Will there be pop culture references in heaven?

Gradie fell through the dark and landed on what looked like a giant contact lens hovering over the shifting blurry cloud of Gunmaze. The other three were already there, now inside avatars of their own.

Nova’s skin was like motor oil floating on a puddle in the middle of a bright morning, rainbow opalescence over rippling darkness, and his eyes were solid pink pearls. He had on what Gradie instantly recognized as a “coat of many colors”, a puffy robe oscillating in rainbows that partially reflected the swirling shapes below.

Angel looked like a dark elf, pale skin and inkblack hair with a crimson shine to it, black silk robes and eyes of solid emerald.

The pattern was completed by Luke, who wore a pair of aviators with blood droplets glinting on their mirror lenses, and a flight suit studded with bullet holes.

“Oh good, you blocked out your eyes,” Nova said. “Was gonna tell you. It’s good practice to not let enemies know where you’re looking. A lot of times the fighting gets pretty close.”

He waved his hand and another big screen floated out of the lens-floor. Multiple boxes. Conquest, Assault, Sponsored, Private, and one highlighted. [Classic]. He navigated the other options too fast for Gradie to see, and the screen changed to a black box with white letters.

Joining queue…

The box shrunk and a soft golden light reflected off the lens floor, outlining each of them as if some unseen user had them selected.

It added to the confusion he had felt since they had first arrived at Gunmaze, and boiled it into a question.

How much were schema and Principalities like software in this place? Up until now, he had only really interacted with forces of the Otherworld that had a clear live consciousness propelling them. The workers at Rays running the “grills” and “fryers”. The DJs at the Allclub operating whatever generated the lights and music. Everything else had just been near inanimate simple objects. A door that responds to you, a craft that takes you places, but this felt completely different than all that. Even different than the Vault, where despite the fact that the twins interfaced with screens and keyboards, which he had always assumed was just for convenience, a way for them to wrap their minds around the visualization needed to make such a place work, Gradie had never felt there was any kind of autonomous machinery beyond what was being immediately willed into existence.

Gunmaze, however, felt like a machine. Like a real program, something created then let go just like any cluster of code in the Real. Which was terrifying, when he thought about it. People who could flick you across dance clubs were one thing, but people who could create something that could trap you, dazzle you with false images, or even torture you, all without being near you or even knowing you existed, were horrifying beyond anything he could imagine. To what extent would these things hold up without the master observing them? To what extent could they be maintained?

Despite the terror these ideas sparked in his mind, none of it was surprising. It all seemed to follow logically from what he already knew about the Otherworld, as if all these facets of its complexity would have been revealed to him if he had only taken the time to stop and think it through. Which made it all the more unsettling, because it made it seem that much more real, that much more certain.

Another platform floated by, this one shaped like a broken off bridge of a very familiar and highly trademarked spaceship right out of a certain film series. Through the wide windows, he saw people inside standing in front of their own screen, dressed as all kinds of movie and game characters.

It was the first time he had seen anything like it in the Other, and it was so jarring he laughed out loud.

“What the fuck?”

“God dammit,” Nova said almost under his breath, and started making motions on a summoned screen. Their clear platform floated away from the cluster of fanboys but it was too late.

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“Fucking soomers,” Angel snarled, with an intensity that surprised Gradie almost as much as the fanboys had.

“What?”

Nova sighed and looked away. Angel exhaled through his nostrils and explained in a pained voice dripping with contempt.

“Consumers. TV heads. Fucking can’t exist without their cartoon bullshit.”

“Angel hates Star Wars,” Luke said, shooting a smile at Gradie behind Angels back.

“I don’t give a shit about the fucking movies!” Angel said, twisting towards Luke. “But they have to shove their pop culture bullshit into everything they do. They’d make Gunmaze look like a god damned shopping mall if they could.”

“You actually get extra points for killing them,” Nova said, like he was weary of saying it for the hundredth time. “And Gunmaze herds them into their own maps when it can. Really bro, the makers hate them as much as Angel does.”

