Post by Kyle Shane on Jul 5, 2017 1:16:33 GMT -5
"You've been looking at the jump for five minutes," she said, with daggers of hidden annoyance. "So jump."
He sat astraddle a hovering, jet-powered bike, powerful motor gunning between his legs, staring across the expanse of pixelated chasm. It was such a long stretch, and the bottom of the pit had been colored in with a suggestion of an endless pit. The walls of the cavern around them were red, pulsing with blue veins that brought to life an image of some vast, biological organ. It was like being in an 8-bit heart, looking out over a gorge. On the far end of the expanse was the opposite side, and in the distance, a carefully constructed wall. A roadblock. As if making the jump at speed wasn't enough, you had to just barely miss the wall. His gloved fingers gripped onto the handlebars and thumbed the nitro-blast triggers. The repulsors flared to life, and the engine roared again, louder. He tried to steel himself. Tried to let go of the release, kick the hover-bike into gear, and push off for the jump.
But he stopped himself. He looked away, pushing the faceplate of the helmet up, eyes closed. "No."
He ripped off the feeder which was pumping the psychotropics into his perception. The 8-bit surroundings faded, the room swirled and melted away... the glowing biological organ became the garage of the bunker. And as he removed the wristband which was pumping his perceptions with the drug Patrick had been using on him, the world around him came into focus. He made a face. "You know, ever since we've been using Patrick's cocktail as a makeshift The Next Generation holodeck accessory, I've had the worst taste in my mouth."
"Physically or psychologically?" Krista called, from where she sat, leg crossed. He turned to her. "Ha ha, not in a mood for our playful back and forth, you know what I mean."
"I do, but you know what this exercise was about," Krista said simply. She observed him as he peeled off the tight, motocross style leather windbreaker. She tried to keep her gaze clinical and professionial as she measured his body, taking in the sharp lines of his back; his rigid hips and his indents. She told herself that it was only in her capacity as a medical doctor to check on her patient. And yet, as he stretched, Krista felt her face flush. She bit the tip of her pen.
And he grabbed again at his ribs. She came closer, probing at the still sore spots with her fingertips. "Don't do that," he snapped, gripping her fingers.
"So why not jump?"
"I think," he said, regretfully, "Jumping is exactly what's caused a lot of problems." He nods at the walls, which are fast losing their glow. "I dunno how up you are on your vintage gaming history, but my first system was the NES, and there was, uh, this game called Battletoads, and it defined the term Nintendo difficulty- that arbitrary, bullshit, manifest unfairness that clamped down like an iron wall in front of you. That split second timing that sadistic developers put in just so they could say they created the most evil level ever created. Ha, I can relate to that. See, in the game, there was this jump, you had to hit it at just the right second, and hop to a ledge maybe a centimeter around, spring off that and jump your bike across the other side, avoid the brick wall, and then clear the level and it... was... impossible. It was the first experience I had like that, but there came others. Shit that wasn't even your fault, but the game was rigged in such a way that it made you question why you even played it. Why you broke yourself trying to get through the level you couldn't reach. The game Dark Souls 2 for example -"
He hesitates, then seems to think better of explaining the finer points of unreasonably difficult level and boss design, and he sees that it really wouldn't matter anyway. Krista and he tone down to awkward silence in the echoing bunker. As the rushing echo of nothingness falls around them like a glove, it's a haunting reminder of just how empty he's been feeling the last few days. He sits down on the edge of an equipment crate. Almost everyone who worked with the Grey has, over the past few weeks, gone back to their lives, emptying the place that had once been a fervent and alive underground movement into a lie.
Maybe that's the truth coming out; that I never was much of an underground hero, and the emperor's clothes are off now, Aesop, he thought, in a mire of pity. It's somewhat of a sour proposition, all around, to find that people don't adhere to the same ideas of finding a home as you do. It's bleak, but it felt like a neccessary move for them. And it reminded him that where he walked, he pretty much did it alone. Which called to mind one further question, "Why, of all people, are you still here, Krista?"
