Forced Time Off

Gradie’s last month of training had been a mad dash to put distance between himself and the coin Job.

After the job was over, when he had calmed down enough to have a debrief, Michael had congratulated him on his successes, while Philip tried to drive home a warning.

“If that coin had been in one of those last three pallets, we woulda been sunk. Pushing is always a gamble. Never forget that.”

Gradie had tried to protest that he hadn’t actually pushed anything, but they gave him another one of those “how do we explain the sky is blue” looks, and he remembered that’s how pushing was supposed to feel.

The rest of the debrief had been spent going over minutiae about his performance in the various firefights, the discussion enhanced by a live play of mem from his point of view. It was hard enough to focus given his mind’s tendency to fly off on wild what-if scenarios, but the entire time he was terrified they might start playing his memory of Sam’s apartment. Still, he managed to pick up enough details to compile a list of his shortcomings, then it was off to the Vault.

The training had been oriented around his biggest failing; priming a Self that could survive dropping into a specific Hardworld intact. A lot of his progress during the first round of training had fallen short when it came to preserving a Self’s abilities while also waking up in the target’s world.

“It’s a push and pull, like everything else.” Philip had advised him, and that was essentially the extent of his advice. For weeks, Philip would drop into a Hardworld, Klara would scrape a vision together and feed Gradie the data. Then he would drop in and head to the clubhouse, where Philip would run him through the god damned gauntlet.

The difficulty was that while priming a Self alone felt like building in the infinite, each additional parameter increased the difficulty exponentially. The twins mentioned some kind of law or equation, but Gradie didn’t need terminology to know what Philip made him live through, painfully.

“A real Hardworlder can be given an address, occupation, even fucking a phone number from a client and drop into a self that matches no problem,” he told Gradie casually one day. Around the same time, probably three weeks into it, he gave Gradie the only other piece of advice he would give on the matter.

“It helps to work backwards.”

It was another week and a half before Gradie realized what he meant. Rather than priming a self like telling a story, birth to adolescence to the present, the key was to push the final result, visualize the self actually using the skills in the Hardworld he was dropping into, and letting the hardworlds sort out the how and why.

It was nearly impossible in practice, and the few times he came close to pulling it off only made it worse. At least if he had never done it, he could tell himself it was simply beyond him.

One day, around the month mark or so, He found the door to the Vault unresponsive, and Michael standing nearby.

“I had hoped you would have gotten over your fear of the Otherworld on your own by now, but it looks like I’m going to have to throw you out. I feel like a dad dropping his kid in the deep end.”

It took Gradie a moment to realize what he had just said.

“Why would I be afraid of the Otherworld? I thougt you said nothing out there could hurt me? Or was that another half truth?”

Michael kept on smiling, as If everything Gradie said or could ever say was something he had orchestrated.

“You are going to go out there, and make a craft. Then you are going to take that craft and fly it away from the ball. To a gameworld, or a resort world or something, I don’t care, but you will not stay here. If I find you still hanging around tomorrow, I’ll drop you out into the black myself.”

“I thought only demons could make people go where they didn’t want to.”

“Maybe I am a demon. I could be, for all you know about any of it. It’s time you stop taking everything I told you the first day for granted. Maybe I should have let you flounder around—”

“I don’t know how to make a craft, and I don’t know where—”

“Fly up, past the blue, where the Principality of the Allworld lets go, and use your mind. Put this inside your craft,” he took a black orb out of his jacket. “And connect it to a screen. Then you can navigate your craft to wherever you want. I loaded a few worlds into it.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Gradie took the orb and kept his face taught. The idea of flying around a liquid dreamworld in a ship out of his mind sparked a current in his throat. Childhood fantasies jumped back to life, and he realized what Michael meant about his fear. He wasn’t scared of the Otherworld. He was terrified it would disappoint him.

“After you’ve spent a few days or so outside the ball, get with the Twins and construct your home realm. For the next week, you are not a Hardworlder. You are a new Spirit, looking for a good time. If you need—”

“A week?” Gradie was sure a job would get called before then. The twins had mentioned at least three in negotiation. The thought of dropping in on a live run when he had just started ironing out last jobs failures soured his aspirations. He had intended to drop into the next job as a Hardworlder unlike anything the team had ever seen, putting on a show of true lethality, culminating in a daring rescue of Sam and EP, drenched by tripped fire sprinklers, menage trois among the shell casings—

“Your Spirit needs an anchor,” Michael continued. “If the next job lasts more than two days, you’ll understand, but it will be a painful understanding, and this is one lesson I’d prefer you learn the easy way.”

