Post by Kyle Shane on Jul 17, 2017 17:45:22 GMT -5
Consider the fable of John Henry for a moment.
John Henry was a workhorse of a man, with the power and skill of 10 ordinary men on his railroad crew. He drove steel into the ground through rock and clay with a single hammer in each hand. He was an emancipated slave in the Reconstruction Era Mid-west. The men who worked over him saw no value in him, at first.
Until he showed them that he could build and drive with the efficiency of more than half the supposedly superior men in his company.
Capitalism being voracious as it is, the bosses threw him into the grind. They put him on point; a mighty oak of a personality. He was formidable. He put down everything they told him to, flattening land and laying tracks with little more than the strength put behind his own two hands and his hammer. Didn't matter what seemingly inconquerable obstacle was in his way, not terrain, not weather, not the human levels of fatigue and pain and doubt that slowed down normal workers. The men in charge viewed John Henry as a growing legend, with awe... but they couldn't have someone who was meant to be so low born start showing up such high regard, could they?
"It just feels like I'm not doing enough," he said into the phone.
He recalled a meme he had passed by on social media that gave him pause. "You are always haunted by the idea that you're wasting your life." And it's true, in that way bohemian nuggets of wisdom that populate your newsfeed are insipid, but insightfully true. He sat in his car outside of the PCW offices, having just come out of a meeting with the people in charge of tv production. Worker bees were coming in and out of the parking lot, most of them low-level office drones that pushed paperwork about ordering and shipping and didn't watch wrestling a day in their lives. He watched the sun bake over the parking lot, as he sat behind the wheel, looking at the paycheck on his dashboard, and feeling a peculiar sense of emptiness.
"Well, you know, what do you want me to say," rejoindered the new roomie. Krista was in the middle of unpacking boxes into a big, empty flat in Dorchester. It was a ways away from the financial district high-rise he had rented on the top floor back when he was younger and felt on top of the world, but they both had needed a place to land, if temporarily; and it wasn't an empty warehouse converted hacker enclave. "That there's more fulfilling things you could be doing? That you are actively blowing off meeting with a string of relatives and seeing what they want to be part of your life?"
He looked impatiently at the screen of the phone as if it was to her face; looking annoyed, he said, "I don't need extended, unfamiliar family connections to fake being whole, what I need is to... feel like I'm working to my potential at something, and I'm not."
He picked up the check. A couple thousand dollars for pinning the World Champ, Whitey Ford, right in the center of the ring. He frowned at it, before folding it up and tossing it in the console without a care. The guys in charge of the weekly Trauma show said it all when they told him that they were thankful for his weekly contributions, but that there were few creative directions for him to go, as packed as things were in the main event race right now, with Grimm's rematch, and Seromine being a looming threat; the winner of The 2017 IceMann Invitational Tournament would have to take a step back or get lost in the shuffle. You know how it goes, champ. Sympathetic shrug, fist bump to stay good, you're still a big merch seller.
It felt empty. And he chafed at the restrictions. And nobody could ever deny that he was alway hungry to prove himself, because proving himself was what Kyle Shane's mantra was about. But it just felt not enough.
As always, his sounding board was picking this up by his sullen silence. "Talk me through what you're feeling," she said in her least stern voice. He was growing thankful for her, for being able to pull him out of moods in ways even the other one couldn't. "You not feeling challenged by Trauma? They're slipping you into big matches as much as they can."
From the backburner, he thought, but didn't say. She continued, "And if you're feeling nervous about a rematch with Grimm, that's understandable, he sets a high bar, but so many people came up and shook your hand afterward and told you that you put on such a good show against him and it could have gone either way."
He sighed. That fawning, gladhandling bullshit line always rankled him deep down, it was... nice, but it's not what a gamer kid wants to hear. How could he put this to her... he fumbled his hands in the air to try and pull the words from the air. "Facing Grimm is a test of my skills as a wrestler, which I have the utmost confidence in. It's no secret that when I fought him, the announcers were rooting me on like goddamn Rocky. To the point that more people were talking about the Underground champ going in and coming out of that match than they were the remorseless, implacable World Champion. He even had to change his own game plan and specifically mention me because he sweated me as a threat. Right? Plus, Whitey fuckin' Ford exposed a big hole in his armor; and if I can push past Whitey, I'm more than confident in my skills as a wrestler. I'm the best in the world. But it feels like... okay, I'm going to nerd reference here, hold on..."
