Do I dare, Disturb the Universe?

Gradie was afraid it would all be for nothing. He saw himself floating around the Allworld, settling for the recycled scraps of other people's lives while the Hardworlds blazed somewhere out of reach.

The memory of the gas station pulled him out of it. He had done it before, somehow. He could do it again. Still, better make sure to squeeze every half answer out of Michael first.

“So, I just sit here and try to believe that my real life is a dream, until my mind wakes me up?”

“It’s better if you try and remember your real life and focus on that,” Michael said slowly, as if offering Gradie something fragile that might slip through his hands.

“And what’s my real life?”

“How should I know? I’m a dream, remember?”

Gradie sat in silence with clenched fists until Michael spoke again.

“This is the final test before you can join the team. If you can’t do this, I can’t use you.”

“I can do it.” Gradie snapped.

“I believe you, but before I leave you to it, a final warning.”

Michael set his glass down and stepped closer to Gradie.

“The Hardworlds are a dangerous place for the unwary. They pull on your spirit, attacking it, like an immune system attacks a foreign body, because what you are is unnatural to them. If you let them, they will make you believe that the self in the Hardworld is the real you, and you will forget about the Otherworld, about your real life, and you wont be able to escape. We call it dropping out. It gets harder to resist the longer you’re in the Hardworlds, but for a novice like you, even the first hour can be perilous. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

Gradie felt like Michael had gut-punched him inches from the finish line. He had just gotten used to the idea that this wasn’t all a dream, and now some other layer of it had revealed itself, like reality breaking apart twofold.

“But, I’ll still go to the real world when I wake up, right? Like I did in your craft?”

“Yes, but the Real will be even less than a dream to your spirit. It can only hold one life as real.”

“So, what? Do I actually become that other me? Does the Hardworld become my real life?”

“I can't say. I just need to know that you understand the risk. I cant let you join if you don’t.”

Something in Michael's tone or words filled him with a heavy fear. It was the kind of fear he had thought impossible in this place, the kind Lucy had tried so intently to make him feel.

It occurred to him that the one pure difference between waking life and a dream was the danger of something you could not recover from.

A low, cracking thunder gave an unexpected depth to the world outside the window, revealing it in his mind for an instant. Then it was gone, and they were floating in the void, alone.

“I understand,” said Gradie.

“Are you sure?” Michael waved behind him. “There’s always the Otherworld. You can shoot people and steal cars and all that shit there, risk-free.”

For a moment, Gradie thought about it. The advertisements in the city, sending hints of dreamlives into his brain. Wouldn’t that be easier? Wouldn’t it be the same?

No. The Hardworlds, the gas station, just that small part of it, had been unlike anything this place could ever give him. Even this hotel room, as near perfect and simple as it was, didn’t come close. He wanted a life, a real life in a real world, without restraint, without limits, where he could find out who he was, and what he could become.

Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

“No. I’m ready.”

Something in his voice must have done it. Michael could barely keep the smile off his face as he stood up.

“Good. Don’t say I never warned you. Take out that card I gave you earlier.”

Gradie did, wondering how pockets worked in a world where everything was crafted of thought.

“Flip it over.”

There was some text that hadn’t been there before.

“Memorize everything on that. The phone number is the most important. Call it at nine a.m. on the dot.”

It was an eight hundred number with a triplet followed by two doubles. He ran through it a few times.

“What is it?”

“It’s how we’ll synchronize with you.”

“What?”

“You don’t know how to drop into specific Hardworlds yet, so we have to come to you. When you call that number, and I visualize you calling me, the Hardworlds puts us together to make it happen. There are other ways to do it, but this will be the easiest.”

Wouldn’t that mean that until they synchronized, Michael would be in a Hardworld with some other version of him? Another question formed from his confusion. Gradie hadn’t thought about it before, but now as he prepared to throw himself across realities, his ignorance flared up in the dark.

“How many Hardworlds are there?”

Michael’s answer was surprising and obvious at the same time, a fitting paradox for this place.

“An infinite number. It's better to conceptualize the Hardworlds as a field, a meeting of multiple qualities, rather than a series of distinct planes. As Hardworlders, we move between states constantly. Every change we make is done by entering an alternate reality, you could say.”

For once, Michael’s words clicked smoothly into place in Gradie’s mind, eradicating pockets of confusion that had lingered in his understanding, and kickstarting new questions, but Michael interrupted his reflection before they could form.

“One last thing. Before you call us, you need to do something drastic.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something that makes it impossible to return to your old life. Something you can't come back from. You need to put as much distance between your spirit and your self as possible.” Then suddenly, as if remembering, he added “But don’t kill anyone.”

“Ok, so what should I—”

“It’s up to you, but whatever it is, do it before you call me. I need to know that you believe that the self in the hardworld isn’t the real you.”

Gradie nodded as if he understood and looked at the card again. Michael clapped him on the back.

“If I don’t see you in the Hardworlds, stop by the office and maybe we’ll find something else for you to do.”

“Fuck that.”

Michael smiled and waved. There was a sound like a trap door opening in an empty theater and Gradie dropped through the floor with his arms flailing at nothing. The square slice of hotel room shrunk into a speck and blinked out above him, and he was left floating in a black void with only distant faint stars for reference. The card floated by him lazily in zero-g.

“All right.” His voice fell flat in the darkness, as if he was tucked away in a carpeted bedroom. Strange. He had expected an echo. Everything Michael had told him rolled around in his head, and he tried to organize it into a plan of action, but kept dropping pieces into the void. The only thing that seemed solid was the phone number.

Suddenly, something blinked out in the darkness. A light, changing color as it hung among other lesser stars. It held his attention for a moment until he shook it off and looked down to try and think again. Down became forward and the light slid out of view.

“I’m dreaming.”

He remembered saying the same thing to Michael when they first met, and to himself a million times since then. He tried to believe it.

He thought of waking up in his own bed and felt that life rising up to meet him. In a panic, he pushed it away and tried to think of something else. The first thing that came to mind was the girl in the gas station.

That first Hardworld, and the him attached to it, bloomed in his mind and his other life fell away. The sensation was familiar to him now, and he pulled his mind back again. Something in the stars around him birthed a realization. Both lives felt equally far from him.

Michael's voice drifted through the dark.

Here in the otherworld, you are equidistant from all the lives you could ever live.

They felt like dim stars, distant and faint. He grabbed onto that metaphor and let it grow, until he remembered the colorful star and rolled it into view.

It shifted between a bright purple and neon green.

“That’s my real life, in there, I just don’t remember it.” His voice shook out from his head and boomed in the space around him. He held the thought and focused on the star.

Something flashed across its surface, a line bisecting the blinking orb. It dropped down suddenly and a flat plane rose above. The entire shape came right at him.

A door. Rolling towards him in the dark. Its edges glowed in the same colors as the shifting star, and it hummed with a vibration he could hear, speaking of memories and another life. He willed it to a stop right in front of him.

It was off-white with a beige coat of paint peeking through where the top coat flaked away. The knob was a brushed dull copper color and it hung off like the screws needed tightening. A shard of some other life, a weapon to shatter illusion.

“When I open this door, I'll wake up, and remember everything.”

The idea became more solid and certain by the second. Everything else faded away into a dull hum somewhere behind him, pushing him towards the door. He grabbed the handle and turned. Light poured in from the edges and the sensation of remembering something made him smile.

“I cant believe I forgot.”

He opened the door and stepped through.