Post by Kyle Shane on Nov 28, 2016 17:36:01 GMT -5
As the lift took them up into levels of research and development he had never been able to access in his ten years at Bluesky, his forebrain was busy assembling the gist of his presentation into a working, non-jumbled order. (Remember, stay confident, on message, don't ramble, "thank you for this opportunity, sir", present cool.) His hindbrain, meanwhile, was growing ever more agitated at Jono, who was projecting even more jitters than Rhys felt. His cube-buddy of five seasons in R&D was sweating through his collared whites, licking his upper lip and humming some insipid nonsense.
It was the most unlikely start to a story about triumph as any he'd ever heard.
Instead, he smiled, and nudged Jono. "Hey, after this Vasquez can't give us anymore flark, am I right?" Jono was short, with sandy hair and glasses. He looked as meek and nerdy as to cut a diametrically opposed figure from Rhys himself. Checking his own outfit in the glass side as the lift rose, he admired his reflection, vainly, smiling at his well-coiffed hair, newly bought vest-and-cravat combo, and expensive boots. He wanted to look like a winner when they took their findings to the top brass.
As if reading his thoughts, Jono cut his eyes over to him, sweating. "I don't know if we're right to bring this to Otto Grunberg, Rhys. It's still in beta phase, excessive exposure to the machine still causes sides effects like - "
Rhys quickly gripped Jono's mouth so that it puckered enough to shush him as he flicked a gaze at the ceiling of the lift, nervous that cameras or listening devices could pick up his lab partner's words, "Bup, bup, bup, we're not focusing on the negative trials f'r flarksake. We've got results, and they're encouraging." He nodded his head to the side, allowing another point, "Plus we have to produce results by the end of the quarter or they're pulling our funding for whatever Vasquez has, as in this quarter, as in this week. We're out of time."
Jono hangs his head, looking nervously at the immersipad generated by his gauntlet with it's scroll of data. "Sure, what's a little brain damage to deter positive results."
Rhys sighed, "Look, Jono, aren't you tired of our lot in life, eating scite from the troughs poured down on us from Chemwar division and gorram Vasquez, lording it over us. Vasquez. That slick oil salesman's run game over everyone to make himself look good, and we're hardly seen as high on the totem pole as the feebs in the mail room. It's time for advancement, I'm saying."
He tapped his own gauntlet, bringing a display to life in front of them, washing the lift in blues. Brain engram patterns lit up like an interconnected web. He knew his research. And with the secrets his project could unlock, a long held mystery could finally be solved.
"But the subject we're presenting," Jono whined, "What was so special about the memories of a Kyle Shane, decades ago?"
"Kyle Shane is our key to moving up," Rhys said diffidently, and that was all. It was a hard but neccessary truth for him to articulate. Years of interlabratory politics and infighting between divisions was hardly the type of environment that he wanted to be part of. But that was the difference between him and Jono, he supposed. He held on to his vision.
"Look," his lab partner sighed, "Rhys... that's not to say I don't want this for us. I know all the hours you've put into this. But look at you here, slicked hair, expensive boots, it's like you're going into this trying to out-Vasquez Vasquez. The other guys in the lab and me, we all believe in you, man. We want you to get the funding and the promotion..." his voice was ingratiatingly annoying. "I just don't want to see you become something you're not."
Rhys fixed hard eyes on Jono as the lift was coming to a stop. "And becoming something I'm not is the whole point of all of this. Because who we are sucks." And that was all there was to say.
The lift had reached the upper echelons of the 15th floor. Here was executive offices and labs with projects that had funding in the millions, where scientist-rockstars worked for years unravelling miracles of genetic coding, eliminating disease, unlocking hidden powers planted like secret codes inside strands of DNA sequencing. And it is in this office that Rhys' story, and Kyle Shane's, began surprising new chapters...
The doors were opening. Rhys looked up at the sky, blew out a few breaths and wobbled his forearms to exhale the nerves. No big deal. Just meeting Otto Grunberg and presenting a breakthrough with years of funding and advancement on the line... He was hot, flushed, and he pulled again at his cravat, which was serving as a noose around his throat. The chime dinged, and the doors trundled open, only to find Vasquez and a small knot of his Chemwarfare scientists behind him like a waiting raid. Cocky, Vasquez stood there in his pressed suit and purple cravat, looking at him in all his swarthy charm.
Vasquez extended his hand, two forefingers out and thumb cocked, and then plunged the thumb down like a trigger, letting a soft plosive "Pow" escape from his lips, and then he grinned, "Got you, feeb."
It was an inside joke among Bluesky that had taken on a life of it's own over decades, until such duels were treated as seriously as gunfights. When someone drew a gun on you, you had to shoot back or you would have to fall. But he hadn't been expecting it, and this ambush had taken him totally off guard. "Come on, Vasquez..." he started to say, but Vasquez had his fingergun trained on Jono too now, who was cowering and holding his hands up in surrender. He bent to the will of clear alpha males easily. Sighing, Rhys threw himself back as if he'd been shot, smacking into the wall of the lift, and sliding down, leaving a smear of invisible blood.
He opened one eye, trying to see if Vasquez was satisfied, and then he stood up. Vasquez smiled coldly at him, letting him know that the pecking order was thus established again by his killing them. "Scuttlebutt among the divisions is you fools were presenting to Grunberg today. I just had to be here for peer review when you presented your science fair project to him... your little Ego machine project pipe dream..." He chuckled thickly. "I wanted to be here when it gets rejected, because everyone knows this is your last chance, Rhys."
Rhys cleared his throat and glared at the head of his division. "What do you mean by that, Vasquez."
"I mean, that the right bug has been getting into the Science Board's ear and they've seen your little mind microwave has done nothing but make chimps violent and human subjects bleed from the ears. Three years of funding has gone into a thing that won't work, and Grunberg won't tolerate it. I'm saying," His voice took on a mocking tone that fit in with frat boy jeering, "That your funding is getting cut and going to Chemwar. And your balls are going in a jar on my desk. How do you like the taste of my taint, feeb."
"That's not going to happen," Rhys said, as firmly as he could. And then, he noticed a figure across the lab, watching them both. He had appraising eyes on the tableau, Vasquez, standing triumphant, and him, on his butt in the elevator. The imposing authority figure glowered, and Rhys snapped to his feet immediately.
They crossed the lab where complex computer models were scrolling by. Everything was a sterile white, even the monitors. Everything was futuristic, and holo displays swam into view on the walls of the founder of the company, and historic views of the billionaire tech firm at it's peak. As they grew near the figure, silently waiting at the head of a railed ramp leading into a private lab, he noted that it felt like they were sailing on an ocean towards a dark cloud. A cloud with thunderheads named Grunberg.
In contrast with the slickly suited Vasquez with his pompadour and his sheen of smugness, Otto Grunberg was a dark clad figure in black khakis, turtleneck and lots of utilitarian pockets. He looked military. He had a salt and pepper beard, and dangerous eyes that pierced through you. He had his hands clasped behind his back, and a patient waiting expression. His face was lined, almost to the point of being an indeterminate age. But it was the look on his face that struck the most fear in everyone's heart. He seemed to cut right through you, looking right into your motivations as soon as he saw you.
Remembering the order in which he was composing his presentation in his head, he extended his hand, "Mister Grunberg, it's an honor to be presenting our findings for you today, I hope you'll give our project due consideration."
"I've heard some interesting things about your work, Rhys," he said, tersely. "If your machine can do what you're promising..."
"Ah. Well," Rhys took one look back at Jono, who was being lost in the crowd of Vasquez's peer review team. He was giving Rhys the most helpless look. Rhys decided to go for it, and launched into his pitch. He spread his hands out, like a movie camera in front of him. "I want you to picture the ability to relive the genetic memories of an ancestor in real time, to be fully immersed in a world that hasn't been seen in decades, even centuries. We have found that our device allows someone to actually inhabit the body of someone who has been dead for years. Not just relive it, but to download all of their knowledge and skill set into your own cerebral cortex, to train your body to accept their experience through muscle memory. We call it, the Ego machine."
Grunberg raised an eyebrow at the ostentatious name. Rhys led them through as the glass doors parted, into the private lab where the machine had been set up for this presentation. At a work station, a chair had been set up, contour backed and with high arm rests. It was topped by a crown of a strange composition, a headset with suctioned wires dangling from it. This was connected to a machine with orange glowing output monitors.
He continued his pitch. "The Ego machine's implications are useful in so many situations. Say, for example, you had genetic ancestry in common with Alexander the Great, or a soldier from Sparta. A session in the machine could allow you to live through their training as if you were there thousands of years in the past, absorbing their knowledge and life experience of years in a matter of hours."
Grunberg rubbed his salt and pepper beard. "Interesting, if true." He flicked his eyes up to Rhys. "How does it work?"