In their new apartment, Krista rolls her eyes, but smiles, as she's unboxing her clothes. Gods help her, but this man...
"Feels like in Fallout when you've maxed out the potential for a stat, and it can't go any higher, but you've spent all of your time levelling that skill up exclusively. You're 100% levelled in computers, but your speech skill is at 30, and you can't pass any speech checks... and that means in some places you can't progress any farther in the game... And - am I - am I making sense here, or - "
Krista spoke softly, indulgently, to reassure him. "You've levelled up the wrestling skill as far as it'll go, but you wonder what skills elsewhere you have left neglected."
"Yes! Thank you," he said, and there was a ten second pause where he wished she was here in the car with him. "Wrestling is amazing and it's saved my soul on many days, but like the whole thing with the hacker group and the Grey being a way for me to branch out, you know... to do something bigger, to do something that leaves a huge mark... I've just grown disenfranchised with being just a wrestler. Ya know?"
Elsewhere, something was turning it's eyes towards Kyle, as he sat in the car, viewing him as if through a screen and scanning him as he talked on the phone.
"Then..." Krista said, rationally, as she opened up another box in her seemingly never-ending effort to sort out their collective closet. "Doesn't it follow that the best way to start levelling that stat up, so to speak, is to get yourself out there with your family and start a new side quest, or... whatever, just so you can get the experience?"
"I don't need family," He cut her off so harshly that the phone crackled in silence as she held it away from her ear, looking at it like it just bit. More Shanes, more offspring of the piece of shit that spawned him, more potential bombs like Patrick or just more people holding their hand out and wanting a piece of that sweet Shane money. There was a lot to not want to walk with there, and the promise of family in Seattle felt like just further exploring a wealth of angst. He didn't need that. And a lot of the pain that had come between him and Hiro, when he'd helped the Grey ruin his father's company, for example, had shown him he didn't have much place for friends, either.
Krista picked up on this, across the phone, perceptive as she was. And now, she was wary, uncertain of her place in her new roommate's scheme of things. "Right... well... sounds like you've got some things to work through..."
He had his wall fully up now, and it was much more frigid in the car's front seat as he said, "Yeah, right. I'll see you when I get back to the new place."
"Okay, but Kyle -" she paused, wanting to reach across the gulf, try and bring him back. Offer him help if there was anything more he wanted to explore with her.
He shut it down before she could get the thought out. "Bye Kris." And he ended the call.
Cursing, he threw the phone onto the dashboard without much care. He pinched his eyes tight, a storm of everything going on in his head. His confusing, hot-and-cold relationship he was building with Krista, his life in wrestling that took up both too much and not enough of his time, and what he really wanted to be. And the bleak realization that maybe he didn't know how to balance them all. Maybe he hadn't levelled that part up enough, after all.
So, in our fable, these higher ups, they realized they had to make John Henry wear himself down. To break him, if they could, 'cause one slave could not be permitted to rise too far ahead of the pack. Plus, the very nature of the business stated that workers could not be treated as indispensible, no matter what their natural skill, they could not be compensated for their value; the very nature of the system meant that even the hardest working man would have to be reminded that he is a mere cog.
And so it felt apropos for them to give this worker a test they believed he could not pass, and show him that he was replaceable, in the best way they knew how... by pitting him against a machine they created just for the purpose of doing the job.
He was still sitting in the car as the parking lot was emptying out. He had already packed a bowl and smoked himself out to calm the anxiety, but a one-hitter wasn't enough to tamp down what was really eating at him. He thought, maybe, if he called Krista back...
He left the phone where it was, sitting askew. He watched the summer sun as it went down and the sky orange'd and purpled over the parking lot.
