12-30-2024, 06:31 PM
Statistics claim that 55-65% of Americans admit to drinking more alcohol during the holidays.
Dexter wasn’t a drinker, but damn if the urge to do so wasn’t strong after the past several weeks.
As he had predicted, Fatal Fortunes had been nothing more than a bloated spectacle of pomp and violence usually reserved for SCW’s pay-per-views, and unsurprisingly, people had been going nuts over all of it judging by how many fans he’d picked out in the crowds on both nights who were more glued to their phones than actually watching what played out before them. An ironman match that allowed otherwise worthless social media darlings like Selena Frost and Ryan LeCavalier to hog the spotlight, a goddamned Thanksgiving ‘food fight,’ a convoluted mess of a match that closed out the whole ordeal that only further promoted depraved individuals like Derek Adonis, false saviors like James Evans and Waylon Creek, and perhaps worst of all, an excuse to shove the obvious shiny new faces of SCW in the Light in the Darkness down everyone’s throats for that extra little bit of social media clout.
Deep down, Dexter couldn’t help but ponder if SCW actually cared about the LGBTQ community or if they were just another in a long list of companies marketing the idea solely for social brownie points that would make them look good even if they were truthfully some of the most heinous individuals alive. It would certainly explain why the likes of Selena and Syren had been pushed as dominant forces for so many years and why this tag team was being built up to look like all-loving and all-conquering heroes leading the way into the next generation for SCW. Hell, the fact that people like Ace Marshall were still allowed to make crass comments that towed the line felt like proof enough in his mind that any ‘support’ for those who identified under that umbrella was just a promotional tactic at best.
He shook the thought from his mind as he focused on his current task at hand: trimming his beard to make it look presentable enough. Truthfully, Dexter had stopped giving two shits about how he looked a long time ago, hence his somewhat disheveled appearance even on SCW programming. It was just another mindset heavily promoted on trash like Instagram and TikTok to push what some believed should be ‘the norm’ just to subtly shame and bully those who didn’t fit the bill. Clearly clowns like Ace subscribed to such trivial philosophies given his antics from the recent Breakdown, but Dexter wasn’t going to bite no matter how over the top the man wanted to get with his fun and games.
Ace could consume himself in that algorithm if he wanted to, maybe modify his body however he wanted to like he’d been suggesting ‘on behalf of the fans’ in Baltimore. Dexter knew he was already more of a real man than Ace would sadly ever be, and that was a cold hard fact.
Just thinking about that walking joke reminded Dexter of why he’d done what he did during Fatal Fortunes. Some would probably believe he was just taking a huge step up on the proverbial ladder to try and get himself further ahead, and while they were right in a sense, they were blind to the truth of why he’d done it. Yes, Ace was a bigger name in SCW’s history, and the fact that he was an obvious product of the social media machine wasn’t lost on Dexter from the moment he first noticed him. Disconnecting him would certainly send a shockwave throughout the mindless masses that Dexter was a genuine threat and his message should not be ignored, and the little viral Make-A-Wish stunt Ace had pulled just to cultivate his own image for this latest return simply gave Dexter the perfect excuse to pull the trigger. He had cost Ace a first blood match by being the one to make him bleed, even if giving a freebie to one of those tag champion puppets sickened him, and thus, war had been declared.
Dexter had just gotten his beard to look exactly the way he’d wanted it to when he heard his phone ringing. With a sigh, he trudged out of the bathroom of his shack and plucked the device from the table he’d left it on. It wasn’t anything special, just one of those cheap burner phones he constantly went through so a very select few could contact him if necessary, specifically going this route and choosing much older models to kill any temptation to let the online world suck him back into its twisted web.
“Hello?”
“H-Hey Dexter. Happy holidays!” the voice of Wendell called from the other end.
“Same to you, I guess,” was Dexter’s reply. He hadn’t meant to come off as gruff as cold, but he wasn’t exactly in the mood to talk to his flunky right now. Part of that was in response to how easily Wendell had briefly fallen into the clutches of Ace’s little succubus that constantly hung off his arm, even if she had only paid the kid any mind to try and score one for Ace in their little tit-for-tat. For the most part, though, today was just not a good day for Dexter to want to give the kid any time compared to what was looming over his head.
