Your problems are illusions and the solutions are simple

“They’re anyone’s worlds.”

It was a lifechanging statement. Every other person he had ever heard talk about the Hardworlds had made them sound like some mystical place that required multiple levels of enlightenment just to earn the right to step inside, which made Luke’s box driven excursions feel like a perversion or at least a sacrilege, and everyone else in the biz seemed to feel exactly the same way.

You would think, looking back, that all pretense of wonder and majesty regarding the Hardworlds would have died away the moment he woke up in his sweaty boxers or felt the headache from lack of caffeine or waited at a light in a fast-food smelling SUV with a bunch of unemployed wastoids carrying hand me down guns, but it hadn’t. Quite the opposite. Coming from the Other, where even the piss streams sparkled, all that mundane dimness had felt like getting closer to God. In a world where everything sung with divine energy, the Hardworlds were the ultimate holy pilgrimage.

But Philip seemed like the type of guy to ask God, if given the chance, why his dumb ass invented heartburn, and though later Luke would find that he had his own kind of religious seriousness regarding the Hardworlds, it wasn’t the same kind as everyone elses, and at the time of their first meeting, just the fact that he lacked the protective reverie of every Hardworlder he had ever met was enough to convince Luke he was completely a-spiritual.

But despite his reframing of the Hardworlds as open to anyone, he had simultaneously posited that Luke might still be too lost to find them.

“See you in the Hardworlds, or not at all.”

His challenge to Luke, drop in without a box, seemed to, in some way, conform the sanctimonious view of the Hardworlds, but his tone and mannerisms said something else. Dropping in without a box was the lowest of tasks, and if Luke couldn’t even do that, then there was no use wasting any time with him.

Luke got the idea, from all this, that Philip wasn’t so much bringing the Hardworlds down to the level of the unholy as he was looking at their facets from the point of view of the ascended. Getting in was the easy part. Anyone could do that. Then what, Luke wondered, did he consider the hard part?

Luke went to his realm and created a door in the basement, telling himself when he stepped through it, he would wake up in some shitty apartment, just like he did every job. He turned the knob, opened the door, and stepped into darkness. After floating for a few seconds, his Realm rolled back into view. He had dropped out the bottom of it.

Immediately, he understood what had gone wrong, an unusual clarity of thought. Like a dream, his faintest of doubts had soiled his efforts, directing the outcome. His realm was in the heart of pure void, where every thought burst into being with a bit of focus, and every fear, if left un squashed, could be realized. Half of his time making the big floating house had been spent stabilizing it, as Car-Crash had called it, meaning visualizing that within the walls, change was a slow process and subject to multiple confirmations.

Here with no box to strong hand his mind into believing, it would take nothing less than pure untainted belief to get him through the door and into the Hardworlds.

The extractor reduced his struggle to a montage, and for the first time he found it offensive. When displayed as a few seconds of doors opening into the void, or back into his Realm, now with a new bedroom, or onto some random suburban sliver of the Allworld, the hours lost most of their edge, and here, above all other times, he wanted the pain to be precisely and fully communicated.

Dr. X reminded him that with these things you had to strike a balance, and so reluctantly, and with a creeping doubt about the whole thing rising in the back of his mind, Luke led him to the important part.

Down there Luke stepped through a final door, right into a bliss den.

Cue the screaming, the crying, the swearing, and the feeble attempt at physical destruction, throwing the little ottoman or the candle stand into the wall and all that, which in a world of blurred physics and a place where the objects always kept their form, was less than satisfying. Even the bean bag returned swiftly to its sagging shape after he kicked it.

And there, waiting on the square end table of faux black marble and bronze, were two hits of Bliss, little shining crystal sticks, either glowing from a light frozen inside them, or reflecting an unseen sun, the great debate of all Bliss moths.

And, a little note.

“Luke, thanks for your patronage. Please accept—”

And so on. His long absence before this most recent binge must have spooked them. He wondered, smiling coldly, what percentage of their monthly revenue he had been at his height.

Holding the doses, letting them roll in his hands and clink together, he thought of what they had said about it.

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“You’re not addicted! You’re just bored!”

“It’s not super heroin.”

Yet here he was, at the end of his effort, at the bottom of his life, holding two dim lights like they were revolver and single bullet, trying to get up the nerve.

“—the happiest day of my life…”

He squeezed them both. One vanished and he was back in that void, falling, as the light burst into being just ahead.

He chased it, it fled, it sang to him about its power to wake him to his real life, where everything made sense and Rory was waiting in bed beside him, morning breath and all, to hear him try and describe the dream he had where she was an astral realm con artist and he shot people for a living. Maybe she would say something like, “that’s so you,” or something, but they would smile and hold each other, and the flesh would be solid and the gravity certain and everything still and quiet with maybe some traffic noise but no strange rushing hum of the Allworld and all memory of this fucking nightmare would dissolve into dreamscraps and fall out of his mind for good.

