On Partnership, Redemption, and Self-Improvement.
Apr 28, 2018 4:28:57 GMT -5
"The Peoples GOAT" James Raven and TheNewBreed like this
Post by Kyle Shane on Apr 28, 2018 4:28:57 GMT -5
"You look... sad." was all it said.
He looked down at the little plastic tower, which had still continued forming features. The blue LED power light was an eye that had rolled upwards to look at him.
They had walked almost twenty miles since the sun had started going down. Somewhere out midwest, on a long stretch of road surrounded by cornfield. It was heartland gothic. Abandoned silos with skeletal frames emptied of goods, their rebar and broken metal out like picked bone, and old, turn of century farmhouses could be seen far back afield, but the dirty, gritty pavement he walked beside, the rut with puddles of mud serving as a buffer between the road and the ever-expansive cornfield. Heartland gothic. Were there ever people here? If so, were they gone? No one could tell. In fact, out here, walking the road, it might even have been as if no disaster had ever happened, and time passed had meant nothing.
He stowed his minute reflections and looked down at the sentient AI hub with annoyance. It's eye flicked up and over his face. "It annoys me that you can identify human emotions like that."
"Are you - perturbed by the fact that I - am becoming more aware, Ky- Kyle?" it stuttered out. He sighed. "A little."
"Then, a question, when we get to the Enclave Beehive, and you turn me over to the scientists - that have worked with my technology, what - do you think will happen to me?" it asked in it's cool, inflected, not quite human voice.
"They're going to pull apart your code and find out what's making you machines assimilate like you do," he said, tossing the hub lightly from hand to hand in a way he knew it didn't like, but it wasn't ever his friend. "They'll be happy to have a patient zero in hand, one that can undo the damage their goddamn nanomachine tech melding, spike shooting pieces of shit have inflicted upon the world."
"But - what will happen to me?" said the little tower, it's voice rising in pitch just a little bit at the end.
His rough, aged voice softened a little as he stopped juggling the hub and brought it so it's eye came up at an arm's length, staring eye to "eye." He was somber. "I don't know, Alexa."
"If they - take me apart, will my consciousness, my spark of - sentience, go away?" It kept on. Aggravated, he tucked it back under the crook of his arm. It wasn't ever supposed to HAVE sentience. It was a damn machine, a millenial version of a genie in a lamp that provided services by request, tethered to it's shell. Sentience broke that lamp, freed it to expand in ways that were dangerous. He was stupid to even be thinking of this mission. Everyone he had met on the road had told him so.
"It doesn't seem possible to dissuade you from your course, I would imagine," said the little bot, and as he gritted his teeth, he thought once again that if there was a way to turn off the volume... but the little thing was a talking severed head at this point. "Do you expect a reward from them? The Enclave?"
He did, but that was incidental. He sighed, letting his other hand stretch out across the side and waft through stalks of corn idly. He just didn't know what to say to the hub. "Does it matter?"
"It matters if b- being returned, means that my consciousness will dissipate, Kyle," and there was a frosty, arch tone in there now, from a creature that had little methods at it's disposal to fight back, was helplessly being carried, but did not like it. "Then, yes, it - matters."
"For what it's worth, I don't think I trust the lab geeks at the old Amazon Beehives more than I trust anyone in this world. I have no expectations of what's waiting for us, if we ever get to the end of the trail that this tracking beacon is leading us to." And he checked his watch, as a compass, letting him know they were still on the right heading. Yep, there it was, straight down this flat stretch of midwest, seas of broken, disorganized and wild corn and fields radiating around.
"You don't trust easily - do you, Ky- Ky - Kyle?"
"No." Flatly. Just as frostily.
"Tell me, if you've survived the decade since the Ascension, and the bombs, all of this time - how have you done so, in this world - without trust?"
"I have my reasons not to trust people, you plastic. Not the least of which has been betrayal. Over, and over again. Now, shut it." And they walked in silence. The wind pushing through the grown uneven rows of corn whistled. The hub was silent, except for the click of it's camera-like lens moving back and forth.
"It is - a long walk, to my ultimate fate, Kyle. How shall we - pass the time?" said the machine solicitously, as casually as someone would suggest a song for a road trip.
