Which me are you again?
“Where the fuck have you been?” Car-Crash’s voice boomed in his ears.
“In my, uh, zone thing. Why—”
“Dumb ass, we can’t reach you in there unless you set up a communicator link.”
“What? I didn’t take the thing out!”
How the fuck would he take the comms out? Go digging in his head for the little liquid mercury bead? He had bigger fish to fry at the time. Like spending days diving through every molecule of mem from the Hardworlds and trying to forget all about Bliss and a bitch.
“Doesn’t matter. Next time you go in, give me a call out. That’ll set up the link.” Car-Crash’s voice softened. “Your loss anyway. Had some choice jobs up for grabs. Now it’s back to siren slutting. You’re on in five.”
It was enough to make Luke want to fly off to the Bliss den that instant. He had been waiting ages for a slot on a guard or assault team, and now he had missed it digging through memories of lesser jobs. The fucking irony!
“Alright. I’ll see you there.”
He hitched a ride with some new hire in the back of Spoke’s craft. The dude gawked out the window and asked Spoke moronic questions the whole god damned way. Luke wondered how long it had been since Sammy had picked him up off that rooftop, and what the fuck did he have to show for it?
As he got ready to jump in the box, he dug through the hardworld mem, or at least the stains and negatives it had left in his mind, and tried to find something to use, something that would help him rock this job like a fucking superstar, but it was like shoveling sand with a pitchfork. It had all seemed so simple when he was digging through it in his Realm. How to shoot, how to drive, how he could have capped the target at least five times before, even on the jobs when he never saw him. But now, standing at the cliff’s edge, all he could do was hope that other Luke on the other side would get something out of it.
In a way, he did. As Hardworld Luke was laying on the ground, cops over him screaming for medical, he saw the extent to which he had missed the mark, could actually feel the vast abysm between him and the level of skill the other side had displayed in slipping the tail and drawing him and the other crash dummies into the police, before the black took everything and he was back in the office.
But to the Luke dropping into the office, it seemed the revelations in his Realm had been simple delusions, that for all his pain and effort, he hadn’t really gotten anywhere, like a cartoon character running in place, bunching up the carpet behind him or some shit. He had momentarily slipped the binds and clinging fabric of his new existence and leaped into some bright high morning sunlight, full of promise and possibility, like a freshly awoken alcoholic who hasn’t gotten around to drinking yet, but he could no more stay up there than a fish could stop and take a nap on a cloud after breaking out of the ocean. The gravity of it all was too much, and it pulled him right back down.
The extractor played out the physics of it again in montage. Luke resumed his three-pronged route, from office, to Dr.X, to bliss den, and back again, the Hardworlds becoming something less than a place he went than a thing he was made vaguely aware of for a few minutes a day, as he was unable to break out of the route, fly to his realm, and take any time remembering what he did there.
Every time he got ready to fly out into the black, or summon the door to his realm, he found himself flying right back to the door that led to his alcove. Some part of his mind, apparently, didn’t want him to kick the habit.
It was enough to make him want to join that cult that handed out little mem packets around the Ball. The one that promised they could help converts find a way to die for good in the Otherworld.
But something had changed. The realm was not completely forgotten. It showed itself in the form of the Luke who inhabited it, that Spirit who didn’t give a shit about Bliss, or Rory, and held encyclopedic knowledge of the operations of a Hardworlder (up to a point), and who made himself known at times when Luke prime found himself anguished over the choice to return to the Bliss den or fly off into the black and try and escape that fucking light for good. Realm-Luke now added his voice to the chorus sounding off in Luke’s head, and though Luke always chose the song of the Bliss-light, which took the form of his Self from the Real, promising it was the only way to wake up for good, Realm Luke did not go completely unheard.
Now that there were so many god damned Lukes, (even the Luke in the office who only existed between the Hardworlds and Drudge saying “All right, see you next time”) that he wondered if he could ever get them all together. Even if he did, they would probably kill each other. Maybe that was the solution. Some of the Lukes had to kill the others for any of them to make it.
Here, Dr. X butted in, and Luke could feel his discomfort, though couldn’t identify the cause of it, through the strange mind to mind connection of the extracting process.
“Might it be more streamlined, better for the narrative overall, if we cut out this period of anguish, and instead move your advancement to the ranks of skilled operator up to immediately after creating your realm? Possibly, include a training montage and a have you emerge determined, and show you landing your first kill immediately after? Of course, we would have to create a stand-in for the realm, but that wouldn’t—"
“You done?” Luke thought. There was a silence, and the extractor started up again, speeding through the days and weeks, looking for the turning point Luke was trying to guide it towards.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
It came in the form of Car-Crash, which looking back from this strange vantage point, upper-Luke realized had more significance than he had then understood. God damn. The guy really had saved his life.
“This is for you. A token of appreciation from Ace Tactical, care of Constellation and its thorough research on asset retention,” Car-Crash said, dryly, as he caught Luke in the Hall between Drudge and the door.
“A fucking bonus, I hope,” Luke said, taking the envelope from Car-Crash. It was a postcard-sized manilla envelope with a bump in the middle. Car-Crash let out a fake sigh.
“Hope springs eternal. Of course, they probably have it bottled, capped off, and sold under a brand name by now.” He clapped Luke on the back in a strange show of affection that reminded Luke he hadn’t had any physical contact outside of getting tackled in the Hardworlds since Rory had disappeared.
“Hang it on your mantle in your Realm,” Car-Crash said over his shoulder as he turned a corner.
Then he was gone, leaving Luke’s section of the hallway dead silent, somehow broken off from the white noise of the rest of the office.
