Post by Kyle Shane on Jun 3, 2017 4:15:13 GMT -5
Hey You With the Pretty Face, Welcome To The Human Race.
Going back to the first entry, where expounding on where heroes come from seems tricky in this instance. Because I don't think we ever acknowledge just how... human heroes can be. You think of larger than life, auras of invincibility, flawless, peerless. Achilles and his tanned, impenetrable skin, Superman and his diamond square jaw. Gods that walk the earth. But it's been seen that that can be just a presentation, an act of willful manipulation. To make yourself larger than life, to make yourself into an iconographed figure that transcends human limitation, it's often due to a lot of your own press. Achilles had Homer writing about his exploits in the Trojan War and boosting him up, and Clark Kent was in charge of his own press at the Daily Planet, so he always knew to get the best sides of himself in the paper. But is it cynical to think of it that way? It's hard to tell. It feels like a nihilistic denial, a tearing down of statues to see behind the colors and the armor, and see them when they were weak at times. Or when they fall.
Or maybe that's the secret of them. Maybe heroes falling adds so much more to their myth. Maybe bringing God down to earth is the final, most convincing way the old historians had of relating the hero in his life's quest to the people that gathered around and heard their story. Maybe the hero was never more relatable to the people than when they saw that he was just like them. Or maybe, the takeaway for it goes even deeper, into what it means to be a man who was playing at being a God, or a God that tried to present itself as a man. In the end maybe the most heroic arc is that of transcending limitation. Overcoming the odds stacked against you and rising above. And maybe that's what Krista was trying to say about being mortals after all. Maybe this was the life lesson of Kyle Shane, his final leaving. What he ultimately wanted to impart when the chips were down. Talking about how he grew up in Roxbury, and was made in a mold that pushes people until they break, and he emerged from the cast harder than he was poured into it. That he came from his formative years as someone scrappier than anyone, who would always rise to meet a challenge.
But what if he faced a challenge he couldn't win, and this was that last time?
I'm dictating this last entry not into the recorder, but in my head, as I see myself in slow motion walk up a dais and grab the hand of the man who's handing me an award for this. In reality, my voice is hitting a shrieking pitch as the blinding speed cuts into my skin. I'm riding bitch behind a young mixed girl on the back of a bike. She's a practiced pro at this, and she has the throttle all the way down. This, however, is my first time riding such an archaic and yet muscled contraption, and I'm clinging on to her midsection for dear life, and also screaming into her ear. She deftly turns the bike on a dime and cuts us between two craft as we jet up the parkway.
"Can you please stop screaming?" Brandy shouts over the wind.
It's some time later on our journey that we get to any kind of notable destination. Our trip on the road has been a fast and furtive one. We seem to be trying to lose a tail, possibly the masked assailant that put Krista in the hospital if anything. It's sometime later, nearing nightfall, as we've left city roads and interstate behind and are on a quiet, mountain road. Rocky New England shoreline stretches around us, in a panoramic, beautiful shot. We ride on up the road, rarely passing any more vehicles, and when we do Brandy swerves into the next lane.
Dusk has come by the time we skrtch to a stop on a gravel road, onto a big, beautiful estate that looks overgrown with time.
I have to gape, not just at the old house, but at the girl standing in front of it now. She's wearing leathers like a stunt rider, and when she removes the helmet, despite her mocha skin, she cuts a silhouette in the darkness that calls to mind the image of a figure we remember. Very slender and tall, with a long neck, and her hair is done up in a side-swept quiff of curls. She looks at me as she pulls the helmet down, saying "What?" and I just shake my head out of my reverie. This whole thing is remarkable. And incomprehensible so far. I tell her so.
"There's more answers than you think, it gets... messy from here," Brandy says, distracted. We walk up a set of marble steps with curved barristers to the front door. Amazingly, it opens without a knock, only a single push, and we're alone in a house that's lain fallow for years. Going by the dusty, earthy smell of the waterlogged furniture and the wood that's seen rot, perhaps longer.
"Someone lives here?" I ask, and Brandy seems to be hunting around the room. Because it doesn't seem like it. There's family heirlooms and keepsakes, but the house is old, and none of this looks like it fits in Kyle Shane's timeline. Much farther back than that. "You said we had to meet up with a wife. Everyone knows that he didn't - "
"You're basing that off the fact that he slept around," Brandy cuts in brusquely, "Obviously. You meet a girl that looks like him with dark skin, it gets your mind turning. In those stupid little student films he was always doing, he documented a lot." She grunts, and pulls out a book from a shelf. She appears to be searching the shelves for something. Her fingers fumble over a glass egg sculpture.
