Soul satellites and strange sanctuaries

The montage ended abruptly, with down there Luke standing at the counter, and Dr. O staring at Luke like he had tracked mud all over the recently mopped floor.

“All right, go on back,” Dr. O said, defeatedly, like it was his memories getting sold for scrap.

Luke walked down the hall with an odd feeling that something had changed, and his suspicions were confirmed when he found Dr. X standing outside the door of his office, hands in the pockets of his white coat, waiting to say something.

“Sleepy, I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do for you right now.”

“The fuck do you mean? Had enough of my life? Too bad. I got a good one for you this time. I almost fell off—”

“I know,” Dr. X sighed. “Almost fell to your death building that complex out in Hutchins. Tripped on the tarp dumb ass Steven didn’t have secured.”

Luke froze, his mind racing back in memory and getting stuck in the fractures, bounced around by the doubled experiences. Dr. X helped him.

“Luke, you already sold your mem from the Real for today. It’s been less than six hours world time. I’m assuming you’ve been in a Bliss den since then.”

Luke looked at Dr. X’s fake fucking stethoscope for a second, then turned on his heels and stamped out the hallway. This time, the door kicked him out right into the Allcity. He floated and swore and cried. Then he went back to the god damned rooftop he had come from, and laid down.

But this time, the extractor was there. Down there Luke thought about Rory, the way she had been, bright face smiling at him over an impossible sky, and the extractor was there. He thought about their first time in the resort, and the extractor was there. And, he thought about Bliss, or, his brain searched for Bliss, but could only find the memory of it, and so cried out like some wounded animal, begging him to get off the rooftop and go get it, and, of course, the extractor was there, supplementing the hazy flashbacks with its pristine extractions of them, enhancing and editing them in ways no Luke could ever be sure of.

The Luke that lay on the rooftop this time wasn’t the same Luke that had lay there those eons ago. That Luke had been made of the Real, his only thoughts and concerns born from that place, but this Luke was something entirely new, so different that when Luke awoke into the Real, and spent a day without the memory of Bliss, or of her, it didn’t soothe rooftop Luke at all. It only widened the divide between them, and created a new longing.

He wanted to wake up. Really wake up, which meant remembering all this for what it was, a bad dream.

He remembered that someone, somewhere in the Other, had mentioned a group, maybe a club or even a cult, that was obsessed with waking up for good. The discussion, wherever it had been, had devolved into an argument over whether any of them had managed to do it, with Rory taking a typical disinterested neutral position. He tried to remember if anything had been said, by those now obvious dream characters, that would help him get the fuck out of here.

But, like half-finished coffee poured down the sink that, eventually, inescapably, meets with the soiled water in the sewer line, his thoughts returned to Bliss.

That must be what it is. That’s what’ll happen when I finally touch the light. I’ll wake up.

The thought was like an electric current, and he jolted upright. Then, in one of those strange story-like coincidences that seemed to happen in the Other just often enough to make you doubt it all, his phone rang.

He clawed for it, and remembered he didn’t have a phone here. It rang again anyway. After a moment of confusion that blended into a euphoric hope that this really was just a dream and his phone ringing on his dresser in the Real was about to wake him up, he realized it was his communicator.

Somehow, it had the same ring as his cell in the Real. He put two fingers under his right ear and pushed up.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“Hello?”

“Hey Luke, good morning. This is Bob Beefeater.”

Gravelly voice like an unabashed pack-a-dayer. Smooth cadence like a career cold caller, or a seasoned collector. A smile under it all, like “these funny formalities, am I right?”.

“Who?”

“Bob Beefeater. Call me Bobby. Listen,”

“How’d you get this number?” Luke said before he had thought about it. Were there communicator numbers? He had only ever talked to Rory on it. Mr. Beefeater laughed in a way just under mocking, like they were both sharing a chuckle about a fuck up in Luke's past that had long since lost its sting.

“Well Luke, to be honest you could say I got your number from Dr. X. See, when you got enough deets on a guy in this world, you can call him up pretty easy.”