“So, I know it’s the holidays and all, and I’ve got stuff I’m doing with my family, but I wanted to-”
“Then you should spend your time with them,” Dexter abruptly cut Wendell off.
“H-Huh?” the kid sounded confused. “But…our mission…”
“Wendell,” Dexter began, “even I’m not foolish enough to think my voice has enough power just yet to try and cut through this cyber cancer around Christmas of all holidays. Those junkies for validation can have this time to post their family Christmas photos online and compromise their personal lives if they wish. And…I think you should just worry about spending today with your family.”
“I mean, I certainly will,” Wendell pleaded, “but…”
“No buts, Wendell,” Dexter interrupted again. “Look…you’re a good kid, and you’ve been a faithful follower of mine in this fight for a while now. I know I don’t say it often, but I’m grateful for your contributions. That said, I know your family has no reason to like me or want you helping me out. I know they don’t understand what we’re fighting for. But that’s all the more reason why you should spend today with them and not make them think I’m trying to rip you away from them any more than it already looks like. Maybe try to help bring them around to what we’re doing.”
“I…I guess I can do that…” Wendell pondered.
“Consider that my Christmas gift to you and them,” Dexter added. “And I’ll pay back that money you borrowed so we could get the RV as soon as I can. Just do me a favor and have a good holiday Wendell…we can hit the ground running on saving the masses from themselves and cutting down this digital demon in the new year.”
Wendell tried to reply, but Dexter ended the call there and shut off the phone to preserve what few minutes he still had on it. It felt a little weird seeming like he actually cared more than he did, but everybody could get even a tiny bit into the holiday spirit around this time of year.
Which was exactly why he was going to take advantage of this weird break from SCW’s touring hell to finally open a door he’d slammed shut a long time ago.
As he hopped in his trusty old pickup truck, sparing just a moment to eye the RV parked and waiting for more road action, he started driving through the secluded path through the woods he kept cleared and hidden to keep people from just following him to his isolated little home. The peace and quiet that living out here offered was a true luxury lost on so many these days that it made him laugh whenever he thought about how much those vultures practically hardwired into their computers and phones wanted to take their petty little shots at him when they clearly couldn’t understand his fight.
As he drove, his mind drifted to the other development regarding him and Fatal Fortunes, that being the ladder match he’d been made to compete in. As enjoyable as it had been to finally get the full attention of Gavin Taylor and prove to him firsthand that Dexter had been right all along about how retirement was truly a prospect he should consider given how lost and forgettable he’d become, he’d been right to call SCW out on knowing he would be ‘randomly drawn’ into a title opportunity of some sort in a desperate attempt to prove his statements wrong. If it wasn’t the only way to actually end the damn match, Dexter would have ignored the carrot dangling on a line above the ring and just ended Gavin’s career right then and there. But now he was the owner of an Adrenaline title match somewhere down the line…and truthfully, he could care less.
He had heard Glory Braddock’s inane spiel about how he “wasn’t championship material” and chastising him about trying to take on too many fights, rolling his eyes even now at how a supposed wrestling prodigy was too stupid to comprehend the war he waged. At the end of the day, people like Glory and Ace meant absolutely nothing, just as they always had in their sad, miserable excuses for lives. It was why they turned to social media to try and give themselves worth, why they signed away their souls to SCW and just played the roles they were told for the sake of what would trend the best. Glory would find out the hard way, just like Kim would at the next Breakdown and just like everyone else had up to this point, that who you were and what you could do meant nothing by comparison. Dexter Grant was a man on a mission, and he would destroy everything that pumped digital blood through SCW’s veins if he had to in order to be one step closer to saving humanity from itself.
And if he just so happened to become Adrenaline champion in the process? Well, SCW could do with one less title belt existing as a distraction for people to tweet about.
Honestly, Dexter had to laugh the closer he got to his destination. The fact that the next Breakdown was taking place in Sacramento, about a 2 hour drive from here, meant that he could actually do what he was about to do without wrestling getting in the way. Not that getting to literally beat his message into people without repercussions wasn’t cathartic, but the traveling and some of the decisions on booking dates was grating on his nerves, with night 1 of Fatal Fortunes falling on Thanksgiving being a prime example. It had ended up being a convenient excuse not to answer this call then, but after giving a little more time…he knew it would do him no good if he didn’t at least offer a chance in case he did gain some extra help in this endeavor.
