A Division Rising Up.

[Kyle Shane]

She had nothing but questions from the start of this trip.

The little tingle at the back of her neck had started with Kyle's terse demand to meet Patrick, the Voice in the Gray, face to face. Considering that she had never seen him herself without the sleek, form-fitting mask, it was questionable, but he hadn't been taking no's. He was drawn, pale, his lips pursed the entire time, even though he had to be blindfolded as they took side street after side street in a deliberate manifest to throw anyone off. From that point on in the park, through the back streets of Cambridge, all the way down to the docks off Pearl Street. He said nothing, not even when the blindfold fell away. Pearl Street, Griffin's Wharf, it was evocative of revolution, as Patrick would have said, on this site in 1773, the common man of Boston had risen up, joining the Sons of Liberty in their raid on the East India Trading Company, smashing a shipment of tea that would put a sizeable dent in the economic holdings of the rich, capitalist, ivory tower elite back home in England. So their mission was in modern days, Sons of Liberty. That all made sense to Krista.

What didn't make sense was Kyle's laser-focus, his terse, heightened expression, his disinterest in any obstacle as he pushed past freedom fighters of the modern day Sons, the Grey. Brodie held his hand out, a big, gappy grin on his shaggy face, as he came up to the legend, Kyle effin Shane, but Kyle blew right past him. Brodie's lips turned downward in hurt, he didn't even get to speak to his hero. "He didn't even recognize me, man, what - " the former MIT computer tech whined.

Krista, soothingly, rubbed Brodie's arm, not knowing what else to tell him. Kyle walked straight through the crowd. She knew the generals were proud of their Gray. She looked at the faces of the people in the warehouse around them, all of them a motley crew from a dozen stations and backgrounds, but many of them affecting a stripped down, organic, earth essence. They were like proto-cyberpunk gypsies, cobbled together with cheap or deep web tech, but living off the grid and away from the world. But Kyle cut right through the crowd, and made his way to the back, the big metal door of the bunker, which was guarded by two bruisers holding side-arms. "You're gonna step aside before you reach for those, or you're gonna be eating them," Kyle growled, and it was so unlikely to see the wiry, child-like frame of Shane brimming with such menace, but both guards did a double take and looked unsure.

Krista had had enough. She grabbed Kyle by the arm and pulled his shoulder back. "What in the hell is the matter with you, Shane. What is this about?"

"It's about Patrick." He said stubbornly.

A couple of people at work stations looked up from their computers. The name of the man in the mask was known, but it was never thrown around so casually. A lot of people working on coding streams of data or looking at schematics suddenly began watching the two of them. Krista knotted her brow, "Yes, fine, I told you Patrick, the Voice, thank you, wants to meet with you, but these are our people, these are the people in the trenches of our war against Shinron and - "

"And I'm not interested in giving a crap about them," He retorted abruptly, "And you've already given me the big sales pitch about the evils that the mega-corporations that run the world are putting on the little guy. But the only evil I'm concerned about is that guy behind this door."

Now it was her turn to look at him dubiously. "Evil? What the hell are you talking about? How do you know each other, exactly?" He turned his back on her, began knocking on the thick metal door. The two big men, Dax and Ben, looked at her as if she was in a position of power here, as if she was anything except rapidly losing control of an escalating situation. He was banging hard on the shuttered door. She tried to pry them away for a sidebar, but it was a pressure cooker situation, a balloon with a lit match seconds away from bursting the whole works. Their enclave, this army they had built, mostly out of nervous technicians and service workers, were frightened by this enormous breach of protocol, at the outsider now kicking in their door and demanding to see the Voice in the Gray. For quite a few of them, they hadn't even seen the man in person their entire months or year in existence. Some like Krista, or Brodie, had audiences with him in the war room filled with Cray super computers; but a good many of them communicated only through dark web forums or email pings. Some took direction straight from lieutenants in the movement.

"I'm telling you right now, this entire shit is a front for this psycho to try and take over my life. I'm not feeding into it, not this time," he shouted, frothing. "Patrick! Patrick!"

"Kyle! Kyle!" She snapped, "There's too much backstory here we don't know about. Talk to me. We can - "

And with that, like the vault of Lazarus rolling away it's stone, the damn metal door unlatched, and it opened a crack on automatic hinges. Peering inside, the dark room was lit in blue by the corona of dozens of screens. Kyle looked at Krista, thinking furiously for a moment of her plea to deescalate and talk it out rationally. From inside the shuttered room, a figure in a black mask sat in a high-backed chair, and it lifted a cordial hand and beckoned Kyle to come inside. Kyle, not saying a word, stalked through the door. He had the grim purpose of a man confronting someone he knew he was going to have to hurt. And then he swung the vault door shut, echoing through the warehouse with a CHOOM. Both of the brawny men stationed at the door eyed each other. Everyone else looked at Krista, not knowing what to do.

