Chapter 14: The Next Step
Monday, May 18, 2015
The sound of the phone alarm was a brutal blow. Michael moaned and tapped the screen until the noise stopped. Seven in the morning. The weekend, with its odd night out, felt like it was a month ago.
Now, it was time to go back to hell.
The morning routine was the same as always. The shower in automatic mode, the toast eaten standing in the silent kitchen, the uniform of black hoodie, shorts and sunglasses. The only difference was that, as I walked to school, I didn't listen to the generic pop that came with the phone. I listened to the loop of "Ghost Boy".
It felt... not bad. Listening to his own creation, raw and full of flaws, gave him a strange sense of power. It was his secret. It was real.
He arrived at school. The corridors were the same chaos as always. The din of the lockers, the screams, the high-pitched laughter. He put on his headphones, turning down the volume of his own music so that it acted only as a filter, a buffer against the noise of the world.
He walked to his locker, his head down, moving through the crowd as he had learned to do, like a ghost. He was in his usual mode of "don't see me, I don't see you."
"Hey! Zombie!"
The voice cut through his music. Michael stopped. He looked up.
Leaning against a row of blue lockers were them. Leo, Sam and Nate. They stared at him, almost as if they were waiting for him.
For a second, Michael felt exposed. The party. The conversation on the steps. Alcohol. The grass. I wasn't sure what the social protocol was for this.
'Are we supposed to pretend nothing happened?'Thought.
He took off his headphones, letting them hang around his neck.
"Hey," Michael said, his voice a little hoarse from lack of use.
Sam, who seemed to vibrate in the place, laughed. "Dude! You're alive! I thought you only existed at college parties."
"Sometimes," Michael replied, shrugging his shoulders.
"How's it going, Mike?" asked Leo. The one with the notebook. His gaze was analytical, as if he were deciding whether Michael was as weird in daylight as he was at night.
"Good. Tired," Michael said. It was the truth.
"See you at lunch, right?" Sam blurted out suddenly. It wasn't a question, it was a guess. "Nate is going to bring his 3DS. We have a Smash Bros. tournament.".
Michael blinked, surprised by the invitation. He looked at Nate, who just nodded once, confirming it. It was the closest thing to a social plan he had had since he arrived.
"Ah... of course. I guess," Michael said.
The shrill doorbell rang above their heads, a one-minute warning. The crowd in the hallway rushed over.
"Shit," Leo said, picking up his backpack. "I have to go to art class. See you later, Mike."
"Yes, I'll see them later."
The trio left, mingling with the stream of students. Michael stayed there for another second. It felt... strange. Not bad. Just different.
He turned and turned to his own class. Algebra II. Hell on earth.
He entered the classroom, which smelled of chalk dust and boredom. He ignored the professor's gaze and went to his usual seat in the back row. He collapsed in his chair.
He put his headphones back on. He put a random playlist. He put on his sunglasses. And then, as he had done every day for months, he folded his arms over the desk and rested his head. He turned off the world.
Just before the teacher's noise began, he heard a muffled laugh from the door. He raised his head an inch. It was Leo and Sam, who were passing through the hallway and had seen him through the door window.
Sam pointed at Michael, then pretended to fall asleep loudly. Leo just shook his head, laughing, and pushed him to keep walking.
Michael watched them leave. A small, almost imperceptible smile formed on his lips.
'Idiots.'
He rested his head on the desk again, but this time, the silence of his hood felt a little less lonely.
…..
Michael went back to his routine, but something was different. The little interaction with Leo, Sam, and Nate in the hallway had been... pleasant. It was the first time he interacted with schoolmates without feeling like a daycare supervisor.
He sat at his desk in the back row, as always. He put on his hood and sunglasses, ready for his daily nap. But instead of immediately disconnecting, he pulled out his phone.
The warm feeling she felt the night before from Chloe's comment was still there. It was a small fire in the cold void.
He opened SoundCloud. The ghost boy page loaded.
Views: 75. Likes: 5. Comments: 1.
It was pathetic, actually. Ridiculously small. But that "1" in the comments section was everything. It was the proof of concept. He sat back, closed his eyes, and let the algebra teacher's voice turn into white noise.
