《MANDALA》


 Prologue

    Bear with me, my memory is hazy...


    It was a long way down. Fifty stories of empty air between him and a vaulted semicylindrical skylight. Tempered window glass glittered on the roof, the stairs, the street, reflecting the red-blue lightbars like fae fire for the modern age.


    Up here, golden twilight bled across the sky from an hour dead sun. Down there, downtown gathered shadow in the streets and alleys and on the eastern faces of the buildings. Somewhere a helicopter growled. Newscast. They had already lost one police chopper. A smoking husk setting fire to a grass slope between the curved ramps of the mixmaster, its jet fuel burning on six lanes.


    Snipers watched him. Swat moved into the lobby below, ant-like. National guard not far behind. Unknowable tier-one operators waiting in the wings after that. His death inescapable. But something else, something more pressing, had chased him up here.


    ¡°You¡¯ve made your own little world and you think you¡¯re safe in it. There¡¯s no place they can¡¯t get to anymore. That time is over. You can either go down pretending it isn¡¯t, or you can bring some piece of that old world with you into the new. God knows we¡¯re going to need it.¡±


    But he had never felt safe. Never felt powerful. Never felt like he was untouchable. He didn¡¯t need to. He had had something better. He had never felt alone.


    Until now.


    Behind him, the door flew off the hinges and bounced along the carpet. He was already falling when the gun fired, a CQBR M4. He could tell by the sound, but he would have known without hearing it, the same way he knew without looking who fired it.


    The round that made it under his back plate was the most painful wound of his existence. It twisted like a knife and stung like hate, burned like betrayal.


    Other guns joined in, but they missed or jammed. Useless. He was already dead, a falling corpse too forsaken to stop breathing.


    Air rushed over his ears, drowning out everything like the world was screaming. A spotlight flashed up and passed over him, blinding him for a brief moment, a sun-bright star turning everything else to darkness, reminding him of another world. When the city returned, he saw a jagged gap in the vaulted frame rising towards him and the body crumpled in the lobby below. Another fallen Angel.


    He pulled the chute and the harness squeezed the wound. The city around him burned and the sound of rushing blood drowned out the wind in his ears. Then the old familiar feeling of flight took his spirit with it, and the pain faded to nothing. He cut right at four hundred feet up, aiming at the black mirror side of a swordblade shaped tower. A lucky spotlight caught him. Doomed him.This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.


    He barely heard the gunfire, but the tracers glowed like meteors and cracked like a body on the pavement. They zipped past his head, tore through his canopy, dug into his shoulder, and sliced paracord to nothing. The spotlight held him until he spun and dropped uncontrollably. Defeated by light. Falling into darkness. What kind of Angel?


    Black glass rushed by him as he struggled for control and flew over a thin grey sliver of building so close he almost lost his legs to the AC units. As he came out from the side of the black tower, another current sent him spinning again, but not before he saw it.


    Alone on a triangle plot of grass, cement pathways, and fountain ponds. Unnatural in an urban biome of glass and steel. Squat corkscrew tower of white stone, made in imitation and celebration of things a thousand years dead. He laughed. It seemed to pull him in, spiral roof coming up to meet him, to catch him, to save him. Another god damned spotlight swept him as he tried to position himself for some kind of landing. He found the flashlight button and trigger on his slung FN F2000 and fired half a mag between his feet. The disc of plastic set in the top of the spiral shattered and wildflower colored stained glass burst beneath it, flowing down his beam into the dark chapel. He fell through the ring without a scrape, as if guided.


    The sudden stop pulled the harness so tight on his wound that for a moment the world went black and he floated in a swarm of glowing rainbow fragments while spirits waited out in the dark.


    He returned to reality hanging forty feet up in the air, blood running down his leg, flashlights sweeping in through the doorway below, catching bits of colored glass and shell casings on the floor. He got the harness undone with sluggish movements while the beams below grew brighter and boots striking concrete echoed in the conical hall.


    Just before he got the last strap off, a spotlight flashed above him, sending a solid column of white past his head and setting the colored circles on fire. The rotary blades roared over his heartbeat and a voice boomed out of a loudspeaker, wordless, barking.


    The strap gave. He dropped and his legs pulled in automatically for a para fall. For a moment, he thought he would fall forever. The floor and walls were one plane of darkness beneath a blazing white oval and a scattering of prismatic shapes.


    His knees came up with a jolt and his feet crashed through a chair. He rolled hard on the carpet and slammed into a cube-shaped stone altar.


    A moment of stillness. Light playing on the walls. The helicopter morphed into a thunderstorm. They broke in with weapons raised, screaming.


    ¡°Hands! Lemme see your fucking hands! Hands! Drop the rifle!¡±


    It¡¯s on a sling, dipshit. But all that came out was a wheeze. They kept on screaming anyway. As if they didn¡¯t want to shoot him. As if they didn¡¯t know the guys on that first chopper.


    A voice came in, clear as polished silver, floating over the screaming like real speech over TV dialogue.


    ¡°It won¡¯t end with this.¡±


    That¡¯s what you think. But again, just a wheeze. He grabbed the F2000 with one hand and they shot him thirty times. He watched glowing gunsmoke rise to the disk of light above and disappear.

 The Office Job | Chapter 1: The Gun

    Gradie dreamed of being chased and a gun that refused to fire. As he awoke, the details of the dream faded like vapor, but the fear remained. He told himself it was the fear of being late again, another write-up, another meeting, but it wouldn¡¯t fit. It was the fear of having forgotten something. A revelation given by the dream, slaughtered by the alarm.


    Morning broke open as he hit the highway and the sky turned a sweet pinkish-orange, like the strawberry-banana drinks he used to get as a kid, glass bottle shining in the summer sun, dripping condensation like mercury. Thin clouds took on the colors and floated lazily above the grey concrete chopping by. Passing cars reflected the sky on back windows, chrome strips, and side mirrors. He tried to ignore it. There was something about it all that reminded him of the dream, of something forgotten.


    He worked at an office park off the highway, in a water-stained cement and glass tower. The little gazebos that had seemed so charming during his interview looked like gargoyles two years later and the bowl-shaped cracked parking lot seemed about to fall through into something unknown. He walked across it, trying not to see, wondering how it would look to him in another two years.


    He beeped his ID on the door and the noise found a thousand others in his memory, all singing that he¡¯d be here forever. He rushed past the coffee gargling break room, already smelling of microwaved Styrofoam, into a cubicle maze of white noise and coaxing voices. A clock on the wall said 0801. He dropped his bag next to his desk and clocked in without sitting down. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.


    After a few minutes of daydreaming, he clicked the icon that brought up accounts, like shooting an old friend. The first one had a long history of phone calls to an insurance company with nothing accomplished, each one spent entirely on hold. A small mercy. He opened his bag to pull out his book, a thick paperback fantasy, and locked up like he had touched a live wire.


    He went through much of his day, especially at the office, in a series of automatic movements that slipped by unnoticed. (He would park his car at the apartment and be unable to remember anything about the drive home). But now that automata had encountered something unexpected, and froze.


    The shape was familiar, but the familiarity was fleeting. Fluorescent light caught a textured matte-black grip and a mirror square of metal.


    A handgun. His thoughts became a solid tone, like a piano key held down. He broke out in a full sweat and slumped over in his chair. When he could move, he reached back in, expecting his hand to pass through the gun like a hologram. He wrapped his fingers around it and lifted. It was heavy and real.


    What the fuck?


    Someone walked down the aisle throwing out good mornings and he closed the bag in a hurry. He pressed his fingers into his palm to make sure he wasn¡¯t dreaming.


    He was undeniably awake.

 The Office Job | Chapter 2: The Diner

    Two killers walk into a greasy spoon. One says to the other-


    What started as a sheet metal taco stand next to an auto shop was now a fully built restaurant, its wide windows covered in fluorescent advertisements for specials that never went away, and a small drive-through window punched into the side. Truckers and office workers sat side by side under humming fluorescent lights, pressed against walls covered in framed newspapers and fake memorabilia. Cheap cooking oil smoked on hash browns, and scents of coffee and bacon floated by in little pockets.


    A blonde woman in a navy trench coat sat near the front window, arms folded, legs crossed, coiled like a snake. Her coffee steamed untouched on the table and she watched the door with prepared disappointment.


    A black SUV pulled up to the fractured cement ramp out front. A broad man in a Burberry trench over an Adidas tracksuit got out of the center door and smiled like the world had rolled into his trap. He made it halfway to the entrance and remembered the cigarette dangling from his mouth. He took one last kiss-you-goodbye drag and flicked it away. The smoke clung to his head as he stepped through the door.


    ¡°Good morning sir. Table or booth?¡± the hostess called to him. He pointed and walked towards the blonde woman, who watched him with a look like disgust but less passionate.


    ¡°Morning,¡± he said in a low tone that told everyone around to stop listening. His SUV parked in a spot just outside the window and a tall thin man in a charcoal suit stepped out of the driver¡¯s door and lit a cigarette. The blonde woman felt that if a bomb went off, he would just shrug and take another drag. She sighed and looked back across the table.


    ¡°Good morning. I¡¯m Theresa,¡± said Lindsey, green eyes sharpened under thick brown eyebrows. She had a soft round face, held in a controlled pose of contempt, with a chin strong enough to make it work. The man took off his sunglasses and blinked his flashing brown eyes at her.


    ¡°Nice to meet you, Theresa. I¡¯m Malachi,¡± said Philip, smiling.


    Lindsey squeezed her coffee cup in a way that let him and anyone else still watching know she wanted to throw it at him.


    ¡°What¡¯s on your mind?¡±


    ¡°Wait...¡±


    He held up his hand and spun around as the waitress walked up behind him.


    ¡°Four scrambled eggs, four pieces of white buttered toast, four big ass pieces of bacon, and a pot, like the whole damn pitcher, of coffee. Thanks.¡±


    He turned around and the waitress scratched on a notepad.


    ¡°Write while you walk, babe.¡± She grimaced and marched off. He smiled and reached over the table for Lindsey¡¯s cup.This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    ¡°You never drink your coffee.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t see the point,¡± she said. He laughed and his bulging cheekbones jumped on his face.


    ¡°No fun at all. Here.¡±


    He handed her a phone. She turned it on with her thumbprint and pulled up a file labeled Paul. It gave his home address, employer, favorite bars and clubs, work schedule, and friends (the smallest portion). There was also a black and white photo and some handwritten notes in the margins.


    ¡°What¡¯s all this shit on the sides?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s my notes.¡± He leaned back in his seat proudly and stretched. His wide chest tested the zipper on the tracksuit.


    ¡°I can¡¯t read it. Is she sure about his job? It doesn¡¯t seem like he would go for it.¡± According to the file, he worked at a large insurance company as a shift supervisor. Usually, they were venture capitalists or something.


    ¡°They made sure,¡± said Philip. He grunted at the end of his stretch and brought his hands together on the table.


    ¡°They?¡±


    ¡°Yea, Mom and, uh, Rochelle. Went in together while he was out.¡± He finished the coffee and set the cup down at the edge of the table.


    ¡°So, he¡¯s not up?¡±


    ¡°No.¡± He looked back towards the kitchen. A few people who had been staring at them looked away hurriedly and he smiled at the side of their heads.


    ¡°Then he¡¯s being watched,¡± Lindsey said. Philip, seeing no sign of his food, leaned forward over the table.


    ¡°Probably. That¡¯s what my notes said.¡± He pointed at the phone.


    ¡°Any clue who¡¯s covering him?¡±


    ¡°No idea. I don¡¯t think they¡¯re anyone big time, though.¡± Lindsey was about to tell him what his assumptions were worth to her when the waitress came up from the kitchen. She set down the plate of eggs, bacon and toast, the pot of coffee, and a smaller plate with three pancakes.


    ¡°Pancakes?¡±


    ¡°They come with all breakfast combos,¡± the waitress said icily.


    ¡°Does it count as a combo? Thought it was, like, ¨¤ la carte.¡± She was already gone, so he looked at Lindsey instead. ¡°I guess since I ordered so much?¡±


    ¡°Was there something else or can I leave you to your food?¡± She had tried to get him to just leave the goddamned phone somewhere else, but he had said he was ¡®already on the road¡¯. She had been trained not to meet up unless absolutely necessary. The boss had told her Philip was old school, but every job so far had her doubting it.


    He pulled his jacket off and let it hang on the back of the seat. A few of the truckers who had been watching from a booth started talking quietly about the obvious shape of body armor under his tracksuit. He unrolled the silverware from the napkin and cleared his throat.


    ¡°Have you seen Monkey? She hasn¡¯t touched base yet.¡±


    Lindsey let the silence grow before she spoke, low and sharp.


    ¡°Who?¡±


    Philip realized his blunder. ¡°God dammit, Beth, or whatever. Our driver?¡±


    Lindsey stayed quiet.


    ¡°Fine, well, if you hear anything, just let me know.¡±


    ¡°Is that all?¡±


    ¡°Yea. No! You know where the new guy is on this?¡± he pointed with his knife and dripped syrup on the table.


    She just glared at him, so he sighed and started forking his food.


    ¡°All right, whatever. It¡¯d be nice to know. Like there¡¯s microphones in the silverware or some shit.¡±


    Outside the diner, Lindsey stopped next to the man in the charcoal suit and pretended to check her phone.


    ¡°The less words that come out of his mouth, the better.¡± She said just loud enough for him to hear. He smiled and flicked a butt on the ground.


    ¡°You haven¡¯t seen him work,¡± he said to the wind. She glanced up at the sky and walked off across the parking lot. Last night''s rain had broken into thin fragments of clouds, and a bright ring of silver morning reached over the banks and fast-food places like an explosion frozen in the air. It was one of those electric days where every sound carried for miles. What a day to die.

 The Office Job | Chapter 3: The Target

    Is there a price on my head, or am I just hungover?


    Paul had a rough night and some strange dreams. He had stayed out clubbing till three in the morning and according to his account, had spent four thousand dollars at bars, strip clubs, and ATMs. There was no one else in his bed, but he had dreamed of two of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. He didn¡¯t think he could have made them up. He wasn¡¯t that creative.


    What he was, at least, was rich. He traveled all over the country helping criminals hide their money, which lately meant a lot of crypto wallets and trying to explain the difference between Bitcoin and Monero to people who knew how to manage criminal networks like magic but had never passed a math class. Some trips were covered by his day job, supervising the west coast accounts unit at a large insurance company. He paid his manager three grand a month to fudge the productivity reports and generally make him invisible to management. He laundered his money in the usual ways and had recently made a fortune trading options in an insane bull market. Life was good.


    One of his favorite things about his life was staying up all night, which also meant sleeping in. Most days, this wasn¡¯t a problem. He would get up around one, make it to the office after three (already clocked in since eight). However, it was only nine o¡¯ clock and he was wide awake. His phone was ringing for the second time, buried in his clothes on the floor halfway across the room and he kicked two bottles getting to it.


    ¡°Hello, Paul?¡±


    He nearly threw it into the wall. It was his therapist. He had weekly sessions about a suicide attempt he only half-remembered. According to the police report, he had tried to drive his car off a bridge and only managed to get it stuck on a curb. He usually got really fucked up before he went, but had just skipped the last two. He figured that since he didn¡¯t remember them anyway, there wouldn¡¯t be any harm in not going at all. His therapist disagreed.


    ¡°Paul, I have you down for nine-thirty today. Do you remember when we agreed on that time? You rescheduled twice before, and you assured me this time would work for you. I tried to call you three times last night.¡±


    So that¡¯s who was blowing up his phone in the champagne room.


    ¡°I¡¯m not going to be able to make it. I got to go to work.¡±


    ¡°I thought you didn¡¯t go in until the afternoon. Isn¡¯t that the arrangement?¡±


    Paul pulled the phone away from his face and gawked at it. How much had he told this dude?


    ¡°Uh, no, what? I just can''t make it. Look, I''m doing better, I just¡ª¡±


    ¡°Paul, the court mandated that you attend our sessions. If you don¡¯t show up today, I''ll have to report it.¡±


    Shit. He could probably pay him off. But why hadn''t he done that before? Had he tried? He couldn¡¯t remember.


    ¡°All right, fine. Can you give me a couple of hours? I just got up.¡±


    ¡°I will see you at ten. I¡¯ll have breakfast brought to my office, so don¡¯t worry about eating beforehand. Please expect to stay until eleven. Goodbye.¡±


    He hung up! Paul considered having him dissolved in a barrel somewhere, but something told him he had to go to this session or the heat was going to come down on him hard. He decided just to pop something and head out, but found the condo completely drug-free, nothing but thin amber slivers left in the bottles.


    He passed out in the back of the Uber on the way and dreamed of a room with no doors. When he screamed, his voice echoed back as a laugh.


    His therapist¡¯s office was halfway up a black glass tower downtown, in a hooked hallway between a hedge fund and a fintech startup. The breakfast spread came from a five-star kitchen at the top and almost made it all worth it. He gave his therapist, Andler, a censored summary of his last few weeks while he finished two plates. Afterward, Andler asked him something he asked every session, or at least the ones Paul remembered. It had never seemed weird before. It did today.Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.


    ¡°Any strange dreams lately?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°None?¡±


    ¡°I never dream.¡±


    ¡°Everyone dreams, Paul. Every night. You just might not remember them.¡± The office was small and minimally furnished, but what was there screamed money. Andler was sitting in a love seat across the coffee table. Paul was sunk into a big leather couch he always struggled not to fall asleep in during their sessions, sipping orange juice and praying for vodka.


    ¡°Then I don¡¯t remember them.¡±


    ¡°Paul, you¡¯re sober today for once, which I appreciate, but you usually don¡¯t have any problems talking about your dreams. That tells me you want to, but you think you need the drugs to get up the courage to do so.¡±


    Paul didn¡¯t remember ever telling him about his dreams. Looking back, he could remember being asked, but had no idea what he had said.


    ¡°So, you analyze dreams? I thought that was outdated.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t analyze them in the Freudian sense, no. However, they can be useful for you to talk about.¡±


    ¡°Like, what I say I feel about my dreams is more important than what you think they symbolize?¡±


    ¡°You could say that.¡±


    Paul ate more of the scones and drank some coffee. He watched the river glitter behind the downtown skyline out the massive floor-to-ceiling window and wondered if any patients ever tried to throw themselves out of it.


    ¡°Paul, you really can''t recall any of your dreams? You told me last month you would try to remember as many as you could.¡±


    Andler moved his papers around in his folder. Paul hated it. Despite his efforts, there was more of him in those pages than on this side of the coffee table. Maybe coming here high had been a bad idea.


    ¡°It was one of our goals, the first one. ¡®I will try to remember my dreams. I think they are important. That¡¯s what you wrote right here.¡±


    Andler showed him the paper with his handwriting. Paul didn¡¯t remember writing it. He looked at it like he was giving it serious thought and imagined some maniac throwing Andler through the window.


