Don’t feel my Self, Doc

If you had never been shown it, you never would have seen it. A door-sized hunk of shadow stuck between two half-pillars, gradient curves of beige cement or maybe the kind of skin-toned plastic they used to make PCs out of, like an exhaust port in the tower.

It was even more unexpected because the tower it was stuck in was one of those big glass office buildings that gave the Allcity just enough realish features to make your mind say “city” when your eyeballs gave it the rundown, even though it did usually say it with half a question mark at the end. The tower didn’t even float or rotate or anything, and was topped off by a standard flat roof with a fire escape door. It was unusual only because of its impossible height and the surreal mind-defying things reflected in its sapphire glass. Which made it easy to find. But the port was something else.

You could always tell the new ones, flying around in circles, too afraid to ask, cursing to themselves. The old heads like Luke found it immediately. The trick was to fly to the base of the tower, come in past the mangled art piece in the courtyard, fly down the hedge bush lined shadowed sidewalk that led to the squat parking garage at the back (which the newbies missed entirely, too busy staring at the mirrored face of the tower, waiting for their fix to float out of their own reflection in some flash of light, maybe with a choir screaming in the background) and then fly up the v-shaped wedge cut into the back side of the glass tower, until you found it, waiting between awning and balcony, where a sliding glass door probably would have been in whatever tower in the Real they had based it on.

It didn't look like anything a human being should go into, and that first time, Luke remembered, he had thought she was trying to trap him.

The memories sparkled in his head and he let them die as he floated in front of the slab of shadow, savoring the moment. When he came back out, he would never see this place again.

A familiar sensation nudged his ear canal, and he visualized a hand radio in his head and hit the switch.

“Yeah?”

“Come into the office, please. As soon as possible.” It was Klara.

“Is this a right this second kind of thing?”

“Well, it’s certainly a ‘within the next ten minutes’ kind of thing.”

“Can you give me fifteen?”

After a pause, she came back with a sigh.

“I can give you fifteen. Make them count.”

He killed the connection and wondered at her last words. Did she know? Could she know? Nah. It was just like Philip had said. Her being in your head, made you think she was smarter than she was. Start imagining that she’s clairvoyant. Half of what gave Speakers such pull around here.

He tried to get back to the way he had felt before she had called, that feeling of ‘my life’s gonna change after this’, but could only manage some half-assed echo, so he dove into the shadow headfirst.

The sound came first, a rushing white noise roar, like he was in the center of the earth and it was flash flooding all over the surface, then there was the light, floating softly in the endless black, about a quarter of a mile away, streetlight on a sidewalk in front of a strip mall shop face, the two ends of the building disappearing into darkness on either side.

When he was a few yards from it, gravity took notice of him and pulled him down to the sidewalk. He landed less softly than other places in the Other. The maker wanted you to know who was in charge here, he guessed.

“Look who’s back.”

Old guy, dressed like a hobo, or the nineties TV interpretation of one, sitting next to the door. Like always. Couldn’t be just some beggar, though he did often ask for spare mem. Luke was damn near certain he was shop security. Maybe he used to be one of those Saviors people went on about. Masters of Otherworld combat and control. But how would anyone hold up one of these places? Did they keep the memories in a safe under the floor tiles?

The guy watched Luke push through the door with blue eyes like fake ice that clashed with the rest of his costume. Like he could read Luke’s thoughts. Don’t go asking questions like that, boy. Whatever. After he sold this mem, he’d never see the son of a bitch again. Today he was going to cough up something that should wipe his debt clean.

The door dinged an electronic bell and fluorescents hummed overhead. It was like an old video rental smashed into an arcade and textured like a dreamworld corner store. Spirits stood at shelves and kiosks, their eyes glowing, their “bodies” translucent, previewing mem.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Mr. O was standing at the counter like he had been expecting Luke, just like he always was, the way every junkie who walked through the door probably saw him, though probably not in the same form, like some kind of personalized illusion, like Mr. O was a projection upon one of infinite facets. A small feat for someone who could get people to sell their lives at a discount and beg for the opportunity to do it.

Still, somehow, he was an okay dude.

“Hey Sleepy. How’s it going?”

One day, during the lullaby of small talk that Dr. X wove around the ice bath plunge of the extractor, he had mentioned that everyone in the Other really just wanted one thing. To wake up. Luke had thought about that a second, then said the he really just wanted to go to sleep. Dr. X laughed. The name stuck. Luke was sure everyone had nick names inside Dr.X’s place. Wouldn’t want the outside world to know you were a junkie. Most people even wore a mask, but Luke never had. Hiding seemed like admitting he was doing something wrong. Kind of convenient now. He had just recently found out his junkie spirit persona would become yet another mask, another kind of cover, protecting what he felt in his soul would be his true self.

