Full-auto wake up call
They called it being shaded, or sketched out, or if they were really old-school they might call it being cloned. Or drained. When a Spirit has enough of his mem floating out in the mesh that anyone can get a measure of his soul, so to speak, for a price. It meant you ain’t running far. It meant the Hunters could sniff you out of a Hardworld like that. It meant the greenest speaker on the ball could, if given access to the mem and a little guidance, pick you out of the swarm, no problem.
It also meant Constellation and its subsidiaries would label you a very safe hire. And that even the most uninspired escort could craft a box to drop you into the Hardworlds with very little thought required.
Which is why, just a few moments after Luke believed he had walked into his apartment, he was waking up in a Hardworld for the first time in his life.
But it wasn’t any fucking bird noise or phone alarms that brought his Self out of a deep Thursday day-off sleep at 11 in the morning. It was the sound of his apartment door getting kicked in and some pack-a-day-throated piece of shit yelling,
“Rise and shine mother fucker! Training day!”
Then some other guy cackled and a third muttered something. The combination of multiple unfamiliar and adrenaline or drug tremoloed voices breaking into the sanctity of his black out curtain bedroom, and the fact that he had been dreaming about signing up for a murder squad with a guy who’s mask looked like a head-on collision wrapped around his face, made this version of Luke bolt up and reach for his bedside pistol.
Before he could get a good grip on it, the bedroom door flew open and a blast of white light caught him in the face.
“Sup Luke. I’m Backdraft. Today you are—”
Luke got his hand around the pistol and swung it into position.
“Hey!” Backdraft yelled and the light danced. A hand the size of a fucking catchers mitt grabbed Luke’s hand, the gun, and half of his forearm for good measure. Amidst the sudden crushing, just under bone-breaking pressure and the sheer weight of the hand, Luke felt the man's thumb deftly find and reengage the safety.
Despite the disorientation and depersonalization and the shock of everything else, Luke made a mental note to keep a Glock with a loaded chamber next to his bed next time. He had always felt trigger safeties were kinda goofy, but as he felt his Beretta float away from him, he saw the appeal.
“All right, hit the lights,” Backdraft said.
“Where the fuck—” someone else said. There was no overhead light in Luke’s bedroom, but rather than give the B&E guys any tips, he stayed quiet.
“Where’s your light switch bro?” The tone surprised Luke. Friendly. Like they were all in this break-in together.
“Right next to the safe, bro. Meaning non fucking existent.” Luke said as acidly as he could muster considering his morning cotton mouth and still-sleeping throat.
“Fuck it bro!” another, less friendly voice said. The next instant everything was blaring white and it took Luke's mind a bit to realize the guy had ripped the blackout curtains off the wall, rod and all.
“Fuck!” Luke put his hands up to his face.
“All right Luke,” Backdraft’s voice boomed as Luke squeezed his eyes closed. “We’re on a tight fucking schedule, so you’re gonna have to get through a bunch of philosophical paradoxes and crisis of identity and shit really fast.”
“Damn dude, I remember my first day!” the less friendly voice said.
“No one gives a shit! Shut the fuck up!” Backdraft boomed. Luke got the courage to open his eyes enough to blink at the sheets.
“Hey!” Backdraft tapped him on the top of the head with one finger. Reluctantly, he looked up.
Up there Luke had to laugh at the effect. At first, Backdraft’s face was completely unseeable. Not that it wasn’t there, but more that the features refused to be absorbed into memory, like water into oil. Then, after the extractor had caught up, a pixelated effect, like someone who hadn’t signed the form on Cops, popped up over backdrafts face, and then over the faces of his two operators. A few moments later, their faces appeared, though they weren’t really their faces. The extractor had supplied generic features from either Luke's memory or its own pool to protect the Hardworlder's identity. Though the expressions were the same, the faces didn’t match, even against his flimsy memory of that first day.
Memory of the Hardworlds, Luke had learned, was fragile. Like the memory of a dream. If you wrote down your dreams the moment you woke up, you could look back on them, kind of, but if you waited and got up and went about your day, the dream would be gone for good, leaving only a kind of greasy remnant of its emotion behind, staining your day.
The effect was less total with Hardworld mem. You could still remember bits and pieces, the gist you could say, days or even months later. “Yeah, we won that one. No I got dropped out pretty early, I think.” But the only way to truly remember all the details, the kind that you could actually learn from, was to see a Scraper the moment you got back to the Other. But Scrapers were expensive. During his time at Ace Tactical, after every job, Luke had to go see Drudge, a short, fat little guy in a reflective latex lab coat and gloves, whose welder goggles glowed like his eyeballs had been replaced with white-hot ball bearings. Sometimes there was a line, and his memory of the job was so hazy by the time Drudge asked “where did you wake up this morning?” that he was amazed the guy was able to scrape as much detail out as he was.
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The memory of his first day, however, had been one of the first things he had purchased from the Ace Tactical archivists, paid against his future earnings of course, which in his bliss-deprived state had taken an act of unnatural defiance. But after his drop in the Hardworlds, such acts became more familiar to him.
And so, though the faces were changed, and certain identifying remarks were let pass by the extractor, the mem was all there for higher Luke to witness again for the thousandth time.