The light got closer, and he could just about see that other him in bed with her, and he felt the pull, that final gravity that always came with waking up, like the dream was leaning to one side then turning upside down, trying to dump him out like the last corn flake into the waking world below.

But at the last second his mind stopped dead still, momentarily immune to the tug, and spoke to him with memories.

Another Luke drove down the highway, sirens wailing all around, empty beretta in his hand, fresh from his first kill, feeling at the center of a liquid reality, feeling that whatever he willed, could be.

That Luke wouldn’t mesh with the waking sleeper who spoke of dreams to an altered Rory, and instead stood in front of that vision of waking like a guy getting up in the middle of a movie and blocking the screen. He looked at Luke and smiled, and somewhere in Luke’s mind a door opened and all the other memories swirled inside.

“They’re anyone’s worlds.”

“And buddy, the Hardworlds are one hell of a battlefield!”

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

He smiled. He laughed. He reached out and touched the light.

It felt like a hot bulb that had been left on all night. He crushed it in his hand and felt the glass and filament crumble, and woke up.

The extractor jumped the tracks and sailed through the darkness. The mem of the Hardworld meeting with Philip was unavailable to the searchlight spirit of Dr. X, though it did twinkle in the back of Lukes mind, uncannily clear, as Philip’s own personal Scraper had done excellent work, neither his first nor last gift to Luke.

While the extractor tried to pick up the thread, Luke guided it to his own revelation on bliss, the main scrap of mana around which the story was wrapped, like pastry dough around a pill.

In the Otherworld, the once an addict always an addict rule didn’t apply. Bliss, it seemed, had primarily been a trick of his mind, convincing him the light lead somewhere and letting him fill in the blanks, and once he showed himself where it could really lead, linked that formless burning desire to something real and current, the trick was foiled. He could never again believe the light would wake him up to some perfect life.

Against the shotgun blast of his escape from Bliss and subsequent revelation, the last events in the story felt like things leaking out of something torn, dead dumb moments succumbing to gravity.

Upon his tending resignation with AT, a representative from the Constellation franchise outreach office had contacted him and presented what amounted to a fairly generous offer designed to keep him in the fold. He would be given a position in the main assault squad on a new team comprised mostly of his co-conspirators from the A.T. coup. It would be lower run jobs at first, and they would be responsible for drumming up most of the business themselves, but it was a ladder rung to a legitimate advancement in the organization.

His only real temptation was brief, and came in the form of a daydream that he would one day find himself flush with Constellation power and prestige, and thus able to track down Rory and end her campaign of destruction for good, maybe even by putting his own contract on her head once she slipped away to the Hardworlds trying to evade Savior inquisition.

It was a short-lived fantasy. He had no idea what it took to get the Saviors to go after someone, and he doubted he would have the stomach to see it to the end anyway, and most importantly, he had another future ahead of him. Another brighter star to follow.

At the end of the exit interview, he was informed that his line of credit had been terminated. Almost immediately after he left the office for the last time, Dr. O called him up.

“Hey Sleepy, I’m sure you heard, but you’re credits been revoked. Come see me when you can and we can talk about your balance.”

Balance was putting it lightly. The hole was so God damned big, he spent his entire time with ST56 paying it down. When Philip called him into his vacant strip mall office in the Hardworlds and told him that the team was splitting up, with Philip and Sam joining some mysterious veteran’s new team and Domino and Cat going their own way elsewhere, and that Luke had an open invitation to follow Philip on his new endeavor, Luke still had half of the balance to pay off. And there was a new hitch.

They new boss had a strict “no extraction” rule. Luke wouldn’t be able to go under with Dr. X even to sell his Real mem. The guy didn’t trust them. Said you could never really give access to a piece of your mem without giving up all of it. Luke would have to pay the balance off with straight cash.

So, right before he signed on the dotted line and became an official member of Liquid Light, he paid Dr. X a final visit, and sold him something he was sure would wipe the slate clean. A story of loss and redemption, of addiction and sobriety, of love and betrayal.

When it was all said and done, and he was sitting once again in that archetypical Dr.’s office, he expected that it was all neatly resolved, that the value of his confession would dissolve neatly into his debt, destroying both and leaving him a free man, never to see that god damned place again, a perfect endcap to the story.

But when Dr. X showed him the valuation from Reminiscence (the third party pricer) he was stuck between laughing and screaming.

The book value of his extracted mem only covered half of his outstanding balance.

There was shouting. There was threatening to take it elsewhere, then there was pacifying and reminding of the deposit and the first option section of his debt contract, and finally there was a handshake and an exit into the swirling chaos of the Allworld.

The rest of his fucking balance was now payable only in cash. It would be a while before he was really, finally free.

But luckily, the new job paid suspiciously well. Michael was nothing if not generous.