He indicates the empty space no longer occupied by anything but bad memories. "We all got a clean slate out of this when Patrick's blackmail files went away. Go back to your practice. Be a clinical therapist. Fuck, strip for jello shot money, I don't care what you do."
Krista rolls her eyes to the ceiling, inspecting tiles, reflecting on her current situation; "Not much of a practice to go back to, thanks to your brother. You know I can't go back. I was disbarred once unethical practices came to light, thanks to his damn file."
"Unethical practices?" with a raised eyebrow.
She slapped his elbow, "It wasn't an impropriety with a patient... I just broke confidentiality... I thought I was doing the right thing by telling the object of a patient's desire that he was stalking her... too late, far too late to keep him from finding out and killing her." Her eyes become faraway, and sad. "I lost two people trying to save one."
She bucks back up. "So I can't be a therapist anymore. What I'm saying to you is, why let that stop me? And as to why I'm hanging out with you, graveyard ghost haunting this ruin; well. Maybe I have a vested stake in you now." She flashes him a sardonic, sidelong look.
He gets closer, inspecting her face. As close as they are to each other, sitting on opposite ends of the box, their faces are nearly touching. "Yeah?" he says, daringly.
"Yeah, maybe I do," she shoots back. "For whatever reason that might be. But you've got to give me a reason to be, Kyle... So... talk." Disgruntled, he let out a sigh and turned his back on her, shattering the potential of the moment.
She wasn't letting him stew in his foul mood. Always trying to pry into him. He threw his hands up and groaned. "What are you asking me?"
"You're holding back," Krista said archly, stronger than he had anticipated. She gathered herself and pushed the glasses up on the bridge of her nose. "What I mean is that you defended the Underground Title and won the Icemann Invitational in the same night." Before he could snarkily say he knew that, she continued on, face pinched. "And then you follow it up by being almost subdued the next week. If you hadn't come out there with a live microphone and bragged for a few minutes, people probably would have thought you were taking a rest period. And then you go into the tag match -"
"Correction, was thrown into the tag match by Random Authority Figure #5A," he said crossly, a fact that still rankled him. He saw where she was leading, but from his perspective, the fact that he was blue-skying just a few moments before that idiot had inserted himself into his segment for no reason changed the entire dynamic. He was content with feeling like Icarus, ascending to the heavens on his new wings, if it meant that eventually he was going to burn and flame out; but having some stupid AUTHORITY FIGURE coming out at every opportunity tossing around fiats about when to defend belts changed the story. Now it wasn't his decision, he had made the jump perfectly, but as soon as he crossed the chasm and gotten to the other side some mean-spirited and petty little developer had put a brick wall right in his path. It was his Battletoads stage 3. Now it meant that he had to do the typical bratty little boy thing, cry that he had been screwed out of his title, moan the fates that had put unfair punishment out there, when it didn't have to happen. It ruined his message.
So he was bitter, so what.
"My point is, at Living A Legacy, you jumped. For all you were worth, you put everything you had behind your effort there and even if it killed you that week, you made your goddamn point. You. Jumped for it." She picked up the gauntlet with the injectors built inside the wrist cuff, indicating the hallucination of his stage 3, his metaphorical long jump. "But the next week, you didn't go all in on the jump. You misfired, you might as well have taken a little hop and fell flat on your face."
He scoffed, not the least that he was ticked that she was questioning him when it was him out there busting his ass every week, "Maybe I didn't go in with the same fire, but you cannot sit there and tell me I didn't try. I bust my ass every week, in ways these people here don't."
"You're safe, is what I mean," Krista said, stubbornly.
"I'm - I'm safe?" He said, looking agog.
"Yes, Kyle, at the end of the day, our entire set-up, your comfortable little working arrangement, even the places your mind goes when you want to explore your personality, you play it safe. You film these little art-school movies; images of your family life. You go back to your mother because that's what's a safe spot for you, memories of her. Even the worst ones." Krista looked into his eyes. "So it's telling that when you manifest a challenge from your childhood, it's an impossible jump, and you sit there on the other bank without making the jump. It speaks volumes to how pushing yourself out of your zone can hold you back. Identifying it is key to owning your self-destructive behaviors."