That was what ultimately saw him park in front of a house he hadn’t gone anywhere near in about five years, and what led to him knocking on the door and seeing a very surprised face open it for him.
“Dexter? Dexter, is that you?”
“Merry Christmas, mom,” Dexter replied to the woman, who wasted no time in moving for a hug. Dexter, however, took a step back, which he could tell broke her heart. “Not now, mom…not yet. Dad and Max home?”
The woman nodded before she motioned for Dexter to come inside. As the door was closed behind him, all the memories came flooding back of how cozy this place truly had been. Deep down, part of him would admit without hesitation that he missed this place, but he fought to keep from getting too nostalgic just yet. There were still some bandaids that needed to be ripped off first.
Dexter followed his mom into the living room, and immediately he found the eyes of both his father and brother on him. The former looked incredibly shellshocked, while the latter looked hopeful.
“Dex?” his father couldn’t help but ask. “Is that really you?”
“In the flesh,” Dexter confirmed.
“Glad to see you finally came around,” Max threw out as he stood up and approached, but just like with their mom, he stepped back as a sign that he didn’t want to be approached right now and Max got the hint.
“I didn’t want you to feel like you had to upend your Thanksgiving plans when I had to be on the road,” Dexter claimed. “Christmas, though…yeah, I think even SCW knew that would get some backlash even from social media.”
“Speaking of…” his father said, which immediately put Dexter on guard as he saw the man pull his phone out of his pocket. He opened his mouth to say something, but immediately paused when he watched his father grab a nearby sack and drop the phone inside, passing it to Max who did the same and then to his mother who followed suit. She walked over to a little closet door that was built into the side of the staircase leading upstairs and tossed the sack inside.
“A peace offering,” she clarified when she returned to the living room, “as a show of faith.”
“I told you when you came by the shop for that RV last month that we were willing to hear you out and not treat this like a joke or a phase, Dex,” Max added.
Dexter was taken aback, to be honest. He had been hopeful, but he hadn’t actually expected his family to have been entirely truthful about wanting to hear him out, nor had he expected them to cut straight to offering him the floor to explain himself. It unnerved him a little bit, but his mind was being flooded by a feeling he hadn’t felt since he cut these ties so long ago.
Taking a deep breath, Dexter moved to sit in the recliner off to the side of the couch, which had been turned to face it as he watched his mom and brother join his dad on it, all of them waiting patiently.
“Alright then,” Dexter almost laughed, clearly having not expected to just jump straight into this. He’d honestly expected more resistance and then things breaking down to the point where he’d call coming here a mistake and that would be the end of that. Maybe he’d truly been too cynical and untrusting for too long now. “You all remember the day when I came home from work saying I’d quit?”
“We do,” Dexter’s dad admitted. “It was the day you first began talking about the evils of social media and what it was doing to humanity. It just…it was so unlike you, it kind of shocked all of us and we weren’t really sure what to make of it.”
“It’s why we thought it was just some weird phase,” his mom chimed in. “Maybe an overreaction to a bad day at work, or you’d been fired for some reason and didn’t want us to worry…”
“I kind of wished I’d been fired, in hindsight,” Dexter scoffed, more at himself than at his family’s commentary. They were just offering their perspective on what he knew had been a rather abrupt change in his attitude. “The truth is, I’d just finished coding my part to this big new app that Innovatech was launching, and I was so excited that my boss was giving me such high praise for the work I’d done. And then…I found out the truth of what I’d coded, and it disgusted me.”
“I was about to say,” Max jumped in, “I don’t remember Innovatech releasing any new apps around that time.”
“That’s because we’d been lied to about what it actually was,” Dexter replied. “It was no app…it was essentially a back-end trap we’d been hired to code for some of the big dogs of the social media world, designed specifically to gather data, personal or otherwise, on anyone using them so they could start implementing the subtle hooks and algorithms that truly trapped people in that web and force fed them this…this need to treat their socials like they were their jobs, their whole lives. That addictive feeling that modern social media has whenever you use it and see it start tailoring your experiences to keep you engaged in one form or another? That was my doing.”
An uneasy silence fell over the room now that Dexter had finally gotten that off his chest. He wanted to say it felt good to finally open up about that after keeping it locked away for so many years, but the reality was…it didn’t. He hadn’t even wanted to hide the hand he had to play in the way everything was now, but he took the fight personally for that very reason and he would hate himself as much as he hated everyone else until the day he could undo this travesty…if that day ever came, that is.