"It works by unlocking hidden memories coded into your own DNA. The human body has millions of lines of code, and hidden within them are genetic memories from every ancestor shared among the line. With our machine, we can find these, and access them, projecting them into our system, and allowing us to work through them."
Vasquez snorted derisively, and said something to his peer reviews about bleeding monkey brains. They all laughed. Grunberg frowned. "I have heard there come with side effects."
Rhys sighed inwardly, "There have been some cases where the subject being exposed to the Ego machine for a prolonged amount of time has encountered some psychic pushback. The brain can only handle so much. But we've found..."
Vasquez muttered, "How to drive someone off their nut." It was clear, he was trying to rattle Rhys, get under his skin and allow him to blow the presentation.
He was quick to butt in. "But sir, what I have to show you today is something that's bigger than that. I've taken the liberty, of doing a DNA match, and, well, you and I share a constant ancestor, a couple hundred years back, and this ancestor has information that, if we continue to experiment with the Ego and play through his memories, will bring us to a discovery that will bring Bluesky fame unlike anything we've ever seen."
Grunberg raised an eyebrow. "Intriguing. Go on..."
Boldly, he puffed out his chest, and gestured to the machine, for Grunberg to take a seat. He held up one of two helmets. "If you'll permit me, I think I will show you." Vasquez curled his lip back at him, saying, "sir, I don't think we should - " but Grunberg shot him a withering look that alchemically transformed the slick player into a whinging toady. "I think we should give all presentations due consideration, Vasquez. After all, so much of our already bloated budget goes to chemicals, if cutting funding is to be done, I can think of several other projects that can be leaned." He mused. In triumph, taking even a small, petty victory, Rhys cocked his thumb back, and pointed two fingers right at the plum-cravated heart of Vasquez. Vasquez' look could scorch plasteel, but he gripped his chest in pantomime of being shot and said no more.
Fingers trembling with fiberglass nerves, he held out the headset to his overseer. The peppered beard twitched, crinkled in a frown. A long moment spun out.
Eyeing him skeptically, the laconic man came over and swung a leg over the contoured chair. To the side, Vasquez hid his lips behind the flat of his hand and whispered something to one of his underlings, who nodded. Jono was checking the power readouts on the Ego machine, as he did his part. Rhys pulled up the shared DNA mapping display on his immersipad, scrolling deeper into strands. Complicated gene sequence markers blurred by, reading through hundreds, if not thousands of years of genetic potential, as he refined the search. "I'll be joining you on this journey, as our subject was, ahem, my great, great great, great-grandfather. So I will be hooked into the Ego as well."
"Kyle Shane?" Sneered Vasquez, reading the output as the sequencers homed in on the strands of DNA that carried memory. "What in the world could be important about Kyle Shane?"
Placing the second helmet on his head, Rhys tapped a few keys on his gauntlet. He stiffly ignored Vasquez' hectoring tone, telling him frostily, "This subject was at the forefront of a key flashpoint in human history, and something he discovered is of great interest to our bosses here at Bluesky. Now, Grunberg, if you will let me show you..." he tapped one final key, "...the way!"
And the machine is
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The blue light feels like an out of body experience.
Part of him knows he's in the lab, but he's inhabiting a body, right now, being flung into a mental/astral projection, filtered through the machine's cyber interface. He holds his hands up, examining them. As he's doing this, colors are whipping past at breakneck speed. It almost feels like he's going into orbit, achieving escape velocity in nothing but a suit and tie. It's all very weird. He's been in the Ego before, experienced the out-of-body as the interface connected him into the hardwired memories and dumped him into the corpus of an ancestor, but it still shocks him.
For a second, there are just two figures, floating in a void. Of course, Grunberg, his distant cousin and this mysterious company man, are there, separated across the gulf and floating in a dark sea. The illumination around them comes from racing strands of light that run like sparks down a wire, dancing like fireflies from strand to strand. Memories. These are the best way to envision memories, an interconnected web, a relay that sparks from one to the next instantaneously. It's occurred to Rhys that this point in the Ego process is entirely metaphorical, that there's no way of knowing what they really see until the machine lets them recreate the memories of an ancestor, and that these visions may just be the human mind's way of coping, of explaining these concepts too abstract for their more lineal minds to picture...
But, of course, because he and Grunberg were sharing this ride, they were experiencing the same thing. Amazing thing was, the older man was completely passive to the whole trip, staring in silent awe. Except then he pointed, and Rhys turned. And as they did, the memory synapses firing off began to grow into bubbles, little windows showing flashes of action and life. Again, possibly abstract, but as they oriented themselves to it, a bubble began to grow, to overtake them, and the world filled with light, and...
And the first memory deposited them inside of a brightly lit arena. It was incongruous. Colored ropes fenced the body in on four sides, and a roaring, ravenous crowd greeted them, cheering and yelling. There was a distinct sense of being in an unfamiliar body, and the limbs not wanting to work. Maybe it was because his limbs had expanded, and he was in a totally unfamiliar frame, or, as he looked down, his hands were entirely different. He took a fraction of a second to get his bearings, then placed where he was. Unfortunately, he was not being given much of a chance, as a giant in clown facepaint was bearing down on him from across the wrestling ring. He was beginning to get an idea of what this was.
In some other world, the interface connecting him to the outside allowed a mental connection to the Ego. It also served for communication between subjects in the machine and those working the exchange.
So it surprised him a little to hear Grunberg's mental voice cut through the ether, barking a clipped, military command that spiked him right between the ears. "Scientist, tell me what this is. Where are we?"
He was seeing this new body try and dodge underneath outstretched tree trunk arms. Across from him, a world away, was a much smaller man, a teenage boy, really, with Asian features, dressed in similar attire to the new body. He was leaning over the ropes, desperately begging for a tag. Historical analysis dictated this would be the first partner of Shane, Hiro Sasuke, making this the IEW era, circa 2009, the dawnings of a long and strange journey for Kyle Shane. And then he knew what this was. "Our earliest recorded memory fragment we could find of Kyle Shane is him appearing on the scene in this small regional wrestling company. This, then, is where the public first met Kyle Shane, as part of a team known as Game Boyz."
Grunberg grunted, something that could almost come off as derisive. "You said that Shane was part of a flashpoint in human history. Why would he come to wrestling?"
Still interacting with the memory, he was accessing the physical knowledge, the muscle memory of all the hours of grueling training unseen by anybody who wrote the Game Boyz off as just scrawny nerds, the bone-breaking sessions, the sweat and sacrifice. He was downloading how Kyle Shane learned to fight, so that he could pepper the massive, rippling giant clown with kicks.
"That's the thing, sir, we don't know." Rhys admitted. "We don't know why Kyle Shane turned to wrestling. His personal history showed that his personality was mercurial and fickle, and he tried and abandoned multiple projects before settling on this one." He used leg muscles that had never been used for this before to launch himself into the air and hit a dropkick, which made the big clown Sicko stumble backwards on his feet. "Even Kyle Shane doesn't know why he did."
But the match would not end. Through the etheric connection, he could heard Grunberg's grunts of discomfort, even as a mass of flesh pressed down on him, bearing him down. A bone-jarring crunch went that he knew was his hip and even though he was just reliving synched memory, he felt it in his bones as he was slammed to the mat. It was the meeting of his lack of experience in using Shane's skills and his opponent's mass all converging together like lines on a chart.
"Why is this still happening, Rhys," his superior snapped, "And how do we escape this memory?"
The heat baking off those terse lines was sinking his hope of funding fast. As was the even worse news that a hard and fast disconnect from the machine would trigger a psychic backlash that had left some test subjects sorely downgraded in mental capacity. No, better to shelf that news rather than unpack the worst. Still the alternative may not prove to be any better. Best to go with the direct route; so with that in mind, he admitted, softly, "The memory sequence will stay synched until we play through it fully to it's conclusion, absorbing all the knowledge and information learned in those moments. We have to make it to the end of the sequence."
"So..." he could not tell whether the older man's tone held dry amusement or raspy distaste, "Like a game." He, himself, could not fail to see the apropos, at that.
Separately they set to it, with the grim determination of men facing an insurmountable challenge. It was taking a surprising amount of will to fight back against the titanic clown wrestler, all told. His tree trunk swatting arms punished the physical shell and would swat you away with ease. And just when you were down, you would be swarmed upon, stomped on every extremity, or slammed violently into the mat with the force of a bullfight. Health seemed to be waning. Kyle Shane's essence started to glitch, the whole arena began flickering and turning red, and losing consciousness now would mean they were in for a sudden and fatal desynchronization.
