Post by Kyle Shane on Jan 11, 2017 17:04:40 GMT -5
"Give me your honest assessment," he said, and for a moment the line crackled on the other end with winter wind punctuated by a short laugh.
"He's not what we're looking for," came the brusque response that had a million reasons behind it.
"He's what I've been looking for for decades." Countered the voice on the other end of the line, the voice behind the Gray. Krista Greer bit out a response on her end, "I know he has, because of your connection, but for the mission statement of the Gray, he isn't right. I can tell you after one session with this Kyle Shane. He's a narcissist, emotionally unsure boy with sociopathic tendencies. He's built too much of a safe shell for himself only, a grind of drugs and alcohol and trying to get in the pants of any woman who ventures within a twenty foot radius."
"Which is, exactly, why you were installed as his therapist," his voice was amused. "We call this the carrot and the stick."
"Yeahhh I'm not seeing the stick here," Krista protested, "And before you even suggest it, I wouldn't sleep with him even if you paid me."
The Gray's voice turned frosty, relentlessly pragmatic. "You will do whatever we need to get Kyle on our team."
The wind whistled, and even if Krista Greer's face was flushed with suppressed outrage, she knew how deeply she was on the hook. The entire point of the Gray is that he was omnipresent, that he had doxxed information from the deepest parts of the web on whoever they needed. So when the Gray had that arch tone in his voice, Krista knew instantly that she had no choice but to acquiesce. Even if it killed her. Which, having seen her superior in one of his fits of pique, she was ultimately certain was going to be her fate anyway. Make no mistake to her, she had become entangled in a cutthroat web, and one way or another the throat that was going to be cut was hers. So best to play along.
But still, she had to push back against the will here, because what he was asking carried the highest probability of failure. "We are taking on the biggest media and financial institutions in the world, Gray. That's riding a lot of money on a one-trick pony. That's putting a lot of faith in Kyle Shane to listen to his better angels."
"We aren't in the business of looking for heroes, Krista" Gray's voice said. Even with the synthesizers of his mask that made his voice a flat, neutral hum, his tone was chiding, like a teacher explaining a theorem to a backward student for the third time. And he watched Krista from the security cam feed as she paced back and forth on the subway platform. Her hands were shaking as she lit a cigarette. And he pulled in on her face, looking pensive about what he was asking her to do here. Krista had divested herself of the severe attachments she wore in a clinical setting, let down her hair, dropped the high glossy pumps and business skirt attire for a peacoat and a beanie. In her way, she looked even more unapproachable and rough hewn. He could not have been more intrigued with this toy he had acquired. Krista smoked furiously, letting him sit contentedly on the other end of the line as she weighed what she was going to say. And all the while, he watched her; and all the while, she knew he was, because of course he was. Finally, she let her head hang a little, and her body language became a signal of submission. "God damn it Patrick," she said quietly enough to crackle on the line. He had told her about using his real name on a recorded line. He let the verbal slip pass by in seconds without comment, but he was going to have to punish her.
"I still think you're wrong," she said.
"Your staunch contradiction to my ideological purposes is one of the most refreshing things about you, Krista," the modulated voice came back through, "But don't push it too far. These 'better angels' of Kyle Shane's, though, do come with some earthly attachments. I assume you were able to probe them for their worth."
"For whatever they can do for you," she came back. She was glancing at her phone now, swiping left to access picture files that couldn't be read over the medium of the camera, but he knew she was giving him an update. A file pinged on his computer, and he was given a feed of a corporate office in Japanese culture, security cams hacked to show footage of a group of Asian men all gathered around a young professional, a small, well built young man with slicked hair and a polished suit. "Hiro is the one we're going to have the most opposition with, he's well positioned at Shiron and he's on the fast track to be moved into the executive suite. Five gets you ten that when Kyle learns our primary mission is to take down the corporation that his best friend has been positioned in he's going to go rogue." He cleared his throat. Krista, sensing his displeasure, gave her analysis, speaking a little louder to override him, "BUT, I say best friend, but the two have had a falling out. Or drifting apart. Depends on how you define it. Hiro's the one that left. Maybe due to Kyle's habitual need to push people away. Speaking of which, the girl..."