He opened the envelope and dumped it into his hand. A thick cigar labeled “Orion Robusto” rolled into his palm. The inside of the opened manilla flap said “hold cigar here to light” in bright red sharpie. He considered dumping the whole thing in the fucking trash, but another Luke reminded him there might be a check or something inside, so he looked in the envelope first.
Nothing but a strange mesh of bubble wrap. He couldn't even get his hand in it.
Oh. Cheesy mother fuckers.
He held the cigar in his mouth and touched the manilla flap to the end, and sure enough both burst into flame. Luke puffed on it until a cherry glow reflected off the dark glass office faces and unlit fluorescents around him. The envelope burned to ash and left something else behind in his hand.
A tiny metal pin, about the size of a mini post-it note, shaped and styled like a playing card, specifically a six of aces, pinned to a piece of cardstock, which in black, slightly ornate font, said,
In recognition of six months of service with Hardworlder Operations.
BOTTLE
Play the cards you're dealt. Shake the hand of Fate.
Ace Tactical’s motto had never sounded more like bad thrash metal lyrics out of context than they did at that moment. Other words bounced around in his head.
“Put it on your mantle in your realm.”
Yeah. He would do that. If he could ever get there. Maybe he’d put it in his alcove instead. On the windowsill. A constant reminder of everything he had thrown away. Six months—
Jesus fucking Christ. Six fucking months? How?
His most recent drop in the Hardworlds, he had nearly evaded the cops in a stolen Mazda. Zipped towards a parking garage and taken a sharp turn at the alley behind it, flown over a curb and down a sloping grass lot towards another street. The cops had lost him and immediately swarmed the parking garage trying to close it off. He had felt so proud, so powerful, knowing that evading the fuzz was one of the required move sets for a front-line operator, until he heard the chopper in the sky and knew he was fucked.
All that time, all those months, and he couldn’t even lose the cops. The memory faded. He wouldn’t be able to return to it for God knows how long. His last purchased mem was from a job… he didn’t even know how far back. He didn’t know how many Hardworld hours he had in between, what multipliers they would use to rate them, how much his pay would be in that time, or even how long he had been inside.
“That’s cause it’s a dream, dumb ass.”
He tried to believe it, reached out for that other him, hazily outlined in memory of the “Real”, but felt nothing, no connection, no recognition. What did that other him know about bliss? About selling your memories and still coming out in debt?
“I know all about that, mother fucker.”
The extractor had trouble with this kind of inner dialogue, or maybe Dr.X just didn’t see any value in it, so the extraction focused on the mem of Luke swearing at the 6 on the pin, pulled it crystal clear, and drifted by the rest of his thoughts, doing little more than watching them lead down-there Luke back to the Bliss den, rendered his arrival there and the Bliss light in HD, and wiped to the next “scene”, Luke floating around the Craft rack, staring out at the lights, trying desperately to wake himself up, sobbing.
Then, for one beautiful moment, Dr. X and Luke got on the same page. As down-there Luke fell to pieces trying to find the common thread in all the hims and all the lives and all the days that he could grab onto and weave into some kind of lifeline, some way to move forward out of this intricately woven trap he had found himself in, the extractor rendered a montage that, for the first time, Luke thought was perfectly suited for the story.
It was a collage of Lukes, locked in their respective paths, destroying each other’s future. Hardworld Luke couldn’t bear to think of the Otherworld, where addict Luke fiended and seethed, so he couldn’t keep a lock on his Spirit enough to really excel on the job. After the job, office-Luke knew he should go straight to his realm before the Bliss cravings woke up, but he couldn’t shake the fear that he didn’t have enough Hardworld mem stashed away, that he would gather all his experiences and leap and still fail, which for him was worse than anything, so he got snagged up by Bliss addict luke, who dragged him out into the black until he dissolved completely, and then of course, as every other Luke could agree, destroyed everything with his god damned addiction, which for him wasn’t an addiction but just the sensible desire to wake up into the Real world, which was probably similar but not identical to the one inhabited by so-called Real-Luke, and which he would be able to do if all the other Lukes weren’t so obsessed with being a big shot in the Hardworlds or getting enough success to flaunt it in front of Rory, who didn’t even god damned exist, you idiots.
So as all the Lukes pushed and pulled against each other like gears faced the wrong way, down-there Luke sobbed into the black, and absentmindedly reached into his pocket.
He felt the square form of the cardstock, and the words flashed up in memory. Six months of service.
His snarling groan died inches from his face in the pseudo vacuum, but the extractor captured it for eternity. He threw the fucking card overhand toward some black space between a pair of un-stars and watched it fly, spinning, like one of those bullet-discs fired in animes he had watched as a kid.
The shape was what tipped him off. He reached back in his pocket, and felt the cardstock with the metal pin stuck to it. As the spinning thing caught some stray beam of light, it flashed in rainbow. He had thrown one of his god damned CDs.
As down-there Luke took off after it, higher up Luke reflected that the contents of his pockets were intention-activated like everything else in the Other, which meant some part of him had meant to throw the CD. He smiled. He laughed. Down-there Luke cursed and flew, but the CD seemed to accelerate. He was suddenly overcome with the idea that the only way to catch it was to summon something in front of it. The next moment, it all became obvious.
He watched the stars melt away into darkness, waited for that distinctive sensation of absolute isolation to wash over him like cold carbonated water, then brought his realm into view, right in the path of the disc.
The extractor panned away before it did, sweeping towards the black, panning some more, and capturing the disappearing stars, one of which twinkled suspiciously like a Bliss light.