So it was that in this darkest part of the memory, just as he was about to desynch and/or die, that he found himself on his stomach. The behemoth behind him - Maker, how he could even smell him! The absorption into the tide of memories, the whole new worlds conjured by the Ego, was so complete that he could even smell the unpleasant, sour tang of madness and sweat, hear the giggles of the deranged clown as he gripped the foot of the avatar he worked through. He was looming fast and hard behind him, and feet away, was the younger boy. Telemetry was running side by side, giving him database analysis. Facial recognition scanned the boy hanging over the top rope, holding his hand out to be present for a tag, giving him a full readout to be downloaded instantly into memory banks. Hiro Sasuke. IEW Tag Team Champion, first partner of Kyle. He could read down the file mentally as time went on, and read of what happened to Hiro after the IEW shut down, and his partner went on to become a bigger star in wrestling than the "HBK of the team" ever managed to do, but it didn't seem pertinent to read that file just now. What mattered was, the memory all seemed to hinge on this one moment.
His hand rocketed out, and he reached for the tag, giving over to instinct. And as the two hands moved together, time slowed to a molasses crawl, and the world broke away into shards as the memory flitted away. The world broke itself down in mid-second, and was rebuilding itself into something completely different as one synched memory ended, and the next one began, taking them deeper into the story of Kyle Shane. Telling them what they needed to know.
He was walking through the quad of a university as stone buildings started creating themselves. Time began to run as the world around him filled out, students wearing garb appropriate to the millenial generation began moving, walking, either alone or in tight little knots of humanity. The amount of flesh exposed was enough to tell him it was a light spring day of the kind their environment never got anymore. He felt the warmth of the sun on his face, and a gentle breeze across the quad. But time continued running forward as the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came to life. He made his way across the quad to dorm rooms, sensing a point on an invisible map he had to get to. And this was where Shane next popped up, after the legend of the Game Boyz faded out of memory. Fascinating. Enrolling as a student at this prestigious Eastern college through faked transcripts. All of this information dumped into his brain faster than he could tell.
The memory continued, as he entered his dorm room. He scanned the room, taking in it's disheveled state, the disrepair of everything except the game station TV with three different consoles on a tiered crystal dais. Across from it sat a fat, slovenly nerd, absently playing the game, who grunted in annoyance as he passed through it. This, according to the profile that downloaded, was Chad Jacoby, the primary, and before Kyle had forced his way in through duplicity, only occupant of the dorm. Soon to become Kyle's best and only friend. The timeline was advancing. Now, the frame he was inhabiting was morphing, getting a little taller, longer in the legs (and neck) as he evolved. And he grew more distant. His relationships with everyone became more superficial as he let fewer people in. And he seemed to be running from someone.
In the simulation, Chad is handing Kyle a pamphlet for a frat kegger.
"All right, I think we're done here," came the dismissive voice of Grunberg. "This is getting us nowhere." As they spoke, time surged forward, playing out the tableau. Getting from point A to point B advanced the day and hour to the night of the frat party. It seemed like everything in Shane's life up to this point was hinging on this. As they crossed the quad to Sigma Beta Nu's house, the crowd around them moved in fast forward. "What possibly could happen that impacts the course of destiny at some insipid college party?"
Well, it was about a girl. She may as well have been lit up with a marker. As soon as he walked into the room, he saw her there. Fascinated by the impetus of this girl being the most important thing in the room, he passed the frat bro, subidentified as Conner Teal, two little thin packets of molly. The girl, coyly, watched him from the steps as the rest of the party continued on around her, LMFAO's "Sorry For Party Rockin'" going on around them, Conner saying something slowed and distorted about thanking him for the rohypnol. He was drawn, magnetized to her. Her profile downloaded. Her name was Array.
He began making his way over to her, as fascinated by her in his real mental capacity as Shane was when he first laid eyes on her. Slim, coltish, but, despite her obvious youth (Shane was cradle-robbing, according to this file, Array was 15) she had a daring, adventurous look in her eye as she met Kyle's, and he was drawn across the room to her.
But by the time he reached the marker, she collapsed, the red Solo cup falling out of her hand. Governed entirely by instinct, he jumped for her. And as he did, the world shattered again, and the memory synched.
As the world broke itself down and history and memory continued onward, information dumped into his brain. This girl, Array, was the catalyst for ending Shane's adventures at MIT, and his first foray back into the world of wrestling in the XWF. The world reassembled itself into a neighborhood in South End in Boston. The type of place that has lofts for artists and young professionals who work in the city, and as time synchs to seven months later and counting. Kyle and Array were here. But they weren't happy. As she grew up, forced to mature, he stayed a game boy, wanting only to keep her at a distance. And Kyle's world went from a colorful, vibrant 8-bit world to something much darker. He began using credit card fraud, drug dealing and out-and-out theft more liberally to pay his way now that he dropped out of school.
"This is the catalyst for a historical flashpoint? This boy?" Grunberg sneered doubtfully. "The more that gets revealed about his story, the less likely it seems. He's wasting his potential."
More quick memory synchs flit by. Coming to the WGWF, winning their World title within six months. Breaking things off with Array, kicking her out of the loft and making her go out on her own at 17. A string of one night stands. Weed. Trying to kill the pain. Wrestling.
"It's an escape." He heard himself musing. "That's all it is. The games, even wrestling. It's an escape, it allows him to project his energy into something and harness his pent up rage. But just think of what he could do, the potential he'd have if he dealt with it."
"He never will. Pull the plug on this, scientist."
"Wait, we're uncovering more memories. As Shane's story moves forward, he looks back more, into the past..."
The world wipes away yet again, and we come to a trailer park in Roxbury, a very poor, segregated community, and this trailer park, as it builds itself around them, is even worse than the neighborhood surrounding them. It looks like a cross between a Dust bowl shanty-town and an apocalyptic survivor camp, all of the machines and shells are degenerated husks in bad disrepair, weeds growing over all. The Shane that forms into this world is a bony, thin, broken little geek of fifteen. And he pilots those thin legs into the memory awaiting him, morbidly fascinated, swept up in the dark tide of Kyle Shane's life. Because let's face it, once you begin getting into it, it is impossible not to look, impossible to turn away.
The profile blings behind his eyes, reading a file on the swaying, red-eyed, drunken bundle of rage that confronts him. Eric Shane. The final player in the mystery play. Kyle Shane's father. He's ranting about his son not respecting him, and he grabs his son by the scruff of the neck.
"Enough, Rhys, get us out of this memory - "
He's too sucked in, though. As the first swat of Eric Shane's hand hits, those rings he wears on his third and fourth knuckles tearing the fragile young boy's lip to shreds, time skips. "In a second...." he mutters...
"No. Now." History repeats itself. The world breaks, and reforms, into a different day, but still the same second, another slap, beating the young boy down.
"I just -" the world shatters, reframes, sixteen year old Kyle Shane getting into an argument, standing up to his father, receiving a blow to the eye, and a savage kick to the ribs.
"ENOUGH." "No, mister Grunberg, if we just keep playing out the -" "ENOUGH." A hard, unforgiving fist puts a seventeen year old boy, begging on his knees, out like a light.
And then comes the day when the boy snaps...
There is a jarring, piercing electrical spike through his head as his consciousness is ripped out from the synchronization. For a second he doesn't even register what's happened, because he's experiencing such a discord between the life he was just playing out and what he knows. Where do Shane's memories end and his begin? Was he Shane or was he...? It was so disorienting, and being thrown out of that so suddenly and urgently was like being in a car crash at 40 mph. The lights of the lab around were pulsing fluorescents. They burned into his skull, leaving craters. He gritted his teeth, trying to make the world sort back out. He had warned Grunberg about suddenly stopping the machine. As sensory perception of this world came back, he noticed that his clothes were sticking to his body with sweat. And then, he noticed that Vasquez was standing by, that he had been the one to cut the power on the feed. And he wondered how much of the dialogue had been in the real world, and how much had been in his head.
Rhys couldn't articulate it, but entering that life and experiencing the power of the Ego had given such a hunger, a thirst for playing through that life and experiencing those memories. His first thought was of jilted desperation, he had to go back in and see how that memory ended, what that final memory was between Eric Shane and his son.
Grunberg, too, was gasping, holding his chest. He no longer looked like an intimidating, militaresque, dangerous man, he looked old, haggard, and weakened. He sucked in lungfuls as he sat up in the contoured chair.
"Sir, are you alright," said Vasquez, solicitously. He helped the older man up to his feet. He was sure to cut a look over at Rhys that smacked of vindication. "I told you that machine was a bad idea, you were seizing out and screaming that it was enough. I had to pull the plug. Any longer and your brain would've been fried, like those lab rats Rhys tries to hide in his progress reports."
He wanted to deny. He wanted to scream down that twisted interpretation. But he, winded, but full of wonder, could barely do anything but lay back. "Sir, I think with further study of the Shane synchronization, we can find - we were on to something - All the tools are right there, Kyle is on the road to something - "
"Kyle Shane," Otto Grunberg spat derisively, "Was on the road to nothing but self-pity and ruin. I don't know what historical flashpoint you saw, but it wasn't his DNA that got him there."
