Kyle – ch. 1

Kyle Weber, age 8
Let’s start with Kyle. His story is wild, plus he’s around through all of the major events Daddy remembers.

Kyle’s early life was really hard. Maybe when you’re older, or when Daddy gets bored with the rest of the story, he’ll tell you about Kyle’s father and why Kyle is so weird.

When Kyle was your age, he suffered some horrible events no father should ever tell their daughter.¹ One day, after the no-no times, he was covered in soot and feces in an abandoned field outside of São Paolo, Chad.²

Kyle rubbed his eyes, looked around, got up, and resumed his journey. His feet were blistered from two days of hard walking and he was plodding less eagerly than when he’d first began.³

Two days ago, the only place he’d ever known had exploded. Within a few moments, his father, the laboratory technicians, his cat Buttons, and everything else he’d ever known was erased from existence. Now he was walking toward Mecca, as his father had once mentioned, headed due East.⁴

Kyle was walking East in the hopes of finding any sort of help from anyone. He had always a keen sense of direction, but he was beginning to doubt it now. For two days he’d only managed to find bananas, insects, and a pair of testicles he’d managed to pluck from an unguarded jaguar. Kyle’s stomach growled.

Kyle’s mind wandered. His feet followed.

The recent events kept replaying through Kyle’s mind. His father’s last, loving, heartwarming call kept ricocheting in his mind, “Run! For the love of fuck, RUN!” Kyle had never before heard that word: ‘love,’ but he picked up enough context clues to get the gist. ⁵

Kyle fled straight into the Amazon desert.  Despite the fact that Kyle was one of his father’s company’s most valued assets, the guards were too busy and underpaid to put forth any effort into stopping him.
“no, please, don’t. come back. help.” they weakly enthused. In their defense, they were currently having the realization that their uniforms were flammable.

So Kyle ran. He kept running until he was far enough away to pause and consider where to go. He remembered the story his father had read him one night, as he put together a TV storage unit. “Hvis du er i tvivl om, hvilken type skruer/rawlplugs du skal bruge, skal du kontakte et byggemarked.” ⁶

Kyle teared up, recalling the suspense of learning what his father was saying. One of Kyle’s curses was a perfect memory, although he could only remember things at the least opportune time.

The first night, he stopped when the darkness overwhelmed him. Surrounded by potential predators, Kyle felt like a potato that happened to be also surrounded by potential predators.
Kyle had an impeccable sense of smell and hearing, so he’d barely slept the night as the noises and sounds enveloped him. When he awoke, he found himself the small spoon to a jaguar.
Now, if most children were in that situation, they would panic. Actually, most kids wouldn’t be in that situation in the first place. The rest would either panic or go back to sleep, hoping it would go away. But Kyle was unable to feel fear, though his hair did stand up slightly. So he assessed the situation and slipped out, slyly, stopping only to pluck some unguarded snacks. He stuffed them in his pockets and skipped away.

It was a while before he stopped running and returned to his joyful plodding. As his journey continued, he began thinking of himself as an animal, making loud sounds. ⁷

The next night, he sought refuge in a nearby clearing, but woke up multiple times as insects overwhelmed his body and attempted to drag him to their colony. Kyle was genetically engineered for maximum edibility, which posed a problem for him his entire, nougat-centered life.⁸

Kyle eventually made his way to a nearby field where he fell asleep for the rest of the night. This, if you’ll recall from several moments ago, was where we were when we started this story. ⁹

Let’s take advantage of Kyle being asleep to talk about him. Kyle had a hard life. That doesn’t justify his humanity-ending cowardice, but we won’t get to that point of the story for a while. Kyle had the unearned optimism of a baby in free fall. 

A lot of us confused his optimism with stupidity, because they behaved much the same way. Once, he failed to see a pretty obvious betrayal that was right in front of him. That also comes later.

Until an unfortunately timed breakthrough about eight years and eight months ago, Kyle never had a sad thought. He simply couldn’t feel sad, which made him feel frustrated, but not sad, obviously. It always helped him out, but was really annoying, to be honest. His entire life, he kept finding more and more features and foibles that had been hardwired into him. One time, he discovered that he literally could not learn how to multiply by three, which comes up waaay more often than you’d suspect.