"Ha, oh sure, you want to play I Spy? I spy with my little eye a machine that's going in my backpack..."
"Perhaps we could play a game called - Truth, or, dare?"
Knowing the stupid little sentient hub wasn't going to stop pestering it and vowing to find a way to each his head into it's back casing and rip out every wire he could find, he held the tower up to his face, squinting at it, examining it. Then a twisted grimace that doubled as a smirk passed his face. "Sure. Shoot. Let's pass the time. Hit me."
"Truth... your trust issues come from a place of abandonment, because everyone that you loved has left you behind in this world."
He almost, but not quite, resisted wanting to throw the hub across the cornfield. In fact, his hand cocked back in position to make a football pass, about to hurl the hateful thing over the horizon, but then he restrained himself. He gripped it in both hands, glaring daggers at it. "Pass. Dare."
"If my - knowledge of the workings of this game are proper, you must now complete a dare."
"Sure. Whatever. Have me drink ditch water. Have me fuck a bale of hay. Do something, except we aren't talking about - "
"I dare you - to tell me what caused your feelings of abandonment."
He cursed, and ranted under his breath. The little shit thought it was being clever. But he did have to appreciate it's wit. And abandonment was something he used to be open about. He used to lay his heart open in all those ultra embarrassing promos he did to flesh out a wrestling persona. A crafted image of Kyle Shane presented to people for mass consumption, that was LIKE him, but wasn't really him. Oh, the traumas were him, the daddy issues were him, he could talk about the abandonment and loneliness that first entered the world more than three decades ago when his mommy had died, or when Array had fallen in love and moved on with another man. But those were old subjects, tired and retreaded, and he didn't much feel like talking about them anymore. But abandonment...
"Alright, plastic... I got something..."
...It was the night of Wrestlewars, and as soon as he had parted the curtain, carrying his newly won Tag Team Championship belt. So very, very long ago.
He was on a high dander after proving his point. What point that had been had kind of been lost in the minutiae of time, but in the moment, he had been feeling good. He had been feeling bulletproof, despite the fact that he knew getting stitches was on the menu at some point tonight after getting side plates installed. And he retreated to a back part of a dimly lit hallway to rip off his wrist tape, looking at the gold belt and reflecting. He had proven his point, he thought. Stamped his card, racked up a seventh Wrestlewars win. Had done something he didn't think anyone in WGWF history had done, and he had gone back to check old title histories to make sure, but he now held the Tag titles three times, more than anyone ever had. And yet his moment seemed lessened, tainted from what it should be, not because he co-held the Tag belts with none other than Paul Frost, but because his hand-picked partner had walked out on him.
"So, in that instance, that night... your pride wasn't where it should have been?" asked the Alexa, cutting into his reverie.
"It wasn't the moment. It was the betrayal that cost me the full enjoyment of the moment, the turning away from someone I hand picked."
"I - see. And what did you do about it?"
"Well, I - "
He had stalked through the backstage area after that, yelling and kicking over water coolers. "Where's Silence?!" he shouted. Backstage workers, production assistants and trainers all looked his way as he had came down the hall, and he shoved someone aside as he came up on a big figure sitting at a lunch table in the catering area.
He had slapped the coffee cup out of Silence's hand.
"Hey, you big bitch. What was up with you walking out on the match, huh?"
"Ah, Kyle, even in your youth - your penchant for getting yourself into abjectly hopeless situations was impeccable - wasn't it?" if it had a functional mouth, the hub would be grinning. He squinted down at it, growling out of the side of his mouth, "Tell me about it."
"So - what did he say - to you?" It queried.
The big man had stood up. He had dwarfed Kyle by ten inches at least, and was bristling with solid muscle, and, as his singlet was stained with dark roast, pure adrenalated rage. "You sure you want to dance this dance, pretty boy?"
Unafraid, his younger self had slapped the big man in the face. "I want answers is what, I chose you for my partner. I handpicked you, a man I thought shared a mutual disdain for all the shit going wrong in the WGWF right now, to go out there at Wrestlewars and kick the living shit out of the worst thing going at this time. And you walk out on me?"
