Free Third Class Superhero by Charles Yu

attempts embarrass me because I can see My Mother is Happy. Already I wonder if she, if anyone watching, will ever miss my flawed puny experiments, my willingness to be Melancholy, my amateur efforts to properly Love My Mother. My search for happiness through Sadness.
    The new Me can't do Melancholy, but he can do pretty much everything else. He can do Tedium. He can do Ironic. He can even do Secret Joy. The advanced stuff. But the thing is, I get the sense he doesn't even know the names. He doesn't think: Now Me should tilt his head this way and furrow his brow just so to Self-Deprecate, to Commiserate. He's past that. Where I played wobbly individual notes, he plays chords. Huge, booming, double chords, eight, nine, ten notes struck simultaneously, with differing amounts of force, all of it coming out together.

    I wonder, why did I always have to tinge everything with Melancholy? Why did I think it was all about Interactions? Why did I have to capitalize every Emotion? Why didn't anyone explain that all I had to do was lean down, crouch down, and forget the script and ignore the weird smell coming from her and say, to My Mother and to the strange woman in the fat suit: I'm Sorry uppercase and I'm sorry lowercase and I Love You and I love you and I'm here, Your Son, a stranger, a guy trying to play him. We're all right here.

Two-Player Infinitely Iterated Simultaneous Semi-Cooperative Game with Spite and Reputation
    1
The highest score of all time was recorded on July 24, 2016.

    2
On that date, Wally Kushner, age seven, of Eureka, CA, achieved a point total of 1,356,888, including all bonuses.
    3
Using a modified Stupps-Kinsky approach (1973), Wally conducted a single-session game lasting more than nine thousand rounds. In total, he played for eleven days, six hours, twenty-four minutes, and three seconds.
    4
Wally's mother kept time. She also fed Wally and wiped down his face and neck with a damp washcloth. She did this twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening.
    At the conclusion of the game, Wally, then seated cross-legged on the floor of his bedroom, looked up at his mother. He asked her, "Are you proud of me?" Wally's mother was very proud.

    5
The game begins when a player walks into a room and announces a statement. The statement can be a truth or a falsehood. If another player is in the vicinity and hears the announcement and if such other player has his setting switched on to Accept Truths, then the program will engage. The subroutines will be loaded. This is the beginning of a game and this is how a game always begins.
    6
During his marathon effort, Wally consumed forty-three bologna-and-cheese sandwiches, seven and a half gallons of orange juice, and one hundred ninety-one Oreos. His average pulse during the game was a placid sixty-four beats per minute. Doctors monitoring Wally noted his almost total lack of perspiration.
    7
The program run-time summary from Wally's record session reported that Player 1, controlled by Wally, made exactly nine thousand and forty statements. Of these, five thousand were statements about the world, four thousand were statements about other players, thirty were statements about himself, ten were statements about all of the above.

    Seven thousand five hundred statements Wally made were true, one thousand five hundred were false, sixty statements were both true and false, ten statements were neither true nor false, one statement was false and beautiful, one statement was neither true nor false nor beautiful, but it was funny and sad and sweet and, on top of it all, grammatically correct.
    8
The basic tool in the game is the eye-looking vector. Each player has one. The eye-looking vector starts from the center of the player's head and extends forward, parallel to the sagittal plane and orthogonally to the coronal plane of the player's body. Players can point their eye-looking vectors in a ninety-degree peripheral field of vision from their line of forward