Dis-orientation
After the Bliss, in the dim light of his alcove, Luke pulled back the shades and blinds and stared out the window, if you could call it that, at the void. He preferred having a room near the edge of the undead resort. Something about being on the inside reminded him of old horror movies, like the art deco crypt could devour him any time he closed his eyes.
Out in the black, frozen white points stood in for stars, adjacent worlds that had once been part of a network of similar resorts, now all dead ruins. A sparse cloud of closer lights, all different colors and sizes, danced in the sky, some breaking away and shooting off into the dark while others vanished suddenly. It wasn’t the romantic movement of spaceships you might see in movies or games, but more like the flight of a scrap of reflected sunlight when you move your watch, or the path of a red dot from a laser pointer right after you’re done messing with the cat.
He thought about the crafts, each with their own pilots and crew, playing out their own tale of bliss addiction, and wondered if she was out there.
The extractor pulled her face from the thick muck of memory, cleaned it off, and overlayed it on the feed, and high up in the bleachers Luke almost threw up.
Down there Luke, however, sighed and took out the cigarette. It looked normal, felt normal, and as he bent it in his hand the paper tore at the bend, exposing the musty- gold shreddings of tobacco. He wondered what would happen If he tore it up. Would he be able to wish it back together? Some objects in the Other were like that. Or would he have to call up Beefeater or Mr. Filepress and ask for another one?
He decided he wasn’t interested enough in any of it to try. The mysteries and paradoxes and just plain old nonsense of the Otherworld were so vast and numerous that you tripped over three of them going out any of the fucking doors, and right now the only question he had was, “Why do I get the feeling that these wannabe dream gangsters have something I want?”
He pulled a lighter, the archetypical silver Zippo, like the one he had been so proud of as a teen, out of his pocket and got the cig going. It tasted like a regular cigarette. In the Real, he had switched to menthols right before switching to a vape for the convenience, but this was a classic red 100 if ever there was one. He inhaled and felt the old familiar chill down his throat and in his lungs, then exhaled and the smoke clouded the window and stuck there.
A sound like a projector starting up before an old film, or the sound as it was depicted in sit coms and cartoons he had seen half a century after the sound itself had ceased to really exist, played from inside his ears and he knew the smoke had gotten inside them. A light beamed out from the burning end of the cigarette like the projector was hidden within and lit up the smoke like a screen.
It was an old-timey radar circle countdown. 3, 2, 1…
“Welcome to the orientation. You will need roughly ten minutes of uninterrupted viewing, so if you are not prepared, please pause the film by extinguishing the cigarette and re-ignite it once you are ready. Please note, you may only do so three times before the file disintegrates.”
It sounded like someone doing an impersonation of a 50’s propaganda narrator or something. Luke found that no matter where he held the cigarette, the light beamed out of it straight to the smokescreen and the feed wasn’t affected, so he leaned back on the matt and got ready for some bullshit.
A musical sting played, like an old alt-rock riff, and big bold text appeared on the screen and slowly came closer.
“ACE TACTICAL”
Luke laughed and rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. Up there Luke laughed too. Hell even Dr. X snickered somewhere unseen.
In small letters below, in a much more professional and less spikey font,
“A Constellation Franchisee”
Some half-saved memory floated out of down there Luke, of another smokey evening in the Bliss den, and someone saying, as they waited for their accounts to clear and delivery to be made,
“Those motherfuckers at Constellation…”
Down there Luke made a mental note, and the video progressed to a title card.
“Orientation 1:A – For New Hardworlders”
An animated orb, like a soap bubble floating in a black void, filled with fluttering lights, some revealing themselves in flashes to be recordings of spirits and places in the Otherworld, appeared on the screen.
“This is the Otherworld,” said the Narrator. “The encapsulation of your present existence. All the worlds and all the Sims and everything your Spirit knows is contained in this illustrious sphere.”
The sphere moved up to the top of the screen, so that half of it was out of frame, and another sphere, or at least the edge of it, moved into frame like a glowing horizon.
“This is the Real. Though you have memory of it, you have never been there. You are wholly a facet of the Otherworld, now and forever.”
The Otherworld exited stage-top and the Real shrunk down a bit.
“You may have often wished, as many do, to return to the Real, to bring your newfound enlightenment back to the place you feel is your home. Of course, this is impossible. But with Hardworlding, you can do something better.”
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The Real shrunk down and became a half orb floating at the bottom of the screen, and beams of color shot out from it, projecting other spheres into the black, like a biology textbook displays a zoom-in on a cell wall.
“Much like the Real you is projected onto the soul of your Spirit every day, the Real is constantly projecting itself. Though we can never touch the Real that we know and love, or hate, we can interact with its projections.”
The Otherworld reappeared on the screen.
“The Otherworld lives, as the saying goes, and thus is a home for living things. Even its objects are alive, speaking, and constantly active. But, should a thing become too rigid, too definite, too real, if a thing should die, one could say, the thing vanishes from the Other completely. But where does it go? Such questions had long confounded the greatest makers, until the solution revealed itself.”
The Otherworld shrunk, and another larger circle came into frame around it. Tiny objects drifted off of the soap bubble and disappeared into the ring with little sparkler effects.
“The Hardworlds exist below the Otherworld in all directions. They are alternate worlds, infinite in number, that at first glance, seem identical to the Real.”
The camera zoomed into the ring at light speed and after a wipe, a hotel room appeared on screen.
“Of course, it's not as if these too-real objects were popping into the Hardworlds. It is more accurate to say that the Hardworlds appeared around the object.”
