Where am I myself
Luke dreamed of the robbery a thousand times, and it was never the same. Sometimes he shot all three of the mother fuckers and the cops immediately threw him in prison for life. Sometimes his mom or his sister showed up and the robbers laughed and shot at them, and Luke would either shield them with his body or pick them up and try and escape, sometimes by flying. Other times he just got shot and died right there.
Reviewing the memory of his first job, however, was completely unlike dreaming. Though, in a way, you could compare it to a lucid dream, (not that he had much experience with those at the time); He was transported to another place, had some control over that place, and the place seemed real beyond all possibility, despite the fact that he knew his “real body” was somewhere else, and could even at times sense it. Not unlike having to take a piss in a dream, he felt the carpet of the Bliss den on his crossed legs if he focused enough to think about it. But like many things in the Other, the comparisons to a dream were more out of the thing being less unlike a dream than it was unlike the real world.
But, the real glaring difference between the Hardworld mem and a dream, and even between it and the other sims and trips of the Otherworld, was that he had absolutely no power to change it.
He could alter his awareness, control the flow of time, even step out of his body and fly around the room or SUV to get a different view, up to a certain point, but everything happened the exact same way every time.
He learned later that the art of preserving mem, meaning not just storing it on a “physical” object, but freezing it in a state that was immune to the natural human process of altering memory as its remembered, was a hefty feat that had changed the nature of the Otherworld. They called it one of the prime discoveries, or some shit. And the art of preserving mem of a Hardworld was not far behind.
But, however unlike a dream it was, it had the same dreamlike ability to absorb him completely, and the extractor had to montage his obsessive exploration down to about a fifteen-second sequence, when in reality, he had been inside for hours.
Until a voice broke through and brought him back to Other-reality.
“You’re not keeping that mem in your fucking Bliss-Den cubby-hole are you?”
It was Car-Crash, apparently broadcasting from his craft orbiting the Den. Luke, who had been analyzing why his arms had been so slow to raise his weapon at the pivotal moment, stopped still and tried to think of how to get out of his memory and back into his body. The CD hadn’t even come with a leaflet!
But, just the act of thinking about it was enough to drop him back into his non-body, lying there in his alcove.
“Where else would I keep it? It won’t fit in my pocket.” Luke pondered this oversight for the first time. Shouldn’t every object be pocket-sized? Was there a limit to how many hallucinated objects he could fit in there?
“In your personal realm.”
“What?”
“I’m coming in.”
“Uh. Ok.”
Car-Crash threw open the Curtain and stepped in. He held a martini glass and scowled at Luke with his posture.
“You been born six God damned months and you never made your own space? No wonder you’re a fucking wastoid.”
Luke just stared at him, so he shook his head and brought the glass up to his mask with a clink and drank. The ghostly images behind his fractured windshield face took up an absinthe hue.
“Hm. Damn, haven’t had one of these in ages.” It was Concordia’s signature drink.
“What do you mean my own space?” Luke was suddenly eager to get him the fuck out of here. It was like having a friend digging through your room, and you weren’t sure how you were going to explain all the soiled bedsheets, and now that he was out of the Hardworld mem, he could smell the Bliss in the air.
Car-Crash leaned against the wall and sipped some more.
“Most of the Otherworld is invisible. Hidden. Private, I mean. hidden in places you can’t see. Little pockets. Not so big pockets. Goings on you could never even imagine. And some you wouldn’t want to. All the shared places, the Ball and all the worlds attached to it, like this place for example, are really only a fraction of the Other. Tip of the iceberg. Feet under the curtains. Know why that is?”
Luke stared.
“Cause when you make a place in this dimension, you get to make the rules. You become the prince of the pocket. Following me so far?”
Luke looked around the room. Car-Crash nodded.
“Yeah, so the guys that made this dump thirty fucking years ago got to design all the rooms, but they also got to tell it that gravity here is non-negotiable and that you can’t enter someone’s little cubby unless they let you. They also have the standard boilerplate ban on physical pain. Principalities and Schema. They’re what make the places and things in this place more than just ideas.”
Luke was only half listening, and the extractor recreated the effect by muffling Car-Crashes words. He was mulling over the idea that if the rules of this place meant you could only enter an alcove with permission, like he had given Car-Crash moments before, then when he had seen Rory laying down that woman, it was because she had wanted him to.
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“But, this place is linked, or on the map, tagged or whatever they call it now. Meaning you can fly out that window and get to the Ball and a hundred other places. If you can see it in the sky, you can get to it, which means it’s in the same space, which means the Maker that put it there allowed it to be linked. Understand?”
Luke nodded, and thought about Rory watching him fly into this place every single fucking time he had ever done it.
“So what you want to do, is make a place that’s not linked to anything else. A place that you can only get to with your thoughts. Got it?”
Luke’s thoughts and Car-Crashes words met up for the first time. A place where she couldn’t see him. A place she could never find.
“How the fuck do I do that?” Luke said.
“Don’t they give you newborns info on that from the feed now? Thought that was law.”
Luke vaguely recalled his first encounter with the feed, while Rory watched over his shoulder, and dismissing something about realms and rights of the spirit and safety practices, so he just stared at Car-Crash, who shook his head into his drink again.
