You, me, into infinity

Sam came out of the bedroom and saw him standing there, gun drawn on high alert. She smiled at him in a way that made him feel like an idiot, but he didn’t move. She laughed quietly and mimed eating out of a bowl.

Oh. The food.

As she stepped into the entryway and disappeared behind the wall, fear cracked and splintered in his head. He saw her opening the door to a cluster of gun barrels and falling in a roar of gunfire. The vision propelled him down the hallway, stepping as quietly as he could. The sound of the locks sliding open skipped towards him like the sharpening of knives. He stood at the corner and leaned out with his gun hidden.

Sam had the bag in one hand and the other in her jacket pocket. The delivery guy said something to Sam as she took the bag of food. His words were lost in the rain, but had the tone and cadence of banal normalcy. Something like “Hello, hope you enjoy” that he had said twenty times tonight and might say another twenty before he went home. His voice stuck out against the electrifying atmosphere that Gradie was submerged in, this world of fractured reality, gunfire and violence, sexual hunger and existential instability. Like a fax machine spitting out cover sheets in the middle of a fantasy battlefield.

A part of Gradie jumped at the sound and begged to be let go. His Self pleaded for mercy as the delivery guy disappeared down the stairs.

Sam shut the door with her foot and looked back at Gradie and laughed.

“Why are you lurking in the shadows like that?” She handed him the bag and locked the door.

“Just being careful,” he said.

“Zoey has eyes on this place. She watched him walk up. Also, if he had seen you, he probably would’ve called the cops and told them I was being held hostage.”

“Ok next time I’ll just sit on the couch then,” He took the bag down the hall.

“Oh my god, just don’t be so obvious about it!”

They laid the food out on the table. It steamed into the ceiling and was the brightest thing in the room. The neon orange sauce on Sam’s chicken, the electric yellow pineapple chunks, marker red pepper squares, soft white of the steamed buns. The smells exploded over the scents of old ash trays, solder, and dust.

The meal kicked up memories from his Self of all the Chinese food he had ever eaten, and his life blossomed out of it, like a chain reaction. Dates, nights alone, friends he had forgotten he even had. The act of satisfying a physical hunger gave the Self power, gave the memories life and threaded them into the flesh he had wrapped around his Spirit. For the first time, he felt this world was the domain of the Self, and he was just a visitor.

He paused with a final piece of steamed bun in his fingers and looked over at Sam. She ate without any signs that it affected her at all, but he was overcome with a need to remind himself that this was a Hardworld.

“In the real,” he said suddenly. Sam looked over at him with a noodle hanging out of her lips.

“Are you a competitive shooter or anything like this?” He waved in the general direction of the wall of certificates. Sam finished her bite and smiled at him shyly.

“You’re not supposed to talk about the Real.”

“Why not?”

“Boss didn’t tell you?”

“You’re the first person I’ve asked about it.”

A stunned expression flashed across her face, and she looked back down at her food.

“Well, for one thing,” she said “When you’re in here, you can’t remember the Real very well. Haven’t you noticed?”

He shrugged and picked up the last half of his pork bun, trying to preserve her earlier expression in his memory forever.

“And if you start to realize how far away it is, your mind will freak out and look for something to replace it, and that’s how you drop out. Your mind gets attached to the Self because there’s nothing else to get attached to.” She forked more chicken.

Gradie reached out for memories of the Real, and found them just as distant as they always were. It hadn’t felt strange before. He had assumed they were just lost beyond all the novel sensations of training and the Hardworlds. But the more he tried to get to them, the more they drifted away. A brief moment of terror took him, but flashed into nothing again just as fast, and his mind shifted to other thoughts.

The Allcity rushing beneath him. The responsive energized texture of the Otherworld, as if it was constantly reminding him that he was alive. EP glaring in her mask. Michael’s story. Philip hunting him through the clubhouse. The twins running him through the vault and geeking out with him over guns. Though to the Self they were just vivid dreams, to him they were more real than anything in his memory. Somewhere out there, was another him that worked another job and slept in another house and had a slightly different job, but it didn’t seem anything of lethal importance.

