Shift

## Appearances

### Appears In

Gridrunner 1: Gridrunner, Gridrunner 2: Abort, Gridrunner 3: Corrupted, Gridrunner 4: Offline, Gridrunner 5: Rebooted, Gridrunner 6: Firewall, Gridrunner 7: Glitch, Gridrunner 8: Terminate

### Debut

Gridrunner 1: Gridrunner

**Shift** (born Phaedra McLain) is a founding member of the Gridrunners. She plays primarily a support role, offering emotional, psychological, and spiritual advice.

## Biography

### Personality

Soft-spoken, motherly, warm and welcoming. Shift is the eternal light that glows in the heart of the Gridrunners even at their most desperate hours. She is a shoulder to cry on, an ear to listen, and voice to guide wayward thoughts. A peacemaker and pacifist in a world at war with itself, Shift is akin to a glue that holds the Gridrunners together from the inside out, whereas Vision holds them together on the outside.

### Appearance

Stark black hair halfway turned to pure white falls to her shoulders and frames a heart-shaped face with dark lips and smiling eyes of deep blue. Aside from the CyberGen mod, all of Shift's mods are internal except for her neck, which had to be significantly repaired and replaced with a metallic covering after severing her spinal cord. She is covered in scars from battles and surgeries alike.

At 5'8" tall with a lithe frame, Shift once possessed the great physical abilities granted to other members of the Gridrunners, but her spinal cord injury has essentially put her out of action until Dex can work up a better alternative to what she has now. Nonetheless, she is in no hurry to get back to physical conflict, and prefers to work instead as the Gridrunner spiritual guide.

Shift prefers to wear a long orange and black coat with a high collar. She tends to wear white gloves not to hide the scars on her hands but to give her hands a soft touch, as she feels that is important when holding another's hand and listening to their troubles. She is also fond of high black boots that lace up to her knees. Due to the neural mod which allows movement in her paralyzed limbs, she moves with a quiet and deliberate gait which can be described as elegant.

## History

### Spiritual Guide to the Gridrunners

Shift believes that the human mind and body only evolved to the point where they were able to create, manipulate, and eventually integrate technological advancements with their physical forms. Humanity's grasp of technology is their next step in the evolutionary process. The human brain only grew large enough to understand the technological advancements that put an end to natural selection in humans. We use technology to further evolve technology, and this evolution of technology is the next phase in human evolution - a combining of biology and technology.

The technological advancements of humankind were born out of a desire to tap into the spiritual world that the ruling class has conditioned society into believing is not real or possible to engage with. Because people could not find purpose in the physical world, and were not permitted to engage with the spiritual world, they created their own world of energy beyond the physical realm.

Shift is a strong proponent of the belief that our physical forms are not what define us. The human body is not who we are, but merely a temporary vessel used for our consciousness to enter one world from another, and that consciousness is who we really are. She believes our physical forms confine us, a prison we are put in through no fault of our own. We don’t determine what our physical form is unless we hack ourselves. Our physical forms and physical connection to consciousness is imprisoning us, not liberating us. Therefore, she believes, our natural state is one of constant change, both internal and external. She does not believe the un-modded human form is inherently superior to the modded form, and argues that the mods enable a greater human experience than those without mods. She believes "purists" are merely technophobes, and would have opposed the internet and electricity - two developments which radically altered and made better the human experience - if they lived in earlier times.

Because our external selves is seldom a representation of our internal selves, Shift believes that our physical forms are an obsolete concept, which is why humanity has evolved to develop the means to radically alter physical reality - both through body modification as well as augmented reality. Our physical forms are merely biological machines that we have little control over. The way a computer must be adapted and rebuilt to accommodate newer programs and processes which the older model was incapable of handling, the Gridrunners believe their bodies themselves must be adapted and rebuilt in order to do what their restrictive older bodies could not.

More than anyone on the team, Shift grasps the connection between human consciousness and machine consciousness. Dex built Synthia, an entirely artificial consciousness which no physical form, only represented by holographic energy in an AR field. Consciousness is not physical reality or the ability to manipulate it; consciousness is the energy from which all life grows, even digital life. It is the time before and the hereafter, and the physical world is merely a dream, no more real than the augmented reality of Center City, Re-Angeles.

## Notes and Trivia

* Founding member of the Gridrunners.