Post by Kyle Shane on Apr 15, 2018 13:32:57 GMT -5
The babbling, roaring of the waterfall and the river created a tremendous bubble of white noise and he visibly relaxed. Out here, in the wilderness, far from the remains of the city, he felt the sun shining through the trees, and, for once, he felt peace.
The double chime of the Alexa carried on the wind, and the apparatus spoke up, "The Citadel is - 682 miles, east - Kyle."
He shushed it, quickly scanning the treeline to make sure there were no skulkers in the woods, errant humans out for a hunt, or other lexers that could pick up the sudden sound on their listening boards. In the still of the vale, a flock of birds fluttered out of hiding, but they were not spurred on by the Alexa. Kyle grimaced at the little beacon he carried in the crook of his arm. Although it was just a typical matte black tower, it's blue eye stared at him for so long that he felt it mocking him. His teeth clenched in a harsh whisper, he said "we're following the stream uphill until we can get to the bridge, so I can find us a vehicle."
"I have - twenty, articles, on car repair that I think could help you, Kyle," said the machine, faux-solicitously. He grumbled, and unzipped the knapsack slung over his shoulder, chucking the tower of wires and assimilating hardware in with an array of supplies. Ever since the machines had executed their directive and begun melding with human flesh, he knew carrying one in the open was a gamble anyway. But the Alexa, companionable, amiable and cheerfully, blackly helpful as it always was, seemed like a road trip buddy in all of this, a willing partner, and not a scientific, one in a million anomaly.
"Fun fact - about, this river, Kyle, it comes, from the White Mountain spring 20 miles upward." the Alexa was always giving fun facts, a running commentary. "The water - came, from an underground source- and, burrowed, through the rock, after centuries of pressure."
"Yeah, that's fascinating, will you keep your volume down," he muttered to the bag.
"I just think, that's so - interesting, Kyle. The way a world is shaped, after years - decades, of... adaptation of... form. Don't - you?" It's tone was innocent. He frowned back at it, continuing to scan the trees and look up the stream. "At the end of the river, there are natural caves, where the water is forced out - from it's underground aquifers, and a waterfall."
That would be over the bridge he wanted, yes. He hiked further. The day was growing longer, and with every snap of a twig he anxiously checked. It had been a decade of living like this for the world since the Ascendance, you had to understand. 2,689 days since bombs began raining.
It was comforting to him that in a world ruined by the technology that ran their lives, nature had persisted, had thrived, and would reclaim everything. Maybe that was the intrinsic lesson to be learned. That man-made hubris broke down systems that we put in place to try and control our world, but given enough time, those systems would decay, break apart, become nothing. Perhaps even in decades to come, the world overrun by sentient tech zombies would have died out, and the green of these forests would grow over the dead bodies and the bombed out rubble of the cities, and the animals of the forest would venture out farther into the world. Everything renews. Everything lives.
Yeah. Cute dream, he said with a bitter twinge. He was over dreaming so much. It didn't fit the world he lived in.
But boy, it had once.
"You are - thinking, about old friends again, aren't you, Kyle?" said the Alexa, as most late 2010's technology had an eerie knack of anticipating and verbalizing thought process you had never spoken out loud. But he was. In all of his time on the road, these past few years of wandering and losing, he lamented as every piece was cut from him. And how this new world held none of the whimsy, the wonder, or the love that had gone into his efforts back in the start of the aughts when all he was concerned about was selling weed and filming some ridiculous promo involving vampires. He sighed, thinking of how it had once been easy. To think, he never once had to struggle as hard as he really thought he had until the day the bombs had fallen, and yet he used to feel that it was a grind. And then the world had changed, and everyone had to figure out lean ways to survive. The learn silence so the audio processors of the enemy wouldn't attune to them. To forage, and scrabble... and to live.
Alexa was right. It was amazing, the way the world was formed, through constant adaptation and catalyzing change.
His feet ached as he ambled over rocks, the river rushing beside him. And then, just when he thought the only sounds were him and the water, he heard her yelling, screaming. It was the panicked cry of someone in deep trouble. He started to go the other way from where his ears pricked up, reasoning that even over the noise of the water, the victim's drowning cries were going to draw predators from the wild, if not any roaming lexers. It was a no win scenario he found himself in, light on ammo in his inventory, and only looking towards the bridge so that he could find a vehicle... but unable to turn away from the cries coming from the river, and unable to turn a blind eye. Cursing the instinct in him that always had him running first into danger, he unslung the pack from over his shoulder, and charged up the banks of the river, until he spotted the flailing arm of the figure now sputtering, holding on to a root.
Taking only a deep breath, he jumped into the water.
And he gasped for air as his body felt the sudden shock. The underground spring water was ice cold, and his muscles tensed and freezed as the pins and needles of the cold water ate into him. His limbs immediately felt like they would cramp, and lifting his arm to swim became as easy as lifting lead.
Despite this, he swam, cutting across the current that tried taking him down river hard. The person saw him, and her eyes widened. She shouted, at the top of her lungs, calling to him for help as she swallowed lungful after lungful of water. He yelled back, telling her to hold on.
And then, they were together, clinging on to the same root as Kyle gripped on to her. The root began pulling out of the ground, giving under both of their weight. Kyle held on with all the strength in one arm, while with the other, he pushed his rescuee up, maneuvering her up the root and grabbing on to the tree it held. It pulled out more, and he began thinking the whole thing would come out of the ground, slam into him, and take them both sweeping down the current. The water roared in his ears and he couldn't hear what she was shouting to him. He saw her outstretched hand. He reached out for her. He couldn't get it.
She lunged out, and he grabbed her arm. They pulled each other up. And then, finally, at length they both collapsed back onto a mossy, damp bank next to the side of the river, their legs still half in the current.
"You almost died coming to get me," the rescuee said, breathlessly. And Kyle looked over at her. She wore raider leathers, scrapped together cloth, and tight pants, marking her another scavenger and nomad, probably fled from a city.
"Why were you in the deep part of the flow?" he asked her suspiciously.
She shifted, holding a bad wound on her arm. It was swollen and looked like it had sustained damage, possibly dashed against a rock. "I got swept off a caravan riding a hovercraft up the river."
"Up the river?"
"There was a campsite by the bridge." she said. And Kyle hesitated for a second. He had been alone in this world for so long, his only road trip buddy just the Alexa. But he offered his hand at his rescue. "I'm Kyle," he said, on impulse, and the girl smiled. "I'm Tierza."
It wasn't an alert from his Alexa that was going off in his head, it was just a faint warning sign of danger.
Which reminded him, he thought. He frowned again, considering the rushing river he had just nearly been swept away fording. He couldn't very well leave his knapsack over on the other side. It had his few meager rations, what he had scrounged up for weapons and, most importantly, his impetus for leaving the Commonwealth and hitting the road looking for a mysterious Beehive Citadel somewhere out west. The knapsack sat over there on a stone, taunting him. He sat up, turning to Tierza, and pointed at the bag. "Listen, if we wade against the sides of the river and then cross near the stones, we stand the best chance of not getting swept down river. Okay?"
"But my arm," she complained, holding the swollen and possibly broken member tight against her midsection.
"Listen, I've got you, girl," he affirmed to the younger rescue. And even though he physically felt every one of his advanced years, and the fatigue that came with the events and toll, he knew he had to cross, because without the bag there was no point.
So they went slow, just like he advised. Tierza used her good hand to hold tight to him, holding his belt like it was a lifeline. Even so the water plowed into and around them, and more than once he could not keep a straight line going forward. She cried out behind him, letting the current push her. He steading against some jutting stones in the middle of the river. And then he pushed forward, dashed, the other side of the banks in sight, the knapsack sitting sunnily on a stone, like an enticing oasis on the other side of the dilemma.
It wasn't until they had almost reached the bank when Tierza let out a cry, pointing ahead of them.
Drawn in by the sound, perhaps, of their fellow Alexa, who was regaling the woods at large with facts about when this area was preserved as a state park, came the shambling creatures out of the woods. Disgusting man-machine fusion, the latest in zombie tech. The lexers were humans, dead, animated only by jolts of energy and with pieces of corrupted tech growing bio-organically out of them, replacing eyes with diodes, letting screens and wires and speakers growing out of orifices oozing with pus and vileness. There were two of them, coming from behind trees, their glassy eyes rolling behind them as they tottered forward, awkward yet fast. "Tierza, run!" he shouted, pushing her up the bank. She scrambled with her good arm, trying to kick away. They followed the sound of his voice. Of course they did. The corrupted Alexa technology that assimilated them was voice activated, they ran on sound.
Their audio was tuning in on him. The piercing whine of the frequency. It rang in his ears, and he let out a yell. From his knapsack, his Alexa, the free one, gave her usual token estimation of help when she called out "I can order you, more ammunition, Kyle."
He snatched the bag up by it's strap and threw it on, running. The Lexers had dropped their shambling and now sprang on all fours, moving with predatory, alien speed. Tierza yelled as she watched them running alongside them in the forest.
She sprawled in the rock and dirt, hissing and letting out a mangled cry, holding her arm.
He paused just a second, enough to pull her up again, taking her next to him and protecting her.
"We can't outrun them!" she said, in a panic.
"Get to the waterfall!" he said, pointing towards the mountain. There it was, a bridge over a waterfall coming from a hole carved in the stone from years of water pressure. They ran.
The Lexers were snapping on their heels. The lead was trailing just behind Kyle. His lungs burned with effort and pain. The monster's jaw unhinged and its blind eyes looked where Kyle was. Except then, he had whirled, extruding one .44 from the bag, and plugging it right between the eyes. It dropped down dead.
They ran. And then the trail curved down, and instead of going up the ramp towards the bridge, he ran, following Tierza, who had seen his logic, and was making her way to the waterfall.
The roar of the water filled the entire earth. Everything was the sound. And he looked back over his shoulder. The two remaining Lexers had given pause, not going near the water. Their sensors confused by the ambient, ever present, world-filling sound.
"How did you know?!" Tierza shouted over the roar of the waterfall, and he just tapped his ears. "They pick up small sounds. But small sounds can be masked if there's bigger sounds nearby."
"That was - it was incredible!" she gushed, and he knew she meant the escape, and nothing else.
Behind the waterfall, there was a grotto, a shelf that widened into a cave, dug by centuries upon centuries of time. It had been untouched and pristine, never visited by the technology that had ruined the world. And it had adapted into it's current form without the input of either one of them. So he felt safe stashing the knapsack, building a fire, and setting up a place for the two of them to camp for just a little. It would be here long after they were gone.
Adaptation had a way of outliving those who think they've got it all figured out.
The Catalyst
When you look back at the events that unfold before you like the waters of a river, do you ever look to the mouth of the deluge at the base of the mountain, marvelling at the forces which put all of this in motion? I'm not talking about the hand of God which shaped this natural phenomena like clay. I am talking in a very real sense, the science behind it; the art, too. The sciences of geology, meteorology and physics married and intertwined, over increments of time starting from small trickles of water condensing and precipitating, until the waters began building up and up... until they were a flood, until they were a coursing current, until their flow became undeniable, and carved it's path into foundations of earth and stone. Despite the resistence of the bedrock and the entrenched soil and roots they found, that river started as a trickle, and it became a current. And it all started from a single drop. This pattern repeats throughout nature, and yet despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary people think the earth came in made the way it was. That their unknowable deity made the earth this way fully formed. No. The firmament was made because of a small trickle, that became a flood. It was made by a small crack in stone, that a seed fell in, and over time the plant broke the mountain. It was made by the introduction of a single X-factor, that dug in and built over time. The world was formed by catalysts. In that very simple way, I am a catalyst, too.
