Wesley Park

**Wesley Park** is the co-founder of Whiz, founder of OPTIC, and father of Olivia Park in *A Trick of Light*. Originally from North Korea, Wesley somehow found himself in East Berlin in 1989 just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

## Description

in 1989, Wesley contacted a number of hackers with a complex puzzle. Only William Ackerson managed to solve them. William crossed over to East Berlin during the celebration following the opening of the gates between the two halves of the city. Wesley’s goal was to infiltrate a secret Soviet facility in East Berlin in order to steal something called the Cypher, which the Soviets planned to use against the West. During the infiltration, William’s makeshift EMP knocked out the building’s power and unlocked the vault, but it also caused the Cypher to begin overloading. The Cypher turned out to be some kind of alien artifact, capable of manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum. Wesley tried to stop the overload, but William knocked him out of the way. The blast knocked out the Soviets who were about to shoot them but didn’t harm either thief. Except its power somehow transferred itself to William. Envious of his new friend, Wesley nevertheless decided to suppress the jealousy and work with him to help humankind using the technology.

Soon after he and William founded Wiz, a tech company that released Oz, a virtual reality network that revolutionized the tech industry. William was the technical brains, as well as using the Cypher to secure the network, while Wesley was in charge of finding investors and making deals.

However, Wesley was obsessed with his friend’s power and yearned to get some himself. So he conceived of xenobots, nanoscale devices that could enhance a person’s body to superhuman levels and heal any damage. He injected himself with an early prototype, just in time to be forced to use his new abilities when a former Soviet agent attacked an event thrown by Wiz to obtain the Cypher. The xenobots were faulty and caused nearly as much damage to his body as the attackers. He and William managed to kill all the attackers using their respective powers. Wesley even sustained a bullet wound to the heart but the damage was repaired by the xenobots.

After the attack, William and Wesley had different ideas about the xenobots. Wesley was obsessed with fixing them and continuing the work on them, while William thought they were too dangerous. After the dot-com bubble burst, the company found itself in dire straights. In order to keep it afloat, Wesley stole William’s encryption technology and sold it. William refused his share of the money and ended their partnership and friendship, dissolving Wiz.

While Wesley’s people skills and connections helped him recover and start OPTIC, William became poor and barely made ends meet by fixing other people’s code, unable to market his intelligence and tech skills.

In 2004, William learned that Wesley had continued working on the xenobots, but this time with a sinister purpose in mind, planning on secretly unleashing them on the city in order to infiltrate people’s bodies and steal their biological information in order to target them with advertising. Dying from the Cypher, William went to Wesley’s home and confronted him. This resulted in a fight between the former friends and partners. Wesley used his enhanced strength to nearly kill William, all the while asking him to take the xenobots. However, William knew that Wesley’s years of resentment were finally coming to the surface. Wesley managed to use the Cypher’s abilities to destroy the xenobots about to escape into the world and then to absorb the xenobots in Wesley’s body, crippling him. William then left and was never seen again. Wesley’s daughter Olivia witnessed her father’s crippled state. He would later tell her a twisted version of the story, making William out to be the villain, stealing his life’s work.

Wesley was bearded and bespectacled. Even after their following out as a result of him stealing encryption technology from William Ackerson, Wesley kept tabs on William when the latter began showing signs of mental deterioration in his pursuit of the source of said technology. Wesley died in an accident with his wife when their prototype self-driving car malfunctioned.

## References

1. ↑ *A Trick of Light*, ch. 3: Adrift
2. ↑ *A Trick of Light*, ch. 29: Revelations
3. ↑ *A Trick of Light*, ch. 11: The Watcher