Post by Kyle Shane on Mar 19, 2017 14:24:10 GMT -5
The sound of her heels clicking against the floor of the lab woke him up from his pensive quiet.
He perked up, to see Melanie, striding into the lab and peering at him with bemusement. She had a pad clasped to her chest, her hair was coiffed in an elaborate side cornrow, and her business suit was cut sharp and severe. She looked down at Rhys in his disheveled, rumpled yesterday's jumpsuit, and she raised an eyebrow. He felt immediately self-conscious and small, and moved his arm over to cover the crumbs and food stains on his tunic. "Rhys," she called, "Why are you burning the midnight energon, it's clock out time, boy."
She seemed to catch him admiring the way her shoes shaped her calf muscles, and he snapped back to attention, before turning back to the helmet on his workstation and the data streaming on his four screens. "I've ran into some bugs with the memory playback of the Ego and I can't access past a certain point."
"So you've hit a part of your game that you can't get past?" the way she said it instantly made him shrivel inside. Melanie was a tough egg, she had risen up in her division fairly well, but she was known to bust balls. He admitted that he didn't know much else about her, but he was always game to try. He'd even asked her out to a drink a time or two. But she always steered conversation back to the bottom line of what was going on in the lab. Now, though, she was looking at his displays, all of the scroll of numbers that translated into conceptual imaging of a life from a century ago. It felt intrusive.
"It's not a game," he said defensively, pulling the helmet back away from her. "Using the Ego to reconstruct the life of Kyle Shane using genetic muscle memory is an involved process that's taken years of my research, and it's - "
"You're replaying somebody else's life from checkpoint to checkpoint to get to the last stage. If that's not a game, what is?" Melanie said, throwing up her hands a little.
He pooched his lower lip out. Melanie's lip curled a little, playfully mocking. She was leaning against his desk now, and he squawked as she pushed papers around. "So what part can't you get past?"
He hedged with whether he wanted to let an office worker, even a highly ranked one, that he had only encountered professionally and had never really let in to his research before, know the ins and outs of where he was going. Worst case scenario was she could be a mole for another department looking to torpedo his Ego project and take the funding. But Melanie's carefully pencilled eyebrows raised and her hazel eyes pierced deep into his, and he found himself unable to turn her away.
"In my playthro- My research, I have hit upon a nexus of possibilities that are frustrated by an unexpected X-factor that pertains to the behavioral history of the test subject."
Melanie rolled her eyes, "Geez you're wordy, you need to be careful with that, if you talk too long, you are going to lose your audience."
"Kyle Shane can't talk to girls!" Rhys blurted, and then he blushed. As if he had spilled some embarrassing secret of his own adolescence.
Melanie looked at him for a long second, mouth parted, and then she laughed lightly, even though it felt like it was him she was laughing at. "So why do you even care?"
Frustrated by her ambivalence, he paged through strings of code in an endless universe, isolating the memory bubble. "Because this is an ancestor that had a Gengis Khan effect on an entire generation. Kyle Shane was proven to copulate with a double digit number of women, to the point where a very large percent has been passed down Shane DNA from multiple donors. The EGO machine can reconstruct imbedded memories and recreate the past through anyone with the DNA in their body, but the memories start breaking down once you start factoring in the past behavior. Kyle Shane did manage to find multiple girls to mate with, somehow, but the further I probe into his memories, the more I find myself desynchronizing, because reconstructing - playing - as Kyle Shane is... frustrating. His choices were so bad."
Melanie looked at the datastream, "Because he doesn't know how to talk to women. Hmmm. Sounds like people I know..." she says, picking up a small, anatomically correct model on his desk.
He felt like he was defending not just Kyle, but in a weird way himself and his work when he spoke up. (Also he snatched the model of the nubile elf princess out of Melanie's hands because she... didn't need to see that...) "Kyle sees himself as someone who loves and honors women, because a lot of them remind him of his mother, who was a saintly figure to him..."
Melanie squinted. " - Which is deeply problematic in it's own roots..."
Rhys, not getting the implication, gave her an understood gesture, "But the problem is always that his intentions may had started out as good, but they tend to come across strong, which attracts either the wrong type of girl, or pushes equally strong personalities off."
"So, creepy, got it."
"Not creepy!" Rhys defended, stoutly, eyeing Melanie snarkily as he picked up the feed helmet. Again, this felt as much an attack on him as it did the ancestor through some unknown branch. "Just not understood. But if I can just figure out which encounters with which female partners led to success, I could continue synchronizing and mapping the lifeline of Shane, including where his geneology ends up."
