Shock Value (MXM)

“What am I meant to do now?”

My mother rubbed both hands over her face, dragged them down until her fingers caught beneath her chin.

“I’m standing at this fork in the road thinking, do I stay beside the son I have left, because you’re the only thing I have right now? Is that the right thing to do? Do I go grieve the son I no longer have in this life? Do I help you find a lawyer and get you out of here, or do I leave you here because you deserve to be here?”

Her hands dropped into her lap.

“I don’t know. It’s a ridiculous position to be in as a mother. I never thought I’d be sitting here having to make this decision. Rylan.”

She looked at me.

“Why? Why would you do that?”

I don’t remember much of her face from that day.

Old, mostly.

Older than it had any right to be.

Tearful. Sweaty.

The visitation room was hot enough to make everybody look guilty. There was a fan bolted high on the wall, pushing warm air from one side of the room to the other with a tired little rattle every few rotations.

It needed another fan. Probably ten more fans. Maybe somebody could’ve opened a window, although I suppose allowing prisoners access to fresh air without authorization might’ve collapsed the entire penal system.

I’d already shouted myself hoarse.

I didn’t do it.

I didn’t fucking do it.

I repeated it over and over, trying every possible cadence: calm and measured, choked through tears. I enunciated every single syllable, knowing a line can carry a different weight when delivered with precise control.

I. Did. Not. Do. It.

I swore up and down, but none of it penetrated.

By that point, her mind had locked around a single narrative, fortifying it so completely that no alternative could break through. To her, I had murdered her son, my own brother. Whether that was a belief she chose, accepted, or had fed to her until the boundaries blurred, it had become her unshakeable reality.

Whenever my mind drifts back to who she was before everything shattered, my memory lands on her hair—a deep, burnt red, cut short to rest just above her shoulders.

I could always tell when the color was fresh because the bathroom towels would get these rusty stains near the edges.

She had pale blue eyes. Beautiful ones. Almost offensively beautiful.

She had long eyelashes, too—another trait I inherited from her, among so many others.

During my childhood, she was constantly working.

Her constant absence used to hurt, but as you age, you begin to grasp the reality of finances, tight schedules, and endless expenses. You see how adults spend a lifetime chasing a moving target just to keep up with the rent.

So, you learn to adapt.

You realize early on that no one is coming to save you—a truth that gradually feels less like a misfortune and more like a simple matter of fact.

You feed yourself.

Keep yourself occupied.

Find your own way home.

Work it out on your own.

Yet, amid all that self-reliance, there is an underlying expectation for you to extend grace and understanding toward the people who weren’t around.

She was working.

She was exhausted.

She did the best she could.

Times were tough.

Fine.

All true.

Then another thought always came limping in behind them.

You birthed me.

Whose fault is this?

That line of reasoning quickly tangles into a mess.

It points directly to the non-identity problem. When I stumbled across it in a book, the uncanny familiarity made my stomach turn.

Stripped to its essentials, the conundrum asks: how can you hold someone accountable for harming you through choices that ultimately caused your existence, when making any other choice would have meant a completely different individual was born instead?

Alter enough factors prior to conception, and you erase that specific person from the picture entirely.

So when I look back and demand, Why drag me into a world where I had to raise myself half the time?

What am I actually claiming?

That I deserved a better upbringing?

Of course.

Yet if you trace the path back through the very decisions that shaped those conditions, you inevitably reach the exact choices without which I wouldn’t exist at all.

Where does that leave me?

Am I supposed to wish for an alternate reality where I was never born?

How the fuck do you even respond to that?

It always struck me as an absurd catch-22 built right into living: you can despise the circumstances of your life, yet you remain indebted to those very circumstances—somewhere further down the line—for your very presence in the world.

Absurd, truly.

Useful too, if you’re a parent looking for an airtight defense.

Maybe that was why I could never figure out what I wanted from my mother.

An apology?

More time?

A childhood returned with store credit?

Clear answers simply didn’t exist—they rarely do.

By the time my mother was sitting across from me in that stifling visitation room, soaked in sweat and demanding to know why I had killed my brother, those old grievances felt entirely irrelevant.

Perhaps she just desperately needed a target for her pain. Attaching a name gave her grief a place to settle.

The alternative—waiting—meant facing each morning with the same unresolved agony, forced to confront the reality that her son’s true killer was still out there walking free.

Finding closure becomes remarkably simple once you’re provided with a culprit.

Yet I knew the truth.

I was right there, watching as it happened, and I laid it all out for them. But my account called for actual effort to accept.

It demanded further investigation, probing questions, additional suspects, and unnecessary hassle. Their version was far simpler: it had me. I was already present, tied to the scene, and effortlessly fit into a narrative everyone could easily digest.

Eventually, you move on.

You have to.

Do I have regrets in life?

Countless.

I’ve always admired people who can stand there and claim they regret nothing. Either they’ve achieved some spiritual level unavailable to me, or they’re full of shit. Both possibilities interest me.

There are things I would take back.

It all hinges on the smallest details: standing on one street corner rather than another, picking up a single phone call, or making a five-minute detour to follow someone. You happen to be in one exact place at one precise instant, and only decades later do you realize you can trace every turn of your entire life straight back to that single point.

The butterfly effect, but I’ve always despised that term. A butterfly feels entirely too frail to capture that kind of wreckage. It’s just one tiny, throwaway action—yet the fallout compounds continuously until you wake up trapped in an unrecognizable existence, desperately trying to pinpoint which minor choice threw the whole structure off balance.

How could being in that one location years ago carry so far? How could a brief moment stretch across prison, survive my release, and trail behind every misstep that followed, right up to where I sit today?

—

“Hey, Snow White, you’re up.”