With an aimlessness and helplessness she couldn't help but feel, Krista walked over to where Brodie was writing lines of code on an old program. She knew he was in charge of the project that they had run, doxxing the records of more than a dozen state department employees who were receiving payment from Shinron for some of their less legal shell holdings. But she couldn't begin to comprehend the scrawl of lines in Basic and binary as he tapped keys. Still, if there was anyone in the Gray she considered an, albeit unlikely friend, it was Brodie. He switched the stick of a lollipop from one side to the other of his camel-like mouth, and looked up at her with young, innocent eyes. "Feels like mom and pop are fighting?"

"I have to say I don't get the weight of what's going on," Krista admitted as she leaned her lithe legs down on the edge of Brodie's work station. She picked up a cup of hot tea that may have been his, gazed down at the rippling reflection in the liquid. "Brodie, you were at MIT back when Kyle was there briefly, what is the deal with all of this? Give it to me straight..."

His eyes sparkled, this impish savant in his knit beanie and his pube-thin beard. He removed the lollipop from his mouth and rolled his rolly chair across the desk to turn towards Krista, talking lower, conspiratorially. "This is some real deep-cut stuff, you know, I mean six years ago, my man there was still a rookie in the Reboot? He was also a freshman in college." He nodded his head towards the metal closed door, where right now two men were holding a clandestine meeting.

"Somebody was doing some killing on the campus, stabbing people that Kyle sold drugs to... it got real crazy there for a second." The enthusiastic hipster's eyes widened, he gummed on his lollipop earnestly. "But the weird thing is, Kyle Shane's genetic material was found at the scene of the crime?" He shook his head, looking back at the door, totally engrossed in the drama of spilling this hidden side of history. "Only thing was, Kyle said that it was the work of a brother named Patrick nobody had ever heard of; some secret son of his dad's, raised by some other family."

Krista, unnerved, almost dropped the mug full of tea. Brodie smoothly scooped it out of her hands, and he took an unperturbed sip.

"Wh-what?" Brodie nodded sagely, swishing tea from one side of his mouth to the other, and continued. "Oh, yeah. It was a big goose chase. Only the thing was, nobody ever saw the two of them together, in the same light. This all went down to some big confrontation down at their old home in some crap-ass trailer park, but -"

"So you're telling me there's a man named Patrick who looks just like Kyle, who's his... brother? And that's why Kyle was so rattled?" Her mind was whirling. She tried to recall every snippet of her time with the Voice in the Gray. Every hint he had given her, every scrap of information on his interest in bringing Kyle Shane into the fold, and why he wanted, of all things, a cog in the small machine of dummy corporations owned by Shinron to be a part of their grand plans. "Are you telling me that the Voice called on Kyle not because he wanted to recruit him, but because the Gray is some kind of... cover for a vendetta between two brothers?" She took the cup of tea back from Brodie, taking a deep, bitter sip, and suddenly wishing she had something stronger in it.

Brodie, unphased, shrugged, turning back to his laptop, punching in code. "Sure, that. Or..."

She raised an eyebrow. She didn't see what else it could be. Also, he had been in that room, alone, with the black-clad figure, for an awful long time... Brodie held a finger up in the understood gesture of hitting on inspiration. "Or, consider this, nobody had ever seen Patrick. Just like nobody's ever seen the Voice in the Gray. Even now, you get phone instructions to go meet Shane, pull him in out of the cold, give him the entire package; and then when you mention Patrick, he goes berserk and suddenly has to meet him. Nobody gets in to see him, so we don't know what those meetings look like. I mean, how many times have you even been in that room, Kris?" Krista hemmed for a second, but she was having trouble meeting details. She shook it off. "That's ridiculous, though. There is someone in there with Kyle Shane right now. He lifted his hand up. He - he..."

"Sure, dude," Brodie said, his unnervingly chill voice trying to soothe and yet cajole at the same time. "We saw a guy in a black hooded outfit an' a mask... But come on... call me paranoid..."

"Okay, you're paranoid," Krista rejoindered.

"What? Who says that about me?" His head whipped around. Then he turned back, and held an empty lollipop stick out to her face like a pointer. "Just simple facts, Kris, what if Kyle and the Voice are the same person, and the entire movement, this entire thing is an elaborate... freak out? What if this is the story of Kyle Shane's emotional breakdown?"

