How do you hunt a lost soul?
Cooper dreamed of never-ending retail parking lot where cops spawned like video game mobs. He ran from them, hid from them, but whenever they found him they never cuffed him, just stared at him with those eyes made of Otherworld. Eventually, just as he had every night since he had dropped in, he found the edges.
He stepped through one of the closed down strip mall stores, a Gamestop circa 2006 with a full size Kingdom Hearts 2 advertisement and 360 kiosk, and found the hallway that ran along his dreamworlds like a spine, or a plastic vein, dosing them with unease and forgetfulness.
Echoing, linoleum floored and fluorescent-lit. School hallway during classes meshed with a late night hospital wing. White noise from rooms unseen, like scrambled conversations and rushing blood in the ears. The doors on his left were endless, leading to more parking lots and other dreams, some molded from his Self, drug houses and arrests, and others seemed borrowed from the Real Cooper, embarrassing family dinners that took up stadiums and porn breaking into the real world and getting him fired. The dreams inevitably swallowed him and split his Spirit from its memory, so he avoided them, or tried to.
The opposite side of the hall was complete bare painted cinderblock wall, besides a single door. A metal slim windowed jail or school style door propped open on a rubber wedge, leading to a small room where two suited men with glittering pistols on their hips looked up from newspapers at him as he passed, their eyes made of something else, not this world or the other, but an energy crafted, he knew, to keep him from moving between the two, and to keep anyone else from getting here from there.
However, the seal wasn’t foolproof. In sleep he knew his Spirit, and as he walked the hallways now, a memory returned.
Memories of the Spirit never felt like those from the Real. The Spirit, he knew, is not bound by the flesh, neurons or grey matter. He had been told that the only thing keeping his memories of the Otherworld from staying static, crystalized, objective recordings of events as they had happened, was his own minds inability to accept that its limiting organ was no longer in control.
Regardless, the memory was close enough, and as it swelled in his mind, the hallway disappeared, and he moved through the events at the speed of thought.
Planetarium had been one of the firstborn resort worlds, supposedly. It was a scaled-down recreation of the solar system, with each planet dramatized in some way. Earth was endless beaches, backyards, and oceans. Mars was an ochre orb covered in biodomes and populated by blue-green women. Jupiter was a constant cyclone storm, they eye being the common dance floor, while the limited visibility in the arms made for an endless zone of pockets of privacy. Neptune was an orb of ocean navigated by carved icebergs. The sun was a crystal mazework of glittering lights that made anyone who entered it sweat baby oil and lose all of their clothes. In its day it had been infamous.
Now, it was as close to a ruin as anything could get in the Otherworld. Without aging, wearing down, or actually decaying, most places that fall out of vogue are just abandoned. Many of the first clubs and worlds hung frozen out in the dark, just as they had been the day the were made, but empty and quiet, kept in existence by the mythical ghostlike Principalities, or maybe by the memories of those who had seen them in their prime. There was a dignity in that. Planetarium, however, had just enough visitors to keep it alive. The cheap kinds of people, addicts and broke newborns, were like a life support line keeping a vegetable alive out of some perverse misunderstanding of theology.
The room the had spent their last hours in was made of a Saturn sunset, everything warm vanilla gold light and orange-tinted vapor. The circular dance floor was clear as glass and a lazy lightning storm raged below. The interior was shaped like the inside of a lampshade, with the wide mouth above open to a sea of stars, through which the other planets could be seen coasting by at times. Many of the visitors had oriented their gravity so that they danced or lounged on the walls, where rows of couches and cushions wound up like ripped wrinkles of a throat. Cooper, however, had been reminded of other body parts.
Ghostly attendants, colored to be transparent and ignorable, took orders. They were like videos cut and sliced and molded into human form. Cooper had never seen phantoms before that. They were forbidden by the Schema of almost every Principality from the Allworld to Gunmaze.
The main attraction, which he was sure hadn’t been there during Planetarium’s heyday, was the tangled orb of girls floating at the center of the room, fucking and squealing endlessly. For a price, one (or two) would dislodge herself from the group and float down to you, and for even more money she would hang around. The two girls Roland had enjoyed finished licking all the cum off themselves just before they returned to the throng, and a moment later it was like they had never left. Cooper knew just by the look in their eyes they were all under some illusion. They probably couldn’t even see the customers until they were bought. Maybe floating through forests and gumdrop lands. Real Spirits were always preferred over Phantoms. It seemed even the greatest makers had trouble creating lifelike people.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
They had been on their second full day in the resort, and were now completely out of mem. It had all been spent freely, knowing from the get-go that the robbery would go down when they ran out, a predetermined signal left up to just enough variability to keep any of them from pussing out or turning snitch.