"Well - but he did - " I sputter, "I did my research for this article, and there's a few lines of -" I stop right there as she's glaring at me. "But he never stayed in one place long enough to - "
She fully came around to poke me in the chest with a forceful finger that made me step back a few paces, "Listen. He may have fathered me, but let me tell you about Kyle Shane. He was an asshole. Through and through. Cockiest piece of shit in the world, but what he really was was a disaffected little boy. His feet were on fire from walking out of everything as fast as his wanderlust could take him and he had the impulse control of a fruit fly. He wasn't the type that put anything before himself."
It was interesting to get this type of insight, and I wish I had thought to record this. But honestly, this had ceased to be the type of thing you hand in to an editor.
"He was, all of that, child," came a voice from behind us, and we both whirled. A kindly woman, advanced in years and frail from disease, came in. My jaw dropped to see her spotted skin, white hair, and unseeing, blank eyes. She was still recognizable.
"But that boy had the devil in his eye, and when he got that grin on his face, he could make you believe he could do anything." Finishes the older woman. I wouldn't put her in her sixties, so she is clearly a peer of his. But she'd been ravaged, and her body was weak.
"I'm... sorry, Mother Ray," Brandy said out of the side of her mouth, coming around to help the weak woman traverse the room, and she now seemed to regret speaking out about her father in such a way.
The little woman smiled brightly as she touched her face, feeling features blindly. "Oh, it's quite alright, child." But the blind woman - Ray? ...Array? It couldn't be... she made her way as if she knew where she was going.
"We don't have time, Mother Ray," Brandy explained, "He's coming for the Eden. And he knows we were here. He... he got Krista, and I wasn't in time to help." She looks away, even though the older woman can't see her, only hear her shame.
Her lined mouth thins into a pensive thoughtful grimace. Then, the white-haired woman moves over to what she seemed to be searching for... an old piano. It looked ancient, caked in dust and webs, and it felt like the keys would crack as soon as it was touched.
Array brought her fingers down, expertly for someone who couldn't see, and played the first few notes of an unfamiliar melody.
"The Song of Time," Brandy said, breathlessly, as if it held a deep meaning for her.
Array flashed a grin back at her, saying "He always had the most affinity for the N64."
I had no idea how to take any of this, but suddenly an entire section of the bookshelf retracted, pulled back, and slid aside... and the room behind the wall was glowing white in the gloom of the old house. Proudly, the matriarch waved a hand in, saying "Entre vu, to the real Kyle Shane's sanctum. We don't have much time."
Come A Little Bit Closer, You're My Kind of Man.
The room was filled with so much memorabilia that it was enough to make my head want to explode. There were things in here that I had no idea existed, or took place in connection to Kyle Shane. Even if I had researched his disappearance and life leading up to it, exhaustively, for a year or more, I would'nt know where to begin. So much of it was futuristic, almost anachrony in this setting. There were sophisticated little gadgets that played holograms if you pushed a button, and pre-recorded messages would spring up in 3D hardlight figures. There were freeze frame three-dimensional stills that were like standing pictures that cut a moment in time and replayed it instantly. I watched, fascinated, as Kyle Shane, in a long-ago wrestling ring, held his hands and held up some sort of... trophy, screaming and holding his hands up in ultimate triumph.
Feels like I shouldn't be seeing this, really. A lot of this was memorabilia to specific time periods of Kyle's life, commemorating victories and failures too numerous to even catalog anywhere else.
There were wrestling belts hanging on the wall. For someone not versed in the sport, it still held a strange pull, as I came to put my fingers to the cool metal faceplate, running my fingertips over the engraved surfaces. Brandy sees my piqued interest, and despite her earlier bluntness, is almost tender as she walks up to look at them herself, nodding quietly. "He liked collecting them. Said it was just like platting a series of trophies when he collected all the ones available. It was like the ultimate expression of human achievement to him. Bottom line, that was what Kyle Shane liked to tell people he was about: achievement. Just winning a thing was meaningless. Kyle Shane wanted to win everything that he physically could, because that meant," she shrugs and rolls her eyes as if she doesn't understand, "That he did beat the game on it's hardest mode." She may not understand, but I do. I really do. It echoes what Krista was saying, about rising above.
Affectionately, Brandy touches the title belts hanging the lowest. Running her fingers over the nameplates, reading "Underground" and "World" I can almost hear her mutter, ah dad, under her breath. She looks over at me. "S'funny, coming in here helps me feel closer to him than daddy-daughter time ever did."
