Disclaimer: This is a work of fan-fiction using characters from Marvel Comics. The Shadowlands concept is Alicia McKenzie's alternate multiverse disaster, and I have specific approval of the story from her. "Video Killed the Radio Star" is actually credited to the appropriate people within the story itself. What's left of the story is mine. No tangible profit is being made from it or is intended to be. Thanks go to those who looked at it for me. Please contact me to tell me what you thought or regarding archival, MST, or Pop-Up; objections are unlikely, but if you do any of the above, I'd like to see.
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Circuit Sight
by Persephone
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I see.
Video.
I see.
I see way too much.
Way too much.
I wasn't really a radio star. I was a DJ; I was an announcer. I have an Announcer Voice. It's actually the same one my teammates call the Leader Voice. Very useful for shouting out orders in battle.
"MOVE LEFT, THERE'S A SHIFT ABOUT TO OPEN!"
Used to call, actually. And used to be the same. It's gone a little strange on me. There wasn't actually any need to shout just then; I only meant to project enough to cut past the weird dampening effect and the music that keeps playing and playing.....
Every time I speak in a normal voice it seems like the air in here swallows my words or I wind up singsonging them.
I try to make myself heard, and I wind up booming so loud it shakes the windows.
Out of the way, nobody hurt. Probably wouldn't be permanent anyway; he heals fast and he's pretty hard to kill. I've seen the shiftlines tear people apart, though, and dismemberment's pretty hard for most people to recover from.
He growls at me for yelling, but it's half-hearted. He didn't see the shift about to open. I did.
Video.
"Video killed the radio star.
Video killed the radio star...."
The repetitions finally die out again and there's a hiccup as the song starts over.
I am getting so sick of this song that I've started waxing philosophical about it wholly in self-defense.
"I heard you on the wireless back in Fifty-Two...."
"Video Killed the Radio Star," released by the Buggles under the Polygram label as part of the album The Age of Plastic in 1980. First music video MTV put on national broadcast two years later....
One year before, apparently, my sons came back in time and started wreaking havoc. And I thought Alex was bad.
Now that was a rotten joke.
"Lying awake intent at tuning in on you...."
I'm tuned in to the shifts. There's a reason. I'm starting to get it.
"If I was young it didn't stop you coming through....."
When did it ever? Childhoods destroyed....
Apocalypse and his hosts.
"Rewritten by machine and new technology...."
I didn't know where I was or where I was going. Hadn't for a long time, not since things started falling apart.
Hank would quote Yeats, there. He did, several times.
Don't know where he is.
It's a lousy leader who loses everybody he's responsible for. Looks like I've done that.
I don't know what to do about it....
I was wandering around and came across this... thing. A mass of stuff that looked an awful lot like what Reed said was Celestial tech, in the Reaver base. They say any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic; I'm not sure I'd agree. I've seen magic; some of this looks more like... life.
I poked around some, very carefully. There was the creepy feeling that something might be calling me -- and it was definitely something, not someone, which is usually ominous. And I had a very bad feeling about the place that I was almost sure wasn't entirely mine.
Then I heard the most horrible scream of my life, echoing out of somewhere deeper inside. Louder and more agonized than the sounds all my friends and too many strangers I've seen made dying, ripped apart by shifts opening or changing midway through -- what happens when you go through a doorway and it leads to one room when your face goes through and another when your back does? I've seen it. I saw the shifts coming sometimes but I wasn't fast enough....
This sounded worse, I don't know how. It was a howl and a screech and it didn't sound like whoever'd made the noise was very practiced at screaming, maybe like he'd been trying not to.
Of course, I didn't recognize the voice.
Of course, I went leaping down inward with an answering yell, like a complete idiot, because I couldn't let someone be tortured like that if I could save him, right?
So I blasted away at the wires and tentacles all around the closest thing I could see to a human form, and then jumped in and started scraping the nearest ones away. I didn't do that when Stryfe gave us an image of Nathan all wired into T-O -- it was probably not the most brilliant move at this point either, but it worked. Though the stuff started trying to climb onto me, which shouldn't have been a surprise. Then its victim got himself together and staggered out, so I could get out of the way.
My skin started repelling the pieces by itself.
Look who I'd found.
Apocalypse himself.
He looks better than I'm used to. Not shriveled up and not bonded to any kind of bizarre mechanical... things.
Apparently I interrupted that. He was pretty shaky for a while, there. I wasn't sure if I should even help, on some level, and on another I felt like I had to....
I keep wondering secretly if I should kill him, or if he's going to try to kill me. He doesn't trust me either, I can see that. Can't entirely blame him for that. Considering what I keep thinking about, considering the absolute fury that runs through me about three times every day just thinking about what he's done or what he was going to do or whatever you want to call it, plus any time we come across the remains of it.... Considering what I do blame him for.