    ¡°We talked about lucid dreaming, how a friend told you about it and you felt it would be helpful to you.¡±


    Paul smiled and nodded. His friend had said ¡°Bruh, you can fuck any girl you want, any way you want when you go lucid. I fuck porn stars two at a time every night¡±. It had sounded legit.


    ¡°Do you remember any of your dreams this week?¡±


    Paul thought about the two girls from last night, which was easy as he had been thinking about them off and on all morning, and decided it would be funny to see Andler¡¯s reaction. He couldn¡¯t imagine the guy even discussing sex. If those two girls showed up at Andler¡¯s house, he¡¯d probably make them tea and ask them about their dads.


    ¡°Well, last night I dreamed about two girls, the hottest girls I''ve ever seen, I mean ever. I don¡¯t know how my mind did it. I''m not creative enough to come up with girls that hot, you know?¡±


    Andler¡¯s reaction was not what Paul had expected. He got very still and seemed to be waiting for Paul to give some grand confession.


    ¡°What did these girls want from you?¡±


    Paul laughed and spilled his coffee.


    ¡°Are you a robot, Andler?¡±


    Andler didn¡¯t laugh, and something in his not laughing killed Paul''s laughter. Was he analyzing his dreams for real?


    ¡°Did they ask you anything?¡± Andler said.


    ¡°Uh, yea, you know, normal girl shit. Where I worked, how much I made, what I do for fun.¡±


    ¡°What did you tell them?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know why, but I told them about my job, that I worked for an insurance company. It was weird but, they seemed really interested. Like they thought it was cool that I worked there. What''s that mean?¡±


    Andler took a moment to snap out of whatever thoughts he was having.


    ¡°It could be a sign that you want to be that person, to take pride in your job. The idea of someone liking you for that seems to be something you want. What else did they ask you?¡±


    ¡°Uh, where the good clubs were, stuff about the city. I think they were from out of town. What does that mean?¡±


    ¡°What else did they ask you?¡± Paul usually took no shit from anyone, and by all rights he should have backhanded Andler for his tone alone, not to mention ignoring his question, but something had come over him and he couldn¡¯t even consider doing anything besides answering truthfully.


    ¡°They asked me where I would be tomorrow. I mean today. They wanted to see me again.¡±


    ¡°What else?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s it.¡±


    ¡°Are you sure?¡±


    ¡°Yes. Sorry.¡± Paul couldn¡¯t remember the last time he had apologized to anyone.


    Andler sat back and sighed.


    ¡°Well, I want you to think about what you think that dream means and tell me about it next session. And try to remember any other dreams you have. We talked about dream journals a few sessions ago. I suggest you try your best to write in yours regularly.¡± There was a pause.


    ¡°Are we done?¡± Paul asked. It had only been half an hour.


    ¡°Yes.¡± Andler didn¡¯t offer any other explanation, and Paul remembered he didn¡¯t want to be there anyway, so he got up and left.


    When he was gone, Andler took out his phone.


    ¡°He just left. Someone¡¯s trying to get to him. No. I don¡¯t know. Two girls, it seems. Got his P.O.E. Understood. No. Well, call me if they do so, and I¡¯ll get him up.¡±


    He hung up and went behind the desk, pulled the carpet up, and opened a floor safe. He took out a Beretta Px4 with a custom grip, a pouch of three magazines and some car keys, then grabbed his other keys off the desk and went out the door.

 The Office Job | Chapter 4: Death Threats

    Did you put ketamine in the Coffee-Mate??


    The office park, four glass buildings brushed with sad oaks and box hedges, waited for him like jail time. There was nothing around but the same old paved over prairie land stacked with strip malls, chain restaurants, parking lots, clustered office buildings, and upper-middle-class housing units cranked out like thirty caliber rounds. The land was as smooth as if it had been created the same moment as the highway and the sky slid across it all without resistance. It made him miss the beaches of Thailand and the clubs of Ibiza. This kind of America felt like quicksand.


    Paul had stopped by a liquor store on the way and poured a quarter of the whiskey into a coke with a few sips missing. He shoved the bottle into his shoulder bag and walked towards the tallest building. An armed guard watched him from outside the front door. They had beefed up security after some guy came in with a gun. He had waved it around in the lobby crying about something, then drove home and shot a few cars on the highway. He was watching porn in his living room when the cops broke down the door. Everyone at work was cracking jokes about it for a month until they sent out that email. "Can you blame him?" "A living legend." "I got one of his signed qualities. Think I''m gonna frame it."


    Paul felt he was being watched and looked around. His Uber passed a black Mercedes SUV parked near the edge of the lot. The driver had that ex-military or current cop look to him. He glanced at Paul and then back down at his lap.


    "Oh, what the fuck is this?" Paul muttered. After he was wanded, he saw another cop-looking guy in the lobby who made eye contact over a magazine. Paul looked away and got in the elevator.


    "I''ll just go in my office, tell them to fuck off and come back with a warrant. Then when they''re gone, I''ll get lost." The elevator climbed. Did they need a warrant to search his office? Had one of the workers called in a tip or something? Was there even anything in his office? Stupid! Probably just some corporate guys. The reports must have finally set off alarms higher up. Whatever. He could get another job.


    He stepped out of the elevator and saw his senior manager, Todd, standing between the reception area and the call center floor with a man he had never seen. The man was shorter than Todd but filled out his suit like the god damned terminator. He looked like something out of an old mob movie. Short slick hair, sharp brown eyes, charcoal suit, and a striped wallpaper tie. Paul turned to go around the edge of the cubicles toward his office in the back, hoping they hadn''t seen him.


    "Paul," Todd called. Shit. Paul looked around for a bit like no one would ever have a reason to call his name before making eye contact and walking over.Stolen novel; please report.


    "Hey, did you call the attendance line?" Todd asked.


    "Uh, no, I had kind of a rough morning."


    "Ok, no problem. I''ll take care of it. This is Robert. Mind if we go talk in your office?"


    Paul shook Robert''s hand awkwardly, then led them both across the floor. He glanced around and saw Jeremy, his manager, watching like they were taking Paul to be executed and he was next. Paul glared but couldn''t really blame him. This didn''t seem like something three grand a month could take care of.


    They all went into his office. Robert sat like the terminator too.


    "Ok, Robert''s with NFG." Paul almost ran right then. Nations First Guard was the security company brought on after the incident. They had good relations with law enforcement and hired a bunch of veterans. They were also the only reason Paul had been thinking of changing locations. Should have known this setup was too good to last.


    "Sir, I''ll cut right to it. We''ve received some threats against your person, which we have reason to believe could be legitimate."


    "What? Like from the employees? What kind of threats?"


    "Some kind of retaliation. Can you think of anyone that would feel like you wronged them in some way?"


    "No. I''m just a supervisor. I''ve never even fired anyone," Paul said. Todd shifted in his seat.


    "Well, we''re going to be keeping an eye out,¡± Robert said. ¡°I''m going to leave you my info and if you think of anything, or if anyone tries to contact you, just let me know." He got up, handed out cards, shook hands, everyone said goodbye, and he was gone. Todd turned to Paul with his hands up like he expected a freak out.


    "Now before you get all excited, Robert told me they think it might be just some guy off his meds. Maybe related to that other guy. I think he said something about an incel website."


    "Who the fuck called NFG?" Paul had forgotten himself out of panic, but Todd ignored it.


    "I don''t know, Paul, now just calm down. I don''t think anyone called them, but this is serious. They said they might have to escalate the case to the cops."


    Paul clenched his teeth together.


    The case. Fuck me, I''m in a god damned file somewhere now. Notes being added. My picture in the corner. This Paul character, I wanna know everything about him.


    "So, what? Am I just supposed to stay here for the rest of the day, waiting to get blown up or shot?"


    "No, Christ Paul! Nothing like that is going to happen. They''re all over the place and this guy is probably just some nut. They did say they would prefer it if you stayed in the building.¡±


    ¡°So I¡¯m just supposed to sit here waiting to die!"


    "No one''s gonna die, Paul! They said it''s just emails right now. Probably some kid in a basement in another state."


    "How am I supposed to work like this? I can''t leave?"


    "They said they''d prefer if you didn''t. Look, there''s no reason to panic. Just sit and watch some videos or something."


    "What?!"


    "Well, I don''t expect you to do any metrics or one-on-ones given the circumstances. But I did tell Robert I could get you to stay the rest of the day. It didn''t look good for me when you came in late, I''ll say that!" Todd had his hands on his hips and was red in the face. Paul wished he was in the mood to laugh.


    "All right. Fuck!"


    Todd wiped the sweat off his forehead and left. Paul heard him murmuring to some people outside in a reassuring tone.


    He sat down and took out his phone. How was he going to get out of here?

 The Office Job | Chapter 5: Lindsey

    There¡¯s a shell casing in my Caesar salad.


    The glass tower shot up into the blue sky, reflecting it in a deeper hue. Ghosts of hazy fluorescent lighting peeked through in dim squares. A flat cement parking garage, sunk into the ground off the side of the building, watched her from wide dark slits. The entire structure seemed to dare her.


    She counted at least three hired guns parked in the back lot, and a few other vehicles checked all the boxes. Live oaks had spread enough roots under the concrete to burst out in masses of dark green leaves. She was parked under one with an untouched to-go salad on her thigh and a laptop in the passenger seat. When the wind blew, tiny leaves shaped like cockroaches fluttered past the windshield. She watched some employees come out of flashing doors and move across the grass lawns and parking lots like things caught in the breeze or ants following a process familiar only to them.


    "I can get in with the rest of the lunch rush coming back."


    "You don''t have a badge," EP said. Her voice came through the earbuds with a clattering of keys behind it and snapped off suddenly. It was like a sharpened purr with just a rinse of a Russian accent.


    "I forgot it. Silly me," Lindsey said.


    "You should leave that kind of thing to Rochelle. Anyway, they''ll be looking for that."


    Lindsey scanned the files on the laptop screen.


    "Got a lot of disposable income."


    "Yea. Probably a trust fund baby. He gets regular payments from some pretty big boomer investments."


    "So, he''s really a supervisor? At a life insurance company?"


    "Health insurance."


    "Pretty boring."


    "They like to put them in dull jobs if they can. Makes them harder to find."


    "Apparently not."


    "Just because I did it doesn''t mean it was easy." There was no tapping of keys under her voice this time.


    "Sorry babe. Forgot you''re just that good."


    Lindsey watched the people walk by and a tired question drifted into her head. She shook it off and looked back at the office. Blue block letters at the top tried to make a bullshit word seem legitimate.


    "Babe, could his job be a front?"


    "For what?" said EP.


    "Like maybe he''s undercover, or a drug lord, sometimes they..."


    "You rang?" Philip said. His voice cut in with the distinctive roar of the inside of a car in traffic.


    "Why are you on this line?" Lindsey said.


    "Thought I''d stay in the loop."


    "You''ve handed this job off to the professionals already. Go take a nap."


    "So he''s dead? Why didn''t I hear?"


    Lindsey squeezed the steering wheel. The Boss had brought Philip and the other two members of his crew on to supplement their manpower a few jobs ago. They had mostly operated independently, which was fine with her, but recently Michael had sat them all down and talked about integrating and streamlining and the tried-and-true optimum team size. Now they were working this op together. Pointless. If it got bad enough that they needed the extra firepower, they would be outgunned anyway.The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.


    "Babe, mute him," Lindsey said. Philip got half a syllable out before EP silenced him.


    "Done. Anyway, I''m trying to trace his accounts. Got all the normie shit already, trying to track him with some of his pics. One sec."


    Lindsey sat in silence and watched the people stream out, endless. Her phone vibrated. It was a number she didn''t recognize.


    "Shit. Mute Line," she said, and her earbuds chirped.


    "Hello?"


    "Hey, you think they gave him some other history?" Phillip said.


    "Holy fuck dude! How did you get this number?"


    "I have my ways. Look, let me be honest for a second. I''ve held back a bit the last few jobs because I didn''t want to step on anyone''s toes, but I can probably track this guy if you think he''s got some shady history."


    "Hold that thought." She hung up.


    "Open Line. Sorry babe, I''m back. Can you kick him from the call?"


    "Ok one sec." EP dragged Phillip¡¯s icon from Lindsey''s call to another channel and muted herself in it.


    "I found some more stuff on our guy. He makes a lot of out of state trips. The dates coincide with other shots of him at parties and clubs. I think you''re right. Looks like he''s going out of town to sell drugs or something."


    "Can you pull a police record? Parole officer or something? Maybe I can¡ª"


    "He doesn''t have a record, or I would have already found it. Can''t you just wait till he goes home? You have his address, right?"


    Lindsey sighed quietly. That''s the first thing they would expect. EP was a blessing for her intel and little fleet of drones, but when it came to the nuts and bolts of an op, she was still an amateur. Lindsey''s old boss never would have had it. Despite his flaws, every member worked front line before being put in a support position.


    "Uh, yeah. Can you send me the rest of his file? Just everything you have so far. I''m gonna look it over before I try and sneak in." EP sensed she was being brushed off.


    "Sure, then I guess I''ll go take a nap. Here''s Malachi." EP dragged Phillip''s icon back into Lindsey¡¯s call and muted herself.


    "No!" Lindsey hissed.


    "Hello?¡± said Philip. ¡°What did you find?"


    "Drop Line," said Lindsey. The earbuds chirped twice to let her know she was off the call.


    She grabbed her laptop and studied the file. He moved from work to the same two nightlife districts, to his condo, and his therapist once a week. That was it. Lindsey wondered if EP had cracked his phone, but didn''t feel like calling her back to ask. She looked back up at the office, a fifteen-story death trap, the kind of building they liked to fill with caches and teams on each floor. Even if she got in with the lunch rush and found out where he was, there was almost no chance of her getting to him without them knowing. The best option was to wait until he left. Or get him to leave.


    She looked over the file again. No family. No friends. Just whores and clients.


    Her phone vibrated again. Same number.


    "Hello?"


    "Hey, be on the lookout. He''s should be leaving soon," said Philip.


    "What?"


    "I called him. He''s gonna meet me to set up a deal."


    "You what? Fucking idiot, it''s a trap!"


    "Hey!" His voice was colder. "I''m telling you he''s moving. You can thank me later."


    "Fuck you."


    "Fine, you think it''s a trap, don''t go. What was your plan again? Sneak in with the lunch rush? Put a grenade in his Meatball sub?"


    He hung up. She threw her phone into the passenger door.


    That son of a bitch. If Philip fucked this up, Michael would give them a lecture about ¡°cohesion¡± and ¡°trusting each other¡±, and she would probably quit right there. How was she supposed to operate with a man-child trying to play contract killer? Why couldn''t he just get the gear, set up some stashes, and let her work? They had done just fine without him and his goons!


    Though, if she was being honest, she wouldn''t mind having Luke join the team.


    "Call Mark," she said. The earbuds beeped again.


    "What''s up? Was that you he was yelling at?" said Luke.


    "Yes! Did he tell you he called him?! I''m supposed to be looking to see when he leaves! He could have just trashed this job!"


    "You haven''t seen him work."


    "Ha, no, I have not, and¡ª"


    "But you''ve seen me work." She remembered suddenly and felt her face get warm.


    "So what¡ª"


    "So trust me. Do what he says."


    "I don''t really have a choice now!" she hissed, but he kept on like they were best friends.


    "True. Hey, do you know where the new guy is? Haven''t heard from him."


    "No," she snapped. "And it''s kind of a bad time to be doing training day, anyway." Michael had plucked the guy out of thin air and put him on the next job like what they did took nothing special. Or maybe he thought the guy had whatever it took in droves. Either way, adding on a new hire when the other three were far from adjusted was a shit move.


    "Boss told us to look out for him," Luke said.


    "Michael can fuck himself. I''m no one''s mom." she thought, but just said:


    "He was supposed to be observing, but If I see him, I''ll tell him you said hi. Drop line." She rolled down the window and threw her untouched salad into the side of a sedan.

 The Office Job | Chapter 6: Panik

    Nine2Fiv3 [headshot symbol] you


    The land was flat in all directions. Low silver clouds slid across the sky towards a knee-high horizon like they were part of some other world. It was the kind of bright blue day that had a feeling of motion even when standing still.


    Philip sat in the center of the SUV with Luke in the driver¡¯s seat, parked next to a 24-pump gas station facing an empty field. McMansions with faces of brick and vinyl siding stared hungrily over a subdivision wall at the bare earth and weeds, waiting to pounce.


    He had called one of his guys who had contacts near the target¡¯s POE to ask for the name of the cleaner that worked in the area.


    ¡°Peter, no, fuck, lemme see.¡± The guy had talked to someone in the background while a child¡¯s whine and the drone of daytime tv came through in choppy echoes. When he got back on the line, he said the cleaner¡¯s name was Paul and gave Philip the number to his secure line. Philip put on his best ¡°I¡¯m a little bitch trying to hide my money from the divorce lawyers¡± voice and made the call. ¡±Uh, I heard you do wallets and stuff.¡± That was that.


    Luke heard Philip yelling on the phone as he pulled out of the lot. Less than a minute later, he got the call from Lindsey. She sounded mad and he regretted he wasn¡¯t there to see her green eyes burning under those cute little eyebrows. He smiled and rested his hand on the big matte box built into the center console, like a movie cowboy holding his hand over a revolver.


    ¡°Thanks for backing me up,¡± Philip said.


    ¡°Don¡¯t make me regret it.¡±


    Philip leaned forward and opened the back of the console.


    ¡°How pissed do you think she¡¯ll be when I drop this guy over a fucking ham and swiss?¡±


    Luke glanced back as Philip took a small dark handgun, a SIG P365, out of the black box and racked the slide. A round went bouncing onto the floor.


    ¡°Shit.¡± He went down to pick it up.


    ¡°I keep all my chambers loaded. This ain¡¯t a goddamn field trip.¡± Luke said.


    Philip put the mag back in, racked the slide, ejected the mag, put the round back on top, and slapped it back into the gun.


    ¡°His guard will probably follow him and brain you when you sit down.¡± Luke rolled smoothly through a turn.


    ¡°Won¡¯t you be keeping an eye out? Or are you gonna let them pop me just to make a certain blonde woman smile?¡± Philip put the gun in his jacket pocket and took out a cigar tube.


    ¡°I¡¯m just saying you better shoot fast.¡±


    ¡°You remember I started out as an operator, right?¡± He put the cigar in his mouth and took out a lighter.


    ¡°That was a long time ago, I heard. Those don¡¯t roll down.¡± Said Luke. Philip had been poking the window controls repeatedly. He swore and cracked the sunroof.


    ¡°You know, he doesn¡¯t know what you look like. Why don¡¯t I just do it?¡± said Luke.The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    ¡°He may not know what I look like, but he knows I don¡¯t look like you. He heard me on the phone and my voice wouldn¡¯t come out of your face in a million years.¡±


    Philip held the cigar above the flame and rotated it slowly.


    ¡°Also, he should find me familiar when he sees me.¡± He smiled and blew on the glowing red end.


