Jump at the sun and miss

Here, the extractor jumped the track. Its linear path, which it not so much followed as made up as it went along, finally gave way and left it ping-ponging across a starburst web of memories, the gaps between them sanded and smeared by the jackhammer cravings of addiction.

Every hit of Bliss Luke had ever taken had apparently linked themselves somewhere under the oblivious chronological slope the rest of his mind aligned to, like a fungus meshing its mycelium under the topsoil. The extractor took a quick survey of the memories, found them identical enough to be interchangeable and completely devoid of even the smallest filament of latent contextual memory, packaged them all together under a single label, and went back to work forming the narrative.

The high-up watching Luke almost shit bricks. What had seemed at the time to be repeated brushes with enlightenment, each with their own personal message about his present state of existence, proved in the enhanced hindsight of the extractor to have been the same fucking lizard-brained sensation every single time.

Its like being lifted out of the cold and flying slowly towards a bright warm light. The closer you get, the more the heat and energy seep into your skin, your muscles, your bones, then into your mind. First your present thoughts, then what you were thinking moments before, than every thought you ever had, so that your entire existence has been overwritten by approaching the light.

You have been flying towards it forever. You began existence when its light struck the void. Should something come between you and the light and cast a shadow over you, you would not exist. The light is the answer that created the question. The light. The light. The light. There!

And just before you get to it, just as you reach out (with whatever a being made of pure light-wantingness has for hands) and just before you reach the final stage of light meeting not light, of light becoming all, just before the final and pure revelation from which all knowledge and existence sprouts,

You wake up in a fucking bliss den, staring at the ceiling or something, and your body and Spirit are devoid of even the tiniest microsensation of the light and the warmth, so that your time flying towards it dissolves out of memory and becomes like an impression in your mind, like a fossil after the leaf or animal has eroded away.

The extractor picked up the trail again, and the down there Luke looked up at Rory like she had just pulled a chair out from under him.

“That’s it?”

She feigned disappointment, even a little taking offense.

“You didn’t like it?”

“Fuck no. What’s the point of that shit?”

“It’s supposed to give you like, a spiritual experience, like you see yourself—”

“Didn’t I tell you that first day on the rooftop I’m not looking for that shit?”

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“Yes. But I guess I had thought that was just a kind of newbie cynicism.”

“Nah, baby. That’s all me.”

He had stroked her cheek, her thigh, oblivious. The cut was already made. A dead man lumbering forward like an old kung fu movie.

“I don’t need anything to show me how to look at myself. I just want to look at you.”

She smiled with everything but her eyes. Guess she had got fed up with faking those the moment he took that hit.

“We’ll I’ve shown you everything in this world,”

“And I could give a fuck less. Like I told you—”

“I know, I believe you.”

Then the sad look down, the fake self-consciousness.

“But I know you’ll be just as disappointed with me as the rest of it.”

God damn. Girls were the same all over, he thought.

He lifted her chin. He made sweet promises. He spoke of the day on the rooftop and the unwaveringness of his revelation there. She smiled and pulled back, emotionally, with her words, and he chased her with his. They sat there on that little silk mattress between marble pillars with the sheer curtains waving and the candlelight and the whole place like some middle eastern emperor’s opium den as designed for a music video, and the words played out like taped readings for the extractor to collect.

And the up there Luke ignored them, watching only her eyes, hearing their story for the first time, and knowing, disgustedly, that the extractor was picking up on that too.

“I have to go,” she said, after the conversation had spun them around a hundred times like two kids holding hands in a montage.

“Why?” he said, like the impact after a thing had been dropped.

“Well, this wasn’t just a selfless act, showing you all this. I was hoping, I mean I thought, when I saw you, I thought if I found someone knew, I had hoped you would find something worth it all in this place, and that way, I would find it too.”

It was a strange lie, watching Luke thought. She must have known then, as he did now, that she had him dead to rights, and all other words beyond ‘pay up bitch’ were pointless, but she spun this shit out anyway. Was a part of it true? A way to blame him for his own destruction? If you had only found true happiness, I wouldn’t have had to do this.

But the next part made sense.

“I borrowed a lot of money to do it,”

Down there Luke had never thought about money in this world. He had heard it mentioned, even heard her use the word ‘expensive’ a few times when describing the worlds or sims, but thought it was a kind of metaphor. Now, with his mind freshly branded with the imprint of the common Bliss addict, she explained, in expert detail, watching Luke thought, the economics of the Otherworld, the exchange of memory, the value of experience, even the way the Nine worlds had come together and created a common currency, MEM, after the currency wars and the collapse of a gameworld token.

He had found her obsessive interest endearing, like a child learning about the workings of government, hoping to find proof that the sharing is caring style ethics they had learned in kindergarten still applied in the imperceptible upper strata of the world.

Then she explained her debt, and tried to explain the methods loan sharks used to pursue their debtors in this place, using words like seekers, hounds, hardworlders, that he didn’t understand or even fully believe, but the gist of it all shined through.

“I need help.”

On this second go-round with the raw mem, watching Luke realized that she never actually said it, and while he was sitting there waiting for her to ask down there Luke to sell some of himself to save her, the conversation slipped by, and they were climbing back in her ship. The classic cliché con artist ability to make the scam seem like the mark’s idea.

So, as the ship dropped into the Allcity, as he watched her tell another, less broken and less healed Luke all about extractors and selling mem and her gushing gratitude, he found he had only himself to blame.

Even though, he found some consolation, some absolution, in the fact that if she had never shown him the door, he never would have seen it.

But, guilt or no guilt, the down there Luke followed her into that little square of shadow just the same.