Never alone, never outgunned
They were walking across a vacant parking lot with only the evening sky behind them, dressed like a thrash metal band going to a funeral, armed with belt-fed machine guns, snub-nosed revolvers, and everything in between. Three of them had machetes on their hips, and one of them wasn’t smoking.
“People like us had never felt at home in the Otherworld,” Michael said. “Sure, we danced in the Allclub, lost ourselves in Hedonisia, spent weeks in Gunmaze, but it wasn’t made for us. We didn’t get invited to historic gatherings or help build any of the great worlds. Our memories weren’t worth much, and we didn’t fight in the war. We were always on the edges, wasting eternity on whims and vices, watching each age come and go.”
“But the Hardworlds were exactly what we had been waiting for. When everyone else fled to the fortresses, we rushed in with screams of joy.”
They walked through doors and woke up in bedrooms, hotels, and behind dumpsters. A nostalgic sadness slipped through the vision and Gradie heard it in the waver of Michael's words.
“Everyone watched in terror, thinking the same thing.”
A skinny kid in a Garfield t-shirt that said “I hate Mondays” waved at a gawking crowd on the Allworld, then walked through a door and disappeared.
“These idiots are the only ones left in the fight?”
“To be fair, we didn’t immediately hunt down the Demons. We weren’t looking for a war. We wanted other things.”
The guy in the Garfield shirt waved a gun around at a fast-food counter while his friend loaded fries into a bag. Another kid holding a Glock 18 with a thirty-round mag put his head under the soda machine and drank straight from the nozzle. As they skipped out the door, one of them threw a stack of hundreds at the counter and howled.
“It was our kind of dreamworld. A chance to live life the way we always wanted. Not selling our memories for tickets to imagined carnivals, but making new ones in a world of flesh and blood, pain and fear.”
The cops closed in on them as they sped across the highway in a Honda civic with the windows busted out. Two of them made out in the back, while the driver shot roman candles at a police chopper.
“We learned early on that the Hardworlds may feel like the Real, but they’re not completely different from the Otherworld. They’re malleable. They listen to us, as long as what we will is possible, and as long as we have the drive.”
A man walked down a row of slot machines, dropping coins and pulling levers. Each one paid out a jackpot. His friend walked behind running his fingers under the streams of silver.
“We drove a million stolen cars across endless highways, drank and danced in countless clubs, and lived a thousand lives. We probably would have continued like that forever, but the demons didn’t trust us.”
US National Guard Humvees rolled into a burning city. A prisoner in an interrogation room begged uniformed men to let him sleep. Warfighters in gen 3 night vision goggles burst into suburban homes and penthouse suites. A mushroom cloud bloomed over a highway and turned the shopping centers into molten glass.
“They gunned us down in clubs, leveled the highways with nuclear bombs, turned entire nations against us, and smothered us in our sleep. They killed us a million times in a million ways, but in the Hardworlds, death is a great teacher.”
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Armored cars chased a speeding motorcycle through a pitch-black underground garage. The roof exploded, dropping tons of concrete and vehicles on the pursuers. The biker doubled back and swung a short assault rifle up on its sling.
Operators kicked down a bedroom door in a middle-class suburban home. The explosion ripped the roof off the house and tripped car alarms all down the street. Headlights blinked in the darkness after the orange glow faded in the smoke.
A figure burst out of a mirror window forty stories up a towering downtown building. Gunfire strobed in the dark office as the figure dropped out into the night, parachute expanding behind them. A flash turned the shooters to mist and blew out half the windows on the floor. Glass fluttered twinkling down to the street, and the night was still again.
“They probably expected us to run back to the Otherworld and seek shelter in a fortress world, or drown our trauma in some resort orgy. They didn’t understand that for us, dying in a Hardworld was better than living in Paradise. That’s why they never stood a chance. They were protecting their hideouts, but we were fighting for the only place we ever felt at home.”
There were eight of them in the car, flying down the highway, smoke on the horizon, sirens in the air. They checked their weapons and smiled at each other. Fearless.
“We beat them in gun battles, freeway chases, cyberclashes, and all out wars. Then we did the unthinkable and freed our friends from their timeless tombs and raided their vaults of memory.”
Brilliant spirits broke through solid planes of darkness and pulled others out of blurry illuminated clouds, like television projected through a fog, and flew them into doors floating in the dark. On the other side, the Allclub roared and molten plasma fireworks exploded in the sky.
“At last, the Otherworld was safe, at least from them.”
Gradie was back in the craft with Michael, looking out the wide window at the Allworld, drink in hand.
“After the war, Hardworlders were the new money, and the Hardworlds the new frontier. The curious paid us a fortune to teach them how to get in, and to set them up in their ideal life. Eventually, people warmed to the idea of a place that mimicked the Real. Everything felt more real than anything you could make in the Otherworld. The food, the sex, the people. Even the gods were curious to try it.”
Gradie sipped the scotch, wondering if it would be even better in a Hardworld. Michael made a face like he had remembered something.
“Of course, that was a long time ago and a lot has happened since then. Not to say the Hardworlds aren’t still important. They’re the best place, the only place for many, to escape to when the powers of the Otherworld are after you. And, of course, someone usually gets hired to bring them out.”
Gradie remembered Michael and the woman walking across the lot outside the gas station and something clicked.
“So, which one do you do? Hide people or go in after them?”
“Depends. Usually the latter.”
“Won't people come after you if you hide criminals?”
“We keep our identities secret when taking on a job. Besides, there’s no central authority in this world, only what you can buy, or what you can get enough people to care about. A criminal to some is a VIP to others. It’s accepted that Hardworlders are gonna play both sides. They’re our worlds, after all.”
Gradie sipped the scotch. Out the window, a craft made of double wide trailers broke apart and the homes sailed off in different directions towards the Allworld. The story had a hold of him. He tried to hide it by asking a question he only barely wanted an answer to.
“So, Why cant I remember who I am?”
“Probably because you started out in a Hardworld, and your memory of that other self is taking precedence over your memory of the Real.”
Gradie had no idea what that meant, but something was distracting him from thinking about it. A gentle tugging at the edge of his mind, like he was about to remember something.
“I’m about to wake up.” A sadness he hadn’t expected poured out through his words. God damn. It really was too good to be real.
“That should help,” Michael said.
“What?”
“When you come back, you should remember your real self.”
Gradie tried to lay out what Michael had said and make sense of it, but there wasn’t any room. The sensation of remembering expanded in his mind, and it all went black again.
A man named Gradie woke up in bed, his alarm blaring, with fragments of a dream slipping out of his head. Something about his old house and his cousin looking for a dog. If anyone asked him about the Otherworld or Hardworlders, he would have no idea what they meant.