Don’t let go

She had done her best to explain it all to him, but his dream-lust floated over his mind like a cloud, and she would go off on a tangent every other sentence, so by the end of her rambling he had only the vague idea that this was a place beyond his understanding, or at least his attention, and that while the rules of the world made a kind of sense to people like her, his brain might as well have been trying to absorb one of the odd passing crafts through his ear canal.

Looking back through that fractaled vision, another Luke understood that the specifics and rules hadn’t been the point anyway. The message got through loud and clear.

Bro, you're out of your fucking element, and I’m swimming like a fish, so you better hang on tight.

And he did.

“If you could do anything, go anywhere, be anyone, for one day, what would you do?”

She asked him, wide-eyed, after a long pause that signified the death of her final attempt to explain it all, and he had sat there and thought about it a moment.

The answer, he found, was that he didn’t know. He had no goals, no dreams, really, besides a vague hope that one day he would ask himself, “is this all there is?” and something would answer, “no.”

So he told her,

“Ten women at once.”

She blinked at him.

“Is that it?”

“Maybe not, but lets get it out of the way and see if I still have any aspirations afterwards.”

She sighed and stood up straight, and clicked a keyfob that popped out of thin air.

“All right, I’m gonna get you your ten women, then I’m going to show you what this world can really do.”

“What, twenty women?”

But she had ignored him, and a second later, he ignored himself, because a ship shaped like a giant teddy bear, its head and torso two felt-covered orbs, had dropped down on the rooftop with a thud and a squeak. It stood over him and she flew up into a tear that opened in its ass, disappearing inside a cloud of white stuffing. Before Luke could figure out if he had what it took to fly, a tractor beam, rings of green neon accompanied by the classic 60s ‘woo-woo-woo’ sci-fi sound, dropped around him and pulled him inside.

The stuffing had been soft as a cloud. The interior like a spaceship, one orb the cockpit and lounge, and the larger chest orb a kind of combo dance floor observatory.

She had made him watch through a window as the Allworld faded away, slowly, and spoke softly in his ear about makers and archetypes and schema and principalities and other things that he would have to hear a hundred times from people he wasn’t hopelessly in love with before they would stick.

And she had made him promise,

“Never forget that I’m the one that got you off that rooftop and showed you the world.”

He wouldn’t, he had thought. He hadn’t, he snarled to himself, as the extractor chopped on.

The promise came back to him, for the first time, after the ten women, and before the rest of it, as he lay there, spent, and she explained to him that this particular refractory period was a facet of the mind, a vestigial barrier that he could, with time and effort, learn to break through, if he wanted. He turned and faced her, and asked her why she had helped him.

“Because you’re new, fresh,” she sighed. “People who have been in this place a while, get tainted by it. Get locked into the same old ideas, the same old wants and fears. I wanted to see what it was like to be new again. To have so much hope.”

He had reminded her that, while laying on the rooftop, he hadn’t had any hope in this place at all, and she had been the one to drag him off into the black with promises of “whatever, whoever, whenever.”

Or at least the far away Luke thought he had, but the extractor peeled off the truth and threw it at him like an old potato skin while it continued to dig into the solid ground of his past, leaving him flailing his arms and falling over and shit topside.

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The Luke in that big mirror-walled hotel suite, with its hot tub floor of rolling neon foam and floating raft beds and near zero-g, had only asked her why, you poor sweet thing, why did you lose hope? What took it from you?

But she had’nt answered. Left him dangling by his own pity, ensnared in his masculine desire to comfort and protect, pulled him along with the unspoken promise that he would one day open her up and reveal what had been broken inside, the scar that only he could heal.

Then there were two kisses, one in glowing softened memory, and one peeled off and dropped wetly at his feet. An old curling potato peel. A warning ignored.

The extractor sliced through his second session with the ten women and he noticed, numbly that this time there were eleven, only one of whom seemed solid and real when he turned his back.

When they were done, the ten slithered away like faintly aware steam, and she lay there with him, leg thrown over his, ass moving side to side slowly like a thing counting time, asking him, again,

“If you could be anyone, do anything, go anywhere,”

And he still hadn’t known, but had said,

“I’m fine right here. Fuck the rest of it.”