    Luke looked back for a moment. He had forgotten, even though he had just been telling Lindsey, that Philip was good.


    ****


    Gradie saw the gun waiting in the bag every time his mind drifted off. He worked on auto pilot. Numbers flew out of his mouth and his fingers fluttered on the keys, but there was nothing in his brain but jail cells and court appearances. He glanced at the timer. On hold 16 minutes. His shirt peeled off the chair as he stood up, expecting to see cops marching down the aisle. It was just the same spread of browns and greys. Someone leaned on the door to a cubicle office and laughed over their coffee. He sat back down and decided to look in the bag again. Maybe he had imagined it.


    He reached in and his fingers felt cold plastic. He snatched his hand away and zipped the bag closed. It must be hot. Some meth head dropped it into his bag yesterday when he left it out in the car, and now he was sitting at work with a murder weapon. He had to get it out of the office, but what if security stopped him for one of those searches they started after those laptops went missing? If he got caught with it, they would raid his house, search his computer, find all his journals and poems and figure ¡°Yea, this guy was gonna shoot up the place and got cold feet¡±. He would be on the news, run through the courts and never get another job. Never get laid again either. You only got the fan mail and shit if you actually killed someone.


    He wiped sweat off his forehead and tried to take deep breaths.


    Maybe he would just get fired, keep it quiet. Get a job working fast food or in a warehouse. Might not be so bad having a job that was anything but this. His breathing slowed, and he watched himself work a thousand jobs in a thousand other lives until he forgot where he was or what he was afraid of.


    ****


    Bolton sat in the corner of the conference room and leaned his forehead on the windowpane. Glass towers blended chameleon-like into the sky and cars inched across the highway. All those people. He usually didn¡¯t have time to think about it, but now¡­


    One of the Operators came in looking like any other office worker. It was so convincing that Bolton thought he had the wrong conference room. The door shut behind him like an air lock as he stopped dead, frozen by Anthony¡¯s glare.


    ¡°Were you monitoring when he got a call?¡± Anthony¡¯s voice was like a building collapsing.


    ¡°Uh, yeah, about lunch?¡±


    ¡°What did he say?¡±


    ¡°He just made plans with someone for lunch. Something about money. Probably for his drug gig. What? Were you not on that?¡± He looked around. Anthony stepped towards him. He was six and a half feet tall and built like a powerlifter. His shaved head said ex-con, but his suit whispered CEO.


    ¡°Where was he going and with who?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know. I only got his side. I don¡¯t get the recordings off his cell. Isn¡¯t it encrypted?¡±


    It was. The team hadn¡¯t thought about trying to monitor it because a tap would be another point of failure, and they had a lid on everyone who knew the number. Or so they thought.


    ¡°You didn¡¯t hear any names?¡± said Anthony.


    ¡°No. Wait! It was, uh¡ª¡± He hugged himself and looked up at the humming fluorescence. Anthony just watched.


    ¡°Oh, it was Davis! That¡¯s that guy in claims, right? No shit, that¡¯s David. Maybe¡ª¡±


    ¡°Who is Davis?¡± Anthony asked the room.


    One operator typed frantically into a laptop.


    ¡°He¡¯s a former client of Paul¡¯s. From a year ago.¡±


    ¡°Were any of you aware of his existence before hearing his name just now?¡±


    No one breathed. Anthony spoke to the room and into his headset.


    ¡°Anyone on action team go hot and get on the road. Intel, get into his phone and find him. Everyone else get set up, but don¡¯t spook the scenery. Let them fire first. Exit team on me.¡±


    Everyone moved at once. Some went out the door while others slid the top off the conference table and grabbed guns out of the slots.


    ¡°So, are we done with this place?¡± one operator whispered after Anthony had stepped out.


    ¡°Yep. We¡¯re outta this bitch.¡± another one said as he holstered a pistol.


    ¡°Why? If we can take them out, why not just stay here?¡±


    ¡°Because they tracked us already. It¡¯s better just to start from scratch. They¡¯ll just send in another team.¡± The operator slid an Origin 12 and two 20 round drum-mags into his work bag.


    Bolton went out the door without grabbing anything. If he got to the boiler room fast, he might get to use that SAW after all.

 The Office Job | Chapter 7: Lunch Rush

    FMJ BLT: $14.50


    The deli place was at the end of a long alley in a cluster of bar-grills and glass hotels, squeezed between two convention centers off the highway. Luke was parked in the back next to the outside seating area with his SIG rattler, a short assault rifle chambered in .300 blackout, in his lap. He had the seat rolled back into the shade and was near invisible thanks to the tint.


    The smell of onion rings and citrus-flavored Friday lunch cocktails came in the cracked sunroof, along with echoes of loud brags and laughs from people who made enough money to vacation in the Maldives three times a year, but didn¡¯t have the sense to order something other than bad quesadillas and sour mix margaritas from restaurants whose greatest achievement was keeping its customers from realizing it was a chain.


    Luke hadn¡¯t eaten since those drive-thru breakfast burritos around eight. He hoped they¡¯d have time to run in and grab something after they killed the guy.


    Philip was the only person at the outside tables, sitting near the edge of the patio with his back to the SUV. He fully expected just to drop Paul when he sat down, but there was no reason not to give Luke line of sight just in case. He ordered a grilled chicken club sandwich with potato salad and a beer from a waitress with pupils shrunk by roxy. Her eyes reminded him of neon green pickle slices, so he asked for some fried ones.


    He lit the half-smoked cigar and thought about what he would say to Lindsey after it was all over. A different server came out to remind him that you couldn¡¯t smoke anywhere in this god damned state anymore. Philip killed the stub on his heel before the poor bastard was halfway across the tables.


    ¡°My food done yet?¡±


    ¡°You¡ª uh no, not yet. You can¡¯t smoke here, Sir.¡±


    ¡°Alright.¡± The silence begged for a crow caw or something. The guy walked back across the tables and ran into a chair on the way and the sound bounced around in the alley. That would have to do.


    ¡°Blondie ever check back in? Did she tail him?¡± Philip said behind his beer.


    ¡°Nope. If she did, she hasn¡¯t told me.¡± Luke said in his ear.


    ¡°Guess she¡¯ll miss all the action.¡±


    ¡°You kinda cut her out on this one.¡±


    ¡°She¡¯s the one who wanted to ride solo. And what was I supposed to do, sit around and wait for her to sneak in the air vents?¡±


    ¡°Might have been nice to have some backup if he doesn¡¯t come alone.¡±


    ¡°What, you scared of a little shooting?¡±


    Luke didn¡¯t respond. Someone somewhere had brought out a sizzling plate of fajitas and the smell was demanding all his attention.


    Paul had his driver drop him off in the grocery store parking lot down the alley from the restaurant. He walked as casually as he could and pretended to text. He glanced up at the tables and saw a guy in a black tracksuit and a Burberry trench. All money, no class. There was his client all right. He took a right at the restaurant and went through the brushed steel door.


    ¡°Think that¡¯s him going inside,¡± Luke said.


    Philip looked up from his food and watched the guy with faded frat house features stroll into the door like he was coming home. He had on a stained light blue oxford and khaki slacks with a pale gold tie.


    ¡°Good disguise for an area like this,¡± Philip said.


    ¡°Go hit him and let¡¯s go.¡±


    ¡°Nah, give it a sec.¡±


    ¡°What? Shit, I¡¯ll do it.¡± Luke unbuttoned his suit jacket and started to tuck the Rattler under it.


    ¡°No, you won¡¯t. He¡¯s coming to me. Just wait. You might spook him.¡±


    ¡°You haven¡¯t been on this end of things in a bit, man, but let me tell you. Shit never stays this chill for long.¡±


    ¡°Here he is,¡± said Philip.


    Paul opened the glass door and looked across the tables, and the guy in the tracksuit waved and smiled. Something clicked in his mind, and he remembered seeing him at one of Davis¡¯s parties months ago. That didn¡¯t mean this couldn¡¯t be a setup, but it made him feel a bit better. Still, he would let the guy talk until he felt comfortable enough to make a deal. He waved back and walked towards the table.If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    A car turned the corner and came down the alley on Luke¡¯s left. It was a high-end sedan with two finance bros in the front seat, but he switched the Rattler from safe to auto and folded out the stock just in case.


    Philip watched Paul weave through the seats and pushed the fried pickles across the table with one hand and switched the safety off the pistol in his pocket with the other. He could taste the payday.


    It all happened in under two seconds. The car pulled into the handicap spot next to Luke and two men stepped out with MP5 submachine guns raised. Luke had no choice but to fire through his window, filling the cab with casings, smoke, and glass as the sound dampening kicked on in his earbuds.


    Philip¡¯s table exploded in a burst of glass and food. Paul went leaping sideways and Philip put two rounds through the restaurant windows. When he turned back to yell at Luke, he saw two men collapse next to a car that hadn¡¯t been there a second ago, and Luke stepping out of the SUV. Philip wiped beer and ranch off his face and looked around. People inside the restaurant hopped around and dove under tables, or stood staring like they were already dead. Window glass glittered on the ground and his beer streamed towards some crack in the concrete. At the edge of his peripherals, Paul¡¯s foot disappeared behind a booth as tires squealed down the alley.


    A black truck flew out of the grocery store lot with a man standing out of the sunroof. His face flashed and Philip dove for cover as bullets cracked through the tables.


    Luke braced his rifle on the hood of the SUV and opened fire. Thirty caliber rounds put big white circles in the truck¡¯s windshield and the shooter dropped out of sight.


    Philip popped up and emptied his mag into the bench seating Paul had disappeared behind, visualizing the bullets taking him in the chest. When sound returned to the earbuds, Philip heard him scrambling across the sidewalk.


    ¡°Fuck you.¡± He dropped the empty pistol and picked up an MP5.


    Luke slapped in a fresh magazine as the truck barreled down the alley. He fired half the mag and the windshield turned solid white. The truck swerved to the left and slammed into a parking space behind a work van. Luke took a step back from the SUV and listened for the truck¡¯s doors. In the silence, broken in places by screams bouncing in the alley, another engine roared.


    A fiat 500 jumped the curb in the front parking lot and sped through a row of little two-seat tables between the restaurant and a yogurt shop at forty miles per hour. It took a sharp turn around the corner of the building and crashed through the tables towards Philip. He dove behind the blood-splattered sedan Luke had lit up a few seconds ago.


    Three gunmen got out of the Fiat and Philip flipped the MP5 to full auto. He held the trigger as he stood up then leaned into it and dumped the mag in a single controlled burst. One man dropped dead and the other two vanished behind the car. As Philip looked for another mag on the body next to him, someone behind the Fiat let loose with an ungodly rate of fire and he ducked back behind the engine block on one foot. Rounds slapped off concrete and thunked through the car.


    ¡°They miss me. They miss me.¡± He recited the mantra in his head, slid the driver''s seat of the sedan forward, got it into gear, and wedged the gas pedal down with the empty MP5. The car hopped the curb, crashed through the tables, and slammed into the Fiat. The gunfire died with a metallic crunch.


    Luke had taken cover in the front seat and saw a guy with a short-barreled AK step out from behind the van. Luke fired through the passenger window and got him three times in the face, then climbed over the console and hopped out the center door on the driver¡¯s side. He got low and kept his feet behind the tire and aimed around the engine block. Another shooter moved down the sidewalk around the front of the van, aiming at the SUV¡¯s passenger side. Luke¡¯s Rattler snapped five times and the shooter stumbled and face-planted onto the sidewalk. Somebody down the alley yelled ¡°Jesus!¡± like they had just seen a touchdown.


    Philip shouldered the other MP5 and scanned the restaurant through jagged window frames. Lots of whimpering and whispering to 911 dispatchers. Paul was nowhere to be seen.


    ¡°Shit!¡±


    ¡°Where is he?¡± Luke loaded a fresh magazine.


    ¡°In there, I hope.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll get him. Get in the god damn¡ª¡±


    Luke took one step towards the restaurant and two cars screeched into the parking lot on the other side of the building. Gunmen poured out and tables erupted in bursts of fries and soda and honey mustard. Luke and Philip got low and returned fire. Philip emptied his mag and put a panel of wall between him and the shooters.


    ¡°Moving!¡± he yelled and ran for the SUV as Luke covered him. He swung open the driver-side door and returned fire between the door jams. Luke fell back and slid into the passenger seat. When his Rattler went to work, Philip hopped behind the wheel, backed out to the right, cut it to the left, and floored it down the alley as Luke put more fire through the restaurant. He turned a hard right around the corner while Luke reloaded with a flurry of sharp movements. As they came out from behind the building, bullets struck the SUV like hail.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± Philip yelled. They sped out of the lot and stopped on to the access road with the grass slope at the bottom of the lot between them and the shooters.


    ¡°He got in a car!¡± Luke yelled. ¡°A grey sedan.¡± There was blood on his hands.


    ¡°You hit?¡± Philip asked. Luke ignored him and raised his weapon towards the lot. A grey Nissan zoomed onto the street ahead of them.


    ¡°Fucking catch him!¡± Luke yelled. More gunfire cracked from the lot and Philip peeled out. A stray bullet bounced off Luke¡¯s chest plate and clattered across the dashboard.


    ¡°Why didn¡¯t you have them armor these god damn windows!¡± Philip yelled.


    ¡°I always have to shoot out of them!¡±


    Someone leaned out of the sedan and let off a burst that put three small white circles in the glass. Philip¡¯s heart skipped a beat.


    ¡°At least you let them armor the windshield.¡±


    Luke dropped his seat back and rolled into the center row. He pulled a net down from around the sunroof, stood up in the middle of it, and opened fire.

 The Office Job | Chapter 8: Michael

    Requirements: whatever you got, Salary: whatever we can take


    He was the only thing to look at in the sleek lobby. Ceiling high glass windows and brushed steel everything ran together into a single feeling, like muzak sculpted into a physical space. He sat with his foot on his knee playing a DS in one of the swooped back leather chairs in the waiting area. He wore a charcoal trench coat over a navy suit and concrete grey tie. His boyish face was framed by a trimmed beard and straight brown hair, styled as sleek as if he had done it in a single motion. You could imagine him as someone who never had to adjust his life to fit into a nine to five. Nevertheless, he was here for a job interview. It seemed an act of defiance.


    ¡°Hello, Mr. Carpenter?¡± A small woman, with a bounce like a gymnast in a pantsuit, walked towards him from the elevator lobby. She took him for a neckbeard all cleaned up, until he looked at her.


    ¡°Yes?¡± His eyes reminded her of a mugshot she had seen somewhere, or the grey-blue stare of a Cane Corso.


    ¡°I¡¯m Kelsey. They¡¯re ready for you now.¡±


    He stood, well over six feet tall and at least three hundred pounds, with an ease she suspected came from never having to shy away from a physical confrontation.


    ¡°Awesome, and you can call me Bryan.¡± Said Michael, shaking her hand. He put the DS in his inside pocket and followed her across the marble floor.This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.


    He noted five men, behind the desk or up on the loft, who stood with a calm that wasn¡¯t corporate and the bulge of a plate carrier under their suits. He imagined they took no notice of him, and they didn¡¯t.


    In the elevator, Michael turned to Kelsey and spoke to the top of her head.


    ¡°How is your day going so far?¡±


    ¡°It''s good. How about you?¡±


    ¡°It''s great, I like this part of town. Probably stay in the area afterwards. What''s your favorite spot for lunch?¡±


    She tried to decide if he was hitting on her.


    ¡°I like the Vietnamese place near the movie theater, Real Pho Grill. It''s in the shopping center with the dance studio. ¡°


    ¡°Ah, nice. I¡¯ll check it out. Maybe I¡¯ll see you there.¡±


    She smiled at the floor.


    ¡°Maybe.¡±


    The elevator dinged open and he followed her out. They passed a man in a dark suit with a Bluetooth in his ear sitting in the waiting area. Kelsey thought he looked like an FBI agent. She had seen a lot of guys like that lately and had updated her resume just in case. Her sister had been unemployed for half a year after her CEO got caught. ¡°I should¡¯ve ran when I saw all those suits poking around.¡± She said every time she talked about it, glass in hand, eyes tired from double shifts and retail horrors.


    Kelsey led him to a row of glass conference rooms along the edge of the office floor. Three management types stood waiting.


    ¡°This is Bryan Carpenter. Bryan, this is David, Aaron, and Stephanie.¡± Kelsey said. They shook his hand and thanked Kelsey. As she walked back towards her desk, Michael called out to her.


    ¡°Bye Kelsey! If I don¡¯t see you again, enjoy your lunch!¡±


    Half the office looked over and Michael grinned and went through the door. David raised an eyebrow and followed him in.


    She sat back down at the reception desk and tried to ignore the blue-grey eyes floating everywhere. A message tagged urgent popped up on the IM system.


    ¡°Did you see Paul Taylor leave for lunch?¡±

 The Office Job | Chapter 9: The Chase

    In Texas, speed limits are suggestions


    The sedan swerved onto the highway as wide white circles broke out on the back window. Philip slammed on the gas and the SUV¡¯s engine roared, straining against the weight. A car ahead of him squealed to a stop and he almost lost a side mirror passing the son of a bitch.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± Luke bounced around in the net. Philip glanced up and saw two cars gaining on them in the rearview, gunmen leaning out the windows.


    ¡°Behind us!¡± he yelled, wishing his words were bullets.


    Luke dropped down, flipped his Rattler to safe and slung it behind him. He hopped off the center seat into the back where the last row of seats had been taken out. He opened a compartment built into the floorboard and undid the straps with a smile. Michael aint gonna like this.


    He checked the belt, racked the charging handle, and shouldered it, thinking of all the noise it would make and regretting that his earbuds would dampen the sound. He pressed a button in the hatch and the triple-thick window eased open. When the gap of sunlight was a few inches wide, he stopped it and shouldered the weapon.


    As he poked the barrel through the window, one of the drivers saw what was up and veered off to the right. The other one, a big SUV, barreled forward. They were going over a hundred miles per hour and Philip was swerving wildly. It took a moment for Luke to get a shot, but when he did, it was a good one.


    The M240B roared and shell casings and links danced in the cab. The pursuing SUV came alive all at once. Rounds sparked off like fireworks. The windshield went white then gave out, and the driver exploded in bursts of gore. It veered off the road and slammed through a guard rail into a grass ditch, bouncing like a toy. Luke kept on the trigger and put more rounds through the cabin until it was out of view and nothing around could tell him it wasn''t just a nice day for a drive.Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.


    ¡°Holy shit!¡± whooped Philip from the front, laughing like a maniac. Luke snapped the gun to the right, remembering the other car. It had taken a rising offramp and was already half-hidden behind the barrier, but Luke shot at it anyway, the gun beating into his shoulder like a jackhammer. Rounds cracked on cement as he walked the fire towards the sedan''s windows. Before he could get a bead, the ramp raised it out of his line of sight for good. He held the trigger in bitter defiance.