“That explains a lot…” his dad finally broke the silence. “Why you were in such an uproar all of a sudden about social media taking over people’s lives and consuming them, why you quit…”
“As soon as that bombshell got dropped on me, I told my boss I wanted no further part in it,” Dexter admitted. “I even tried to delete the code I’d written, claiming I technically owned it as I’m the one who wrote it, but it turns out they slipped a little legal jargon into my contract stating that anything I coded for Innovatech was legally owned by Innovatech, not me.”
“That can’t be legal though, lying to you about what your work was really for,” his mom noted before turning to her husband. “Is that legal?”
Her husband shook his head, but Dexter had a counterpoint. “Not with a cleverly-worded contract, it isn’t. Besides, even if I were to take it to the police or to court, they’ve got all the tools to just sweep it all under the rug, no harm done.”
“Is that why you became…well…who you are now?” Max chanced asking, to which Dexter nodded.
“It’s not pretty, but it’s a fight someone has to take up,” he admitted. “Might as well be the idiot who created the problem in the first place.”
“You’re not an idiot, Dexter,” his dad firmly said, which surprised him as he rarely remembered the man ever getting this stern about anything. “You were misled about the work you were doing, and what your code is being used for is illegal in and of itself. If anything…we shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions when we had every reason to question this radical change in you and didn’t.”
“We’re sorry we failed you Dexter…” his mom added, and it truly broke Dexter’s icy heart to hear the tone in her voice. That led to him slowly standing up and going to surprise her with the hug he had denied her earlier, which opened the floodgates as they all shared a proper family group hug for the first time in years.
In a sense, it truly was a Christmas miracle, but Dexter wasn’t going to get too far ahead of himself just yet. He’d finally enlightened his family about how he got to this point and they were more than understanding, but there was still a lot of healing to do and a ways to go before he felt comfortable wanting them to join his fight, assuming they even wanted to.
Even still, the only path forward he felt comfortable in was trying to make his voice heard.
And no one…not Ace Marshall, not Glory Braddock, not Kim Williams, no one…was going to stop him.
Dexter wasn’t a drinker, but damn if the urge to do so wasn’t strong after the past several weeks.
As he had predicted, Fatal Fortunes had been nothing more than a bloated spectacle of pomp and violence usually reserved for SCW’s pay-per-views, and unsurprisingly, people had been going nuts over all of it judging by how many fans he’d picked out in the crowds on both nights who were more glued to their phones than actually watching what played out before them. An ironman match that allowed otherwise worthless social media darlings like Selena Frost and Ryan LeCavalier to hog the spotlight, a goddamned Thanksgiving ‘food fight,’ a convoluted mess of a match that closed out the whole ordeal that only further promoted depraved individuals like Derek Adonis, false saviors like James Evans and Waylon Creek, and perhaps worst of all, an excuse to shove the obvious shiny new faces of SCW in the Light in the Darkness down everyone’s throats for that extra little bit of social media clout.
Deep down, Dexter couldn’t help but ponder if SCW actually cared about the LGBTQ community or if they were just another in a long list of companies marketing the idea solely for social brownie points that would make them look good even if they were truthfully some of the most heinous individuals alive. It would certainly explain why the likes of Selena and Syren had been pushed as dominant forces for so many years and why this tag team was being built up to look like all-loving and all-conquering heroes leading the way into the next generation for SCW. Hell, the fact that people like Ace Marshall were still allowed to make crass comments that towed the line felt like proof enough in his mind that any ‘support’ for those who identified under that umbrella was just a promotional tactic at best.
He shook the thought from his mind as he focused on his current task at hand: trimming his beard to make it look presentable enough. Truthfully, Dexter had stopped giving two shits about how he looked a long time ago, hence his somewhat disheveled appearance even on SCW programming. It was just another mindset heavily promoted on trash like Instagram and TikTok to push what some believed should be ‘the norm’ just to subtly shame and bully those who didn’t fit the bill. Clearly clowns like Ace subscribed to such trivial philosophies given his antics from the recent Breakdown, but Dexter wasn’t going to bite no matter how over the top the man wanted to get with his fun and games.