"But his potential to -"
"Forget about his potential, and forget about the Ego. I'm shutting down this lab. Take this machine out of here." He turned to Vasquez, "Perhaps you were right. Maybe now, I'll look at your research proposal with a more open mind. But you - " he glared back at the Ego, and Rhys sitting helplessly with the cradle in his hands. "This project is to be shut down immediately. I don't want any more money invested in this... madness."
And with that, the research team left, Vasquez was schmoozing, putting a companionable arm around Grunberg's shoulder. As they came to the doorway, Vasquez looked back. His greasy, mustachioed lips wormed upwards in a smug grin and a wink, and then he extended a finger at Rhys, pointed, and let fly with a shot. Rhys, already feeling like he'd been wounded, grabbed his chest.
Jono hung around in the background, making apologetic noises and acting like he wanted to come in for a reassuring pat on the back; but Rhys waved him away, and anyway Jono was too awkward about it overall. He started to say something, hummed for a split second, and then, he made a veiled, mumbled excuse, and retreated. Just as well. Now he was alone. With nothing but the helmet, and a decommissioned, defunded, and, if Grunberg had his way, soon to be shuttered machine in his hands. One that held tantalyzing power, the insight into one of the most fascinating individuals he'd ever met, a dozen lifetimes away. What was it, he asked himself, that draws him so much into the world of Kyle Shane? The allure of seeing Shane give in to his baser instincts, push the world away, and run from his problems, or the possibility of better angels winning out? He could not say.
All he knew, as he turned the crown in his hands and considered the Ego again, was that he couldn't stop there. He had to find out what made Kyle Shane so important. He had to know. The need grew in his mind to the point of obsession, and, decommissioned and soon to be shuttered, or not, there was only one answer to this.
He sat the helmet around his brow, and began slipping down into another world, a life long past, in hopes of seeing it's connections to today.
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I'll bet no one ever saw this coming.
The name Kyle Shane has been so linked, although some may say, tied down to one company for so long, throughout all it's management drama, highs and lows in roster depth and the aggravations of daily operations that me going anywhere else seems incongruous. However, nobody remembers that, at the start, me walking away from a lucrative contract with the old XWF Reboot to jump ship to the WGWF is how I made the biggest impact, suddenly a small fish in a big pond jumped over into the next biggest body of water and made a splash. And yeah, I'll bet so many people expected me to just walk away into the sunset when I left there, so me signing my name on the dotted line after a few months turned some heads and raised some eyebrows. But I knew I wasn't done. Actually, the thinking is, I may never really be "done". There is always something left unsaid, whether it's something I didn't get around to on an opponent or the broader sense, of leaving without getting the final word. It's a symbiosis, or maybe, in some cases, a mutually assured destruction. I need this outlet because I need some place I can spit my venom and push my skills, hone my wit and prove myself at the highest caliber of competition. I'm a gamer. What I get out of it is another achievement unlocked. What you all get out of it is - well. I can't say that it's a special thrill for anybody that has to try and compete with me, because I raise the bar to such a degree and I demand my opponents bring nothing less than their best, or they'll get crushed. I promise you that, even on the weeks where I'm not feeling it, you'll never get less than the best of me.
But as I look around my competition here, I have to note, that Kyle Shane on his worst day is better than 95% of this roster at it's best.
I don't deal in hyperbole when I tell you all you ain't seen anything like me pass through these doors.
From Seromine to Alexa Black, from my old pal-slash-punching bag Dan Fierce to Lunacy of all people, I look around me and I see a dearth of talent, originality,or real merit. Mostly I just look at the possibility of what I can bring to open some eyes and turn some heads, because if you think Lunacy is what's passed for sick and threatening to your entire roster, then I could take you into the dark parts of my head and have you screaming in ten seconds. If you want skill, wordplay, verbal jousting, then there is nobody who stands up to me. If you want promos that challenge the form and content of what we do, then I'm always willing to experiment. I am going to open up entirely new worlds with what I can do. Some of you should be thanking me just for the opportunity to play in them. Hail your God of Game.
But I know, talk is cheap and you'll want to see me back that up with some real action. That's why I have to question the wisdom of putting me, right out the gate, in a "double debut" match against somebody who also is new to you and trying to establish their name and get a foothold in the consciousness of Pure Class Wrestling. Because logic dictates that this is our big shot, our one chance to hit the ground running and make our presence felt right away, so only one of us is going to be able to rise to that occasion. It would have been smarter to let us test our mettle against more established competition so that when I kick the bejesus out of someone on my first show, it means a little more, and the audience is a little more awed by what they've just seen. And, also, it doesn't cut the legs out from under some other poor sap. As it stands now, I've got to face someone else who is just getting started, but by simple virture of him getting booked against Kyle Shane, everything he does from now on is going to be tainted by the knowledge that he just wasn't good enough to shine in his own debut.
It's actually a little worse than that, frankly, because if you've never seen how Kyle Shane operates, you're going to witness how unwise it would be to put someone like "The Enigmatic Creature" TEC against me and hope that he comes away looking salvageable. I'm famed for shredding crappy gimmicks and ill-thought out backstories, and brother, when I took a single look at that shithead's profile I almost had a stroke. How can you possibly book me against "The Enigmatic Creature" and expect him to show up again on the next card after I'm done making him look ridiculous? Honestly I'd be surprised if he wasn't one and done after this, he just decided not to come back after he gets served into embarassment; that is the danger of putting him up against somebody like me and expecting him to produce anything. I'm going to make it so hard for anyone to take "The Enigmatic Creature" seriously that he's probably going to put down his bags in the locker room and get laughed out of catering.
Ah, I'm sorry, I'm probably overusing air quotes when I say the name "The Enigmatic Creature" but I steadfastly refuse to call him by that undignified, childish name as if I'm using it at an interview. Even calling him TEC seems like humoring him more than he is warranted. It's the type of name that you auto fill on your first Create A Wrestler on Smackdown versus Raw when you're 12 years old. There's nothing enigmatic about this man, other than why he thinks walking around, a supposedly grown man, and CALLING himself enigmatic makes us look at him twice. It's hollow, flat and uninteresting. It's about as on the nose as that roided out Deadpool ripoff shitbrick Lunacy, who claims not to be a carbon copy of every crazy person ever, which is likewise a flat-out lie. You walk in here, with the handle of someone Enigmatic, and to you, it would conjure up this aura of dark secrecy and conspiracy. But really it just sounds like something a mealy mouthed, pimply faced geek who frequents Hot Topic would think is cool. And that bears out by your wardrobe, with fetish clothing and face paint carried over into this day and age. Enigmatic". "Creature". All of which makes it severely impossible to look at you as a real person, which thankfully means I don't have to show the slightest bit of remorse for fucking you up, because I'm not slapping around a skinny, nebbish little geek in facepaint, nah I'm dealing with some mythological creature of the night. The only Enigmatic thing about you is what clown applies your face paint and if you ever ask them to draw kitty cat whiskers on.
Besides which, every single aspect of your life is stolen.
I mean, I'm sorry, but I'm not known for holding back, and anyway, just tiptoeing around the edges of what is laughably called your persona is grating to me. Your entire existence is inspired by another "Enigma" in a largely defunct company, but sadly everything I've seen you produce sorely lacks that Enigma's charisma. Like you, he comes out to the ring calling out to the Creatures, but where he has a more famous brother who's at least providing some significant buzz, there is nothing about you that makes people remember you. So you might as well Delete yourself out of my way. I mean, honestly, what else can be said about you? Who has time to deal with your garbage, crapman? I could read your list of accolades. I could listen to that abortion of a promo you cut a few days ago to glean insight into how you're approaching that match. I could watch tape of every single match you've had up to date. But I would get just as much sense of accomplishment figuring out what makes you tick as I would doing a breast stroke across a kiddie pool. It's about how shallow your entire aesthetic is.
You are a stupid pair of clown shoes of a man and I couldn't respect you less if I tried. That is the entire point of this. You should never, never have been put against Kyle Shane, the mighty God of fuckin Game, the Game Changer, first off. I'm on an entirely different plane from you, son, you're strictly entry level goon material. You are a cheap knockoff clown paint nothing, a wannabe of a drug-addicted burnout, a pedantic little choad making baby mouth sounds. I sorely wish I had been given some actual competition on jump street rather than having to deal with you, and crush you into powder. Because then I wouldn't be taking so much of a leap, from doing nothing by beating you, to talking about my dreams and my lofty aspirations.
I am going to show Pure Class Wrestling a brilliant new reality, a new consciousness. Once they see what I bring to the table, they are going to embrace the borning future that I am the avatar of. They are going to see what I bring to the table and they are going to fall in line, bow down before me, and thank me for gracing this place with my eternal presence. You are all toiling in my wake now. You're welcome.
