Chapter 19: The Ghost Becomes Visible
Early July 2015
Summer had arrived in California, and with it, a sweltering heat that made work at the Burger Barn a damp hell.
Michael's life had settled into a new routine. It was no longer just the ghost that slept in the back row. Now, at times, her social life felt almost normal.
He arrived at school. He was still the "Glasses Boy" to most, but he was no longer completely alone. In the hallway, between classes, he would sometimes cross paths with Leo, Sam, and Nate.
"Hey, Mike," Leo would say, nodding.
"Dude, did you see the new trailer for Batman? It looks crazy!" said Sam, speaking at a thousand miles an hour.
"Then," Nate would reply, with his usual brevity.
They were not deep conversations. They were small anchors. Little reminders that I was no longer totally adrift. He was still the zombie of history class, but now, he had people to talk to about Zelda at lunch.
Work, however, was still hell itself. The same smell of grease, the same back pain, the same miserable salary.
But now he had a new obsession. An addiction that filled every dead moment of the day. The statistics.
On the bus to school, he pulled out his phone. Open SoundCloud. Update. Ghost Boy - 5,430 views. Star Shopping - 3,112 plays. A small smile. The numbers were rising.
At lunch, while Sam ranted about why the N64 was the best console, Michael updated again. +50 reproductions. +2 likes.
On 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. It opened YouTube.
'One hundred comments on 'Star Shopping'.'
I read the comments. Most were superficial. "Good beat". "vibrate". "What guitar is that?" But every once in a while, he would find one that would stop him.
"I'm going through a breakup right now. This song hurts. Thank you."
I was looking at the SoundCloud numbers. Weeks had passed. He already had a couple of thousand plays on both songs. A few dozen likes, and a few more comments from people like Chloe and Victor, spread around the world.
It was a trickle. Slow, painful, but steady.
That night, in his makeshift study, before he began work, he invoked the System. He had become accustomed to this. It was his true progress report. I was expecting a big reward for growth.
TOTAL BALANCE: 245 PI
Michael stared at the number. It had gained thousands of new views and dozens of likes that week. And his IP balance had barely budged. It had gained about 31 points since Victor's commentary.
The math was brutally clear. The System was not playing.
Chloe's comment had given him 100 IP. Victor's, another 100. The following 2,400 casual views and 30 superficial likes... 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.
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.
…..
Saturday, July 18, 2015
The heat of the afternoon was suffocating. The air inside the city bus was thick and smelled of sweat and hot plastic. Michael sat in the back, his forehead pressed against the vibrating glass of the window.
I was on my way to work.
I watched the streets go by, the same boring route as always. The same convenience stores, the same laundromats. He felt trapped in a loop, not only in his life, but even in his journeys.
The bus stopped at a corner he didn't fully recognize. On impulse, simply because of the need to break the monotony, he got up and got off, two stops before his.
"Well off," the bus driver muttered as the doors closed behind him.
Michael found himself in an older part of town. The sidewalks were cracked and the buildings were lower, many of them with boarded-up shop windows. He decided to take a shortcut, cutting down a side street he had never seen, to get to the Burger Barn.
As he walked, he passed a bazaar, or rather, a thrift store that had overflowed its contents onto the sidewalk. It was a chaos of old furniture, clothes piled up on tables, and cardboard boxes filled with electronic junk.
Normally, I would have moved on. But something in one of the boxes caught his attention.
He approached out of curiosity. The box was filled with beige landlines from the '80s, broken DVD players, and a tangle of power cords that looked like dead snakes. And underneath all that, he saw a familiar shape.
It was a VHS video camera. A black and gray Panasonic, the size of a brick. The kind of camera his father used to use to record his birthdays as a child, in his afterlife.
He bent down and took her out of the box. It was heavy, much heavier than I remembered. It was covered in dust and had an old "Channel 8 News" label taped to the side. It seemed like a relic of a forgotten time.
"Do you like that junk?" said a raspy voice.
Michael looked up. The store owner, an older man with a tobacco-stained beard, was watching him from a folding chair in the shade.
"Maybe," Michael said. "Does it work?"
The man laughed, a dry cough. "No idea, kid. I found her in an eviction. Probably not. Give me ten dollars for it."
Ten dollars. It was half of what he would earn that night at the Burger Barn. It was stupid. It was a giant plastic paperweight.
But as he held the camera, he felt its weight, its texture. He remembered the kind of image those cameras produced. Granulated. Unstable. With faded colors.
An idea, vague and formless, began to form in the back of his mind.
He pulled a crumpled ten-dollar bill out of his pocket. "I'll take her."
The man took the money without getting up. "There are no returns."
"I wasn't going to ask for it," Michael replied.
He continued on his way to work, now carrying the plastic brick into a bag. I didn't know exactly why I had bought it. He just knew that that texture, that imperfect image, reminded him of something. And I felt it was important.
…..
He got home around midnight, exhausted. The greasy smell of the Burger Barn had stuck to his skin and clothes, a constant reminder of his routine. He threw the keys on the kitchen table. All he wanted was to take a shower and collapse into bed.
But then, his eyes fell on the cheap plastic bag he had left on the floor. Inside, was the VHS camera he had bought for ten dollars.
The tiredness faded a little, replaced by curiosity. 'Let's see if this junk even ignites.'
He went to his living room. It didn't have a modern flat-screen TV. He had an old tube TV, a heavy hulk that the previous owner had left in the house. It was perfect.