    ¡°Watch your god damned fire!¡± EP yelled in his ears. Shit. In all the excitement, he had forgotten about Michael¡¯s rules of engagement. He hoped none of the rounds dropped out of the air on anyone.


    Philip watched the sedan swerve ahead of him into the fast lane, but all he could do was keep on the gas. Powerless. It felt strange being on this side of the operation again. A flat expanse of big box stores and fast-food signs rolled by and brought on an unexpected nostalgia. The guy in the sedan had stopped shooting, and if he ignored the smell of gunfire and the white marks on the glass, it felt like the energetic start of a weekend.


    A police siren ruined it. He looked in the rearview and saw Luke fire off another burst. The flashing lights jerked to the side then faded into the distance.


    ¡°Fuck! You watching this!?¡± Philip yelled. ¡°I need a god damned intercept!¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m working on it. Theresa is on her way,¡± EP said.


    ¡°What? No, I¡¯m sure it¡¯ll be over in no time, right Malachi?¡± said Lindsey. ¡°No need for me to get in the way.¡±


    ¡°The other car got away,¡± Luke said from the back. ¡°Went up the ramp, probably gonna try to take the express lane and come around on us.¡± He scampered back to the net.


    ¡°Looks like the targets heading towards the office,¡± said EP. ¡°That¡¯s probably where the door is.¡±


    ¡°Shit.¡± Said Philip squeezing the wheel, Luke loading his rattler, and Lindsey pushing the gas.

 The Office Job | Chapter 10: Reevaluation

    I''ve measured out my life with coffee spoons


    Where the fuck had it come from?


    A flash of memory, of him buying the gun, even trying it at the range, burst in his mind, but he knew it couldn''t be memory, because it had never happened. So why did it feel like memory? Well, man, a voice said, what do you call it when you can''t tell memory from fantasy? That''s right. A psychotic break.


    Shit.


    ¡°Sir, are you there? Hello?¡±


    The rep on the line sounded like he would know what to do with a mystery gun in his work bag. Gradie took down another series of numbers and got off the call.


    An email chimed in Gradie¡¯s headset, and a notification popped up on the screen. Meeting in 15 minutes


    Did they know about the gun? The idea that management had found out he had a gun and decided the best thing to do was have a meeting, while in some ways realistic, was unlikely. So, what was the meeting about? He was on time today!


    Ten minutes evaporated and the five-minute reminder came up on his screen. He spent every second fanning his shirt, wiping off sweat, and putting his bag in a hundred different places. Finally, he stuck it in the bottom drawer. It felt like a burial.


    He walked down the aisle of cubicles towards the office in the back wall, trying not to lock eyes with anyone. He envied them, dealing with the same mundane issues as every other day. Rude callers, shitty lunch, accounts fucked up by another unit, maybe a write-up. It felt like walking through a place no longer meant for him, like dreaming of a house long since sold.


    He promised himself, with about ten feet left of the aisle, that if he got out of this, if he got rid of the gun without getting arrested or fired, he would change things. He would come into work every day and be the best fucking worker in the building, make supervisor in a month and never give anyone a reason to call him into a surprise meeting.


    In the office, his senior manager Holly sat behind a big L shaped desk, his supervisor Matt leaned on a bookshelf, and his team lead Martina sat close enough to touch.


    ¡°Good morning Gradie. How are you?¡± she said.


    ¡°Good, thanks.¡±


    ¡°Well¡ª¡±


    ¡°How are you?¡± he said, before he realized they were moving on.


    ¡°Oh, I¡¯m doing well. It¡¯s Friday, so can¡¯t complain...¡± She smiled at the room, but dropped it when she looked back at Gradie. He had been trying to remember if it was more common for people to get fired on Fridays.


    ¡°Well, as you know, this meeting is about your performance.¡± She continued.


    ¡°Oh¡ª¡±


    ¡°Did you not see the meeting request? It said performance meeting,¡± like coaxing a child toward the name of a shape.


    ¡°No, well, I saw the request,¡± He had stared at the box so long he forgot to read it.


    ¡°Oh, ok. Well, before we start, I just want to tell you, you¡¯re not in trouble. This is just a meeting to develop a plan to help you improve.¡±


    It sounded like a well-worn prayer. He wondered if it had been someone at his office who flipped out in a performance meeting. Or someone so far away and so long ago that all that was left of the incident was a policy of assuring employees they weren¡¯t being terminated as soon as possible. A kind of corporate superstition.


    ¡°So, can you think of any distractions, anything lately that might be affecting your work?¡± Martina looked at him like he was about to make some grand confession.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know. No.¡±Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.


    ¡°Are you on your phone?¡±


    He caught his smile before it was fully formed and turned it into a thoughtful grimace.


    ¡°No.¡± Every single employee was on their phone constantly, from temps to managers. The idea that this wasn¡¯t the case seemed to Gradie to be another one of those managerial superstitions, like the sanctity of stat reports or the righteous pursuit of ¡°engagement.¡±


    ¡°Ok,¡± Holly flipped through some papers. ¡°Do you know what your metrics are for the month, Gradie?¡±


    He didn¡¯t, but they had printed out the spreadsheet they emailed at the end of every week and handed it to him. He had no idea how to decipher it. They helped him.


    ¡°Your productivity month to date is as at sixty-four percent.¡± Martina pointed out, pen aimed at the highlighted number. ¡°The goal for the team is eighty, and the team average is eighty-three. We would like to see ninety, ideally, but¡­¡±


    It felt like being told you have cancer. They were trying to keep everything friendly, but underneath it all was a grim understanding. If the numbers don¡¯t improve, you¡¯re outta here.


    ¡°And here is your average time on the phone, collections, accounts per hour, average time between accounts¡­¡±


    For every metric, Matt gave an innocent reason the number might be down.


    ¡°Looks like you¡¯re taking some time after a call, maybe getting your notes together¡­ You might be holding too long¡­¡±


    ¡°Matt¡¯s been giving a lot of things it could be,¡± Holly said. ¡°But I wanna know what you think it is. What¡¯s keeping you from making stats?¡±


    He usually hated these meetings, his entire future hanging on a razor¡¯s edge in a back office, numbers on a spreadsheet threatening to send him crashing into unemployment and ruin. But today, compared to the fear of being caught with a handgun at work, it was oddly comforting. One last chance to re-live a part of his life he had thought was gone forever. He played along.


    ¡°Uh, this new campaign¡ª¡± ¡°The accounts have a lot of touches¡ª¡± ¡°This week has been¡ª¡± It felt like dancing for quarters. Holly saved him.


    ¡°Your metrics have been down for two months now, Gradie.¡±


    He just looked at her, enjoying the silence.


    ¡°Alright, how about this.¡± She stacked the papers together in a motion of finality. ¡°Let''s go over what we¡¯ve been seeing. Martina?¡±


    Martina jolted and locked eyes with Gradie. For a moment, it felt like she was the one with her job on the line, asking Gradie for a helping hand. After a quick glance at Holly, she sat up straight and slipped back into her designated role.


    ¡°Ok, Gradie, since this new campaign rolled out, we¡¯ve been doing some monitoring, and we noticed some periods of inaction throughout the day.¡±


    They all looked at him like this was supposed to awaken a realization. The word monitoring bounced around in his head, trying to find somewhere to stick.


    ¡°Like what?¡±


    ¡°We¡¯ll, there are times, fifteen seconds, or up to five minutes, where you don¡¯t take any action on the account. The cursor doesn¡¯t even move.¡±


    Another waiting silence that they all expected him to fill somehow. Martina leaned in, trying to look in charge. Holly struggled to keep her eyelids above the midline. Matt looked like he had just turned Gradie in the cops for his own good, but was now wracked with guilt. Gradie just sat there.


    Martina tapped the open page on the desk. A spreadsheet with one collum dedicated to ¡°inactive time¡±, the boxes filled with 15s, 45s, 3m28s, and on and on. Gradie pretended to study it, and suddenly, the banality of it all reached up and slapped him in the face.


    Is this my life now? Justifying myself 15 seconds at a time?


    He tensed up, ready to spring out the door, and remembered the gun. If he quit, would they check his bag? Make sure he wasn¡¯t stealing anything? They let the silence stretch, waiting for him.


    Gradie thought about his poems, sketches, directionless daydreaming. All the things he had grabbed at like a shipwrecked sailor clawing at driftwood. All the things that had slipped through his fingers, taken by the current of time. Maybe it was the hours, days, now years, he had spent at this job, or maybe the gun at his desk, waiting like a time bomb to take out everything he was now struggling to preserve. Or maybe he just couldn¡¯t think of another excuse, but his next words were something like honesty.


    ¡°Sometimes I just space out.¡±


    There was another silence. Martina opened her mouth and closed it. Matt shifted on the bookshelf.


    ¡°Space out?¡± Holly said.


    ¡°Yea, like I just start thinking about something else.¡±


    ¡°Like what?¡±


    He had run out of honesty.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know.¡±


    There was another pause.


    ¡°Well, maybe you need to think about whether this is the job for you,¡± Holly said.


    Gradie managed a nod. Did she realize she was saying that buying groceries and paying rent might not be his thing?


    ¡°No. I like the job.¡±


    ¡°Well, Gradie, if that¡¯s the case, we¡¯re going to put you on a thirty-day plan. Martina and Matt are going to monitor your performance, meet with you weekly¡­¡±


    They went over it all and Gradie watched them as if from a distance. None of it had anything to do with him anymore. If some deity snapped his fingers and swapped their job titles, they would act like completely different people. He pictured Holly leaning up against the bookshelf, slipping him excuses, Matt calling him on his bullshit¡­


    Suddenly, they were done. Gradie stood up to leave and thought of the gun.


    ¡°Oh, I forgot. Something came up. I need to leave early today.¡±


    Holly started to laugh, but caught herself.


    ¡°I¡¯ll have to check the calendar,¡± said Martina.


    Back at his desk, Holly¡¯s words looped in his head. The idea that this job wasn¡¯t ¡°for him¡± had been so obvious he had never really thought about it. Like most long hidden truths, it was terrifying, and the fear was strangely familiar.

 The Office Job | Chapter 11: Overlord

    He¡¯s playing TWEWY


    Kelsey had been trying to ignore the rising voices coming out of the conference room for half an hour. It sounded like old friends at a bar. When the door finally opened, they all walked out laughing. Everyone shook Bryan¡¯s hand at the desk.


    ¡°Will you see him out please, Kelsey?¡± said David, still smiling.


    ¡°Oh, that¡¯s fine, I think I remember the way,¡± said Michael. ¡°Actually, where is your bathroom?¡±


    Kelsey pointed it out and Michael shook her hand. ¡°Thanks, Kelsey. Look forward to working with you.¡±


    ¡°Yeah, you too.¡± She watched him walk away and tried to decide if she had meant it.


    Michael sat down in a stall and opened the encrypted text chat.


    ¡°Status?¡± he typed.


    ¡°Target on the road - Mal and Mark giving chase - hot - playing catch up.¡± EP replied.


    Michael hissed through his teeth. He had given them specific orders to avoid collateral at all costs, and now they were shooting on the fucking highway. He considered what he would be out if he fired two of his operators and tapped the keys frantically.


    ¡°?! thought T had eyes on POE? How¡¯d he get out?¡±


    ¡°T went to employee garage - thought he was driving - I hadn¡¯t cracked his phone yet.¡±


    ¡°T engaged?¡±


    There was a pause.


    ¡°No - still en route.¡±The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    ¡°T: fall back and return to the POE.¡±


    ¡°Why?¡± Lindsey popped into the audio chat with a muffled roar of highway behind her.


    ¡°Low chance of a kill - get you caught in a roadblock.¡± Michael typed. There was a pause while Lindsey¡¯s earbuds read it to her.


    ¡°Fine.¡±


    ¡°Get to vehicle stash - C give her the coordinates.¡± Michael typed.


    ¡°Alright. I¡¯m out.¡± Said Lindsey.


    He messaged EP directly.


    ¡°I want info on any confirmed collateral when this is over, copy?¡±


    ¡°OK.¡±


    ¡°My stuff inbound?¡±


    ¡°Conference room B 5th floor - within the hour.¡±


    ¡°You in?¡±


    ¡°On local net now - everything else will be wide open before you get it.¡±


    ¡°Good. Out.¡±


    Michael went down the hall to the staircase, expecting that Kelsey was too distracted to notice him passing by the lobby. She was. He came out of the stairwell into the elevator lobby, where office sounds bounced off the polished floor. Keys clacked, voices rolled across practiced phrases, and a white noise generator rushed under everything. Someone laughed and he flinched. If there was any collateral, he was going to throw Philip out of a window.


    The elevator dinged and he got in alone. When the doors closed, he reached in his pocket and pulled out the lanyard connected to his fake badge and let it hang. He came out on the fifth floor with his phone to his ear, talking to no one.


    At the desk along the divider wall between the lobby and the office floor, he waved his badge at the receptionist and signed in as ¡®Visitor, Brad Haray, IT¡¯. EP came on the earbuds.


    ¡°I''m in the cameras. Looks like most of the security is in the basement cages and the main lobby.¡±


    He found conference room B along the edge of the office floor. Inside was a long pressed-wood table surrounded by high-backed office chairs. There was a flat-screen on one wall and a canvas print of the streets of Prague on the other. An easel pad in the corner said ¡°Idea Bank¡± in black marker and nothing else. The mundane, sleepy stillness reminded him of something he had never been part of. A way of life seen only from the edges.


    ¡°What about the other buildings?¡± he asked.


    ¡°They have a skeleton crew but they¡¯re moving them out.¡±


    ¡°To where?¡±


    ¡°Your building, and the tunnels.¡±


    ¡°Then the door¡¯s down there.¡±


    ¡°Seems like it. I only have cameras on the main tunnel. It could be in one of the restaurants or something.¡±


    ¡°Try and narrow it down.¡±


    ¡°Will do. I routed all emails and calls about the package to me. I¡¯ll send you a text when It¡¯s in the building.¡±


    ¡°Good work.¡± He pulled a chair away from the table and sat down. Out the window, sapphire glass towers shimmered over glittering streams of cars flowing across hazy concrete. He took out his DS and filled his eyes with primary colors.

 The Office Job | Chapter 12: Guns and Cars and Accidents

    Bodies on the Mixmaster. Expect delays


    Philip flew down the right shoulder as the sedan wove in and out of the fast lane. Luke fired from the sunroof, and his shots sparked off the road just short of the tires.


    ¡°Get closer!¡± he yelled down his chest.


    ¡°I''m guarding the exits!¡±


    ¡°Fuck that! If he goes for an exit, I got him!¡±


    Philip took a deep breath, then merged out of the shoulder. Luke gave up on the tires and concentrated his fire on the back window. He got four good shots on it before the sedan cut to the right and brake checked a hatchback.


    ¡°Fuck!¡±


    Philip swerved and Luke got tossed around again. By the time he got back in position, the Sedan had disappeared behind a truck.


    ¡°Next exit is about a mile out,¡± EP said.


    ¡°Push the other shoulder!¡± Luke yelled. Philip merged left and watched the speedometer climb.


    The sedan came out from behind a car and Luke put another two rounds in the back window before he saw the guy leaning out the passenger side. His head flashed and bullets raked the top of the SUV. Luke dropped down and blood dripped off his ear.


    ¡°You hit?¡± Philip yelled as more rounds smacked on the windshield.


    ¡°Fuck this!¡± Luke grabbed something out of the center console that looked like a short cartoon shotgun and fired shells the size of pill bottles.


    ¡°There¡¯s too much collateral!¡± yelled Philip ¡°Just take out the window¡ª¡±


    ¡°I''m gonna take out the window, then the next rounds going up their fucking ass.¡± Luke pumped a round into the chamber and loaded another. More bullets skipped off the hood as he hooked the pouch of grenade shells to his belt and took hold of the netting.


    ¡°Get me some cover!¡±


    Philip swerved into the center lane and the bullets stopped as they came alongside a semi. Luke popped up through the sunroof.


    ¡°Clear!¡±


    When they passed the semi, the sedan had gained about fifty yards. The GM94 thunked and the road behind the sedan exploded.Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    ¡°God dammit, let me gain on them!¡± Philip yelled.


    ¡°Exits coming up,¡± EP said. Luke pumped the weapon and the empty shell fell smoking into the netting.


    ¡°Push the god damn shoulder!¡± he yelled.


    Philip merged into the left shoulder and punched it. In a heartbeat, the traffic thinned and there was nothing between them and the sedan but wide-open highway. Philip smiled, anticipating another ¡®thunk¡¯ and the end of a long day. Instead, gunfire broke out right behind him.


    In the left side mirror, he saw the other car coming off the expressway, muzzle flash blazing out the windows. Luke dropped down in the net as the side window went white. Philip leaned right in his seat to avoid the rounds coming through the busted-out window, pressed the brakes, and cut the wheel to the left. The crash was loud enough to test his earbuds, but he didn¡¯t even feel it.


    The car bounced back into the express lane and squealed over posts that broke like toothpicks. Luke popped up through the sunroof grenade launcher first and Philip eased off the gas to match speed with the car. For a few strange seconds, there was only the sound of the road and that nostalgic feeling came back in waves.


    In the mirror, he saw the inside of the car explode in a bright orange flash. Fragments of gore, glass, and upholstery shot out the windows. Luke had put the 43mm thermobaric grenade right past the passenger gunner and turned the car into a rolling funeral. It moved forward like a ghost for half a second, then veered into the barrier and fell into the distance, becoming just another piece of scenery.


    Luke dropped down and loaded more shells.


    ¡°He¡¯s in the far-right lane!¡±


    Philip moved in behind the sedan. The guy popped out the passenger side again and let out a wild burst.


    ¡°Yea, you fuck. You heard that boom.¡± Philip whispered.


    ¡°Exit¡¯s right ahead,¡± EP said.


    ¡°He won''t take it!¡± Luke said. It¡¯s a ramp!¡±


    Philip saw it coming up. A slim, curving, rising ribbon of concrete with one lane. Might as well have been half a mile of gallows.


    ¡°That¡¯s the exit for the office,¡± EP said.


    ¡°He won''t take it! Get me on him!¡± Luke pumped another grenade in.


    ¡°Hang on!¡± Philip said. A sense he had learned to rely on long ago was sending warning signals, and as always, he was slow in deciphering them.


    ¡°He won''t fucking take it!¡± Luke yelled. ¡°God dammit go!¡±


    Philip had let off the gas and they were coming up on the exit. As they got closer, the sedan veered into the left edge of its lane.


    ¡°I got him.¡± Luke popped up. The Sedan moved into the left lane and Philip pushed on the brake. His mind had finally caught up with his instinct.


    ¡°God dammit, I¡¯m telling you¡ª¡± The sedan cut a hard right at the last second, braking and taking the ramp at ninety miles an hour. Philip did the same move going almost eighty. He barely cleared the exit and scraped the side of the SUV on the concrete barrier, which was a blessing. He was sure he had been about to roll over.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Luke bounced around up top and fell into the net again. Philip looked in the rearview and was shocked to see he still had the launcher in his hand.