So I hope you stay, TEC. After I choke you out. After I break your nose, or break your arm. After I leave you beaten, confidence shattered, self-worth obliterated, your entire chintzy stolen personality being rethought. Don't leave. Stick around. Live in my new world, be part of the bright shining morning of PCW with Kyle Shane rising to the top. This is just the beginning.
But for you, it's the Endgame.
It was the most unlikely start to a story about triumph as any he'd ever heard.
Instead, he smiled, and nudged Jono. "Hey, after this Vasquez can't give us anymore flark, am I right?" Jono was short, with sandy hair and glasses. He looked as meek and nerdy as to cut a diametrically opposed figure from Rhys himself. Checking his own outfit in the glass side as the lift rose, he admired his reflection, vainly, smiling at his well-coiffed hair, newly bought vest-and-cravat combo, and expensive boots. He wanted to look like a winner when they took their findings to the top brass.
As if reading his thoughts, Jono cut his eyes over to him, sweating. "I don't know if we're right to bring this to Otto Grunberg, Rhys. It's still in beta phase, excessive exposure to the machine still causes sides effects like - "
Rhys quickly gripped Jono's mouth so that it puckered enough to shush him as he flicked a gaze at the ceiling of the lift, nervous that cameras or listening devices could pick up his lab partner's words, "Bup, bup, bup, we're not focusing on the negative trials f'r flarksake. We've got results, and they're encouraging." He nodded his head to the side, allowing another point, "Plus we have to produce results by the end of the quarter or they're pulling our funding for whatever Vasquez has, as in this quarter, as in this week. We're out of time."
Jono hangs his head, looking nervously at the immersipad generated by his gauntlet with it's scroll of data. "Sure, what's a little brain damage to deter positive results."
Rhys sighed, "Look, Jono, aren't you tired of our lot in life, eating scite from the troughs poured down on us from Chemwar division and gorram Vasquez, lording it over us. Vasquez. That slick oil salesman's run game over everyone to make himself look good, and we're hardly seen as high on the totem pole as the feebs in the mail room. It's time for advancement, I'm saying."
He tapped his own gauntlet, bringing a display to life in front of them, washing the lift in blues. Brain engram patterns lit up like an interconnected web. He knew his research. And with the secrets his project could unlock, a long held mystery could finally be solved.
"But the subject we're presenting," Jono whined, "What was so special about the memories of a Kyle Shane, decades ago?"
"Kyle Shane is our key to moving up," Rhys said diffidently, and that was all. It was a hard but neccessary truth for him to articulate. Years of interlabratory politics and infighting between divisions was hardly the type of environment that he wanted to be part of. But that was the difference between him and Jono, he supposed. He held on to his vision.
"Look," his lab partner sighed, "Rhys... that's not to say I don't want this for us. I know all the hours you've put into this. But look at you here, slicked hair, expensive boots, it's like you're going into this trying to out-Vasquez Vasquez. The other guys in the lab and me, we all believe in you, man. We want you to get the funding and the promotion..." his voice was ingratiatingly annoying. "I just don't want to see you become something you're not."
Rhys fixed hard eyes on Jono as the lift was coming to a stop. "And becoming something I'm not is the whole point of all of this. Because who we are sucks." And that was all there was to say.
The lift had reached the upper echelons of the 15th floor. Here was executive offices and labs with projects that had funding in the millions, where scientist-rockstars worked for years unravelling miracles of genetic coding, eliminating disease, unlocking hidden powers planted like secret codes inside strands of DNA sequencing. And it is in this office that Rhys' story, and Kyle Shane's, began surprising new chapters...
The doors were opening. Rhys looked up at the sky, blew out a few breaths and wobbled his forearms to exhale the nerves. No big deal. Just meeting Otto Grunberg and presenting a breakthrough with years of funding and advancement on the line... He was hot, flushed, and he pulled again at his cravat, which was serving as a noose around his throat. The chime dinged, and the doors trundled open, only to find Vasquez and a small knot of his Chemwarfare scientists behind him like a waiting raid. Cocky, Vasquez stood there in his pressed suit and purple cravat, looking at him in all his swarthy charm.
Vasquez extended his hand, two forefingers out and thumb cocked, and then plunged the thumb down like a trigger, letting a soft plosive "Pow" escape from his lips, and then he grinned, "Got you, feeb."
It was an inside joke among Bluesky that had taken on a life of it's own over decades, until such duels were treated as seriously as gunfights. When someone drew a gun on you, you had to shoot back or you would have to fall. But he hadn't been expecting it, and this ambush had taken him totally off guard. "Come on, Vasquez..." he started to say, but Vasquez had his fingergun trained on Jono too now, who was cowering and holding his hands up in surrender. He bent to the will of clear alpha males easily. Sighing, Rhys threw himself back as if he'd been shot, smacking into the wall of the lift, and sliding down, leaving a smear of invisible blood.
He opened one eye, trying to see if Vasquez was satisfied, and then he stood up. Vasquez smiled coldly at him, letting him know that the pecking order was thus established again by his killing them. "Scuttlebutt among the divisions is you fools were presenting to Grunberg today. I just had to be here for peer review when you presented your science fair project to him... your little Ego machine project pipe dream..." He chuckled thickly. "I wanted to be here when it gets rejected, because everyone knows this is your last chance, Rhys."
Rhys cleared his throat and glared at the head of his division. "What do you mean by that, Vasquez."
"I mean, that the right bug has been getting into the Science Board's ear and they've seen your little mind microwave has done nothing but make chimps violent and human subjects bleed from the ears. Three years of funding has gone into a thing that won't work, and Grunberg won't tolerate it. I'm saying," His voice took on a mocking tone that fit in with frat boy jeering, "That your funding is getting cut and going to Chemwar. And your balls are going in a jar on my desk. How do you like the taste of my taint, feeb."
"That's not going to happen," Rhys said, as firmly as he could. And then, he noticed a figure across the lab, watching them both. He had appraising eyes on the tableau, Vasquez, standing triumphant, and him, on his butt in the elevator. The imposing authority figure glowered, and Rhys snapped to his feet immediately.
They crossed the lab where complex computer models were scrolling by. Everything was a sterile white, even the monitors. Everything was futuristic, and holo displays swam into view on the walls of the founder of the company, and historic views of the billionaire tech firm at it's peak. As they grew near the figure, silently waiting at the head of a railed ramp leading into a private lab, he noted that it felt like they were sailing on an ocean towards a dark cloud. A cloud with thunderheads named Grunberg.
In contrast with the slickly suited Vasquez with his pompadour and his sheen of smugness, Otto Grunberg was a dark clad figure in black khakis, turtleneck and lots of utilitarian pockets. He looked military. He had a salt and pepper beard, and dangerous eyes that pierced through you. He had his hands clasped behind his back, and a patient waiting expression. His face was lined, almost to the point of being an indeterminate age. But it was the look on his face that struck the most fear in everyone's heart. He seemed to cut right through you, looking right into your motivations as soon as he saw you.
Remembering the order in which he was composing his presentation in his head, he extended his hand, "Mister Grunberg, it's an honor to be presenting our findings for you today, I hope you'll give our project due consideration."
"I've heard some interesting things about your work, Rhys," he said, tersely. "If your machine can do what you're promising..."
"Ah. Well," Rhys took one look back at Jono, who was being lost in the crowd of Vasquez's peer review team. He was giving Rhys the most helpless look. Rhys decided to go for it, and launched into his pitch. He spread his hands out, like a movie camera in front of him. "I want you to picture the ability to relive the genetic memories of an ancestor in real time, to be fully immersed in a world that hasn't been seen in decades, even centuries. We have found that our device allows someone to actually inhabit the body of someone who has been dead for years. Not just relive it, but to download all of their knowledge and skill set into your own cerebral cortex, to train your body to accept their experience through muscle memory. We call it, the Ego machine."
Grunberg raised an eyebrow at the ostentatious name. Rhys led them through as the glass doors parted, into the private lab where the machine had been set up for this presentation. At a work station, a chair had been set up, contour backed and with high arm rests. It was topped by a crown of a strange composition, a headset with suctioned wires dangling from it. This was connected to a machine with orange glowing output monitors.
He continued his pitch. "The Ego machine's implications are useful in so many situations. Say, for example, you had genetic ancestry in common with Alexander the Great, or a soldier from Sparta. A session in the machine could allow you to live through their training as if you were there thousands of years in the past, absorbing their knowledge and life experience of years in a matter of hours."
Grunberg rubbed his salt and pepper beard. "Interesting, if true." He flicked his eyes up to Rhys. "How does it work?"
"It works by unlocking hidden memories coded into your own DNA. The human body has millions of lines of code, and hidden within them are genetic memories from every ancestor shared among the line. With our machine, we can find these, and access them, projecting them into our system, and allowing us to work through them."
Vasquez snorted derisively, and said something to his peer reviews about bleeding monkey brains. They all laughed. Grunberg frowned. "I have heard there come with side effects."