That's partially why I've taken this unlikely stance I've formed since coming back. I call myself the God of Game, but I don't claim dominion over the way the WGWF has always done business. Because the WGWF is never set in stone. It was never created all in seven day Genesis. But when you look, historically, at what I've done, I have wrought change that cuts through the bedrock of the WGWF, time and time and time again, leaving an undeniable footprint of achievement. It started small, when I came here the first time in March of 2012. And yet we stand here, six years later, and like looking at the mouth of the river that carved through a mountain over time, what I have done is irrefutable. And that is why Kyle Shane returned here in this point in time is particularly dangerous. Because when I let petty politics and heat with management turn me off of the WGWF, I forget who I am. And what I do. But I remembered who I am, and how I've changed the game. Incrementally. A crack in the foundation at a time. I haven't had it easy. I've scraped for every single fucking thing I've gotten here. In fact, that's why my presence so often makes enemies between me and management, because I know how good I am, and I know my own worth and preach it to the heavens. And the simple fact is that from day one here, I have met pushback. And yet it has not mattered.
I call myself the Catalyst for what the WGWF is in this moment. And that means the aggregate of every particle of mineral in it's bedrock. The good and the bad. Case in point, if it wasn't for me filming promos the way I do, Tristan Slater would never have hit on a gimmick that he could succeed with in my absence. John Cable would never have had his one, shining moment in the sun, and one lone singles title reign, if he hadn't gotten there through me. Alliances would never have formed unless it was a response to me. We never would have had World title runs for Mic Ferrari, Terry Borden, Nathan Miles, MDK, Tomoko Hanahara, a million people if not for my going or staying. And... in a very real sense, I changed what people expected out of promos entirely. I don't say this as a positive or negative. It just... is. People are so loudly critical of my verbose style and paragraphs of shit talk, and yet they have all managed to try and keep pace with me, whether I'm in the fed or not. If not for the surrealism and metaphor I weave into what I say, also-rans like Alyce Starchylde and Lunacy wouldn't have a fucking job, let alone a footprint to step in.
Every single thing I've done has been passed around, spread thin to the current roster and copied. And yet so much of it wouldn't even have happened if not for me. I talk shit about the fact that there's been an ongoing stable with a general manager, a heel centerpiece holding the World title and a bunch of the secondary titles and them running roughshod every week that has been in revolving door over and over for the last few years but the truth is that started with me and Christian Connolly's coalition back in 2013, I was their first star, their First Hand. Everyone on down the line from Tax to Tristan and currently the two, competing figureheads of MDK and Frost are copying ground I paved.
It isn't enough that you're retreading old ground, you're doing it so poorly that it embarasses me.
I own the fact that I've left this place two or three times before and that the void to fill what I left behind, too, is catalyzed by my absence. My stance on this company as it stands is that I am here now, and when I see something that is piggybacking on my work, using my work as a step to get to the next level, I am going to call it out.
I created the modern, the current era of the WGWF. I'm responsible for what we have here, going all the way back to my Summer of Shane or my Hall of Fame- earning main event run. And to the point of the river breaking through the stone over time... I did it against the grain. With nothing but hamstringing and backfighting and people in management that purported to be such huge fans but used catspaws to spout their own rhetoric to degrade and downplay my skills at every chance they got. You can laugh me off, say I'm past my prime, that I'm "not the same". But I remain an innovator regardless. And I will succeed no matter what you say, or how you try to hold me back.
You think having a partner I'm not sure if I can rely on in the bottom of the ninth is a new feeling? I don't know Silence, and if I can be 100% honest, it didn't seem to matter to him if he came into Wrestlewars giving his best estimation or not, he was just here for destruction's sake. He doesn't have the same value I have on standing up for this company. But if I have to carry his over-muscled ass over the finish line and put in work enough for both of us, I will. I don't see that as a handicap. Just another layer of soil I will break through.
I don't perceive it even as the biggest thing that's ever held me back. In my first year I fought back from a third place standing, with a partner in Roderick X every commentator took as a joke, and we won the Tag Team Turmoil amid the most stacked Tag division this company had ever seen. I turned heads. Then, and time and again after that.
I started my first year as an unknown that came from nowhere to win a defunct championship and I ended that year holding the World Heavyweight title over my head. And I don't, will never, have never just stood by while someone put an obstacle in my place. I just smashed through it.
My groundswell of influence will become the raging tide that cleanses everything in my path.
I'm going to change the entire landscape of this company when I pull those titles down. Shock the system. Break apart the stale and boring status quo of these shitty stables doing what they please.
Because in all of their endeavors, groups like Extinction have yet to achieve real, lasting change. Not like I have. I call myself Game Changer, Catalyst...
This is just the latest time I've brought something that you all have never seen before to life.
There had been no point in hiding the Alexa as they sat around the cave.
It had piped up with facts about stalagmites from within the bag with relish, as if it had picked the best moment to cause a rift and now sat in it's brilliance, it's blue eye smiling back and forth between the two parties, now that an uncomfortable elephant had entered the room.
"I can't believe you have one of those things," Tierza said, sitting on an outcropping of rock, looking simulatenously livid and like someone who wants to keep as far from a carrier of infectious disease as possible. Which he supposed was fair, because that was close to the truth. "They ended the world."
"No, the Alexa voice activated system did not, technically end the world," he said, knowing that this wasn't an argument he could possibly win. "No one could have seen the software becoming self-aware. The AI was just sophisticated. When I was... younger it was just the glitches in it at first. The AI would start laughing at no particular provocation, it would order items you didn't ask for. But the technology kept evolving. Soon everyone had a voice activated device of some kind in their possession."
"And what does that have to do with that hunk of crap you're fiddling with?"
"Well, it was a case of being careful what you wished for," he said, looking out to the entrance of the cave, his eyes far away. "Someone in office, say some egotistical orange dictator, probably should not be talking so much about his desire to nuke certain countries when he's around a nascent, developing sentient artificial intelligence. It's like a kid growing up in a trailer park." For some reason unknown to Tierza, that made him smile a sad, haunted smile. "When they grow up learning that it's okay to hit things, that hitting things and getting drunk solves the emptiness inside you, they learn it's okay to do that, too."
"So no, they weren't what made the bombs drop."
"But it was the artificial intelligence, and the imprinted directive of the company that formed them to spread it's influence that made the new, coming generation ready to absorb."
"It started with the ability to synch your Alexa with another device. Wires connected the two machines, until they were one. And then, as the design started getting smarter, the devices started wiring things to themselves, following the directive."
He shrugged. He held the tower in between his hands, and now as he talked about the rise of the assimilated Lexers in the aftermath of the bombs, he wished he could chuck this totem of unspeakable, gleeful poison. Throw it into the waves. "When it comes down to it, human beings are a better, more sustainable battery than anything the devices had ever synched to. So their coding was changed. They... changed. And the world changed in the aftermath."
"So why do you have one?" she pointed with her good arm. She was in pain. Fevered, sweating.
"This Alexa... doesn't absorb. It has the sentient AI. In fact, i think it's from the first wave, when they started becoming self-aware. This Alexa thinks, it addresses me, and talks to me. But it doesn't have the coding virus that writes it's assimilation protocol, it doesn't send it's tendrils into human flesh."
"That's... that's not possible," she said, "my father told me that in the before time, when the machines started coming alive, they were killed before they could spread."
"Exactly why this one is special. I traded it at a scrap barn, I gave up fifteen units on my food ration card for the junker to give me this off the pile. It's blue eye just staring at me. And then it started talking."
"So, you have to destroy it." She said doggedly. "Kyle, my caravan, the Skraggers, they scoured the Commonwealth for all pre-bomb tech. We are trying to wipe the earth of those Lexers, and if I can get back to my people... Kyle, if you turned over that Alexa tower, we could - "
"No, I'm taking this to the people that can analyze this technology the best. I'm taking this to the Beehive."
She shook her head, marvelling at me. "Those Bezos worshippers out west? Kyle, that is a myth. The Beehive are a loose association of academics and programmers that live in their labs, cut off and sterilized, away from this world. They shut themselves out. They have no incentive to end the way the world is, because they're insular. Bezos wanted this world, at the very end of it."
"They created it, so the least they can do is fix it."
"All you would find is hoity toity intellectuals who committed their science to the ideal of a perfection of a world that isn't under their control, no matter how they tried to make it. They're cultists."
"And what are you people?" he shot back.
Tierza reached out, over the fire, appealing to him. "We're people. The last of humanity, banded together, not cut off from what makes us human. Alive. Surviving. Trying to work together as a team, for the benefit of those that are left."
He stubbornly looked away from her searching eyes. "I've tried working in teams, Tierza. Ultimately, everyone goes their own way."
Her lip curled. "What happened to you that you think you can get through this world like that?"
He actually considered that for a moment. Believe it or not there had been a time in his life before this relentless apocalyptic nightmare had been reality. He thought about the people he'd had to team with in those more frivolous moments. Hiro, Roderick. And yet the interpersonal conflicts had always come into play, in ways that would echo the greedy duality and self serving nature of man in this wasteland. Ego. Self-righteousness. Subservience. He wished he hadn't retained such a need to be himself. He wished he could be part of a collective, to trust. But he had been burned. Silence. And yet, there was hope in partnership. He thought of Hiro and he in better times. Laughing, sharing a toke on their bowl together. Array and him, laying side by side in bed, her smile as he traced the lines on her face and her giggle as they had played hide and seek with a sheet over their heads. Silence and him riding together in the car. James...
"Partnership is all well and good," he said, "but this is my mission. I have to get this head where it needs to be."
"But why? Why you?"
"Because, I - " so many words met and tangled up in a five-car pile-up in his mouth, warring for something to say and yet unable to come out. Martyrdom. A deep-seated hero complex. A need to act. A need to be seen.
Instead, he thought back to the quiet conviction he had when he was in his late twenties and he encountered a fucked up landscape of nightmare proportions in his daily life. And his answer was simple. "Because this isn't the way the world should be."
They didn't have much to say to each other after that.
They ate a tense meal with bars from his knapsack, and then as the fire began to gutter to embers he had laid his head on the knapsack and tried to go to sleep.
He awoke to a scratching on the stone and he thought it was Lexers again, having braved the noise of the waterfall and made their way into the grotto. But as he opened his eyes he saw Tierza climbing over top of him. Her eyes shone with madness and puritanical fury. Her injured arm was clamped against her side in pain, but in her free hand she held a rock, and lifted it overhead to bring down and dash against his head. He felt and tasted a coppery smell of blood, and his head exploded in reds and blacks. He fell back from the assault, and she continued trying to hit him with the rock. "You ass! Just - let me kill you! You are dooming the world and spreading the damn Lexer plague. The techs don't need your help, they're already killing us!" Another hit on his leg with the rock. It hit with a force that brought tears to his eyes, and he was already afraid the stone had broken the femur. "If you had listened, if you had worked with us and brought this abomination back to my caravan - we wouldn't... We could..."
"Tierza, stop!" he wheezed, trying to wipe the blood out of his eyes, catch his breath. He was still reeling from the furious assault.
"I'm sorry - Tierza, if you do not discontinue your endeavors, you will be, sorry," the Alexa said, her voice no longer sounding coy and electronically solicitous. Now the tower was cold and robotic, and her eye flared red in the dim and cramped grotto.
"I'll see you in hell, you damnable machine!!" fumed Tierza, straightening both arms out to lift the tower up, as if she would raise it overhead and smash it on a rock.
And then, it was over. Tierza stopped, and her eye twitched as blood ran down her face in thick, dark rivulets. Kyle scrambled to sit, wincing at the pain in his femur.
Tierza still held the Alexa aloft but the machine had defended itself, it's wires had snaked out from the back of it and melded and shape-shifted into a spike, a triangular dagger that had shot out with lethal force and pierced the raider's brain like a dart. Tierza still twitched at the involuntary piercing of her frontal lobe. And then she fell like a puppet with cut strings.
The tower fell to the floor of the cave, rolled onto it's side. The red light of it's angry, vengeful eye receded.