He finally roused himself and told himself he had to go somewhere. He was morose, and moving slow. So he didn't pay much mind when a shadow loomed out of the backseat, arms reached out for him, and he felt a thump on his temple that turned out the lights. He fell forward, and his cheek mashed against the steering wheel. His horn honked loudly and long in the parking lot as it moved into dusk.
He swam to consciousness sometime much later. And when he did, groaning and touching the bruises that rose on his cheek from smashing into the wheel and a hard lump on his head, sudden surprise cut through his pain and he looked around him with wonder.
He was in a vast hall of some incredibly arcane castle. It beggared his description. The walls rose up to a natural arch in many places like gothic architecture, but a strange subset of this view was that there were icy, bluish-white crystals growing out of the stone walls, pointing everywhere. As he forgot his wounds, he stepped closer to the crystals, which grew and formed more as he got close. It was like they were organic, like some kind of moss. And as he peered into the crystal, looking through facets in it's surface, the glow began reflecting in his eyes, and he saw figures moving within. "Wow," he breathed out. He was prepared to forget all the implications of the knock on the noggin, and the waking up somewhere else - willing to write them off as either a dream or just more Kyle Shane bullshit that happens sometimes, but this - this right here, was bringing him into a special species of awe.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" said a voice.
"Uh, hello?" He looked around. All he saw were crystals, and as his head moved across them, he saw his face looking back from all of them, squashed and stretched, like he was in an endless crystalline funhouse mirror.
"Mirrors, that's... apropos," a sneering, confident voice said, "Because they are showing you reflections... We're tuned in to you, the you that exists in some form across infinite realities..."
He whirled around, still not getting a direction.
"Millions of Kyle Shanes, in every permutation you could ever want. You want to talk against the grain? Try the world of Kyle Shane where transistors were never invented in the 1950's and everyone's got a raygun gothic thing going on. Try the world where everyone has four arms. Try a Kyle Shane made of methane gas. There are infinite possibilities... but among all of them, you called out."
He seemed to finally hit a reference point for where the voices were coming from. The dais, which was a huge sheet of crystal, with three facets at it's back. Each face of the crystal showed a much different world. Stumbling a little bit, he made his way to it.
"In just about every timeline you can conceive, and discovers his true purpose. Some of them worked towards the benefit of their future. Some of them did something terrible. But we've all stood where you are, Kyle designate #PC-132."
He squinted at the dais. Up on the steps, obscured by the light from the crystals, stood a gaggle of figures. "Uh huh. And exactly who are you?"
"Oh, come on, chum," said the sneering voice. "Don't make me guess, other me." And they stepped forward a bit, three of them.
They were him.
There was him with a completely shaved head. That one was wearing the swankest suit he'd ever seen, and he tapped his forehead, a bubble of psychic energy flaring around his lobes. Kyle felt the greeting in his own mind.
There was him with a long, scraggly beard, and the robes and miter of a cleric. He was carrying a leatherbound tome, and had a jeweled gauntlet on one hand.
And there was him in the center. He sas outfitted in a form-fitting jumpsuit with an insignia sewn onto the chest, with goggles, a tech belt, and multiple gadgets. He seemed to take the lead, but the bald psychic behind him levelled a sidelong, shifty glance at him. When the super scientist spoke to him, it was in a booming, Doc Samson-ish voice. "We've been looking for one like you for a long, long time, PC-132."
"So you... brought me here?"
"You called, we came," said the dusty old scholar, harumphing as he messed with his beard. "We heard your entreaty across the void between worlds. Through our crystals."
The super scientist came down, placing a fatherly hand on his arm. "You have nothing to fear from your future. You're far more than 'just a wrestler', it can be proven mathematically that - "
The bald psychic stepped in, steering Kyle away from the other two with a companionable arm around his shoulder, completely breaking boundaries. It was a side effect of being able to read minds. It was also borderline creepy. "Never mind them... I'm you... and I've read you like a book, my man. I can tell you exactly what you want out of life... and we can give it to you. You want to make a difference."
He looked at his counterpart hesitantly, but he said, "That's right..."