"That- you're making - That's a bunch of-" He couldn't formulate a response, and his ire was raising, but... damn her.
"So tell me I'm wrong," she said in that way she had, and of all the people who'd stuck by his side, why did it have to be the clinical therapist. He turned half on the container, to look her in the eye. "Maybe you missed the last couple of weeks, but I am not afraid to take risks."
"But now, you're hesitating because, what, you're calculating loss?" Her eyes searched into his. "Because you took one big risk, and it paid off, but the stakes keep raising on you, and you don't know how to handle that without the possibility of losing more?" She poked him in the side, "Huh, little sadboy. So, mister risk-taker, where do you want to go now, now having a home in this hacker enclave fell apart. Back to the trailer park? Back in your single apartment, plunked down in front of your X-Box?" She seems to hit on a flash of mean inspiration. "Back to Array the little girl you've been off and on trying to figure out her own shit and live a Kyle-free life? Life is crossroads. Life is one big leap after the next. Are you up to the challenge or are you going to sulk because some low level bureaucrat put you in a shitty couple of matches?"
Her persistent prodding was getting under his skin, drawing a fire out. He felt as if he were back on the hoverbike, it's power throttling between his legs. "I am Kyle goddamn Shane," he said, and it didn't sound like a lament, "Challenges are my god. Risk is my motherfucking manna."
Krista smiled wolfishly, "What about unfair level design? What about the developers putting something in your way that you know you can't get past, to the next level?"
He squinted his eyes. "Ain't no such thing."
"So... jump."
"You want me to jump?" He stood, veins standing, his jawbone working back and forth beneath the stretch of his skin.
"Yes, jump." Krista said, her face open, her eyes narrowed, staring straight up into his. The moment was electrically alive with potential.
Again, the moment was shattered when his cell phone began to ring, from somewhere nearby. The both turned their heads, looking for it. "Uh, yeah, maybe I'll get that -" Krista said, too quickly, at the same time Kyle bumbled over himself to say "I can go look for -"
She put a reassuring hand on his arm, and he flinched, just a little bit. "No, you stay here. I imagine you have some things to work out, but remember... remember what we talked about... okay?" this isn't the doctor looking at him as she picks up a suit jacket and searches the pockets, it's... something he isn't sure how to define. He purses his lips as he watches her, turning her back.
It's time to begin, then. He takes a deep breath as he straps the sophisticated gauntlet on, with it's sensory output interface and the psychotropic drug mix in ampoules on his wrist. He activates it with a touch, the chemicals interacting with his neurons to build his pre-programmed fantasy world around him. Holo-deckin' it up, he thought, as the vast bunker around him became a facsimilie of a long racing strip in an 8-bit world. A pulsing, colorful, bio-technical game world. Forget the subject matter of the game itself, the challenge that rises from it is grim. The hoverbike materializes next to him, as the course builds itself into it's long stretch, the vast chasm, and the waiting shore across the other side. The huge jump.
If Krista was right, he'd misfired his jumps and he couldn't afford to let it make him shy away from trying it again. If he misfired or mis-timed again...
He frowned a little bit. The act of putting those fears aside every time was Kyle Shane's routine... it was his motherfuckin' manna, as he said, but it was easy to jump for it when you were sure that the ground was there on the other side to stick the landing, wasn't it.
But if you stopped trying for the jump altogether...
A simple doorway separates her from this reality as she holds his phone to her ear, listening to the message with a dawning fascination.