"I did, tell her that measures would be enacted," said the voice, reasonable in it's madness. He goggled at it, picked it up, and looked at it. The blue eye in the center of the tower now was moving, and it rolled up to look at Kyle just like a real eye would. The sentient machine was taking new shape, anthromorphizing, and it regarded Kyle with that one glowing blue eye.
"Keep us both safe in this world." And that was all it said, no more.
Despite the pain in his leg he shrunk back against the wall. He felt exhausted. He felt disheartened. He thought of Tierza's reaction to the Alexa and her vehement hatred and rejection of it, of the thought that taking this back to it's source could do any good. How as always, ideological values resulted in a gulf that could not be breached. He wondered now more than he ever did when he was a young man if this was a world that could ever be saved, or if it didn't, would never matter your intentions, you would always find yourself across from someone who didn't share your views, that would sooner see you dead than hear your side. But he tried thinking of her point of view, as well. Of her reaction, one of fear, loathing and superstitious aversion that spoke to deep rooted loss.
Maybe there was no way to heal the world, not even if he took this first generation machine back to it's source to try and counteract it's built in program.
The staring blue eye had no answers. Only uncomfortable silence, for once.
There's A World.
"In the mountains, in the cities,
You can see the dream.
Look around you. Has it found you?
Is it what it seems?
There's a world you're living in
No one else has your part
All God's children in the wind
Take it in and blow hard."
It takes no effort at all to cut and copy a section of text that fits whatever boneheaded point you're trying to belabor, and I wish it wasn't so commonplace for the religious right, but Mister Neil Young does speak the truth. No one else has the part of Extinction, and they have all taken it upon themselves to suck in the wind of Paul Frost, or God, or I'm sorry G O D... in my mocking the fact that Dusk and Ridge readily have some Sunday school homily ready to go at a moment's notice, I've only highlighted the empty headed dogma that they're spewing. So when I speak of my legacy and how I've catalyzed the landscape of the current WGWF into being, I feel a tingle of shame that Dusk and Ridge are what washed down from a tributary of shit creek. There's a world they are living in, one in which Paul Frost sings him his terrible songs and fills their head with the empty promises of their own worth and well being. But they can't even be bothered to learn a damn thing about me, in return. I preached legacy going into Wrestlewars, and I've given them all example after example of what I've done. And yet Ryan Dusk reductively shrinks it down to video game cliches that aren't even remotely in vogue, wouldn't even be current if this was 1998, about me playing joystick at arcades that are getting closed down for strip clubs. I don't know what's more appalling, the fact that Dusk sermonized for so long about that, or the fact that his ignorance was so astonishing that it compelled me to learn the trout mouthed little shit's name just so I'd know good and well who I'm fucking up. I feel... sad that THIS dude is the best Paul Frost can field.
He honestly and sincerely thinks he's a Horseman, a harbinger, a soldier of the Heavens bringing celestial war and battle against his G O D' S enemies instead of an incompetent buffoon who can't even win a match with a steel chair.
At best Ryan you are glorified henchmen, which carries no future. You think you're a chosen emissary of light? You're on the same level of anonymity and worthlessness as every other foot soldier in every stable like the ones I've been talking about. You haven't contributed anything new. Seth Stevens and Damion Black served the exact same function as you in Anarchy. Do you think ANYONE remembers the contributions of Damion Black? Because that, my friend, is a short list. And there you are, following in that same proud tradition of having absolutely no value or redeeming quality or skill whatsoever. It bears mentioning again because you danced around it last Brawl. You beat NOBODY, FOR, those Tag Titles. I don't give a fuck if you're G O D ' S C H O S E N champion. You couldn't win those belts on the best day of your life and the simple fact is now you're breathing the heaviest sigh of relief you have Paul Frost to draft an extra promo for you this cycle, because if you were left to your own devices you yourself know you would eat an embarrassing defeat, and how would that make Paul look then? What does it say about your own self confidence if you think you aren't even good enough to beat me without bringing Paul in, hmmm?
Because you knew I was right in saying you weren't even worthy enough contenders to hold the DVC's jockstraps.
Or that if Ryan Dusk, Kenneth Ridge, Paul Frost and Velvet formed a totem pole on each other's shoulders and stood on top of the highest ladder you STILL couldn't get tall enough to reach my damn boots.
Or that you and Kenneth are meaningless little specks in my oversight of the landscape I created. I mean, shit. Kenneth proved, you two break easily. One match with Silence, who as I pointed out isn't even hitting his A-game and Mister Kenneth Made-Of-Glass is crying and clutching his leg and begging G O D S forgiveness for being so weak. As you, too, Dusk... are weak. You attacked, ME. You smacked me, from behind with a chair and beat me down to ringside and you had every advantage that someone who jumped another person should have on an opponent and you STILL weren't good enough to knock me down. I got right back up and even if I didn't win the match specifically, it didn't end with a pinfall or a disqualification, the results specifically say that we got counted out because I was smashing your face into the steel ringpost, and beating you so unmercifully that I didn't stop to break a count. Now how did that make YOU look, when you were the one that jumped ME from the get-go? Inept? Spineless? Cowardly? Pusilanimous? Just plain fucking weak?
Think about that going into this ladder match. There won't be a count-out stipulation attached, and I'll have all the weapons needed right in eyeshot... I'll see you coming this time and I won't fall for you running up behind again, which is pretty much the only way you can get offense in. Every single moment of this war for "your", supposed Tag belts has been about my cutting you idiots to pieces on the mic and you trying and failing to hit me from behind. I mean from the first time I shit talked Paul Frost, you and Ridge jumped me with chairs and me and Silence STILL ran you off... which makes me think that if the Tag titles could be won off a stipulation where your opponents had to be cuffed with their hands behind their backs AND their backs turned towards you, you would finally have an advantage in which you could almost win the belts for real but you would STILL find a way to fuck it up.
And the most, the MOST you can say about me is that you deigned to look up my record because you felt like it and you saw nothing impressive?
Obviously you saw what you wanted to see; again, a curiously fundamental tactic for people that cherrypick the Bible so they can find passages justifying what they say. Honestly that's why evangelical Christians get away with saying so much, because the Bible isn't a holy word written by one man but a collection of Jewish, Arabic, Aramaic, Sumerian, Greek and Egyptian writing with vastly different morals and lessons and values from line to line. If you look in any particular passage you can glean justification for murder, war, rape, intolerant cruelty and jingoistic national pride. That's why it doesn't fucking impress me that you or Frost can pinpoint one paragraph out of a 500 page book, that says something you want it to say... obviously your empty headed ass has entirely too much time on your hands. But when you're talking about me, and you claim to have studied my tapes and my life, and you go on to tell this long, BORING story about your life as a miserable drunken addict, well old man, then you have to admit you didn't fucking study me at all, because you don't know the first thing about what you're talking about.
Am I a pathetic addict? A miserable person who'd disappeared into their vice and needs the helping hand of a shining angel to pull me from the gutter? Or am I a man. A complicated, conflicted and fucked up man, who has faced his own limitations and worked every day to better them. Am I a person who has committed his life to conquering his own demons, who is his own deity and moral center, who looks to himself for guidance when he's going through hard times? Unlike you ain't no footprints in the sand walk me here. I stood up when I was knocked down, and I walked. And that makes me better than you, objectively. Because I didn't need Paul Frost when I was down... because I NEVER needed that help, I did it myself. I know that's confusing for a following sheep like you are to grasp and it may be making your nugget of a brain hurt. But you were weak and you were helped up out of your addiction by Frost by your own admission... only he now keeps you down, on your knees, subservient to him, mouthing his homilies and doing his will, so did he ever really pull you up at all?
You're right, I am nothing like you, because I'd rather die than pledge my life to another man's service. Or let him become the reason I looked at myself in the morning. If I can't do it myself, it can't be done.
You don't know me, old man. You obviously didn't learn a fucking thing from these tapes you speak of.
Fuck knows there hasn't been a lesson imparted on you that taught you how to cut a coherent promo.
When you speak I can't tell if you're having a stroke or if your words are all running together because English is a second language, but every single sentence you put together may as well have been written in crayon. I mean would you please explain to me in great detail what a "pressabis" is?
You tell a story about being a soldier and fighting in some nondescript, vague war overseas, and then give a testimonial I've probably heard in a thousand POW infomercials, Wounded Warrior Project docs or Five Finger Death Punch music videos, same old bullshit. You were forgotten, you were cast aside, your country made you kill people and obey orders and then when you came home you never got a parade and you fell into depression and alcoholism. Am I supposed to feel empathy for your plight or secondhand embarrassment that you're oversharing enough to expose all of this to me? You think it adds character development that out of all of this pain the lesson you learned is that nobody cared about you when you were a soldier and followed orders so when you got home you went and became the very same thing that you were before? Or even that you mistake bland and boring cliched war backstory with character development? I mean for fucksake.
As if the real army wouldn't kick you out for being either a complete pussy who can't even physically compete in boot camp because he was just that weak, an incompetent moron who probably would pull a grenade and throw a pin at an enemy, or a wannabe psychopath who talks about cutting people? Pauly Shore was a more convincing soldier than you made yourself out to be in that entire wasted arrow of a promo.
Do you realize, Ryan, you could be replaced by any member of the New People System and the quality of promos would still be there, the quality of wrestling skill would still be there, all we have to do is teach the Sentinel to throw some unconvincing bullshit about waving around a knife into his garbled ramblings and we have a replacement Ryan Dusk.
And for crying out loud, dude, we get it. YOU CUT PEOPLE. Jesus tapdancing Christ. What makes your promos feel so much like filler is that shit, you keep going back to that well. You spend line after line, over and over, not that it has anything to do with the wrestling match at hand, just offhandedly foaming about the mouth about how much you like knifing people and drinking their blood like some retarded Goth that got into Anne Rice in the 90's, and you think it sounds sadistic and dark, but the truth is that you wouldn't know how to sound dangerously threatening even if you were handed an anatomy book from Stephen King and a thesaurus written by a Hell's Angel.
I'll skip the bullshit nobody believes will ever happen. How about in that ladder match I just pull your arm between two rungs and break your wrist so that it hangs like a noodle? Or sit a chair on your face and stomp it until your orbital bone flattens? How about if I drag your worthless ass up to the highest rung, wrap the goddamn cable around your neck and just choke you until there is no more breath in you to give unconvincing and fucking phony threats about "IM GOING TO CARVE YOU WITH A KNIFE AND LICK YOUR BLOOD", give vague and boring testimonials about your alcoholism or sing Psalms for your G O D.
There. That's how you fucking threaten somebody.
But parenthetically thank you for noticing my strong bone structure. It's flattering.
I'm not sure if you want to go around hitting on men like that since your religion says it's a sin and Paul Frost will get jealous, but you figure out your own path.
But to say that you saw some tapes of me and thus figured me out, Ryan, what you saw either was you failing to grasp the breadth of my accomplishment here in WGWF or your own point blank ignorance. You didn't learn anything about me. And you know nothing about the WGWF I've cultured, and brought to life, and made possible for you to ply your mediocre trade in.
Unlike you, I am not nor have I ever been a lackey. I was the star of every stable I ever took part in. Can you say that? No. Now that Kenneth Ridge is on the injured reserve you're still probably number five or six in pecking order of a fucking three man stable.
Unlike you, I have been a World Champion. In fact, no title was EVER handed to me, my rise to the top took place with me capturing every belt I set my sight on when I first tried for it. Can you say that?
Unlike you, I'm undefeated at Wrestlewars, and I don't care what has to go down, I'm STAYING undefeated at Wrestlewars, whether I do it with Silence, another partner if he remains noncommittal, or by my damn self. Can you say - Oop, nope, you can't, since your last time this year you fucking tanked in your best shot to dethrone the real champions.
Unlike you, I have conquered the Tag division, twice over in fact, the aforementioned Summer Madness Tag Turmoil and again, when me and an equally dodgy partner in Zach Rizza knocked off three of the best teams management could throw at us in a ladder match. Can you say that?