A door slid open in the wall and Michael’s noir-lounge control room twinkled on the other side. He stopped in the frame and looked over his shoulder like Gradie had tried to run off.

“And don’t bother going to the Vault in your craft. The twins have strict orders not to let you in.”

Gradie nodded, a comforting thought forming in his head, but Michael cut it off.

“Orders that I have ensured will be followed to the letter.” His voice had the shape of threats, and Gradie knew the Vault would be sealed from the jungle planet as well, if he could even find it. The twins had mentioned being able to make the entire world “un-reachable” at will.

“And remember, don’t go to any mem dealers.”

“You already told me that,” Gradie snapped. Despite Michaels insistence that he try and sell his mem that first day on the ball, he had been forbidden to sell any after joining the team. Not that it mattered. He had enough MEM to buy whatever he wanted, if he could ever figure out what that was.

Michael disappeared and Gradie sulked down the hallway towards the door to the atrium, trying to explain to the childish part of him now jumping with excitement that the Otherworld was a disappointing place and he should curb his enthusiasm and replace it with a more adult skepticism or at most a mild hope, like when the movie your friends drag you too isn’t quite as insulting as you expected.

The office was unusually empty and the lights were somehow dimmed, probably Michaels doing. He tried to remember the “exit procedures” (which reminded him, painfully, of springing out of an armored SUV with a rifle raised in some parking lot millions of realities away) and remembered what Philip had told him, one day between training sessions, after Michael had insisted for the thirtieth time that he take some time off.

“This is the trap door. It’ll kick you out through one of a couple thousand open access doors around the city. Randomized for security. If you don’t have a destination in mind or don’t need the privacy of the hallway.”

Gradie recalled nodding and excusing himself and walking right back to the Hallway and the door to the Vault. Philip had been waiting for him in the Hardworlds like Michael had never said shit and they continued the training as if they had never stopped. It was unspoken, but everytime Gradie returned to the Vault or the Hardworlds after assuring Michael he would take a break, Philip’s words got just a little less harsh, at least until Gradie made some mistake that reset their relationship back to grunt and taskmaster.

He held the trap door open, and stopped himself. His black sleeve brought out another sluggish half buried memory. He needed a new outfit for “dreamer Gradie”, that other persona who knew absolutely nothing about Hardworlding besides some Allclub urban legends, and who loved flying around the Allworld and sinking into harem simulations or whatever. Gradie flinched and decided that Dreamer Gradie had a similar distaste for all that shit, and just wanted to fly. He had learned that a simpler identity, oriented around a single facet, was easier to slip into anyway.

He banished his mirror mask and long dark jacket and 90’s action movie assassin get-up, stashing it in a compartment he imagined was a few centimeters wide on the left side of his pocket, and looked in the mirror hung above the chute.

Neutral grey sweats and shirts. The archetype of all “clothes”.

What would Dreamer Gradie wear? He does a lot of flying. Spacesuit? Something with a high collar. Metallic, mildly reflective maybe. With goggles—

In the mirror, the air around him rippled and an outfit shook out of it. A high collared jacket that the mirror told him through dreamknowledge was a ski jacket

In the mirror, there was an infinite line of Gradies, as if another mirror had sprung up behind him, but when he glanced back to check, there was nothing but empty office.

The other Gradie’s were wearing variations on his chosen theme, high collared metallic jumpsuit esque get up, and he knew that the mirror would help him dial in his look with a library of almost every kind of clothes ever worn in the Other.

Ok. Ski suit. So…

The outfit took shape, with some refinement. He had to stop himself from gravitating towards his Hardworlder aesthetic, the mirrored surface of the goggles and the high collar already reminded him of his mirrormask and trenchrobe. Eventually, he chose a metallic blue-grey ski suit, reflective enough to pick up the hues of the office, and he assumed whatever else he stood next to, mirrored ski goggles hanging around his neck from an invisible strap, and gloves, boots, and belt pouch of a kind of leather the same color as the underside of a raincloud.

Just enough personality to look like his Otherworld Self gave a shit about putting it together, and just enough anonymity and camouflage if he needed it. Perfect.

He kicked open the trap door and jumped down into darkness.