Rhys sighed inwardly, "There have been some cases where the subject being exposed to the Ego machine for a prolonged amount of time has encountered some psychic pushback. The brain can only handle so much. But we've found..."
Vasquez muttered, "How to drive someone off their nut." It was clear, he was trying to rattle Rhys, get under his skin and allow him to blow the presentation.
He was quick to butt in. "But sir, what I have to show you today is something that's bigger than that. I've taken the liberty, of doing a DNA match, and, well, you and I share a constant ancestor, a couple hundred years back, and this ancestor has information that, if we continue to experiment with the Ego and play through his memories, will bring us to a discovery that will bring Bluesky fame unlike anything we've ever seen."
Grunberg raised an eyebrow. "Intriguing. Go on..."
Boldly, he puffed out his chest, and gestured to the machine, for Grunberg to take a seat. He held up one of two helmets. "If you'll permit me, I think I will show you." Vasquez curled his lip back at him, saying, "sir, I don't think we should - " but Grunberg shot him a withering look that alchemically transformed the slick player into a whinging toady. "I think we should give all presentations due consideration, Vasquez. After all, so much of our already bloated budget goes to chemicals, if cutting funding is to be done, I can think of several other projects that can be leaned." He mused. In triumph, taking even a small, petty victory, Rhys cocked his thumb back, and pointed two fingers right at the plum-cravated heart of Vasquez. Vasquez' look could scorch plasteel, but he gripped his chest in pantomime of being shot and said no more.
Fingers trembling with fiberglass nerves, he held out the headset to his overseer. The peppered beard twitched, crinkled in a frown. A long moment spun out.
Eyeing him skeptically, the laconic man came over and swung a leg over the contoured chair. To the side, Vasquez hid his lips behind the flat of his hand and whispered something to one of his underlings, who nodded. Jono was checking the power readouts on the Ego machine, as he did his part. Rhys pulled up the shared DNA mapping display on his immersipad, scrolling deeper into strands. Complicated gene sequence markers blurred by, reading through hundreds, if not thousands of years of genetic potential, as he refined the search. "I'll be joining you on this journey, as our subject was, ahem, my great, great great, great-grandfather. So I will be hooked into the Ego as well."
"Kyle Shane?" Sneered Vasquez, reading the output as the sequencers homed in on the strands of DNA that carried memory. "What in the world could be important about Kyle Shane?"
Placing the second helmet on his head, Rhys tapped a few keys on his gauntlet. He stiffly ignored Vasquez' hectoring tone, telling him frostily, "This subject was at the forefront of a key flashpoint in human history, and something he discovered is of great interest to our bosses here at Bluesky. Now, Grunberg, if you will let me show you..." he tapped one final key, "...the way!"
And the machine is
:::::::::::::::::::::::::SYNCHRONIZING:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
The blue light feels like an out of body experience.
Part of him knows he's in the lab, but he's inhabiting a body, right now, being flung into a mental/astral projection, filtered through the machine's cyber interface. He holds his hands up, examining them. As he's doing this, colors are whipping past at breakneck speed. It almost feels like he's going into orbit, achieving escape velocity in nothing but a suit and tie. It's all very weird. He's been in the Ego before, experienced the out-of-body as the interface connected him into the hardwired memories and dumped him into the corpus of an ancestor, but it still shocks him.
For a second, there are just two figures, floating in a void. Of course, Grunberg, his distant cousin and this mysterious company man, are there, separated across the gulf and floating in a dark sea. The illumination around them comes from racing strands of light that run like sparks down a wire, dancing like fireflies from strand to strand. Memories. These are the best way to envision memories, an interconnected web, a relay that sparks from one to the next instantaneously. It's occurred to Rhys that this point in the Ego process is entirely metaphorical, that there's no way of knowing what they really see until the machine lets them recreate the memories of an ancestor, and that these visions may just be the human mind's way of coping, of explaining these concepts too abstract for their more lineal minds to picture...
But, of course, because he and Grunberg were sharing this ride, they were experiencing the same thing. Amazing thing was, the older man was completely passive to the whole trip, staring in silent awe. Except then he pointed, and Rhys turned. And as they did, the memory synapses firing off began to grow into bubbles, little windows showing flashes of action and life. Again, possibly abstract, but as they oriented themselves to it, a bubble began to grow, to overtake them, and the world filled with light, and...
And the first memory deposited them inside of a brightly lit arena. It was incongruous. Colored ropes fenced the body in on four sides, and a roaring, ravenous crowd greeted them, cheering and yelling. There was a distinct sense of being in an unfamiliar body, and the limbs not wanting to work. Maybe it was because his limbs had expanded, and he was in a totally unfamiliar frame, or, as he looked down, his hands were entirely different. He took a fraction of a second to get his bearings, then placed where he was. Unfortunately, he was not being given much of a chance, as a giant in clown facepaint was bearing down on him from across the wrestling ring. He was beginning to get an idea of what this was.
In some other world, the interface connecting him to the outside allowed a mental connection to the Ego. It also served for communication between subjects in the machine and those working the exchange.
So it surprised him a little to hear Grunberg's mental voice cut through the ether, barking a clipped, military command that spiked him right between the ears. "Scientist, tell me what this is. Where are we?"
He was seeing this new body try and dodge underneath outstretched tree trunk arms. Across from him, a world away, was a much smaller man, a teenage boy, really, with Asian features, dressed in similar attire to the new body. He was leaning over the ropes, desperately begging for a tag. Historical analysis dictated this would be the first partner of Shane, Hiro Sasuke, making this the IEW era, circa 2009, the dawnings of a long and strange journey for Kyle Shane. And then he knew what this was. "Our earliest recorded memory fragment we could find of Kyle Shane is him appearing on the scene in this small regional wrestling company. This, then, is where the public first met Kyle Shane, as part of a team known as Game Boyz."
Grunberg grunted, something that could almost come off as derisive. "You said that Shane was part of a flashpoint in human history. Why would he come to wrestling?"
Still interacting with the memory, he was accessing the physical knowledge, the muscle memory of all the hours of grueling training unseen by anybody who wrote the Game Boyz off as just scrawny nerds, the bone-breaking sessions, the sweat and sacrifice. He was downloading how Kyle Shane learned to fight, so that he could pepper the massive, rippling giant clown with kicks.
"That's the thing, sir, we don't know." Rhys admitted. "We don't know why Kyle Shane turned to wrestling. His personal history showed that his personality was mercurial and fickle, and he tried and abandoned multiple projects before settling on this one." He used leg muscles that had never been used for this before to launch himself into the air and hit a dropkick, which made the big clown Sicko stumble backwards on his feet. "Even Kyle Shane doesn't know why he did."
But the match would not end. Through the etheric connection, he could heard Grunberg's grunts of discomfort, even as a mass of flesh pressed down on him, bearing him down. A bone-jarring crunch went that he knew was his hip and even though he was just reliving synched memory, he felt it in his bones as he was slammed to the mat. It was the meeting of his lack of experience in using Shane's skills and his opponent's mass all converging together like lines on a chart.
"Why is this still happening, Rhys," his superior snapped, "And how do we escape this memory?"
The heat baking off those terse lines was sinking his hope of funding fast. As was the even worse news that a hard and fast disconnect from the machine would trigger a psychic backlash that had left some test subjects sorely downgraded in mental capacity. No, better to shelf that news rather than unpack the worst. Still the alternative may not prove to be any better. Best to go with the direct route; so with that in mind, he admitted, softly, "The memory sequence will stay synched until we play through it fully to it's conclusion, absorbing all the knowledge and information learned in those moments. We have to make it to the end of the sequence."
"So..." he could not tell whether the older man's tone held dry amusement or raspy distaste, "Like a game." He, himself, could not fail to see the apropos, at that.
Separately they set to it, with the grim determination of men facing an insurmountable challenge. It was taking a surprising amount of will to fight back against the titanic clown wrestler, all told. His tree trunk swatting arms punished the physical shell and would swat you away with ease. And just when you were down, you would be swarmed upon, stomped on every extremity, or slammed violently into the mat with the force of a bullfight. Health seemed to be waning. Kyle Shane's essence started to glitch, the whole arena began flickering and turning red, and losing consciousness now would mean they were in for a sudden and fatal desynchronization.
So it was that in this darkest part of the memory, just as he was about to desynch and/or die, that he found himself on his stomach. The behemoth behind him - Maker, how he could even smell him! The absorption into the tide of memories, the whole new worlds conjured by the Ego, was so complete that he could even smell the unpleasant, sour tang of madness and sweat, hear the giggles of the deranged clown as he gripped the foot of the avatar he worked through. He was looming fast and hard behind him, and feet away, was the younger boy. Telemetry was running side by side, giving him database analysis. Facial recognition scanned the boy hanging over the top rope, holding his hand out to be present for a tag, giving him a full readout to be downloaded instantly into memory banks. Hiro Sasuke. IEW Tag Team Champion, first partner of Kyle. He could read down the file mentally as time went on, and read of what happened to Hiro after the IEW shut down, and his partner went on to become a bigger star in wrestling than the "HBK of the team" ever managed to do, but it didn't seem pertinent to read that file just now. What mattered was, the memory all seemed to hinge on this one moment.