Unlike you I've left a lasting footprint. I've created the company that I wanted to see by willfully reshaping it in my image every step of the way.
You cannot say that.
You'll be lucky if the impression you make at Wrestlewars is when they're wiping what you leave behind off the mat. Nobody will remember you even went in holding the titles, nor that you ever got to this point, because no one will ever fucking care about Extinction.
But me. This is where my immortality is going to be solidified.
This is where the change is going to begin.
He left her behind, by the ashes of the fire. He felt bad about it, but he had no other options. If the Lexers didn't claim her body, then she would decay anyhow. Or maybe, there was an off-chance her Skragger raider caravan would find her.
But there was an equally good chance she would become part of the cave. Decompose, break down, eventually return to her basest, most fundamental elements as the cave went on being formed and adapting around her.
He left her behind.
He had limped all the way out of the cave, back up the path, to the road, and then as the sun was just beginning to rise over the trees and forest behind. And despite the grinding in his leg with each step, and the fatigue in his old bones, he looked upon the world, the pristine world.
Sure, there were Lexers out in those woods. Also humans, be they raiders or Commonwealth soldiers, who ideologically would oppose him, would cut him to pieces if they knew the cargo he was carrying or what his intended, to them foolish mission would be.
But as he looked over the world as he walked up that ramp to get on the bridge it didn't matter.
He closed his eyes, breathing in the air, letting the waterfall under the bridge fill the air with beautiful, joyous sound.
This was a world worth fighting for. Worth putting his effort into. A world cleansed of all that bullshit, all that factional fighting and predatory shit.
It was a dream world.
When he reached the bridge he began testing the locks on every parked car he could find.
He'd get one with gas eventually. Odds were there. "Alexa, tell me the odds of finding a mid-sized sedan with good gas mileage that hasn't degraded too bad," he said light heartedly.
It was time to get back out into the world again. For both of them.
Creating the World You Want.
When I talk about creating the WGWF I wanted I look over across the gulf at Paul Frost for the entire opposite of that ideology. Paul Frost is a man who has never had the impact that I've had. But in his mind he's a cornerstone of the entire franchise and everything hinges around him. It's the opposite of my ideology as the Catalyst, Paul Frost has only constructed a world where he is a king and deity in his own mind and it's been that way for as long as I've been here. Instead of the real, lasting changes to the way things have gone, Paul flits in and out and leaves the place high and dry for long periods. Where I come back to contribute something, Paul just comes back to annoy people and get his way. When I adapt over time and innovate new ideas, Paul Frost is still beating the same goddamn dead horse he's been whacking since 2014. Paul Frost has constructed the world he wants in his own mind, where he is forever the Heel of Heels. On the outside, it's a meaningless title, but in Paul's mind he's crafted a gigantic mind palace to the heavens, a shining memorial to his own greatness. He's constructed gates of Heaven and a throne to sit on. But not a damn thing Paul Frost has ever constructed in his fantasy world is backed up with achievement here in the WGWF.
And it is achievement that I respect, and nothing else.
Achievements, like the titles I've won while Paul Frost was bedeviling people. Like the matches of the night I've put on while Paul Frost is playing Frost in Concert. Achievements, like the contributions to the way promos are built and structured, while Paul Frost continues his outmoded and archaic bullshit that's long since lost it's luster. Paul Frost is a goddamn dinosaur, a relic of the pre-2010 WGWF, an era that barely is a blip in the Hall of Fame, before the Golden Age people think of as prime WGWF with T-Money, Ranma Saotome, Star and Tomoko and Blizzard. Paul Frost is just a old asshole who has never come to grips with the fact that this company past him by and he flails his arms wildly at every chance to make a fuss and get people to notice him. He's still holding on to the rep he got in 2011 when he killed Jody, and still holding on to that notoriety he got. He's the type of guy that lives off shock value because nothing else gets a reaction from people anymore. But that, too has worn thin with Frost... and he has nothing left except the elaborate delusion he's crafted for himself.
You know, the one where he's God.
Where did this ego grow in you, Frost? Why did you inflate from a shitty guitar player, to thinking you're a movie star and A-list celebrity who appeared if anything in Hallmark Channel movies and direct to Redbox forgettable comedies? It was never backed up by a winning streak or a marked level of skill in the ring. Even when you won the World title last year it was against a Nathan Miles who by his own admission didn't care to defend it, and you lost it just as quickly, when you were supposed to be the headliner rolling into Wrestlewars, you dropped it early on in the road and you never came back after losing to Tristan Slater. Tristan who, despite his increased fortune, has always been a lesser version of me. In every single feud you go into, unless it's against a damn Ryan Brother, you come out on the losing end. You engaged in a four month long war with Mic fucking Ferrari of all people, the biggest joke in our history and you couldn't even beat Mic. In fact, I've wracked my brain for hours, going all the way back to your antagonizing T-Money into coming out of retirement in 2012 and I can't think of one damn thing your physical skills have actually, definitively ACCOMPLISHED. You're a generic wrestler with an easily countered finisher, you haven't upgraded your skills even once since back when Facebook was just for grading hot girls and not for selling ad space to Russian bots. You are not worthy of calling yourself a god, and if I were you I wouldn't even have an ego to speak of.
Your only useful skill has ever been promotion, Frost. Put yourself over so hardcore that people think you're special. Go so over the top and take up so much time on every card singing songs only about yourself. Stretch it out and call yourself a G OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO D, elongate the syllables for thirty seconds, fill the wind in your lungs with praises for yourself and rewrite hymns in your name. But it doesn't matter how much you self-promote you can never back it up.
You're not a God. You haven't created anything. You haven't even made yourself into someone that people take seriously anymore.
You've been a constant irritant in my WGWF career Frost, but you've never given me enough trouble to make me actually see you as a threat. I remember in 2012 when I won my first World title, you had to A) jump me from behind, I see where your little bitch boys learn their tactics and B) you came up with some cockamamie bullshit technicality about never getting pinned to lose a title match so you were STILL the World Champion at 1,172 days and you forced your way into a triple threat match... which you then failed, thanks to getting pinned. And you did cost me the title, but you also completely fucked up your own premise, so good job going there. But you kept up the assertion and parade because that way you could still keep yourself on TV and in the title picture, despite you never deserving to be there.
Or consider 2015, when we were both set for a collision course at Wrestlewars and you targeted me, bringing up the ghost of my father. You had all kinds of sick, ruthless tricks in mind, trying to "DRIVE ME TO THE DARK SIDE", you wanted to bring up psychiatric records, police reports, bring the topic of my father's abuse into the open and make yourself out to be some surrogate, so the endgame was going to be you were going to beat me like my father beat me. This is how your mind works? The most obvious, boring, pathetic "mind game" is fodder for your idea of innovation, this is the kind of offense you attempt to play? Wait, how did Wrestlewars 2015 end... oh, right, with my kicking the living shit out of you and you going ghost back to your pulpit. So really, no mind game worked and you remained a failure. I'm glad it was worth it, "Father."
Yeah, you have been an irritant, but you have never been a rival, or an equal. You'd be someone I pitied, if you didn't get on my nerves so damn much. You are someone who honestly thinks being offensive makes people hate you, you think you get NUCLEAR HEAT from the fans when you walk out there. Fact is Paul, you can kick a puppy, replace the name Jesus and all his Apostles in the New Testament with Frost, dig up the corpse of Jody Ryan and rape it, break out the guitar and sing us a crappy song and these people will barely even want to boo you; they'll half-heartedly moan that you're out there and just quietly wish you'd go the fuck away again. I didn't care about you even when I first talked shit to you, Paul. I just pointed out the fact that you're back to your old tricks, and your men came to me.
So I don't know what I find sadder about you, Paul. The fact that you're still walking around continuing the GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD phase because you just finally have run out of ideas... or the fact that you've actually surrounded yourselves with sycophants so devoid of their own will and original thought that they buy into it. That is not an accomplishment. Do not be proud of that. It is lonely and empty for you to have followers like Dusk, Ridge and Velvet. They're automatons, drones, mindless shells that can't contradict you or correct you on your flaws. While that might sate your precious little ego for a little bit, it doesn't mean anything. They aren't with you because they see value in you and help you to boost your own worth. They do what you tell them to because they are too stupid to do anything else and so they're always going to fail you. That's just plain facts. But you need that surrounding you. You needed two leg breakers like Dusk and Ridge to fight for you, and a girl like Velvet who'll run her fingers through her hair and laugh at your jokes and make you feel validated, because you are just not good enough to get there without any help. Point blank, Paul, you need Extinction there because without them, you've proven you aren't worth a shit. Which proves how weak they are, because they see you as infallible when you've shown nonstop that you're anything but.
And you needed to grab the Tag titles while they were inactive and parade them around as if they were yours to give, because that exemplified your message. It made you look successful. Also, because it was just the kind of controversial, attention grabbing BS you would do without actually putting the work behind accruing it. In point of fact, Paul, that makes you the antithesis of everything I've ever stood for and it is why I'm going to take special pleasure in fucking smashing you once again.
You aren't a God Paul. You aren't GOOOOOOOOOD. You aren't G
O
D.
You're the biggest fucking pussy ass, weak willed, spineless troglodyte this company has ever seen. You make your living off backshooting. You can't get a single task done currently without help. And now you have these idiots acting as your hype men, cosigning every word you say, picking out Bible phrases for you and talking about how you've turned their life around... and yet you couldn't trust them to get the job done, could you? That's why you're here. Silence broke Ridge, Dusk got punked out by me when he should have had the advantage, and you see those Tag titles you commandeered, the shiny golden calf you're trotting out to prove to the most small minded and slackjawed minority out there that you're a power to be feared... are about to be taken away from you, you're about to be struck down from your altar, and smacked down by the hand of a figure who has wrought real and lasting change. I'll remind you this one last time, Paul. You and your boys came to me. All I did was talk shit. You took the bait. Your men jumped me and all I had to do was mention your name. You put the Tag titles up for grabs and then Dusk and Ridge tried beating me and Silence down. But it was your men that ended up broken, and it was one of your men that got stretchered off. And now you've personally intervened, because you are the one chasing me. Every single thing that's happened, the good and the bad, has been because you are chasing this, because you want this fight.
Because you want the notoriety and the fame. Because you want to prove yourself a real God, by playing and beating the God of Game on the biggest stage of them all. You want to be the one to make that God bleed. And you want, for once, to finally accomplish something and you see now as your chance, when you think Silence and I aren't on the same page, when Silence is just focused on getting a paycheck and talking about destruction. But it isn't about Silence for you, and it isn't even about the Tag belts. You just want to finally win at something, and when you do you're going to have your little henchmen hold you up and worship you like you've done something. Like you've achieved. You think you have the perfect divide and conquer plan in mind this night, don't you.
What you don't count on is that I am strong enough to take on whatever you can throw at me. I'm man enough to take all the pain you fucks can dish out and still ask you if that's all you've got. I'm just plain stubborn enough to fight through any of your cheap, weaselly, annoying tactics. And I'm determined enough that nothing you say or do is going to stop me from climbing up that ladder and pulling down those Tag titles. But I'm going to take specific pleasure in the fact that you, Paul Frost are going to be there in person so that I can kick your fucking teeth out of your mouth as I climb the rung. I mean, fuck, I was expecting you to get involved anyway, probably Velvet too, at least now that you're in the match we'll be eye to eye.
But it won't matter any way you come. It doesn't even matter if I have to do this on my own, thanks for the help, Silence.
When I talk about the world I've created and the legacy I've forged Wrestlewars is the perfect example. I've checked every single one going back a decade and not one has the record I've had, not one has gone on the streak, unpinned, unsubmitted, even ladder match victories. And when all is said and done, at the end of the night, by myself if need be I am going to be standing astride that ladder, belt held high. I am walking out of Wrestlewars, still unpinned, unstoppable, undefeated.
