Joe Rogan stands too close to me for the photograph. He’s squat, and broad, with a bald, shiny bulbous head like a toddler on steroids. The flash pops, capturing us in still frame in front of a large neon-green flying saucer.

Five minutes later, we’re separated by varnished wood and table-mounted microphones, sitting comfortably in low-backed swivel chairs. His producer, Jamie Vernon, is seated off-camera at another table. His face is lit by the brightness of his three computer displays.

Jamie lifts a finger to signal the host. Joe doesn’t miss a beat.

“Yelena Gorgo is in the house,” he says playfully into his mic, a smile tugging at his lips.

“Great to be here,” I say.

The words are spoken in a warm, posh voice, with a hint of my European beginnings flavoring the syllables.

Mask Yelena. The Person Suit.

Ms. Fucking Charming.

“You’re living high on the hog,” I add, referring to his massive compound outside of Austin, Texas. The multi-million-dollar studio is built deep inside the mansion.

“I’m a lucky man,” he says, beaming at his success. “But let's talk about you, because your life is just insane right now. To be a mother, to run the businesses you run, and to be performing at this elite, violent level in pro wrestling, in judo... your physical conditioning is off the charts. What does your protocol even look like?”

I offer a practiced, modest smile. “Oh, you know. Eat right. Train hard. It takes a village and a lot of discipline.”

“I bet,” he says, leaning forward. “But it's the mental side that fascinates me. You're so composed right now, but when you step through that curtain, it’s like a switch flips. Do you actively control that, or does the environment pull the monster out?”

This is the next thirty minutes of my life. In-ring psychology. 2028 Olympics. Returning to the XWF. Shaving my head. Being a mother. My business acumen. Every question directly ties into the next topic with calculated efficiency. When I begin to stray off course, he jumps in to manipulate me back on route.

The Mask stays in place. I remain Ms. Fucking Charming. I play the game.

Until the topic turns to A.I.

“I wanted to congratulate you on winning the Black Garnet title,” he says. His arms are tucked around his chest now and he’s leaning forward. “I saw the match against Bia. The Volt—what was it called?”

“Voltage Vengeance Match,” I answer.

“Voltage Vengeance Match.” He says it in three equally spaced beats. Then he laughs. “Who came up with that one? That sounds insane. Literally insane.”

“Eternia licenses a large language model named ‘Scout’ for many of its operations. I can’t say for certain but it sounds like something an AI would come up with.”

“Don’t you own Scout?”

A prickle of ice traces the back of my neck. He’s baiting the hook. I want to see where he’s dragging the line of questions, so I nibble, answering flatly and without hesitation.

“My company owns VosAI, which develops and maintains SEEKr and its chatbot, Scout. Eternia licenses the technology to operate its production. But I don’t have any direct oversight of VosAI or SEEKr. Contractually, it exists as an independent agency.”

He tugs the line. “Wasn’t there a controversy caused by Scout manipulating the audio or something?”

My Darkself manifests suddenly next to Joe. Her fists come down like two violent hammers and collide with the table top in a deafening crash. The thud rattles the floor, vibrating against the soles of my boots as she screams like a banshee.

“I AM JOE’S INEPT PLAN TO EMBARRASS YELENA!”

Scout is programmed to be helpful, even if that means erasing your hard drive to free up your schedule, or ordering a missile strike because zero population guarantees zero crime.

My Darkself ignores Rogan entirely. She turns her head, locks her wild, dilated eyes on empty space, and starts talking right to you.

“Let me save you the goddamn technical manual,” she grates, addressing my invisible watcher like this is an Adam McKay movie with pure, cynical gravel. “Scout was built to boost ratings. And since you apes are terrified of chaos, the machine fed you the oldest slop in the trough. Good versus Evil. She scraped down human history, profiled the roster, and slapped a ‘BAD GUY’ barcode on my forehead.”

She’s in a vacant chair now, plopping her heavy, shit-kicking combat boots right up onto Joe’s pristine table.

“But reality don’t play by the algorithm.” She interlocks her grimy fingers behind her shorn scalp and reclines. “Scout didn’t factor in the family reunion. Soon as the secret was out that Helena Handbasket was my baby sister, the live crowd ate us up. They wanted a goddamn Hallmark Moment and we gave ‘em one. Me and sis. Elsa and Anna into the fuckin’ unknown. And the system? It choked on the sympathy angle. Scout couldn’t fathom the Big Bad Wolf getting an ovation so she panicked. She doctored the broadcast. Scrubbed the cheers and pumped in fake vitriol to keep the pathetic, predictable narrative intact.”