But she had giggled, and pressed on, no really, what do you really want, and he said he wanted to know her name, and her smile had passed away, like he had broken through some barrier and touched her where she was serious and vulnerable, and she had told him,

“Rory,”

And he had said it again like a spell, and that sealed it. If it even needed sealing at that point.

Then she asked him again what he really wanted most in the entire world, then giggling, in any world, and he had said again,

“I have no fucking idea.”

“Well, let's go find out together, ok?”

They had gone to Gunmaze and failed miserably, their single conquest, a two-on-one gunfight in a broken down church where Rory had hummed here comes the bride as they camped in wait, had been celebrated like V day. They had toured the resort worlds, even Titanova with its neon blue “hydrogen” lakes and tropical Genesis with its edible everything and drinkable lazy river. They had been to every corner of the Allclub, from the rolling human waves of the great floor, to the floating secluded velvet rooms. They had sampled every simulated life Rory could find him, from marital bliss to bank heists to indescribable and nearly inhuman experiences.

Here, the extractor stuttured, skipped, and let go, just a bit. It let the granular details slip through its claws like sand, zoomed out and scanned in the frame of days, not seconds, and relied almost purely on its second tongue, that other orifice made only for the absorption of sticky emotion laded and fallible memory, while the more objective data was left to whither.

Luke wondered if it was what you might call an artistic choice, but then quickly changed his mind. First, Dr. X had as much artistic sensibilities as a scalpel, and second, the artistic embellishment was usually left up to the sim makers themselves, Dr. X being what you might call a dealer in raw material.

Nope, it was probably just that some kind of Otherworld copyright law kept him from taking too much mem of what might be considered by his clients, competition, or he didn’t want any memory enticing the future customers to skip out on whatever low-grade Sim Luke’s memories were destined for, and seek out the high-class shit he and Rory had been doing. Better to keep it vague.

Whatever the reason, after the days had flaked off he saw, from the mathematical viewpoint of the extractor, that it hadn’t even been a month before she took him to do Bliss. Wild. Those first few weeks had the weight of years in his memory, a vast expanse he often wished to go back to, that he now realized, with it packaged neatly for resale, would be like trying to land a plane on a postage stamp.

Somewhere in that parcel of memory, toward the end, she had asked him,

“Did you find what you wanted?”

Years later, he had tried to remember what he had told her, but couldn’t. Now, he watched as he said nothing at all to her.

She hadn’t let the silence stay for long.

“Well, do you at least know what you don’t want?”

Her teddy bear ship had produced a cup and saucer, and they were lounging in the frothy tea-scented water within, orbiting Crystalia, that old world resort now left nearly abandoned, like a half-opened geode, where the trillion crystal facets reflected every fantasy its patrons had ever had for your choosing. What he had found most amazing about the place was that it was apparently possible to get a headache without a body.

“To go back in there,” he had said. She hadn’t laughed, only smiled, and asked for the last time,

“What do you want, more than anything? What do you want to get out of boundless paradise?”

He had looked her in the eye, and told her the truth.

“I want you.”

While one Luke was telling the truth, another was finally figuring it out. That had been a fucking lie, and she knew it.

She smiled, shyly, and looked down, and the Luke unblinded by lust and longing saw the disappointment at the edges of her face. Had she been hoping he would say something else, or had she hoped she could believe him?

“If you want me, I have to be sure there’s nothing else in the world you want more than me.”

He had made all kinds of moronic statements and promises, and she had sat there, listening but trying not to hear, smiling with her face and screaming with her eyes, waiting for him to shut the fuck up. Then she said,

“There’s one last thing we have to try, just to be sure.”

“What?” he had said, like a child going along with a bedtime story.

And she had shown him.

The Bliss den had been nestled in the husk of a dead gameworld. Some kind of sex game, judging by all the beds. She had talked about the ruins. About how in this world, where nothing degrades, there were abandoned places a thousand times larger than the earth that some mad dreamer had made just for fun.

“Those are the harmless ones,” one of the patrons had said, with a voice like existence had become for him a kind of itch. “It’s the places designed to trap you that you gotta look out for.”

She had nodded like that was a really good point sir, even though now, Luke could see the contempt. From up here, he could see right through her. If he could have moved, really moved, not just lay there and floated through dead memory, he would have screamed at himself to run.

But he couldn’t, so the Luke from long ago and far away took his first hit of bliss, and that was it.