    ¡°Take him the fuck out!¡± He yelled as Luke sprang back up through the roof. When he looked ahead, his sense of danger flared from a warning into a scream.


    Brake lights flashed and Philip did the dumbest thing he could have done. He slammed on the brakes. If he had just kept his speed, he could have hit the sedan at seventy mph and maybe killed the target from the impact alone, seatbelts and airbags be damned. Instead, he hit it at just below fifty and only managed to kill Luke.


    ¡°Shit.¡±


    The airbags went off, and the world disappeared.

 The Office Job | Chapter 13: Blood Fire Death

    Fortunate Son intensifies


    Philip returned to a world of chemical smells and harsh sounds. Distant sirens and rough wind came through the window with scents of gasoline, blood, and something burning. His face stung, his ears rang, his body ached. He focused his breathing until the pains faded into background noise, one by one. Luke coughed in the netting. The wet sound told Philip his chest was caved in, and he didn¡¯t have long.


    The crash had knocked the sedan twenty yards ahead and crushed the back end into a jagged mass of metal and plastic. A man stumbled out of the driver¡¯s side door and leveled a submachine gun. White, snowing circles sprung up on the windshield as the muzzle flashed, silently, muffled by the ringing in his ears and the earbuds. He reached weakly into the center console and his fingers brushed a pistol grip.


    Something slammed into the gunman and threw him into the side of the sedan. He crumpled to the concrete as it twisted to a stop with a squeal. A motdorcycle. The rider swung up an MP5k and finished him off with a few suppressed snaps.


    ¡°Thanks, Mother Theresa,¡± Philip said weakly.


    ¡°What?¡± said Lindsey in his ears, freeway traffic roaring behind her voice. The rider took off their helmet, exposing a poof of short, bright red hair half-hidden under a bandana. Little grey-blue eyes in a soft round face glared at the crumpled car like it had insulted her.


    ¡°Oh. Beth¡¯s here,¡± Philip said. Luke coughed behind him.


    The passenger door swung open and the guy came out firing. He missed her by a mile and she dropped down and got him through the head with one burst. The door closed itself as he hit the ground. Philip sighed and everything hurt again.


    Sam stood back up and fired on the windshield till the mag ran dry. She let the gun swing down smoking on its strap and flicked a sawn-off double-barrel shotgun out of her side holster. She pulled both triggers and the windshield went solid white.


    ¡°The fucking guns she brings.¡± gasped Philip. He had given up pulling whatever gun out of the center console when he remembered the pistol on his hip. He doubted he would have to use it now, but he unbuckled his seatbelt anyway.


    Sam stepped around the passenger side of the sedan like a lioness, breaking the shotgun and sliding two more shells in. She held it one hand and took out her phone. The sedan chirped as she spoofed the locks.


    ¡°We fucking got him.¡±


    ¡°Are you sure?¡± said EP.


    A noise had been rising in his ears, but he hadn''t thought to pay it any attention. Sam aimed the shotgun in one hand and reached for the door handle with the other, just as he realized what it was.


    A bullet cracked through the air and Sam collapsed behind the sedan. The gunshot boomed a second later. Philip looked up at the helicopter about half a mile away. Something flashed on the side of it and the windshield went white in an area the size of a dinner plate. Another crack followed closely by a second boom. This time, he was sure it was a fifty.


    ¡°Shit.¡± He threw himself back over the center console. Another round landed, but this time it zipped through and bounced around the cab like an angry metal insect. He crawled over the folded down center seat onto the floor as another faster weapon joined in. Another loud smack and distant boom, then more cracks and zips as rounds flew freely through the windshield, and the dull sound of rounds hitting flesh above him where Luke hung in the netting. Gore splattered the back window and everything else. Hot blood poured onto his legs. The chopping roar pressed in through the windows, mocking him.


    ¡°Is the target dead?¡± EP said in his ear. She sounded panicked. Good.


    ¡°Not unless he died from friendly fire! Mark¡¯s dead! Beth¡¯s dead! I need back up.¡±


    He crawled towards the hatch as death flew thick as rain a foot above his head.


    ¡°Theresa¡¯s been rerouted to the office,¡± EP said.


    ¡°Fucking great!¡±


    ¡°Boss wants her on intercept!¡± She had the nerve to sound annoyed, even as the steady boom of the sniper grew louder.The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    ¡°How the fuck did you not see a helicopter coming at us? Isn¡¯t intel your job, you sassy bitch?!¡± He yelled into the floorboards.


    ¡°And killing the target is yours! If you had done it, they would be airlifting a corpse right now!¡± He could tell from her voice that she felt guilty, but he tried not to care. A bullet grazed the top of his shoulder. That helped. He growled and crawled faster.


    ¡°They¡¯re on the ramp,¡± said EP. ¡°The target looks like he¡¯s struggling to get out of the car. Can you get a shot?¡±


    Philip laughed, but the bullet storm above his head let up. He looked at the hatch. If he opened it, they would dump lead all over him again.


    ¡°We¡¯ll fucking see!¡± He pulled the M240 out of its recessed compartment, pulled the belt out of the case and tossed it on top. He put his foot next to the hatch open button and braced himself.


    ¡°Someone hopped out of the chopper. He¡¯s moving to the target!¡± EP said.


    ¡°What a friendly guy,¡± Philip whispered. He kicked the button, hoping the hydraulics hadn¡¯t taken a bullet, and the armored door strained open. After a few seconds, when the gap of sunlit road was a foot wide, the gunfire resumed and rounds hammered the SUV. A fifty punched through the side window and sprayed Philip with glass and bullet fragments. He shoved the M240 out the back and rolled out after it.


    ¡°They¡¯re loading up!¡± EP said.


    ¡°Try and hack the helicopter or something!¡± He moved in a low crouch away from the back of the SUV with the M240 shouldered and fanned out the belt. In a panic, he realized he hadn¡¯t heard any gunfire in about five seconds.


    He stepped out and fired in bursts at the rising, shrinking helicopter. Rounds danced up the underside and sparks flashed like sunlight. It was already a good five hundred yards away, moving up and out fast.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± He moved to the cement barrier, lay the weapon on it by the tripod, and took aim again.


    ¡°You¡¯re out of range,¡± EP said. He let out another couple of bursts.


    ¡°Cops coming up the ramp!¡±


    Flashing red and blue lights moved up the curving ramp. Two cop cars. Did they not hear the god damn machine gun fire?


    He swung the gun around by the carrying handle with the stock under his armpit and let out a few bursts. The cars screeched to a stop just behind the curve of the barrier, then peeled out backwards. He sprayed the cement until the belt ran out, then dropped the gun on the street and turned back to the SUV.


    ¡°Can you get me out of here? Or should I jump?¡±


    ¡°There¡¯s a roadblock the other way, too.¡±


    Philip looked around. Wide, flat land from dull horizon to dull horizon. A haze of strip malls, fast food drive-thrus and industrial buildings spreading off the highway. Half a mile away, red and blue lights glittered towards him down a shimmering street. From some half-digested memory, he saw an old friend smiling at him, pointing at a place that could be right below him.


    ¡°This is what Updike called the un-grandest landscape in the world.¡±


    There had been gunfire and pain then, too.


    He noticed the ramp that passed underneath him, and walked up to the barrier and looked down. It was about a thirty-foot drop.


    ¡°Can you get a car stopped on this ramp below me?¡± he said.


    ¡°Let me see. Yeah. Can you get to it?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. Any police choppers inbound?¡±


    ¡°One so far, but they¡¯re still about five minutes out. I had it called south when you and Mark started shooting.¡± So smug. Philip wanted to throw the earbuds off the ramp, but in a moment of unexpected calm, he felt guilty for yelling at her. If they got this one in the bag, maybe he would make it up to her.


    He opened the side door of the SUV and got out the case of repelling gear from under the seat and set it on the street. Then he pulled the keys out of the ignition and grabbed the pouch of grenades, two more pistol mags, and one of Luke¡¯s ammo pouches, all while trying not to look at him hanging in the netting. He snatched the rattler out of the net with his eyes closed and slung it over his shoulder.


    ¡°You¡¯re on TV,¡± said EP as he attached the line to the hook on the SUV. The news chopper grumbled in the distance, and he wondered if they had seen him shoot at the other one.


    ¡°Cool. Got that car ready?¡± He got the harness on and took the line in his hands.


    ¡°Yep, routed an Uber to you. Hacked his Bluetooth and told him I was the FBI, ha ha ha.¡± She laughed through the voice changer like an old detective.


    ¡°Is it close?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, one sec.¡±


    Tires squealed below him. Sirens wailed and the wind seemed determined to throw him off now that he was ready to jump. He held the trunk, alarm, and unlock buttons on the key fob. When it chirped, he let go and started counting to sixty in his head. He threw the keys at the horizon and swung over the barricade.


    There was a sporty hatchback stopped in the middle of the road with its hazards on and a line of honking cars behind it. They got quiet as he came down. Once on the ground, he snapped the harness off then drew his pistol, a blued P226 Legion, off his hip and pointed it at the driver, who put his hands up as he came around the driver''s side. He flicked his pistol in the universal ¡°get the fuck out¡± signal and the guy scrambled off.


    He holstered the gun, got in the driver¡¯s seat, closed the door, arranged the Rattler in his lap, put on his seatbelt, flicked off the hazards and put it in drive. He had counted 45 seconds so far.


    ¡°News chopper got you going down. Coming around to get an angle.¡±


    ¡°They¡¯re about to have something else to look at,¡± he said.


    Right on cue, the bomb went off. The sound was massive. The ramp shook and groaned, and a bright yellow flash glared off the cement ahead of him. He floored it. The familiar smell of spent explosives rushed in the open window on a hot wind. As he came out from under the ramp, fire and smoke rose in the mirror, and debris hit the car like the ghosts of gunfire. The boom echoed across the flat landscape, shattered, and returned in pieces.


    ¡°Are they watching me now?¡± He took the first exit at eighty miles an hour.


    ¡°Nope. Looks like you¡¯re in the clear.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m gonna swap cars. Ask Boss where he wants me.¡±


    He swerved into the u-turn lane and disappeared under the bridge.

 The Office Job | Chapter 14: Paul?

    I dreamt I was a butterfly


    A squat man in a plate carrier over a black tax assessor suit threw Paul into the helicopter, while two other guys leaned out firing. A shell casing as thick as a shot glass bounced off his shoulder and the gunshot made the helicopter roar seem shy. He put his hands on his ears. It didn¡¯t help.


    ¡°Close it up!¡± someone yelled. Paul put his hands down. Even muffled, the voice was familiar. Andler sat down across from him as the gunmen shut the door. One hugged a GM6 Lynx, a semi-auto .50 BMG bullpup rifle, and the other dropped the mag out of his Tavor 7, a .308 assault rifle. Paul tried to remember why he knew what those guns were as Andler handed him a headset. He put it on, and for the first time in what felt like hours, it was quiet.


    ¡°What the fuck is going on? Why are you here?¡± said Paul.


    ¡°Do you remember what you did after high school?¡± said Andler.


    ¡°What?¡±


    Paul flinched as a bullet smacked into the window and left a small white dot. More rounds hit the side and the gunmen looked out like someone had called their name.


    ¡°Is that a fucking M240?¡±


    ¡°He still ain''t punching through this armor.¡±


    Andler ignored them. ¡°Paul, what did you do after high school?¡±


    ¡°This isn¡¯t the time for a fucking session!¡± Paul screamed. Andler leaned in.Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.


    ¡°What did you do after you graduated?¡±


    Whatever power Andler had over him returned and something tugged at the back of his mind, pulling him towards the question. He had a bachelor¡¯s in finance. That¡¯s how he got his first cover job. So, he must have gone to college, right?¡±


    ¡°I went to college,¡± Paul said. His voice cracked.


    ¡°Did you go to college?¡± Andler asked. He didn¡¯t sound like he believed it.


    Paul let his mind fall backwards till it snapped into place just after high school, like a groove worn into his memory, and it all came back with a wave of nostalgia. The feeling of having so much freedom so suddenly. People asking him what he was going to do with his life, like they were trying to warn him of something they couldn¡¯t put into words.


    Dim smoky back bedrooms, the tidepools of house parties. Friends popping out of existence like they had been chosen for rapture. Moving out of state or dying in a puddle of vomit.


    You should come work with me, bro. I don¡¯t think I can do long-distance, babe. We wish you success in your future endeavors, Mr. Taylor. A million paths opening and closing like blood vessels. The feeling of being stuck still in the middle of it, unable to move. He pushed through like he was living it all over again, and there was something at the end.


    His memory split in two. In one, a man went to a university, took classes, got a degree in finance, met an old friend from high school at a bar, did work for some people he knew, and slowly got into the game. The man was named Paul, looked like Paul, acted like Paul, a bit, but¡­


    In the other, a scared boy. Patching the holes with weed and delusions. Working sixty hours a week at a shitty retail job just to have enough money to move out, doing anything to get away from¡­


    ¡°Fuck!¡± the man who had been Paul yelled. The first memory fell away and all the weight of the second fell on him like a beating. He choked on his breath.


    ¡°Are you with me?¡± Andler said.


    ¡°Yes! Why the fuck didn¡¯t you get me up sooner?¡±


    Andler leaned back in his seat.


    ¡°You can complain about our methods if we don¡¯t get you through that door. Otherwise, just keep your head down.¡±


    Paul stared at him. The word ¡®door¡¯ caught fire and blazed in his head, and he knew there was still something he had forgotten.

 The Office Job | Chapter 15: Transitions

    Los Colinas is one big liminal space


    Lindsey found the stash car in an empty parking lot, next to a half-built hotel at the edge of a mound of retail space. Strips of luxury shops and restaurants that served eighty-dollar entrees to Rolex men and Gucci women flanked the lot like prison walls. Laughter echoed on the hotel¡¯s bare sheetrock as a smiling group left the sushi place. She would have felt like an outsider even without all the weaponry.


    She pulled back the carpet in the trunk and opened a reinforced compartment where the spare should be. There was a large luggage bag that felt like it was half full of solid steel. She loaded her weapons into the side pouch and wheeled it carefully to the trunk of her car. Her headset beeped as Michael answered her call request.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got it. About to head that way,¡± she said.


    ¡°Take the tunnels under his office.¡±


    ¡°You think he¡¯ll head down there?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m almost certain that¡¯s where the door is.¡±


    ¡°Should I try and find it?¡±


    ¡°No, they¡¯ll be on guard for that. And be on the lookout. Their nest is probably down there.¡±


    Michael¡¯s tone was almost fearful. Lindsey told herself that it had nothing to do with her. The failure at the restaurant had set him on edge. She let her wounded pride flare up and die down before she answered.


    ¡°All right then, I¡¯ll set up. Anything else?¡±


    ¡°If they find you, blow the stairwell and get the hell out. I have a feeling we¡¯re gonna be down a few people soon.¡±


    She opened EP¡¯s folder and pulled up a map of the tunnels, pastel colors woven under a grey lattice of streets and retail centers. A maze of restaurants, shops, basements, and garages. Not a good place to be caught by surprise. Michael was right. Going for the door would be a waste of time.


    ¡°Hey babe, what¡¯s the nearest entrance to these tunnels?¡±


    ¡°Lobby of that building to your left,¡± EP said.


    It was a squat cement tower with dark brown windows and a parking garage built into the side. The stone sign sitting in a bed of pansies out front said ¡°Dativasoft¡±.


    ¡°Think you can get me past security?¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t need to. People come in to use the tunnels all the time.¡±


    She parked in the first open spot, marked ¡®reserved¡¯. She wouldn¡¯t be needing the car again anyway. If they were moving to the door, the next fight would be all or nothing. She got her things out of the trunk and walked across the lot. Somewhere a helicopter was chopping up the afternoon air.


    ~


    The basement was a flat box of stained concrete floors, bare pillars, and brick walls flaking off the multi-toned paint of four decades. Rough fluorescent lighting flickered next to the occasional foam ceiling tiles and wide areas of darkness packed with pipes, wires, and beams. Everything was pushed off to the sides. Desks topped with overturned chairs, pyramids of old file boxes, forgotten mail carts, and one sad refrigerator. In the back wall, a door stuck out of its dusty worn surroundings. Dull grey steel, rivets the size of half dollars, and a slit window of glass thick as a telephone book.The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    Behind the door was an old maintenance office. Two robot-still men in fold-out chairs sat facing each other in the center of the room. Another man crouched frowning next to a sagging cloth sofa holding a needle and vial. An older guy in a suit, his arm out of the jacket and his oxford sleeve rolled up, lay on the couch like he was being painted by an old master. He watched the frowning man in front of him struggle to get the needle in the vial.


    ¡°Hurry the fuck up.¡±


    ¡°Thanks, that¡¯ll help.¡±


    He finally got the dose drawn.


    ¡°Make sure I can breathe this time, jack ass.¡±


    He couldn¡¯t get it in the vein fast enough. When the arm hung limp, he put the propofol back in a whining mini-fridge and picked an Origin-12 off the top. He sat down in the chair in the far corner with the shotgun leaned against his shoulder.


    There was a long quiet while they waited. One of the guys in the center stirred and walked over to a desk against the wall. He put his cigarette out on an inch of the exposed, water-damaged wood, and grabbed an assault rifle, then sat back down, loaded a magazine with a loud snap and racked the slide. The frowning man in the far chair glared at him.


    The guy on the couch groaned and his eyes sprang open.


    ¡°Got it.¡± He said to the ceiling. Frowning man pressed his ear-piece.


    ¡°Anthony, this is bedroom.¡±


    ¡°Go for Anthony.¡±


    ¡°Just got a confirmation.¡±


    ¡°Good. The rest of you load up and meet us in the control room.¡±


    ¡°On our way.¡± He got up and the man on the couch grabbed his knee.


    ¡°Drop me the rest of that vial. I¡¯m getting out of here.¡±


    ~


    Paul leaned his head on the window and watched the flat spread of parking lots and grass lawns slide below him. What would it be like to be down there, driving around, having lunch, without the feeling that life is slowly closing in on you? He couldn¡¯t picture it. It didn¡¯t exist. That world would never be anything more to him than scenery, rolling by without compassion, untouchable as an old cartoon background.


    The helicopter touched down on the roof with its blades still going. Andler pushed Paul across the pad as the other guards formed up around him. There was nothing in sight but sky and a boxed door at the edge of the roof.


    Andler punched numbers on a keypad and the door came open with a metallic sound and a beep. They went down the stairs and came out in the elevator lobby. A worker leaned up against the window looked up from his phone and bag of cookies. His mouth hung open and he scanned the new faces for some sign of a disciplinary action coming his way. Paul felt for him. No one was ever on this floor and it was a great place for ¡°time theft¡±. Andler pointed a gun at the guy and he almost cried.


    ¡°Fuck off.¡±


    He sprinted to the stairwell, whimpering.