Another ping, and he turned his chair. The little room he was stationed in had a ring of monitors, bathing the room in an eerie, sterile glow. He just switched his focus to another screen. And there she was. Beauty queen of only nineteen. The camera tracked in on her, and despite himself he savored every inch of her with a yearning for the pleasures that he never got to know. (But Kyle did, which made him hate him all the more.) She had grown into a slender young woman. Long neck, perfectly symmetrical features. She was sitting in a director chair having makeup applied with the pristine zen of a lifeless doll. The camera didn't pick up audio, but as he pulled out of the shot to allow more of her surroundings, he saw that she was in a photoshoot on a beach in, what was that, Cabo? His tracker recording all of this showed the scene, the photographer off on one side pitching a fit and yelling at some assistants, throwing a pile of prints into the air. The backdrop that had been set up on the beach to allow shooting under specific conditions. And the poor, lonely girl that sat apart from it in her makeup chair, being painted up as she wore only a silk kimono robe over a bikini. This poor girl, he thought. She was everything he was endeavoring to save. Broken people being chained to the wheel by a media juggernaut, enslaved by the corporate machine that sold their flesh like cattle or chattel to be consumed by jaded masses already inundated with ads as pornography. It was sickening.
The girl on his screen didn't appear fulfilled. He reached out a tentative hand, stroking the screen where her cheek was. Array sat apart, having worked her way into this life of material gain for selling herself. The camera pulled in closer on her face, and she broke out in a big, happy smile as some of her co-workers passed by, but the instant they walked on the smile fell away. She was an angel, if ever there was one, in every sense of the word. For a little while, she was, improbably, a positive influence, a rudder in the life of a boy who'd never learned how to steer. But she was never going to save him, and he knew he could only stain her halo worse. So she, too, had to get pushed away, but he couldn't let her go. Damn him.
"... Boss?" Krista's voice crackled on the line, and the voice of the Gray knew that he had been woolgathering. He cursed himself for a sentimental fool. He pushed the chair back over to the screen displaying Krista.
She threw the stub of her cig away, looked sheepish for a second. He could see her look back and forth on the platform for a second, and then her voice dropped down, conspiratorially. "Look, after I recruit Kyle, if I can, I was thinking... our debt is settled, right? I just want to go back to my practice and open up shop in another city... somewhere south, maybe... just do clinical and publish papers and be a doctor again... be a person again... Please..."
He almost laughed. Why, Krista. How sad and childish your voice suddenly became, like a kid in time-out that's swearing she learned her lesson. No, he had no intention of letting Krista Greer off the hook, because she was vital for what she did. And plus, he had her in every way possible. Plagiarizing the results of a clinical test from a co-worker, and when she got called out on it, trying to cover up the evidence in a way that backfired spectacularly. Was a time when Krista, under another name, was a very prestigious get in the psychology field. Now that she had been run through the mud, she was just another person at bottom, willing to compromise ideals for a place at the wheel. There were moments when his hypocrisy appalled him, because in his way he was just as good at tying up broken people with no hope into working for him. But, he always brushed that off without a second thought. For he was in the right, and the work they were doing was vital, and for pieces of trash like Krista Greer, or... yes, Kyle Shane... this unsavory experience was mining nuggets of karma to make up for the bad in their lives. So if they got there through being given the stick more than the carrot, who cared? He almost laughed at Krista. But her wheedling voice, and her hesitance to comply with what they needed to bring the one player missing from the fold that this could not do without, that pushed him into a petty sort of anger. How dare she?
"You forget just who you're talking to, Krista. If you want I can ruin you even worse than you were before. I can leave you a bombed out, financially unstable blob of jelly that wouldn't be able to publish a classified ad in the back of a newspaper. The Gray can ruin your life in a thousand different ways," his tone, through the modulator, was arch, thin. "Do not toy with me."
She sighed. He knew he had been too immature. Some when confronted by such a conflicting tableau and knowing they'd gone too far would feel sorry... except that he had never really been able to grasp emotions in that way. But he knew she'd been lashed by the stick hard, and was therefore contrite. "Just a little bit more, doctor. Kyle Shane is at a crossroads in his life, he needs someone to guide him through. Work with him. You have all the skills necessary to turn him into the most powerful asset. The knowledge he gained at MIT is going to serve us so well when we hack into Shiron and cripple their hold on the financial complex, and strike a blow against white collar, ivory tower oligarchs that are choking this country. You know the mission. Kyle is an integral part of it."
She ran a thin forefinger over the top of her lip, considering. "There are a few things I can appeal to in Kyle's better nature. I think I can get him to see it our way."
He laughed, then, and ended the connection. He turned to his displays, the semi-circle of monitors. Flipping from one to the next, observing the players in the drama to unfold. From the former game boy who was now a white collar Wall Street wheeler-dealer to the former love interest who was cast aside and had to make her own way in an industry that treated her like a side of beef, to the man himself. Who he very much could not wait to meet, face, to, heh... face...