The rest of the week became a new kind of routine. School. Work. And now, "the review of statistics". It became an addiction, a way of taking the pulse of the invisible world.
I refreshed the page between classes, walking down the hallway. People would see him looking at his phone with an intensity they didn't understand, and they assumed he was playing games or something.
He was refreshing the page during his ten-minute break at the Burger Barn. He sat on an overturned milk crate in the back alley, smoking a cigarette, the smell of tobacco mingling with that of the garbage. He looked at the screen: Views: 134. Likes: 7.
'Seven people', he thought. Seven people in the world had pressed the heart button. It was something.
He refreshed the page at home, just before starting his Ableton tutorial shift. Views: 210. Likes: 9.
I refreshed the page just before sleeping. Views: 245. Likes: 11.
The numbers began to move, but not as he expected. He had read stories in his afterlife about songs exploding overnight. One million views in 24 hours. That did not happen.
It was a trickle. Slow, painful, but steady.
By Wednesday, it had about five hundred views. 'Okay, it's not bad. Five hundred people.' But the likes hardly moved. Likes: 12. And I only had a couple more comments.
One was "good beat". The other was a broken heart emoji.
By Friday night, at the end of the week, the final numbers were disappointingly modest. The days go by. It has reached a couple of thousand views. Maybe 2,500. It had a few dozen likes, maybe 30 or 40.
And a few comments.
"This is different" "What guitar is that?" "vibe"
They were comments... Nice. But none felt like Chloe's. They were comments on music, not on feeling.
Michael was in his makeshift studio that Friday night. I was tired from work. He looked at the SoundCloud stats. 2,500 views. Era... something. He had created something that 2,500 people had experienced.
But it wasn't the metric that mattered.
He closed his eyes and summoned the System interface. The cyan panel appeared, floating in front of the acoustic foam panels. He looked at the upper right corner, where his balance shone.
Impact Points (PI): 114
He stared at the number. One hundred and fourteen.
It had gone from 58 views to 2,500. It had gained 30 more likes. He had gotten half a dozen new comments. And her IP balance had only gone up 14 points since Chloe's comment.
The math was brutally clear. The System was not playing.
Chloe's comment, a single person connecting on a deep level, had given him 100 IPs. The following 2,400 views, 30 likes and 6 superficial comments... they had given him just 14.
He realized that the System did not reward virality. It rewarded the impact.
'So it is,' he thought, leaning back in his chair. 'I can have a hundred thousand plays, but if no one really connects, if they only listen to it in the background, it doesn't mean anything. Not all of them had the same impact on them as the other.'
The System didn't want it to be popular. I wanted it to be necessary.
This revelation was strangely liberating. He stopped worrying about numbers on SoundCloud. They didn't matter anymore. They were a false metric. The real marker was invisible to the rest of the world, stored in his head.
The goal wasn't to get thousands of casual fans. The goal was to find the next "Chloe". It was to create something so honest that it would force the System to reward it.
The creative paralysis that had plagued him the previous week disappeared, replaced by a new direction. It was no longer a question of which song would be most popular. It was about which song was the most real.
He looked at his laptop. The money from his last check was in his account. The anxiety about the reproductions was gone. Now, all that remained was the mission. And for the next mission, he needed better tools. The team hunt was about to get serious.
…..
Payday arrived. This time, the Burger Barn check felt different. It wasn't just money for food and bills. It was the last payment he needed.
That night, Michael drove his Corolla to the parking lot of a suburban shopping mall. It was almost empty, the streetlights projecting puddles of orange light onto the cracked asphalt.
He parked far from the entrance, turned off the engine, and waited. Nervousness fluttered in his stomach. I always hated these Craigslist encounters. They looked like drug swaps straight out of a bad movie.
A few minutes later, an old Honda Civic pulled into the parking lot and parked two spaces away. A college boy wearing glasses and a Strokes T-shirt got off.
"Mike?" the boy asked, his voice sounding nervous.
"Steve?" replied Michael.