His hand rocketed out, and he reached for the tag, giving over to instinct. And as the two hands moved together, time slowed to a molasses crawl, and the world broke away into shards as the memory flitted away. The world broke itself down in mid-second, and was rebuilding itself into something completely different as one synched memory ended, and the next one began, taking them deeper into the story of Kyle Shane. Telling them what they needed to know.
He was walking through the quad of a university as stone buildings started creating themselves. Time began to run as the world around him filled out, students wearing garb appropriate to the millenial generation began moving, walking, either alone or in tight little knots of humanity. The amount of flesh exposed was enough to tell him it was a light spring day of the kind their environment never got anymore. He felt the warmth of the sun on his face, and a gentle breeze across the quad. But time continued running forward as the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came to life. He made his way across the quad to dorm rooms, sensing a point on an invisible map he had to get to. And this was where Shane next popped up, after the legend of the Game Boyz faded out of memory. Fascinating. Enrolling as a student at this prestigious Eastern college through faked transcripts. All of this information dumped into his brain faster than he could tell.
The memory continued, as he entered his dorm room. He scanned the room, taking in it's disheveled state, the disrepair of everything except the game station TV with three different consoles on a tiered crystal dais. Across from it sat a fat, slovenly nerd, absently playing the game, who grunted in annoyance as he passed through it. This, according to the profile that downloaded, was Chad Jacoby, the primary, and before Kyle had forced his way in through duplicity, only occupant of the dorm. Soon to become Kyle's best and only friend. The timeline was advancing. Now, the frame he was inhabiting was morphing, getting a little taller, longer in the legs (and neck) as he evolved. And he grew more distant. His relationships with everyone became more superficial as he let fewer people in. And he seemed to be running from someone.
In the simulation, Chad is handing Kyle a pamphlet for a frat kegger.
"All right, I think we're done here," came the dismissive voice of Grunberg. "This is getting us nowhere." As they spoke, time surged forward, playing out the tableau. Getting from point A to point B advanced the day and hour to the night of the frat party. It seemed like everything in Shane's life up to this point was hinging on this. As they crossed the quad to Sigma Beta Nu's house, the crowd around them moved in fast forward. "What possibly could happen that impacts the course of destiny at some insipid college party?"
Well, it was about a girl. She may as well have been lit up with a marker. As soon as he walked into the room, he saw her there. Fascinated by the impetus of this girl being the most important thing in the room, he passed the frat bro, subidentified as Conner Teal, two little thin packets of molly. The girl, coyly, watched him from the steps as the rest of the party continued on around her, LMFAO's "Sorry For Party Rockin'" going on around them, Conner saying something slowed and distorted about thanking him for the rohypnol. He was drawn, magnetized to her. Her profile downloaded. Her name was Array.
He began making his way over to her, as fascinated by her in his real mental capacity as Shane was when he first laid eyes on her. Slim, coltish, but, despite her obvious youth (Shane was cradle-robbing, according to this file, Array was 15) she had a daring, adventurous look in her eye as she met Kyle's, and he was drawn across the room to her.
But by the time he reached the marker, she collapsed, the red Solo cup falling out of her hand. Governed entirely by instinct, he jumped for her. And as he did, the world shattered again, and the memory synched.
As the world broke itself down and history and memory continued onward, information dumped into his brain. This girl, Array, was the catalyst for ending Shane's adventures at MIT, and his first foray back into the world of wrestling in the XWF. The world reassembled itself into a neighborhood in South End in Boston. The type of place that has lofts for artists and young professionals who work in the city, and as time synchs to seven months later and counting. Kyle and Array were here. But they weren't happy. As she grew up, forced to mature, he stayed a game boy, wanting only to keep her at a distance. And Kyle's world went from a colorful, vibrant 8-bit world to something much darker. He began using credit card fraud, drug dealing and out-and-out theft more liberally to pay his way now that he dropped out of school.
"This is the catalyst for a historical flashpoint? This boy?" Grunberg sneered doubtfully. "The more that gets revealed about his story, the less likely it seems. He's wasting his potential."
More quick memory synchs flit by. Coming to the WGWF, winning their World title within six months. Breaking things off with Array, kicking her out of the loft and making her go out on her own at 17. A string of one night stands. Weed. Trying to kill the pain. Wrestling.
"It's an escape." He heard himself musing. "That's all it is. The games, even wrestling. It's an escape, it allows him to project his energy into something and harness his pent up rage. But just think of what he could do, the potential he'd have if he dealt with it."
"He never will. Pull the plug on this, scientist."
"Wait, we're uncovering more memories. As Shane's story moves forward, he looks back more, into the past..."
The world wipes away yet again, and we come to a trailer park in Roxbury, a very poor, segregated community, and this trailer park, as it builds itself around them, is even worse than the neighborhood surrounding them. It looks like a cross between a Dust bowl shanty-town and an apocalyptic survivor camp, all of the machines and shells are degenerated husks in bad disrepair, weeds growing over all. The Shane that forms into this world is a bony, thin, broken little geek of fifteen. And he pilots those thin legs into the memory awaiting him, morbidly fascinated, swept up in the dark tide of Kyle Shane's life. Because let's face it, once you begin getting into it, it is impossible not to look, impossible to turn away.
The profile blings behind his eyes, reading a file on the swaying, red-eyed, drunken bundle of rage that confronts him. Eric Shane. The final player in the mystery play. Kyle Shane's father. He's ranting about his son not respecting him, and he grabs his son by the scruff of the neck.
"Enough, Rhys, get us out of this memory - "
He's too sucked in, though. As the first swat of Eric Shane's hand hits, those rings he wears on his third and fourth knuckles tearing the fragile young boy's lip to shreds, time skips. "In a second...." he mutters...
"No. Now." History repeats itself. The world breaks, and reforms, into a different day, but still the same second, another slap, beating the young boy down.
"I just -" the world shatters, reframes, sixteen year old Kyle Shane getting into an argument, standing up to his father, receiving a blow to the eye, and a savage kick to the ribs.
"ENOUGH." "No, mister Grunberg, if we just keep playing out the -" "ENOUGH." A hard, unforgiving fist puts a seventeen year old boy, begging on his knees, out like a light.
And then comes the day when the boy snaps...
There is a jarring, piercing electrical spike through his head as his consciousness is ripped out from the synchronization. For a second he doesn't even register what's happened, because he's experiencing such a discord between the life he was just playing out and what he knows. Where do Shane's memories end and his begin? Was he Shane or was he...? It was so disorienting, and being thrown out of that so suddenly and urgently was like being in a car crash at 40 mph. The lights of the lab around were pulsing fluorescents. They burned into his skull, leaving craters. He gritted his teeth, trying to make the world sort back out. He had warned Grunberg about suddenly stopping the machine. As sensory perception of this world came back, he noticed that his clothes were sticking to his body with sweat. And then, he noticed that Vasquez was standing by, that he had been the one to cut the power on the feed. And he wondered how much of the dialogue had been in the real world, and how much had been in his head.
Rhys couldn't articulate it, but entering that life and experiencing the power of the Ego had given such a hunger, a thirst for playing through that life and experiencing those memories. His first thought was of jilted desperation, he had to go back in and see how that memory ended, what that final memory was between Eric Shane and his son.
Grunberg, too, was gasping, holding his chest. He no longer looked like an intimidating, militaresque, dangerous man, he looked old, haggard, and weakened. He sucked in lungfuls as he sat up in the contoured chair.
"Sir, are you alright," said Vasquez, solicitously. He helped the older man up to his feet. He was sure to cut a look over at Rhys that smacked of vindication. "I told you that machine was a bad idea, you were seizing out and screaming that it was enough. I had to pull the plug. Any longer and your brain would've been fried, like those lab rats Rhys tries to hide in his progress reports."
He wanted to deny. He wanted to scream down that twisted interpretation. But he, winded, but full of wonder, could barely do anything but lay back. "Sir, I think with further study of the Shane synchronization, we can find - we were on to something - All the tools are right there, Kyle is on the road to something - "
"Kyle Shane," Otto Grunberg spat derisively, "Was on the road to nothing but self-pity and ruin. I don't know what historical flashpoint you saw, but it wasn't his DNA that got him there."
"But his potential to -"
"Forget about his potential, and forget about the Ego. I'm shutting down this lab. Take this machine out of here." He turned to Vasquez, "Perhaps you were right. Maybe now, I'll look at your research proposal with a more open mind. But you - " he glared back at the Ego, and Rhys sitting helplessly with the cradle in his hands. "This project is to be shut down immediately. I don't want any more money invested in this... madness."
