring into their oblongs. Rey smiled, eyeing a girl.Oblivious. The hidden hand of the state is far up her skirt. It’s the same on any street in any state in Anywhere, USA.Most people live inside a guided dream, subconsciously beyond their level of awareness. Tonight, I need to do something conscious. Bills have to be paid.

The Uber pulled up at the Triple V. The usual line, around a hundred or so, still early. Marcus was on the door, good, no bullshit. He was a big boy, around 6’5”, Georgian, maybe, Russian, or so he said. He’s probably from Brooklyn.

Rey stepped out of the Uber and walked up to the post and rope. A line of micro minis staring.‘Hey, Marcus.’ He lifted his chin, gave Rey their greeting nod, unhooked the rope and stood to one side.

‘Looking good, Rey.’

Rey smiled. He knew to come see her later.

She was late. As usual.

Rey walked diagonally across the foyer towards a door in the far left corner. The walls and ceiling were painted matt black, overlaid with dull gold and dark red flaked damaskesque acanthus leaves, an Art Deco remnant, an analogue icon in a digital age.

In the ancient pagan world, acanthus symbolised victory over pain and suffering, but the early Christian church inverted the meaning, the son of the father, dragged from his golden throne, tortured and maimed, the suffering Christ, an iconoclastic miracle, transforming victory over pain into guilt and sin. And thanks to the Jacquard loom, damask acanthus is everywhere from restrooms to bedrooms, another semiotic mechanism of control defining the rules we live by that we believe are our own.

The irony always drew out a smile.

Rey reached into her right coat pocket and took out her lanyard key. She held the card against the scanner and looked up. The camera, like an iris before a kill, retracting, widening the pupils, inaudible, silent. Evaluating. A light above the door turned red.

The lock mechanism released the bolts from both sides, retracting heavy steel rods into the reinforced walls. Rey tapped her foot. Waiting. Click. The light turned green. She nudged the door open with her hip. A dark, narrow, passageway led to a yellow oblong sixty feet away, betrayed by a strip of light bleeding out from the changing room. Inside, the air was cold and musty. No point holding my breath. It hit the back of her throat, the taste of stale sweat already in her mouth. Three steps in, the door closed behind her.

She followed the light and at the next door turned to her left, kicked the handle and shouldered her way into the changing room, into bright fluorescent strips bathing her in unnatural light.

High up on the wall opposite, a motion detector flashed red. It always amazed her, the contrast between front of house and back, glamour, glitz. And this. Lockers were bolted onto a bare concrete floor. Graffiti scrawled across rusted grey paint, stickers and phone numbers with ancient messages, clandestine rendezvous from the 1970s, love and violence in dark side alleys, the stench of piss in unkept urinals.Rey opened her locker, hitched off her bag lady overcoat, folded it and placed it inside. She took her four inch platform heels out of the locker and put them on the floor.

Don’t judge.

She stared at them for a second, the boom, boom, rhythm of what was on the other side of the wall penetrating her psyche.

Her uniform hung on the locker door. A mandatory pencil skirt folded over a plastic hanger, a heavy white cotton blouse draped across, the shoulders not quite making it to the ends.She pushed the hanger against the door and pulled down one sleeve.

Rey kicked off her Chuck Taylors and threw them into the locker. She undid the top button on her jeans, pulled sideways and tugged the waistband down past her knees, an ouroboros spiralling around her upper right thigh. Her left foot braced the crotch and pushed the jeans into the floor, a snake shedding its skin. She pulled her T-shirt up and over her head, grey rough cotton, against porcelain skin,a bass player smashing his guitar into the stage, Elvis pose, London, clash, a crying clown.

She took the blouse off the hanger, leaving the skirt as it fell to the floor. In one movement, leading with her left arm and twisting slightly, she dropped her right arm into the armhole, shrugged and pulled the blouse down from the hem to settle the shoulders in place.

Rey picked up the skirt and stepped into it. She pulled it up to just below her navel, zipped up the side, brushed it down and stepped into her four inch heels.

Her makeup bag was at the back of her locker. A trilemma of tricks.

The lockers formed a horizontal line across half the room. They were meant to separate the genders, but it was a free for all. Gender binary no more. Mirrors were bolted to both walls opposite the lockers, and just beyond, a dark red velvet curtain hung on hooks from a pole bolted onto the ceiling, forcing the room into a T shape. Behind the curtain, a half wall separated a shower from the toilet, his and hers. The Triple V, an equal opportunity employer in a kaleidoscopic world.

Rey looked into the mirror. A black bloom crept across its surface, the desilvering distorting the face that looked back at her in the hard blue, fluorescent light, flattening her cheek bones, stealing her vitality, dark discoloured cuts of yellowing skin exposing bags under her eyes.

She adjusted the cuffs. The thud, thud, thud, of a party in full swing on the other side of the wall. Low frequency sound waves collapsing the wave function, strangulating her soul. Rey closed her eyes, inhaled and slowed down her breath. Resting her head against a windowpane, geometric haircut contrasting against perfect skin as she stares into the void. She opened her eyes.

Still here.

She looked at her watch. Five minutes to showtime.

Rey pulled her hair back, twisted it into a coil and pinned it into a high bun with a hair fork.

She put two tiny dots of porcelain peach concealer beneath each eye and feathered it out with her ring finger. Bags done. Rey smiled into the mirror to lift her cheekbones and brushed upwards with the Sex Appeal. Now I have a pulse.

Rey looked into the mirror. She swept a dark charcoal shadow over her eyelids with a soft brush, then deepened the crease with graphite, blending until the edges disappeared. Femme Fatale tonight. Goes with my mood. She blinked twice.

She drew a line of dark eyeliner along her upper lashes, flicked the corner up just slightly and ran the pencil along her waterline. Rey tilted her chin, blinked slowly, and swept heavy black mascara through each lash.

Rey reached into her bag and pulled out the Gucci Crimson. She twisted the base, angled the stick, pouted, and drew colour onto her lips in two precise strokes. Press, blot. Done. Transformation complete.

She unbuttoned her blouse, one button.

Bullshit. I know, but it helps with the tips.

There was another door in the far corner of the changing room. The sign above it read: They are right. Even if they’re not.

A clipboard was nailed into the wall beside it. Rey walked over and checked the who’s who. The Triple V attracts Z-list celebrities on the way up and ex A-listers on the way down, but the clientele was changing. She threw her makeup into her locker, closed the door, removed the key and tucked it inside her bra. She walked to the mirror and took one last look. Please God, no social media influencers tonight. And for the love of all that’s holy, no nouveau riche assholes who lucked out on crypto.

Rey took a deep breath and headed into the club.