Apparently, his Spirit didn’t mind the loss of his memories of the Real.

“Max told me its good not to think about it too much,” Sam said. “He compared it to playing the game. You know? If you think about the game, you lose?”

Gradie nodded and chewed, trying to put on a face that implied he was equally disturbed by this dilemma of identity, while wondering to himself.

What does it say about me that I can be ok with being cut off from my past, from who I am? Is it who I am?

“He was kind of being serious when he said you being stupid like Luke was a good thing,” Sam said.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

Gradie looked at her and she rolled her eyes.

“You know what I mean.” She kept eating and Gradie wondered again what she was like in the Real. The question was so intoxicating that the words rolled out.

“So, are you into cars and shooting in the Real?”

She blinked at him.

“What did I just say?”

“I mean, do you only do this stuff when you’re on a job, or are you actually into it?”

“Why?”

“Just curious. How much it’s possible to change about yourself, I guess.”

“You don’t think it’s possible I’m this cool in the Real?” She smiled this time and Gradie laughed.

“If you have this many guns in the Real I’d be impressed.”

“What about you? Are you like a nine-to-five office guy?”

“Oh. My life in the Real sucks.” It was easy to say. That other him may have blushed, out beyond the void, beyond the edge of the Otherworld, stung by Sam’s reduction of his existence into a few words, but he felt powerless, a fossil.

“What’s so bad about it?” Sam asked.

“I work a shit job, rent some shitty apartment, probably have like a few hundred in my savings.” Looking at it all from far away, the problems seemed so feeble, the solutions so simple.

“So your job doesn’t pay enough?”

“It’s not really that. Money just dissolves for me.”

“Drugs?”

“No. Food mostly. And books. Some games, I guess.”

“That sounds normal.”

“I guess that’s what sucks about it.”

She stared at him and he tried not to notice.

“You don’t like anything about it at all?”

The hours staring at screens, paper, notebooks. All the stories that never found an ending, all the worlds that never found a plot thread. Unable to describe the truth, he chose the closest lie.

“I like imagining I’m somewhere else.”

“Hmm.” Sam looked around and motioned with her fork.

“Not like this,” Gradie said. Sam shrugged and finished the last bun.

“What about you?” He said, finding her eyes with his. She sat up and watched him while she chewed. He didn’t look away, but there was something other than just awkwardness in it.

“Are your one of those people who’s always trying to figure out what people are like in the Real? Max said—”

“No, never thought about it before tonight.” He looked her right in the eyes. She blinked back.

“Really? You never wondered if April is a killer?”

“I bet she’s an office manager.”

“No! She’s too cool for that. I bet she’s an artist. Or like one of those traveling Instagram photographers.” She rolled back onto the couch.

“She’s an office manager that’s poisoning her boss,” he said. Sam laughed and felt it through the couch, a strange closeness that set something aflame in his chest.

“What about Luke?” She looked at him over her beer as she asked, as if there was a taunt in it.

“He is probably exactly the same.”

Gradie took a cigarette out of a pack on the bottom of the coffee table. Sam agreed that Luke was probably the same in the Real, guns and all, but she thought Michael was a shy nerd.

“He’s always playing that DS and we used to talk about games too much and piss Max off. Oh, what about Max?”

“Used car salesman, divorced.”

“Oh my god, leave him alone. He’s not as bad as he seems. I bet he’s a coach or something.”

“I can see him screaming at kids.”

“Ok fine. What about, uh, Ashley?”

Gradie saw Celeste bouncing along with that smile. Like a parody of sexuality. He realized it instantly.

“I bet she’s nothing like that.”

“Quiet weeb or something,” Sam agreed. “Probably takes a lot of selfies but never goes outside.”

“Exactly. Who’s left, other than you?”

“EP.”

“Well, there’s no way she’s that cute in the real. It’s impossible.” He paused, but there was only silence in his hears. He caught Sam blushing before she could raise the beer to hide it.