She didn't want to admit that any of that made sense. And yet, Kyle was a specific asset because he had his fingers in so many pies that were bankrolled by Shinron. Hiro Sasuke was part of Shinron's financial holdings, and was a junior executive. Array Kadima now modelled for a talent agency that was owned by secondary, or perhaps tertiary holdings, investment from Shinron. Even Chad, in his position in the physics department back at the school, was funding his research with grants from... guess where? All of these people that had ties to Kyle's life, and the Voice wanted them all. It fit, except she didn't want it to fit. Because it raised so many questions about the world, and what they were fighting for.

She waved her hands in front of her as if trying to shoo flies or weird, uncomfortable ideas away from her. "No, this doesn't wash. If Kyle is the Voice, he would have been the Voice all along, and if that was the case, what does he get out of targeting Shinron and crippling the biggest mega-corp player in the world economy today?"

Satisfied, the hacker put the lolly stick back in his mouth. "Now, you are asking the real questions."

Her shocked silence was interrupted by a stir of Kyle walking out of the bunker. The room was darkened now, fewer computer monitors were on; everything seemed muted, even the blue light that enveloped the room he was exiting, and try as she might Krista could not make out the shape that was inside of the room, if, indeed, the person who was sitting in that high-backed chair was still there. He had to be! Screw Brodie's conspiracy theories, she had to go see the Voice right now, behold his Purge-masked face with her own eyes, let him tell her in his modulated voice what he wanted her to do right then. Or, maybe she could just skip the pretense and rip the mask off his face right then, expose a face that was not the son of a blue collar worker from Southie Boston, was not a double of the boy she had been sent to recruit. Unmasking the Voice in the Gray was such a revolutionary, frightening, unknowable concept to her that it gave her tingles, but Shane was catching her arm and he took her closer. Talking low, almost subdued from the 10 he was at earlier. "I'll do it," was all he said, and he couldn't meet her eyes.

That brought her back from her thoughts of rushing in there and ripping off her boss'es mask. "Wait, what?" Just what caused this change in attitude made her head spin. What, possibly could they have talked about in there? Did they talk? Was there a "they?" Kyle nodded, and said "I'll do what you want me to do. We have a meeting with the Director of Wrestling Operations, whoever that is, in PCW, and some of the execs from the network, the Voice has filled me in on the targets, c'mon, we'll brief this mission in the limo." And, like that, he walked on. Someone who's been given a job they don't like, but are duty bound to perform. And then, just like that, she knew that where she may not have convinced him, a talk with Patrick had made him give in. Kyle Shane had joined the Gray. Did that disprove Brodie's theory of this being his breakdown, or enforce it?

She could not say, but as she sat with him now, pulling up to the offices of Pure Championship Wrestling and it's polished glass facade, she felt uncomfortable. A wolf in sheep's clothing, a revolutionary woman dressed like some nondescript business aide to the champion. She adjusted the hem of her pantsuit and looked across the gulf at Kyle, who was sitting there, ill at ease, staring out the window at the approaching building. He at least fit his clothes better now, and he had on a suit for the full effect, but he still looked his gawky, boyish self, even if his face had turned to stone and his eyes, harsh chips of obsidian. Kyle was dressed to the effect you would expect the new PCW Underground Champion, a calculated look, sharp and swank, but still rangy and dangerous. His hair was gelled up wires. The stubble under his jaw was days old. And he looked at the office as they pulled up to the curb with the look of a fighter approaching a checkpoint.

"Well, Kyle, your first official meeting with the muckamucks that run PCW corporate," she said brightly, hoping to get his attention. "This is good, it shows that you've started making the waves you wanted."

"True, I suppose, nobody expected me to win the Underground title this fast," Kyle said, looking down at the belt sitting next to him on the seat. It's faceplate glittered innocently. "But I'm also sure that nobody expected me to meet such little resistance in getting here. I am running... dangerously close to the line that says that it doesn't matter how good I am, I'm going to be judged as a failure because I haven't met with any real competition. Even a serial joke and failure like Lunacy flaking was a disappointment because, even knowing that he wasn't really mentally capable of fighting me, I was at least hoping he would try. And now look at me. I'm not getting woe is me at all, I'm simply saying that by defeating three men in a row I should be one of the most head-turning new acquisitions to any roster out there. I don't want to lose that just because I've come up against people that never have put as much work into this as I do."

Krista tried, as she always did, to analyze Kyle, to see into what he was saying. This time he remained unreadable, as if nothing was truly firing. A cold, nihilistic Kyle was something new, and she was trying to jibe this Kyle with the one before going in to that room. Did someone different come out, after all? Or, did he look at the hardcore nature of the Underground division he was championing and see that it was going to take less grand talk and more blunt action. "They see something in you, they're putting you against former champions like Tyrone Smith already."