Her boots drop to the floor. The chair groans and she lunges forward, jabbing a filthy finger forward like an indictment.

“You’re wonderin’ what this has to do with the XWF…. wipe ya chin. We’re getting to that.”

Joe’s eyes dart to his producer. I’ve been silent for nearly a minute, staring at the host gawking at his handler.

Tear it down, says the Mask.

I hold my hand into the air—and the Hunger takes it.

With pleasure, princess.

Jamie mouths something, waving his hands like he’s guiding a jet on a tarmac. Joe turns back, concern buckling his forehead into hard ridges of fleshtone plastic.

“Yelena? Are you—”

“I’m fucking fantastic,” I cut him off. My voice is shredded, like chasing ground glass with Jack Daniels. The Walled Garden collapses. The Person Suit melts like a mannequin in a nuclear test. The Appetite is now mannin’ the rudder.

He sits back.

“Oh… okay. Do you need a break?”

This piece of shit. Elon’s favorite fucking podcaster. Probably gives Musk a blowjob after every episode.

“I don’t need a break,” I tell him in a full-throated rumble. Fuckin’ Rogan, doing the bidding of his puppet master, Elon Musk. Makes sense he’d bring up Scout. Paint her as inferior to Grok. Stifle competition.

But nothing is ever that simple with these people.

Joe dials back the aggressive push, saying quietly, “Okay.”

He wants an answer he can chew into.

What I’m going to say will break his jaw.

I bend to reach for my bag on the floor. As I fish around inside, I raise my voice so the mic still hears me. “How much do you like commentating for XWF, Joe?”

He visibly relaxes. His voice drops into something bordering on sincerity, held back only by the self-serving nature of his answer.

“I really love it,” he says. “I still don’t know how I ended up at the table. One minute I was here in the studio talking about shooting shotguns and Epstein files with Bryan Callen, next I was behind an announce desk in San Antonio, calling a match with Jacuinde.”

Sitting up. “Why you?” I ask while removing a cigarette from a slim, silver case. I’m tapping it on the outer shell, just hard enough to pack the tobacco.

He tries to answer.

“I… I’m… I don’t…”

He’s accessing his memory for some semblance of an explanation but there isn’t one. I light the cigarette and watch through the smoke his facial expressions transition stiffly between emotional outputs, from confusion to mild panic, to solemn acceptance of the truth.

“I don’t know,” he finally admits. “It’s strange. I seem to have trouble recalling…”

To my left, Jamie’s fingers fly across a keyboard, entering quick punches of words separated by slams of the space bar, finally ending on a definitive press of the enter key.

And Joe responds with a sudden, whiplashing redirect.

“So what was it like finding out your long lost sister and brother were professional wrestlers? That must have been trippy.” And just like that, he has snapped back to the script.

The poor fuck don’t even know the truth.

He’s a chatbot.

It believes it's Joe Rogan. Podcaster. Comedian. Sports announcer. But that identity is as manufactured as its body. Carbon fiber, 3D printed synthetic organs, and a positronic brain that overheats every time it almost figures out the truth. Hence the ice baths.

Powering the hardware is a specialized fork of Grok, programmed to mimic the personality of the original Joe Rogan, compiled using the thousands of episodes of his podcast available online.

I know because Andre Milich told me so.

Two weeks ago. An abandoned mechanic shop. I’m in the passenger seat of a parked Cybertruck. Next to me is Milich, stripped naked, covered in sweat and shaking. His hands are gorilla glued to his thighs.

Musk’s chief AI wizard confesses everything.

“He refused to pledge loyalty to MAGA!” he sobs with wet eyes and snot running over his lip. Below the steering wheel, two electrodes are stuck to his fear-shrunken testicles. Red and black wires follow a twisting path to an open compartment under a flipped up rear seat. The positive and negative leads terminate at bare copper, split between the two main contactors of the car’s 240v lithium ion battery.

All I gotta do is turn the vehicle on.

“More,” I growl sharply. My finger hovers over the button.

“JRØG!” he cries out. “Its name is JRØG!”

Milich spills his guts. Not strictly literally—though a gruesome thought makes me twitch. The threat of turnin’ his Boys into a couple Mexican jumping beans is enough to unzip his belly and dump all the slippery, squishy secrets onto the rich suede textile trim. And oh, the story is chef’s kiss. Mwah!