"...so we need your help. I know we haven't ever been much family before... our father was never very good at uniting all of his kids under one banner, big happy family, whatever... But I think that a move would be just what you need, and we need you here in Seattle. Call me back so that we can have a conversation about this, I think us meeting is a move that's been long overdue. I think that if you see what we have here, in Seattle, you'll want to join us and be a part of our endeavors. Just give it some thought, before you make the jump, bro. Love you... your sister. *Beeep*"
Krista stared, mouth agog, at the still playing voicemail system, in a state of shock, mouthing the word sister? as she looked back towards where Kyle might have been.
He was soaring through the air, straddling the rocket, energy-pods pushing and turbo gunning for all it was worth. Jump. Gravity had ceased to even be a concern, as he cut through the simulated air, gauging the distance between his intended landing point and the nose of his skiff. But as the ground came up to meet him, he noted in his despair that he was falling just short of the ledge.
And then he was disassembled, through the magic of the illusion, broken down into pixels, and when he opened his eyes, he was back where he started, standing next to a revving hoverbike floating in midair, ready to run and gun across a vast, yawning chasm. It sat there, mocking him.
His nose crinkled with an expression of "how dare you?" and the fire that Krista has stoked rose up hotter. Jump, she'd said, jump, jump, don't hold back.
He swung a leg over the seat of the bike and gripped the handlebars, giving them a hard twist. The engine of his fake bike roared to life, and his mind went with him, pushing him off with a hiccupy start. He knew this time he had it, if he could only -
He waited too long for his jump, and he barely even got it off the ground before it cleared the lip of the chasm. It wasn't enough. He let out a scream as he began to fall again -
And broken apart again. And pixelated again, and reassembled and turned back in again. He gritted his teeth and pounded the seat with his fist. This goddamn level design... it was such bullshit. It was -
No. He would not let himself go there.
He set his jaw. If it took him all night, he'd be here, and that was okay, because the satisfaction didn't come from mastering a perfect technique to make the jump, the satisfaction came from trying and falling, and rising again. A fall wasn't going to kill him. Nor would a hundred. The only thing that would paralyze him is never trying the jump in the first place.
He twisted the handlebars. The engine whined to life, and the rocket on the back flared blue. The hover repulsors hummed, and he took off. He pushed it harder, and then, at the last possible second, he closed his eyes...
And smiled...
And jumped.
He sat astraddle a hovering, jet-powered bike, powerful motor gunning between his legs, staring across the expanse of pixelated chasm. It was such a long stretch, and the bottom of the pit had been colored in with a suggestion of an endless pit. The walls of the cavern around them were red, pulsing with blue veins that brought to life an image of some vast, biological organ. It was like being in an 8-bit heart, looking out over a gorge. On the far end of the expanse was the opposite side, and in the distance, a carefully constructed wall. A roadblock. As if making the jump at speed wasn't enough, you had to just barely miss the wall. His gloved fingers gripped onto the handlebars and thumbed the nitro-blast triggers. The repulsors flared to life, and the engine roared again, louder. He tried to steel himself. Tried to let go of the release, kick the hover-bike into gear, and push off for the jump.
But he stopped himself. He looked away, pushing the faceplate of the helmet up, eyes closed. "No."
He ripped off the feeder which was pumping the psychotropics into his perception. The 8-bit surroundings faded, the room swirled and melted away... the glowing biological organ became the garage of the bunker. And as he removed the wristband which was pumping his perceptions with the drug Patrick had been using on him, the world around him came into focus. He made a face. "You know, ever since we've been using Patrick's cocktail as a makeshift The Next Generation holodeck accessory, I've had the worst taste in my mouth."
"Physically or psychologically?" Krista called, from where she sat, leg crossed. He turned to her. "Ha ha, not in a mood for our playful back and forth, you know what I mean."
"I do, but you know what this exercise was about," Krista said simply. She observed him as he peeled off the tight, motocross style leather windbreaker. She tried to keep her gaze clinical and professionial as she measured his body, taking in the sharp lines of his back; his rigid hips and his indents. She told herself that it was only in her capacity as a medical doctor to check on her patient. And yet, as he stretched, Krista felt her face flush. She bit the tip of her pen.
