Sitting in the mirror room
The mirror room lived up to its name. There was a polished glass walkway leading to a single wide mirror. The rest was darkness.
He stepped across the mirrored path and the room lit up, and it was all Gradie all the time.
Another wide mirror had appeared behind him, creating an infinite stream of Gradies in either direction. Other mirror pairs, above and below and side to side, completed the fractal, and a chill went up his spine.
He had never seen a better metaphor for dropping into the Hardworlds, and it disturbed him to see it attached to a gameworld.
“Please banish any facial covering,” the same female voice said. He did, and immediately felt like an idiot. The mirrors glowed and rainbow light danced over his reflection as a pop up appeared, a close up of his face in the center of a multi windowed menu. Gunmaze had his face, his real name, and his wallet now. He could only imagine what Philip would have to say about that.
The menu was right out of a video game character creation, despite Angel’s pretentious insistence that this was nothing like one. Of course, if you were trying to get the most people to play your data mining dream game, you would chose an interface most people were already familiar with.
It’s responsiveness, however, was straight dreamworld. When he looked at his eyes, a slew of options rolled out, not just across the screen, but across his mind, and a subtle thought was enough to filter the options down to whatever he wanted. He made his eyes solid black, then moved on to his skin, his hair, his face, and finally his clothes. Surprisingly, in an un-video game like twist, he had limited control over the size of the body itself, his height changeable only by selecting some kind of platform shoe. He guessed that it had something to do with the difficulty the mind might have in taking ownership of a body too far removed from the one it inhabited in everyday life.
It took him less than a minute to create, and when he was done, he had succeeded in creating something that satisfied his only requirement; It looked nothing like him. Gunmaze already knew who he was, but none of it’s players had to. He had been guiding his mind around the idea of a shared dreamworld mmo while tweaking his avatar, and had stumbled upon something that, for some reason, had never occurred to him while flying around the ball or even when creating his Otherworld persona’s ski goggled get up; What if someone from his Real life saw him? They would be here, somewhere, wouldn’t they? If everyone went to the Otherworld? Did everyone get into the Otherworld?
He was nudged back to the present by a prompt, asking him in the same voice if he was done creating his Avatar, and if so, would he like to select a username?
The twins hadn’t mentioned that. In a slightly unsettling deja-vu, especially after the symbolic appearance of the refracted mirrors, he was reminded again of the Hardworlds. Philip had been dogging him for months now to select a Hardworlder name, and he hadn’t been able to think of one. Despite Philip’s promise to choose one for him, he never did, and it was now unspoken that he wasn’t going to, which Gradie assumed was due to some Hardworlder superstition, so Gradie was up on the boards as “5Seven”, which did have a nice ring to it, but was chosen by Michael, and Gradie had an uneasy feeling about letting yet another aspect of his Hardworlding career be determined by “Boss”.
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Philip reminded him constantly to just pick one on his own, nothing flashy, and that “the name is for fame” and would always spit after he said it to drive the point home, at which one time Gradie had reminded him that he had spoken numerous times about the importance of a reputation, which had of course devolved into a shouting rant from Philip on all that, and how only a naïve idiot couldn’t see the difference.
So, Gradie was still up on the board as 5Seven, technically fitting into Philips advised word and number convention, and coming dangerously close to the point of no return.
“You’re up there twice now,” Philip had said after the coin job, showing him his place on the boards, under the header with the job number and name;
“JN:scl195cfm850sa BurningBird and the CoinCollector,” (they all had names that sounded like cold war coded radio messages)
“Winning move made by 5Seven. Located the polytope via last second push.”
“Best Sizzle: MonkeyToo and E.P. : Brought down attack chopper with a drone targeted Carl Gustav.”
One more placement on the boards, Philip advised him, and the name would be permanent. But try as he might, he just couldn’t think of a name and number that expressed how he felt about this new him, despite Philip’s demands that he not try and do so.
Compared to all that, choosing a username for Gunmaze would be a cake walk.
“You figure it out bro?” Nova’s voice came over on his comms.
“Yeah. Just choosing a name. Any suggestions?”
“Whatever sounds good. It can’t be taken though. Don’t have to worry about it rolling off the tongue, we won’t be saying it out loud often.”
“What’s yours?”
“I’m Quasar Cultists. Angel is Emerald Swordsman, Luke’s is NotBannedMan. Sam is Deadriver…”
He trailed off at the end of her username.
“Sam comes here?”
“Uh, yeah, she’s usually with us. But I think she had something to do today.”
Immediately, Gradie knew she had not wanted to go knowing he would be here. He hadn’t seen her in the clubhouse since before the coin job. For the millionth time, he remembered the kiss, the look in her eyes, and the embarrassment washed over him all over again.
“Anyway man,” Nova continued, sounding like he could hear Gradies feelings in the silence. “If you can’t think of one just use a placeholder. You get one free change.”
Gradie, desperate now to distract himself, wracked his head for maze puns, maze mythology, then gave up and skimmed through old usernames for something that meshed with the ones Nova had given him. Finally, he thought of Gunmaze itself, that big swirl of chaos, as he had seen it through the viewport, and his immediate destiny of dying repeatedly. He had learned that the best way to go into a competitive game in the beginning was to accept the fact that you were going to die over and over, and in fact welcome it, as each death was a learning opportunity.
“OrbitingCorpse,” he said.
The name lit up on the screen, blinked for a second, then chimed and turned green. Available.
“Uh, all right bro see you down there,” Nova said.
Gradie accepted the name with a thought, and the screen dissolved away, and there was his avatar, looking back at him in the mirror. He had chosen a jump suit that looked like a straitjacket half undone, combat boots, and shemagh draped over his head, all various shades of black and charcoal.
“Look here, please,” the voice said, originating behind him. He turned around, and saw nothing but the same repeating mirror images, only this time the Gradies were his avatar.
“And now here,” above him this time. “And here,” below him. Then it clicked.
“Look behind you,” E.P. said in his memory. This was the mirror room convincing him he now looked like his avatar. This was another way to take the Spirit to another world.
“Please try and catch the lights.”
They came from random directions, soft orbs of yellow light that zig zagged and changed speeds. He reached out for them, and the avatars around him did the same, solidifying the sensation that he was the avatar.
“Synchronization complete. Have fun out there.”
The mirrors went dark and a spotlight shined down on him. He looked down at his body, glowing in the harsh light, and the sensation of being his avatar was complete.
Then the floor dropped away.