"Do you mind if I ask about the night he passed away?" I probe her, softly inquisitive, and I pull back when she shoots me her hard look, holding my hand up peacefully, "Not for an article, just because... I want to know him..."
"The consensus is that he was holding something in his hand, something that he had taken from the tech start-up him and Hiro Sasuke started back after his exodus from competition." I put out there. That much I knew. What it was varied from personal account to the other. And there was too much history to get into with her about why Kyle had graduated from the wrestling world to get into future tech with his old, old friend. Suffice it to say, it was a way for the Game Boyz to reunite, and this way, Kyle could pay off a debt he felt he owed Hiro. That much, I had in my notes. "It's what happens after that gets dicey. There was a flash of light... and his outline was burned into the pavement... scorched..."
"You have been dancing around the edges of something so much bigger than your copy-paste, workaday world, don't you know it?" Her eyes darted over my face, pushing back on me just as much. "So much bigger than just a story of a kid from outside Boston..."
"I guess I just don't see how it fits," I have to admit, "Or how his family plays into it..."
"Because," Array says from off to the left, "The entire point of Kyle Shane is that his life and his adventures were about how these fantastic elements intersect with ordinary human relationships. How man meets with God, quite literally. Do you see?" She brings her blind fingers to cup my face as she smiles genially. It's the most beautiful sight I've ever beheld.
"But the night that he... was gone..." I continue, as both of them have turned back to worry over his old relics. Array, longingly, has her hands on his old hoodie, with the archaic video game symbols etched all over it's arms.
She holds the hoodie up to her nose, breathing him in deeply, trying to recollect his memory.
She bows her head in sorrow. "What he and Hiro had found was too powerful to be in the hands of humans. Especially them, after all that time, they were still just boys... forever Game boys... Heh... they had to get it out of the Shane-Tech laboratories..."
"It would help me immensely," as I tried to keep the bitterness and frustration out of my voice, "If someone could explain what this, object, they had discovered, was for so I could get a sense of -"
They're both tired, and getting frustrated too. The blind woman sighs, and says, "Imagine you had one wish, and you could go anywhere... to any point in time, and start things over, and get your wish..."
"But what does that mean?" I almost shout.
"It means that you drop everything and run away," says Brandy, a little bit bitter, brittle even in her tone of voice. "It means that when things get harder, you don't do the work to fix it, you hit the reset button and try again. Does that sound like something a 'gamer' does?"
Array snaps her head around, sightless eyes cutting at Brandy, as if hushing her. "It means that for someone has to give up what they have right then to go back and make things better. To make life better."
And now, amid all of the tacky wrestling memorabilia, video game consoles and championship belts, I'm seeing personal mementoes. Pictures of two young guys, a skinny white kid and a Japanese boy, just getting their start in high school gyms. "It means that you can go back and mend a broken friendship that was never meant to fall away."
Underneath those two belts, a picture of a young mother, looking at the camera, not prepared for the photo, tired and disheveled but a beautiful woman, "It means that a son can go back and have more time with a mother..."
A photograph over there, of two figures that look incredibly alike, of a father and son, a roughnecked, portly man and his son who's skin and bones, growing up all elbows and neck, "Or you can make things right with the other parent..."
"It means you can get your hearts desire... by giving a piece to Eden." My head is swimming as I look at the photos around me.
"We could let him explain it," says Brandy, and she touches one of the holographic recorders. Kyle Shane springs into view from a point in the past, and he's wearing the hoodie Array has wrapped around herself now. We all crane our necks a little as the field projects a hard-light image of Kyle, and he's in the middle of speaking. "But this match with the finals of TIIT is something else altogether. You see, ultimately to me, it's something that is tailor made for me to win, because I'm the one that's poured my heart's blood into this thing. Who else, besides me, has sacrificed for it? My opponents? Nah. I went out there every single week, and I put the Underground Championship up for collateral in every single round. And I knew that if I came away with one single loss in the Icemann Invitational Tournament, I came away with nothing, no title, nothing... and I continued to succeed, and win every time. At the same time, Hiroshi Yukio continued to challenge me and tell me that I wasn't fit to be champion every week, so I had to answer his challenge too, and that sprung up the biggest question in my mind. Was I willing to give up one to have the other? No. No, I was not. So I had to put it all on the line, everything. All in one night. The championship first. My pride. Putting my money where my mouth was."