He took the camera out of the bag. It was a black plastic brick, heavy and clumsy. It smelled of dust and a basement. He found the battery compartment. To his surprise, there was a battery inside. He slid it out, saw the metal contacts, blew them and put it back in, making sure it made good contact.
Then, the hard part. The cables. He rummaged through a cardboard box in the closet, the "cable box" that everyone seems to have, filled with old phone chargers and power cords that went nowhere. After five minutes, he found what he was looking for: a tri-color RCA cable. Yellow, white, red.
He connected the cables to the camera and then to the front of the TV. He turned on the TV, a high-pitched buzz filling the room as the screen came to life. Changed the entry to "Video 1." Pure static.
He took a deep breath. He pressed the "Power" button on the camera. A small red light came on, and he heard the faint whirrrr of an internal engine. Worked.
He pointed the camera at the lamp in the living room. The static on the TV was replaced by an image.
It was horrible. And she was beautiful.
The image was grainy, as if he were seeing the world through a fine sandstorm. The colors were faded, the yellow of the lamp bleeding on the brown wall. There were horizontal lines flashing on the screen. And in the lower right corner, in a crude, glossy digital font, the date flashed: "JUL 18 2015."
Michael was mesmerized. He lowered the camera and pointed it at his face. On the TV screen, his own face was staring back at him, but it wasn't him. He was a ghost. The light from the lamp behind him created a blurred halo. His features were soft, undefined.
He stared at that grainy image, and suddenly, the memory hit him with the force of a train. It was not a thought. It was an avalanche of images from his other life, from nights spent in the depths of YouTube.
He remembered Bones. The pale and skinny rapper with long hair. The king of the underground. The ghost of SoundCloud.
He remembered TeamSESH. He recalled his music videos. Hundreds of them. Videos of Bones smoking in a cemetery, standing under an overpass in the rain, or just staring at the camera in a dark room. And they all looked exactly like that.
Recorded with old cameras, deliberately lo-fi. The audio was distorted, the video was full of noise. It was an aesthetic. A powerful aesthetic that aligned perfectly with his music. The lo-fi sound matched the lo-fi video. They were one and the same.
Michael let out a laugh, a sudden sound in the quiet room. He realized something fundamental.
He had been paralyzed for weeks, not knowing which song to release next. Something sadder than "Star Shopping"? Something more aggressive like "Paris"? I was thinking only about the audio. I was thinking like a musician.
Idiot.
Now, holding this ten-dollar camera, the answer was obvious. The tool would dictate the art. The look would define the sound.
I wasn't stuck anymore. He knew exactly what to do.
He put the camera down on the couch, the engine humming still. He ran to his makeshift study and turned on the MacBook. He invoked the System interface.
His eyes scanned the list of his "Founder's Pack". He ignored "Life Is Beautiful." He ignored "crybaby." He ignored "White Iverson."
And there it was. The obvious choice.
"Sodium" - Bones.
He selected it. He opened the guide. The "emotional impression" was simple: 'Atmosphere: lo-fi, ethereal, narcotic.' The beat was hypnotic, almost sleepwalking. The vocal flow was a murmur, almost lazy.
It was perfect. It was the soundtrack for the grainy image on the television.
He decided to create "Sodium" next. But not only the song. I was going to do the whole experience. Audio and video, together.
The plan formed in his head, clear and bright. It would recreate the atmospheric beat. I would record his voice in an almost whispered, monotonous way. And then... Then he would record himself with this shitty camera, walking around his backyard at night.
It would be his first music video.
…..
Michael stared at the VHS camera that rested on his coffee table. The grainy image of his own hand, recorded and played back on the old television, was hypnotic.
He had the plan. I was going to do "Sodium". He was going to recreate that lo-fi and ethereal atmosphere. I was going to shoot a music video.
And then, a simple, cold realization stopped him.
A video needs a subject. He had to be the subject.
Panic, a familiar shiver, ran down his spine. Until now, Michael Demiurge was not a person. It was a sound. It was a username on a SoundCloud page. He was protected by anonymity.
Until now, it was more anonymous. His fans, the few and devoted ones he had, didn't know what he was like. There was no public face for "Ghost Boy" or "Star Shopping." There was only one voice and one dark cover.
This changed everything.
Shooting a video, even a shoddy Bones-style one, meant getting in front of the camera. It meant connecting his face, his body, his real identity, with the music. It meant destroying the barrier that had kept him safe.
'Am I ready for this?'he thought, his gaze going from the camera to the door of his room.
If I was going to do this, it couldn't be half-hearted. If he was going to show his face, he needed to control the narrative. People who saw the video would go looking for it. They needed to find something.
He realized that it wasn't enough to make a video. I had to build a brand. I had to build a public identity.
With a feeling of jumping into the void, he sat down in front of his MacBook. I was no longer on Ableton or SoundCloud.
He opened a new tab. "Twitter.com."
He stared at the login page. It was the next step.
Create Account Name: Michael Demiurge Username: @michaeldemiurge
He clicked. The account was created. The profile was blank.
He opened another tab. "Instagram.com."
Create Account Name: Michael Demiurge Username: @michaeldemiurge
Fact. Another blank profile, staring at him.
He opened Snapchat on his phone. You created an account with the same name.
He leaned back in his chair, staring at the three empty profiles. Twitter. Instagram. Snapchat. The three heads of the hydra of modern fame.
It had been easy. Terrifyingly easy. In less than five minutes, he had gone from being an anonymous voice to having an official public presence.
There was no turning back. He was no longer just a voice in the dark.
The world was about to know his face. And he had to make sure that the first image they saw was exactly the one he wanted them to see.