The bald one smiled, schmoozing him as only the best could (and if he wasn't Kyle Shane, he might have fallen for it, but this guy was very good.) He pointed a bingo pointer finger at Kyle and said, "So let's talk about what we can do for you, and how you can help the Council."
The super scientist took over, holding him by the shoulders and looking into his eyes earnestly. "In all the worlds we've seen, there is the strongest possibility that you have the most potential. We want to harness that potential. We want you on our team. There's a few more of us, on our Council of the worlds, and you'll get to meet them... but that's only if you say yes."
He waved off the fatherly hands on his shoulders, looking at his self suspiciously. "Say yes to what? What do you want me to do?"
The bearded cleric smoothed his robes and his beard, and he gestured broadly at the array of crystals. "We are working on something which will solve the problems that all of our worlds face. Working with you, we can expand your knowledge so that you can tap your full potential on your world, becoming the truly realized individual you wish to be. And in return, you would help us in the same way... on a much bigger scale, of course..."
"That's just blue sky talk," sneered the psychic, "What the Council wants to do, is find a way to solve... everything. Right, C-137?"
The super scientist cut him a warning look, as if he had given away too much, too fast, but he turned back to Kyle. "Yes... that's right... we can do it, if we have the right builders. And I think you can help us."
This was a lot to process. The concepts alone were blowing his mind. But the promises of what they were asking him to do was unreal. But, still, how could he turn down what they were asking of him, how could he turn down a chance to be part of something more than what he was doing? "Yes," he said with a big grin, "Yes, this sounds awesome."
"That's a good man, son!" boomed the super scientist with a grin, clapping him on the shoulder. Kyle reacted strangely to being touched in a fatherly way, as if he didn't know what was happening.
"Come, let us show you what the Council has been working on," said the dusty old cleric, and the two alternates led Kyle away.
The bald psychic scanned their minds, and made sure they weren't listening in, and then he turned to one of the crystals growing out of the wall. He observed the world through it, and looked back over his shoulder at the three of them. The future timeline unfolding in front of him showed the castle in ruins, and dozens of dead Kyle Shane bodies strewn all around... the crystals lying on the floor in pieces. And he smiled.
So it was that John Henry met the machine.
John Henry was a workhorse of a man, with the power and skill of 10 ordinary men on his railroad crew. He drove steel into the ground through rock and clay with a single hammer in each hand. He was an emancipated slave in the Reconstruction Era Mid-west. The men who worked over him saw no value in him, at first.
Until he showed them that he could build and drive with the efficiency of more than half the supposedly superior men in his company.
Capitalism being voracious as it is, the bosses threw him into the grind. They put him on point; a mighty oak of a personality. He was formidable. He put down everything they told him to, flattening land and laying tracks with little more than the strength put behind his own two hands and his hammer. Didn't matter what seemingly inconquerable obstacle was in his way, not terrain, not weather, not the human levels of fatigue and pain and doubt that slowed down normal workers. The men in charge viewed John Henry as a growing legend, with awe... but they couldn't have someone who was meant to be so low born start showing up such high regard, could they?
"It just feels like I'm not doing enough," he said into the phone.
He recalled a meme he had passed by on social media that gave him pause. "You are always haunted by the idea that you're wasting your life." And it's true, in that way bohemian nuggets of wisdom that populate your newsfeed are insipid, but insightfully true. He sat in his car outside of the PCW offices, having just come out of a meeting with the people in charge of tv production. Worker bees were coming in and out of the parking lot, most of them low-level office drones that pushed paperwork about ordering and shipping and didn't watch wrestling a day in their lives. He watched the sun bake over the parking lot, as he sat behind the wheel, looking at the paycheck on his dashboard, and feeling a peculiar sense of emptiness.
"Well, you know, what do you want me to say," rejoindered the new roomie. Krista was in the middle of unpacking boxes into a big, empty flat in Dorchester. It was a ways away from the financial district high-rise he had rented on the top floor back when he was younger and felt on top of the world, but they both had needed a place to land, if temporarily; and it wasn't an empty warehouse converted hacker enclave. "That there's more fulfilling things you could be doing? That you are actively blowing off meeting with a string of relatives and seeing what they want to be part of your life?"
