If paradise can be bought, it can also be served with fries
It had been a week since the Office Job, though time was hard to gauge. The days in the Real felt less and less like they were being lived and more like they were dissolving directly into memory. His life in the Otherworld rushed in to fill the gap. He spent most of it flying above the Allworld, letting his mind wander as the bizarre landscape sped by, as it did now.
He had felt ecstatic after the job. Looking back, it felt like he succeeded where the rest of the team failed, using instinct and quick thinking to turn a shitty situation into a win. Michael and the team didn’t agree. They gave what he did a name, freefalling, or trancing or something, maybe each had given it a different one. They said it was dropping out and letting the subconscious of the spirit guide your entry into the Hardworlds. It rarely worked and wasn’t reliable. Essentially, he had gotten lucky, just as Philip had said. But it hadn’t felt like luck. Up until Paul dropped dead, he hadn’t really thought he could do it.
Either way, he had to agree with them. Spending most of his time in a Hardworld believing he was about to get written up at some shitty job wasn’t the way he wanted to operate. He wanted the freedom, the electrifying knowledge of who he was, and why he was there.
He wanted, even more now that the first job was over, to be a real Hardworlder. It still felt like something just beyond his reach.
Michael had promised him more training after they were done restructuring the team and setting up the next job, but that had been days ago. He had started to worry, imagining scenarios where he was hung out to dry, not part of the team but unable to be let loose due to his knowledge of their identities, until Philip contacted him an hour ago.
“Gonna pick you up today. Be ready.” His voice came through like a track phone, not the crystal clear ‘right in your thoughts’ way that Michael and the rest of the team sounded on the communicator.
“When?”
“Today.”
He had dropped off the call, or connection, or whatever the strange telepathic link could be called, and Gradie had left it at that. Whatever. It’s not like he needed to know a time anyway.
All he ever did was fly.
A red glow floating up from the Allworld caught his attention. Neon letters the color of bright hot heating elements. Ray’s. A memory, a few days old, bubbled up in him.
Sometimes he did more than fly. His third day soaring around, just after zipping through the maker stalls and warehouse portals of the Allmall, but before finding the lagoons of Sunset, where orange sun melted forever on the horizon, Ray’s had floated out from behind a tower of jungle bungalows and given Gradie his second hard lesson about Otherworld advertising.
Hunger was at least partially a function of the Spirit. The scents and sights of the dreamworld meals were just as gut pulling as they were in the realm of flesh and blood. He had to focus on the fact that he had no stomach and needed no food, or the slight hunger would devolve into brutal starvation cravings. It was written into the smells themselves by the makers somehow. The people of this place really were a special kind of evil.
Of course, Ray’s had floated out at him before he learned this lesson. He spent ten mem on the meal, (Michael’s promise to pay him only in experience must have been another kind of test), and the food had been amazing. The archetype of all burgers and a pile of late-night-commercial fries, with a chocolate shake that kept its temperature, flavor, and texture constant right to the last sip. Somehow, his Spirit remembered how to feel full, and the meal progressed from a desperate attack on hunger, to a leisurely observation on flavor, and ended as the familiar ritual of picking at the last fries and slurping loudly on an almost gone shake.
Strangely, yet thankfully, his spirits grasp on digestion ended there. As he flew away from Ray’s, the feeling of fullness dropped away like a bad dream, and he was left just as un-hungry as he had been before the god damned diner had got in his way in the first place.
Now, here he was, once again flying towards it. The memory of that meal brought on the memory of the hunger, which of course brought on the hunger itself.
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God dammit.
He dropped down toward the door and the wrap-around deck’s gravity stuck his shoes to the concrete. No one floated in Ray’s. The makers had done their best to make it feel as much like an ‘aw shucks, just good eatin’ diner floating in a dreamworld as possible. Even the sun, which Gradie never noticed flying around the Allworld normally, lay on his face and coaxed up sweat from his neck in a distinct summer way.
He pulled the door open and the hot metal handle stung his hand. Inside, the cold air smelled of AC, but mouthwatering beef fat and the sweet tang of ketchup and grilled onions pushed in at the edges. White noise conversations echoed on the checkerboard tile floor. Spirits crowded into turquoise booths and fire-engine-red stools. Fluorescence and neon glared off road signs and other kitsch on the walls. He stood in line like everyone else, wondering if this was as close to a Hardworld as any of these people ever got to.