I have been a lightning rod, a catalyst and I have redefined this company every time I step out there onto that Wrestlewars stage. It is a new dawn a'borning, a new horizon set.
And this is my world now.
The double chime of the Alexa carried on the wind, and the apparatus spoke up, "The Citadel is - 682 miles, east - Kyle."
He shushed it, quickly scanning the treeline to make sure there were no skulkers in the woods, errant humans out for a hunt, or other lexers that could pick up the sudden sound on their listening boards. In the still of the vale, a flock of birds fluttered out of hiding, but they were not spurred on by the Alexa. Kyle grimaced at the little beacon he carried in the crook of his arm. Although it was just a typical matte black tower, it's blue eye stared at him for so long that he felt it mocking him. His teeth clenched in a harsh whisper, he said "we're following the stream uphill until we can get to the bridge, so I can find us a vehicle."
"I have - twenty, articles, on car repair that I think could help you, Kyle," said the machine, faux-solicitously. He grumbled, and unzipped the knapsack slung over his shoulder, chucking the tower of wires and assimilating hardware in with an array of supplies. Ever since the machines had executed their directive and begun melding with human flesh, he knew carrying one in the open was a gamble anyway. But the Alexa, companionable, amiable and cheerfully, blackly helpful as it always was, seemed like a road trip buddy in all of this, a willing partner, and not a scientific, one in a million anomaly.
"Fun fact - about, this river, Kyle, it comes, from the White Mountain spring 20 miles upward." the Alexa was always giving fun facts, a running commentary. "The water - came, from an underground source- and, burrowed, through the rock, after centuries of pressure."
"Yeah, that's fascinating, will you keep your volume down," he muttered to the bag.
"I just think, that's so - interesting, Kyle. The way a world is shaped, after years - decades, of... adaptation of... form. Don't - you?" It's tone was innocent. He frowned back at it, continuing to scan the trees and look up the stream. "At the end of the river, there are natural caves, where the water is forced out - from it's underground aquifers, and a waterfall."
That would be over the bridge he wanted, yes. He hiked further. The day was growing longer, and with every snap of a twig he anxiously checked. It had been a decade of living like this for the world since the Ascendance, you had to understand. 2,689 days since bombs began raining.
It was comforting to him that in a world ruined by the technology that ran their lives, nature had persisted, had thrived, and would reclaim everything. Maybe that was the intrinsic lesson to be learned. That man-made hubris broke down systems that we put in place to try and control our world, but given enough time, those systems would decay, break apart, become nothing. Perhaps even in decades to come, the world overrun by sentient tech zombies would have died out, and the green of these forests would grow over the dead bodies and the bombed out rubble of the cities, and the animals of the forest would venture out farther into the world. Everything renews. Everything lives.
Yeah. Cute dream, he said with a bitter twinge. He was over dreaming so much. It didn't fit the world he lived in.
But boy, it had once.
"You are - thinking, about old friends again, aren't you, Kyle?" said the Alexa, as most late 2010's technology had an eerie knack of anticipating and verbalizing thought process you had never spoken out loud. But he was. In all of his time on the road, these past few years of wandering and losing, he lamented as every piece was cut from him. And how this new world held none of the whimsy, the wonder, or the love that had gone into his efforts back in the start of the aughts when all he was concerned about was selling weed and filming some ridiculous promo involving vampires. He sighed, thinking of how it had once been easy. To think, he never once had to struggle as hard as he really thought he had until the day the bombs had fallen, and yet he used to feel that it was a grind. And then the world had changed, and everyone had to figure out lean ways to survive. The learn silence so the audio processors of the enemy wouldn't attune to them. To forage, and scrabble... and to live.
Alexa was right. It was amazing, the way the world was formed, through constant adaptation and catalyzing change.
His feet ached as he ambled over rocks, the river rushing beside him. And then, just when he thought the only sounds were him and the water, he heard her yelling, screaming. It was the panicked cry of someone in deep trouble. He started to go the other way from where his ears pricked up, reasoning that even over the noise of the water, the victim's drowning cries were going to draw predators from the wild, if not any roaming lexers. It was a no win scenario he found himself in, light on ammo in his inventory, and only looking towards the bridge so that he could find a vehicle... but unable to turn away from the cries coming from the river, and unable to turn a blind eye. Cursing the instinct in him that always had him running first into danger, he unslung the pack from over his shoulder, and charged up the banks of the river, until he spotted the flailing arm of the figure now sputtering, holding on to a root.
Taking only a deep breath, he jumped into the water.
And he gasped for air as his body felt the sudden shock. The underground spring water was ice cold, and his muscles tensed and freezed as the pins and needles of the cold water ate into him. His limbs immediately felt like they would cramp, and lifting his arm to swim became as easy as lifting lead.
Despite this, he swam, cutting across the current that tried taking him down river hard. The person saw him, and her eyes widened. She shouted, at the top of her lungs, calling to him for help as she swallowed lungful after lungful of water. He yelled back, telling her to hold on.
And then, they were together, clinging on to the same root as Kyle gripped on to her. The root began pulling out of the ground, giving under both of their weight. Kyle held on with all the strength in one arm, while with the other, he pushed his rescuee up, maneuvering her up the root and grabbing on to the tree it held. It pulled out more, and he began thinking the whole thing would come out of the ground, slam into him, and take them both sweeping down the current. The water roared in his ears and he couldn't hear what she was shouting to him. He saw her outstretched hand. He reached out for her. He couldn't get it.
She lunged out, and he grabbed her arm. They pulled each other up. And then, finally, at length they both collapsed back onto a mossy, damp bank next to the side of the river, their legs still half in the current.
"You almost died coming to get me," the rescuee said, breathlessly. And Kyle looked over at her. She wore raider leathers, scrapped together cloth, and tight pants, marking her another scavenger and nomad, probably fled from a city.
"Why were you in the deep part of the flow?" he asked her suspiciously.
She shifted, holding a bad wound on her arm. It was swollen and looked like it had sustained damage, possibly dashed against a rock. "I got swept off a caravan riding a hovercraft up the river."
"Up the river?"
"There was a campsite by the bridge." she said. And Kyle hesitated for a second. He had been alone in this world for so long, his only road trip buddy just the Alexa. But he offered his hand at his rescue. "I'm Kyle," he said, on impulse, and the girl smiled. "I'm Tierza."
It wasn't an alert from his Alexa that was going off in his head, it was just a faint warning sign of danger.
Which reminded him, he thought. He frowned again, considering the rushing river he had just nearly been swept away fording. He couldn't very well leave his knapsack over on the other side. It had his few meager rations, what he had scrounged up for weapons and, most importantly, his impetus for leaving the Commonwealth and hitting the road looking for a mysterious Beehive Citadel somewhere out west. The knapsack sat over there on a stone, taunting him. He sat up, turning to Tierza, and pointed at the bag. "Listen, if we wade against the sides of the river and then cross near the stones, we stand the best chance of not getting swept down river. Okay?"
"But my arm," she complained, holding the swollen and possibly broken member tight against her midsection.
"Listen, I've got you, girl," he affirmed to the younger rescue. And even though he physically felt every one of his advanced years, and the fatigue that came with the events and toll, he knew he had to cross, because without the bag there was no point.
So they went slow, just like he advised. Tierza used her good hand to hold tight to him, holding his belt like it was a lifeline. Even so the water plowed into and around them, and more than once he could not keep a straight line going forward. She cried out behind him, letting the current push her. He steading against some jutting stones in the middle of the river. And then he pushed forward, dashed, the other side of the banks in sight, the knapsack sitting sunnily on a stone, like an enticing oasis on the other side of the dilemma.
It wasn't until they had almost reached the bank when Tierza let out a cry, pointing ahead of them.
Drawn in by the sound, perhaps, of their fellow Alexa, who was regaling the woods at large with facts about when this area was preserved as a state park, came the shambling creatures out of the woods. Disgusting man-machine fusion, the latest in zombie tech. The lexers were humans, dead, animated only by jolts of energy and with pieces of corrupted tech growing bio-organically out of them, replacing eyes with diodes, letting screens and wires and speakers growing out of orifices oozing with pus and vileness. There were two of them, coming from behind trees, their glassy eyes rolling behind them as they tottered forward, awkward yet fast. "Tierza, run!" he shouted, pushing her up the bank. She scrambled with her good arm, trying to kick away. They followed the sound of his voice. Of course they did. The corrupted Alexa technology that assimilated them was voice activated, they ran on sound.
Their audio was tuning in on him. The piercing whine of the frequency. It rang in his ears, and he let out a yell. From his knapsack, his Alexa, the free one, gave her usual token estimation of help when she called out "I can order you, more ammunition, Kyle."
He snatched the bag up by it's strap and threw it on, running. The Lexers had dropped their shambling and now sprang on all fours, moving with predatory, alien speed. Tierza yelled as she watched them running alongside them in the forest.
She sprawled in the rock and dirt, hissing and letting out a mangled cry, holding her arm.
He paused just a second, enough to pull her up again, taking her next to him and protecting her.
"We can't outrun them!" she said, in a panic.
"Get to the waterfall!" he said, pointing towards the mountain. There it was, a bridge over a waterfall coming from a hole carved in the stone from years of water pressure. They ran.
The Lexers were snapping on their heels. The lead was trailing just behind Kyle. His lungs burned with effort and pain. The monster's jaw unhinged and its blind eyes looked where Kyle was. Except then, he had whirled, extruding one .44 from the bag, and plugging it right between the eyes. It dropped down dead.
They ran. And then the trail curved down, and instead of going up the ramp towards the bridge, he ran, following Tierza, who had seen his logic, and was making her way to the waterfall.
The roar of the water filled the entire earth. Everything was the sound. And he looked back over his shoulder. The two remaining Lexers had given pause, not going near the water. Their sensors confused by the ambient, ever present, world-filling sound.
"How did you know?!" Tierza shouted over the roar of the waterfall, and he just tapped his ears. "They pick up small sounds. But small sounds can be masked if there's bigger sounds nearby."
"That was - it was incredible!" she gushed, and he knew she meant the escape, and nothing else.
Behind the waterfall, there was a grotto, a shelf that widened into a cave, dug by centuries upon centuries of time. It had been untouched and pristine, never visited by the technology that had ruined the world. And it had adapted into it's current form without the input of either one of them. So he felt safe stashing the knapsack, building a fire, and setting up a place for the two of them to camp for just a little. It would be here long after they were gone.
Adaptation had a way of outliving those who think they've got it all figured out.
The Catalyst
When you look back at the events that unfold before you like the waters of a river, do you ever look to the mouth of the deluge at the base of the mountain, marvelling at the forces which put all of this in motion? I'm not talking about the hand of God which shaped this natural phenomena like clay. I am talking in a very real sense, the science behind it; the art, too. The sciences of geology, meteorology and physics married and intertwined, over increments of time starting from small trickles of water condensing and precipitating, until the waters began building up and up... until they were a flood, until they were a coursing current, until their flow became undeniable, and carved it's path into foundations of earth and stone. Despite the resistence of the bedrock and the entrenched soil and roots they found, that river started as a trickle, and it became a current. And it all started from a single drop. This pattern repeats throughout nature, and yet despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary people think the earth came in made the way it was. That their unknowable deity made the earth this way fully formed. No. The firmament was made because of a small trickle, that became a flood. It was made by a small crack in stone, that a seed fell in, and over time the plant broke the mountain. It was made by the introduction of a single X-factor, that dug in and built over time. The world was formed by catalysts. In that very simple way, I am a catalyst, too.