They were all on borrowed time. Soon it was all going to come together, and then...
And then...
He considered the image on his screen, the tall, perennially youthful figure that was was standing in his own aura of indecision, in front of the doctor's office that had carefully been arranged and paid for with a series of off-shore accounts and enough re-jiggering to make the licensing appear free and legal. He was holding a card, and looking at it. And just for a second, the digitized gulf between them was gone, and they were the same. He wished anything it could be like that. That it could be simpler. If he had chosen a different path, might he and Kyle be the brothers he'd always wished they could have been? Behind the mask of the Gray, the luminescent, eyes X-'ed out Purge mask, he squeezed his eyes closed. And cast his memory back into the long-ago. When he was a dark secret. When he was a second gift birthed to Eric Shane. When he was a looked down up, spat upon outcast of a poor neighborhood, who was mocked for his mother being a whore, who always envied what he learned about Eric's real family. Being raised by a single parent who was known through a neighborhood only for not keeping her legs closed, and to know that out there there was another human being that was connected so much by experience, touched by the same hand, but cruelly made into something else. Something covetous. All his life he'd looked at Kyle as his muse, his angel, what he aspired to; hell, Kyle KNEW his mother, as a person. Only to grow up and find that he wasn't beholden to a patina of light and glowing wings at all.
But there was something in his other that did shine, in ways he could only envy, as he wasted, hidden and twisted, in the dark, never to know the sun, never to know the glory of public appearances or never to be part of that world that Kyle tried to keep at arm's length. No friends. No love. If anything, that's what made him hate Kyle, that all that Kyle had, he wouldn't know what to do with... that all the time he spent waiting on Kyle to make good, to listen to his better angels... that he would give anything for. That, was his fateful vanity.
He lost how long he was silently contemplating all of this, how long he was thinking of all of these things and ruminating on picking up everything - and, glancing with a hungry lick of his lips at Array, now dolled up and posed with a sexy arched back as the photographer told her how to work it - everyone that Kyle so foolishly cast aside... when his phone blinged with a text. He looked down, seeing that it said simply, "He wants to talk to you," and no more.
Beneath his Purge mask he smiled. "Thank you," whispered the voice of the Gray.
"He's not what we're looking for," came the brusque response that had a million reasons behind it.
"He's what I've been looking for for decades." Countered the voice on the other end of the line, the voice behind the Gray. Krista Greer bit out a response on her end, "I know he has, because of your connection, but for the mission statement of the Gray, he isn't right. I can tell you after one session with this Kyle Shane. He's a narcissist, emotionally unsure boy with sociopathic tendencies. He's built too much of a safe shell for himself only, a grind of drugs and alcohol and trying to get in the pants of any woman who ventures within a twenty foot radius."
"Which is, exactly, why you were installed as his therapist," his voice was amused. "We call this the carrot and the stick."
"Yeahhh I'm not seeing the stick here," Krista protested, "And before you even suggest it, I wouldn't sleep with him even if you paid me."
The Gray's voice turned frosty, relentlessly pragmatic. "You will do whatever we need to get Kyle on our team."
The wind whistled, and even if Krista Greer's face was flushed with suppressed outrage, she knew how deeply she was on the hook. The entire point of the Gray is that he was omnipresent, that he had doxxed information from the deepest parts of the web on whoever they needed. So when the Gray had that arch tone in his voice, Krista knew instantly that she had no choice but to acquiesce. Even if it killed her. Which, having seen her superior in one of his fits of pique, she was ultimately certain was going to be her fate anyway. Make no mistake to her, she had become entangled in a cutthroat web, and one way or another the throat that was going to be cut was hers. So best to play along.
But still, she had to push back against the will here, because what he was asking carried the highest probability of failure. "We are taking on the biggest media and financial institutions in the world, Gray. That's riding a lot of money on a one-trick pony. That's putting a lot of faith in Kyle Shane to listen to his better angels."