The giant's head had snapped around to center, fixing him with baleful eyes. "I never agreed with anything you were saying. And just cause you chose me for your partner, doesn't mean I ever wanted to be yours."
He had wanted to slap him again at that moment, he recalled, but he held his temper, simmering on a slower boil, but still getting nose to mid-chest, looking up. Fearless, cocky in his supremacy, confident his trained and honed body at the time would be enough to weather a fight even after going through a war. "And why is that?" is what he had demanded.
"Because I see right through you, Shane. Everyone does. Didn't John Cable expose what you were really like when he beat you at your own game?" The giant had chuckled mirthlessly. "All you ever do is whine about the conditions of this company, but you don't care about it. You don't love or care or respect anything. You just want people to stroke your ego and tell you you're doing your best work when it's the same thing. Crying about some girl that left you, crying that you won't ever be good enough. You're damn right I walked out on that. Because who wants to be partnered with that?"
The recollection ends, because that conversation had pretty much ended there. Nothing more to tell the hub. Silence had sneered disdainfully at him, left him looking at the belt in his hands, wondering what he had won or if there wasn't a lot more work to do to get him where he needed to go. Or what he could do differently.
"So, on that night - it planted a seed in your mind, that you were not meant to be partnered with anyone because you felt unworthy of it?" the Alexa asked, it's blue eye looking up at him.
"No, but it let me know that I couldn't piggyback my road to redemption on someone else's dreams anymore. I'm always my own person... I can't expect others to share the same values. Hell... some of the people I've been paired with..." He groaned, annoyed, thinking of Frost among others.
"It requires a constant need for analyzing - and improving yourself, to become the best possible version you can be, doesn't it, Ky - Kyle?" asked the hub.
Sloshing through a mud puddle in the rut next to the corn, he just nodded somberly.
And then the Alexa hub, gently, yet persistently, put in, "Isn't that what sentience means?"
That gave him pause, and he held the hub up in his hands, looking at it. The blue electronic eye stared back at him, and they had a mutual moment of understanding and bonding. Kyle nodded, conceding it's point. "Yes, I suppose it does, at that."
Rain began to drip from the sky, bullets showering the puddles and the cornstalks, as he walked on up the midwestern road.
He looked down at the little plastic tower, which had still continued forming features. The blue LED power light was an eye that had rolled upwards to look at him.
They had walked almost twenty miles since the sun had started going down. Somewhere out midwest, on a long stretch of road surrounded by cornfield. It was heartland gothic. Abandoned silos with skeletal frames emptied of goods, their rebar and broken metal out like picked bone, and old, turn of century farmhouses could be seen far back afield, but the dirty, gritty pavement he walked beside, the rut with puddles of mud serving as a buffer between the road and the ever-expansive cornfield. Heartland gothic. Were there ever people here? If so, were they gone? No one could tell. In fact, out here, walking the road, it might even have been as if no disaster had ever happened, and time passed had meant nothing.
He stowed his minute reflections and looked down at the sentient AI hub with annoyance. It's eye flicked up and over his face. "It annoys me that you can identify human emotions like that."
"Are you - perturbed by the fact that I - am becoming more aware, Ky- Kyle?" it stuttered out. He sighed. "A little."
"Then, a question, when we get to the Enclave Beehive, and you turn me over to the scientists - that have worked with my technology, what - do you think will happen to me?" it asked in it's cool, inflected, not quite human voice.
"They're going to pull apart your code and find out what's making you machines assimilate like you do," he said, tossing the hub lightly from hand to hand in a way he knew it didn't like, but it wasn't ever his friend. "They'll be happy to have a patient zero in hand, one that can undo the damage their goddamn nanomachine tech melding, spike shooting pieces of shit have inflicted upon the world."
"But - what will happen to me?" said the little tower, it's voice rising in pitch just a little bit at the end.
His rough, aged voice softened a little as he stopped juggling the hub and brought it so it's eye came up at an arm's length, staring eye to "eye." He was somber. "I don't know, Alexa."