And so Melanie, who before had been little more than a mystery, a tempting pixie in the office pool who he had never dared to get close enough to, looked at him with some look of calculating, and she slid over into a work chair next to him, and said "So, okay, let's look through the memory together, see if we can't keep it synchronized."
"You? And me? T-together?" He stammered. She shrugged as if it wasn't the big deal he was playing it as. "Sure, Gengis Khan effect on multiple donors, like you said. I'm pretty sure I've got some DNA from Kyle Shane in my family line, too... c'mon, hook me up." And so, she picked up the second feed helmet. And before he could even consider the ramifications of this, the possible side effects (brain pudding) or the fact they shared a far-back link... his need to impress this laconic office acquaintance with the alluring eyes and dusky skin overrode all. He plugged in, and began pinging on his pad for a few moments. And then, there was the ripped into the void sensation of synchronizing.
And then, he woke up in another body, and he knew that Melanie did too, in a separate simulation, showing her the same thing.
So he was running through the memory bubble again, trying to find some way of successfully completing the simplest mission of all: mere copulation, a meaningful and emotional bond with a female of his species. He sat there, legs crossed, and in a chair across from him was a woman the digital readout showed as Krista Greer, a non-compatible subject. She was talking to Kyle, but he was tuning her out as he flipped through apps on his phone. He heard, from a million miles away, Melanie trying to cajole him, "Maybe you should be listening to this woman, if she's connected with Kyle, maybe she could be the mate that Kyle is supposed to end up with, the one that completing an encounter with synchs the memory."
He obviously, obviously knew more about this than her, being her first time in this simulation. "Krista's NPC, non playable, she doesn't matter in this simulation. Now can we focus." He turned back to the phone.
There was a possibility, Kyle had multiple contacts in his phone, if he successfully completed the encounter known as "sending nudes" in the parlance of the early Aught Millenial era, then it's possible he would find the link and synch the memory. He opened his contacts and created a text message to the first promising entry, a cute little name with a heart beside it. Texting her, what the memory downloads had taught him about the language of mating in Kyle Shane's time period.
"Hey sexy. Wanna send me nudes?"
MEMORY FAILED. DESYNCHRONIZING.
After the burst of static finished and the world coalesced back into the memory replay, in Krista Greer's office, Rhys grimaced and felt stupid. Childish, fumbling, grasping at concepts he had no experience with. He was starting to know how Kyle could be getting it wrong. He opened too bluntly, he proclaimed his intentions too broadly. With his next try he would need to employ a little more subtlety. He began a text...
"I just wanted to say that you look gorgeous in your profile picture and I really want to get to hang out sometime so we can talk."
He awaited a response for a second, grinning at the better wording.
MEMORY FAILED. DESYNCHRONIZING.
He growled, and now, with the feeling of Melanie watching, observing, he felt chagrined. She just seemed to be sitting back and watching him desynchronize. "Do you want me to give you some pointers?" She asked, amused. Irritated, he waved her off, "No, I can do this, I know how to talk to women, alright." When he returned to the office simulation, phone in hand, he saw that he had a message from a number in his phone. "Heyyy, haven't seen you in a while!" He opened, anxious over little things like that he might come off as desperate for this to work through tone.
"Hey!" he was relieved when he got a response.
"Whatcha up to?"
"Not much, hbu?"
"I'm good, I'm just sitting in my doctor's office, bored, haha." A bead of sweat dripped down between his eyes as he tried to figure out how to close this message off and stick the landing.
"Wanna play 20 questions?"
MEMORY FAILED. DESYNCHRONIZING.
"Oh come on," he exploded to himself as he lost connection and had to restart the memory from where the bubble began, with his phone in his hand, sitting in the office across from Krista Greer. And something tingled at the back of his mind, some fact about Kyle Shane's life that was lost to time. Maybe the reason that this memory hadn't synched is because he kept trying to talk to random women that didn't mean anything to Kyle. If memory searches led him to anything, he did know that once, there was a girl in Kyle's life that meant a lot to him, that brought him out of the darkest places. And so maybe, there was a chance, if he reached out to her, and explained things, had Kyle pour his heart out to his lost love, they would rekindle a flame between them, be the catalyst that pushed Kyle forward into his new destiny and make a future. So he looked through the contacts in the phone, and found the name of that soulmate. Array. And he began, with every good intention, to reach out to the ex of Kyle Shane, to explain how he felt.
"I miss you."
MEMORY FAILED. DESYNCHRONIZING.