"Oops, that's not the right recording," Brandy said, and she fumbled around, trying to find a different setting, possibly playing another message. But he kept talking, from some specific point in the past, and I was held spellbound by not just the man but the earnest, unshakeable confidence in his words. Array was right, boy had the devil in him, but he made you believe in what he believed so... simply. "Neither one of them can say they were willing to do that, in fact... Alexandra Tamora just had to win a few gimme matches, against nobody important. She didn't put anything on the line in it, and there would be no big loss if she did, because this isn't her rightful timeline. Non Compos Mentis actually lost his shot and is only in this position because of some stupid rule that offers redemption - which actually undercuts the entire buildup of the tournament, since he barely scraped by a battle royale victory over a newbie like Sicko, and was only in that battle royale because he lost to a man that I beat to earn my way into the finals."
"Almost got it," Brandy is saying, and past, young, champion Kyle Shane is saying, "So in conclusion, when it comes to The Icemann Invitational, I have to reflect that this is the culmination of what I've been working towards. This is it. I'm either going to win big, or fail in the most spectacular fashion on the biggest stage. But losing is not an option for me, not something I can ever consider. I have only myself out here, only me to depend on, and if I believe in the he- Sqwarkkkkk" it cuts off.
And then, when another holo-projection shimmers into view, the hologram of Kyle Shane is significantly older.
Ooooh Child, Things Are Gonna Get Easier.
He smiles, laugh lines crinkling the edges of his cheeks, his face grown out into a full beard. Even though she can't see him, Array seems to have joyful tears welling on her cheeks as the Kyle she remembers comes into holographic life. He smiles, fatherly. "If you're seeing this, then the Eden is in trouble. But you've come, and I know that I can trust you with what to do. I've lived a lot longer than I expected to, and I've had some crazy adventures, and gotten myself into things that I never thought possible. But what has always been in the back of my mind is leaving something for the children I left behind. My legacy, and their legacy, and everyone's. See, legacy is what you spread. Everything you touch, every person you interact with, come into contact with, you leave a little piece of yourself with them, and it's up to you to leave the most lasting piece, the best legacy you can. And there have been some dark parts of that, but..."
He pauses, and his digitized face sobers up, "But even though I haven't always been the best father... I'm... proud, of the kids that came from me... Eldon, the brilliant, smartest boy... Brandy, god, the prettiest little girl you've ever seen, when I met her mother... it lit fireworks up inside of me..."
Array lets out a little sigh, letting the mention of someone else beside her slide. Brandy, for her part, sniffles a little bit, and whispers "Daddy..." as she wipes at her eyes.
He continues, gesturing, "But there was always the thought that I can be better. I need to be better. Hah..." he looks off-camera for a moment, suddenly very down, "Isn't that the essence of Kyle Shane. To any child of mine, don't be a fool like your old man. Too perfectionist, and yet too ruled by anxiety. Can't stop endeavoring to be better. Can never pause to let the little things in, always have to be chasing a standard that was difficult to attain. I wasted a lot of my life chasing perfection, only to find out there was no mean standard of it. It's all subjective. But, always be better, was my motto. Always strive to achieve. That has it's admirable qualities, but it can also lead to a fatal, and crippling flaw."
Array, sympathetically, holds her wizened hand out to Brandy, and Brandy takes it.
"How will you know the difference between good pursuit and bad pursuit of perfection? Is a question I finally came to. You have to trust in yourself. Trust in your heart. But I see now, that what Hiro and I discovered, through our continued work with the MIT physics department, if fallen into the wrong hands, could be... lethal."
He gets very businesslike, "There's chasing after better times, trying to fix something in the past, and then there is something that could destroy time, that could unmake the world. And that is something that cannot be. I know there's people that are after it... I - I have my suspicions, but I - no, there's no time. Listen, this is the most important. Find the heart. Find the heart of the cards, and then you -"
The power in the room is suddenly cut. It plunges into darkness, and the holoprojector shuts off. Only a red, glaring emergency light cuts on.
"No..." Brandy mutters, and my head whips around, "What's happening?"
"Good old dad," says the mocking, hectoring voice from the alley, and the masculine form slides in through the shadows. "Always thinking about finding some quest item... but his scavenger hunt has led me right here."
"Eldon, no, you can't!" Brandy yells, getting in front of Array, ready to protect the fragile blind woman. "If you find the Eden, you'll wipe out -"
"Wipe out all of dad's mistakes?" the sneering voice comes, and in the harsh red light, I see him remove his mask, to show a snobby, long-necked, blond tousle-headed boy, one with cruel, flinty eyes. "One that will go back and make it so that he never does any of this? One that can unmake everything?" He laughs, harshly, the sound of a cruel bully. "Oh, little one. I'm going to make things so much better."
He brings the gun up and begins to fire, the crash loud in the small trophy room.