"We aren't in the business of looking for heroes, Krista" Gray's voice said. Even with the synthesizers of his mask that made his voice a flat, neutral hum, his tone was chiding, like a teacher explaining a theorem to a backward student for the third time. And he watched Krista from the security cam feed as she paced back and forth on the subway platform. Her hands were shaking as she lit a cigarette. And he pulled in on her face, looking pensive about what he was asking her to do here. Krista had divested herself of the severe attachments she wore in a clinical setting, let down her hair, dropped the high glossy pumps and business skirt attire for a peacoat and a beanie. In her way, she looked even more unapproachable and rough hewn. He could not have been more intrigued with this toy he had acquired. Krista smoked furiously, letting him sit contentedly on the other end of the line as she weighed what she was going to say. And all the while, he watched her; and all the while, she knew he was, because of course he was. Finally, she let her head hang a little, and her body language became a signal of submission. "God damn it Patrick," she said quietly enough to crackle on the line. He had told her about using his real name on a recorded line. He let the verbal slip pass by in seconds without comment, but he was going to have to punish her.
"I still think you're wrong," she said.
"Your staunch contradiction to my ideological purposes is one of the most refreshing things about you, Krista," the modulated voice came back through, "But don't push it too far. These 'better angels' of Kyle Shane's, though, do come with some earthly attachments. I assume you were able to probe them for their worth."
"For whatever they can do for you," she came back. She was glancing at her phone now, swiping left to access picture files that couldn't be read over the medium of the camera, but he knew she was giving him an update. A file pinged on his computer, and he was given a feed of a corporate office in Japanese culture, security cams hacked to show footage of a group of Asian men all gathered around a young professional, a small, well built young man with slicked hair and a polished suit. "Hiro is the one we're going to have the most opposition with, he's well positioned at Shiron and he's on the fast track to be moved into the executive suite. Five gets you ten that when Kyle learns our primary mission is to take down the corporation that his best friend has been positioned in he's going to go rogue." He cleared his throat. Krista, sensing his displeasure, gave her analysis, speaking a little louder to override him, "BUT, I say best friend, but the two have had a falling out. Or drifting apart. Depends on how you define it. Hiro's the one that left. Maybe due to Kyle's habitual need to push people away. Speaking of which, the girl..."
Another ping, and he turned his chair. The little room he was stationed in had a ring of monitors, bathing the room in an eerie, sterile glow. He just switched his focus to another screen. And there she was. Beauty queen of only nineteen. The camera tracked in on her, and despite himself he savored every inch of her with a yearning for the pleasures that he never got to know. (But Kyle did, which made him hate him all the more.) She had grown into a slender young woman. Long neck, perfectly symmetrical features. She was sitting in a director chair having makeup applied with the pristine zen of a lifeless doll. The camera didn't pick up audio, but as he pulled out of the shot to allow more of her surroundings, he saw that she was in a photoshoot on a beach in, what was that, Cabo? His tracker recording all of this showed the scene, the photographer off on one side pitching a fit and yelling at some assistants, throwing a pile of prints into the air. The backdrop that had been set up on the beach to allow shooting under specific conditions. And the poor, lonely girl that sat apart from it in her makeup chair, being painted up as she wore only a silk kimono robe over a bikini. This poor girl, he thought. She was everything he was endeavoring to save. Broken people being chained to the wheel by a media juggernaut, enslaved by the corporate machine that sold their flesh like cattle or chattel to be consumed by jaded masses already inundated with ads as pornography. It was sickening.
The girl on his screen didn't appear fulfilled. He reached out a tentative hand, stroking the screen where her cheek was. Array sat apart, having worked her way into this life of material gain for selling herself. The camera pulled in closer on her face, and she broke out in a big, happy smile as some of her co-workers passed by, but the instant they walked on the smile fell away. She was an angel, if ever there was one, in every sense of the word. For a little while, she was, improbably, a positive influence, a rudder in the life of a boy who'd never learned how to steer. But she was never going to save him, and he knew he could only stain her halo worse. So she, too, had to get pushed away, but he couldn't let her go. Damn him.
"... Boss?" Krista's voice crackled on the line, and the voice of the Gray knew that he had been woolgathering. He cursed himself for a sentimental fool. He pushed the chair back over to the screen displaying Krista.
She threw the stub of her cig away, looked sheepish for a second. He could see her look back and forth on the platform for a second, and then her voice dropped down, conspiratorially. "Look, after I recruit Kyle, if I can, I was thinking... our debt is settled, right? I just want to go back to my practice and open up shop in another city... somewhere south, maybe... just do clinical and publish papers and be a doctor again... be a person again... Please..."