And he grabbed again at his ribs. She came closer, probing at the still sore spots with her fingertips. "Don't do that," he snapped, gripping her fingers.
"So why not jump?"
"I think," he said, regretfully, "Jumping is exactly what's caused a lot of problems." He nods at the walls, which are fast losing their glow. "I dunno how up you are on your vintage gaming history, but my first system was the NES, and there was, uh, this game called Battletoads, and it defined the term Nintendo difficulty- that arbitrary, bullshit, manifest unfairness that clamped down like an iron wall in front of you. That split second timing that sadistic developers put in just so they could say they created the most evil level ever created. Ha, I can relate to that. See, in the game, there was this jump, you had to hit it at just the right second, and hop to a ledge maybe a centimeter around, spring off that and jump your bike across the other side, avoid the brick wall, and then clear the level and it... was... impossible. It was the first experience I had like that, but there came others. Shit that wasn't even your fault, but the game was rigged in such a way that it made you question why you even played it. Why you broke yourself trying to get through the level you couldn't reach. The game Dark Souls 2 for example -"
He hesitates, then seems to think better of explaining the finer points of unreasonably difficult level and boss design, and he sees that it really wouldn't matter anyway. Krista and he tone down to awkward silence in the echoing bunker. As the rushing echo of nothingness falls around them like a glove, it's a haunting reminder of just how empty he's been feeling the last few days. He sits down on the edge of an equipment crate. Almost everyone who worked with the Grey has, over the past few weeks, gone back to their lives, emptying the place that had once been a fervent and alive underground movement into a lie.
Maybe that's the truth coming out; that I never was much of an underground hero, and the emperor's clothes are off now, Aesop, he thought, in a mire of pity. It's somewhat of a sour proposition, all around, to find that people don't adhere to the same ideas of finding a home as you do. It's bleak, but it felt like a neccessary move for them. And it reminded him that where he walked, he pretty much did it alone. Which called to mind one further question, "Why, of all people, are you still here, Krista?"
He indicates the empty space no longer occupied by anything but bad memories. "We all got a clean slate out of this when Patrick's blackmail files went away. Go back to your practice. Be a clinical therapist. Fuck, strip for jello shot money, I don't care what you do."
Krista rolls her eyes to the ceiling, inspecting tiles, reflecting on her current situation; "Not much of a practice to go back to, thanks to your brother. You know I can't go back. I was disbarred once unethical practices came to light, thanks to his damn file."
"Unethical practices?" with a raised eyebrow.
She slapped his elbow, "It wasn't an impropriety with a patient... I just broke confidentiality... I thought I was doing the right thing by telling the object of a patient's desire that he was stalking her... too late, far too late to keep him from finding out and killing her." Her eyes become faraway, and sad. "I lost two people trying to save one."
She bucks back up. "So I can't be a therapist anymore. What I'm saying to you is, why let that stop me? And as to why I'm hanging out with you, graveyard ghost haunting this ruin; well. Maybe I have a vested stake in you now." She flashes him a sardonic, sidelong look.
He gets closer, inspecting her face. As close as they are to each other, sitting on opposite ends of the box, their faces are nearly touching. "Yeah?" he says, daringly.
"Yeah, maybe I do," she shoots back. "For whatever reason that might be. But you've got to give me a reason to be, Kyle... So... talk." Disgruntled, he let out a sigh and turned his back on her, shattering the potential of the moment.
She wasn't letting him stew in his foul mood. Always trying to pry into him. He threw his hands up and groaned. "What are you asking me?"