What else? Oh, he has boring hair, an annoyingly symmetrical face, and literally every gene in his body was selected for him before he was born. It was a mixed bag, to be honest. Sometimes, it meant he had the ability to breathe under water. Other times, it meant he had a hard time breathing when it was slightly foggy outside. His genome was even encoded with a Rick Astley song. ¹⁰

Okay, let’s get back to the story.

The evening of the third day, Kyle found himself approaching a clearing. He’d lived his entire life in a laboratory in which he was raised. Kyle was tired, hungry, thirsty, and scared, so he didn’t quite believe his ears when he heard human speech. A normal human could hear strangers whispering from a mile away in ideal conditions. ¹¹

These conditions were far from ideal, so that whisper fact is irrelevant, anyway. Since Kyle could barely hear speaking in the distance, he gathered he had a 90 minute walk ahead of him. Four hours later, he happened upon a house on the outskirts of town. It was an elderly woman, out for a walk, that spotted him.
“<fish tacos>,” she asked. ¹²

Kyle also did not understand Portuguese and so did not know what to say. Kyle studied the elderly woman’s lined face, concluded she seemed trustworthy, then stared at her some more.
“<the feeling of morning dew>”¹³

The elderly woman continued, with some urgency to her voice.
Kyle did not understand Spanish, either, and so remained silent, staring at the elderly woman. They both stood on the pasture, unsure of how to continue.
The old woman gestured to Kyle to come over. Kyle, however, walked past her instead, smelling food just behind her. Perplexed, she said, “?” The old woman, whose name turned out to be Neymar, followed him inside.
Kyle bounded up to the house, went past the table, and began devouring the pellets in the food bowl on the ground.
It’s arguable whether Kyle was lucky in finding the old woman, if she was lucky to have found Kyle, or if the whole of humanity is worse for that chance discovery. You see, the old woman was a drug dealer. She ran a factory that produced the most addictive drugs on the planet. Drugs like glucagon, lithium, and insulin.
The factory was run out of an old army barracks from the Generation Wars. The old woman had been a bad mother once before and, when she met Kyle, she saw an opportunity to beat her record.
She gave Kyle a room and bed. It still had the blanket, clothes, and mostly new toothbrush. The room was largely unadorned, though there was a poster of Rita Hayworth on the wall, that seemed to flap as if by some unseen outdoor breeze. The old woman tried communicating with him some more, but it proved futile. Kyle looked at her warily, then exhaustion overtook him and he collapsed.
—
The old woman left the room and took a few moments to collect her thoughts. The old woman doubted he had family, given his condition and how remote she was from any other humans. Aside from the laborers she could barely understand, she was largely isolated. ¹⁴

She liked living alone, but she was getting quite old and worried about what would happen if an accident befell her. A child who needed help might be exactly the kind of person who could keep track of her suppositories and do some other assorted tasks for her business.
Her thoughts turned to how he could benefit her. He looked innocent enough to be useful in transportation, but probably not in anything else. The old woman pulled out her e-cocaine and did a quick line.
! The child could earn his keep. She jotted down some plans, knowing children brought their own issues. Hopefully, she could beat those issues out of him. At the very least, she could teach him to keep them to himself. By her calculations, even if the child turned out to be useless over the next two or three years, his organs would fetch enough on Amazon to offset his room and board during that time. ¹⁵

Satisfied, she took some quick e-chloroform to calm down enough to go to sleep. She’d found a child that she could assign ‘chores’ without having to pay the global tax reserved for grown slaves. Neymar, whose name didn’t come up as much as Daddy thought it would when he introduced her,¹⁶ slept peacefully, having the most lucid MMF dream.
In another room, several yards away (from Neymar), Kyle woke up suddenly, swatting at the mosquitoes that covered him. After his brief rest, Kyle realized he was somehow now fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. But he couldn’t remember what his new host had said. His memory was quite inopportune.¹⁷