A cartoon man appeared in the chair, like something out of an old Ovaltine commercial, or, once again, like something out of a parody of those commercials Luke had seen somewhere decades after they had last been aired. The man shrugged his shoulders.
“You may be saying right about now, “Well, that’s all well and good, but I signed up to shoot to kill and pay my bills!”
Here the cartoon man took out an AK and let loose on the hotel room.
“And you’re right! But before you start a war, it’s important to understand your battlefield. And buddy, the Hardworlds are one hell of a battlefield!”
The cartoon man stood up out of his chair with a big, excited smile.
“So how do we get there? Well, the specifics will come later, should you be selected for employment, but for now we’ll stick to the basics.”
The video returned to the Otherworld with the ring of Hardworlds still in frame.
“Remember those too-real objects we talked about? Well, what if I told you that you too could become too heavy to stick around?”
Another wipe, and the cartoon man was now standing on a cloud, a Hanna-Barbera version of the Allcity skyline behind him, attaching 45-pound plates to his feet with ropes.
“That’s right, just a simple technique is all you need to say goodbye to make believe—”
The cartoon man dropped out through the clouds, and the camera panned out to track his descent to the Hardworld ring. He struck it with a pop and vanished.
“And say hello to mayhem!”
To the director’s credit, Luke jumped up off the mat. The video was suddenly a very real Go-Pro feed of a gunman kicking in the door of an apartment and letting loose with his AR. Someone responded with full auto fire that flashed and sparked and the noise rattled Luke’s ears. The footage became a montage of gunfights, chases, even parachute jumps, and boat rides, all set to an early 00s nu metal instrumental.
Up there Luke yelled “Bullshit”, but no one was listening. The narrator continued, now with a more serious tone.
“But before you start your new life as one of the rough riders of the Otherworld, let me tell you about the dangers of Hardworlding, which highlight reels and Sims often overlook.”
There had been something like humanity in his voice, just for a moment, that got Luke’s attention and set his mind on edge.
“Firstly, in the Hardworlds, pain is very real.”
Another montage, without the post-hardcore soundtrack, of guys sobbing over gunshot wounds and being dragged out of car crashes.
“You may think you’ve felt pain as a Spirit, but the muffled dream pain of Gunmaze is nothing compared to the cold hard firings of real nerve endings in a real body. And unlike here in the Other, there’s no easy way out of it.”
On the screen, a man with his leg mangled got sick of waiting for a make-do medic to stick him with morphine, so he drew his pistol and shot himself through the temple.
“Well, besides that. Which brings me to the next warning. In the Hardworlds, you can get stuck for good.”
A CC-TV, streaming from some retail chain, focused on a line of registers.
“In the Otherworld, you can escape just about anything. Simply summon a door or will yourself away, and even the most powerful principalities have trouble keeping you there. But in the Hardworlds, there’s no easy escape, outside of a bullet, and if you’re not careful, this—”
The video feed paused and a red circle appeared around one of the cashiers. The camera zoomed in on his face, and even with the drop in quality, Luke could see the “is this my life?”-ness pouring out of his eyes.
“— could be you. Because if you lose yourself in the Hardworlds, the Hardworlds will find a replacement, and it may not be the yourself that you would prefer to be.”
The cashier, now on some kind of handheld private investigator video recorded from a car parked across the street, shuffled towards an apartment complex. His phone rang, and as he tried to juggle his jacket, keys, (already in his hand, clutched tight like a rosary) and thermos, he dropped the latter and sent cold heavily-creamered coffee flying across the sidewalk and all over his pants and shoes. The thermos made a hollow thunk noise that echoed across the street like a musical sting, cutting off half of his swear.
“And there's only one way to bring someone back once they’ve “dropped out” as the operators call it.”
A guy pulled out a gun right behind him and Luke sat up straight. He hadn’t even noticed the guy walk up, either because he had been too focused on the comedic tragedy playing out on the sidewalk or because everything about the gunman, from his clothes, athletic wear in muted colors, to his walk, a similar “this is really my life, huh?” march as his soon to be victim, had made him blend into the setting like an empty tall boy stuck in the grass.
Now, the low-income-housing-grey-man fired three shots from ten feet away, all of them headshots, which was impressive because the last two were made while the body was mid-fall.
“And it’s never a very pleasant experience, dying when you don’t know what’s on the other side.”
The gunman skipped towards the car as the camera zoomed in on the body, the pants now changing color from more than just coffee.
“And that’s if they can even find you. The Hardworlds, you will learn in the course of your work, have a way of concealing their occupants. They do not want you to leave. They do not want you to be found.”
Suddenly, the narrator appeared onscreen. A tall man in a navy suit with wide shoulders and that World War 2 vet straight off the plane look about him, wearing a featureless mask of smooth matte skin-toned metal like someone had smudged his face off. If an insurance mega-corp had needed a masked man for their commercials, this might have been it.
“To reiterate, should you choose employment as a Hardworlder, you can expect physical and mental anguish beyond anything remotely possible in the Otherworld. But, the danger is not limited to pain, as being trapped forever in these hostile realities is a constant possibility. And, of course, we must consider the time. You can expect to spend hours, days, all together years, if you stay in, waiting in hot cars, attics, trying to stay awake in some god-forsaken sewer, while other spirits are dancing in the Allclub, killing their enemies, and fucking their crushes in Sims.”
He stopped walking through the grey gradient and nodded towards the camera.
“In short, is it really worth it?”