Connect the dots

“That’s not exactly the greatest pitch,” down there Luke thought, but even then, the memory of the apartment complex hitman firing those shots, unexpected, invisible, deadly, was catching fire in his head. How would it feel to walk the streets like that? A ghost, part of reality but also above it, ascended in a world where pain still had its power. To do fantastic things in a fantastic world was one thing, but to do them in the world of highways and fast food, where he had only ever felt as low as the rest of it, if not more so…

After a dramatic pause, the narrator leaned back into a more relaxed posture, and continued.

“Well, that’s it for this video. Give it some thought, and if you decide Hardworlding is right for you, simply light that cigarette butt, take a deep breath and press it into your skin until you hear a beep. Till next time.”

The screen went black and some words appeared in white plain font, which a separate narrator read quickly with a tone of lethal warning.

“Licensed under the Constellation essentials franchise ©2020.”

“The use of the constellation logo and name in this recording does not guarantee current licensing. To verify current standing of this organization within the Constellation franchise program, contact the Constellation registrar at 7000 Constellation drive, Brasston, Allcity, or call your preferred operator and ask for our office.”

“For information on the Hardworlds, instruction, history and more, visit the Hardworlders Union outreach office at—”

Luke’s mind wandered as the ending text vanished and the glowing screen disintegrated in the smoke. The corporate feel of the video reminded him of something. A feeling, often just out of reach of any real introspective investigation, that this world contained vast chasms of power invisible to him, effecting him in ways he could never know.

The feeling had come often when he was alone, or when Rory had been busy with something else, not there to fill his ears with ready explanations and bouncy flirtatious ramblings. It was like walking down a hall and passing a door left ajar, and getting a glimpse, through just a few inches between the jam and the door, of a vast network of pipes and wires that you always knew had to be there but had never really thought about.

Once, as a kid, his truck driver uncle had told him, or more like told his dad and the other adults while he listened out the second-story window of his bedroom, about an underground city he had dropped off at.

“They had everything. Even a fucking Wal-Mart,” he had sworn. In the morning, Luke had asked his dad about it, and after grilling Luke over staying up past midnight on a Sunday, had told him about Cheyenne mountain, and when young Luke had asked “What do they do there?” his dad had said “No one knows” and made vague references to apocalyptic warfare and digging into solid granite.

Of course, fucking Dr. X had the memory brought up in living color, and blended it with the Luke sitting there watching the last of the static melt out of the window frame. And as young Luke sat frozen, filled with terror at the idea there was something out there his dad didn’t have ass whooping knowledge about, coming to terms with a wide world that would be forever beyond his understanding, bliss-den Luke reflected on his own ignorance.

He had always thought of this new world as a kind of projection, just lights and colors reflected on a wall, but now he wasn’t so sure. Now there was a chance it had the same kind of depth as the other one, and the last time he had found the texture of the Otherworld without being prepared for it, he picked up a bliss habit and a broken heart.

Now, he decided he had to know what he was dealing with. Not to mention the fact that if this deep hidden thing took all his money, he wouldn’t be able to buy any bliss.

Or maybe, up there Luke reflected, down there Luke was hoping the hidden thing would have the power to free him.

Reflexively, down there Luke thought of Rory, that font of lore and dreamworld street smarts, and tried to remember if she had said anything about Hardworlding. There was only vague conversation about their sanity, and one scrap of psychoanalysis.

“They feel powerless here, so they run to a world they can push people around in.”

Ironic. Another irony jumped after the first, and he remembered the day, or night, though they had been in the lazy afternoon band of the Allworld, when she had showed him “the feed”, a kind of Otherworld version of the internet. Specifically, she had shown him the Freed, which was the free areas of the feed produced by the Allworld princes for new spirits to learn about the basics of the world, history, and various organizations, in order to help them not get taken advantage of, supposedly.

A final irony. He had skimmed it and got bored quickly. It was partially set up like a web browser, for familiarity’s sake, but you could also make queries by thought alone. He had asked it about Rory, and it gave him some boilerplate about privacy, so he had asked it about waking up, and it had given an overview of belief systems, the only one of which he could remember held that the Real had already happened and all the Spirits of the Other were simply re-living it over one day at a time.

