The next half hour was one of the most bizarre i've experienced. After the dancing settled down, for the first time in the entire saga, I spoke to my friends from the future out of character. “Thanks, Kolin.. we couldn’t have hoped for it to go better.” One after another, people I didn’t know from the sides of the stage and the audience came up and shook my hand, telling me how amazing the show was. I was still in a bit of shock, and took a quick trip back to the hallway where I had seen the pictures of myself earlier.
A large robot made out of steel beams and video cameras loomed over the center, watching everyone as they passed. As I went back in towards the stage, a girl came up to me holding a copy of the Father Time Loop comic book. “Can you sign this, please?!” she begged. I laughed, and obliged her. However, this opened up the floodgates for everyone that witnessed the transaction to ask me to sign their programs and comic books. It felt so strange to be a celebrity of sorts for the moment, with one person after another asking me to sign things for them, “Could you make it out to…”
As the crowd cleared out, I got to chat a bit more with Dylan (Zane) and Joe (Maggie). They were all going out to dinner with their families after, and I was cordially invited to go with them. They also gave me a complete copy of the script, which proved to be quite an interesting read. There is a lot of amusing stage direction, as well as placeholder text for my lines.
We all headed to a Chinese restaurant not too far from the theater, and after settling in and ordering, I finally got to ask the questions that I, and everyone else who had read the story always wondered. The first thing I asked, of course, was “How and why did you choose me?”
The answer was that it was kind of an accident at first. They had been good friends with one of my friend’s brother, and were searching for pictures of him on the internet. I host a small community gallery with my group of friends, where we post pictures and comment and such, and a search had led them to my site. This is when they realized, “Hey, there’s a lot of information about this guy on the internet! Maybe we should go and pretend to be his friend or something, and make references to personal things that he may have let slip online.”
It went farther than that though. They began to watch my away messages, scour my site looking for interesting details, and planned a story where Dylan (Zane) would come to my door, and give me a scrapbook from the future. It would be a one-time thing, and they would never contact me again. Originally, it was, too, until after it had been done they decided to take it a step further. The story began taking more shape, now, and they devised the real-life adventure for me, sending me a ticket to Minneapolis, and having me solve the puzzles and “save the future”. This, too, was going to have been the last act, but as before they couldn’t stop. I found out about the show in New York, and they planned to have me travel to it, to gain a hint to the final showdown. The date I received there was May 18 th, 2005. At this point they had the ideas of doing the show, but it was still taking form, and there was obviously a lot to plan out. The time drew nearer, and they realized that it was much too early to actually perform the show, so they improvised the cyberspace battle and trip to the movie theater. For months and months, they slaved away working on planning every little detail of the day, from the airport, leading me around, and eventually to the entire rock opera performance.
Dylan’s parents and others told me that it was amazing to finally meet me, since they felt they already knew me because of how much they heard about my quest through the years. It had become quite a big deal on Antioch campus, and apparently Dylan had been hyping the show for well over a year. After the dinner, we went to the end-of-term party, and people I didn’t know would pass me in the halls saying “Hey, Kolin.” I’d see others conversing with friends, pointing at me from across the room, and had probably a hundred people come up and talk to me that night. The minor celebrity was extremely odd, but not entirely unwelcome as I had never experienced anything like it before. Joe and Dylan were also enjoying it, as I watched them get congratulated on an amazing job over and over. It was a huge relief for them, the culmination of an event three years in the making.
The night went on and the crowd began to thin out. I got coaxed into playing a small game of late-night snow tag, but soon grew sleepy and headed back towards Dylan’s place to settle down for the night. Because I was leaving at nearly 7 in the morning the following day, I said my goodbyes to those still with me, and turned in. I shut my eyes, and ended the most incredible night in my entire life.