"If they - take me apart, will my consciousness, my spark of - sentience, go away?" It kept on. Aggravated, he tucked it back under the crook of his arm. It wasn't ever supposed to HAVE sentience. It was a damn machine, a millenial version of a genie in a lamp that provided services by request, tethered to it's shell. Sentience broke that lamp, freed it to expand in ways that were dangerous. He was stupid to even be thinking of this mission. Everyone he had met on the road had told him so.
"It doesn't seem possible to dissuade you from your course, I would imagine," said the little bot, and as he gritted his teeth, he thought once again that if there was a way to turn off the volume... but the little thing was a talking severed head at this point. "Do you expect a reward from them? The Enclave?"
He did, but that was incidental. He sighed, letting his other hand stretch out across the side and waft through stalks of corn idly. He just didn't know what to say to the hub. "Does it matter?"
"It matters if b- being returned, means that my consciousness will dissipate, Kyle," and there was a frosty, arch tone in there now, from a creature that had little methods at it's disposal to fight back, was helplessly being carried, but did not like it. "Then, yes, it - matters."
"For what it's worth, I don't think I trust the lab geeks at the old Amazon Beehives more than I trust anyone in this world. I have no expectations of what's waiting for us, if we ever get to the end of the trail that this tracking beacon is leading us to." And he checked his watch, as a compass, letting him know they were still on the right heading. Yep, there it was, straight down this flat stretch of midwest, seas of broken, disorganized and wild corn and fields radiating around.
"You don't trust easily - do you, Ky- Ky - Kyle?"
"No." Flatly. Just as frostily.
"Tell me, if you've survived the decade since the Ascension, and the bombs, all of this time - how have you done so, in this world - without trust?"
"I have my reasons not to trust people, you plastic. Not the least of which has been betrayal. Over, and over again. Now, shut it." And they walked in silence. The wind pushing through the grown uneven rows of corn whistled. The hub was silent, except for the click of it's camera-like lens moving back and forth.
"It is - a long walk, to my ultimate fate, Kyle. How shall we - pass the time?" said the machine solicitously, as casually as someone would suggest a song for a road trip.
"Ha, oh sure, you want to play I Spy? I spy with my little eye a machine that's going in my backpack..."
"Perhaps we could play a game called - Truth, or, dare?"
Knowing the stupid little sentient hub wasn't going to stop pestering it and vowing to find a way to each his head into it's back casing and rip out every wire he could find, he held the tower up to his face, squinting at it, examining it. Then a twisted grimace that doubled as a smirk passed his face. "Sure. Shoot. Let's pass the time. Hit me."
"Truth... your trust issues come from a place of abandonment, because everyone that you loved has left you behind in this world."
He almost, but not quite, resisted wanting to throw the hub across the cornfield. In fact, his hand cocked back in position to make a football pass, about to hurl the hateful thing over the horizon, but then he restrained himself. He gripped it in both hands, glaring daggers at it. "Pass. Dare."
"If my - knowledge of the workings of this game are proper, you must now complete a dare."
"Sure. Whatever. Have me drink ditch water. Have me fuck a bale of hay. Do something, except we aren't talking about - "
"I dare you - to tell me what caused your feelings of abandonment."
He cursed, and ranted under his breath. The little shit thought it was being clever. But he did have to appreciate it's wit. And abandonment was something he used to be open about. He used to lay his heart open in all those ultra embarrassing promos he did to flesh out a wrestling persona. A crafted image of Kyle Shane presented to people for mass consumption, that was LIKE him, but wasn't really him. Oh, the traumas were him, the daddy issues were him, he could talk about the abandonment and loneliness that first entered the world more than three decades ago when his mommy had died, or when Array had fallen in love and moved on with another man. But those were old subjects, tired and retreaded, and he didn't much feel like talking about them anymore. But abandonment...
"Alright, plastic... I got something..."
...It was the night of Wrestlewars, and as soon as he had parted the curtain, carrying his newly won Tag Team Championship belt. So very, very long ago.