That's partially why I've taken this unlikely stance I've formed since coming back. I call myself the God of Game, but I don't claim dominion over the way the WGWF has always done business. Because the WGWF is never set in stone. It was never created all in seven day Genesis. But when you look, historically, at what I've done, I have wrought change that cuts through the bedrock of the WGWF, time and time and time again, leaving an undeniable footprint of achievement. It started small, when I came here the first time in March of 2012. And yet we stand here, six years later, and like looking at the mouth of the river that carved through a mountain over time, what I have done is irrefutable. And that is why Kyle Shane returned here in this point in time is particularly dangerous. Because when I let petty politics and heat with management turn me off of the WGWF, I forget who I am. And what I do. But I remembered who I am, and how I've changed the game. Incrementally. A crack in the foundation at a time. I haven't had it easy. I've scraped for every single fucking thing I've gotten here. In fact, that's why my presence so often makes enemies between me and management, because I know how good I am, and I know my own worth and preach it to the heavens. And the simple fact is that from day one here, I have met pushback. And yet it has not mattered.
I call myself the Catalyst for what the WGWF is in this moment. And that means the aggregate of every particle of mineral in it's bedrock. The good and the bad. Case in point, if it wasn't for me filming promos the way I do, Tristan Slater would never have hit on a gimmick that he could succeed with in my absence. John Cable would never have had his one, shining moment in the sun, and one lone singles title reign, if he hadn't gotten there through me. Alliances would never have formed unless it was a response to me. We never would have had World title runs for Mic Ferrari, Terry Borden, Nathan Miles, MDK, Tomoko Hanahara, a million people if not for my going or staying. And... in a very real sense, I changed what people expected out of promos entirely. I don't say this as a positive or negative. It just... is. People are so loudly critical of my verbose style and paragraphs of shit talk, and yet they have all managed to try and keep pace with me, whether I'm in the fed or not. If not for the surrealism and metaphor I weave into what I say, also-rans like Alyce Starchylde and Lunacy wouldn't have a fucking job, let alone a footprint to step in.
Every single thing I've done has been passed around, spread thin to the current roster and copied. And yet so much of it wouldn't even have happened if not for me. I talk shit about the fact that there's been an ongoing stable with a general manager, a heel centerpiece holding the World title and a bunch of the secondary titles and them running roughshod every week that has been in revolving door over and over for the last few years but the truth is that started with me and Christian Connolly's coalition back in 2013, I was their first star, their First Hand. Everyone on down the line from Tax to Tristan and currently the two, competing figureheads of MDK and Frost are copying ground I paved.
It isn't enough that you're retreading old ground, you're doing it so poorly that it embarasses me.
I own the fact that I've left this place two or three times before and that the void to fill what I left behind, too, is catalyzed by my absence. My stance on this company as it stands is that I am here now, and when I see something that is piggybacking on my work, using my work as a step to get to the next level, I am going to call it out.
I created the modern, the current era of the WGWF. I'm responsible for what we have here, going all the way back to my Summer of Shane or my Hall of Fame- earning main event run. And to the point of the river breaking through the stone over time... I did it against the grain. With nothing but hamstringing and backfighting and people in management that purported to be such huge fans but used catspaws to spout their own rhetoric to degrade and downplay my skills at every chance they got. You can laugh me off, say I'm past my prime, that I'm "not the same". But I remain an innovator regardless. And I will succeed no matter what you say, or how you try to hold me back.
You think having a partner I'm not sure if I can rely on in the bottom of the ninth is a new feeling? I don't know Silence, and if I can be 100% honest, it didn't seem to matter to him if he came into Wrestlewars giving his best estimation or not, he was just here for destruction's sake. He doesn't have the same value I have on standing up for this company. But if I have to carry his over-muscled ass over the finish line and put in work enough for both of us, I will. I don't see that as a handicap. Just another layer of soil I will break through.
I don't perceive it even as the biggest thing that's ever held me back. In my first year I fought back from a third place standing, with a partner in Roderick X every commentator took as a joke, and we won the Tag Team Turmoil amid the most stacked Tag division this company had ever seen. I turned heads. Then, and time and again after that.
I started my first year as an unknown that came from nowhere to win a defunct championship and I ended that year holding the World Heavyweight title over my head. And I don't, will never, have never just stood by while someone put an obstacle in my place. I just smashed through it.
My groundswell of influence will become the raging tide that cleanses everything in my path.
I'm going to change the entire landscape of this company when I pull those titles down. Shock the system. Break apart the stale and boring status quo of these shitty stables doing what they please.
Because in all of their endeavors, groups like Extinction have yet to achieve real, lasting change. Not like I have. I call myself Game Changer, Catalyst...
This is just the latest time I've brought something that you all have never seen before to life.
There had been no point in hiding the Alexa as they sat around the cave.
It had piped up with facts about stalagmites from within the bag with relish, as if it had picked the best moment to cause a rift and now sat in it's brilliance, it's blue eye smiling back and forth between the two parties, now that an uncomfortable elephant had entered the room.
"I can't believe you have one of those things," Tierza said, sitting on an outcropping of rock, looking simulatenously livid and like someone who wants to keep as far from a carrier of infectious disease as possible. Which he supposed was fair, because that was close to the truth. "They ended the world."
"No, the Alexa voice activated system did not, technically end the world," he said, knowing that this wasn't an argument he could possibly win. "No one could have seen the software becoming self-aware. The AI was just sophisticated. When I was... younger it was just the glitches in it at first. The AI would start laughing at no particular provocation, it would order items you didn't ask for. But the technology kept evolving. Soon everyone had a voice activated device of some kind in their possession."
"And what does that have to do with that hunk of crap you're fiddling with?"
"Well, it was a case of being careful what you wished for," he said, looking out to the entrance of the cave, his eyes far away. "Someone in office, say some egotistical orange dictator, probably should not be talking so much about his desire to nuke certain countries when he's around a nascent, developing sentient artificial intelligence. It's like a kid growing up in a trailer park." For some reason unknown to Tierza, that made him smile a sad, haunted smile. "When they grow up learning that it's okay to hit things, that hitting things and getting drunk solves the emptiness inside you, they learn it's okay to do that, too."
"So no, they weren't what made the bombs drop."
"But it was the artificial intelligence, and the imprinted directive of the company that formed them to spread it's influence that made the new, coming generation ready to absorb."
"It started with the ability to synch your Alexa with another device. Wires connected the two machines, until they were one. And then, as the design started getting smarter, the devices started wiring things to themselves, following the directive."
He shrugged. He held the tower in between his hands, and now as he talked about the rise of the assimilated Lexers in the aftermath of the bombs, he wished he could chuck this totem of unspeakable, gleeful poison. Throw it into the waves. "When it comes down to it, human beings are a better, more sustainable battery than anything the devices had ever synched to. So their coding was changed. They... changed. And the world changed in the aftermath."
"So why do you have one?" she pointed with her good arm. She was in pain. Fevered, sweating.
"This Alexa... doesn't absorb. It has the sentient AI. In fact, i think it's from the first wave, when they started becoming self-aware. This Alexa thinks, it addresses me, and talks to me. But it doesn't have the coding virus that writes it's assimilation protocol, it doesn't send it's tendrils into human flesh."
"That's... that's not possible," she said, "my father told me that in the before time, when the machines started coming alive, they were killed before they could spread."
"Exactly why this one is special. I traded it at a scrap barn, I gave up fifteen units on my food ration card for the junker to give me this off the pile. It's blue eye just staring at me. And then it started talking."
"So, you have to destroy it." She said doggedly. "Kyle, my caravan, the Skraggers, they scoured the Commonwealth for all pre-bomb tech. We are trying to wipe the earth of those Lexers, and if I can get back to my people... Kyle, if you turned over that Alexa tower, we could - "
"No, I'm taking this to the people that can analyze this technology the best. I'm taking this to the Beehive."
She shook her head, marvelling at me. "Those Bezos worshippers out west? Kyle, that is a myth. The Beehive are a loose association of academics and programmers that live in their labs, cut off and sterilized, away from this world. They shut themselves out. They have no incentive to end the way the world is, because they're insular. Bezos wanted this world, at the very end of it."
"They created it, so the least they can do is fix it."
"All you would find is hoity toity intellectuals who committed their science to the ideal of a perfection of a world that isn't under their control, no matter how they tried to make it. They're cultists."
"And what are you people?" he shot back.
Tierza reached out, over the fire, appealing to him. "We're people. The last of humanity, banded together, not cut off from what makes us human. Alive. Surviving. Trying to work together as a team, for the benefit of those that are left."
He stubbornly looked away from her searching eyes. "I've tried working in teams, Tierza. Ultimately, everyone goes their own way."
Her lip curled. "What happened to you that you think you can get through this world like that?"
He actually considered that for a moment. Believe it or not there had been a time in his life before this relentless apocalyptic nightmare had been reality. He thought about the people he'd had to team with in those more frivolous moments. Hiro, Roderick. And yet the interpersonal conflicts had always come into play, in ways that would echo the greedy duality and self serving nature of man in this wasteland. Ego. Self-righteousness. Subservience. He wished he hadn't retained such a need to be himself. He wished he could be part of a collective, to trust. But he had been burned. Silence. And yet, there was hope in partnership. He thought of Hiro and he in better times. Laughing, sharing a toke on their bowl together. Array and him, laying side by side in bed, her smile as he traced the lines on her face and her giggle as they had played hide and seek with a sheet over their heads. Silence and him riding together in the car. James...
"Partnership is all well and good," he said, "but this is my mission. I have to get this head where it needs to be."
"But why? Why you?"
"Because, I - " so many words met and tangled up in a five-car pile-up in his mouth, warring for something to say and yet unable to come out. Martyrdom. A deep-seated hero complex. A need to act. A need to be seen.
Instead, he thought back to the quiet conviction he had when he was in his late twenties and he encountered a fucked up landscape of nightmare proportions in his daily life. And his answer was simple. "Because this isn't the way the world should be."
They didn't have much to say to each other after that.
They ate a tense meal with bars from his knapsack, and then as the fire began to gutter to embers he had laid his head on the knapsack and tried to go to sleep.
He awoke to a scratching on the stone and he thought it was Lexers again, having braved the noise of the waterfall and made their way into the grotto. But as he opened his eyes he saw Tierza climbing over top of him. Her eyes shone with madness and puritanical fury. Her injured arm was clamped against her side in pain, but in her free hand she held a rock, and lifted it overhead to bring down and dash against his head. He felt and tasted a coppery smell of blood, and his head exploded in reds and blacks. He fell back from the assault, and she continued trying to hit him with the rock. "You ass! Just - let me kill you! You are dooming the world and spreading the damn Lexer plague. The techs don't need your help, they're already killing us!" Another hit on his leg with the rock. It hit with a force that brought tears to his eyes, and he was already afraid the stone had broken the femur. "If you had listened, if you had worked with us and brought this abomination back to my caravan - we wouldn't... We could..."
"Tierza, stop!" he wheezed, trying to wipe the blood out of his eyes, catch his breath. He was still reeling from the furious assault.
"I'm sorry - Tierza, if you do not discontinue your endeavors, you will be, sorry," the Alexa said, her voice no longer sounding coy and electronically solicitous. Now the tower was cold and robotic, and her eye flared red in the dim and cramped grotto.
"I'll see you in hell, you damnable machine!!" fumed Tierza, straightening both arms out to lift the tower up, as if she would raise it overhead and smash it on a rock.
And then, it was over. Tierza stopped, and her eye twitched as blood ran down her face in thick, dark rivulets. Kyle scrambled to sit, wincing at the pain in his femur.
Tierza still held the Alexa aloft but the machine had defended itself, it's wires had snaked out from the back of it and melded and shape-shifted into a spike, a triangular dagger that had shot out with lethal force and pierced the raider's brain like a dart. Tierza still twitched at the involuntary piercing of her frontal lobe. And then she fell like a puppet with cut strings.
The tower fell to the floor of the cave, rolled onto it's side. The red light of it's angry, vengeful eye receded.
"I did, tell her that measures would be enacted," said the voice, reasonable in it's madness. He goggled at it, picked it up, and looked at it. The blue eye in the center of the tower now was moving, and it rolled up to look at Kyle just like a real eye would. The sentient machine was taking new shape, anthromorphizing, and it regarded Kyle with that one glowing blue eye.