    ¡°What the fuck, man,¡± Paul muttered. Andler turned on him.


    ¡°They could be anyone. Don¡¯t hesitate with that thing!¡± He pointed to the Beretta PX4 in Paul¡¯s hand. Paul had forgotten about it. He couldn¡¯t see himself ever using it.


    ¡°Just think about the door,¡± Andler said as he called the elevator. Paul didn¡¯t need to. It felt like the door was thinking about him, broadcasting the absolute knowledge that all of this would drop away the moment he went through it. He didn¡¯t know what was on the other side, but as the world around him detached itself and melted out of place, that other world felt something like reality.


    He tried to let his thoughts fall towards it, and his mind snagged on the edge of a glaring emptiness. There was something else, something massive, that he had forgotten, as if it had been cut out of his mind. The elevator closed and he realized that the revelation in the helicopter, far from being enlightenment, was just another impact on the way down. He was certain the next one would destroy him.


    ~


    At 12:55, Martina walked up behind Gradie and scared the shit out of him.


    ¡°Hey,¡±


    ¡°Yeah?¡± He spun in his chair. He had been sitting on the same account for an hour.


    ¡°Hey, hold off on leaving for a bit.¡±


    ¡°Why?¡± His stomach tried to shoot up out of his mouth, so he clenched his jaw shut.


    ¡°There¡¯s a police chase on the highway.¡± For a split second, he thought it was him they were chasing, but logic caught up with his thoughts and the wave of relief almost knocked him out of the chair.


    ¡°What? For real?¡± said someone in a cubicle nearby. Others looked around and popped up from behind the fabric panels.


    ¡°Yea, two cars shooting at each other with machine guns.¡± Said Martina.


    ¡°Is it drugs?¡± someone said. ¡°Got to be.¡± someone else laughed.


    ¡°They don¡¯t know, but I don¡¯t think they got them yet. The highways are all blocked off.¡±


    More people turned around and started talking. Gradie got a strange feeling, like he had forgotten something. He looked back at his computer and tried to remember what it was.

 The Office Job | Chapter 16: Clamor

    A compact but powerful firearm designed for vehicle crews, support personnel, weird guys in office towers¡ª


    Lindsey sat at a small table outside a coffee shop in the tunnels, watching office workers walk down the linoleum street where fluorescent lights stood in for the sun. They talked into phones with sales pitch confidence and groaned to each other about the tragedies of the last four hours. Voices echoed off the paneled walls and slick floors until they were beaten into white noise. Smells of espresso, peanut oil fried chicken, and pan-Asian sweetness moved with them. It was corporate culture after a nuclear war.


    Across the tunnel from the coffee shop was a dark empty deli with ¡®for lease¡¯ signs plastered on the glass, and its double doors wide open. On the other side of the seating area, behind another set of glass doors, was a well-lit and well-guarded elevator lobby. The two security guards standing at the entrance looked like they should be helping a puppet dictator out of a limo on the other side of the world. Next to the doors, a woman on a poster laughed over a turkey sub. Lindsey imagined her giving a speech to her customer-citizens while snipers shuffled on the rooftops. A new age of fresh eating. Thunderous applause. EP chimed on the line and brought her out of it.


    ¡°How¡¯s it going?¡±


    ¡°Hey babe, can you get me around these guys?¡± said Lindsey.


    ¡°I¡¯m looking. This map is fucked. There¡¯s a parking garage and two levels of basement below you. No, wait, one sec.¡±


    Lindsey tapped the stopper on her lid while the tv in the corner replayed a clip of Philip firing the M240 on the ramp. If it hadn¡¯t been for his road warrior shit, she might have been able to walk right through the front door with the lunch crowd. Now even the rent-a-cops in the tunnels were looking around like machine-gun fire might break out at any moment.


    ¡°Ok, there¡¯s a maintenance door or something in the parking garage below building three. If you take that, you can make it to the elevator in the basement of his building, ride that up and get out in the lobby.¡±


    ¡°There¡¯s no other pedestrian route?¡± Lindsey was sure the first thing they would have locked down was the maintenance access.


    ¡°Not unless you come in above through the lobby.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s Boss¡¯s status?¡±


    EP was silent for a moment. On the tv, the newscaster interviewed an expert on the cartels. Lindsey looked back across the deli. One guard wanded a woman while the other tried to find something telling in her eyes.


    EP came back on the line.


    ¡°He says the guards should be moving soon. Get ready to pull the fire alarm in the lobby on my signal. I think he¡¯s going loud.¡±


    ~


    ¡°The mail guy just dropped it off at reception,¡± EP said in his ear. Michael put up his DS and went out the door. There was a box sitting on the counter at the reception desk.


    ¡°Hey, is that for IT?¡± He asked.


    ¡°Uh, yea.¡± said the receptionist.


    ¡°Thanks. I¡¯ll take it.¡±


    ¡°What is it?¡±


    ¡°New overhead.¡± She had lost interest before he got the words out. He took the box back into the conference room.


    ¡°Anyone rustled out there?¡± he asked EP.


    ¡°No. The guards are all either in the lobby or down in the tunnels.¡±Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    ¡°Do you have eyes on the door?¡±


    ¡°No, but there¡¯re a lot of places with no cameras down there. I sent the map to Theresa.¡±


    Michael opened the box with his keys. Inside was an old computer case. He took it out and unscrewed the panel. Everything was taped down and the only computer component left was the motherboard. He laid it all out on the table.


    The receiver slid into the lower half of the P90 with a familiar click. He took the sight out of its padded wrapping and mounted it, attached the flashlight to the side of the top mount, clipped the strap into place, and loaded a magazine with a slap. He took off his overcoat and put the low-profile plate carrier and magazine pouch on his chest. The last thing left on the table was a leather pouch that seemed to have fallen off a fantasy hero. He put it on his belt like a medieval fanny pack and sat back down.


    Some part of him wanted to take it all off, throw it back in the box and mail it back, go home and come back on Monday to his new job. He could take Kelsey out, get David¡¯s gamertag, build up a 401k and get to know all the restaurants in the area. He smiled at that part of him and gave it something like a mental hug. After today, he would never see it again.


    A helicopter whined outside the window. When it was over his head he got up, set the DS on the table, and walked to the door.


    ¡°Stairs or Elevator?¡±


    ¡°They just came off the stairs, but they¡¯re moving to the elevator. Theresa¡¯s not in position yet. They have the tunnel entrance guarded.¡±


    ¡°They should move once I start shooting. Have her pull the fire alarm after he¡¯s off the elevator.¡±


    He opened the door and stepped out into the office. That other part of him screamed, but the sound had become white noise long ago.


    The post-lunch haze had set in and no one noticed the ammo pouches or small polymer submachine gun as he walked through the office towards the elevators.


    ¡°Sir, you need to sign out please!¡± The receptionist said. He took the elevator key out of his pouch.


    ¡°Center,¡± said EP in his ear.


    ¡°Sir?¡± She stood up. Michael put the key in the small hole in the door of the center elevator and pushed open the doors. He leaned against one, holding the other back with his foot, flicked on the flashlight on the P90 and set the selector to full auto. A man waiting in front of another elevator saw the gun and screamed.


    ¡°Gun!¡±


    Michael aimed up the shaft and fired in short bursts.


    Inside the car, rounds zipped through the floor and cracked on the ceiling. One guard took a burst through the foot and leaned on the wall screaming and emptied his mag through the floor. Another guard got hit in the groin and sunk into the corner without a sound.


    ¡°Get on the edge! Put him above you!¡± Andler yelled. The last two guards lifted Paul onto their backs and backed up into the corner. Andler worked the buttons as they fired blindly into the floor. The guard shot in the foot finished reloading and took two rounds under his chin and fell forward as more bullets cut into him. After a few more seconds of gunfire, two empty mags dropped next to his corpse. A flashlight searched up through the floor, lighting up dust and gunsmoke.


    The doors opened suddenly. Andler leaped out and the two guards pushed through with Paul between them, his feet barely touching the ground. Bullets chased them out and one cracked inches from his ear.


    ¡°What floor is he on?¡± Andler yelled into the radio.


    ¡°Twelve,¡± a voice answered as gun fire sounded below.


    ¡°Send a team to contain him and another to escort us down!¡±


    Michael saw a door open ten stories below him and throw a square of light into the dusty shaft. Two men fired up at him and he stepped back into the lobby.


    Across the floor, a man came out of an office at the back. His shoulder flashed and Michael ducked as bullets ripped through the tops of cubicle walls and cracked the marble floor around him.


    ¡°About ten heading up the stairs,¡± EP said in his ear. The fire alarm went off, and his earbuds muffled it to a low tone as he moved up to the side of the reception desk in a low run.


    ¡°He¡¯s coming up on the right side,¡± EP said. Michael stepped to the left of the reception desk, quietly.


    When the guards at the door ran for the elevator, Lindsey grabbed her luggage and walked across the tunnel into the dark deli. Through the glass double doors, she saw them pry open one of the elevator shafts and aim pistols up, sweeping the dusty darkness with bright beams. She pushed through the doors into the lobby as they opened fire, and someone screamed.


    Four people took off in her direction. She let go of her luggage and stepped right to let them pass and drew her Walther PPQ out of her jacket. She came around them so close the last woman¡¯s hair brushed her shoulder and stopped right behind the guards. From their point of view, she might as well have teleported.


    She shot one in the back of the head and the casing bounced off the other guard just above his temple. She shot him before he had finished flinching. They dropped into the dark shaft and the doors slid closed.


    ¡°You¡¯re such a smooth bitch. Hit the fire alarm, please.¡± EP said in her ear. Lindsey flipped the alarm on the wall and grabbed her luggage.


    ¡°Thanks. You got eyes on the stairwell?¡±


    ¡°Yea.¡±


    ¡°Where do you want me?¡±


    ¡°Office at the end of the hall. Wait out the evacuation, then set it up.¡± EP said.


    Lindsey walked the suitcase down the lobby like she had never fired a gun in her life.

 The Office Job | Chapter 17: Deskwork

    shell casings go in the ''out'' pile


    Michael slapped a new mag into the P90 and stepped over the body of the guard who had until recently been shooting at him.


    ¡°There¡¯s about five coming up the stairwell trying to get past the crowd.¡± EP said. He heard hard breathing and whimpering between the wails of the alarm.


    ¡°Anyone still here needs to leave!¡± No one moved. He glanced back at the lobby, then went to the nearest whimpering cubicle and found a woman crouched under her desk tapping her phone, tears illuminated by the light.


    ¡°Leave now! Take the stairs!¡± She scrambled up and out without looking at him.


    ¡°Anyone else needs to go now!¡± A man stood up in the center row like he had accepted his execution. Michael pointed.


    ¡°Out. Now!¡± The man stumbled towards the lobby. Seeing the other two leave unharmed, the last few got up and followed. Michael stood on a desk to see if he had missed anyone, then got down and set the weapon back on auto.


    ¡°Let me know, EP.¡±


    ¡°They just passed the workers you let out. They¡¯re in the stairwell on your floor.¡±


    Michael got down in a cubicle.


    EP had been looping camera footage to hide the team¡¯s movement, while the real feed was played across three of her stacked monitors. She switched to the lobby cam and saw gunmen with plate carriers over suits and oxfords move out of the stairwell in practiced movements. The one in the rear aimed at her and fired. She jumped in her chair as a window on her monitor went black.


    ¡°They took out the camera. They must know I¡¯m in.¡±


    Michael heard them move through the lobby and set up on the other side of the reception desk wall. He aimed out the cubicle doorway and visualized himself firing without being hit, letting the scenario live in his mind as his body moved automatically. A gun peeked out around the wall and his P90 screamed.


    Using the exposed barrel as a guide, he put the first five rounds through the wall into the man¡¯s chest. As the body fell out into the aisle, he walked his fire to the right and the reception wall coughed out puffs of fabric and particle board. Casings fell down his legs and the muzzle flash brushed the inside of the next cubicle. In about two seconds, he was empty.This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.


    Bullets sprayed through the fabric half-walls and kicked up pieces of carpet around him as he dove down the aisle and rolled into a cubicle in the center row. He ejected his mag and pulled another one from his pouch. Someone cursed loudly from behind the wall, and another fired through the cubicles blindly as they walked down the other aisle. Michael slapped his mag in and sent the bolt home as rounds sparked out of the monitors over his head.


    Someone yelled ¡°Moving!¡± from behind the reception wall and stomped down the row outside the cubicle door to his left. He aimed at the fabric wall and fired as the footsteps reached the doorway. The burst ripped through the panel and caught the guard full in the gut before he ever had a chance to see who shot him.


    ¡°Fuck you!¡± someone yelled, and stomped onto a desk in a cubicle towards the reception wall. They opened fire and bullets ripped through the corkboard planner on the wall above his feet. He rolled under the desk to his right and aimed up at the desktop. The climbing guard stopped firing just long enough for Michael to hear his foot stomp down above him. He fired with his eyes closed and got covered in pressed wood fragments and hot brass. After half a second, a body dropped hard on the desk.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Another gunman, near the end of the row past Michael¡¯s head, dumped his mag through the cubicles. Michael slammed through the paneling and rolled into the adjacent cubicle, ending up on his stomach under the other desk, half tangled in cords and aiming at the wall. To his right, blood streamed through the bullet holes in the desk.


    At the end of the row, the guard cursed, his voice full of fear. An empty magazine hit the ground with a distinctive springy clack and his boots dragged on the carpet as he stepped back. Between the wail of the fire alarm, the sounds came through equally from both sides. Michael closed his eyes and visualized the aisles, the distance, the guard right in the middle, and fired off the rest of his mag.


    The guard screamed in the middle of the burst, a gut-punching scream, like the word ¡®no¡¯ fragmented by terror. It was the kind of scream that made Michael want to run out and hold him. Instead, he untangled himself, sprang into a low crouch and had a new mag in the P90 in under two seconds. He moved out of the cubicle, checked down the row towards the reception desk, then turned towards the window offices.


    The guard breathed heavily. Michael aimed through the doorway of the last cubicle, into the paneling on the far wall, towards the wheezing, panicked sound, and let out a fifteen-round burst. The breathing stopped. After a bit of silence that felt longer than should have fit between two wails of the alarm, he stepped around the end of the row.


    The guard was slumped into a pile of blood, glass, and torn fabric, with a magless AR at his feet and a Jericho in his right hand. A few rounds had shattered the glass wall of the conference room and broken a window on the other side. Police lights flickered on a curve of highway. Thin clouds had moved in and dampened the sun. Sirens came through with the wind and he was hit by an overpowering nostalgia. It really had been a long time. He turned and moved down the row towards the reception desk and heard a strained voice from the lobby.


    ¡°¨Cup here fucking now! He¡¯s up here!¡±


    He stepped through the door with his P90 raised. The guard was leaned up against the front of the counter with blood pooling below his hip. He raised his pistol off the floor limply as the burst caught him in the head. Michael moved to the elevators while casings rolled across the marble.


    ¡°I need a status update.¡±

 The Office Job | Chapter 18: Diversion

    The Galil, an Israeli adaptation of a Finnish rifle based on the Polish version of the Russian AK¡ª


    Lindsey was settled down in the corner of a flesh-toned room, primarily storage for excess office chairs and file cabinets, watching the door. She had been waiting for the employees to clear out before setting up. With Michael''s collateral restrictions and the two god damned cowboys, it was like running an Op with her hands tied.


    ¡°Theresa, can you hear me?¡± EP said.


    Lindsey reached in the bag for her Galil ACE and found the grip. If they had lost connection, EP might have been trying to warn her for the past ten minutes and she wouldn¡¯t have heard. They could be right on top of her.


    ¡°What?!¡±


    ¡°Oh good. It¡¯s like you¡¯re in a bunker down there, I had to boost it off¡ª¡±


    ¡°Is the evacuation done?¡±


    ¡°Yea. Targets on the tenth floor¡ª¡±


    ¡°Moving out.¡± Lindsey headed for the door.


    ¡°¡ªbut they tried to call the guys you killed. You¡¯ve got two heading down.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not set up!¡±


    ¡°You can¡¯t deal with them?¡±


    ¡°They¡¯ll send the rest of them after me!¡± Lindsey couldn¡¯t believe she had to explain this. She only had one option left.


    ¡°I need to blow the stairs before they move him out!¡±


    ¡°How¡ª¡±


    ¡°With my last fucking breath!¡±


    EP got the idea.


    ¡°Wait! I think I can draw the other two out of the stairs. Malachi, can you hit the lobby?¡±


    There was a pause, but Lindsey didn¡¯t waste any time getting the door open.


    ¡°Yea, fine. Give me a sec,¡± said Philip.


    She shut the door as quietly as she could, white-knuckling the handle, and promised herself this would be the last time she ever waited on Philip.


    ~


    Philip was parked in the front lot under the gentle shade of a live oak. Police sirens echoed in the distance and screams popped out at odd intervals like birdsong. Most of the employees had evacuated out the back entrance and fled across the street on foot, leaving their cars in the front lot. He had hoped to stay unnoticed until the target got farther down the stairwell. EP had other plans.


    ¡°Yea, fine. Give me a sec.¡± He told her and started the car. Bet she¡¯s glad he got off that bridge now.


    He drove down the back row under a line of oaks and glanced at the front of the building. There were three armed men standing guard at the tops of the steps. Briefly, through the glass front of the lobby, he saw at least five other guards around the reception desk and more standing on the upper loft.


    The front entrance was recessed about twenty feet from the face of the building, forming a U shape of glass walls. He wouldn¡¯t be able to lob a grenade into the lobby unless he was facing it dead on, and opening up on the door guards wasn¡¯t going to be enough to draw anybody out of the stairwell. He needed something loud and ballsy. He pulled an old trick out of his book, and ghosts smiled at him in the rear view.


    He turned on the row that seemed to have the most cars and stopped behind a tall van. He took two wrapped grenades out of the pouch in the center console, tore off the electric tape and put them in his coat pocket, and got out.If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    He leaned over the windshield, grabbed a wiper, and threaded the blade through the ring on one of the grenades. He set it down easily in the gap between the hood and the windshield and took off the safety clip, then did the same to the second grenade with the other wiper blade and got back in the car. After clipping the grenade pouch on his belt behind his back, he lowered the seat and leaned it flat behind him, then brought the Rattler onto his lap and switched it to auto. It had all taken less than thirty seconds, but he half expected the guards to come around the van and spray him through the windows.


    He went back around and turned down the center row towards the lobby. The seat was so low he could just barely see over the steering wheel. He put on his best scared office worker face as he crept forward and got a good grip on the Rattler. The two guards in front of the big glass doors watched him without much interest. Something came over the radio and they put their hands to their ears and looked back at the lobby. Perfect.


    He lined up with one of the concrete posts on the sidewalk and raised his Rattler at the windshield. Careful not to rev the engine, he pushed the pedal down and the speedometer climbed. He said some mantras in his mind and visualized them.


