Does the xtractor see the mirror clearly?

A familiar reflection. A familiar refraction. Like standing between two mirrors. The extractor recorded his suspicions, his anguish, his limerence and lust, and then, when Rory led him, hand in hand, like a couple facing the horror of some terminal illness he had just been diagnosed with, down that hall to Dr. X, Luke wondered if the extractor extracting itself would cause some kind of explosion, but he was disappointed.

The down-there Luke lay on the table, and became an up-there Luke as Dr. X guided him through the process for the first time. The extractor, most high Luke noticed, focused on peeling off his feelings and fears, and blurred everything else, from the waiting room to even the good Dr.’s voice, so that it became a story of a scared man, with no risk of being anything close to an expose on the predatory inclinations of mem extractors.

Not that tippy top Luke gave a shit. If he really wanted revenge on Dr. X, he’d just drag him into a Hardworld and burn his face off.

Suddenly, both higher-up Lukes were watching from the point of view of a third, who’s entire world was warm sunlight glowing through plastic blinds on solid forms of pure color, and a voice that wove through the world and was the foundation of it.

Both higher Lukes began to sob, one a deep body rocking moaning fit that was twice as devastating because of its unexpectedness, the shock of seeing someone you had forgotten was once your world and who’s absence from the last decades of your existence only intensified their importance, and the other a sob like deep quiet breathing, like accepting the death of someone or something or some time that you had held out hope might maybe possibly would somehow return.

Supreme Luke noticed, through subdued tears, that the reflected extractor had gotten a little too excited and gone searching associated memory for flashes of a funeral. Sorry bro, no such luck. She’s still alive and well. Talk to her every other week and she never hears a word I say.

However, down their Luke had been too preoccupied with the crying and shit to notice, so superior extractor trimmed any evidence of its past self overstepping out of the mem, and moved on.

Afterward, she had held him, whispered that his memories would now be used to help some hypothetical poor orphan feel what it was like to have a mother, and then whisked him off to some café floating above the pastel suburb zone of the Allworld.

He asked her if that settled it, and she laughed and said almost, but not to worry about it, that it would be enough to keep the creditors off her back, and that money in this world had never really made her happy, and then she kissed him, and they had flown off to Gunmaze, her final barb firmly set.

As the extractor peeled away the days, Luke saw that his memory was terrible at judging time, but in this case it was like an inverse of the distortion that had surrounded their first period of honeymoon bliss.

It had been almost an entire month, the extractor tallying his touches with the Real like a cold machine, though in memory it seemed much shorter, the days and conversations squeezed together, ultimately just a bare ragged portion of his Spirits time between two doses of Bliss.

In another paradox of memory, to down there Luke, the days dragged on like years. They flew around the ball, acted as extras in Sims, spent the cash on drinks in the Allclub that tasted faint as carbonated water to Luke, and tested the limits of sex in a world without flesh.

But, of course, something was missing. Down there Luke got agitated. Rory tried not to notice, or pretended to try not to notice, then got agitated or pretended to get agitated, then they had their first fight, then they made up like two pendulums pulled apart crashing together again, and then they started it all over again.

Somewhere in the middle of it, top-shelf Luke had an epiphany. An epiphany that, like all great realizations, it seemed, felt less like a relief or an ah-ha and more like hearing the click of a landmine under your feet.

He saw the Luke down there trying to find the words to explain to her that something was missing, something he couldn’t name, and no I don’t know what it is or I would tell you, and her saying well then why are you taking it out on me, and him saying he wasn’t, but yelling as he said it, kind of defeating the point, and then another fight, and top shelf Luke realized that, while down there Luke was slowly coming to the realization that what was missing looked like a glowing light in the dark that you flew towards forever, what was really missing was no such thing.

What was missing was a warm light hiding behind the dark black irises of her eyes. What was missing was her love. What she was hiding from him was herself. And when, as the Luke down there sobbed and screamed and left and came back and apologized and doubled down, she hid further in the deep recesses of her mind, lest her mark accidentally stumble upon it, down there Luke decided to go after the warm light that came from little crystals handed out in twilight colored dens at the edges of the Otherworld.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

About the thousandth time she asked ‘what is it?’, which had really been, the extractor told him dryly, only the third time, Luke told her he couldn’t get that Bliss shit out of his head, and she had only said, ‘well, lets go and make our visit then,’ and made him feel, somehow, on the way there that this was his fault, and she was sacrificing so much for his desires, mostly by sitting still as a corpse on the way there, and not even looking at him as he took the crystal in his hand.

Or, was it something else, her frowning like a kid lying in bed watching their parent fawn over them just before leaving for work, knowing the cough was fake and they would soon be on the Playstation. Was there a feeling of guilt in it? Any at all?