He looked impatiently at the screen of the phone as if it was to her face; looking annoyed, he said, "I don't need extended, unfamiliar family connections to fake being whole, what I need is to... feel like I'm working to my potential at something, and I'm not."
He picked up the check. A couple thousand dollars for pinning the World Champ, Whitey Ford, right in the center of the ring. He frowned at it, before folding it up and tossing it in the console without a care. The guys in charge of the weekly Trauma show said it all when they told him that they were thankful for his weekly contributions, but that there were few creative directions for him to go, as packed as things were in the main event race right now, with Grimm's rematch, and Seromine being a looming threat; the winner of The 2017 IceMann Invitational Tournament would have to take a step back or get lost in the shuffle. You know how it goes, champ. Sympathetic shrug, fist bump to stay good, you're still a big merch seller.
It felt empty. And he chafed at the restrictions. And nobody could ever deny that he was alway hungry to prove himself, because proving himself was what Kyle Shane's mantra was about. But it just felt not enough.
As always, his sounding board was picking this up by his sullen silence. "Talk me through what you're feeling," she said in her least stern voice. He was growing thankful for her, for being able to pull him out of moods in ways even the other one couldn't. "You not feeling challenged by Trauma? They're slipping you into big matches as much as they can."
From the backburner, he thought, but didn't say. She continued, "And if you're feeling nervous about a rematch with Grimm, that's understandable, he sets a high bar, but so many people came up and shook your hand afterward and told you that you put on such a good show against him and it could have gone either way."
He sighed. That fawning, gladhandling bullshit line always rankled him deep down, it was... nice, but it's not what a gamer kid wants to hear. How could he put this to her... he fumbled his hands in the air to try and pull the words from the air. "Facing Grimm is a test of my skills as a wrestler, which I have the utmost confidence in. It's no secret that when I fought him, the announcers were rooting me on like goddamn Rocky. To the point that more people were talking about the Underground champ going in and coming out of that match than they were the remorseless, implacable World Champion. He even had to change his own game plan and specifically mention me because he sweated me as a threat. Right? Plus, Whitey fuckin' Ford exposed a big hole in his armor; and if I can push past Whitey, I'm more than confident in my skills as a wrestler. I'm the best in the world. But it feels like... okay, I'm going to nerd reference here, hold on..."
In their new apartment, Krista rolls her eyes, but smiles, as she's unboxing her clothes. Gods help her, but this man...
"Feels like in Fallout when you've maxed out the potential for a stat, and it can't go any higher, but you've spent all of your time levelling that skill up exclusively. You're 100% levelled in computers, but your speech skill is at 30, and you can't pass any speech checks... and that means in some places you can't progress any farther in the game... And - am I - am I making sense here, or - "
Krista spoke softly, indulgently, to reassure him. "You've levelled up the wrestling skill as far as it'll go, but you wonder what skills elsewhere you have left neglected."
"Yes! Thank you," he said, and there was a ten second pause where he wished she was here in the car with him. "Wrestling is amazing and it's saved my soul on many days, but like the whole thing with the hacker group and the Grey being a way for me to branch out, you know... to do something bigger, to do something that leaves a huge mark... I've just grown disenfranchised with being just a wrestler. Ya know?"
Elsewhere, something was turning it's eyes towards Kyle, as he sat in the car, viewing him as if through a screen and scanning him as he talked on the phone.
"Then..." Krista said, rationally, as she opened up another box in her seemingly never-ending effort to sort out their collective closet. "Doesn't it follow that the best way to start levelling that stat up, so to speak, is to get yourself out there with your family and start a new side quest, or... whatever, just so you can get the experience?"
"I don't need family," He cut her off so harshly that the phone crackled in silence as she held it away from her ear, looking at it like it just bit. More Shanes, more offspring of the piece of shit that spawned him, more potential bombs like Patrick or just more people holding their hand out and wanting a piece of that sweet Shane money. There was a lot to not want to walk with there, and the promise of family in Seattle felt like just further exploring a wealth of angst. He didn't need that. And a lot of the pain that had come between him and Hiro, when he'd helped the Grey ruin his father's company, for example, had shown him he didn't have much place for friends, either.