Roland, who had just spent the last of the mem on the two working girls, lay back with a lazy look in his eye. One of the tourists they had caught up in their current heckled him to take a nap. Cooper felt the pounding demand from his own groin after watching the twins gyrate for what had felt like hours, another remnant of the flesh, along with the refraction period Roland was trying desperately to shake off. For a small fortune, you could buy a drug to remove the mental dam, dusty remnant that it was, and let the orgasms flow like heartbeats. It lasted hours or minutes depending on who you asked, and its mechanism was a mystery to Cooper. He imagined the placebo effect took a role, but try as he might to swallow a pill of his own making, telling himself in deep seriousness that post-sex grogginess would be a thing of his past, it never worked. Probably for the best. He knew many Bliss addicts, and suspected one of their new friends, the one hammering away at an anime-eyed construct, might be one of them.
Then the memory got hazy. Someone had suggested they go back to their craft, maybe take a scenic path to the Allclub, but he couldn’t remember who it was. JP was their pilot, but he didn’t remember him suggesting anything other than “damn look at that bitch go”. The hole in Cooper’s memory left him grasping for the solid pieces, and he realized a lot of it was hazy.
He couldn’t remember how the two groups had gotten together, only that Ooma had gotten flirty with one of the guys, and Zip had gotten jealous and pulled her aside. The other guys group had approached the two of them, and Cooper, JP, and Rowland had stepped up in case anything went down. Of course, fights on the ball usually consisted of one party being sent flying and absolutely no pain to speak of, but these old worlds were rumored to have a more primitive schema to handle fights. The prince would let you throw hands and feel the impact, broken noses and all, until a set timer was reached and a light or something would appear. First person to touch it got to stay, while the other Spirit got launched out into the black.
Or at least that’s what Rowland had told him. Cooper never got to find out. The two groups meshed together like old friends and for the next day and a half they tore up three planets. Fast friends aside, Rowland let them all know throughout the night that these were the guys they were gonna test it out on. Ooma looked devastated, but went along just fine when the time came. It was one of those things where Cooper imagined another version of himself transplanted to the victim’s side. Like that scam they had run on those Gunmaze noobs. But he did his part at the jump too. Looking back, it had been like someone else miles away and years apart had set it all in motion, and there was nothing he could have done.
It had come out of nowhere. A blocky mass of solid darkness. Light died on its surface, unreflected. It was impossible and unnecessary to be sure how big it was. They had found it by accident, flying in the void. Rowland had seen a black angular shape, like “a bunch of black rectangles” slide in front of a cluster of worlds, maybe Cyberia and its orbitals. It took them hours to find it again, and they only did because he got JP to send some lights out. It had been an hour arguing about that. JP was afraid someone else would see the lights and snag whatever it was from them. He had wanted to sell it. Anything that black would sell to the makers for a good price. Rowland had seen it and realized what it was. Said he thought he knew how to use one.
“Now we’ll find out for sure,” Cooper had thought, watching Roland dazzle one of the tourists with his mini-dancer construct. A few minutes later they were floating down the exit hallway on Saturn to the ring of craft docks. He remembered trading scared glances with JP, sinister smiles with Rowland, and feeling Ooma’s hand on his back, turning to see her reassuring smile, like he was a kid about do something he had just recently come of age for.
For a moment, he had been worried their marks would see it, stuck to the side of their craft, but it had changed color and was completely invisible, so much that JP looked up for it as they got to the bay, saw it missing and looked around at his friends frantically until someone whispered in his ear and calmed him down.
They had waited until Planetarium was a speck in the distance before inviting the victims to their “Sim room”
Afterward, JP called it a mouse trap. Fitting. The way the darkness had snapped over them, one by one, as their squeal-like screams snapped off suddenly. It had even felt like watching vermin get trapped. The thing had dropped them down and away, and given the group an overhead vantage on everything.
It went so smoothly, Cooper had felt like someone was operating it, that maybe Rowland really had known how to use it, but afterward, Rowland confessed he hadn’t done a thing. It had seemed to do all the work for them.
There, he stopped the memory cold. He knew the general shape of what had come after, the brief celebration, the slow realization, the feeble attempts to escape, and at the darkest moment, the unexpected and still unexplained aid.
They had told him not to think about it, that his existence might depend on his ability to forget it, so he yanked his brain away before it had a chance to think about who had told him that.
Every night he remembered. Every night he was unable to stop himself from one last trip across the memory’s jagged surface, and every night he got a little bit closer to losing his grip at the last second, and slipping the rest of the way down. But tonight, he remembered that other him sleeping in a cell, and the memories pull lost some of it’s edge. Tonight, he wanted to see something else besides traps and cells, because there was a good fucking chance that’s all the future held for Cooper, Self or Spirit.
He dropped out of the darkness and back into the humming hallway. When he got to his feet, he shoved open the first door he saw and threw himself into whatever dreams may come.