He paid at the counter. The cashier, a pouty freckled redhead in a low-cut apron, gyrated patiently as he brought up his wallet, slower than the other customers. The mem Michael had paid him in took the form of digital numbers in a clockface he could summon at will. He thought of the memories, childhood pleasures and visceral adult panics that were quantified and represented by the dull orange digits. The stuff with which makers crafted all the oddities of this thoughtformed dimension. Were they cutting up the old world and regrowing it piece by piece in the new? What was the point?
As he was eating outside on the deck, about halfway through his meal, just as frustratingly fantastic as last time, something strange, even for a dreamworld diner, caught his attention.
A man in pajamas, royal blue pants and shirt, with silver star and moon motifs, landed between the tables with his arms folded behind his back.
“Oh brothers and sisters, if you only knew the glory of the Spirit, you would throw the dust in your hands away in an instant!”
Someone laughed. “Oh shit, it’s one of those guys.”
Everyone else had about the same reaction. The man scanned the faces with contempt, until he saw Gradie, who, having never seen anything besides unrestrained pursuit of satisfaction in the Otherworld, was watching him with too much interest.
Fuck. The guy locked eyes and walked over, waving his hands and preaching and shit.
“The Spirit must learn the truth! That it is no longer confined to its shell!” Here he swept his hand at Gradie’s burger, fries, and (this time, cookies and cream!) shake.
“Each time you give in to the phantom song of the flesh, you bind your Spirit to it ever more strongly! Chained to your false form, you will never learn the great pleasures of existing as pure Spirit, without need or want or pain!”
Here, he broke eye contact with Gradie and looked at something towards the front door.
“And more doomed still, are those who go to those so called hard worlds. Truly, the land of the dead!”
Gradie froze, then remembering the man wasn’t even looking at him, relaxed and followed his gaze.
A man in a bright red smoker’s jacket and a mask made of neon-green plasma walked away from the counter with a half-gallon root beer float foaming in a frosted mug. The two women on his arms, each in dresses like colored plastic wrap, ate Tom-and-Jerry-sized ice cream sundaes suggestively and fought for his eye contact.
“I am the land of the dead, baby!” the man yelled, and raised his float in the air, spraying the girls with dark soda and golden foam. They laughed and pressed against him. He looked like something out of Michael’s vision. Gradie tried to imagine Philip or Luke wasting mem on dreamgirls and too-perfect fast food. He couldn’t even picture them inside the diner.
The pajama man piped up again, louder.
“Seek the Spirit! Seek the edge! The abyss! Only there will you find yourself!” Gradie looked back to see pajama man staring him down again. Before he could decide how to respond (taking another bite of the burger was in the lead) a big guy in a greasy apron stepped out of nowhere and kicked the man in the stomach. Pajama man went flying out into the glittering swarm and the guy in the apron wiped his hands together dramatically and wagged a finger at the empty air.
“And stay out!”
The diner erupted in laughter and applause. The apron man pushed through a swinging pair of kitchen double doors and disappeared with them.
The strange event dissolved into the atmosphere of the diner, which continued un-deterred, front door dinging open and orders being called and all that, and before Gradie got another bite down, it was like he had dreamed it.
As he picked at the last fries and wondered if there was a way to put some kind of tracker on Ray’s, (He had bought a responsive map from a floating stall, the seller picking him out of a swarm as a newborn. He had set it to pop up when he made a right angle with his thumb and index finger) Philip called him on the communicator.
The early 00’s Nokia-style ring tone was a welcome change from the gentle dream knowledge prodding that usually let him know a team member was trying to talk to him.
“Yeah?”
“Training day, kid. Don’t make me wait.”
“I’m at Ray’s.”
“I don’t give a— That fucking place?”
“Yeah. Do you know if there’s a way to see where it—”
“Finish your chili dog and meet me in the black.”
“Where?”
“Just flap those little wings and head straight up. I’ll find you.”
The dial tone was almost pleasant compared to the sudden-absence-of-another-presence-in-my-head that ended most conversations on the comm line. Gradie stood up and dusted crumbs off his cloak and kicked off into the air.