No tickets to Paradise
The sky outside the towering windows was lit as if the sun had died just before dawn, but the light had kept flowing out anyway. A dull dead almost blue. Not just cloudless, but uncloudable. Like a gradient backdrop for a film set. A wide flat dry land stretching beneath. Downtown in the distance, black windowed and dead.
She turned back to the hall and seating area behind her, and found it, unsettlingly, just as she had expected.
All the people were gone, and the light had dimmed, as if the clouds had passed over the sun, or it had moved beyond the windows in its arc, the seats and walkway now heavy in sleepy shade. The white noise and occasional engine sound, which her ears had grown used to though her mind had hardly noticed, were gone.
The airport had been dropped into still dark silence, and somewhere down the hall, an exit beckoned her, sternly. She felt a momentary urge to resist, but shook it off. There was no other place she’d less like to be, and she felt that if she stood still too long she might sink into all of it and never escape.
As she walked down the hall between deadfaced restaurants and steel-shuttered agent desks, she felt the place was expelling her. That energetic sense of something beginning that had hummed out of the light and floors before he had left, that had beckoned her to come with him, was gone, replaced by something not quite hostile, but definitely unwelcoming. Despite or because of the absence of any malice in the sensation, she was convinced that he was going to a place unlike what he had been promised, and more than ever she believed that paradise in this world was nothing more than a lie.
The flash of light had been the final clue. She remembered that when they were together, she had gotten the feeling that he had been running from someone, and everyone knew Paradise wipes your slate clean. Someone had said to her once, “Anyone who tells you they’ve been to paradise is lying.”
She had asked them how they knew, and they said, “Cause no one ever comes back.”
Sometime during the trip, he had said to her,
“If I go you won’t see me again. I thought maybe you would want to come with me.”
But she could never remember where or when he had said it. She could picture him saying it at the train station, in the train, the airport, even stopping halfway down the boarding tunnel, but none of the places stood out. Maybe he had never said it at all. It had been a year at least now. It was hard to recall.
Now, sitting at a party, her mind thrown back to that day by an unexpectedly familiar flash of light, dimmed by its crass duplication and placed oddly amidst the light show at the center of the stadium-shaped resort club, she could finally accept that she wasn’t having a good time.
Her friend had invited her. A celebration of the eightieth or eight hundredth piece by some artist well known in the resort industry. It was the kind of thing she would have loved before. Now it seemed petty. Back then, she would have marveled at the brilliant lights, the panoramic effects, the way the scenes played in 3D to the viewer, and allowed you to cast subtle changes, but now, almost a year after her first trip to the Hardworlds, she saw them for what they were.
She had done the same thing herself, in her realm and in the vault before a job. Taken memories and morphed them, but while that had been aimed at a definite purpose, these displays and by extension everything else in the Other seemed like a process severed from meaning. In the light show, she saw the glare of headlights on a rain-slicked road, feel the electric sensation of waking up early to a long-awaited day off, even recognized muzzle flash and felt the distinct concussion of close gunfire. But they were all softened and stretched, designed to hook the viewer with a filed flechette of reality and drag them into a fantasy that they would pine after like an addict for the rest of the night, at least.
It was the kind of thing she would have loved to get lost in, long ago, when she was infamous among the Other’s most unrestrained party scenes. The kind of thing that turned sour in her eyes after the airport, like so much else.
She couldn’t shake the feeling, afterward, that there was so much more to this new existence, and that all the resorts and clubworlds and dreamworld drugs were nothing but a new kind of barrier, a way to bind souls that had found themselves in a world of total freedom.
She had searched for that something else everywhere she could think of, the cults and temples that preached turning your back on all the excesses of the Otherworld, the black market sims that promised to turn your own memory inside out until you could find what really made you tick, what childhood trauma or genetic quirk made you you, and a million other things that all turned out to be different flavors of the same thing. A flight away from yourself towards something ultimately impossible, a way to pacify the feeling but not resolve it, like taking a ride in one of those dive planes to simulate the feeling of zero g.
She had given up and returned to partying when Michael found her.
He always claimed he didn’t, that she had found him, but if this was a lie, told early on to ease her fear that he was just another creeper, and one he was now unable to admit to as her boss, or if he had really convinced himself of it, she couldn’t say. It didn’t matter. She had long since given up the naïve belief that Michael was some kind of enlightened guide. He didn’t have to be. He had shown her what she had been looking for. Maybe his flaws were what allowed him to.
“Are you here alone?”
The theme of the party was “repetition, broken”. The upper echelons of Otherworld party life had long since run through all the expected themes, and now often had to resort to those that reminded Celeste of bad alt-rock album titles. The man standing in front of her wore a houndstooth patterned robe, with one “tooth” popped out and the gap giving a view to a 3D space that made Celeste think of the old desktop music player visualizer. The fact that every other dude had also worn some fractal themed get up brought a smile to Celeste’s face as she spoke to him that he clearly mistook for something else.
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The conversation took the usual course, which made her laugh again in the context of a party themed around repetition. Of course, she would get hit on by the same kind of “wisened” pseudo-intellectual she had met a million times before, who predictably confessed his disdain for “these types of things” and even implied that he had chosen his outfit as a joke, knowing that the lowly masses would of course take the surface level interpretation of the theme, and he would be lost in a sea of fractals.
She smiled and nodded and feigned confusion, glad finally to have someone sitting across from her to prevent anyone else from approaching the table, and let her thoughts float away to the last job, to Cooper and the shootouts, to the razor-sharp pull the memory of lethal fear had on her. Despite being with Michael for almost a year now, the office job had been her first time shooting at anyone. She had gone to the twins immediately after and told them straight up that she never wanted to be brought to tears by gunfire again. They had looked at her like other guys might look at her if she offered her body without reservations, and put her through a course that came in handy when she had found herself trapped in the Beetle with PKM rounds testing the windshield.