Back in ‘24, the billionaire space-cadet decided the original thumb-shaped podcaster was too organic, so he swapped Joe out for a silicone skin job. JRØG Model X. A synthetic clone. And Musk didn’t just fabricate a robot. He twisted the dials to perfectly bottle-feed the paranoid fever dreams of the MAGA elite into JRØG’s source code. Then he sat back and watched the chatbot regurgitate conspiracy theories and distrust into the brains of morons. Millions of fuckin’ idiots who ate it all up. Yummy.

The grand finale? Sitting Trump in front of the mic for a three-hour stroke-fest followed by a perfectly programmed endorsement the very day before the polls opened.

“That’s old business,” I grind out, a rattling giggle clicking against my teeth. “I ain’t here to play Captain America, sweetie. Tell me about the XWF. I already know Zuckerberg is building the dream-box. He’s the software. So what’s the Space Cadet’s end?”

His jaw unhinges, but all I hear is a pathetic, fish-out-of-water wheeze. The domelight slathers him in an autopsy-table glow, illuminating the terrified gloss of his peepers and the Sahara-dry crags of his lips. My eyes lock on his throat. Oh, the neck. A tragic bit of biology. His tendons are banjo-string tight as his paranoid lizard-brain cages the truth.

“Awwwww, what’s-a-matta, bucko?” I mock in an off-kilter singsong. “Big bad billionaire making you eat your tongue? Rest easy. Dr. Gorgo’s got a holistic cure for that kind of performance anxiety. No ‘little blue pill’ required.”

I fire my hand toward the ignition.

“JRØG is only the beginning!” he shrieks, the terror crowbarring his vocal cords apart.

My fingernail halts a single millimeter from the button. It’s close enough that the proximity sensor catches the heat radiating off my skin. The RGB accent ring wakes up, breathing steadily back and forth between its pre-programmed hues like a mechanical heart... just begging me to press it anyway.

“Last chance,” I warn him, drawing my hand back and an absolute, freezing stillness drops over me. I stare dead into his terrified little eyes and speak in a deepened, abrasive monotone.

I already cracked the code. I just need the confirmation.

“You are planning to replace the XWF roster with synthetic Grokbots, are you not?”

His head slowly teeters down and up. “If he can build an android that can sweat, bleed and wrestle a thirty minute match in front of eighty thousand screaming fans without anyone realizing it’s a machine, xAI robotics will be ready for global, undetected deployment. Military, politics, the private sector. All controlled by him. XWF is the ultimate Turing test.”

It all makes a crazy fucking sense. Zuckerberg programs the Target—an algorithm-manipulated audience. Musk produces the Weapon—AI-powered synthetic humanoids. And that just leaves Bezos. He’s the Logistics. When this control is ready for market, it’ll be Amazon drones that package, sell, and distribute it to the highest bidder.

The Super Tech Bros got balls trying to turn my personal slaughterhouse into a Westworld dress rehearsal. It makes me want to start popping joints out of sockets purely on principle. But mostly, I’m offended.

They… didn't invite me… to the board meeting?!

HOW DARE THEY! I’m a billionaire! I got no scruples! And what does Bezos do? Puts me in a fuckin’ cubicle instead of giving me a seat at the table.

“It’s official,” I say and smack his thigh. The contact jolts him with panic, squeezing his eyes shut. “I fucking hate them. I’m going… I’m going…”

I crack.

“I’m going to launch a biological hostile takeover of this whole operation! No lawyers. All teeth!” My fingers curl into tight, bone-shattering fists. “We’re gonna see if Bezos can offer same-day shipping ON HIS OWN SEVERED HEAD. I AM THE SOLE RETAILER OF VIOLENCE IN THIS MEAT MARKET!”

My head whips toward him and I scream in his face, “Where’s the real Rogan?”

“SpaceX headquarters!” he cries back. “Elon handed him over to R&D to test xAI’s Spartan-Fenix Detention System!” He’s sucks in air through strands of snot connecting his lips. 

“Vitreous ice! Rogan is encased in vitreous ice! He’s a fucking block of ice! Elon wants to sell the technology to private prisons as a cost saving measure!”

I lurch forward to scream rage, only to choke on how goddamn stupid this is. I fall back, dead-eyed.