But to Mr. O, he just said,

“It’s going.”

“What can I do you for?”

“Need to make a drop. Put it towards what I owe.”

“Thought you weren’t allowed to sell dailies.”

A daily was a basic strip of everything the Self had seen in the Real that day. Junkies that lived day to day, selling each new day of Real mem the moment it popped into the Spirit, were a special kind of fucked. Luke had been there just a few months before, but this was different.

“Not a daily. Something bigger. Something with a narrative.”

Mr. O smiled like Luke had just offered to let him hold his baby.

“That sounds nice, Sleepy. We’ll take good care of it. Go back and see Dr. X.”

There was a buzz as Mr. O mimed pressing a button under the counter, and a door appeared in the wall just past the kiosk. Luke waved to Mr. O and stomped off towards it.

“All right, have a good one.”

But Mr. O, whoever he really was, had probably already shifted his focus to one of his other facets, maybe the kindly old woman he used to talk to momma’s boys, or the slick-suited man he used on people who needed to think of the whole thing as a business transaction. Luke had done a lot of asking around about Mr. O, but he shook it all out of his head now. It hadn’t gotten him any closer to any kind of freedom.

The door had a push bar and was heavy and smooth-swinging like a hospital door. The familiarity continued into the hallway. Humming fluorescents and a white noise like the drone of a hospital long past visiting hours, but softened at the edges. Smell of antiseptic something.

The hallway turned at right angles and proceeded, doorless, for a while, then turned finally onto a hall lined with shut doors with darkened window slits and a single glowing door frame at the end of the hall, its door open a palms width.

Luke knew by now that the hallway, like the dark cavern void outside the shop and the hospital gown that had replaced his clothes, was there to separate his mind from the “causal chain of memory” and make him more receptive to the extractor. He knew this but his knowledge was powerless against the effect. When he tried to think of how he got there, the thin line of events wilted under the humming waves of present experience.

But the understanding did take some of the fear out of it. A little voice in the back of his head reminded him,

“Yeah, you’ve seen this before, Hardworlder.”

And so, he stepped into Dr. X’s office with a smile on his face.

“Ah, Mr. Fisher. How are you feeling today?”

He said it in that “I already know the answer, but I’m being polite to a mere mortal like yourself” way that doctors had.

Dr. X looked like Luke’s ideal of a Dr. which was how he knew it was all bullshit. They could have made it a little less obvious they were drawing from your own Spirit to generate these facades, but Luke suspected that might be intentional. The feeling that you weren’t getting the full story heightened your sense that anything could happen, which once again made the extractor run smoother.

Luke went along with it. He wanted to be done with it anyway.

“Got something I want to get off my chest, I guess.”

“A confession, so to speak?” Dr. X did his best, whoever and wherever he was, not to let his money-grubbing salivation seep through the layers of illusion, but Luke could still smell it.

“Just a memory I want to let go of. I think it’ll make a good story.”

Dr. X nodded. “Well, like I always say, handing them over is the best way to get over them.”

He did like to say it. Luke suspected Dr. X had borrowed that phrase from someone who had a much deeper concern for the health of a Spirit than he did, but he could never shake the dead certainty that it was essentially correct, which made his disgust that much worse. Here was a creature that had taken something beautiful, a healing process unique to this world, and given it a bottom line.

His disgust quickly doubled back to remind him of his own role in this process, so he dropped the thought and got up on the cushioned table.

“Try and find the singular moment, that focal point of the memory, and—”

Dr. X went through the spiel every time, and it must have been about a thousand by now. After the tenth time, Luke had thought him some kind of phantom, only able to spit out words that had been spoken to him unknown years ago, but by now he had come around to the understanding that after so many times going under, the words themselves became a kind of trigger, opening his Spirit like a scalpel, allowing the memories to flow out, once Luke had found the right origin.

Conveniently, he was on his back in the memory too. Hard concrete rather than firm medical cushion, bright sky rather than foam tiles. He found it, held it, looped it, till it grew and lived, the process by now like opening a drawer, and he didn’t even have time to be disgusted with how quickly his soul opened itself to this stranger before the ceiling melted away, the “Dr.” and his words dissolved, and the sensation of falling took him,

And he was there again, laying on that rooftop, wondering where in the hell he was, watching the impossible crafts and floating buildings whizz by overhead.