Somehow, it never really lost its appeal.
“What did you do yesterday?” Backdraft demanded, his brand new Mossberg shockwave prodding Luke’s chin.
“Uh, work.” and it all spilled out in his head. The shitty AC in the van. The dude's house that had smelled like a certain brand of detergent that Luke had, until then, thought had only ever been used by his grandmother. The strange feeling of trying to install door sensors while overcome with nostalgia. Lunch had been shit. The driest fucking chicken sandwich—
“Did you? Or did you fly around some dead husk of a resort world, waiting for some good Samaritan to bum you a Bliss fix?”
The memories clashed. The Lukes wrestled. It wasn’t a fair fight. One was beaten down by years of go-nowhere jobs and a temper that seemed ill-suited to modern living, while the other, weightless and fresh, was in ecstasy, finally free of an addiction to something that couldn’t even exist here, ready to live out his wildest and most childish dreams.
But the other one wasn’t out of the fight yet, and he had a very convincing argument.
“You fucking delirious moron! This shit is gonna get you killed!”
Still, Backdraft was waiting for an answer.
“I flew around the less than well-preserved remnant of a classy establishment, inexplicably bereft of customers, waiting for a gesture of—”
“All right, let's go.” Backdraft disappeared his short shotgun in his jacket like a sleight of hand and shoved Luke into his closet.
“Get fucking dressed and meet us in the living room. And bring this.”
Backdraft slammed Lukes Beretta 92fs on top of the leaning dresser and stomped out of the bedroom, absently finishing what he had started just moments before by yanking the door off the last fragment of hinges and letting it clatter into the hallway wall. The other two followed behind him, tucking their weapons under their jackets, and Luke was left alone, with a choice to make.
His window, now curtainless, opened out onto the street, reminding him that this version of Luke lived on the ground floor. The squeal of bad breaks came in as someone backed out of a spot. He saw sunlight shining on asphalt through the gap between the blinds and the wall. It would be easy to slide open the window, kick out the screen, and run to safety, flag someone down, call the cops, be done with this nightmare.
But, there was no point in doing it naked, he told himself.
He pulled on some jeans, then a white shirt, then a plaid flannel button-up. His pistol winked at him out of the edge of his vision the entire time, saying,
“You could always pick me up and take matters into your own hands! All those drills, all those range days, and now you got three angry fellas in your living room ready to tango! Whadya say? Lets dance!”
In his head, the gun spoke in a high-pitched voice like something out of a forties cartoon, and he imagined it with big black and white eyes on its textured grip and gloved hands sticking out like something from Hanna Barbara.
“I’m fucking losing it,” some Luke thought.
Another Luke thought it over.
They left me in here. They left my gun. They know I can jump out the window. They know I could go in shooting. They know I could call the police.
They’re testing me.
They’re fucking with me.
They’re gonna kill me anyway.
His mind reeled and his two selves screamed at each other, but somehow he was still able to button his shirt and place his Berretta in his hip holster.
He stood there for a moment, hand on his pistol grip, looking across his room at the window. The bed with no frame. The ceiling stained from the smoke. The treaded carpet. Memories oozed out of it, completing the feeling that this was a special kind of prison cell.
He walked down the hall and the other Luke died screaming. It lost its identity. It was suddenly no longer a person, becoming instead a seething churn of emotions at the bottom of his mind.
“About God damned time dude. I was wondering if Car-Crash gave me a paraplegic or some shit,” Backdraft said, smiling. Hearing the name of his dream character out loud banished the last of Luke’s hesitation, at least for the moment and the boiling fear at the bottom of his stomach died to a whisper.
“So what are we—”
“No fucking questions. When you need to know, you will be told. Where’s your phone?”
“Right here.” Luke barely had it out of his pocket before Backdraft snatched it and threw it down the hall. Luke watched it bounce like the last lifeboat passing over the horizon. Backdraft sensed his turmoil.
“Look at me mother fucker.”
Luke did. Backdraft scowled.
“You ready or what?”
Luke got ready to lie, but in an instant realized he didn’t have to. Something whispered to him that this shit was exactly what he had been waiting for his entire life, at the very least since he woke up on that fucking rooftop.
“I was born ready.”
“Fucking a. Lets go.”
Backdraft swung open the front door and pieces of the frame broke off on the carpet. He stepped out into the courtyard with his hand under his jacket and his head and shoulders swiveling like he could launch rockets from his chest if anything tried to step up. One of the other guys followed him out and the last one nudged Luke in the back. They all proceeded in a kind of staggered triangle formation out and under the stairs and back around the unit. On the street, just out of sight of Luke's back window, a Toyota 4Runner idled on the fire lane.
Luke learned later, after being on the other side of an onboarding, that it was standard procedure with a new guy to have his phone tapped, his exits watched, and a guy ready to plug him with a suppressed subsonic shot in the back of the head the moment he went out the window.
Which explained the movement the driver made as they walked up, like leaning over to stash something in the glove box. He caught Luke’s eye, and smiled, and a part of Luke screamed and begged the other to start shooting, but it was too late.
The Spirit was firmly in the driver’s seat.