My Beautiful Device
In the hollowed-out silence of a Near Future Dystopia set in IO, California, and the digital noise of a Timeless Time, authenticity is the highest-priced commodity. A coder named They Them is losing their memory to the wreckage of a manipulative ex — and building an analog device that wants, more than anything, to come alive.
Originally conceived in 2020 as a prophetic audiobook time capsule — arriving in print and digital in early 2026.
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“I am keeping you away from everyone that’s important to me,” They Them says. Those words weren’t just a warning — they were a cage.
This is not just Cyberpunk Science Fiction — it’s a journey through Analog Wellness and Mutual Aid. In the hollowed-out silence of a Near Future Dystopia set in IO, California, and the digital noise of a Timeless Time, authenticity is the highest-priced commodity. As the coder’s memory fractures under the emotional compartmentalization and word-salad gaslighting of an ex called Hurricane Zoe, the only ground left is the dojo, a brother-in-spirit named Tyrone, and a North Star named Lenny.
And then there’s the Device itself — not a gadget, but a character. Built by hand from old-school, analog parts, it’s a prescient 0/1 being that wants, urgently, to come to life. It isn’t fixing a system. It’s speaking the objective truths a narcissist tries to distort — a tactile friend engineered out of desperation in a world where authenticity has become the rarest, most expensive commodity. Through it, They Them relearns a simple, hard-won rule: the hardware can break, but the soul is the software that survives.
“Not an app. Not a system. A Device — analog, hand-assembled, and, impossibly, starting to want things of its own. To speak. To be believed. To live.”
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Jianda Monique’s ambient electronica, the sonic world the novel grew out of.
Listen on SpotifyClick here to read an excerpt <3
Read SampleThe Robot Story playlist
Alongside the novel, Jianda Monique built an ambient audio companion — sonic capsules that expand on the world, the device, and the analog resistance at the heart of the story.
Audio Capsules — Robot Story
Explore the additional multimedia and ambient audio concepts that accompany My Beautiful Device — the full playlist streams free on YouTube.
Play on YouTubePrefer to listen on the go? It’s also on YouTube Music.
Jianda Monique
Jianda Monique is a Healing Artist, Techie, and Artist Coach whose creative work fuses ambient electronic music with transformative metaphysical teaching, spanning from raucous-to-mellow acoustic guitar, to ambient electronic music and all creations in between. As a cornerstone vocalist for Ghostly International (featured on the seminal electronic release Dive) and a former Om Records signee, she helped to define California electronica — a sonic architecture where atmospheric silhouettes meet technical precision. She has produced her own solo acoustic album and electronica album among over 300 audio-poems and songs streaming on all streaming platforms.
Her artistic foundation, which includes facilitating workshop teachings by Louise Hay and Julia Cameron, informs her prescient debut novella, My Beautiful Device. This exploration of digital and analog interfaces is also a journey archived in her life’s work of tech-metaphysical mutual aid and care. The novella’s themes are further grounded in her academic foundation at Pomona College Claremont and UC Irvine, where she cites her mentors and influences as Brian Stonehill, Marie Cartier, Linda Williams, Judith Grossman, Nancy Salzer, Jay Gummerman, Todd Walton, and Andrew Tonkovich, among others.
Her professional experience includes a Seattle Parks and Recreation Busker Fellowship, where she busked solo with vocals and guitar for a full year as part of a sponsored city-wide community program, with her work also featured in Seattle Metro Transit’s Poetry on Buses program. She spent 3 years as a content creator at MP3.com and eMusic co-producing the first early podcasts, contributing content to the online publications for MTV and Rolling Stone, and gaining early I.T. experience in nascent Internet and computing culture before the first dot-com tech crash.
As a producer, multi-instrumentalist, and acrylic painter, she approaches her work as a seeker of creativity for the public good. Jianda seeks to bridge the gap between high-tech complemented empowerment and human agency to encourage others to find their favorite frequency and luxuriate in it.
