Time to murder and create
The Hardworlds were nothing if not humbling. Things that Gradie had been so sure of in the Vault, fluttered away as his Spirit made the jump, and he found himself constantly trying to shift his perspective, to recapture knowledge and feelings lost in the trip between worlds, like those art pieces that only reveal a single, seamless image if you’re standing in just the right spot.
The first day had started off with a simple task, delivered via text. Get to the clubhouse. He had driven twenty minutes down the highway before he realized he had no idea where it was. His memory of the route filtered through other worlds and other selves. Philip ignored his calls of course, so he had spent half an hour on Google earth before he found it, an hour’s drive away.
“You’re late,” Philip had said.
“You didn’t give me a time.”
“The time was ‘as fast as you can’. You think you got here as fast as you could?”
“Yes.”
“Bullshit. The route from your little yuppie tower takes 45 minutes if you go the speed limit. Which you shouldn’t.”
“But it said—”
They had argued about traffic, toll roads and speed traps, until Philip sent him to run around the development “as fast as you can.” Then came the tests, and a heavy dose of reality.
His first primed self had been a bum fuse, in a lot of ways. His skills with guns were rusty and more suited to controlled romps through plywood hallways and doorless entryways than the real world Philip subjected him to. His parkour days few and far between (most days his self had just settled for a workout in his condo’s gym, which served the trials of a Hardworlder less generously). Even if he had nailed the drop in, it might have only lessened the sting. Philip’s trials were nothing short of grueling.
Rifle in hand, loaded with chalk rounds, Gradie had been sent to clear out the clubhouses, one by one. Even the wooden frames and supervisor trailer. He had EP in his ears and her eyes in the sky for half of it, then after about an hour she told him, ‘oops, EMP. Goodbye’ and that was that. Not that it mattered. He fucked it up in ways completely unrelated to aerial recon.
Philip stepped out of a linen closet and blasted him in the neck with a chalk round while he was trying to remember how to Israeli clear a room from the doorway. He grabbed his neck with both hands and hopped around the hall. It felt like the round had been made of molten metal filed to a point.
Philip was less than sympathetic.
“Just be glad Michael won’t let me shoot you with live rounds. Fun little fact, you can take a lot more gunshot wounds and keep moving here in the Hardworlds than you would in the Real, if you can get control of your mind. A lot of how the body deals with trauma is psychological.”
The pep talk wasn’t as effective as Philip may have hoped. Despite Gradie’s mental whispering that this wasn’t his real body, it still hurt to turn his head for the rest of the day, a constant reminder that here, the Spirit was the slave of flesh and pain.
The next house had a booby trapped door that set off a cache of fireworks rigged to trip his earbuds, so the sound came in completely un-muffled, if not amplified. The ringing in his ears got comfortable with the neck pain and waited for the rest of the gang.
Which, it turned out, included other chalk shots to the hand, knee, and nose, and all over bruising from Philip front kicking him down a staircase. After those had set in, a flying piece of garage door cut open his forearm when Luke backed a Charger out of it and took off down the street.
“Catch him,” Philip advised. He tried. Luke did laps around the neighborhood while he sprinted across fields, climbed over sandpiles, and dove for cover behind a mini dozer when Luke drifted to a stop and opened fire out of the driver’s side window. Finally, Gradie got up on the roof of the main clubhouse by going out a window and had a clear shot on the car, no matter where it turned or swerved. He emptied all his mags at it and Philip came on the earbuds and told him it was armored. Hilarious.
Next up, surprisingly, was a light lunch, interrupted by a drone flying through the kitchen window that Philip advised him was strapped to a bomb. He emptied all fifteen chalk rounds in his handgun as it zipped around the kitchen. When it dove at him he punched it away and it slammed into the window, shattering it.
“You’re dead. Punching bomb bad,” EP let him know.
It was like that all day.
Later, Philip took his weapons and Luke and Lindsey hunted him around the compound. While he was sneaking across the bottom of an empty pool, trying to move from a house Luke was actively clearing to one he had already checked, Lindsey got him in the back of the neck.
“Shit!”
“Make a spiritual note,” she said, leaning over the rim with the setting sun to her back. “Prime the SERE shit when you get back to the Vault.”
But the last test had been the worst by far.
“Uh-oh five oh!” EP said as he was raking the lock on what he hoped was a fully stocked gun safe in a laundry room.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“What do I do?”
“Please don’t ask that. Philip really hates it.” Then she was gone. A few seconds later, he heard the sirens.
He shed his plate carrier and weapons and spent an entire minute trying to decide if he should go for it on foot or boost one of the vehicles. The layout of the clubhouse, seen from the rooftop hours before, lit up in his head, and he realized there was only the one road out, where cruisers now poured through with sirens blaring.
He grabbed a monocular NVG and sprinted out the door. As the clubhouse came alive with red and blue radiance, he made it to the back wall and pulled himself up and over, every injury waking up and clawing at him in the process.
He dropped onto a ten meter wide strip of cut grass that ran below a string of power lines parallel to the wall, with a dense dark brushland on the other side. He was sure he was home free.
A spotlight flashed from a police cruiser parked on the road at the end of the strip and lit up the alley like the sun had jumped back over the horizon.
Gradie took off across the grass towards the brush. The cruiser jumped the curb and barreled down the grass straight at him, kicking up sod. Its engine roar bounced off the wall and rattled Gradie’s aching bones. He made it to the brush, but quickly lost momentum against thorns and branches. He broke into a small clearing, a few yards wide, and was struggling to pull the nightvision monocle on his head when some one tackled him from behind.
