Do your dreams follow you?

Luke had been told, by addicts, by the twins, and even by Rory, once, in that warm melted period of time which in memory was like a mushed misshapen cartoon-character ice cream pop, having all the right features but with the borders between them ruined and useless, a period which the extractor had, using the power of narrative and bullshitting, crafted into a distinct chain of events, that memory did not work exactly the same for any two people.

Some had perfect memory, which you would think was an extractor's dream, but really they liked some wiggle room. To bullshit. Others remembered in black and white, or naturally lost all the faces, which made them ideal Hardworld reporters, or remembered only in an informational way, unable to render their memories as images without extreme work from an extractor.

Which also meant that the experience of being extracted was not the same for any two people. Many relived the memories and forgot they were memories at all, experiencing them as vivid present reality. These poor bastards were fodder for the extractor, probably ideal candidates for Nightmare or Paradise, but also had to be watched carefuly by the good Dr. so that they didn’t distort the memory by playing through it differently the second time around.

For Luke, it was third person. He could sit, perched above, and watch himself run through the memories below, which had a few interesting consequences. First, he could, like a director, yell cut and stop the extractor dead in its tracks. He could also communicate with Dr. X while the mem was playing, giving hard lines on what to pull and what to leave the hell alone. And, of course, it meant he could see himself, which for Luke was excruciating. All throughout the extraction he tried to avoid it. Theres nothing so painful as watching yourself suffer for your own stupidity.

The experience reminded him of something he had heard, something Rory or an addict or one of the twins had said while discussing a brutal session with an extractor, a fragment of a song lyric.

“When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how should I begin, to spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?”

There was a story around it, he remembered. A Spirit, seated in the extractor, selling his last mem for a hit of Bliss, had said it to the Operator of the extractor, and like a magic spell it had reversed the process, and the addict was able to draw out all the memories of the good Dr., and thus not only became wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, but also took the place of the Dr, so that now the real one was bopping around some Bliss den, telling his story to anyone who could catch him between hits.

Yeah, it was definitely an addict that had told him that shit. Still, it stuck with him, and now as the extractor turned into the final lap, up there Luke wondered how his story would be received. Would they get it? Would they take it and run? Would it help them burn the whole fucking shit show down? And how should he presume?

Up there Luke snapped back to it, knowing that they were getting to the heart of it all, the final turning point, and he wanted that lab coat wearing son of a bitch to get it right.

Down there Luke dropped into the Feed and searched “dreamworlds” and found an unexpectedly straightforward answer. Most info on Hardworlding, especially the play-by-play speeches narrating a job after the fact, smacked of embellished bullshit or misrepresentations of third-hand hearsay. But the Dreamworlds were basically concrete knowledge, their definition simple and succinct.

“The dreams of the self, entered in a Lucid state. When the Hardworlder puts enough mental space between the waking world that came before, and the current location in the dreamworlds, return to the Otherworld is possible.”

Of course there were a ton of theories and arguments over what you could do in the dreamworlds, what “mental distance” meant, what the ramifications of a world gestated form a separate identity were, but for Luke, the info was straightforward. Like an engineer solving an equation while others argued over whether or not gravity was magic, he studied just enough for it to click in his mind, then he left the land of layman, and got to work.

The first step was priming his Self as a lucid dreamer, which took some finagling. Since anything spiritual or even the least bit introspective was naturally foreign and incompatible with the Lukes in the Real and the Hardworlds, he had to get creative.

Up there Luke observed, with a warm feeling of accomplishment, that the process of priming a Self, which now felt as natural as loading a gun, had at first felt like trying to pull one end of the bedsheet around while lying on the other. The Self was malleable up to a point, but once it got to doing things that Real Luke had never even thought to experience, it moved like something fossilized, cracking and groaning as Luke twisted it beyond its form.

Most of the time, it was a girlfriend who got him into it. Handing him a copy of Stephen Laberge’s book, texting him links to Reddit posts and old internet forums. And usually, post break up, the Self had been determined to master it just to spite her, but compelled to push forward out of amazement at what he had found.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

The first time he tried to sleep himself back to the Other, he never gained lucidity, and the dreams throttled him around for an hour, nearly dropping him out completely, until a bright alarm tone rang through the dream and a voice commanded him to wake up and eat a bullet. This had the opposite effect, as it immediately made him lucid. His excitement would have woken him up, had he not taken a near-lethal dose of Propofol on top of a brutal adrenal dump. He moved through the dreamworlds, through fragmented pieces of the days driving routes and brightened versions of childhood video games, and got nowhere.

In the end, Flashlight had to come get him. A big guy in a fantasy-style hooded cloak, face hidden, holding a blazing candle in one of those glass and metal boxes. Luke had half expected him to say “who goes there?”, but he had only said “All right man, stay on my ass. Lets go,” in a midwestern drone. And then, as they were halfway into their journey, “Look at that shit,” pointing backward. Luke had turned back to see the subway tunnels they had come through had disappeared and they were now in some kind of catacomb. Finally, Flashlight pulled an old looney toon lever in the ground and Luke shot down through a trap door and out into the office.