Ace could consume himself in that algorithm if he wanted to, maybe modify his body however he wanted to like he’d been suggesting ‘on behalf of the fans’ in Baltimore. Dexter knew he was already more of a real man than Ace would sadly ever be, and that was a cold hard fact.
Just thinking about that walking joke reminded Dexter of why he’d done what he did during Fatal Fortunes. Some would probably believe he was just taking a huge step up on the proverbial ladder to try and get himself further ahead, and while they were right in a sense, they were blind to the truth of why he’d done it. Yes, Ace was a bigger name in SCW’s history, and the fact that he was an obvious product of the social media machine wasn’t lost on Dexter from the moment he first noticed him. Disconnecting him would certainly send a shockwave throughout the mindless masses that Dexter was a genuine threat and his message should not be ignored, and the little viral Make-A-Wish stunt Ace had pulled just to cultivate his own image for this latest return simply gave Dexter the perfect excuse to pull the trigger. He had cost Ace a first blood match by being the one to make him bleed, even if giving a freebie to one of those tag champion puppets sickened him, and thus, war had been declared.
Dexter had just gotten his beard to look exactly the way he’d wanted it to when he heard his phone ringing. With a sigh, he trudged out of the bathroom of his shack and plucked the device from the table he’d left it on. It wasn’t anything special, just one of those cheap burner phones he constantly went through so a very select few could contact him if necessary, specifically going this route and choosing much older models to kill any temptation to let the online world suck him back into its twisted web.
“Hello?”
“H-Hey Dexter. Happy holidays!” the voice of Wendell called from the other end.
“Same to you, I guess,” was Dexter’s reply. He hadn’t meant to come off as gruff as cold, but he wasn’t exactly in the mood to talk to his flunky right now. Part of that was in response to how easily Wendell had briefly fallen into the clutches of Ace’s little succubus that constantly hung off his arm, even if she had only paid the kid any mind to try and score one for Ace in their little tit-for-tat. For the most part, though, today was just not a good day for Dexter to want to give the kid any time compared to what was looming over his head.
“So, I know it’s the holidays and all, and I’ve got stuff I’m doing with my family, but I wanted to-”
“Then you should spend your time with them,” Dexter abruptly cut Wendell off.
“H-Huh?” the kid sounded confused. “But…our mission…”
“Wendell,” Dexter began, “even I’m not foolish enough to think my voice has enough power just yet to try and cut through this cyber cancer around Christmas of all holidays. Those junkies for validation can have this time to post their family Christmas photos online and compromise their personal lives if they wish. And…I think you should just worry about spending today with your family.”
“I mean, I certainly will,” Wendell pleaded, “but…”
“No buts, Wendell,” Dexter interrupted again. “Look…you’re a good kid, and you’ve been a faithful follower of mine in this fight for a while now. I know I don’t say it often, but I’m grateful for your contributions. That said, I know your family has no reason to like me or want you helping me out. I know they don’t understand what we’re fighting for. But that’s all the more reason why you should spend today with them and not make them think I’m trying to rip you away from them any more than it already looks like. Maybe try to help bring them around to what we’re doing.”
“I…I guess I can do that…” Wendell pondered.
“Consider that my Christmas gift to you and them,” Dexter added. “And I’ll pay back that money you borrowed so we could get the RV as soon as I can. Just do me a favor and have a good holiday Wendell…we can hit the ground running on saving the masses from themselves and cutting down this digital demon in the new year.”
Wendell tried to reply, but Dexter ended the call there and shut off the phone to preserve what few minutes he still had on it. It felt a little weird seeming like he actually cared more than he did, but everybody could get even a tiny bit into the holiday spirit around this time of year.
Which was exactly why he was going to take advantage of this weird break from SCW’s touring hell to finally open a door he’d slammed shut a long time ago.
As he hopped in his trusty old pickup truck, sparing just a moment to eye the RV parked and waiting for more road action, he started driving through the secluded path through the woods he kept cleared and hidden to keep people from just following him to his isolated little home. The peace and quiet that living out here offered was a true luxury lost on so many these days that it made him laugh whenever he thought about how much those vultures practically hardwired into their computers and phones wanted to take their petty little shots at him when they clearly couldn’t understand his fight.