It was right then that Luke realized Bobby fucking Beefeater was after his soul. Probably visualizing it sizzling on a plate that very instant. The only people who had ever taken the time to calmly explain the mechanics of this world to him had been Rory and Dr. X, and after their ravagings, there wasn’t much left for this new guy. Still, he was curious if not flattered, and there wasn’t anyone else to talk to, so,

“Why would you want to?”

Another deep “that’s the Luke I know” laugh, then,

“You sell yourself short, bud. I had this roll of mem come across my desk today that tells me you’re just what I need. A guy who can keep cool with a gun in his face.”

It was one of those moments in life where you knew there was suddenly a big wall behind you, because you had just dropped off of it, down onto, a new path, inescapable, like a marble in a groove. Maybe the subconscious really was more alive and aware in the Other, but somehow Luke knew that instant what he was about to be offered, and a deeper part of him, undetectable even by the extractor, saw what it would do to him.

He asked anyway.

“What line of business are you in, Mr. Beefeater? I’m not big on playing in sims, and my Gunmaze clan wouldn’t appreciate—”

“Fuck all that, Mr. Fischer. I’m in the business of Hardworlding.”

They were all insane. They went into sims that looked and felt like the Real, created by some unknown long-gone maker and killed people who tried to hide in them, so that the victims popped out into the black and got scooped up by dreamworld cops. They had defeated the Demons. They were the Demons. There had never really been any Demons, that’s just how they made money. They had to be insane to go in. They went in just like you and me, and came out insane. They were sadists. They were masochists. They were liars.

That was about the extent of Luke’s knowledge of Hardworlders at that time, mostly gleaned from melodramatic references in sims and long-winded rants and arguments with the other dregs of Otherworld society.

Oh, and they always had a shit ton of money and couldn’t spend it fast enough.

“If this is a scam, I should help a brother out and let you know, I’m tapped out. So—”

“Heh heh, yeah buddy I know. If they start charging rent on that rooftop you’ll have to sulk in the black.”

Luke spun around in ways that would have snapped his spine in the Real, and tried to find Mr. Beefeater lurking in some sniper's nest or something.

“Listen, I’m gonna send some guys by. You can’t miss em. If you’re interested, get in the craft. If not, flip em the bird and we’ll strike your name off the list. I got a lot of candidates to reach out to. Have a good one.”

And with that, Mr. Bobby Beefeater hung up with an old world style receiver click that rang in Luke's ears and clashed with the operatic echoes of the Allcity.

He sat there, watching the crafts and spirits flutter around, and noticed they now had the feel of children who thought their parents could never possibly come home. Something in Mr. Beefeater's voice, even as slimy as it was, as obviously designed to snare and set at ease as it was, had changed him.

A dark form excused itself from the pulsing swarm and grew in his direction. Bulbous and insectlike, his Allcity-primed mind tried to identify what it was going for. A dragonfly? No. A fish, maybe. No. Some kind of sci-fi ship, maybe from Halo…

It stopped at the edge of the roof. A black hawk helicopter with no rotors. Black glossy coat of paint, road sign yellow logo of five arrows stuck in the center of a bullseye, forming a kind of five-pointed star with a circle at the center. The doors slid open and two men swung out onto the rails. They stood there, next to the open door, which framed a beckoningly empty bench seat, and stared at him.

At least he assumed they were staring at him. In addition to their slate grey suits and thin black and yellow striped ties, which slithered in the backdraft from the invisible rotors, they also wore full face masks, more like helmets, one of which looked like shell casings welded together over a skull, and the other which looked like a welders mask with a jack-o-lantern smile cut into it with a plasma torch. They stood as confidently still as anyone he had ever seen in this god damned place. Not an ounce of float between the two of them. Like they were hoarding every bit of gravity for themselves.

Luke started to laugh, but the laugh stopped at the smile stage and stayed there as something slithered up his spine and whispered indecipherable things in his ear. Mr. Beefeater’s voice had incubated in his stomach and was now nourished enough to strike.

And so, recalling Mr. Beefeater's words, Luke raised both middle fingers, high and proud, and fanned them at the Allcity skyline.

Then he hopped into the helicopter and let the sound of the doors slamming shut echo in every chamber of his mind.