“You wanna take the dreamworlds out, there’s some training material at the kiosks,” Car-Crash had said harshly, sitting on Tenpound’s desk, while the big guy looked on, uninterested posture under a mutilated gas mask.

“But next time Flashlight has to come drag you out, his rate is coming out of your check. I vouched for your promotion. Don’t fuck me.”

He had stomped out of the office, leaving Tenpound to grumble about Luke’s decision on the job to take a hostage so soon. Halfway through the grilling, Car-Crash came on the communicator, all the acid gone from his voice.

“Just a heads up, that material at the kiosks should be avoided like the plague, unless you want your Dreamworlds to have an Ace Tactical flair for the rest of your life.”

And that’s how it was the rest of the time Luke spent at Ace. Car-Crash became his secret confidant, his guide through the corporate quagmire, his teacher. A role that suited him a million times better than supervisor ever did.

The next time Luke slipped into the dreamworlds, which wasn’t for a few jobs as he had a bad habit of ignoring police orders to drop weapons and show hands, he took his time exploring them, shaping them, studying them, before ever trying to find the way out. Finally, he dropped out through a ventilation shaft right into the office.

It had seemed like an unimportant, almost arbitrary ability, and he realized after he did it that half the reason he had been so hell-bent on figuring it out was that Ace Tactical seemed to want to discourage him from trying, but when he got back to his realm and reviewed the freshly scraped mem, he saw there was a greater purpose to utilizing the dreamworlds.

The memory was far more vivid, far more detailed, than it had been when he dropped out with a bullet. There were even little contextual details he had never thought to look for, like what the Self had been thinking, or more importantly, what the Spirit had been thinking. For the first time, he could actually get into his headspace while Hardworlding, find the flaws in his thinking, see the snares and blocks thrown up by the Self, and his training theories came that much closer to actual practice.

Higher up Luke stressed to Dr. X, that this was the crux of his story, the importance of memory, the value of one’s own experiences, that self-reflection, which was so alien to Luke anyway, was unfortunately the only path out of spiritual enslavement.

Dr. X kinda sighed, kinda rolled his eyes, in tone, and warned Luke against laying it on too thick, and asked Luke, politelyish, if they were coming near the end any time soon.

Luke indicated, with a flash of memory, the kind the brain does a million times a day, linking events separated by years, instantly, where the final pit stops and the ultimate destination of the story lay in relation to current down there Luke happenings. It was too quick for the extractor, but Dr. X got the ball rolling again, in the form of montage. This time Luke had to hand it to him. It was quite inspiring.

Luke was given the greenest new hires in the game. His first job played out by the extractor as a compilation of apartment doors kicked in or unlocked with rakes or pry bars, bedrooms entered with guns drawn, panic and pleading, and even a few scared shitless room-mates, and finally, a question.

“What did you do yesterday?”

When he had his four-headed-knot of scared, staring, stammering newbies loaded up in the 2004 Chevy Suburban, the first thing Luke did was take the head rest off his seat and lean it back. His driver was a guy named Slipdisk, or Slip, with three kills in his five-year career, but Luke rarely saw him. Luke spent the entire ride twisted around in the passenger seat, speaking to the troops.

He told them things he had wished someone had told him his first day. He grilled them until they admitted all the new blood assumptions Luke knew they had stuck in their heads because he had had the same assumptions himself, then shook them until they had all fallen out, then he slowly, deliberately, repeatedly, placed the proper viewpoints in their head. He knew they would fall out at the first shot, but it didn’t matter. He’d put them right back in the next job until they fused to the brain matter.

And he gave them challenges.

“If you can evade the cops, on foot, for ten minutes, Ill give you a quarter of my pay.”

“Get a headshot and Ill buy you a day pass to Silktopia”

He found what they were good at and made them do something else. He even made them take turns driving, to Slip’s very vocal disapproval. He studied their every move in his Realm, even bought their first days and showed them how to watch it.

He poured every scrap of brain power or Spirit power or whatever it was into molding them into an independent strike team. And every day the order was the same.

“Stir some shit up on the east side.”

“We need the birds distracted. Get north of the belt and make some noise.”

And then, another collage, this time of the gory ends of police chases and shootouts, his hard work blasted with 9mm on some street, in some lot, dying covered in tempered auto glass or bleeding out next to a day-old crumpled McDonalds cup.

Until one day, when his team lay dying in four separate places, and Slip had already shed his mortal coil with an overdose of Fet, Luke slipped the cops with a radio in ear and set out to watch the real professionals work.

It was an eye-opener, in the most gut-wrenching way.