As he drove, his mind drifted to the other development regarding him and Fatal Fortunes, that being the ladder match he’d been made to compete in. As enjoyable as it had been to finally get the full attention of Gavin Taylor and prove to him firsthand that Dexter had been right all along about how retirement was truly a prospect he should consider given how lost and forgettable he’d become, he’d been right to call SCW out on knowing he would be ‘randomly drawn’ into a title opportunity of some sort in a desperate attempt to prove his statements wrong. If it wasn’t the only way to actually end the damn match, Dexter would have ignored the carrot dangling on a line above the ring and just ended Gavin’s career right then and there. But now he was the owner of an Adrenaline title match somewhere down the line…and truthfully, he could care less.
He had heard Glory Braddock’s inane spiel about how he “wasn’t championship material” and chastising him about trying to take on too many fights, rolling his eyes even now at how a supposed wrestling prodigy was too stupid to comprehend the war he waged. At the end of the day, people like Glory and Ace meant absolutely nothing, just as they always had in their sad, miserable excuses for lives. It was why they turned to social media to try and give themselves worth, why they signed away their souls to SCW and just played the roles they were told for the sake of what would trend the best. Glory would find out the hard way, just like Kim would at the next Breakdown and just like everyone else had up to this point, that who you were and what you could do meant nothing by comparison. Dexter Grant was a man on a mission, and he would destroy everything that pumped digital blood through SCW’s veins if he had to in order to be one step closer to saving humanity from itself.
And if he just so happened to become Adrenaline champion in the process? Well, SCW could do with one less title belt existing as a distraction for people to tweet about.
Honestly, Dexter had to laugh the closer he got to his destination. The fact that the next Breakdown was taking place in Sacramento, about a 2 hour drive from here, meant that he could actually do what he was about to do without wrestling getting in the way. Not that getting to literally beat his message into people without repercussions wasn’t cathartic, but the traveling and some of the decisions on booking dates was grating on his nerves, with night 1 of Fatal Fortunes falling on Thanksgiving being a prime example. It had ended up being a convenient excuse not to answer this call then, but after giving a little more time…he knew it would do him no good if he didn’t at least offer a chance in case he did gain some extra help in this endeavor.
That was what ultimately saw him park in front of a house he hadn’t gone anywhere near in about five years, and what led to him knocking on the door and seeing a very surprised face open it for him.
“Dexter? Dexter, is that you?”
“Merry Christmas, mom,” Dexter replied to the woman, who wasted no time in moving for a hug. Dexter, however, took a step back, which he could tell broke her heart. “Not now, mom…not yet. Dad and Max home?”
The woman nodded before she motioned for Dexter to come inside. As the door was closed behind him, all the memories came flooding back of how cozy this place truly had been. Deep down, part of him would admit without hesitation that he missed this place, but he fought to keep from getting too nostalgic just yet. There were still some bandaids that needed to be ripped off first.
Dexter followed his mom into the living room, and immediately he found the eyes of both his father and brother on him. The former looked incredibly shellshocked, while the latter looked hopeful.
“Dex?” his father couldn’t help but ask. “Is that really you?”
“In the flesh,” Dexter confirmed.
“Glad to see you finally came around,” Max threw out as he stood up and approached, but just like with their mom, he stepped back as a sign that he didn’t want to be approached right now and Max got the hint.
“I didn’t want you to feel like you had to upend your Thanksgiving plans when I had to be on the road,” Dexter claimed. “Christmas, though…yeah, I think even SCW knew that would get some backlash even from social media.”
“Speaking of…” his father said, which immediately put Dexter on guard as he saw the man pull his phone out of his pocket. He opened his mouth to say something, but immediately paused when he watched his father grab a nearby sack and drop the phone inside, passing it to Max who did the same and then to his mother who followed suit. She walked over to a little closet door that was built into the side of the staircase leading upstairs and tossed the sack inside.
“A peace offering,” she clarified when she returned to the living room, “as a show of faith.”
“I told you when you came by the shop for that RV last month that we were willing to hear you out and not treat this like a joke or a phase, Dex,” Max added.
Dexter was taken aback, to be honest. He had been hopeful, but he hadn’t actually expected his family to have been entirely truthful about wanting to hear him out, nor had he expected them to cut straight to offering him the floor to explain himself. It unnerved him a little bit, but his mind was being flooded by a feeling he hadn’t felt since he cut these ties so long ago.