    ¡°Their bullets miss. They drop dead.¡±


    He added another as he pulled the trigger.


    ¡°They don¡¯t shoot the fucking grenades.¡±


    He was going over thirty when he dropped the first guard. Bullets ripped through his windshield as he missed the second one. The guards on the loft fired through the windows and rounds cracked on the engine block. In his mind, he saw the crash and watched himself get up unharmed. He replayed the vision in his head and felt everything else fall away as his body relaxed and the rifle moved on its own.


    There was a jolt and a moment of darkness.


    The two guards on the steps backed up and emptied half their mags blindly before the car jumped the curb and hit the concrete post head-on. The grenades went flying, leaving their pins on the wipers. One sailed past the guards and crashed through the glass into the lobby and the other struck one of them in the shoulder at thirty miles per hour and bounced off behind him. He stumbled back, tripped over the dead body, and sat down hard. The other guy realized what was rolling around.


    ¡°Shit!¡± He threw himself down to the right of Philip¡¯s car, just in time.


    There was a loud roar, and the shrapnel took out half the glass in the lobby, the rest of Philip¡¯s windshield, and most of the windows. Cars out in the lot shed glass and tires hissed. The guard sitting down died instantly.


    In the lobby, someone yelled ¡°Grenade!¡± and dove behind the front desk. The guards on the ground floor ran to the elevator hallway, knowing the front desk wouldn¡¯t stop shit. The guys on the upper loft backed away from the edge, and the poor bastards in the waiting area hit the ground behind some leather chairs and glass coffee tables.


    The second blast took out the glass railing on the loft and sent shrapnel through the front desk, killing the guard behind it. Another in the waiting area died in the same instant and one running to the elevator hallway dropped screaming. In a flash, a hardened base of operations became a screaming bloody mess.


    Philip came to lying flat in the seat with the sound of the grenade ripping through the air. He felt like his face was on fire, and the aches from the first car crash had flared up again, but otherwise he was untouched. His Rattler was still strapped on his chest and he was covered in glass from the windshield.


    A second later, there was another roar and more shrapnel dinked the car. Someone yelled outside. He snatched his P226 out of its holster and aimed it at the passenger door. The guard made all kinds of noise getting his gun off the cement. Philip put six rounds of .357 Sig through the door and he dropped to the sidewalk with a dull thud.


    ¡°Did that do it, uh.¡± He tried to think of her code name.


    ¡°Yea, that did it,¡± EP said in his ear. He flicked the P226 to safe and set it back in its holster, then grabbed his Rattler and set it to semi-auto.


    ¡°Good, guess I can die now.¡± He sat up.


    Movement up on the loft caught his eye. The guard fired and most of the rounds zipped through the car harmlessly, but one cracked the steering wheel and hit Philip¡¯s chest plate as he took aim.


    ¡°Fuck you.¡±


    The dumb bastard was standing up on the loft with absolutely no cover and jumped back as Philip fired. Not fast enough. He got him four times, walking the shots up from thigh to head. When the suppressed smacks stopped echoing, there was nothing but the sound of the fire alarm and sirens in the distance.


    He reached over to get the extra magazines off the floor on the passenger side and remembered he had already put them in his chest pouches when more gunfire ripped out of the building. He finished leaning his head onto the seat and kicked open the driver¡¯s side door. Bullets ripped into it almost instantly.


    ¡°All right.¡±


    He dropped the passenger seat back and threw himself over it as more rounds cracked into the car. Deja-vu cut through the chaos and somewhere midroll, he smiled.


    The roof concealed him from the loft, but that didn¡¯t stop them from trying. Fabric flew down with streams of sunlight and the seats around him spat out chunks of polyester. He kicked open the passenger side rear door to give them something else to shoot at as he dropped the backseat down and dove into the trunk.


    He rolled over trash, shoes, jackets, a blanket that smelled like death, and an old jack before he got a hold of the release handle and kicked it open. More rounds poured through the lid and skipped off the street as he rolled out. He was in a crouch with the Rattler up and ready to rock before the shit in the trunk settled. Two guards on the loft dropped dead and the others dove for cover. He got down and reloaded with a smile on his face.


    ¡°I¡¯m the god damn attack team,¡± he whispered down the barrel.

 The Office Job | Chapter 19: Cut Down

    You never hear the shot that kills you


    Anthony had been watching things play out in a reinforced room two stories below street level. Five fully armed and armored men stood behind him, like statues modeling SWAT gear, and their goggles reflected the grid of screens on the wall. Someone had been looping camera feeds from the outside and the one-man grenadier attack on the lobby hadn¡¯t been expected, but it didn¡¯t matter. The job was as good as done.


    A big guy in an overcoat passed a camera in the staircase and his P90 sliced the area with expert precision. He moved as quiet as a ghost.


    ¡°House, you¡¯ve got one coming in from above. Get the client out of the stairwell and engage.¡±


    The guards snapped their guns up the stairwell and moved to the door. The big guy stopped just after the sixth floor and listened, still as if the camera feed had frozen. Suddenly, with unexpected agility, he glided down the last flight of stairs and opened the door.


    ¡°He went out on the fifth floor,¡± Anthony said, trying to keep the awe out of his voice. He hadn¡¯t seen anyone move like that in a long time.


    EP picked up the exchange on the guard¡¯s cell phone mic.


    ¡°Boss, they know where you are. They must have more cameras on an air-gapped system.¡±


    Michael moved away from the door and went down the hall, looking for a good position. He passed a window conference room, facing out over the highway towards an upscale apartment complex. Something flashed on the roof and the windows on both sides of the conference room exploded.


    Michael slumped to the floor in a burst of gore as the bullet cracked in the air. By the time the gunshot boomed through the window frame, he was gone.


    ¡°Boss? Boss!¡± EP shouted in the headset, but his heart monitor had already flatlined.


    ¡°I heard it. Sounded like a fifty.¡± Philip hissed and dropped behind the back bumper. Flashes of the carnage on the ramp turned his fear to anger.


    ¡®Where did it come from?¡± EP screamed.


    ¡°South, I think. Fuck! I¡¯m out here in the open!¡±


    He looked around frantically, ready to look death in the eye when it flashed in some distant window, and realized the live oaks rising out of the medians screened him from anything beyond the lot.


    ¡°Oh fuck, the trees.¡± He looked back towards the wide-open cement in front of the lobby. Broken glass glittered in the sunlight.


    ¡°I can¡¯t move up unless that sniper gets dealt with!¡±


    The police sirens had risen to a crescendo and held it without advancing. He placed a grenade, the tape and safety clip already discarded, carefully in his coat pocket. So much for moving up now. He backed up from the car with his gun raised. It had been quiet for too long. As he cleared the roof, the guards on the loft opened fire.


    Two rounds hit his chest plate. One tore a gash in the top of his arm above the elbow and a ricochet slapped another gash in his thigh before he shot one guard in the face.


    Philip dropped back behind the car as bullets ripped through the roof.


    ¡°I¡¯m running out of time here!¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m working on the sniper!¡± said EP.


    Besides her late-night interview with Paul and a few minor social engineering tasks, Celeste hadn¡¯t seen much action on this job, which was fine with her. She didn¡¯t have the same addiction to violence that seemed to possess the rest of the team. She was sitting at a table in a Starbucks half a mile away from the office, sipping a frappe and picking at a Danish, watching the news footage on her phone. Police sirens wailed in the distance and the few other people at the tables around her held panicked conversation.You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.


    Her phone rang on the encrypted line and her heart stopped. Michael had told her to stay in the vicinity just in case, but she never expected to actually be fielded. Maybe the job was already over!


    ¡°Hey, this is Rochelle.¡±


    ¡°Carolyn here. I need you active. You¡¯re on a bike, right?¡± said EP.


    Shit.


    ¡°Yea, do you need eyes, or¡ª¡±


    ¡°Get on the road right now.¡±


    Celeste felt the half danish jump in her stomach.


    ¡°What is it?¡±


    ¡°Rochelle, get on the fucking road and I¡¯ll tell you!¡±


    She sprang up and got as much out of the frappe as she could before trashing it.


    Outside, next to her matte black Yamaha YZF-R1, she took one last look at the massive row of outlet stores and specialty restaurants. Why couldn¡¯t she ever just come here and have a good time?


    As she took off down the quiet streets, following the route EP had pinged on her navigator, sirens rang all around like she was in the eye of a robotic hurricane. She passed wide ranch houses lined over precision cut lawns and didn¡¯t see another driver anywhere. It felt like the opening of a zombie movie.


    ¡°There¡¯s a complex up on the left called Beaverwood. Go inside.¡± EP said, now in her earbuds. Such a control freak. What¡¯s the point of the GPS?


    She turned in at the big wooden sign that said ¡°Beaverwood Estates¡± with an image of a fishing pond in the middle of a pine forest and geese flying overhead. The buildings were a friendly grey with thick whitewashed wood trim and well placed little green hedges. The sky had gone slightly overcast in the afternoon, and everything was lit by a soft silver light. It all made her wish she could go in one of the units and lay down on someone¡¯s couch. Whatever she was here to do, she wasn¡¯t going to like it.


    ¡°Head straight back,¡± EP said. When she had gotten to what seemed to be the second to last lot, EP told her: ¡°Stop here, park in that lot to the left.¡±


    ¡°So, what am I doing¡ª¡±


    ¡°There¡¯s a sniper¡ª¡± Celeste ducked down ¡°¡ªat the top of a building on the far side of the last lot. Get your sub-gun out.¡±


    She got the P90 out of the tail bag. So there was going to be some shooting. She felt like throwing up.


    ¡°Take the camera out of the helmet and mount it on the rail.¡± Her hands were shaking. It took her a bit.


    ¡°Put it on under your jacket and do exactly what I tell you.¡±


    She attached the P90 to the strap already slung under her jacket and zipped it closed.


    ¡°Take the sidewalk to the left.¡±


    She walked beside the three-story apartment faces, feeling that every window was watching her. The entire complex seemed frozen in fear. When she was halfway across the lot, EP told her.


    ¡°Turn right, go through the courtyard, and stop under the stairs on the other side.¡±


    She crossed the deathly silent courtyard of picnic tables and standing charcoal grills and stood in the shadows next to the stairwell between two units. She looked out on the sunlit parking lot beyond and took deep, slow breaths.


    ¡°Ok, when I tell you to, walk directly ahead across the street and take a right on the sidewalk. Get your keys out like you¡¯re going home. Do not look up!¡±


    In a silence touched only by distant sirens and the faint cracks of gunfire, the keys jingling sounded loud enough to carry for miles.


    ¡°Go.¡±


    Celeste hoped her life didn¡¯t depend on convincing a sniper that she was a resident just by her walk and how she held her keys. Her flats clacked dumbly on the street. She saw herself square in the center of a set of crosshairs, a fingertip slowly pressing a trigger.


    ¡°Number 459,¡± EP said.


    It was just like any other door. Bronze colored numbers, eggshell paint, but the peephole looked like a blackhole waiting to swallow her.


    ¡°Very quietly, open the door and go upstairs.¡±


    She raked the lock and turned the handle. The door opened and she was still alive. Inside was a cozily furnished apartment. A long-haired tortie stretched on a cat tree in the kitchen window and watched her creep in.


    ¡°Up the stairs, quietly. Get your gun out.¡±


    Being armed in a house like this felt like a dream. Floral scents poured down the hall from a wax-melter somewhere. Upstairs, the gentle silver sunlight glowed in a bedroom to her left.


    ¡°The room at the end of the hall. Check your corners.¡±


    Somehow Celeste remembered how to do that and, after nervously aiming her gun into the bathroom, where another cat watched her from the tub, stepped through the door. More worn-in furnishings. The bed only half made. No one in sight.


    ¡°There¡¯s¡ª¡± she whispered.


    ¡°Aim at the ceiling! Ok, step up a bit. Aim right¡ª¡±


    EP directed her until she was standing almost in the corner with her gun pointed straight up.


    ¡°Ok, when I tell you to, hold down the trigger and empty the mag into that square. Is your safety off?¡±


    It wasn¡¯t. She flipped it to full auto and tried not to cry.


    ¡°Ok. Now!¡±


    The gun was loud as hell, but she did exactly as she was told. Drywall flaked down on her like snow and brass piled in the corner. Immediately after she was empty, something hit the roof with a thud and scraped off the side.


    ¡°Good, fucking perfect!¡± EP said, keys tapping under her voice. Celeste lowered the gun, and the smoke caught sunlight through the blinds. Wind whistled through the holes in the drywall and a casing clinked under her foot.


    ¡°Now what?¡±


    ¡°Wait.¡± More tapping and clicking. ¡°Oh, fuck yes. Ok, one more thing. I need you to get on the roof.¡±

 The Office Job | Chapter 20: Hits and Misses

    A gun will get you into trouble, but a grenade can get you out


    Philip had been waiting for a fifty to tear through the trees or SWAT to come speeding into the lot for the past five minutes. The fire alarm wailed out the windows and sirens echoed from somewhere out of sight. He controlled his breath and tried to guide his body away from an adrenaline dump he knew would be strong enough to leave him lying on the concrete.


    He imagined EP sending a few of her drones to ¡°deal with the sniper¡±. They would probably get taken out before they got within a hundred yards of him. Then the boys in the lobby would radio in Philip¡¯s location and he would be dead very soon. He was ready for it. It was the waiting that was unbearable.


    ¡°Snipers down,¡± EP said calmly in his ear.


    ¡°You sure?¡± he said. There was no reply. He stood there like an idiot for a moment then got up.


    ¡°All right. Get ready to pack it up and head home.¡±


    He took the grenade out of his pocket, pulled the pin, and visualized the distance to the lobby. He saw the grenade land just below the loft and held the vision as he stepped out from the car and threw it over his head. Rounds snapped in the air and he dropped down. Someone in the lobby yelled. After a brief breathless silence, the roar of the grenade was like an old friend cheering him on.


    With the blast still echoing across the lot, he moved in a low run up the steps and went through the bare frame of the right waiting area. The floor was covered in window glass, shell casings, fragments of furniture, and one long blood trail. The only guard in sight was a corpse sprawled behind an overturned chair, but another one somewhere else was screaming.


    Boots struck marble to his left. He stepped up to a support beam and fired at the two guards coming out from the elevator lobby. In less than a second, they fell dead. Philip had a new gash in his forearm and most of his right ear was gone.


    Two guards stomped up on the loft. He pivoted to the right around the support beam, putting it between him and the guard on the left, and dropped to a low crouch as rounds cracked over his head. He shot the one on the right twice below the vest, and the guard collapsed over the edge and crashed into the fractured front desk. The other guard put five rounds in the beam as Philip stepped around it and shot him in the waist. Another bullet tore through Philip¡¯s shoulder and sprayed him in the face with his blood. He put one last round through the guard¡¯s neck as he dropped.


    There was a brief silence. The fire alarm just ambiance now. Blood pounded in his ears, the one sound the earbuds couldn¡¯t do shit about. He marched across the lobby toward the exterior metal staircase that led from the waiting area to the loft. Blood streamed down his face from a gash in the top of his head, but he didn¡¯t feel the wound. Somewhere out of sight, footsteps crinkled on glass.


    Celeste had gone out a window and pulled herself onto the roof. A news chopper circled in the sky. Cars glittered on the highway like a river of metal. Bumper to bumper traffic. Dead still. The overcast was starting to break above the horizon, and it was going to be a lovely afternoon. For some people.


    Stuck in the crevice between the chimney and the roof was a very big gun.


    ¡°Oh god, you know I don¡¯t know how to use that!¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll walk you through it,¡± said EP.


    She did, and after being instructed how to shoulder the rifle, brace herself for the recoil, and a million other things, Celeste had it aimed at the office building across the highway. Something flashed at the base of the building and cracked and boomed like a firework. She would have jumped, but she was too scared to move.


    ¡°Ok, I need you to look at the fourth floor. Can you see it?¡± EP said.


    Celeste counted up from the lobby.


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°Okay, do you see those men standing next to the stairwell?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.


    ¡°What? Right next to the stairwell!¡±


    ¡°I see a blob, kind of.¡±


    EP flipped through her camera feeds. The glass inside wall of the conference room had a frosted bar across it six feet high.


    ¡°Ok, put the crosshairs on the center of that blob. When I tell you, squeeze the trigger, slowly.¡±


    Celeste tried to cheer herself up.


    If I get him, they¡¯ll have to give me half. Probably more than half! And if I fuck up, they¡¯ll never make me do anything like this again.


    ¡°Now!¡±


    The gun was the loudest thing Celeste had ever heard. She twisted from the recoil, lost her footing, and slid off the roof. Her feet slipped from under her as she dropped onto the second-story roof and rolled off the side. After a screaming fall and an instinctive para roll on the grass, she was on her side on the lawn, right next to the sniper¡¯s corpse. Her ass felt like it had been stabbed and her shoulder was burning from the fall or the recoil or both. When everything settled, she looked up to see two men, civilians, one with a Glock and one with an AR, aiming at her and looking surprised.


    ¡°It¡¯s a girl.¡±


    ¡°Are you Mossad?¡±


    She muttered half a word before a scraping on the roof cut her off. She turned around just in time to see the rifle land on its stock a few feet away. She squeaked in surprise and the men stepped back.


    ¡°What happened?!¡± EP said in her ear.


    ¡°I fell.¡± Her voice cracked.


    ¡°Are you fucking¡ª¡± EP groaned then clicked off the line.


    ¡°Did I get him?¡± There was a pause.


    ¡°No!¡± EP said and clicked back off again. Celeste started to cry. The two guys looked at each other, but kept their guns level.


    Lindsey watched seconds tick by on a yellowed analog wall clock, counted the muffled thumps of gunfire from the ground floor, ran her thumb over the selector switch on the Galil. Anything to distract her from the nagging feeling that she shouldn¡¯t be here. A buried voice cried out.


    You¡¯re going to get killed, or arrested, or maimed for life. Why are you doing this? Run!


    She had set up the bomb in the stairwell and had the camera feed pulled up on her phone. EP had called it a ¡°stairwell cleaner¡±, apparently something Michael had the twins cook up. A specially crafted thermobaric charge tweaked to send an incendiary blast wave snaking up the stairs, killing anything within five stories, but leaving the rest of the building intact. It seemed too good to be true.


    On the camera feed, a guard came down the stairs from the elevator lobby and walked right up to the luggage.


    ¡°They found it!¡± God damn E.P. They must have another camera system. ¡°I¡¯m gonna have to blow it!¡± She flexed her thumb over the button.


    ¡°Shit. Just wait, trying to move the target.¡± Said EP.


    ¡°What? Where is he?!¡± He should have been in range by now. How long does it take to get down five flights of stairs?!


    ¡°Just wait!¡± EP clicked and slapped keys in the background and Lindsey got a sinking feeling in her chest.