“Don’t move! Don’t fucking move!” A jolt of terror ran through him, traveling via the same fleshbound routes as the spike of pain that amplified the days injuries. The self screamed out at a good life ruined by a day of unfathomable stupidity, but the Spirit recognized the voice.
“Luke?” It came out as a wheeze, and Officer Luke didn’t respond beyond pulling Gradie to his feet and dragging him toward the cruiser waiting on the grass.
“Just started my shift and I gotta chase a bunch of teenagers down and do their daddy’s job. What is this world coming to?” said Luke with a smile somewhere in his tone.
“I’m like twenty-seven,” Gradie managed, still a wheeze, unsure if he had dropped a few years on the ground along with his wind.
“Some folks never grow up,” Luke sighed.
Gradie found himself thrown onto his side in the back of the cruiser and something rattled on the seat next to him.
“Yeah, I got one.” Luke said into the radio before turning back to smile at Gradie.
“All right bro. Last test for the day. See if you can get some of those pills in your mouth. Otherwise your’e gonna be sharing a jail cell with your self for the rest of the day.”
Gradie looked at the thing that had rattled in the seat. A bottle of pills. Of course.
The god damn cap was the kind that was annoying enough to get off with his hands, but with his mouth it was a special kind of hell. He spent ten minutes slobbering all over the seat while Luke whistled and drove leisurely down the road, occasionally looking back and cracking a vulgar joke or two, before he finally got the bottle open and ate the pills off the seat like a god damned addict.
About ten minutes later, the cruiser lifted off the ground like someone had entered the flying car cheat in real life, and Luke looked back with a smile, puffing on a big dreamworld cigar.
“Oh, hey bro. How was your first day?”
Luke’s Dreamworld, or at least the path he took to get back to the Otherworld, took the form of a series of wide spaces linked by portals borrowed from old PS1 games and what Gradie assumed must have been his dreams. Wide screensaver plains, a highway half a mile over a blurred city, dense forest dotted with fantasy castles. They drove through it all like a car wash and the cruiser morphed into a deep blue 2001 Lamborghini Diablo (evident from its reflection in the mirrored surface of a rushing waterfall they flew into near the end).
“How did you take me to your dreamworld?” Gradie asked suddenly, wondering what his own would look like.
“I didn’t. You were here after I plunged the propofol.”
“You got caught in his wake,” Klara said, suddenly in his head. “Your Spirit hitched a ride, like you did with E.P. at the clubhouse and Philip’s ghostworlds after the office job. I suspect it’s because the first time you made the trip, with Michael, you did so via his dreamworlds, so now your Spirit just does what it knows. With practice, you should be able to make the trip on your own.”
The journey had the same feeling of dropping away from himself that the other paths had. Sometime during the journey, that other him had gone quiet, but he couldn’t be sure exactly when, and barely noticed it before Luke’s Lambo stopped in a bare cement garage with a door on one end, as if they had phased through the wall. Luke waved his hand in front of the door and it buzzed open. Inside was the office.
Michael and Philip were there waiting. After some small talk about the first day and what he still needed to get down, starting with evading the police, Michael advised him, again, to take some time and explore the Otherworld (while Philip scowled at Gradie, possibly worried he might listen. The guy really didn’t know Gradie at all). Gradie nodded and assured Michael he would do that real soon, then asked about how to get back to the Vault and the twins.
“You could use the door, now that you’re on the team,” Michael said. “But I would prefer you make a craft and fly there. You need to get used to moving through the Otherworld on your own. The more detailed your mental map of this place, the more real it will feel to you, and the more you can use it to keep a lock on your spirit.”
Gradie lied and assured him that all made sense, and he would make a craft later, then got him to show him how to use a door to get to the twins. It was disapointedly simple.
All he had to do was face a door and imagine the castle, and when it buzzed and the light turned green (or the latch unlocked, or the viewport slid open showing his destination on the other side, or any number of other ways doors between thought worlds worked in this place) he could just open it and walk through.
Why the hell would he ever spend time making a craft? The Mask had been a pain enough. Couldn’t he just buy one with his salary anyway? A cluster of questions and annoyances fell away as he stepped through the door into the now familiar massive living room of the twin’s castle.
The ceiling had grown since he last saw it. At least ten floors stacked above him, strange lights and materials peeked out from the walkways, and a frosted glass dome glowed at the top. He stood there for a moment, looking around at the labels on the shelves, before Angel’s voice came in on some kind of intercom.
“Sup bro. Back already?”
“I need some info on SERE.”
“Sick! We’re filtering through some feeds right now. I’ll buzz you into the vault and bring it up in your object room. Let’s see… how about…got it. Just pick up the zip tie hand cuffs and run through the mem that way. Have fun.”
The speaker cracked off somewhere and a door opened in the bookcase. The Vault all to himself. Better than he had expected. As he stepped through into the familiar gun room that held his other mem-encoded items, an idea latched on to him.
He wasn’t going to stop at SERE. He was going to dig through the Vault from end to end. Every last crumb of Hardworlding knowledge was going to be his, and when he dropped in the next time, Philip and Luke were going to be dealing with a fucking super soldier.
Unfortunately, Philip was waiting for him in the Mem room.
“You left the office in a hurry and I couldn’t get ahold of you. The fucking twins started jamming coms here as soon as Michael insisted they use em. No worries though. Run through your little escape memories and prime another self. Trainings just getting started.”