"You're holding back," Krista said archly, stronger than he had anticipated. She gathered herself and pushed the glasses up on the bridge of her nose. "What I mean is that you defended the Underground Title and won the Icemann Invitational in the same night." Before he could snarkily say he knew that, she continued on, face pinched. "And then you follow it up by being almost subdued the next week. If you hadn't come out there with a live microphone and bragged for a few minutes, people probably would have thought you were taking a rest period. And then you go into the tag match -"
"Correction, was thrown into the tag match by Random Authority Figure #5A," he said crossly, a fact that still rankled him. He saw where she was leading, but from his perspective, the fact that he was blue-skying just a few moments before that idiot had inserted himself into his segment for no reason changed the entire dynamic. He was content with feeling like Icarus, ascending to the heavens on his new wings, if it meant that eventually he was going to burn and flame out; but having some stupid AUTHORITY FIGURE coming out at every opportunity tossing around fiats about when to defend belts changed the story. Now it wasn't his decision, he had made the jump perfectly, but as soon as he crossed the chasm and gotten to the other side some mean-spirited and petty little developer had put a brick wall right in his path. It was his Battletoads stage 3. Now it meant that he had to do the typical bratty little boy thing, cry that he had been screwed out of his title, moan the fates that had put unfair punishment out there, when it didn't have to happen. It ruined his message.
So he was bitter, so what.
"My point is, at Living A Legacy, you jumped. For all you were worth, you put everything you had behind your effort there and even if it killed you that week, you made your goddamn point. You. Jumped for it." She picked up the gauntlet with the injectors built inside the wrist cuff, indicating the hallucination of his stage 3, his metaphorical long jump. "But the next week, you didn't go all in on the jump. You misfired, you might as well have taken a little hop and fell flat on your face."
He scoffed, not the least that he was ticked that she was questioning him when it was him out there busting his ass every week, "Maybe I didn't go in with the same fire, but you cannot sit there and tell me I didn't try. I bust my ass every week, in ways these people here don't."
"You're safe, is what I mean," Krista said, stubbornly.
"I'm - I'm safe?" He said, looking agog.
"Yes, Kyle, at the end of the day, our entire set-up, your comfortable little working arrangement, even the places your mind goes when you want to explore your personality, you play it safe. You film these little art-school movies; images of your family life. You go back to your mother because that's what's a safe spot for you, memories of her. Even the worst ones." Krista looked into his eyes. "So it's telling that when you manifest a challenge from your childhood, it's an impossible jump, and you sit there on the other bank without making the jump. It speaks volumes to how pushing yourself out of your zone can hold you back. Identifying it is key to owning your self-destructive behaviors."
"That- you're making - That's a bunch of-" He couldn't formulate a response, and his ire was raising, but... damn her.
"So tell me I'm wrong," she said in that way she had, and of all the people who'd stuck by his side, why did it have to be the clinical therapist. He turned half on the container, to look her in the eye. "Maybe you missed the last couple of weeks, but I am not afraid to take risks."
"But now, you're hesitating because, what, you're calculating loss?" Her eyes searched into his. "Because you took one big risk, and it paid off, but the stakes keep raising on you, and you don't know how to handle that without the possibility of losing more?" She poked him in the side, "Huh, little sadboy. So, mister risk-taker, where do you want to go now, now having a home in this hacker enclave fell apart. Back to the trailer park? Back in your single apartment, plunked down in front of your X-Box?" She seems to hit on a flash of mean inspiration. "Back to Array the little girl you've been off and on trying to figure out her own shit and live a Kyle-free life? Life is crossroads. Life is one big leap after the next. Are you up to the challenge or are you going to sulk because some low level bureaucrat put you in a shitty couple of matches?"
Her persistent prodding was getting under his skin, drawing a fire out. He felt as if he were back on the hoverbike, it's power throttling between his legs. "I am Kyle goddamn Shane," he said, and it didn't sound like a lament, "Challenges are my god. Risk is my motherfucking manna."
Krista smiled wolfishly, "What about unfair level design? What about the developers putting something in your way that you know you can't get past, to the next level?"
He squinted his eyes. "Ain't no such thing."
"So... jump."
"You want me to jump?" He stood, veins standing, his jawbone working back and forth beneath the stretch of his skin.
"Yes, jump." Krista said, her face open, her eyes narrowed, staring straight up into his. The moment was electrically alive with potential.
