Mixing, memory and desire, stirring

“What’s that?” Gradie asked.

“Your new life!” Nova clapped his hands.

“One of them at least,” Angel said. “It’s the core of the Vault. Now that we’ve got a lock on you, using it should feel like the memories are your own.”

Gradie looked at the unassuming door and tried to put his concerns about that into words.

“A little word of warning before you drop in,” Philip said. “We won't always be there to talk your ear off like we did at the clubhouse, so you need something to fall back on, should the Hardworlds sink their teeth in you.”

“What—”

“Prime a self that remembers something about the Otherworld. Something you can focus on to keep from dropping out. Otherwise, everything we teach you today and from now on is fucking useless.”

Gradie flashed through the memories, looking for something that might grab another version of him. Writhing cities, dreamlike diners, floating gas stations and flying everythings, sapphire eyes…

“Like what?”

“How should I know?” Philip said. “I’m not in your head. Probably some girl you drooled over in the Allclub.”

“Think of something your Spirit will be drawn to,” Lindsey said gently. “Something that will make you want to return to the Otherworld.”

Gradie remembered feeling a warm lithe body in his arms, cool mist on his skin, the sensation of falling, and the flashing eyes as she moved away. In a panic, he looked over at Nova. If he could still see in Gradie’s head, he didn’t show it.

Philip snapped his fingers under Gradie’s face.

“You got it yet?”

“Uh,”

“Jesus.” He turned back towards the copycat earth floating outside. Gradie tried to bring back the memory of EP floating through the mist but realized it wouldn’t work. If anything from the Otherworld would get dismissed as a dream by his waking self, it would be that.

“What do you use?” he asked the back of Philip’s head.

“Nothing. I accept the Hardworlds for what they are.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Lindsey scoffed at him.

“I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

“Ignore him,” Lindsey said. “You need to find something that speaks to your Spirit. No one else can tell you what that is.”

Gradie searched his memory of the Otherworld again, and found something so obvious, so omnipresent, he had learned to ignore it.

It was the feeling of being on the edge of a revelation, like the sensation of lapsed memory that had haunted him during the office job, but reflected over an impossible distance.

He had seen it in Lucy’s eyes as she warned him of the dangers of the job, heard it in Michael’s voice when he tried to explain what the Hardworlds meant to people like him, felt it himself when he had seen his own masked reflection blending into the Allcity swarm.

It was of this world, and not. It was beyond the speaking signs and gear that told him how to use itself, and yet a part of them. It was woven into the texture of the Allworld, but visible only from above, while rushing past it at a thousand miles an hour.

It was a feeling that somewhere in this new existence, there was something he had been searching for his entire life, as far beyond the desperation of the Allcity as it was beyond the dusty deadness of a parking lot in the Real.

It was a pure and indestructible hope.

“All right, I got it.”

“We’ll see,” said Philip. “If whatever it is doesn’t cut it, try something else.”

Gradie couldn’t find the words to explain that there was nothing else, so he just nodded silently.

“All right bro, you ready?” Nova yelled.

“Uh,” Gradie realized he had no idea what to expect on the other side of the door.

“So, is it like a fake Hardworld, or,”

“Not really,” said Angel. “Think of it like a responsive simulation of the Real, un-bound to any place or time. But it’s not really spatial either, it meshes to the structure of your Spirits memory, so like—”

“Bro just go through the door,” said Nova. “If we try to explain it to you, it’ll take all day.”

That didn’t make Gradie feel any better about what he was about to do, especially since “non-spatial” and “spirit memory” conjured images of Lucy’s mind stripper.

“One last thing,” Philip said, wearily. ”Make sure to drop into a self that’s clean. Meaning no serious attachments, you don’t talk to your family often, no girlfriend, no kids, not even any potential for advancement at work, nothing that will draw you into— What’s funny?”

Gradie had started laughing.

“That won’t be too hard.”

Philip rolled his eyes and the twins laughed.