Kyle chuckled, "Crazy Boy? If that's their lame attempt at building interest in the division by giving me a new rival until Lunacy comes back from his latest ill-inspired tour of the comics store to rip off Deadpool ideas, I think I'm better off not meeting with the heads of the network. They're going to want to dictate terms to me, of what they expect their champions to look, sound, and act like, and I've already tried so hard to pour myself into a mold only to chafe against it that I'd really rather not give them any reason to try and talk to me about what they want." He pinched his eyes shut, remembering his current mission. And, perhaps, the talk in the locked room with the Voice in the Gray.

"The thing about Crazy Boy is that everything about him is so... ordinary as fuck," Kyle said, "I don't even need to pop melatonin or listen to a tape of whale calls if I want to drift off to sleep. All I have to do is put on a Crazy Boy promo. All I can glean from him is that he's an average wrestler who spends time training with his brothers. And I can't fault him for that, I guess. But what, exactly, marks him as 'Crazy', or anything he does as being the least bit against the grain? I mean, it's not like crazy's an overused perjorative, that entirely too many people trade on the handle that they're some kind of fucked up when they're not. Flamers like Lunacy trade on the crazy handle and go balls out, saying outlandish things and spewing out threats about breaking bones and ripping off earlobes for necklaces. Communing with demons. Talking about how they spent years of their lives in asylums. They go the crazy route because it's the world's oldest, and honestly most insulting shorthand to prove that they're evil. When in fact, mental illness just plain don't work like that. People like the aesthetic of crazy, but not a damn one person ever really nails what it really means. So there's that, but then you have Tyrone Smith, who calls himself Crazy Boy, and, for what? I can honestly say that there is not one thing Tyrone's said or done in his plain, vanilla and unsalted peanut life that's bent reality even a degree out of kilter."

He looks down at the belt on the leather seat beside him, a contemplative expression on his face. "Is he a decent wrestler? I mean, sure, I can gauge that, he's qualified. He doesn't set the world on fire, but I would at least expect him to put up effort where some little paper-thin shit like The Enigmatic Creature got so scared of me trashing his gimmick that he bailed on the company; I at least expect Crazy Boy to make some kind of effort but for what? It won't do him any good. You put him in a room with people that do, like Lunacy, at least try to live up to the name crazy by polluting the air with wacky antics and terms they aren't familiar with, and the simple fact is Tyrone Smith gets the living shit beat out of him by those people all the time. Hell, Tyrone Smith got beaten the last multiple times I did check, by Lunacy, and Lunacy would need to get a twenty foot ladder if he wanted to stand tall enough to lace my God damn boots and kiss the toe. I don't fear anyone who's a bitch to mister Control Is A Lie Copyright 2013, is what I'm saying."

Krista's phone buzzed. It was a message from Patrick, the Voice. She didn't open it to see what it said, but it was curious timing, to her. And thought provoking, because Kyle didn't send it. She smiled. Kyle looked up at the building. "But if they want to build a division around me, I'm going to have to take on the crazies, or the ones that claim to be the craziest, and I'm going to have to kick the living shit out of all of them and slap their fake affected mental illness down their throat. I'm going to have to ram the words that they want people to associate, that they're special, or their supposed differences make them stronger, or darker, or less prone to fear, down their throat - cause those are complete and utter bullshit. If that means that I have to overcome expectations about what somebody with issues looks like, so be it. If that means I have to make my own division rise up over the bodies of wasted little princesses like Tyrone "Badly Chosen Adjective" Smith and his generic create a wrestler existence, then so be it."

He opened the door, adjusted the tie, and reached over to pick up the belt. "You know the mission, though, right, Kyle?"

He fixed her with a look that chilled her soul. "He told me exactly what I have to do, and I know that he wants me to get close to the head of television and get a meeting with the network. The network is the eyes of Shinron, and they're gonna be the first to go blind. I know what my role in this is, Krista. Do you?"

His demeanor towards her was so frosty she almost felt her breath inside of the limo. She then took a minute to look at the text message, sent to her by the boss.

"Krista, plans have changed. We need leverage to break Shane. We need you to get yourself in with the model and see if you can subvert her. Bring her in to the fold. It is only when he is faced with his dear Array that Kyle will join us fully and of his own free will." She squinted. These instructions couldn't make sense, if the Voice thought Kyle couldn't be trusted, why involve the girl, who would provide a clear distraction? It didn't...

She looked up at Kyle, who was standing on the steps of the corporate offices, and he had his phone out, reading a text message. He looked up at her, and for a tense moment their eyes met.

She looked down at the message, even more confused. What if this wasn't him at all? Or what if this led credence to a very scary theory of a divided mind playing a game of chess with it's other half? Who sent the message to go find Array? Who sent the message?

She was very aware of the glass window between the two of them in that instant.