"This... is pathetic," Melanie said, but she sounded a bit more sympathetic now. She asked if he would let her get a try, but he wasn't about to do that. Still, her advice was coming in his ears, about giving girls their own agency and not coming on so strong, but as he slid back into the memory he was just sitting there and stewing.
And there he was, with the phone in his hand, his contacts open, ready for another go-round. But all of the de-synchronizations and failures were adding up to him, and at a frustrated loss for what to do, he shut his phone, sitting back in his seat. In the sim, it was Doctor Krista who looked over to him, and her cool, clinical voice, somehow reminded him of Melanie. "Hey, you. Why the face drooping. We've done some good work this week."
"It's just that it seems so pointless and I'm tired of trying to make this work with these girls that I don't even care about, who don't even care about me." He was speaking for Kyle now, and it felt from the heart, no matter what mouth the words came out of. "I never got any practice at doing this before, when I was young, and now that I've gotten older the rules of what to do to get somebody's attention have changed so much that I can barely understand them. But I'm awkward, so I don't know what I'm doing half the time, and - ugh, I don't know." He was speaking about the simulation itself, but the synched version of Krista nodded as if she knew what he was talking about.
"It can be hard relating to people. But what I want you to do is to stop putting so much pressure on yourself to meet someone and force them to engage you on terms you can understand. When you meet the right person - and you will - when you talk with them, it will come easily and naturally and you won't have to force it."
And that was it. A blue light pinged on the side of his helmet, letting him know he'd passed a checkpoint reserved for a big breakthrough. That was all he had to do. In the simulation, Krista Greer continued, "Now come on, let's go get some lunch," and she picked up her bag, as Kyle put his phone back in his pocket and got up and followed her. Then, the simulation ended, and he took off his helmet.
Melanie was watching him, smiling, a little triumphantly. "So, what did we learn?"
"That Kyle Shane always had the ability to synch the memory, and that the reason he kept failing the challenge was because he was being controlled by people who don't have much experience with women, I know. I know. Here in is the lesson." He felt properly schooled, at that.
Melanie laughed, and patted him on his shoulder, making him bristle. "Rhys, there's hope for you yet."
"So, um," he ventured, throwing it out nervously. "Would you like to go out for that drink?"
She stopped short, and crinkled her lip as she looked over the shoulder at him, walking away. "Oh, god no."
He perked up, to see Melanie, striding into the lab and peering at him with bemusement. She had a pad clasped to her chest, her hair was coiffed in an elaborate side cornrow, and her business suit was cut sharp and severe. She looked down at Rhys in his disheveled, rumpled yesterday's jumpsuit, and she raised an eyebrow. He felt immediately self-conscious and small, and moved his arm over to cover the crumbs and food stains on his tunic. "Rhys," she called, "Why are you burning the midnight energon, it's clock out time, boy."
She seemed to catch him admiring the way her shoes shaped her calf muscles, and he snapped back to attention, before turning back to the helmet on his workstation and the data streaming on his four screens. "I've ran into some bugs with the memory playback of the Ego and I can't access past a certain point."
"So you've hit a part of your game that you can't get past?" the way she said it instantly made him shrivel inside. Melanie was a tough egg, she had risen up in her division fairly well, but she was known to bust balls. He admitted that he didn't know much else about her, but he was always game to try. He'd even asked her out to a drink a time or two. But she always steered conversation back to the bottom line of what was going on in the lab. Now, though, she was looking at his displays, all of the scroll of numbers that translated into conceptual imaging of a life from a century ago. It felt intrusive.
"It's not a game," he said defensively, pulling the helmet back away from her. "Using the Ego to reconstruct the life of Kyle Shane using genetic muscle memory is an involved process that's taken years of my research, and it's - "
"You're replaying somebody else's life from checkpoint to checkpoint to get to the last stage. If that's not a game, what is?" Melanie said, throwing up her hands a little.
He pooched his lower lip out. Melanie's lip curled a little, playfully mocking. She was leaning against his desk now, and he squawked as she pushed papers around. "So what part can't you get past?"
He hedged with whether he wanted to let an office worker, even a highly ranked one, that he had only encountered professionally and had never really let in to his research before, know the ins and outs of where he was going. Worst case scenario was she could be a mole for another department looking to torpedo his Ego project and take the funding. But Melanie's carefully pencilled eyebrows raised and her hazel eyes pierced deep into his, and he found himself unable to turn her away.
"In my playthro- My research, I have hit upon a nexus of possibilities that are frustrated by an unexpected X-factor that pertains to the behavioral history of the test subject."