Krista picked up on this, across the phone, perceptive as she was. And now, she was wary, uncertain of her place in her new roommate's scheme of things. "Right... well... sounds like you've got some things to work through..."
He had his wall fully up now, and it was much more frigid in the car's front seat as he said, "Yeah, right. I'll see you when I get back to the new place."
"Okay, but Kyle -" she paused, wanting to reach across the gulf, try and bring him back. Offer him help if there was anything more he wanted to explore with her.
He shut it down before she could get the thought out. "Bye Kris." And he ended the call.
Cursing, he threw the phone onto the dashboard without much care. He pinched his eyes tight, a storm of everything going on in his head. His confusing, hot-and-cold relationship he was building with Krista, his life in wrestling that took up both too much and not enough of his time, and what he really wanted to be. And the bleak realization that maybe he didn't know how to balance them all. Maybe he hadn't levelled that part up enough, after all.
So, in our fable, these higher ups, they realized they had to make John Henry wear himself down. To break him, if they could, 'cause one slave could not be permitted to rise too far ahead of the pack. Plus, the very nature of the business stated that workers could not be treated as indispensible, no matter what their natural skill, they could not be compensated for their value; the very nature of the system meant that even the hardest working man would have to be reminded that he is a mere cog.
And so it felt apropos for them to give this worker a test they believed he could not pass, and show him that he was replaceable, in the best way they knew how... by pitting him against a machine they created just for the purpose of doing the job.
He was still sitting in the car as the parking lot was emptying out. He had already packed a bowl and smoked himself out to calm the anxiety, but a one-hitter wasn't enough to tamp down what was really eating at him. He thought, maybe, if he called Krista back...
He left the phone where it was, sitting askew. He watched the summer sun as it went down and the sky orange'd and purpled over the parking lot.
He finally roused himself and told himself he had to go somewhere. He was morose, and moving slow. So he didn't pay much mind when a shadow loomed out of the backseat, arms reached out for him, and he felt a thump on his temple that turned out the lights. He fell forward, and his cheek mashed against the steering wheel. His horn honked loudly and long in the parking lot as it moved into dusk.
He swam to consciousness sometime much later. And when he did, groaning and touching the bruises that rose on his cheek from smashing into the wheel and a hard lump on his head, sudden surprise cut through his pain and he looked around him with wonder.
He was in a vast hall of some incredibly arcane castle. It beggared his description. The walls rose up to a natural arch in many places like gothic architecture, but a strange subset of this view was that there were icy, bluish-white crystals growing out of the stone walls, pointing everywhere. As he forgot his wounds, he stepped closer to the crystals, which grew and formed more as he got close. It was like they were organic, like some kind of moss. And as he peered into the crystal, looking through facets in it's surface, the glow began reflecting in his eyes, and he saw figures moving within. "Wow," he breathed out. He was prepared to forget all the implications of the knock on the noggin, and the waking up somewhere else - willing to write them off as either a dream or just more Kyle Shane bullshit that happens sometimes, but this - this right here, was bringing him into a special species of awe.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" said a voice.
"Uh, hello?" He looked around. All he saw were crystals, and as his head moved across them, he saw his face looking back from all of them, squashed and stretched, like he was in an endless crystalline funhouse mirror.
"Mirrors, that's... apropos," a sneering, confident voice said, "Because they are showing you reflections... We're tuned in to you, the you that exists in some form across infinite realities..."
He whirled around, still not getting a direction.
"Millions of Kyle Shanes, in every permutation you could ever want. You want to talk against the grain? Try the world of Kyle Shane where transistors were never invented in the 1950's and everyone's got a raygun gothic thing going on. Try the world where everyone has four arms. Try a Kyle Shane made of methane gas. There are infinite possibilities... but among all of them, you called out."
He seemed to finally hit a reference point for where the voices were coming from. The dais, which was a huge sheet of crystal, with three facets at it's back. Each face of the crystal showed a much different world. Stumbling a little bit, he made his way to it.