“Oh, I thought she was listening,” he said

“She’s always listening,” Sam said, and looked for something unseen in the ceiling. After more silence, she rolled her eyes.

“Ok, girl, sure.”

She finished her beer and stood up.

“All right, enough getting to know you, I’m going to sleep. The couch folds out, so just—”

“Shouldn’t I sleep in your room? If someone breaks in, I’ll have to open your door anyway. Might not get there in time.”

For a moment the only expression on her face was nervous anticipation, but it passed so quickly, replaced by weary annoyance, that he thought he imagined it.

“Oh, well, I guess that’s a risk I’ll have to take.” She stomped off to the kitchen and dumped her takeout container in the trash.

“Blankets and stuff in here.” She pointed to a door in the wall without looking at him.

When the sound of her bedroom door slamming shut had faded in the fry-oil scented air, he slid the coffee table across the room and tried to figure out how the pull-out worked.

Sam’s door opened before he was done and she marched towards him like she had a job to do. They locked eyes. His brain went into overdrive preparing for her kiss, for the fucking afterward, strategizing and fantasizing and—

She dropped a pair of gloves on the couch.

“If we have to use the window rope tonight make sure you have those on.”

He gawked at the gloves while his brain caught up with what happened, and by the time he looked back, she was halfway to her room.

“Goodnight,” she yelled.

He didn’t get a reply out in time. She had changed into sweats and a crop top, and his brain had collapsed from the whiplash. The fantasies and scenarios played themselves out in his head as he fumbled with the fold-out. When he got it halfway open and saw how thin the mattress was, memories of sleepless nights at friend’s houses shook free at the sight of it, and the squeak of the metal frame made his back tense reflexively.

He put it back together and curled up on the cushions with a frayed comforter and set his gun on the floor in front of him.

The rain floated him away towards sleep, but other things got in the way. The sensation of the buds in his ear canal. The sweat, kicked up from the run and the long talk, sticking behind his knees and elbows and other places. Flashes of Sam’s curves, echoes of her voice, EP’s booming shout about her nakedness, and a million other fragments of the day, harassed him as he tried to sleep.

Usually, in training, unconsciousness meant leaving the Hardworld behind for good. But now, on his first multi-day mission, he had to be careful. Propofol or any other sedative was too much of a risk. His body had to be ready in a flash. But he couldn’t just let dumb sleep take him. In dreams the Self was at its most lethal. He had to make a controlled exit from the land of waking.

He closed his eyes and controlled his breathing. Stay present, the twins had said. His Self had been primed as an experienced Lucid dreamer, with an affinity for the WILD method. He controlled his breathing, released all the tension in his body, and let the hypnagogic images play before him, looking for one that could lead him into the dreamworlds with his Spirit aware.

He saw Sam and his mind went wild, and soon he was lost in daydreams, far from the realm of sleep.

He got ahold of himself and tried again.

“Don’t force it, but don’t miss it,” the twins had said. Or had he read that on a lucid dreaming forum? The two memories danced in his mind, without one superseding the other. Here, in the tranquil twilight between realities, there was no structure to separate the contradictory, no difference between dream and memory.

He focused on a floating, falling, scrap of shadow, waiting for it to reveal itself. It was a man jumping out of a plane. The rear of a C130 or some other kind of cargo plane took murky shape around him. The man wasn't Gradie, but when he jumped out the back of the plane, into the lightning ringed rainstorm, Gradie took on his point of view, and became him, and saw the glittering city lights rising up to catch him.

The feeling of falling sparked a fear in him, a sensation that he was missing something.

Did I forget something on the plane?

Everything out beyond his immediate senses dissolved, and he couldn’t remember what he had been trying to remember. Maybe he had forgotten his parachute. Did he even know how to use—

The knock on the door shot him off of the couch.

“Police! Open up!”

He was wrapped up in the blanket, his own weight fighting against him as he tried to push free. His pistol dug into his hip through the blanket. Useless.