“—The Hardworlds. Repetition in ultimate form. But broken?”
She almost jumped out of her seat before realizing the light show in the center of the room had transitioned to a spoken word and image performance art piece, and not as she had feared, tapped into her thoughts and poured them out onto the stage.
The half dome pseudo screen showed a lotus opening, the image becoming a reflection upon glass, the reflection itself reflected, then repeated.
The man across from her took her troubled look as another kind of discomfort and expressed his opinions on the over-hypedness of the Hardworlds.
“They’re really not as scary as people make them seem. I've been in them-” (here she struggled not to smile) “-and came to the same conclusion as Astodryphys. They’re made out of our memories of the Real, and really only seem so lifelike to us after we have left them, a kind of retroactive editing of memory common to—”
She would have had to try a lot harder not to laugh, but the presentation on the Hardworlds was unsettling enough to keep her mood less than jovial.
Fire, ash, burning lotus trampled under tires, all repeated in a half dome of mirrors like a fly’s eye.
“When the mirror is shattered, the viewer is cut, deeply, but even shattered glass reflects. And the light cannot be destroyed, or escaped.”
The show proceeded to scenes of violence repeated kaleidoscopically, and the point beaten home in a similarly repetitive fashion. The Hardworlds were reflections of the real, and Hardworlders, by bringing violence into them, tarnished a place capable of infinite retrospection and enlightenment.
“But the violence is not the final desecration. Nor is it the first.”
Endless MEM symbols, reflected endlessly, accompanied by a distorted sound that Celeste recognized as a winning chime from a slot on Roulette. As the art piece turned lecture morphed into a scolding of monetizing the Otherworld, which Celeste found very naked-emperorish given that everyone at the party besides her and maybe some of the girls had enough MEM to rent out half the Allclub for a night, she let her thoughts float away, knocked free by the reminder of the Hardworlds and the visceral physical terror she had felt in the half a second she was sure her cover was blown.
Michael had once told her of a theory, which felt a lot like a personal confession, that the Hardworlds were as real to the natives inside as our Real is to us.
“To them, it’s us who aren’t real.”
A nice thought. To be unreal. Sometimes, when the earbuds were silent and there was nothing but time to kill, she would stare at the people in the Hardworlds and when they looked back, tell herself, “I’m not real. They are.”
So when Michael asked her, “What do you want from the Hardworlds?”, she had told him, “To be unreal.”
He had smiled at her the way he always did when they talked about things like that. That was another good thing about him. Every time she said something she was sure was weird enough to make him think she was insane or stupid, he just smiled like she had accidentally revealed some truth that most people were too polite to say out loud.
Thinking about Michael, she became aware again of the man across from her. Thinking about the Hardworlds and the people in them, she became aware of the party and the people around her. They felt unreal, in a different, more boring way. Her friend was floating around, leering from behind her glass as if she had some filthy secret only the lucky chosen man of the night would be able to uncover, and all the men she spoke to smiled and played along like they gave a shit.
Celeste thought of the last party she had been to. A Hardworlder party. Everyone in masks. It had been the most candid open experience of her life. Never had she seen people reveal so effortlessly who they were and what they felt and lived. This was exactly the opposite. A party of people being masks. The cliché of the metaphor was only slightly less tedious than the thing itself.
She got up and walked out without saying anything to anyone. It didn’t matter. After the self-flagellation of the art piece, everyone had given themselves wholly to selfish debauchery and didn’t notice her beyond a few hungry stares and even one or two squeezes.
The walls of the stadium space now projected a rolling jungle canopy and molten blue sky burning into sunset. The spherical orbital upon which the party was set turned translucent and fish eyed. A single drop of rain, falling to the jungle below. The feeling of falling was well executed, and the sky and jungle rolled around, making her feel every step might be the start of a trip and fall.
She got over it by focusing on the exit, a frosted glass door that revealed itself reluctantly between the tables and the lounge pool. After a few steps, she had a hold of herself, and the stumbling, staring partygoers with their arms out akimbo for balance took on a comical slant.
She activated her communicator and found a message from Michael waiting for her.
“Just got another contract. Should be dropping in within the day.”
The Hardworlds bloomed in her mind with a radiance that pushed her surroundings out into blurry peripherals, those other hers calling out to be set alight by her Spirit’s fire, her Spirit longing to do something that felt like stretching its legs.
And then, like a light turned on in the early morning, she saw Cooper, sudden and blinding, heard the gunfire and the crinkle of broken armored windows, smelled the blood and acid smoke. In an unexpected burst of vivid memory (Hardworld memory tended to fall from her mind like rain off glass) she could feel the Beetle all around her, crumbling, pressed in vicelike by not just the gunfire, but by all the rest of the world outside. A real world. A dense world.
Then, as she stepped out the exit, she had a sudden vision, halfway between daydream and memory, perhaps brought on by some unseen hazy person waving goodbye as she left the party and the scene forever.
She was in the Hardworlds, talking to a native, at the end of a long day, vial of Propofol clinking in her purse. She looked them in the eye, and said with a smile.
“You know, If I go, you won’t see me again.”
The face watched her with wonder, which filled her with a satisfied, powerful feeling, while it lasted.
But then the face became Cooper’s, and Cooper replaced the face looking out the window of the plane as it vanished, and she felt suddenly that it was impossible to ever leave anyone in this place, that a soul in the Hardworlds was just as close to her as one locked in the center of Paradise, and that all the distance between them was just a trick of the mind.
But the feeling passed, and she was alone in the elevator, speeding toward the office.