So he had closed the viewport of the pod, which apparently you could climb into for a more immersive surfing experience, and went off to fuck Rory in the underside of some dweebs anime starship reproduction.

Later, Rory had handed him a small ring with two metallic stones set in the band.

“Here, you forgot this.”

Apparently, the feed kiosks on the ball spit out little rings that let you access the feed anywhere. Something about making it easier for newbs to use it on a device that wasn’t just feeding their ‘browsing history’ to a scammer. Even then, as wet behind the ears as he was, his first thought had been,

“Or more like the big boys don’t like competition.”

He had often seen spirits floating around looking at their hands with their eyes lit up, and even Rory had consulted it once or twice, usually to check messages or something, but Luke had shoved the ring in his pocket and forgotten about it, never seeing the need to do deep research about a world that seemed as shallow as shadows on a screen, and never wanting to communicate with anyone besides Rory and the bliss dealer.

Now, he took it out of his right-side pocket, where everything else he ever stashed manifested when he went looking for it, and got “online” by beaming the light right into his eyes.

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It was set up like a nerd from the nineties might imagine a VR internet to be in thirty years. Everything was 3D, and you moved the camera around with a thought. For Luke, the view was like a screen projected a few feet in front of him, the same distance he would sit from the TV while melting his eyes and attention span with Syphon Filter as a kid. Though he felt on the edge of his awareness that he had the option to make it fully subversive, he made it very clear to the feed that he had no interest in any of that and the sensation faded. He had seen people access the Feed and fade out of existence and had no intention of dropping down into an even more convoluted and removed plane of reality, even for a moment.

He started his journey in his “home”, a kind of central hub where you could save portals to your favorite “sites”. His was barren. He was sure there was unnecessarily obtuse terminology for all of it, but he didn’t know any of it and didn’t care to. He was here, begrudgingly, only to learn about two things; Hardworlding and whatever the fuck Constellation was.

He navigated to his Search portal, which for him was the default glowing white circle, and thought “Hardworlders”.

Here, the extractor sped things up, though it didn’t have much of a choice. Even with its ability to coax the brittlest breath of memory from the mind, Luke didn’t have much to say about that metaphysical browser session.

He was presented with videos, speeches, more animated diagrams (the map of the Hardworlds as a dense ring floating around the more gaseous Otherworld popped up a lot, but it wasn’t the only theory), and a bit of history.

There had been a war, somehow, in this hollow-gram world, and people called “demons” or “rebels” or “separatists” did some damage, and others called “saviors” or “the militia” emerged to fight them, bravely, and found that their magic save-a-ho powers worked best when used on a world with a strong “Principality” which Luke found out, finally, was not a guy, but a kind of magic spell the maker of a thing cast into it, and which was constantly active for all time afterward. However, in classically confusing Otherworld fashion, the guy who made it was often called a Prince, but only when discussing the spell or whatever.

Eventually, the bad guys fled to the Hardworlds, which, they discovered, the “Saviors” were powerless to reach, as apparently their big mirror-hulled spaceships didn’t fly to Dallas, and then the Hardworlders came to save the day, and the war, if you could call it that, was ended.

That is, until about ten years later when the “demons” broke out of their “cage”. Here the extractor's montage slowed a bit to focus on Luke’s extreme emotional distress at this discovery.

The idea of a place, somewhere in the black, that you couldn’t get out of, had such a deep effect on Luke, like a barbed seed stuck between brainfolds suddenly calling the shots, that his memory of learning that particular piece of info was a hundred times more vivid than the other memories. He had frantically searched for any info he could on “Nightmare” and “Boxes” and didn’t find anything concrete besides a constant mention of people going into Hardworlds to escape a sentence in them.

Another reason to give Mr. Beefeater a call. If there was anything like a prison in this place, Luke was almost certain to end up at least spending the night in it at some point, and the story of the Saviors and the Demons had a very “winner gets to write the screenplay” feel to it, which had him doubting the supposedly infallible justice of the Otherworld.

Fortunately, for Luke’s agitated attention span and for the future viewers of his Sim or Story or whatever his extracted mem was destined to be, during his panicked research into Nightmare and the so called “Second Demon War” where Hardworlders that went rogue and joined the recently freed demons in doing…something, were rounded up and shut into Nightmare, he found a familiar named mentioned at last.

