| Jan. 9th, 2008 @ 01:21 pm OOC: History |
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Background: As a baby, Cyrus was “storked” on the first day of summer: left on somebody’s doorstep to become the legal child of whoever the doorstep belong to. In his case, he was taken in by a male couple who had fortunately wanted a family of their own. His parents were delighted to have him and after getting storked they decided to make themselves “official” and get “mmarried,” a term never clearly distinguished from marriage, though after the Heartland War over pro-choice/pro-life issues years before it was deemed illegal for two men to get married. (It can be assumed, however, that mmarriage is an official relationship similar to marriage.)
Growing up in New York, he nicknamed himself CyFi (from Cyrus Finch) when he decided he didn’t like being called Cyrus all the time. He became interested in the history of umber (the term for “black” people in his time) people, considering them his ancestors, and he developed a strong appreciation for umber culture and old TV shows featuring umber people.
From these he picked up a style of speaking reminiscent of those TV shows, what he called an “Old World Umber” patois, as a statement of sorts in the combination of slang language and high intelligence (an IQ of 155). The other kids his age still considered this strange, but that didn’t too much of a difference. As the umber son of two sienna (“white”) men, Cy already stood out and losing a few more gawkers wasn’t going to hurt him any.
When Cy was twelve years old, he was out riding his bike and got run over by a speeding Mercedes. He nearly died, and in the accident he suffered brain damage to his entire right temporal lobe. Brain damage in those times was easily repairable, though, so he underwent an operation to fix the problem. Normally the procedure would be to piece together many tiny pieces of brain harvested from Unwinds, kids between the age of thirteen and eighteen who were cut up into pieces for replacement organs and body parts when their guardians signed an order for to be unwound. His fathers, however, paid the surgeon extra so that instead of dozens of pieces cobbled together he received an entire new right temporal lobe from one Unwind.
The loss of his own brain parts and the replacement of one from somebody who hadn’t been quite as bright of Cy dropped his IQ down to around 130 and left him with a number of other unforeseen effects. Cy began getting sudden feelings and urges, sometimes images. He soon figured out that it was because of the lobe replacement: getting somebody else’s right temporal lobe meant that roughly seven-eighths of Cy’s brain was now his own, and one-eighth was somebody else’s. That one-eighth of somebody else’s brain worked, but the right temporal lobe that went to Cy couldn’t grasp time well enough to realize that the boy had already been unwound, and it worked as if it was still the one-eighth of the unwound boy’s brain.
And here a little background for the unwound boy is in order. He lived in Joplin, a small Missouri town. He loved pumpkin ice cream (a flavor Cy hated) and practiced on the high school fencing team. Most notably he had an affinity for shiny objects, and had a compulsive need to grab things that caught his eye. It didn’t matter if the items were cheap or priceless—they just had to be bright, shiny and visually pleasing and he would try and snatch it. This led to trouble, naturally. His parents were already stern and treated him harshly: if he was late getting home from school they would leave their dinner uneaten until he returned home and blame him for it. In their eyes he was stupid, mediocre, and good for nothing, and eventually he found out they were considering having him unwound. He was desperate to avoid this, but nearly right after finding out he was taken away to a harvest camp for unwinding.
But he still had unfinished business, and his right temporal lobe was enough to urge Cy to carry it out. For years Cy had to deal with and act on the boy’s urges, which often took control of him (ranging from petting dogs to stealing more shiny objects) while knowing little about the boy himself. He didn’t even know the boy’s name; only his appearance, things he learned through the sudden urges he got at times, and the desperate need to return to Joplin. In short, it was frustrating. The thefts, for one, were in a way unfair to him, because he didn’t steal and the kid did. While umber/sienna relations had gotten better since years past there was still a certain stigma attached to being umber and by stealing he unwillingly proved people’s negative expectations.
He hid all this from his dads as well as he could, believing that telling them would make them feel guilty for giving him the whole lobe, but at fifteen years old he finally gave in and left home to travel to Joplin, technically a runaway but calling himself a “run-to.” His journey was a long one, across five states. On the way he encountered Lev Calder, a boy two years younger than he was whom Cy dubbed “Fry” (for “small-fry”). They first met at a mall, where Cy found Lev trying to feed himself on people’s leftover food and showed him how to get food for himself without resorting to such methods. He told Lev to stick with him, and with no real destination in mind yet Lev did.
Lev turned out to be a tithe, somebody born to be unwound for religious reasons, who had been kidnapped by runaway Unwinds and ended up running away from being unwound himself. Lev was smart in his own right and though at first Cy never told him their destination, when they were in Scottsburg, Indiana, Lev saw the kid’s impulse taking Cy over and leading him to steal an ornament and once Cy realized it happened he panicked. He ran away, and when Lev followed he denied that it was he who had stolen the ornament and ended up injuring himself. He had Lev dispose of everything else he’d taken in the past, but Lev kept one diamond bracelet for himself and used it to coerce Cy into telling him about the Unwind whose brain part Lev had already figured out was affecting him. Instead of rejecting him after all that Lev promised to help him get to Joplin, and they continued on.
By the time they were within twenty miles of Joplin Cy was fighting himself. There was a battle going on, between him and the right temporal lobe of a boy who called the place home, and the boy was quickly taking over. There was no turning back now, and though Cy still had no idea what the boy wanted to do he could only go along with it and hope. Reaching Joplin he managed to find a familiar place and navigated his way “home” through memory of sorts, learning more about the boy through feelings and images that bombarded him all the way there. At this point he was almost entirely the other boy, and reaching his house they found the police there along with Cy’s dads, who he realized must have known about what was going on with him the entire time.
He saw the couple who had been the parents of the boy and from them learned the boy’s name: Tyler. CyFi (now known as Cy-Ty, both Cyrus and Tyler) took a shovel and headed for the yard, digging a few yards behind where he buried his pets. There he dug up a briefcase full of many of the “keepsakes” Tyler had accumulated in the past: everything from jewels to cheap plastic knockoffs. Cy-Ty then took some of what was in the briefcase and stumbled back towards Tyler’s cowering parents, begging them to take what he held and do whatever they unwanted, but not unwind him. Tyler had no way to comprehend that it was too late and he was already unwound, and Cyrus couldn’t do anything to help him.
That was when Lev jumped in from watching. He screamed at Tyler’s parents to tell him they wouldn’t unwind him because it was what Tyler needed to hear, even threatening them with the shovel Cy-Ty had used despite the police’s own threats to him. Finally the couple promised Tyler they wouldn’t unwind him, and Tyler was finally able to relax. Cy-Ty became CyFi again, the threats passed, the couple escaped inside to their house, and Cy’s dads came to help comfort him.
While that was going on Lev disappeared, but that wasn’t the last Cy heard of him. They went home for a while, where Cy found that the urges to steal were now less frequent, but eventually word came out that Happy Jack Harvest Camp had been destroyed by clappers (suicide bombers who traditionally detonated themselves by clapping their hands) and most of its Unwind occupants escaped. Lev’s name was everywhere: he’d been a clapper, but at the last minute he hadn’t clapped.
The events at Happy Jack were cause for talk everywhere, because Lev had given a name and a story to Unwinds when before they’d been nameless, unwanted kids. People who had once looked the other way began reconsidering. CyFi came forward after that, and because of his connection to Lev he quickly became a big name in anti-unwinding. At one point he went to Washington, D.C. and testified before Congress about Lev and his own experiences with Tyler. There was still work to be done before real changes began happening, but it was a step. |
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