"In just about every timeline you can conceive, and discovers his true purpose. Some of them worked towards the benefit of their future. Some of them did something terrible. But we've all stood where you are, Kyle designate #PC-132."
He squinted at the dais. Up on the steps, obscured by the light from the crystals, stood a gaggle of figures. "Uh huh. And exactly who are you?"
"Oh, come on, chum," said the sneering voice. "Don't make me guess, other me." And they stepped forward a bit, three of them.
They were him.
There was him with a completely shaved head. That one was wearing the swankest suit he'd ever seen, and he tapped his forehead, a bubble of psychic energy flaring around his lobes. Kyle felt the greeting in his own mind.
There was him with a long, scraggly beard, and the robes and miter of a cleric. He was carrying a leatherbound tome, and had a jeweled gauntlet on one hand.
And there was him in the center. He sas outfitted in a form-fitting jumpsuit with an insignia sewn onto the chest, with goggles, a tech belt, and multiple gadgets. He seemed to take the lead, but the bald psychic behind him levelled a sidelong, shifty glance at him. When the super scientist spoke to him, it was in a booming, Doc Samson-ish voice. "We've been looking for one like you for a long, long time, PC-132."
"So you... brought me here?"
"You called, we came," said the dusty old scholar, harumphing as he messed with his beard. "We heard your entreaty across the void between worlds. Through our crystals."
The super scientist came down, placing a fatherly hand on his arm. "You have nothing to fear from your future. You're far more than 'just a wrestler', it can be proven mathematically that - "
The bald psychic stepped in, steering Kyle away from the other two with a companionable arm around his shoulder, completely breaking boundaries. It was a side effect of being able to read minds. It was also borderline creepy. "Never mind them... I'm you... and I've read you like a book, my man. I can tell you exactly what you want out of life... and we can give it to you. You want to make a difference."
He looked at his counterpart hesitantly, but he said, "That's right..."
The bald one smiled, schmoozing him as only the best could (and if he wasn't Kyle Shane, he might have fallen for it, but this guy was very good.) He pointed a bingo pointer finger at Kyle and said, "So let's talk about what we can do for you, and how you can help the Council."
The super scientist took over, holding him by the shoulders and looking into his eyes earnestly. "In all the worlds we've seen, there is the strongest possibility that you have the most potential. We want to harness that potential. We want you on our team. There's a few more of us, on our Council of the worlds, and you'll get to meet them... but that's only if you say yes."
He waved off the fatherly hands on his shoulders, looking at his self suspiciously. "Say yes to what? What do you want me to do?"
The bearded cleric smoothed his robes and his beard, and he gestured broadly at the array of crystals. "We are working on something which will solve the problems that all of our worlds face. Working with you, we can expand your knowledge so that you can tap your full potential on your world, becoming the truly realized individual you wish to be. And in return, you would help us in the same way... on a much bigger scale, of course..."
"That's just blue sky talk," sneered the psychic, "What the Council wants to do, is find a way to solve... everything. Right, C-137?"
The super scientist cut him a warning look, as if he had given away too much, too fast, but he turned back to Kyle. "Yes... that's right... we can do it, if we have the right builders. And I think you can help us."
This was a lot to process. The concepts alone were blowing his mind. But the promises of what they were asking him to do was unreal. But, still, how could he turn down what they were asking of him, how could he turn down a chance to be part of something more than what he was doing? "Yes," he said with a big grin, "Yes, this sounds awesome."
"That's a good man, son!" boomed the super scientist with a grin, clapping him on the shoulder. Kyle reacted strangely to being touched in a fatherly way, as if he didn't know what was happening.
"Come, let us show you what the Council has been working on," said the dusty old cleric, and the two alternates led Kyle away.
The bald psychic scanned their minds, and made sure they weren't listening in, and then he turned to one of the crystals growing out of the wall. He observed the world through it, and looked back over his shoulder at the three of them. The future timeline unfolding in front of him showed the castle in ruins, and dozens of dead Kyle Shane bodies strewn all around... the crystals lying on the floor in pieces. And he smiled.
So it was that John Henry met the machine.