“Jesus. Look, go out into the black. Fly into it as far as you can go, and imagine it squeezing shut behind you. Imagine you are cut off from everything in all directions. You’ll know when you got it. It’ll feel right. Like you really are alone in this fucking world for the first time in your life. Hard to explain, but you’ll see. Then, and only then, start making. Oh, and when you make the door, visualize that it’s a door only you can create. That only you can open. Just be smart about the whole thing. There are guys out there that make fortunes finding technicalities in that shit. Not that you’ll have much worth all that trouble.”
Luke nodded. Luke listened. Luke focused on the idea of a place of his own, and tried to use it to sweep out thoughts of Rory. Somehow, in the fantasy of himself standing in a mansion floating in the black, she swung open the door and walked in, rainbow clothes and all.
“Oh, one last thing.” Car-Crash had been heading for the door. “You’ll probably find out that you can hire people to make your realm for you, and even to secure it, but don’t go for that shit. The best security is when only one guy has the key.”
By then, Luke’s fantasy of a place of his own had already been soiled. He saw her climbing through windows and rappelling down through the skylight.
“All right come on. You’re already fucking late,” Car-Crash barked, his helpful, strangely soft tone gone in a flash.
The Extractor sped up again as Luke followed him out to his craft and back to the floating office. It breezed through the next job, a ten-hour long stakeout at a rundown apartment complex capped off with Luke leading two cruisers and a helicopter on a chase in a stolen cable van, and lingered on his walk down the Hall after seeing Drudge. He stood in front of Firefly’s office and rolled the situation around in his head.
Here, momentarily beyond the pull of that Bliss light, he could remember clearly the sensation of power he had felt while moving through the Hardworld mem before Car-Crash came and got him. In a world where memory was just as hazy and impermanent as the foundations, it had been an addicting experience of control. He could easily max out his credit and burn through his paycheck buying more.
But, he could also remember the distinct pain of laying in the Bliss den, writhing in one of those booths, with not a single cent to spare, trying to summon the light by will, but only managing to manifest some little candle flame or something.
Defiantly, office Luke decided that it was a fitting fate for Junkie Luke, and tracked down Firefly and bought as much mem as he could, which unfortunately, didn’t actually max him out.
“It takes a bit to secure the mem. This is all we have ready. Unfortunately, they won’t let you put in orders anymore. Come back in a few hours and the queue should have thinned out a bit.”
He nodded at Firefly, exchanged smiles, and got the fuck out. He knew he wouldn’t be coming back until he was dead broke in the Bliss den and Car-Crash was collecting him for his next job, and he realized, just before junkie Luke took the reins, that the latter always conveniently happened after the former.
The extractor picked up the rhythm again, and days flew by like drumbeats in the background music. Luke bounced between office, Hardworlds, and bliss den, stockpiling mem but never touching it. Most days, the Bliss cravings hit him the moment he hit the black, and the CDs stayed in their case, untouched.
Until, one day, he stood there in line for Drudge, trying to keep the Hardworld mem aloft by his own will, like a kid bouncing one of those dollar store silicone balls in the air, who stumbles into an overgrown part of the park and knows it’s just a matter of time.
It had been a fun job. He had been sent on his own to draw the cops on the east side, and he remembered the feeling of flying down the expressway, thinking to himself that if he wanted to, he could just keep driving forever and squeeze everything he’d ever wanted out of this world, and if that failed, he could slip out of that Luke and try on another and another till he got it right.
He wanted that feeling again so fucking bad, but he knew that the moment he stepped out of that office, that other Luke would drag his ass to the Bliss den, and it would be lost forever. He hated that motherfucker. He hated the guys standing in his way in line. He hated Drudge. He hated the whole goddamned swarm of chuckle fucks flying over the ball like ants on a dropped jawbreaker. He wanted so badly to get somewhere…
The extractor was absolutely forbidden from extracting any mem related to his realm, so just for good measure it cut off a little early. It got the gist of Luke’s interaction with Drudge, his defiant maxing out his line of credit on every piece of mem they would sell him, even paying the extra fees to jump ahead in the processing queue, until his CD case was stuffed with them, and he took off into the black, and the extractor shuddered.
But two details about his first trip to his realm were so important to the story, that Luke let Dr. X include them indirectly.
One, after he had found that true isolation and broken down in tears at the overwhelming experience of being alone in a world that responded to his thought, of the total absence of any barrier between mind and reality, and when he had the form of his realm down and was testing his power over it, he placed a schema in it, a powerful iron rule, attempted as a joke at first, that changed the course of his spiritual existence.
While in his realm, he would be free of his desire for Bliss. While in his realm, he could think of the light, of the flying, of the den, without anything but a neutral reflection, and he was free to dive into his Hardworld mem undisturbed. Dr. X tactically included this detail via a wholly constructed scene of Luke standing on a balcony that didn’t exist anywhere in his real Realm and smiling smugly at a glowing blisslight floating a few yards before his face.
The second detail came before the first, and he almost didn’t let Dr.X see it, but decided that on the off chance it could help some other junkie get free, he should give it up.
As he had been flying into the black, seeking out that sensation of isolation Car-Crash had told him to look for, he felt the blisslight floating in the black, somewhere out of sight. But this time, he was sure that it was chasing him.