And with that, the research team left, Vasquez was schmoozing, putting a companionable arm around Grunberg's shoulder. As they came to the doorway, Vasquez looked back. His greasy, mustachioed lips wormed upwards in a smug grin and a wink, and then he extended a finger at Rhys, pointed, and let fly with a shot. Rhys, already feeling like he'd been wounded, grabbed his chest.
Jono hung around in the background, making apologetic noises and acting like he wanted to come in for a reassuring pat on the back; but Rhys waved him away, and anyway Jono was too awkward about it overall. He started to say something, hummed for a split second, and then, he made a veiled, mumbled excuse, and retreated. Just as well. Now he was alone. With nothing but the helmet, and a decommissioned, defunded, and, if Grunberg had his way, soon to be shuttered machine in his hands. One that held tantalyzing power, the insight into one of the most fascinating individuals he'd ever met, a dozen lifetimes away. What was it, he asked himself, that draws him so much into the world of Kyle Shane? The allure of seeing Shane give in to his baser instincts, push the world away, and run from his problems, or the possibility of better angels winning out? He could not say.
All he knew, as he turned the crown in his hands and considered the Ego again, was that he couldn't stop there. He had to find out what made Kyle Shane so important. He had to know. The need grew in his mind to the point of obsession, and, decommissioned and soon to be shuttered, or not, there was only one answer to this.
He sat the helmet around his brow, and began slipping down into another world, a life long past, in hopes of seeing it's connections to today.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::SYNCHRONIZING:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
I'll bet no one ever saw this coming.
The name Kyle Shane has been so linked, although some may say, tied down to one company for so long, throughout all it's management drama, highs and lows in roster depth and the aggravations of daily operations that me going anywhere else seems incongruous. However, nobody remembers that, at the start, me walking away from a lucrative contract with the old XWF Reboot to jump ship to the WGWF is how I made the biggest impact, suddenly a small fish in a big pond jumped over into the next biggest body of water and made a splash. And yeah, I'll bet so many people expected me to just walk away into the sunset when I left there, so me signing my name on the dotted line after a few months turned some heads and raised some eyebrows. But I knew I wasn't done. Actually, the thinking is, I may never really be "done". There is always something left unsaid, whether it's something I didn't get around to on an opponent or the broader sense, of leaving without getting the final word. It's a symbiosis, or maybe, in some cases, a mutually assured destruction. I need this outlet because I need some place I can spit my venom and push my skills, hone my wit and prove myself at the highest caliber of competition. I'm a gamer. What I get out of it is another achievement unlocked. What you all get out of it is - well. I can't say that it's a special thrill for anybody that has to try and compete with me, because I raise the bar to such a degree and I demand my opponents bring nothing less than their best, or they'll get crushed. I promise you that, even on the weeks where I'm not feeling it, you'll never get less than the best of me.
But as I look around my competition here, I have to note, that Kyle Shane on his worst day is better than 95% of this roster at it's best.
I don't deal in hyperbole when I tell you all you ain't seen anything like me pass through these doors.
From Seromine to Alexa Black, from my old pal-slash-punching bag Dan Fierce to Lunacy of all people, I look around me and I see a dearth of talent, originality,or real merit. Mostly I just look at the possibility of what I can bring to open some eyes and turn some heads, because if you think Lunacy is what's passed for sick and threatening to your entire roster, then I could take you into the dark parts of my head and have you screaming in ten seconds. If you want skill, wordplay, verbal jousting, then there is nobody who stands up to me. If you want promos that challenge the form and content of what we do, then I'm always willing to experiment. I am going to open up entirely new worlds with what I can do. Some of you should be thanking me just for the opportunity to play in them. Hail your God of Game.
But I know, talk is cheap and you'll want to see me back that up with some real action. That's why I have to question the wisdom of putting me, right out the gate, in a "double debut" match against somebody who also is new to you and trying to establish their name and get a foothold in the consciousness of Pure Class Wrestling. Because logic dictates that this is our big shot, our one chance to hit the ground running and make our presence felt right away, so only one of us is going to be able to rise to that occasion. It would have been smarter to let us test our mettle against more established competition so that when I kick the bejesus out of someone on my first show, it means a little more, and the audience is a little more awed by what they've just seen. And, also, it doesn't cut the legs out from under some other poor sap. As it stands now, I've got to face someone else who is just getting started, but by simple virture of him getting booked against Kyle Shane, everything he does from now on is going to be tainted by the knowledge that he just wasn't good enough to shine in his own debut.
It's actually a little worse than that, frankly, because if you've never seen how Kyle Shane operates, you're going to witness how unwise it would be to put someone like "The Enigmatic Creature" TEC against me and hope that he comes away looking salvageable. I'm famed for shredding crappy gimmicks and ill-thought out backstories, and brother, when I took a single look at that shithead's profile I almost had a stroke. How can you possibly book me against "The Enigmatic Creature" and expect him to show up again on the next card after I'm done making him look ridiculous? Honestly I'd be surprised if he wasn't one and done after this, he just decided not to come back after he gets served into embarassment; that is the danger of putting him up against somebody like me and expecting him to produce anything. I'm going to make it so hard for anyone to take "The Enigmatic Creature" seriously that he's probably going to put down his bags in the locker room and get laughed out of catering.
Ah, I'm sorry, I'm probably overusing air quotes when I say the name "The Enigmatic Creature" but I steadfastly refuse to call him by that undignified, childish name as if I'm using it at an interview. Even calling him TEC seems like humoring him more than he is warranted. It's the type of name that you auto fill on your first Create A Wrestler on Smackdown versus Raw when you're 12 years old. There's nothing enigmatic about this man, other than why he thinks walking around, a supposedly grown man, and CALLING himself enigmatic makes us look at him twice. It's hollow, flat and uninteresting. It's about as on the nose as that roided out Deadpool ripoff shitbrick Lunacy, who claims not to be a carbon copy of every crazy person ever, which is likewise a flat-out lie. You walk in here, with the handle of someone Enigmatic, and to you, it would conjure up this aura of dark secrecy and conspiracy. But really it just sounds like something a mealy mouthed, pimply faced geek who frequents Hot Topic would think is cool. And that bears out by your wardrobe, with fetish clothing and face paint carried over into this day and age. Enigmatic". "Creature". All of which makes it severely impossible to look at you as a real person, which thankfully means I don't have to show the slightest bit of remorse for fucking you up, because I'm not slapping around a skinny, nebbish little geek in facepaint, nah I'm dealing with some mythological creature of the night. The only Enigmatic thing about you is what clown applies your face paint and if you ever ask them to draw kitty cat whiskers on.
Besides which, every single aspect of your life is stolen.
I mean, I'm sorry, but I'm not known for holding back, and anyway, just tiptoeing around the edges of what is laughably called your persona is grating to me. Your entire existence is inspired by another "Enigma" in a largely defunct company, but sadly everything I've seen you produce sorely lacks that Enigma's charisma. Like you, he comes out to the ring calling out to the Creatures, but where he has a more famous brother who's at least providing some significant buzz, there is nothing about you that makes people remember you. So you might as well Delete yourself out of my way. I mean, honestly, what else can be said about you? Who has time to deal with your garbage, crapman? I could read your list of accolades. I could listen to that abortion of a promo you cut a few days ago to glean insight into how you're approaching that match. I could watch tape of every single match you've had up to date. But I would get just as much sense of accomplishment figuring out what makes you tick as I would doing a breast stroke across a kiddie pool. It's about how shallow your entire aesthetic is.
You are a stupid pair of clown shoes of a man and I couldn't respect you less if I tried. That is the entire point of this. You should never, never have been put against Kyle Shane, the mighty God of fuckin Game, the Game Changer, first off. I'm on an entirely different plane from you, son, you're strictly entry level goon material. You are a cheap knockoff clown paint nothing, a wannabe of a drug-addicted burnout, a pedantic little choad making baby mouth sounds. I sorely wish I had been given some actual competition on jump street rather than having to deal with you, and crush you into powder. Because then I wouldn't be taking so much of a leap, from doing nothing by beating you, to talking about my dreams and my lofty aspirations.
I am going to show Pure Class Wrestling a brilliant new reality, a new consciousness. Once they see what I bring to the table, they are going to embrace the borning future that I am the avatar of. They are going to see what I bring to the table and they are going to fall in line, bow down before me, and thank me for gracing this place with my eternal presence. You are all toiling in my wake now. You're welcome.
So I hope you stay, TEC. After I choke you out. After I break your nose, or break your arm. After I leave you beaten, confidence shattered, self-worth obliterated, your entire chintzy stolen personality being rethought. Don't leave. Stick around. Live in my new world, be part of the bright shining morning of PCW with Kyle Shane rising to the top. This is just the beginning.
But for you, it's the Endgame.