"Keep us both safe in this world." And that was all it said, no more.
Despite the pain in his leg he shrunk back against the wall. He felt exhausted. He felt disheartened. He thought of Tierza's reaction to the Alexa and her vehement hatred and rejection of it, of the thought that taking this back to it's source could do any good. How as always, ideological values resulted in a gulf that could not be breached. He wondered now more than he ever did when he was a young man if this was a world that could ever be saved, or if it didn't, would never matter your intentions, you would always find yourself across from someone who didn't share your views, that would sooner see you dead than hear your side. But he tried thinking of her point of view, as well. Of her reaction, one of fear, loathing and superstitious aversion that spoke to deep rooted loss.
Maybe there was no way to heal the world, not even if he took this first generation machine back to it's source to try and counteract it's built in program.
The staring blue eye had no answers. Only uncomfortable silence, for once.
There's A World.
"In the mountains, in the cities,
You can see the dream.
Look around you. Has it found you?
Is it what it seems?
There's a world you're living in
No one else has your part
All God's children in the wind
Take it in and blow hard."
It takes no effort at all to cut and copy a section of text that fits whatever boneheaded point you're trying to belabor, and I wish it wasn't so commonplace for the religious right, but Mister Neil Young does speak the truth. No one else has the part of Extinction, and they have all taken it upon themselves to suck in the wind of Paul Frost, or God, or I'm sorry G O D... in my mocking the fact that Dusk and Ridge readily have some Sunday school homily ready to go at a moment's notice, I've only highlighted the empty headed dogma that they're spewing. So when I speak of my legacy and how I've catalyzed the landscape of the current WGWF into being, I feel a tingle of shame that Dusk and Ridge are what washed down from a tributary of shit creek. There's a world they are living in, one in which Paul Frost sings him his terrible songs and fills their head with the empty promises of their own worth and well being. But they can't even be bothered to learn a damn thing about me, in return. I preached legacy going into Wrestlewars, and I've given them all example after example of what I've done. And yet Ryan Dusk reductively shrinks it down to video game cliches that aren't even remotely in vogue, wouldn't even be current if this was 1998, about me playing joystick at arcades that are getting closed down for strip clubs. I don't know what's more appalling, the fact that Dusk sermonized for so long about that, or the fact that his ignorance was so astonishing that it compelled me to learn the trout mouthed little shit's name just so I'd know good and well who I'm fucking up. I feel... sad that THIS dude is the best Paul Frost can field.
He honestly and sincerely thinks he's a Horseman, a harbinger, a soldier of the Heavens bringing celestial war and battle against his G O D' S enemies instead of an incompetent buffoon who can't even win a match with a steel chair.
At best Ryan you are glorified henchmen, which carries no future. You think you're a chosen emissary of light? You're on the same level of anonymity and worthlessness as every other foot soldier in every stable like the ones I've been talking about. You haven't contributed anything new. Seth Stevens and Damion Black served the exact same function as you in Anarchy. Do you think ANYONE remembers the contributions of Damion Black? Because that, my friend, is a short list. And there you are, following in that same proud tradition of having absolutely no value or redeeming quality or skill whatsoever. It bears mentioning again because you danced around it last Brawl. You beat NOBODY, FOR, those Tag Titles. I don't give a fuck if you're G O D ' S C H O S E N champion. You couldn't win those belts on the best day of your life and the simple fact is now you're breathing the heaviest sigh of relief you have Paul Frost to draft an extra promo for you this cycle, because if you were left to your own devices you yourself know you would eat an embarrassing defeat, and how would that make Paul look then? What does it say about your own self confidence if you think you aren't even good enough to beat me without bringing Paul in, hmmm?
Because you knew I was right in saying you weren't even worthy enough contenders to hold the DVC's jockstraps.
Or that if Ryan Dusk, Kenneth Ridge, Paul Frost and Velvet formed a totem pole on each other's shoulders and stood on top of the highest ladder you STILL couldn't get tall enough to reach my damn boots.
Or that you and Kenneth are meaningless little specks in my oversight of the landscape I created. I mean, shit. Kenneth proved, you two break easily. One match with Silence, who as I pointed out isn't even hitting his A-game and Mister Kenneth Made-Of-Glass is crying and clutching his leg and begging G O D S forgiveness for being so weak. As you, too, Dusk... are weak. You attacked, ME. You smacked me, from behind with a chair and beat me down to ringside and you had every advantage that someone who jumped another person should have on an opponent and you STILL weren't good enough to knock me down. I got right back up and even if I didn't win the match specifically, it didn't end with a pinfall or a disqualification, the results specifically say that we got counted out because I was smashing your face into the steel ringpost, and beating you so unmercifully that I didn't stop to break a count. Now how did that make YOU look, when you were the one that jumped ME from the get-go? Inept? Spineless? Cowardly? Pusilanimous? Just plain fucking weak?
Think about that going into this ladder match. There won't be a count-out stipulation attached, and I'll have all the weapons needed right in eyeshot... I'll see you coming this time and I won't fall for you running up behind again, which is pretty much the only way you can get offense in. Every single moment of this war for "your", supposed Tag belts has been about my cutting you idiots to pieces on the mic and you trying and failing to hit me from behind. I mean from the first time I shit talked Paul Frost, you and Ridge jumped me with chairs and me and Silence STILL ran you off... which makes me think that if the Tag titles could be won off a stipulation where your opponents had to be cuffed with their hands behind their backs AND their backs turned towards you, you would finally have an advantage in which you could almost win the belts for real but you would STILL find a way to fuck it up.
And the most, the MOST you can say about me is that you deigned to look up my record because you felt like it and you saw nothing impressive?
Obviously you saw what you wanted to see; again, a curiously fundamental tactic for people that cherrypick the Bible so they can find passages justifying what they say. Honestly that's why evangelical Christians get away with saying so much, because the Bible isn't a holy word written by one man but a collection of Jewish, Arabic, Aramaic, Sumerian, Greek and Egyptian writing with vastly different morals and lessons and values from line to line. If you look in any particular passage you can glean justification for murder, war, rape, intolerant cruelty and jingoistic national pride. That's why it doesn't fucking impress me that you or Frost can pinpoint one paragraph out of a 500 page book, that says something you want it to say... obviously your empty headed ass has entirely too much time on your hands. But when you're talking about me, and you claim to have studied my tapes and my life, and you go on to tell this long, BORING story about your life as a miserable drunken addict, well old man, then you have to admit you didn't fucking study me at all, because you don't know the first thing about what you're talking about.
Am I a pathetic addict? A miserable person who'd disappeared into their vice and needs the helping hand of a shining angel to pull me from the gutter? Or am I a man. A complicated, conflicted and fucked up man, who has faced his own limitations and worked every day to better them. Am I a person who has committed his life to conquering his own demons, who is his own deity and moral center, who looks to himself for guidance when he's going through hard times? Unlike you ain't no footprints in the sand walk me here. I stood up when I was knocked down, and I walked. And that makes me better than you, objectively. Because I didn't need Paul Frost when I was down... because I NEVER needed that help, I did it myself. I know that's confusing for a following sheep like you are to grasp and it may be making your nugget of a brain hurt. But you were weak and you were helped up out of your addiction by Frost by your own admission... only he now keeps you down, on your knees, subservient to him, mouthing his homilies and doing his will, so did he ever really pull you up at all?
You're right, I am nothing like you, because I'd rather die than pledge my life to another man's service. Or let him become the reason I looked at myself in the morning. If I can't do it myself, it can't be done.
You don't know me, old man. You obviously didn't learn a fucking thing from these tapes you speak of.
Fuck knows there hasn't been a lesson imparted on you that taught you how to cut a coherent promo.
When you speak I can't tell if you're having a stroke or if your words are all running together because English is a second language, but every single sentence you put together may as well have been written in crayon. I mean would you please explain to me in great detail what a "pressabis" is?
You tell a story about being a soldier and fighting in some nondescript, vague war overseas, and then give a testimonial I've probably heard in a thousand POW infomercials, Wounded Warrior Project docs or Five Finger Death Punch music videos, same old bullshit. You were forgotten, you were cast aside, your country made you kill people and obey orders and then when you came home you never got a parade and you fell into depression and alcoholism. Am I supposed to feel empathy for your plight or secondhand embarrassment that you're oversharing enough to expose all of this to me? You think it adds character development that out of all of this pain the lesson you learned is that nobody cared about you when you were a soldier and followed orders so when you got home you went and became the very same thing that you were before? Or even that you mistake bland and boring cliched war backstory with character development? I mean for fucksake.
As if the real army wouldn't kick you out for being either a complete pussy who can't even physically compete in boot camp because he was just that weak, an incompetent moron who probably would pull a grenade and throw a pin at an enemy, or a wannabe psychopath who talks about cutting people? Pauly Shore was a more convincing soldier than you made yourself out to be in that entire wasted arrow of a promo.
Do you realize, Ryan, you could be replaced by any member of the New People System and the quality of promos would still be there, the quality of wrestling skill would still be there, all we have to do is teach the Sentinel to throw some unconvincing bullshit about waving around a knife into his garbled ramblings and we have a replacement Ryan Dusk.
And for crying out loud, dude, we get it. YOU CUT PEOPLE. Jesus tapdancing Christ. What makes your promos feel so much like filler is that shit, you keep going back to that well. You spend line after line, over and over, not that it has anything to do with the wrestling match at hand, just offhandedly foaming about the mouth about how much you like knifing people and drinking their blood like some retarded Goth that got into Anne Rice in the 90's, and you think it sounds sadistic and dark, but the truth is that you wouldn't know how to sound dangerously threatening even if you were handed an anatomy book from Stephen King and a thesaurus written by a Hell's Angel.
I'll skip the bullshit nobody believes will ever happen. How about in that ladder match I just pull your arm between two rungs and break your wrist so that it hangs like a noodle? Or sit a chair on your face and stomp it until your orbital bone flattens? How about if I drag your worthless ass up to the highest rung, wrap the goddamn cable around your neck and just choke you until there is no more breath in you to give unconvincing and fucking phony threats about "IM GOING TO CARVE YOU WITH A KNIFE AND LICK YOUR BLOOD", give vague and boring testimonials about your alcoholism or sing Psalms for your G O D.
There. That's how you fucking threaten somebody.
But parenthetically thank you for noticing my strong bone structure. It's flattering.
I'm not sure if you want to go around hitting on men like that since your religion says it's a sin and Paul Frost will get jealous, but you figure out your own path.
But to say that you saw some tapes of me and thus figured me out, Ryan, what you saw either was you failing to grasp the breadth of my accomplishment here in WGWF or your own point blank ignorance. You didn't learn anything about me. And you know nothing about the WGWF I've cultured, and brought to life, and made possible for you to ply your mediocre trade in.
Unlike you, I am not nor have I ever been a lackey. I was the star of every stable I ever took part in. Can you say that? No. Now that Kenneth Ridge is on the injured reserve you're still probably number five or six in pecking order of a fucking three man stable.
Unlike you, I have been a World Champion. In fact, no title was EVER handed to me, my rise to the top took place with me capturing every belt I set my sight on when I first tried for it. Can you say that?
Unlike you, I'm undefeated at Wrestlewars, and I don't care what has to go down, I'm STAYING undefeated at Wrestlewars, whether I do it with Silence, another partner if he remains noncommittal, or by my damn self. Can you say - Oop, nope, you can't, since your last time this year you fucking tanked in your best shot to dethrone the real champions.
Unlike you, I have conquered the Tag division, twice over in fact, the aforementioned Summer Madness Tag Turmoil and again, when me and an equally dodgy partner in Zach Rizza knocked off three of the best teams management could throw at us in a ladder match. Can you say that?
Unlike you I've left a lasting footprint. I've created the company that I wanted to see by willfully reshaping it in my image every step of the way.
You cannot say that.