Nathan....
"I met your children...
What will you tell them?"
What would he tell them? What would I tell them? What can anyone tell them, what can anyone tell anyone's children now?
In the twentieth century Apocalypse infected my baby boy with a techno-organic virus that almost killed him, and I had to give him up to strangers who turned out to be my daughter's followers... and me and Jean.
In the thirty-eighth century Jean and Nathan and I kept Apocalypse from taking over Stryfe, and killed the ancient tyrant once and for all.
(Which makes it really interesting that Nate's dropped hints from time to time that suggest Apocalypse or somebody going by that name and appearance was still around well after that point, might even have won the war. Maybe the Canaanites really did have him. Maybe they had a figurehead who acted like him to be encouraging, who knows. Or maybe he came back. Again.)
At the end of the twentieth century Jean and Nathan and I were all there, but there wasn't one thing either of them could do to stop Apocalypse from taking over Nate Grey -- and there was only one thing I could do, and that was take his place.
At the start of the twenty-first century they came and saved me, tore Apocalypse's mind free and killed it and left me with the body. Both bodies. Something like that. The merged body, and his powers, and my powers, and a whole load of partly subconscious crud. I think some of my teammates were afraid I'd do something analogous to Dark Phoenix.
Blazes. I was afraid I'd do something analogous to Dark Phoenix.
"And now I understand the problems you can see...."
I got enough memories and enough out of that little encounter with the leftover Celestial ship to start seeing some point to Apocalypse's wanting to be prepared for them to come back. He wanted the power to fight them. There was even some twisted sort of loyalty to humanity there.
I could see wanting to be prepared, myself, even if I don't agree with his methods. (What if it turned out that was what we had to do for anybody to make it past their arrival? But I don't think that's how it would work....) I can't forget arguing with them before. Can't ever forget the Beginagains.
I wonder how they're doing?
"Pictures came and broke your heart...."
Then nobody had to worry about whether I was going to go mad or start obsessing over the Celestials or advocating some kind of gladiatorial arena for all of humanity to determine fitness and get somebody who could fight the Celestials. (I'd have thought he'd be less eager to kill Franklin Richards, even to keep him away from Onslaught, given that interest....)
Then we all had worse things to worry about.
Then the world started getting sliced apart and pieces replaced with other things. The best comparison I can come up with is cutting up pictures to make a jigsaw puzzle, and then trying to put then together again with the pieces all mixed up. And heaven help you if you're in the way when the blade passes.
"And now we meet in an abandoned studio...."
Exactly what this is. Part of this is part of an abandoned studio, that is. Broken glass jarred loose by my shout is still shivering and clinking to the ground. The equipment is working surprisingly well considering that a shiftline shoots right through one end of the sound system and there's a speaker on the other side that appears to be under water. That one's new, the one I saw coming just in time to warn Nur out of the way of.
Why did I warn him? Lingering sense of responsibility. Knowing I'm completely on my own again if he's gone. The feeling that this is his fault and my fault and all the Twelve's fault even though we won -- we WON and this still happened!
We're responsible. Somehow, some way. The Twelve didn't even happen for him; it was way too early. There has to be something we can do to make things better, because I refuse to believe there isn't, and we're both key. I just have to figure out how. Right? Before I lose it completely and kill him.
The remnants of his temper are not helping.
Would he really have been in danger? Yes. Probably. Maybe not; I don't know. The wiring the shiftline ripped through is apparently intact. Living matter and dead matter and matter that was never alive in the first place don't necessarily react in even remotely the same way to the same shift, though.
There was one across the opposite corner already. Weird slimy things with strong-base gunk that leaves eaten-away trails in the floor keep coming through it. You can see across that shiftline when it holds steady, but it seems to switch to other destinations sometimes and when it's at the one the slime comes from, it's usually too murky on the other side to see anything. I'm just glad whatever fluid that is, air or water or something else, doesn't seem to cross over on its own. I keep warning it not to, as if it would listen to me.
I think it does listen to me, which is starting to worry me even more.
"And you remember the jingles used to go...."
It just keeps playing "Video Killed the Radio Star." I don't know where it's getting the power or how the sound system works when practically everything else in the studio is broken, including the chairs and a three-legged stainless-steel stool with a light bulb on the end of the only intact leg (OK, the light bulb isn't broken.), or why it won't STOP.
It isn't playing the song from The Age of Plastic, by the way. I checked; it's the single. I know too much crud like this -- it has "Kid Dynamo" on the other side.
Not that it's ever going to be possible to switch sides. It just keeps going and going and -- I'm stopping right there.
Partly because I'm not sure whether to make a crack about the Energizer Bunny or Juggernaut, and partly because if I did En Sabah Nur over there wouldn't get it anyway. I think I've given him enough reasons to doubt my sanity by now without cackling over an incomprehensible or unspoken joke.