Before he could figure it out, she was gone, and after a quick flash of a light, the extractor's chosen metaphor for Bliss, down there Luke ‘awoke’, and staring up at the strange projections the proprietors of the Bliss den had thought should play on the roof for some reason, like clips of vacations played with the lens at the wrong angle and covered in dust, he said out loud,

“You might as well have left me on that fucking roof, all the difference it made,”

But when he lifted his head, he found his corner of the den empty, and in her absence and the coming down feeling of failing again to catch the light, he felt about the worst pain possible in a world made of dreams and wishes.

Then came the guilt, which was somehow worse.

While down there Luke anguished and paced, then screamed into a communicator he had never had to do more than whisper in while they were temporarily separated in the Allclub, then got no answer and started to sob, up there Luke let go of his own memory, and the extractor really kicked it into overdrive.

He had learned, or been told at some point, that the extractor’s first job was to sever the memory from your working, active mind, and then talk only to the subconscious, who had less hangups about spilling your deepest secrets out into the void, and in fact often enjoyed it, which Luke had some sympathy for. An entity that spent its entire existence trying to communicate via symbols and dreams and impulses to some dumb creature comprised mostly of denial that it was doomed to live beneath, could now speak freely of its wants and memories and all that shit to something that listened and even asked questions. Must make the shadow Self feel like a neglected wife getting all the attention online.

So, as up there Luke looked away in disgust, the extractor slid over the days of agony in record time, till it hit a bump.

Down there Luke, having gotten it into his head that her reason for abandoning him was the massive debt she was running from, had returned to the little square of shadow, and Dr. X, and the extractor was painstakingly censoring the faces and other particulars.

This time, Luke had sold some of his exceptionally active teenage years. An entire half-decade of easy sex and drugs and fights and even a brief stint as the school dealer, till all the texts and phone calls made him feel more like a secretary than Scarface.

Another hiccup, a pause and a refraction, like the extractor had run over a landmine. The memories poured out of somewhere, one of the two Lukes or maybe even a third, and the extractor tried to hack through them like a Vietnam vet in the jungle and get to the relevant facts.

First, that down there Luke had only sold about a month's worth of those memories, and second, that he had been advised by the kind Dr. X, that spending too much time at once in the extractor could have disastrous consequences for the Spirit.

“You spend too much time in dead memories, the mind makes them the world, and you cant get out.”

The voice in the extracted mem was hollow, monotone, compared to the easy cadence echoing in up there Luke’s head, and said more like an absolute warning than the “hey man, it’s your funeral,” tone up there Luke actually remembered. Not to mention the fact that he was pretty sure he had actually sold all of freshman year that sitting and spent half the day in some kind of recovery room in the back of Dr. X’s cave, where high school Luke and present-day Luke argued and cried and the Spirit went back and forth between them, unable to settle on a single POV.

But, up there Luke let the edits pass without a word, and down there the story picked up again, essentially unchanged, with Luke putting the word out to every club, ruin, bliss den, and odd shopkeeper they had visited together during the good times, that he had a lot of money with Rory’s name on it.

The extractor revealed, like a cold diagnosis, that she had waited exactly three days to come find him, and despite the fact that, in his panicked addict brained frenzy, he had forgotten to leave a location or time for her to meet him, she had picked him out of the pulsing masses of the Allclub and motioned towards an elevator.

Time slowed, memory bloomed, and Luke could imagine the white noise hum at the bottom of it all rising into the roar of an engine pushed to its limits as the extractor kicked into high gear.

She stood in the softened light of her craft, this time furnished like an art deco office building, arms crossed, cold eyes watching, waiting, as he tried to explain what he had done and how it had all been for her.

It took him a moment to notice the change, which seemed like magic to Luke and Luke. Her eyes were black. Her cheeks less rosy, less pronounced, lips not as full, her hair a soft brown pulled back in a bun. Even her tits were smaller.

And when she spoke, finally, there was a rough gravellyness to it that threw out the clear sing-songy bell toned voice that shined laser-like in his memory, and from then on, when he fantasized about her, ran her through all those scenarios that he used to paper over the wounds, it was the only voice he could ever hear, the first one lost like a dream to an alarm.

It was obvious, later, that she really had no choice. Her pixie dreamgirl schtick could work while Luke was unsure of the reality of it all, but after Bliss, even the most rational Spirits find it near impossible to believe the Other is a dream they could ever wake up from. Her old visage would have stuck out, been ridiculous, maybe even loosened her hold on him.

So there she was, somewhat closer to the Real her, maybe, telling him,

“I don’t want it.”