The handler’s voice came from outside.

And there went my peaceful philosophical reflection.

I got dressed.

That sounded more dignified than what actually happened.

There was a rash guard, shorts, a mouthguard I rinsed under the tap, and a pair of hands checking that I hadn’t somehow acquired anything dangerous between being summoned and getting changed.

Then the door opened and I followed the handler into the corridor.

The place was already busy.

We passed one of the futsal rooms first.

Five-a-side football inside a box of reinforced fencing, artificial turf worn pale around the goalmouths, cameras mounted high enough that nobody could reach them. Two teams were halfway through a match.

Spectators were somewhere else.

We kept walking.

The next room handled table tennis.

Smaller space. Brighter lights. Two tables running at once, with another pair of players waiting against the wall.

The ball made that thin little tick, tick, tick every few seconds.

I hated that sound.

Always had.

Farther down, another door led to one of the grappling rooms. Another corridor fed into the areas used for whatever else happened to be running that week.

The rotation changed. People changed. Sports changed.

The money didn’t.

If you still hadn’t grasped the business model, congratulations on possessing a healthier imagination than whoever built this place.

It was a sports-betting farm.

Matches around the clock.

Futsal. Table tennis. Grappling. Whatever could be staged repeatedly, streamed cheaply and turned into numbers quickly enough for somebody to place money on it.

You worked the shifts, assuming they didn’t work you over first.

On paper, the whole operation looked almost like real employment—complete with rotations, schedules, handlers, replacement bodies, cameras, and an endless list of regulations—provided you underwent severe brain trauma before examining the agreement.

Naturally, the cruelty wasn’t distributed evenly. Some drew far worse duties and took much harsher beatings, whereas others proved valuable enough that leadership leaned toward keeping them operational.

That was my category.

Calling it “fortunate” felt foul in a place like this, but desperation excels at resetting expectations. Deprive a person long enough, and standard mistreatment starts looking like special treatment.

Nobody had to break my fingers that morning.

Wonderful.

Nobody had withheld my food.

Excellent customer service.

I knew roughly when I would fight, usually knew how long they wanted it to last, and I generally walked away capable of fighting again.

Five stars. Would recommend.

My particular value came from the people betting on me.

RHYS moved money.

I’d learned that much without needing access to the actual books. People talked. Handlers got careless. Instructions changed depending on how much action was coming in. Sometimes I could tell from the atmosphere outside the cage before anyone even gave me the plan.

Heavy money meant everybody suddenly became attentive.

My name attracted heavy money.

People trusted me to win.

The irony had stopped entertaining me months ago.

We turned another corner.

The handler opened the next door and gestured me through.

This was mine.

The grappling room could have passed for something built after society collapsed and a committee decided entertainment should continue anyway.

The cage occupied most of the center.

Chain-link walls. Padded posts. Matting underneath. Cameras mounted around the room at different angles, with another fixed above the cage. Lights strong enough for the stream, unpleasant enough for everybody physically standing beneath them.

There was no crowd to impress.

The handler behind me had already started looking at something on his phone.

That was the farm.

All the aesthetics of sport stripped down until only the wager remained.

I stepped toward the cage.

The smell got stronger near it.

Disinfectant. Something chlorinated underneath.

They had cleaned recently.

Whatever happened in the match before mine had been wiped away with industrial chemicals and somebody’s hourly wage.

Blood, sweat, spit. Maybe somebody vomited. Maybe somebody tore something important. Maybe both fighters walked out perfectly fine.

I wouldn’t know.

Results outside your own matches were kept close unless you had a reason to know them. Players knowing too much created conversations. Conversations created comparisons. Comparisons created questions.

Questions were inefficient.

I climbed inside.

The mat still had that barely damp tack under my feet where the cleaning solution hadn’t fully dried.

My opponent wasn’t in yet.

That happens sometimes.

I rolled my shoulders once and looked around.

There.

Camera above the far side.

Somewhere, creepily enough, somebody was watching.

Could be one person.

Could be hundreds.

Some guy sitting in front of three monitors with several bets open. Somebody checking odds on their phone while pretending to listen to their wife. A group passing money around. A person who had watched me enough times to believe they understood what I would do before I did it.

Place the bets.

My matches were predetermined, mapped out long before I stepped into the ring. While the rest of the roster had to navigate hidden agendas, my arrangement was straightforward: I was scripted to win. Before my bare feet even made contact with the mat, the victory was already mine.

The only variables were the theatrics. Depending on the script, I might give the opponent room to maneuver, hand them a staged takedown, or stretch out the clock.

Other times, they needed a rapid submission. Making a clear favorite appear briefly vulnerable was a lucrative tactic, and my sole duty was to project convincing struggle without ever letting control slip for real.

That was the main perk of my position. I rarely had to go all-out; I just had to execute the choreography of a grappling match. There is a crucial distinction between fighting and performing—one that saves your body when you have to do it all over again the next day.

I flexed my fingers and bounced once on the balls of my feet.

The overhead camera lingered in my peripheral vision, and some fucked-up impulse made me acknowledge it—just like I did every single match.

Lifting my head, I locked eyes with the lens and held the gaze.

I couldn’t see anything behind that black circle, but somewhere, my pale face, black hair falling forward, and palm-tucked mouthguard under the harsh lighting were filling someone’s screen.

I stared anyway, making it long enough so whoever was on the other end knew I was aware of them.

Perhaps it undermined the point of surveillance, or maybe it just translated well on camera.

Maybe a gambler saw that confidence and decided to drop another couple hundred on RHYS.

I never asked, and since nobody complained, whatever strange gratification I got from staring back was evidently marketable.

I slipped the mouthguard into place and waited for my designated loser to appear.