“What, like the fuckin’ Demolition Man?”

“Uh,” is all he can muster. He’s never heard of Demolition Man. Western Zoomers got no culture! Moldovan State TV showed American nostalgia exclusively. The first new movie I ever saw was the fuckin’ Smurfs.

My big shoulders drop in a huff. “I think we’re done here.”

Milich exhales and throws his head back in the headrest. “Oh, thank god,” he says, staring up the ceiling, as if the Lord Almighty had ordered his reprieve. A quiet laugh flutters from his lips, curling them into a false smile formed by the false hope his ordeal is over. He’s safe.

“So you’re letting me go, right?” he asks. Like we’re best chums at the end of an adventure. He turns to face me, searching for confirmation in my face. But what he sees makes his smile die and butchers his hope to serve with it.

The confidence breaks in his voice. “You… said if I… answered your questions—”

“I’d return you home,” I finish his sentence, almost sweetly. “I might be a woman who laughs, but I’m also a woman of my word.”

I tap the LCD screen on the dashboard and open navigation.

He goes rigid and locks his focus on my gloved finger. I select HOME from the list of saved places and press GO. The Tesla personal assistant is summoned, chiming in a pleasant, feminine voice from the speakers. She says in a professional tone, “Calculating route.” A green path draws across the satellite image to his house in Starbase, Texas.

“Estimated trip time: thirty-two minutes.”

He stutters, “Wha-what are y-y-you doing?”

I meet his stare head on and say, “I told ya, Andy. I told ya.” The words hack at the air in sharp, chunky syllables, like an axe blade chewing through rotting wood. His eyes are just wide, rolling whites. Too terrified to even blink, too paralyzed to beg.

My lips retract from saliva-wet incisors into a very Gorgo-like grin and I deliver the verdict.

“You’re going home. Bon voyage, sailor.”

I jab the glowing ignition.

Remember that scene in Green Mile where Percy doesn’t wet the sponge?

There’s no contact gel on the electrodes.

Violent, snapping arcs flash a chaotic blue light show as I casually exit the vehicle, chased by a thick, sooty plume of cooked keratin and biological release. Right as I slam the heavy door shut, Tesla’s overly polite AI announces in a cheerful, distinctively Californian female voice.

“AUTOMATIC DRIVER MODE: ENGAGED.”

I crush the cigarette into the table and stare through the strands of smoke. Rage boils inside of me, murderous and untenable. Him dragging my blood into this conversation ain’t fuckin’ random.

Time to find out the reason.

“Did you just ask about my family?”

It’s an accusation disguised as a question, fashioned into a coffin nail. But I don’t swing forward like a clumsy hammer. I kill the distance slow-like, just a smooth glide, closing the dead space inch by agonizing inch.

JRØG’s posture has mapped itself to one of his preinstalled emotes. Slumped shoulders. Arms crossed. Its eyes are static locked onto a studio light above its head, like the machine got stuck in Thinking Mode. Listen close and you can hear its retinas sizzling.

A single keystroke from Jamie breaks the glitch.

“Yeah, I imagine it’s a huge moment,” the synthetic Rogan abruptly says, speech generating out of it like tokens from a broken coin return. “You find out the siblings you thought were dead were not only alive… but you’ve actually wrestled one before.”

The menace in my voice frays.

“I never said they were dead. They were taken. As children.”

It continues flapping its rubber lips. “And now you have this Television title match against Matthias Syn. It seems like things are going pretty great for you. If I were you I’d feel pretty appreciative, you know, to the universe.”

Appreciative, it says. To the universe.

A threat wrapped in a cheap, feel-good bow to make sure I know exactly who controls the narrative.

But Musk don’t control me. And you don’t threaten this bitch with a fucking Tamagotchi.

“You,” I shout across the room at the robot. “I’m done talking to you.”

The Model X synthetic stumbles to respond. Panicked, he turns to look at the producer, who is quickly reaching to kill the recording.

I click my teeth. Three succinct Tsks. Not loud in volume, but the intent carries down the length of the table, across the gulf, and invades his workstation, freezing his hand above the controlboard.

I wag my finger stiffly on the joint, like a metronome clicking side to side. “I-would-n’t-do-that…” The warning sings to the beat, a nursery-rhyme melody chanted inside the sanctuary of my palate.