“And try to push that your self is a lucid dreamer,” Lindsey added. “Makes it easier to navigate the dreamworlds.”

“Make sure you prime all the stuff you need to work the gear we showed you,” Angel said. “Shooting, driving, medical training. Some familiarity with the phone apps would be nice too.”

“Parkours another good skill to have, as you saw,” Nova said. “Also distance running, sprinting,”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“All right don’t bog him down,” Philip said. “Just focus on the basics this time.”

There was a silence and they all stared at him. Gradie nodded dumbly and put his hand on the doorknob.

“Here we go!” Nova said, a bounce in his voice. “We’ll be watching you till you drop out, then Lindsey and Philip will meet you on the other side. So quit looking so nervous!”

Gradie hadn’t noticed his frown until then. The fear that he would end up lost in the Hardworlds again had sprung up at the sight of the door, and wrestled with his excitement, that hope of something electrifying waiting for him at the edge of existence.

Before either feeling could conquer the other, he opened the door.

It was instantaneous. He didn’t even remember stepping through the frame. Suddenly, he was standing on the roof of a parking garage, a familiar cityscape swirling around him. The traffic sounds, the smell of fast food grills and exhaust, the heat radiating off the concrete, all felt intensely real. But while the memory crystal that had led him to Paul and even Lucy’s near-perfect replica of his life in the Real had just a razor-cut slice of unrealness at the edges, this immediately felt different. It was unreal all the way through, worked masterfully into the shape of reality.

It felt like a Lucid dream.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of hundreds, then let them flutter away in a wind that came on just as fast as he thought of it.

“God damn.”

“Told you bro. Fully responsive. Like the best dream you ever had,” Nova said, his voice floating out of the air like Gradie was imagining it.

Nova was right. This place was like weightless liquid thought compared to the Otherworld. The excitement was crippling.

“What do I do?”

“First step to get to the Hardworlds is always the same,” Philip said, his voice walkie-talkie like. “Ask yourself, who are you?”

Gradie reached for the answer reflexively, and his mind stepped out into a void.

It was easy to forget, flying around the Allworld or firing imagined guns in the twins simulations, that who he was in this world, was a choice.

His memories of the Real had lost their power. Holding them in his mind, they floated like everything else, and he let them drift away.

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

Michaels words came back to him, but now that his Spirit had grown into itself, the feeling of floating between lives wasn’t the aimless falling it had felt like the first time, and he didn’t feel like he was about to stumble into a self the way he had in the crystal.

Here, he was stable. The other selfs floated around him, not like a swarm, but infinite and indiscrete, like a field. The world was made of him. He just had to shape it.

“I’m endless,” he said to himself.

“That’s the Spirit,” Philip said. “But I would like this little lesson to come to a conclusion at some point, so if you would be so kind, put together a self so we can get to the real training.”

Gradie looked around him. Nothing in the cityscape gave him any idea how to go about doing that. Being stuck between endless versions of himself was just as crippling as being tugged from one to another.

“How?”

“Jesus God almighty, someone—” Philip sounded like he was swearing into his hands with the radio hanging at his side.

“Start with an anchor,” said Lindsey. “Like a house you grew up in, a job you had. Something to branch the rest of the self off of.”

The mention of houses and jobs ignited memories from the Real, and that version of him outshined all others for a moment, until he pushed it away.

No. I don’t have to be him. Here, I can choose.

“Who am I?” he whispered to himself.

An anchor. One thing.

Where did I go to sleep last night? Where will I wake up?

An apartment, I live in an— No. A condo. A big expensive one, over downtown—

It hit him all at once. Like Lucy’s box in reverse. The memory wasn’t drawn out, it was constructed in front of him. In an instant, he knew of, or remembered, hundreds of condos, apartments, and townhomes around downtown. Addresses, price, size, all the little annoying issues and all the perks. Just as quickly as the strange dream knowledge had exploded in his mind, he had picked one, a brushed steel and concrete two bedroom with a slice of balcony and solid glass railing.