Gradie’s initial reaction was to wonder what the big fucking deal was. It was all fake anyway, and if he got into a fake shootout with a guy dressed like Nova or a guy pretending to be a jedi, didn’t really seem like it would change the experience much, but he sensed it was the kind of thing people more attached to Gunmaze or just the Other in general might get more worked up about, so he tried to change the subject.

“So, what’s the basic, uh, gameplay like?” said Gradie.

Angel was glaring out at the now descending platform of cosplay spirits and Nova was looking at him like his brother was struggling to open a jar by twisting it the wrong way and not for the first time, so Luke stepped in.

“Fight people. Solve Puzzles. Try and get to the center.”

“What’s in the center?”

“Well, at the very center is the original maze,” Nova said, pulling his eyes from his scowling sibling. “This place was built around the first arrivals fighting it out for fun and grew from the inside out. The center is where the best players are. But we won’t get there.”

“Why not?”

“Because you have to get a win-streak for days or get a challenge invite. But I think what Luke’s talking about is the main map in Assault mode. It’s kind of like the central hub.”

“Yeah, the big murder island,” Luke agreed.

“It’s not the central hub,” Angel said, his anger flaring again. “It’s fucking noob nation,” “The higher ups threw it in a few years ago to appease the new blood who are all obsessed with continuity and progression and shit, but don’t have the attention span for Conquest.”

“It’s like, a cluster of segments, wrapped around a big land mass, but you keep your gear and shit between zones. It’s like a big battle royale. If you die you just go to one of the peripheral zones until you get a win, then you can come back. The creators made it so that players who weren’t interested in the ladder could have something else to grind for.”

“Sounds kind of fun,” Gradie said.

Angel glared at him.

Nova laughed.

“We can give it a shot another time, but for your first time we’re gonna do it old school. A classic run. Randomized segments. You win one, or get enough score if it’s a time battle, and you get moved into the lower rings where the rewards and difficulty increase. You lose, you get knocked back up a rung. Some segments repeat at different levels with the difficulty tweaked, while others you only see at certain levels.”

“What is the combat like?” Gradie asked.

“Usually depends on the segment. They each have their own rules, setting, objectives. Could be guns, blades, vehicles. Any kind of shit you can think of. Gunmaze is more like a thousand different games sharing a common reward currency.”

A warm, electric sensation had been building on the back of Gradie’s neck since he dropped out of the mirror room, and something in Nova’s description ignited it into a pulsing reaction. A current of childish excitement surged down his spine, over his scalp, across his tongue.

Here was something out of his dreams, his fantasies. A swarm of players orbited alongside him, ready to play something that hovered out at the edge of his imagination. It was every lobby and start up screen that had ever excited him, all rolled into one, or maybe, it was the thing all those other moments had been born from, breaking off from the mother lode and floating up, distorted and slightly tarnished, into his Real life.

Below him, through the transparent platform, Gunmaze rolled and flashed. Like soap bubbles that had figured out how to break the sphere-only rule that bound them back in the Real, the multitude of visions refracted through the hazy stormy membrane added a visual to Angel’s words. He saw bubbled, fish eyed views of massive cities, island chains, night drenched forests, rolling lava volcanoes. He wondered if he was really seeing the segments, as the twins had called them, or if this was the Otherworld equivalent of a loading screen, flashes of curated images rather than a live feed of the gameworld.

A bright chime broke his spaced-out train of thoughts.

“Damn that was quick,” Luke said.

“It’s cause we’re in an orientation queue,” Angel said, standing up and taking a deep breath, which struck Gradie as strange.

Suddenly, Gradie got a sinking, rollercoaster drop feeling in his stomach, and the clear platform descended towards the haze.

“Remember, stick together, communicate, every fight a choice, and look for work,” Angel counted the rules off on four fingers, but Gradie hardly heard him.

The jittery excitement that had taken over his body reached a frenzied rhythm, and the lens dropped them all into darkness.