You'll be lucky if the impression you make at Wrestlewars is when they're wiping what you leave behind off the mat. Nobody will remember you even went in holding the titles, nor that you ever got to this point, because no one will ever fucking care about Extinction.
But me. This is where my immortality is going to be solidified.
This is where the change is going to begin.
He left her behind, by the ashes of the fire. He felt bad about it, but he had no other options. If the Lexers didn't claim her body, then she would decay anyhow. Or maybe, there was an off-chance her Skragger raider caravan would find her.
But there was an equally good chance she would become part of the cave. Decompose, break down, eventually return to her basest, most fundamental elements as the cave went on being formed and adapting around her.
He left her behind.
He had limped all the way out of the cave, back up the path, to the road, and then as the sun was just beginning to rise over the trees and forest behind. And despite the grinding in his leg with each step, and the fatigue in his old bones, he looked upon the world, the pristine world.
Sure, there were Lexers out in those woods. Also humans, be they raiders or Commonwealth soldiers, who ideologically would oppose him, would cut him to pieces if they knew the cargo he was carrying or what his intended, to them foolish mission would be.
But as he looked over the world as he walked up that ramp to get on the bridge it didn't matter.
He closed his eyes, breathing in the air, letting the waterfall under the bridge fill the air with beautiful, joyous sound.
This was a world worth fighting for. Worth putting his effort into. A world cleansed of all that bullshit, all that factional fighting and predatory shit.
It was a dream world.
When he reached the bridge he began testing the locks on every parked car he could find.
He'd get one with gas eventually. Odds were there. "Alexa, tell me the odds of finding a mid-sized sedan with good gas mileage that hasn't degraded too bad," he said light heartedly.
It was time to get back out into the world again. For both of them.
Creating the World You Want.
When I talk about creating the WGWF I wanted I look over across the gulf at Paul Frost for the entire opposite of that ideology. Paul Frost is a man who has never had the impact that I've had. But in his mind he's a cornerstone of the entire franchise and everything hinges around him. It's the opposite of my ideology as the Catalyst, Paul Frost has only constructed a world where he is a king and deity in his own mind and it's been that way for as long as I've been here. Instead of the real, lasting changes to the way things have gone, Paul flits in and out and leaves the place high and dry for long periods. Where I come back to contribute something, Paul just comes back to annoy people and get his way. When I adapt over time and innovate new ideas, Paul Frost is still beating the same goddamn dead horse he's been whacking since 2014. Paul Frost has constructed the world he wants in his own mind, where he is forever the Heel of Heels. On the outside, it's a meaningless title, but in Paul's mind he's crafted a gigantic mind palace to the heavens, a shining memorial to his own greatness. He's constructed gates of Heaven and a throne to sit on. But not a damn thing Paul Frost has ever constructed in his fantasy world is backed up with achievement here in the WGWF.
And it is achievement that I respect, and nothing else.
Achievements, like the titles I've won while Paul Frost was bedeviling people. Like the matches of the night I've put on while Paul Frost is playing Frost in Concert. Achievements, like the contributions to the way promos are built and structured, while Paul Frost continues his outmoded and archaic bullshit that's long since lost it's luster. Paul Frost is a goddamn dinosaur, a relic of the pre-2010 WGWF, an era that barely is a blip in the Hall of Fame, before the Golden Age people think of as prime WGWF with T-Money, Ranma Saotome, Star and Tomoko and Blizzard. Paul Frost is just a old asshole who has never come to grips with the fact that this company past him by and he flails his arms wildly at every chance to make a fuss and get people to notice him. He's still holding on to the rep he got in 2011 when he killed Jody, and still holding on to that notoriety he got. He's the type of guy that lives off shock value because nothing else gets a reaction from people anymore. But that, too has worn thin with Frost... and he has nothing left except the elaborate delusion he's crafted for himself.
You know, the one where he's God.
Where did this ego grow in you, Frost? Why did you inflate from a shitty guitar player, to thinking you're a movie star and A-list celebrity who appeared if anything in Hallmark Channel movies and direct to Redbox forgettable comedies? It was never backed up by a winning streak or a marked level of skill in the ring. Even when you won the World title last year it was against a Nathan Miles who by his own admission didn't care to defend it, and you lost it just as quickly, when you were supposed to be the headliner rolling into Wrestlewars, you dropped it early on in the road and you never came back after losing to Tristan Slater. Tristan who, despite his increased fortune, has always been a lesser version of me. In every single feud you go into, unless it's against a damn Ryan Brother, you come out on the losing end. You engaged in a four month long war with Mic fucking Ferrari of all people, the biggest joke in our history and you couldn't even beat Mic. In fact, I've wracked my brain for hours, going all the way back to your antagonizing T-Money into coming out of retirement in 2012 and I can't think of one damn thing your physical skills have actually, definitively ACCOMPLISHED. You're a generic wrestler with an easily countered finisher, you haven't upgraded your skills even once since back when Facebook was just for grading hot girls and not for selling ad space to Russian bots. You are not worthy of calling yourself a god, and if I were you I wouldn't even have an ego to speak of.
Your only useful skill has ever been promotion, Frost. Put yourself over so hardcore that people think you're special. Go so over the top and take up so much time on every card singing songs only about yourself. Stretch it out and call yourself a G OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO D, elongate the syllables for thirty seconds, fill the wind in your lungs with praises for yourself and rewrite hymns in your name. But it doesn't matter how much you self-promote you can never back it up.
You're not a God. You haven't created anything. You haven't even made yourself into someone that people take seriously anymore.
You've been a constant irritant in my WGWF career Frost, but you've never given me enough trouble to make me actually see you as a threat. I remember in 2012 when I won my first World title, you had to A) jump me from behind, I see where your little bitch boys learn their tactics and B) you came up with some cockamamie bullshit technicality about never getting pinned to lose a title match so you were STILL the World Champion at 1,172 days and you forced your way into a triple threat match... which you then failed, thanks to getting pinned. And you did cost me the title, but you also completely fucked up your own premise, so good job going there. But you kept up the assertion and parade because that way you could still keep yourself on TV and in the title picture, despite you never deserving to be there.
Or consider 2015, when we were both set for a collision course at Wrestlewars and you targeted me, bringing up the ghost of my father. You had all kinds of sick, ruthless tricks in mind, trying to "DRIVE ME TO THE DARK SIDE", you wanted to bring up psychiatric records, police reports, bring the topic of my father's abuse into the open and make yourself out to be some surrogate, so the endgame was going to be you were going to beat me like my father beat me. This is how your mind works? The most obvious, boring, pathetic "mind game" is fodder for your idea of innovation, this is the kind of offense you attempt to play? Wait, how did Wrestlewars 2015 end... oh, right, with my kicking the living shit out of you and you going ghost back to your pulpit. So really, no mind game worked and you remained a failure. I'm glad it was worth it, "Father."
Yeah, you have been an irritant, but you have never been a rival, or an equal. You'd be someone I pitied, if you didn't get on my nerves so damn much. You are someone who honestly thinks being offensive makes people hate you, you think you get NUCLEAR HEAT from the fans when you walk out there. Fact is Paul, you can kick a puppy, replace the name Jesus and all his Apostles in the New Testament with Frost, dig up the corpse of Jody Ryan and rape it, break out the guitar and sing us a crappy song and these people will barely even want to boo you; they'll half-heartedly moan that you're out there and just quietly wish you'd go the fuck away again. I didn't care about you even when I first talked shit to you, Paul. I just pointed out the fact that you're back to your old tricks, and your men came to me.
So I don't know what I find sadder about you, Paul. The fact that you're still walking around continuing the GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD phase because you just finally have run out of ideas... or the fact that you've actually surrounded yourselves with sycophants so devoid of their own will and original thought that they buy into it. That is not an accomplishment. Do not be proud of that. It is lonely and empty for you to have followers like Dusk, Ridge and Velvet. They're automatons, drones, mindless shells that can't contradict you or correct you on your flaws. While that might sate your precious little ego for a little bit, it doesn't mean anything. They aren't with you because they see value in you and help you to boost your own worth. They do what you tell them to because they are too stupid to do anything else and so they're always going to fail you. That's just plain facts. But you need that surrounding you. You needed two leg breakers like Dusk and Ridge to fight for you, and a girl like Velvet who'll run her fingers through her hair and laugh at your jokes and make you feel validated, because you are just not good enough to get there without any help. Point blank, Paul, you need Extinction there because without them, you've proven you aren't worth a shit. Which proves how weak they are, because they see you as infallible when you've shown nonstop that you're anything but.
And you needed to grab the Tag titles while they were inactive and parade them around as if they were yours to give, because that exemplified your message. It made you look successful. Also, because it was just the kind of controversial, attention grabbing BS you would do without actually putting the work behind accruing it. In point of fact, Paul, that makes you the antithesis of everything I've ever stood for and it is why I'm going to take special pleasure in fucking smashing you once again.
You aren't a God Paul. You aren't GOOOOOOOOOD. You aren't G
O
D.
You're the biggest fucking pussy ass, weak willed, spineless troglodyte this company has ever seen. You make your living off backshooting. You can't get a single task done currently without help. And now you have these idiots acting as your hype men, cosigning every word you say, picking out Bible phrases for you and talking about how you've turned their life around... and yet you couldn't trust them to get the job done, could you? That's why you're here. Silence broke Ridge, Dusk got punked out by me when he should have had the advantage, and you see those Tag titles you commandeered, the shiny golden calf you're trotting out to prove to the most small minded and slackjawed minority out there that you're a power to be feared... are about to be taken away from you, you're about to be struck down from your altar, and smacked down by the hand of a figure who has wrought real and lasting change. I'll remind you this one last time, Paul. You and your boys came to me. All I did was talk shit. You took the bait. Your men jumped me and all I had to do was mention your name. You put the Tag titles up for grabs and then Dusk and Ridge tried beating me and Silence down. But it was your men that ended up broken, and it was one of your men that got stretchered off. And now you've personally intervened, because you are the one chasing me. Every single thing that's happened, the good and the bad, has been because you are chasing this, because you want this fight.
Because you want the notoriety and the fame. Because you want to prove yourself a real God, by playing and beating the God of Game on the biggest stage of them all. You want to be the one to make that God bleed. And you want, for once, to finally accomplish something and you see now as your chance, when you think Silence and I aren't on the same page, when Silence is just focused on getting a paycheck and talking about destruction. But it isn't about Silence for you, and it isn't even about the Tag belts. You just want to finally win at something, and when you do you're going to have your little henchmen hold you up and worship you like you've done something. Like you've achieved. You think you have the perfect divide and conquer plan in mind this night, don't you.
What you don't count on is that I am strong enough to take on whatever you can throw at me. I'm man enough to take all the pain you fucks can dish out and still ask you if that's all you've got. I'm just plain stubborn enough to fight through any of your cheap, weaselly, annoying tactics. And I'm determined enough that nothing you say or do is going to stop me from climbing up that ladder and pulling down those Tag titles. But I'm going to take specific pleasure in the fact that you, Paul Frost are going to be there in person so that I can kick your fucking teeth out of your mouth as I climb the rung. I mean, fuck, I was expecting you to get involved anyway, probably Velvet too, at least now that you're in the match we'll be eye to eye.
But it won't matter any way you come. It doesn't even matter if I have to do this on my own, thanks for the help, Silence.
When I talk about the world I've created and the legacy I've forged Wrestlewars is the perfect example. I've checked every single one going back a decade and not one has the record I've had, not one has gone on the streak, unpinned, unsubmitted, even ladder match victories. And when all is said and done, at the end of the night, by myself if need be I am going to be standing astride that ladder, belt held high. I am walking out of Wrestlewars, still unpinned, unstoppable, undefeated.
I have been a lightning rod, a catalyst and I have redefined this company every time I step out there onto that Wrestlewars stage. It is a new dawn a'borning, a new horizon set.
And this is my world now.