“That’s my house,” he told himself, and the world shifted. The other apartments fell away, and he couldn’t even conceptualize ever knowing of them in the first place. Things moved too fast for him to reflect on the strangeness of this.

The condo struck roots in his mind. It morphed from dull information into living, breathing memory. The first day in it, boxes everywhere. The jacuzzi jet bathtub going unused for months. Scrambling through it, looking for his keys, late for work—

“No. Fuck that.”

“You O.K.?” Angel asked. Gradie was standing in the Condo, his hands out in front of him like the office was going to pour in through the window.

“I work from home,” Gradie said defiantly.

“Ok bro, sounds good,” Nova laughed. Gradie fluttered through the house at the speed of memory and saw his desk in the second bedroom, three monitors, stock charts.

I’m a day trader.

The phrase brought on another deluge of choices, and he picked ‘futures’ out of the stampede and let the rest rush past him into un-memory.

He went over to the keyboard and decided to test his skills. The text on the screen was blurry and shifting, like the gas station ages ago.

“Why is it hazy?”

“Cause you’re not loading all this into your Spirit,” Angel said, his voice now faint, like a piece of dialogue Gradie was imagining.

“If we cleaned up every scrap of mem the same way we prepped your training, it would take lifetimes. The Vault has just enough texture to convince your Spirit that your self is real.”

Gradie reached out again for the trading knowledge, like poking at a sore, and found something like an itch in the back of his head. Like a word on the tip of the tongue. A feeling that when he woke up, he would remember.

When he woke up.

The idea generated a gravity in his mind, drawing his focus. Like the memories had developed mass and were now rolling off towards a new life, pulling him with them.

Ok. Now I got it.

He reached out with his new sense of thought-memory and dove back into the endless resources of the Vault.

He had grown up in a brand new development. His cousin fifteen minutes down the road, trailer in the sticks. Grew up hunting. Shooting. Parkour in college. Dropped out. Paintball, airsoft, force on force training. A half-serious attempt to join the police with an eye on SWAT or maybe the Marshalls. All the while learning about trading from a relative. Lots of money lost. Unemployment checks. Regular wageslave jobs in between. Then one day he looked up and he was making enough to quit the other work, with a bit of belt-tightening. Just as he got the hang of a budget, he didn’t need it.

He had spent the last year either trading or getting shot at with chalk rounds and tearing through an obstacle gym to blow off steam. Combat first aid courses. Casual hookups. Ignored family functions and phone calls. A hermit in a high rise.

The world warped around him. Distance lost meaning. Time became just another quality, like the amber tone of a street light or the perspective of his reflection as he turned in front of a mirror. The memories had all come instantly, fully extended into their own frame of time and place. The condo was next to downtown as much as it was after his twenty-seventh birthday and concurrent with his casual flings. The purchase of his first gun was located alongside retail work and a painful demoralizing breakup.

Memories melded with locations and slotted themselves into time, and through all of it wove a single thread of being. A person. Another Gradie. A new self.

He desperately wanted to be born. He desperately wanted to wake up.

“All right. I think I’m ready.”

“All right then. Slam out,” Angel said, his voice blending into memory.

Gradie instantly matched the words to their meaning, and for a moment the memory of the Spirit blazed through the newly crafted self so brilliantly that he was afraid the self would dissolve and he would have to start all over again.

But then an understanding, from his subconscious or the latent knowledge of the Vault, he couldn’t say, revealed itself to him.

I am lucid dreaming. This is a real me, and when I open this door, I will wake up.

The idea took hold, and the flight around the vault, the training with the twins, even the trip on Philip’s magical gas station, and all that came before, arranged themselves in a straight line behind him as a long history of dreams, fusing the two Gradie’s that until then, had been watching each other warily from opposite ends of the Spirit.

And nestled among the dreams, like a gun in a workbag, was that feeling of something more waiting just beyond them. An indestructible hope. His anchor to the Otherworld.

“See you in there.”

He stepped through a door and slammed it closed behind him.