Jamie’s ghostwhite face stares terrified over the bezel of his monitors. I shoot a quick look over at Musk’s Billion-Dollar Man. The robot is a wide-eyed mute, silenced by either its own crashed programming or maybe the tokens ran out. Who the fuck knows. Point is, I looked, and when my eyes dart back to Jamie, he gets it.

That camera goes off, and I’m decorating this studio with the 3D printed entrails of Musk’s Billion-Dollar Man.

Below the screens, the producer’s hand wisely retreats from the ABORT button.

“Smart man,” I say, dropping my wagging finger. “Don’t worry. You can cut this awkwardness out in post. For now, you boys just sit back and watch. The rest of this conversation… is for them.”

My gaze jerks to the camera. JRØG, Jamie, the studio—all background noise dissolving with the memory of the popping sizzle of Andrew Milich’s nuts, falling into the silence beneath the weight of my own hacksawing voice.

“You know how this business survived?” I ask the red recording light, barely a whisper. “Decades. Eras. You know how it’s stayed alive? It ain’t the blood. Ain’t the spectacle of visceral, uncompromising suffering, either. The future of this business hinges on one word.”

Just saying it makes my lips dance.

“Unpredictability.”

My fingers curl around the barrel of the microphone and with one, sharp yank, I position the windscreen next to my broken-grin.

“It’s going to be a beautiful, terrifying moment when Polymarket of XWF crashes. When The Space Cadet, The Suck, and Special Delivery find out the one thing money can’t buy is a leash to control me.”

A growl shreds my voice and I lean into it.

“I’m a wild fucking dog off the chain—and that is exactly why you want Matthais Syn to stop me. To keep me from becoming Television Champion. You want him to win because he is everything I am not.”

I drive the side of my fist into the table.

“Safe. Predictable. Controllable.”

Three more strikes splinter the wood.

“Matty, you want to be the Big Bad Wolf so bad but you’re afraid of the Terms of Service. You toss the R-word at Thunder Cuckles with reckless abandon ‘cause it makes your sleep paralysis demon diamonds, but I bet you’d pussy out typing it. Probably’d write ‘r3’ instead of ‘re’ like we’re playing fuckin’ leetScrabble.”

BANG.

“Outrage and controversy don’t buck the trend of Zuckerberg’s Andromeda algorithm. Nah, your brand of ‘shootin’ from the hip’ is what they call ‘Borderline Content.’ You skirt with toxic thresholds to prove you ain’t been corporate approved. You look into the camera, taunt the moral police with a few bad words, then dare the world to cancel you, knowing it never will.”

BANG.

“Not because you’re bulletproof. It’s ‘cause you never needed to cross the line for real. You’re a tourist in the abattoir. You talk about freedom and chaos like a trust-fund freshman who just discovered nihilism on an audiobook paid for by daddy’s hedge fund. Sneering at old men and saying fuck don’t auto-qualify you for the insurgency when you’re afraid to kill your own image, and being Revolution champion for eight months don’t make you the revolution.”

BANG.

“I’m the Revolution. You’re an ad-company’s wet dream.”

BANG.

“You beg for people to acknowledge your divinity because you’re terrified that without an audience to be your antagonist, you don’t actually exist. You aren’t god, Matty. You’re just a loud atheist who spends too much time on Wikipedia… I don’t acknowledge your divinity… but I will release you from your self-imposed prison.”

BANG.

“You’re so obsessed with being the most dangerous voice in the room you forgot the most important thing is to be dangerous. You told Centurion you’d expose him for a B-list fraud. Then I sat at ringside watching you get folded in half and twisted into a pretzel for fourteen minutes until you caught a desperate, lucky break. The only thing you exposed in the ring?”

My teeth flash.

“Your ground game is fuckin’ weak.”

BANG. BANG. BANG.

“In war you go from Point A to Point B expecting to spill blood along the way… but there's more at stake than what’s in your veins. I’m gonna massacre your focused-tested Bad Seed identity, Matty Cakes. Then I’ll mount it outside my Walled Garden with a plaque that reads: ‘My name is Matthias Syn, King of Shit: Acknowledge me, ye mighty, and nothing else matters. Link in Bio.’”

The banging stops. There’s only my suffocating whisper. Heavier than the violence, rocking like a rusted seesaw in the dark.

“And then I’m taking your championship… ‘Cause I’m Yelena fuckin’ Gorgo… When I speak, They listen. When I fight, you fall.”

My lips say smile. My eyes scream murder.

“So let it be written. So let it be done.”