Melanie rolled her eyes, "Geez you're wordy, you need to be careful with that, if you talk too long, you are going to lose your audience."
"Kyle Shane can't talk to girls!" Rhys blurted, and then he blushed. As if he had spilled some embarrassing secret of his own adolescence.
Melanie looked at him for a long second, mouth parted, and then she laughed lightly, even though it felt like it was him she was laughing at. "So why do you even care?"
Frustrated by her ambivalence, he paged through strings of code in an endless universe, isolating the memory bubble. "Because this is an ancestor that had a Gengis Khan effect on an entire generation. Kyle Shane was proven to copulate with a double digit number of women, to the point where a very large percent has been passed down Shane DNA from multiple donors. The EGO machine can reconstruct imbedded memories and recreate the past through anyone with the DNA in their body, but the memories start breaking down once you start factoring in the past behavior. Kyle Shane did manage to find multiple girls to mate with, somehow, but the further I probe into his memories, the more I find myself desynchronizing, because reconstructing - playing - as Kyle Shane is... frustrating. His choices were so bad."
Melanie looked at the datastream, "Because he doesn't know how to talk to women. Hmmm. Sounds like people I know..." she says, picking up a small, anatomically correct model on his desk.
He felt like he was defending not just Kyle, but in a weird way himself and his work when he spoke up. (Also he snatched the model of the nubile elf princess out of Melanie's hands because she... didn't need to see that...) "Kyle sees himself as someone who loves and honors women, because a lot of them remind him of his mother, who was a saintly figure to him..."
Melanie squinted. " - Which is deeply problematic in it's own roots..."
Rhys, not getting the implication, gave her an understood gesture, "But the problem is always that his intentions may had started out as good, but they tend to come across strong, which attracts either the wrong type of girl, or pushes equally strong personalities off."
"So, creepy, got it."
"Not creepy!" Rhys defended, stoutly, eyeing Melanie snarkily as he picked up the feed helmet. Again, this felt as much an attack on him as it did the ancestor through some unknown branch. "Just not understood. But if I can just figure out which encounters with which female partners led to success, I could continue synchronizing and mapping the lifeline of Shane, including where his geneology ends up."
And so Melanie, who before had been little more than a mystery, a tempting pixie in the office pool who he had never dared to get close enough to, looked at him with some look of calculating, and she slid over into a work chair next to him, and said "So, okay, let's look through the memory together, see if we can't keep it synchronized."
"You? And me? T-together?" He stammered. She shrugged as if it wasn't the big deal he was playing it as. "Sure, Gengis Khan effect on multiple donors, like you said. I'm pretty sure I've got some DNA from Kyle Shane in my family line, too... c'mon, hook me up." And so, she picked up the second feed helmet. And before he could even consider the ramifications of this, the possible side effects (brain pudding) or the fact they shared a far-back link... his need to impress this laconic office acquaintance with the alluring eyes and dusky skin overrode all. He plugged in, and began pinging on his pad for a few moments. And then, there was the ripped into the void sensation of synchronizing.
And then, he woke up in another body, and he knew that Melanie did too, in a separate simulation, showing her the same thing.
So he was running through the memory bubble again, trying to find some way of successfully completing the simplest mission of all: mere copulation, a meaningful and emotional bond with a female of his species. He sat there, legs crossed, and in a chair across from him was a woman the digital readout showed as Krista Greer, a non-compatible subject. She was talking to Kyle, but he was tuning her out as he flipped through apps on his phone. He heard, from a million miles away, Melanie trying to cajole him, "Maybe you should be listening to this woman, if she's connected with Kyle, maybe she could be the mate that Kyle is supposed to end up with, the one that completing an encounter with synchs the memory."
He obviously, obviously knew more about this than her, being her first time in this simulation. "Krista's NPC, non playable, she doesn't matter in this simulation. Now can we focus." He turned back to the phone.
There was a possibility, Kyle had multiple contacts in his phone, if he successfully completed the encounter known as "sending nudes" in the parlance of the early Aught Millenial era, then it's possible he would find the link and synch the memory. He opened his contacts and created a text message to the first promising entry, a cute little name with a heart beside it. Texting her, what the memory downloads had taught him about the language of mating in Kyle Shane's time period.
"Hey sexy. Wanna send me nudes?"
MEMORY FAILED. DESYNCHRONIZING.