"You were the first one...
You were the last one...."
The First One -- what Apocalypse told me his name meant. En Sabah Nur. His father called him that. It's hard to imagine Apocalypse ever having had a family of any sort, though I suppose he had to come from somewhere.
The First Ones -- what the Askani called me and Jean, the ones Aliya "Jenskot" took her name from. The parents of their Chosen One, the mantle they shrouded Nathan in, and for that matter of their founder Mother Askani. Rachel.
The first what, I'm not sure in either case. Too many things that could have been intended.
Video killed the radio star
Video killed the radio star...."
I see....
I see without my visor or goggles in the way now, because I finally figured out how to stop the beams. Gave myself a killer headache experimenting; I just hope I didn't damage anything important on the way.
I see....
I see, whenever I close my eyes, the shifts that took my friends and loved ones away, by killing them or only separating us.
I see....
I see way too many connections.
I see the Celestial ship transforming Apocalypse into something more powerful, more dangerous, and in some ways perhaps weaker, though he might kill me if he knew I thought it. I see it starting him on his own mission.
I see him using it (or is it the other way around?) thousands of years later.
Ship.
That same terrifying mass of technology was what was later Ship, Apocalypse's slave who gladly helped us -- X-Factor -- reprogram it for our use. I'd stumbled across Apocalypse and Ship once earlier -- he'd landed it, of course --
Ship became the Professor; its consciousness entered my baby's body and stayed with him as he jumped ahead in time. Either that or it got left behind and waited several centuries for him to get back into the timeline. Nathan's advisor and confidant and closest companion sometimes was the Celestial ship that transformed Apocalypse and gave him the techno-organics in the first place.
After I realized that I couldn't even bring myself to be surprised that Prosh -- Prosh! -- only aggravated the T-O on Nathan. Maybe that was because of the Phalanx; right now I'm skeptical.
I've hit more shifts involving that one... entity. I've been putting the pieces together. I think it matters. I'm not sure how.
I could be wrong.
I see all these connections, though.....
It's almost as if the shifts have been guiding me to Ship/Professor/Prosh somehow. I don't know if they can. What directs chaos?
I don't know if I want an answer to that....
It could just be pure chance. The law of averages. Probability. Necessity. In an infinite number of universes, infinite timelines, because that's what everybody who's had a chance to look into it scientifically and actually talked to me afterwards thinks is happening and it fits what I see as well as anything else, there has to be a Scott Summers, Cyclops, who takes this path.
Or maybe there doesn't.
"...Put the blame on VTR...."
I give the new fault line in reality a warning glare as I walk over to sit down across from a younger version one of my worst enemies and share stale bread and algae-decorated water and moldy cheese we could probably both live without eating.
On the bright side, it probably won't kill us, either.
If it does... if you're only merged with an External's body, do you still come back?
I look idly across at the broken videotape recorder thrown in the corner -- looks out of place except for the general disrepair -- and trace the wires spilling out of it with my eye. Then I stop chewing and freeze, because those wires don't all just end in breaks or loop back into the cracked casing.
I think if I went and looked, I'd find they run into the record player.
The back of my neck prickles as I suddenly feel certain, as if I could see it already, that if I went and pulled apart the sound equipment and looked inside, it would be that same half-living Celestial techno-organic circuitry.
I put down my sandwich and go to look. Pry it apart. Nothing. Nothing even remotely out of the ordinary. Exactly how it's supposed to look, well within the norms for record players I've had to repair.
Except for the fact that the song keeps playing.
I just shove this one back together.
The VTR in the corner doesn't look alive inside either.
I just go back and sit down. Getting paranoid....
Who am I kidding? "Getting" indeed.
Nur is giving me, as far as I can tell from the limited experience I have studying his features, a funny look. I can deal with reading unusual physiognomy, but it takes longer, although really given the number of different ways people show or don't show things, probably my own long-discarded ruby quartz should've been harder to work around than a few minor differences in bone structure.
It's just a matter of looking past the strangeness. You'd think by now I'd be better at that.
Right. The look. It's probably deserved. I've been tearing apart random weird objects looking for something that isn't there, or if it is, it's hiding.
I stare into the improvised cup -- I think it was meant for rolling dice; the carpeting inside makes drinking out of it really weird, but I keep telling myself it captures some of the algae. Mental note: concentrate on finding uninhabited water. Preferably not uninhabited due to poison.
Then keep looking for something to fix. Don't know how I'll get Nur to cooperate -- I'm not even sure why he's still along, actually. Maybe he just doesn't have anything better to do.
"We can't rewind; we've gone too far...."
The needle scrapes across the ridges of the record as the room shakes, and the song finally halts.
I don't know what I'm doing or how this works or how to fix it.
I only know there's no way back and so we have to go on....