Kaiden Cross

He wasn’t ever meant to be a person, really; he was meant to be a tool.

He was supposed to be a revenue stream. A cure to the ultimate disease; there was no budget for the R&D of his creation because they thought he might have an endless pay out. A salvation for the Company.  With Project Elixir, DCI would save the world — at a hefty profit — on their terms.

Josh Foley was a miracle. If records were to be believed, his mastery over life itself was second to none– that potential they sought to exploit to earn their place back within the modern business regime.

Unfortunately, the sample of Josh’s DNA they had was imperfect, and attempts at cloning it was not viable. That is, until they hybridized it with another mutant sample, one with a flexible and adaptive genetic code. A shapeshifter.

Kaiden Cross is not Josh Foley, though. The Company made no attempt to instill in him any part of what made Josh who he was, save his power alone; but for his power to work it required knowledge. He grew up within a Framework reality, where Kai was a prodigy, a genius, where he knew intuitively about medical sciences what others studied with difficulty. His mind and the Frameworks database were linked at a very intimate level, and he grasped biology in a way few others could.

In this reality, he never thought he had any power at all.

He was a star athlete, a star student, a medical researcher, geneticist, and as he learned to cure disease after disease, he was in truth simply learning to know and master his sense of organic matter.

Meanwhile, the Company connected him to patients in the real world, and the Framework integrated their scans with his own biological perception to heal them.

Project Elixir was showing itself to be a success.

But it was the practical part of the testing that proved the failure of the project; Kaiden could not heal without a touch, could not touch but feel what was wrong with someone, and he felt this on a level deeper then the scans of the Project Computers could provide. This created a disconnect: what he knew and what his natural senses told him diverged.

Something was wrong.

The implant, the connection that linked Kaiden into the machine, he became aware of unconsciously. He healed it, he expelled it, he became whole… and awoke in a white room, bleeding lightly from where his body rejected the implant, though already healing even that.

He was thin, weak. He had never been entirely aware of his body while in the framework. He was afraid, and confused. Kaiden may have been weak, but he wasn’t helpless. He rose, he stumbled– knowledge of walking and the reality of walking are different things– but he moved. A nurse came, and he lifted a hand and she fell.

He was shocked, afraid, horrified.

But he walked.

Kaiden escaped, almost entirely on pure instinct, and he left in his wake some hurt in his passing. He shapeshifted for the first time unconsciously, just mimicing people as he tried to fit into this world which was mostly the same– but not– that did not quite make sense.

He grew stronger, faster then he should, as he became truly aware of his own body for the first time, and his ability to manipulate it rushed his healing and strengthening.

Chicago.

He can’t let go of who he was within the dream– the VR psychosis the Company laid on him– but he knows he’s not that person, and this isn’t that world. He doesn’t know who he is, or where he is, truly.