He almost laughed. Why, Krista. How sad and childish your voice suddenly became, like a kid in time-out that's swearing she learned her lesson. No, he had no intention of letting Krista Greer off the hook, because she was vital for what she did. And plus, he had her in every way possible. Plagiarizing the results of a clinical test from a co-worker, and when she got called out on it, trying to cover up the evidence in a way that backfired spectacularly. Was a time when Krista, under another name, was a very prestigious get in the psychology field. Now that she had been run through the mud, she was just another person at bottom, willing to compromise ideals for a place at the wheel. There were moments when his hypocrisy appalled him, because in his way he was just as good at tying up broken people with no hope into working for him. But, he always brushed that off without a second thought. For he was in the right, and the work they were doing was vital, and for pieces of trash like Krista Greer, or... yes, Kyle Shane... this unsavory experience was mining nuggets of karma to make up for the bad in their lives. So if they got there through being given the stick more than the carrot, who cared? He almost laughed at Krista. But her wheedling voice, and her hesitance to comply with what they needed to bring the one player missing from the fold that this could not do without, that pushed him into a petty sort of anger. How dare she?
"You forget just who you're talking to, Krista. If you want I can ruin you even worse than you were before. I can leave you a bombed out, financially unstable blob of jelly that wouldn't be able to publish a classified ad in the back of a newspaper. The Gray can ruin your life in a thousand different ways," his tone, through the modulator, was arch, thin. "Do not toy with me."
She sighed. He knew he had been too immature. Some when confronted by such a conflicting tableau and knowing they'd gone too far would feel sorry... except that he had never really been able to grasp emotions in that way. But he knew she'd been lashed by the stick hard, and was therefore contrite. "Just a little bit more, doctor. Kyle Shane is at a crossroads in his life, he needs someone to guide him through. Work with him. You have all the skills necessary to turn him into the most powerful asset. The knowledge he gained at MIT is going to serve us so well when we hack into Shiron and cripple their hold on the financial complex, and strike a blow against white collar, ivory tower oligarchs that are choking this country. You know the mission. Kyle is an integral part of it."
She ran a thin forefinger over the top of her lip, considering. "There are a few things I can appeal to in Kyle's better nature. I think I can get him to see it our way."
He laughed, then, and ended the connection. He turned to his displays, the semi-circle of monitors. Flipping from one to the next, observing the players in the drama to unfold. From the former game boy who was now a white collar Wall Street wheeler-dealer to the former love interest who was cast aside and had to make her own way in an industry that treated her like a side of beef, to the man himself. Who he very much could not wait to meet, face, to, heh... face...
They were all on borrowed time. Soon it was all going to come together, and then...
And then...
He considered the image on his screen, the tall, perennially youthful figure that was was standing in his own aura of indecision, in front of the doctor's office that had carefully been arranged and paid for with a series of off-shore accounts and enough re-jiggering to make the licensing appear free and legal. He was holding a card, and looking at it. And just for a second, the digitized gulf between them was gone, and they were the same. He wished anything it could be like that. That it could be simpler. If he had chosen a different path, might he and Kyle be the brothers he'd always wished they could have been? Behind the mask of the Gray, the luminescent, eyes X-'ed out Purge mask, he squeezed his eyes closed. And cast his memory back into the long-ago. When he was a dark secret. When he was a second gift birthed to Eric Shane. When he was a looked down up, spat upon outcast of a poor neighborhood, who was mocked for his mother being a whore, who always envied what he learned about Eric's real family. Being raised by a single parent who was known through a neighborhood only for not keeping her legs closed, and to know that out there there was another human being that was connected so much by experience, touched by the same hand, but cruelly made into something else. Something covetous. All his life he'd looked at Kyle as his muse, his angel, what he aspired to; hell, Kyle KNEW his mother, as a person. Only to grow up and find that he wasn't beholden to a patina of light and glowing wings at all.
But there was something in his other that did shine, in ways he could only envy, as he wasted, hidden and twisted, in the dark, never to know the sun, never to know the glory of public appearances or never to be part of that world that Kyle tried to keep at arm's length. No friends. No love. If anything, that's what made him hate Kyle, that all that Kyle had, he wouldn't know what to do with... that all the time he spent waiting on Kyle to make good, to listen to his better angels... that he would give anything for. That, was his fateful vanity.
He lost how long he was silently contemplating all of this, how long he was thinking of all of these things and ruminating on picking up everything - and, glancing with a hungry lick of his lips at Array, now dolled up and posed with a sexy arched back as the photographer told her how to work it - everyone that Kyle so foolishly cast aside... when his phone blinged with a text. He looked down, seeing that it said simply, "He wants to talk to you," and no more.
Beneath his Purge mask he smiled. "Thank you," whispered the voice of the Gray.