After the burst of static finished and the world coalesced back into the memory replay, in Krista Greer's office, Rhys grimaced and felt stupid. Childish, fumbling, grasping at concepts he had no experience with. He was starting to know how Kyle could be getting it wrong. He opened too bluntly, he proclaimed his intentions too broadly. With his next try he would need to employ a little more subtlety. He began a text...
"I just wanted to say that you look gorgeous in your profile picture and I really want to get to hang out sometime so we can talk."
He awaited a response for a second, grinning at the better wording.
MEMORY FAILED. DESYNCHRONIZING.
He growled, and now, with the feeling of Melanie watching, observing, he felt chagrined. She just seemed to be sitting back and watching him desynchronize. "Do you want me to give you some pointers?" She asked, amused. Irritated, he waved her off, "No, I can do this, I know how to talk to women, alright." When he returned to the office simulation, phone in hand, he saw that he had a message from a number in his phone. "Heyyy, haven't seen you in a while!" He opened, anxious over little things like that he might come off as desperate for this to work through tone.
"Hey!" he was relieved when he got a response.
"Whatcha up to?"
"Not much, hbu?"
"I'm good, I'm just sitting in my doctor's office, bored, haha." A bead of sweat dripped down between his eyes as he tried to figure out how to close this message off and stick the landing.
"Wanna play 20 questions?"
MEMORY FAILED. DESYNCHRONIZING.
"Oh come on," he exploded to himself as he lost connection and had to restart the memory from where the bubble began, with his phone in his hand, sitting in the office across from Krista Greer. And something tingled at the back of his mind, some fact about Kyle Shane's life that was lost to time. Maybe the reason that this memory hadn't synched is because he kept trying to talk to random women that didn't mean anything to Kyle. If memory searches led him to anything, he did know that once, there was a girl in Kyle's life that meant a lot to him, that brought him out of the darkest places. And so maybe, there was a chance, if he reached out to her, and explained things, had Kyle pour his heart out to his lost love, they would rekindle a flame between them, be the catalyst that pushed Kyle forward into his new destiny and make a future. So he looked through the contacts in the phone, and found the name of that soulmate. Array. And he began, with every good intention, to reach out to the ex of Kyle Shane, to explain how he felt.
"I miss you."
MEMORY FAILED. DESYNCHRONIZING.
"This... is pathetic," Melanie said, but she sounded a bit more sympathetic now. She asked if he would let her get a try, but he wasn't about to do that. Still, her advice was coming in his ears, about giving girls their own agency and not coming on so strong, but as he slid back into the memory he was just sitting there and stewing.
And there he was, with the phone in his hand, his contacts open, ready for another go-round. But all of the de-synchronizations and failures were adding up to him, and at a frustrated loss for what to do, he shut his phone, sitting back in his seat. In the sim, it was Doctor Krista who looked over to him, and her cool, clinical voice, somehow reminded him of Melanie. "Hey, you. Why the face drooping. We've done some good work this week."
"It's just that it seems so pointless and I'm tired of trying to make this work with these girls that I don't even care about, who don't even care about me." He was speaking for Kyle now, and it felt from the heart, no matter what mouth the words came out of. "I never got any practice at doing this before, when I was young, and now that I've gotten older the rules of what to do to get somebody's attention have changed so much that I can barely understand them. But I'm awkward, so I don't know what I'm doing half the time, and - ugh, I don't know." He was speaking about the simulation itself, but the synched version of Krista nodded as if she knew what he was talking about.
"It can be hard relating to people. But what I want you to do is to stop putting so much pressure on yourself to meet someone and force them to engage you on terms you can understand. When you meet the right person - and you will - when you talk with them, it will come easily and naturally and you won't have to force it."
And that was it. A blue light pinged on the side of his helmet, letting him know he'd passed a checkpoint reserved for a big breakthrough. That was all he had to do. In the simulation, Krista Greer continued, "Now come on, let's go get some lunch," and she picked up her bag, as Kyle put his phone back in his pocket and got up and followed her. Then, the simulation ended, and he took off his helmet.
Melanie was watching him, smiling, a little triumphantly. "So, what did we learn?"
"That Kyle Shane always had the ability to synch the memory, and that the reason he kept failing the challenge was because he was being controlled by people who don't have much experience with women, I know. I know. Here in is the lesson." He felt properly schooled, at that.
Melanie laughed, and patted him on his shoulder, making him bristle. "Rhys, there's hope for you yet."
"So, um," he ventured, throwing it out nervously. "Would you like to go out for that drink?"
She stopped short, and crinkled her lip as she looked over the shoulder at him, walking away. "Oh, god no."