“Constellation has its roots in the second age of Hardworlding, having been found shortly after the first Demon wars by veterans of that conflict. During the second Demon war, they were instrumental in locating rogue Hardworlders, mustering forces to combat the demons, and of course, bringing the Angels to justice.”

Luke let his mind linger just long enough on that to wonder why some people called the Angels were on the same side as people called the Demons, before following the “link” attached to the word Constellation to a new space filled with information, arranged like, of course, a 3d starfield with some of the stars linked by straight lines of faint light.

The extractor really kicked the montaging into high gear as Luke dug through the files, looking for any sign that Constellation was an Otherworld MLM or something, until he got to the mention of Constellation as “a founding member of the Hardworlders Union.”

They have a Union? Am I going to have to pay dues? Are they going to keep Filepress from making me work weekends?

It turned out the Hardworlders Union wasn’t that kind of a Union.

“While less than 10 percent of all Hardworlding teams are part of the Hardworlders Union, the Union is an important part of the Hardworlder ecosystem, being the exclusive executor of jobs billed by the nine worlds, so called capital jobs—”

From there, the article jumped into a description of the Nine Worlds, and delved into the mechanics of currency exchange and shit so he closed it, satisfied that Constellation was legit, but now worried that they might be too legit. The masked guys had said Filepress was like the company’s HR, and Luke wondered how similar this was going to be to other jobs he had held in the real, write-ups and all, as he jumped back to the search portal and thought “Ace Tactical Hardworlder team.”

For all its power, the Freed seemed to have finally found something it couldn’t ramble on. After searching for a link that didn’t just lead back to the Constellation hub, Luke was rewarded for his effort with one snippet:

“Constellation franchisee Hardworlder team. Low barrier to entry.”

And unlike Constellation, which had a million fucking reviews on various hubs, ranging from suspicious praise to accusations of being “traitors” and “the worst thing to ever happen to the Hardworlds”, Ace Tactical only had one, a five out of five stars with no written review attached.

At the end of it all, as the montage rapped up for higher Luke and lower Luke tossed the ring across the ground, disgusted, the situation was about where it had started, so lower Luke summoned a flame from the end of his finger and lit the butt end of the cigarette.

It glowed red hot, as if some unseen set of lungs was puffing on it steadily, and Luke felt his face break out in sweat. Interesting.

He pressed it to his palm and threw his arms apart like the cigarette had exploded.

“Shit!”

The butt went flying across the room and landed, still glowing, on the carpet a few feet away. Luke looked at his palm. It was just as undamaged as it had been after he had put the one in Filepress’s hallway out on it, but the pain had been even more realistic.

So that’s the trick.

He rolled onto his side and reached his hand across the carpet until he had the glowing cylinder between his fingers, then sat back up and plunged it into his palm.

It hurt. A lot. He buckled over and his entire body broke out in a surprisingly real sweat, but he didn’t let up. He counted to three in his head and reminded himself that there was absolutely no way this thing should be able to hurt him. Strangely, after the first second, his body started to listen. The pain lessened, and by the time the butt end chimed, he felt nothing but the dim idea of burning.

“Have you completed the video?” It was Beefeater again, his voice now coming out of the smoking hole in Luke's palm. He held the hole up to his ear like a phone, and wondered what kind of contortion he would have had to do if he had put it out on his knee or something.

“Uh, yeah. Pretty cool.”

“You still interested?”

“Yeah. Definitely.”

“All right. I'll send the boys around for you in a day or two. Get the paperwork started. You get cold feet, just call our—”

“How much does it pay?”

There was a pause. Luke thought he could hear his skin ashing over in his ear.

“Depends on the job. Should be enough for you to take a run at that glowing Charlie Brown football once a day or so, if that’s what you’re asking. Or maybe you’ll get some sense in your head and save up for a good scraper.”

“Scraper?”

“Hardworlder term. Ask around. I’d bet good money there’s some old heads hanging around one of those dives you like to sulk in who would love to dissuade you from throwing your life away.”

The line went dead, and Luke sat studying his fully healed palm, wondering if a steady stream of income was worth what the Hardworlds had to offer, whatever that was.