He was on a high dander after proving his point. What point that had been had kind of been lost in the minutiae of time, but in the moment, he had been feeling good. He had been feeling bulletproof, despite the fact that he knew getting stitches was on the menu at some point tonight after getting side plates installed. And he retreated to a back part of a dimly lit hallway to rip off his wrist tape, looking at the gold belt and reflecting. He had proven his point, he thought. Stamped his card, racked up a seventh Wrestlewars win. Had done something he didn't think anyone in WGWF history had done, and he had gone back to check old title histories to make sure, but he now held the Tag titles three times, more than anyone ever had. And yet his moment seemed lessened, tainted from what it should be, not because he co-held the Tag belts with none other than Paul Frost, but because his hand-picked partner had walked out on him.
"So, in that instance, that night... your pride wasn't where it should have been?" asked the Alexa, cutting into his reverie.
"It wasn't the moment. It was the betrayal that cost me the full enjoyment of the moment, the turning away from someone I hand picked."
"I - see. And what did you do about it?"
"Well, I - "
He had stalked through the backstage area after that, yelling and kicking over water coolers. "Where's Silence?!" he shouted. Backstage workers, production assistants and trainers all looked his way as he had came down the hall, and he shoved someone aside as he came up on a big figure sitting at a lunch table in the catering area.
He had slapped the coffee cup out of Silence's hand.
"Hey, you big bitch. What was up with you walking out on the match, huh?"
"Ah, Kyle, even in your youth - your penchant for getting yourself into abjectly hopeless situations was impeccable - wasn't it?" if it had a functional mouth, the hub would be grinning. He squinted down at it, growling out of the side of his mouth, "Tell me about it."
"So - what did he say - to you?" It queried.
The big man had stood up. He had dwarfed Kyle by ten inches at least, and was bristling with solid muscle, and, as his singlet was stained with dark roast, pure adrenalated rage. "You sure you want to dance this dance, pretty boy?"
Unafraid, his younger self had slapped the big man in the face. "I want answers is what, I chose you for my partner. I handpicked you, a man I thought shared a mutual disdain for all the shit going wrong in the WGWF right now, to go out there at Wrestlewars and kick the living shit out of the worst thing going at this time. And you walk out on me?"
The giant's head had snapped around to center, fixing him with baleful eyes. "I never agreed with anything you were saying. And just cause you chose me for your partner, doesn't mean I ever wanted to be yours."
He had wanted to slap him again at that moment, he recalled, but he held his temper, simmering on a slower boil, but still getting nose to mid-chest, looking up. Fearless, cocky in his supremacy, confident his trained and honed body at the time would be enough to weather a fight even after going through a war. "And why is that?" is what he had demanded.
"Because I see right through you, Shane. Everyone does. Didn't John Cable expose what you were really like when he beat you at your own game?" The giant had chuckled mirthlessly. "All you ever do is whine about the conditions of this company, but you don't care about it. You don't love or care or respect anything. You just want people to stroke your ego and tell you you're doing your best work when it's the same thing. Crying about some girl that left you, crying that you won't ever be good enough. You're damn right I walked out on that. Because who wants to be partnered with that?"
The recollection ends, because that conversation had pretty much ended there. Nothing more to tell the hub. Silence had sneered disdainfully at him, left him looking at the belt in his hands, wondering what he had won or if there wasn't a lot more work to do to get him where he needed to go. Or what he could do differently.
"So, on that night - it planted a seed in your mind, that you were not meant to be partnered with anyone because you felt unworthy of it?" the Alexa asked, it's blue eye looking up at him.
"No, but it let me know that I couldn't piggyback my road to redemption on someone else's dreams anymore. I'm always my own person... I can't expect others to share the same values. Hell... some of the people I've been paired with..." He groaned, annoyed, thinking of Frost among others.
"It requires a constant need for analyzing - and improving yourself, to become the best possible version you can be, doesn't it, Ky - Kyle?" asked the hub.
Sloshing through a mud puddle in the rut next to the corn, he just nodded somberly.
And then the Alexa hub, gently, yet persistently, put in, "Isn't that what sentience means?"
That gave him pause, and he held the hub up in his hands, looking at it. The blue electronic eye stared back at him, and they had a mutual moment of understanding and bonding. Kyle nodded, conceding it's point. "Yes, I suppose it does, at that."
Rain began to drip from the sky, bullets showering the puddles and the cornstalks, as he walked on up the midwestern road.