Again, the moment was shattered when his cell phone began to ring, from somewhere nearby. The both turned their heads, looking for it. "Uh, yeah, maybe I'll get that -" Krista said, too quickly, at the same time Kyle bumbled over himself to say "I can go look for -"
She put a reassuring hand on his arm, and he flinched, just a little bit. "No, you stay here. I imagine you have some things to work out, but remember... remember what we talked about... okay?" this isn't the doctor looking at him as she picks up a suit jacket and searches the pockets, it's... something he isn't sure how to define. He purses his lips as he watches her, turning her back.
It's time to begin, then. He takes a deep breath as he straps the sophisticated gauntlet on, with it's sensory output interface and the psychotropic drug mix in ampoules on his wrist. He activates it with a touch, the chemicals interacting with his neurons to build his pre-programmed fantasy world around him. Holo-deckin' it up, he thought, as the vast bunker around him became a facsimilie of a long racing strip in an 8-bit world. A pulsing, colorful, bio-technical game world. Forget the subject matter of the game itself, the challenge that rises from it is grim. The hoverbike materializes next to him, as the course builds itself into it's long stretch, the vast chasm, and the waiting shore across the other side. The huge jump.
If Krista was right, he'd misfired his jumps and he couldn't afford to let it make him shy away from trying it again. If he misfired or mis-timed again...
He frowned a little bit. The act of putting those fears aside every time was Kyle Shane's routine... it was his motherfuckin' manna, as he said, but it was easy to jump for it when you were sure that the ground was there on the other side to stick the landing, wasn't it.
But if you stopped trying for the jump altogether...
A simple doorway separates her from this reality as she holds his phone to her ear, listening to the message with a dawning fascination.
"...so we need your help. I know we haven't ever been much family before... our father was never very good at uniting all of his kids under one banner, big happy family, whatever... But I think that a move would be just what you need, and we need you here in Seattle. Call me back so that we can have a conversation about this, I think us meeting is a move that's been long overdue. I think that if you see what we have here, in Seattle, you'll want to join us and be a part of our endeavors. Just give it some thought, before you make the jump, bro. Love you... your sister. *Beeep*"
Krista stared, mouth agog, at the still playing voicemail system, in a state of shock, mouthing the word sister? as she looked back towards where Kyle might have been.
He was soaring through the air, straddling the rocket, energy-pods pushing and turbo gunning for all it was worth. Jump. Gravity had ceased to even be a concern, as he cut through the simulated air, gauging the distance between his intended landing point and the nose of his skiff. But as the ground came up to meet him, he noted in his despair that he was falling just short of the ledge.
And then he was disassembled, through the magic of the illusion, broken down into pixels, and when he opened his eyes, he was back where he started, standing next to a revving hoverbike floating in midair, ready to run and gun across a vast, yawning chasm. It sat there, mocking him.
His nose crinkled with an expression of "how dare you?" and the fire that Krista has stoked rose up hotter. Jump, she'd said, jump, jump, don't hold back.
He swung a leg over the seat of the bike and gripped the handlebars, giving them a hard twist. The engine of his fake bike roared to life, and his mind went with him, pushing him off with a hiccupy start. He knew this time he had it, if he could only -
He waited too long for his jump, and he barely even got it off the ground before it cleared the lip of the chasm. It wasn't enough. He let out a scream as he began to fall again -
And broken apart again. And pixelated again, and reassembled and turned back in again. He gritted his teeth and pounded the seat with his fist. This goddamn level design... it was such bullshit. It was -
No. He would not let himself go there.
He set his jaw. If it took him all night, he'd be here, and that was okay, because the satisfaction didn't come from mastering a perfect technique to make the jump, the satisfaction came from trying and falling, and rising again. A fall wasn't going to kill him. Nor would a hundred. The only thing that would paralyze him is never trying the jump in the first place.
He twisted the handlebars. The engine whined to life, and the rocket on the back flared blue. The hover repulsors hummed, and he took off. He pushed it harder, and then, at the last possible second, he closed his eyes...
And smiled...
And jumped.