Taking a deep breath, Dexter moved to sit in the recliner off to the side of the couch, which had been turned to face it as he watched his mom and brother join his dad on it, all of them waiting patiently.
“Alright then,” Dexter almost laughed, clearly having not expected to just jump straight into this. He’d honestly expected more resistance and then things breaking down to the point where he’d call coming here a mistake and that would be the end of that. Maybe he’d truly been too cynical and untrusting for too long now. “You all remember the day when I came home from work saying I’d quit?”
“We do,” Dexter’s dad admitted. “It was the day you first began talking about the evils of social media and what it was doing to humanity. It just…it was so unlike you, it kind of shocked all of us and we weren’t really sure what to make of it.”
“It’s why we thought it was just some weird phase,” his mom chimed in. “Maybe an overreaction to a bad day at work, or you’d been fired for some reason and didn’t want us to worry…”
“I kind of wished I’d been fired, in hindsight,” Dexter scoffed, more at himself than at his family’s commentary. They were just offering their perspective on what he knew had been a rather abrupt change in his attitude. “The truth is, I’d just finished coding my part to this big new app that Innovatech was launching, and I was so excited that my boss was giving me such high praise for the work I’d done. And then…I found out the truth of what I’d coded, and it disgusted me.”
“I was about to say,” Max jumped in, “I don’t remember Innovatech releasing any new apps around that time.”
“That’s because we’d been lied to about what it actually was,” Dexter replied. “It was no app…it was essentially a back-end trap we’d been hired to code for some of the big dogs of the social media world, designed specifically to gather data, personal or otherwise, on anyone using them so they could start implementing the subtle hooks and algorithms that truly trapped people in that web and force fed them this…this need to treat their socials like they were their jobs, their whole lives. That addictive feeling that modern social media has whenever you use it and see it start tailoring your experiences to keep you engaged in one form or another? That was my doing.”
An uneasy silence fell over the room now that Dexter had finally gotten that off his chest. He wanted to say it felt good to finally open up about that after keeping it locked away for so many years, but the reality was…it didn’t. He hadn’t even wanted to hide the hand he had to play in the way everything was now, but he took the fight personally for that very reason and he would hate himself as much as he hated everyone else until the day he could undo this travesty…if that day ever came, that is.
“That explains a lot…” his dad finally broke the silence. “Why you were in such an uproar all of a sudden about social media taking over people’s lives and consuming them, why you quit…”
“As soon as that bombshell got dropped on me, I told my boss I wanted no further part in it,” Dexter admitted. “I even tried to delete the code I’d written, claiming I technically owned it as I’m the one who wrote it, but it turns out they slipped a little legal jargon into my contract stating that anything I coded for Innovatech was legally owned by Innovatech, not me.”
“That can’t be legal though, lying to you about what your work was really for,” his mom noted before turning to her husband. “Is that legal?”
Her husband shook his head, but Dexter had a counterpoint. “Not with a cleverly-worded contract, it isn’t. Besides, even if I were to take it to the police or to court, they’ve got all the tools to just sweep it all under the rug, no harm done.”
“Is that why you became…well…who you are now?” Max chanced asking, to which Dexter nodded.
“It’s not pretty, but it’s a fight someone has to take up,” he admitted. “Might as well be the idiot who created the problem in the first place.”
“You’re not an idiot, Dexter,” his dad firmly said, which surprised him as he rarely remembered the man ever getting this stern about anything. “You were misled about the work you were doing, and what your code is being used for is illegal in and of itself. If anything…we shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions when we had every reason to question this radical change in you and didn’t.”
“We’re sorry we failed you Dexter…” his mom added, and it truly broke Dexter’s icy heart to hear the tone in her voice. That led to him slowly standing up and going to surprise her with the hug he had denied her earlier, which opened the floodgates as they all shared a proper family group hug for the first time in years.
In a sense, it truly was a Christmas miracle, but Dexter wasn’t going to get too far ahead of himself just yet. He’d finally enlightened his family about how he got to this point and they were more than understanding, but there was still a lot of healing to do and a ways to go before he felt comfortable wanting them to join his fight, assuming they even wanted to.
Even still, the only path forward he felt comfortable in was trying to make his voice heard.
And no one…not Ace Marshall, not Glory Braddock, not Kim Williams, no one…was going to stop him.