"Great," Steve said, visibly relieved. He went to the trunk of his car and took out a cardboard box. "Here it is. Just as I described it."
Michael walked over and looked inside the box. There it was: a bright red Focusrite Scarlett Solo audio interface and a black Audio-Technica AT2020 condenser microphone . They were the exact models I had been researching for weeks.
He took out the microphone. It was heavy, cold to the touch. He inspected it under the orange light, looking for dents or damage to the grille. It seemed to be in perfect condition.
"It works perfectly, dude," Steve said. "I'm only selling the equipment because I'm moving and I need the money."
Michael nodded. He didn't care about history. He only cared about the tool.
He pulled a wad of crumpled bills from his hoodie's pocket. It was the hundred and fifty dollars he had saved with so much effort, ticket by bill, shift after shift. He handed them to Steve.
"Great. Thank you, bro," Steve said, quickly counting the money.
"Thanks to you," Michael said.
He took the box and went back to his car. He did not run. He walked with a deliberate, careful step. He placed the box on the passenger seat as if it were a fragile and valuable object.
He drove home, this time without music. The silence in the car was full of anticipation.
He arrived home and went straight to his makeshift studio in his father's office. Carefully, he pulled the microphone and interface out of the box.
He unplugged the old Rock Band USB microphone from his laptop and threw it into a corner of the room. It was a symbolic gesture. He had graduated.
He plugged the Focusrite interface into his MacBook's USB port. The little green "on" light lit up. Then, he connected the microphone's heavy XLR cable to the interface.
He opened Ableton. Created a new audio track. He selected the Scarlett Solo as the input device. He activated monitoring.
He approached the new microphone, the metal grille was cold. He took a deep breath.
"Try," he said, his voice normal.
He played the recording. And the difference was so great that he almost laughs.
The sound was clean. Of course. I could hear every nuance of his voice, every texture. There was no background hiss. There was no electric hum. It was just... his voice.
A slow, satisfied smile spread across his face. It was a huge victory.
He stood there for a while, just recording and playing his own voice, listening to the clarity. The gap between the sound in his head and the sound he could create had narrowed dramatically.
Now, I was ready to really work.
…..
Michael spent all of Saturday playing with his new team. The difference was staggering. He connected the AT2020 to the Focusrite interface and recorded his voice.
"Try, one, two."
He played the recording. And he smiled. His voice was clear, warm, present. It no longer sounded like he was talking through a can of soup. It sounded professional.
On Sunday morning, he woke up with a feeling he hadn't had before: a desire to work.
He sat down in front of his MacBook. He opened Ableton. The program, which had seemed like an intimidating button wall for weeks, now felt like home.
I had already completely mapped Ableton. The tutorial nights had paid off. I no longer used the mouse to search the menus. His fingers were flying over the keyboard.
He knew the shortcuts by heart. Cmd+D to duplicate a clip. Cmd+T for a new track. Their workflow was faster, smoother.
He was no longer an amateur guessing. Now I had the tools. He had the basic knowledge. And he had 114 Impact Points that proved his plan wasn't crazy.
He leaned back in the creaking chair, his hands behind his head. He thought about what song to do next. Last week's paralysis was gone. "Ghost Boy" had taught him the most important lesson.
The way was not the aggression of "Paris". Not yet. The road was not the atmospheric vibe of "Sodium". The path was pain. Honesty.
Chloe's comment was still on her mind. "I feel like a ghost too."
I needed to keep talking to those people. With those who felt like him. He had to build his tribe, and he would build it on the basis of that shared emotion. He decided to continue with the theme.
He invoked the System interface. The covers of his "Founder's Pack" floated in front of him. He ignored the others. His eyes locked onto one.
"Star Shopping".
He remembered the melody of the guitar. He remembered the lyrics. It was the saddest love song I knew. A song of longing, of broken promises, of feeling "not important enough".
It was perfect. It was the next chapter in the same story that had begun with "Ghost Boy."
Closed the System interface. He created a new project in Ableton.
Project: Star Shopping_v1
With a confidence he didn't have a month ago, he dragged the guitar's MIDI guide to the first track. The work had begun again.