    ¡°He¡¯s not in the stairwell?!¡± she whispered. ¡°Why did they move him out?!¡±


    ¡°Boss was moving down!¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s been dead for ten minutes!¡± It didn¡¯t make any sense. Unless they had seen the bomb. Lindsey grimaced as the man on the screen rummaged through the suitcase. All this for nothing! If those two idiots had been on site instead of dying on an overpass, they could have made a move together. Now all she could do was pray.


    ¡°I¡¯m setting it off!¡± she whispered.


    ¡°Just wait! Why aren¡¯t they moving him?!¡± EP screamed, and Lindsey, despite herself, felt for her. On the feed, the man tore the back fabric off, exposing the main case.


    ¡°Clear the stairs!¡± Lindsey said. She dialed the number and hoped for a miracle.


    Her earbuds muffled the roar, but she felt the shock rip through the walls and jump from the floor straight into her bones. Support beams groaned and dust flaked off the ceiling. The quiet that followed made her feel like the room was the last thing left in existence.


    ¡°Kill confirmed?¡± She said, hopelessly. Her voice fell flat on carpet and dusty air, already smelling of the chemical explosion.


    ¡°No,¡± said EP. ¡°They¡¯re opening the elevator shaft. You need to hurry.¡±


    Lindsey got her Galil up and moved to the door. Finally, something direct. Adrenaline washed over her like a wave. She was ready for it.


    Paul was crouched in front of the elevators when the glass conference room exploded and the guard standing over him went down a bloody crash. The guard¡¯s head and shoulders wobbled strangely as he dropped, and his vest caved outward with a burst of gore. Something flew off at an angle and clanged on an elevator. An arm. Paul sat there stunned, covered in blood and gore while the guards scrambled around him.


    ¡°Get him down!¡± they forced him on the floor and up against the wall between the elevators and crouched around him with their guns up. Andler screamed at the space where the window used to be.


    ¡°You mother fucker! Must¡¯ve been bought off! Overlord this is House! We¡¯re taking fire through the windows! Moving to the stairwell!¡±


    ¡°No! Get him away from the windows and drop the blinds!¡± Anthony¡¯s anger was a rolling boil, but a fifty cal is a fifty cal. The guards looked at each other and Paul could almost see the words ¡°fuck that¡± form in the air between them. Paul waited for one of the other guards to get ripped in half, but they just sat there staring and breathing and grimacing for a few seconds that dragged on like hours.


    A boom rose from the floor and shot up the walls, and a roar in the stairwell rattled the door like a tornado had been summoned on the other side.


    ¡°Overlord, what was that?¡± Andler screamed.


    ¡°The stairs are gone,¡± Anthony said. ¡°Drop the blinds, get that elevator open and get him down the shaft. Gear is in the manager¡¯s office.¡±


    He sounded like he was explaining how to boil water. All the guards looked at Andler.


    ¡°You get paid more,¡± someone said.


    Andler marched swiftly to the shattered glass wall and let down the floor-to-ceiling roller shades. Paul and the guards all exhaled at once.


    ¡°Ok!¡± Andler¡¯s voice cracked. ¡°Get that fucking elevator open!¡±

 The Office Job | Chapter 21: Wet Work

    Thermobaric blonde


    Anthony and his two remaining men moved through the deli with weapons raised, flashlights shining through the smoke as the fire alarm flashed and screamed. In the lobby, the elevators waited with open doors like ghosts had called them. The three men got in position and froze, still as corpses.


    ¡°How many?¡± Lindsey asked EP.


    ¡°Three, taking cover in the elevators. One in the right-center, and two in the last two on the left.¡±


    ¡°Moving.¡± She went down the hall in a low crouch. At the corner, she visualized them, their position and distance, how she would gun them down, one by one. She went over it all again in under a second, then took a breath, backed away from the wall, and stepped in front of the doorway.


    The guard in the center-left elevator fired just as she cleared the frame. Her Galil snapped soundlessly and his face was no longer a face. She took another step and the guard in the far-left elevator came into view, muzzle flash blooming on his chest. Bullets ripped through the drywall and one punched her in the thigh. Stumbling, she put three rounds in his chest. Another punch in her right side as she shot him in the jaw. She stepped again to engage the guard in the right-side elevator and put five rounds into the doorway before she realized he had backed out of sight. Still firing, she stepped into the hallway and got punched in the side.


    The guard she had shot in the jaw was up on one knee and his muzzle flashed again. She put three rounds in his face before she knew he had missed her. Brains smeared on the elevator wall as he slumped down.


    She turned back towards the right elevator, and the marble and metal around the call button exploded in a stream of bullets. Most missed her or struck her chest plate, but she felt another punch in her hip and fell to the right. She rolled with it and emptied the rest of her magazine into the inside left wall of the adjacent elevator. With the empty mag still bouncing on the floor, she threw herself back into the hallway.


    ¡°I¡¯m hit,¡± she whispered. Blood pooled on the carpet and her fingers moved sluggishly from the mag release to her mag pouch. She tried to drag her mind out of the cloud of pain and visualize all her limbs working correctly. Somewhere deep and distant, a voice cried out, begging to be spared.


    ~


    Philip had killed another guard whose M249 jammed after firing about ten rounds into the floor of the lobby. The sad sound of the trigger had been louder than gunfire, and now that the body was out of sight, it felt like a dream.


    He was standing out in the open on the top of the loft with nothing around but broken glass and bodies when the bomb went off. He just laughed while the ground shook and something roared behind the wall like a dragon caught in the pipes. So, this was Michael¡¯s brilliant plan? Hit the elevators, then blow the stairwell when the target was inside? Too bad they were after a guy with the ability to open a door and walk ten feet.


    EP came on the line, frantically trying to explain why he needed to get up the stairs, now! The same staircase the dream team had conveniently turned into a smoking burning mess a few seconds ago. She assured him the stairs themselves should be intact. Golly gee, good news all around.


    ¡°All right. How many?¡± he said softly, fighting the adrenal dump and the urge to say something cutting.


    ¡°Five. They have the elevator open and they¡¯re formed up around the target. Lindsey¡¯s hit, you need to move now!¡±


    He laughed again. If he could even make it up the stairs. He took a deep, painful breath, and got to it.


    He let his Rattler hang down at his waist and took out the last grenade, ripped off the electrical tape and safety clip, got a good grip around the ball with his thumb on the lever, and took out the pin. Ready to die, he opened the door to the staircase.The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    The walls were scorched and something below was burning. A fire sprinkler had burst above and water flowed off the landing and down the stairs. The rushing sound of another broken pipe below echoed up the shaft like the world was sinking. Immediately, his eyes stung, and he had to hold his breath. He drew his P226 and struggled up the stairs, battle wounds and two car crashes calling their debt.


    Blood streamed off his hand and joined the water flowing past his feet. Nostalgia hit him again and all the pain and weariness fell away. Gunfire and oncoming death, tessellated. Memories. Fractured the way they always were here. Like standing between two mirrors. The world moved beneath his feet and brought the door to him. One last deep breath, and he felt alive again.


    He let go of the grenade lever, kicked open the door, and went out gun first. The P226 jumped three times. He counted to one in his head.


    Two guards threw the target to the ground, while the other two took aim at Philip and one fell over with his kneecap blown in half. Philip shot the guard next to the elevator in the face and took a bullet to the thigh and another to his hip before the grenade left his hand. Bullets tore into his legs as the grenade soared through the air, and shots cracked all around and sparked off his chest plate as he fell. The floor took ages to touch him. For a moment, he thought he might keep falling forever.


    He collapsed into a tangled crouch as the grenade smacked into the side of the guard with one knee. Another guard looked at the grenade bouncing on the bloody carpet and Philip shot him in the face. Someone fired a burst that ripped through Philip¡¯s right arm, shoulder, and the side of his neck. The pistol fell from his hand and he counted to three.


    ¡°Grenade!¡± yelled some son of a bitch. Bullets sparked off the Rattler and kicked up bursts of carpet as Philip reached across with his left arm and grabbed at his fallen pistol. The other guard got the target up and moved him into the elevator shaft in a single stride. They reached for something attached to the cables as Philip lifted his gun. Too slow. He shot the guard that tried to follow them through the legs. He dropped screaming as Philip counted four in his head.


    ¡°Fuck y¡ª¡± The grenade cut Phillip off with a bang that no one on the floor would ever hear. They all fell dead as the lobby fractured into a cloud of smoke and dust.


    ~


    A metallic thunk echoed in the elevator lobby as Lindsey stood bleeding in the hallway. It was time to move.


    ¡°The Targets on top of the Elevator. Philips out.¡± EP said in her ear. She finished tightening the tourniquet, raised her weapon, and moved forward. Automatic movements took over as she cleared the doorway. She watched herself as if from far away. Her boot came down on a shell casing with a light ¡°tink¡±. It was the loudest noise in the world, bright and ethereal in the humming quiet.


    A suppressor snaked out of the elevator and flashed as the gunman stepped into view. The Galil moved on its own and in a second it was over. She fell with the gun still going and landed on her side in the center of the lobby. The shooter folded up in the elevator with his face hanging off and his neck spraying.


    Lindsey was still breathing, but her right arm was mangled beyond use. She reached over to her right hip with her left hand and got out her PPQ, aimed it at the elevator car, and coughed up blood. There was no sound but the whisper of the fire alarm and a distant rush of water. Smoke drifted across everything like a dream. She was sure reality would come crashing down any moment. Her hand shook as she slowly and quietly brought her right knee up under her forearm.


    All at once, the guard dropped through the hatch into the elevator car and her Walther flashed. She shot him five times before he had time to pull the trigger, but in less than half a second his Origin-12 ejected three shells and Lindsey was dead.


    He sat bleeding in the smoke for a moment before he pressed his radio.


    ¡°Where the fuck are you?¡±


    ¡°Hold tight house, we¡¯re almost there.¡±


    Two guards in full kit moved into the lobby and started clearing the other elevators. The bleeding guard screamed.


    ¡°There¡¯s no one in there, god dammit, get on me!¡±


    One looked down at Lindsey¡¯s mangled corpse in awe.


    ¡°Holy fuck.¡± He turned to the shotgun on the ground.


    ¡°Oh, fuck yea!¡±


    ¡°Shut up and get me a tourniquet! Get down here, god dammit!¡± The bleeding guard shouted at the roof of the car and tried to worm out of the way. His legs were dripping blood and one of his arms hung limp. Paul hopped down through the hatch and almost landed on him.


    ¡°Where¡¯s the door?¡± said Paul.


    ¡°Down the tunnels, in another basement.¡±


    The guard on the floor reached up to be lifted onto his feet, and Paul grabbed the Origin-12 off the ground.


    ¡°What the fuck?¡± He was as offended as a dying man could be.


    ¡°Can you walk?¡±


    ¡°No, I¡ª¡±


    ¡°Then stay here.¡±


    ¡°What am I supposed to do here?¡±


    Paul reached down again and took a 10-round stick out of the guy¡¯s mag pouch.


    ¡°Not slow us down,¡± said Paul. He put it in his pocket and walked out. The guards fell in line around him and marched out of the lobby.

 The Office Job | Chapter 22: The Mandala Effect

    Have you been having strange dreams?


    Gradie had been listening to distant gunfire and explosions for half an hour when Holly came out of her office and said in a loud, shaking voice: ¡°Guys, we just got word that there¡¯s a shooter in the other building, and they¡¯re telling us to go into a lockdown, so everyone under the desks. Matt, get the lights¡ª¡±


    The office broke out in a panic. Was this it? Was he really going to die here?


    Another explosion thumped outside. It felt like reality was collapsing, and somewhere in the chaos was a message meant for him. The phantom gun. The terrorist attack right next door. It didn¡¯t seem real.


    The feeling of having forgotten something became too intense to ignore. He had to do something. So he did what he had been terrified of doing all day. He reached in the bag and grabbed the gun.


    This time, it was something more.


    FN Five-Seven. Twenty-one rounds of armor-piercing 5.7x28 ready to fucking go. He could feel it fire just looking at it. All at once, the office snapped into place around him. His life jumped off the track it had been chained to since birth and took flight.


    Hilarious. He looked around at the panic. Nothing here had anything to do with him. This wasn¡¯t his job. This wasn¡¯t his life. His destiny had fallen out of a cage and landed right in his hand with one in the chamber. He loved the feeling so much he laughed out loud.


    In a hidden flap inside the mag pouch, he found the phone and earbuds. There was a moment of silence as he pressed them in. They chimed and sound returned. He pulled up the chat logs and opened the map. Holy shit. He was right there. He sent EP a message.


    ¡°In building three. Moving to tunnels. Call me.¡±


    Matt yelled at him as he moved down the aisle.


    ¡°Gradie! We¡¯re still in a lockdown! Gradie!¡± He ran into the break room, humming darkness lit only by the microwave clockfaces, like a transition zone before the rest of his life. He pulled out the Five Seven, got it in the holster then on his hip and put the mag pouch on his belt.


    In the dark front lobby, police lights glittered across the lot like magic. A smile spread across his face that he felt he would never lose. He went into the stairwell and waited for EP to call him.


    When EP was sick of looking at the smoking lobby, she leaned back in her chair and groaned at the ceiling.


    The massive desk in front of her supported three large monitors and was covered with papers, phones, detonators, sensors, empty energy drink cans, and used coffee cups. The attic was decorated to host a Halloween party and smelled of spices and dried marigolds. There was a custom mini-Uzi on the desk next to her coffee and a Saiga leaned up against the bookcase.


    All the windows were quadruple thick and bullet resistant. The ground floor and most of the wooded, uninhabited land around was rigged with traps and cameras and her solar-powered drones hovered above in set flight paths, augmenting borrowed satellite feeds.


    Now that the noise of violence had died in her headset, the gentle sounds of nature pushed in through the windows. When she was done regretting the failures of the day, she leaned forward with a sigh.


    One of the icons on the bottom toolbar was orange. She jumped. How long had it been like that?


    ¡°Can you hear me?¡± EP said in his ears. Memories attached to the voice flooded in, bringing in pieces of another world and another him. It was electrifying. He felt ready for anything.


    ¡°Yea. I¡¯m in the stairwells. Where do you want me? I¡¯m assuming shit is getting heavy next door, right?¡±


    ¡°Everyone else is down. They¡¯re moving the target through the tunnels.¡±


    His chest dropped out. Whatever tore through the rest of the team was escorting the target right below him, and his only purpose on earth was to get in front of it. He went down the stairs in a hurry.


    ¡°The door is down there somewhere,¡± EP added.Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.


    ¡°The what?¡±


    ¡°The Door!¡±


    ¡°I thought that was in his head?¡±


    ¡°What? Didn¡¯t you listen¡ª¡±


    ¡°Ok, whatever. Where is it?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know! Somewhere in the tunnels. They took out the cameras.¡±


    Gradie stopped on the landing. The feeling of forgetting something hit him again. It was too much of a coincidence. He had been completely out of it until five minutes ago and now the target was right below him? He had put himself here for a reason, and if he could do that¡­


    He closed his eyes and reached into his memory, and felt it start to open. He pushed it, guided it. It was like light falling on hidden things.


    He remembered yesterday, last week, a month ago, looking for anything about the tunnels, and there it was. A few months ago, there had been loud construction noise coming from the basement. He always liked to eat lunch down there if he could, and that day he had seen the back maintenance area blocked off with a temporary fabric wall and a security guard sitting on a fold-out chair.


    ¡°The doors in this basement?¡±


    ¡°What? How do you know.¡±


    ¡°I saw some construction a few months ago.¡±


    ¡°You pushed memory?¡± She sounded surprised. He tried not to let his ego flare up and jumped down the stairs.


    ¡°How many guys are with him?¡±


    ¡°Two.¡± Adrenaline bit his tongue and worked out towards the rest of him.


    ¡°Any other advice?¡± he asked.


    ¡°Move fast.¡±


    He pushed the handle on the basement door. Locked. He reached out again and remembered getting into lockpicking a few weeks ago, buying the picks online...


    He slid the thin metal tension and rake out of the back of his wallet and raked the lock. After he got the handle down, he waited until he was sure of the silence on the other side, and slipped through the door without breathing.


    The basement was dusty and still, lit only by a weak amber glow from a thin viewport in a large metal door. The floor was bare besides the junk pushed up against the walls and thick concrete pillars that reminded him of all the glass and steel stacked above him. It felt like the bottom of the world.


    A light flickered in the darkness to his left. A flashlight, pointed by someone coming down the stairs behind another door. The beam caught swarms of dust as it flashed out of the narrow glass pane. He looked around for somewhere to hide.


    A few ceiling panels were missing right above him, exposing solid blackness. He ran forward, kicked up the nearest support pillar, and grabbed onto one of the exposed beams. He pulled himself up into the ceiling just as the door opened and more flashlights scanned the room below him. He positioned himself horizontally, with his feet on one beam and his hands on another, and held his breath. The large metal door opened with a sucking sound. Someone stepped out.


    ¡°Where the fuck is everyone?¡±


    ¡°Dead, but it¡¯s clear now.¡± said the lead guard.


    ¡°Even Anthony?¡±


    ¡°Yea. For all the shit he talked.¡±


    Gradie held himself steady with his left hand and reached down and grabbed the gun off his hip with his right. They passed below him with the target in the center, cradling an AK patterned shotgun. The guard up front killed his light and approached the door, while the guard in the rear shined his light at the door Gradie had come through. Gradie flicked the safety off, aimed at the side of the target¡¯s head, and stifled a laugh.


    The muzzle flash lit up the room like a rave. All three shots blew through the side of the target¡¯s head before the guards reacted. Their flashlight beams crossed below him and he put another two rounds through the front guard¡¯s face. The rear guard aimed up past Gradie¡¯s right arm, where he had seen the muzzle flash, and fired into empty dark air. Gradie let go of the beams and brought his hands together as he fell.


    He put three rounds through the guard¡¯s face before he hit the ground and landed in a low squat with a support pillar between him and the guard at the door. It was only a foot wide, but it was enough to give Gradie the second he needed to bring his weapon around while the guard stepped to the side to get a shot. As his head came out from behind the pillar, Gradie shot him under the chin and the bullet came out the crown of his head. He fell over and kicked up a cloud of dust that danced in the crossed beams of the fallen flashlights.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± someone yelled from inside the room. Gradie aimed back at the target and saw him twitching. The Five Seven spat fire four more times and left the target''s head and neck a dripping mess.


    ¡°He¡¯s already gone, dumbass.¡± Said the guy inside, stepping out to have a look. His rifle was down at his side.


    ¡°With a fucking pistol.¡± He smiled and shook his head as he unclipped one end of his rifle from the sling and brought the barrel up to his mouth. He dropped in a blast of brain matter and the shot echoed off the back wall of the basement.


    Gradie stood there in the silence until it occurred to him that EP had no way to see what happened.


    ¡°You got any cameras in this room?¡±


    ¡°No. Hold up your phone.¡± Her voice shook.


    He did and the camera and flashlight came on by themselves. He took a wide triumphant pan of the bodies, lingering on the target''s crumpled head.


    ¡°Holy shit. You did it.¡±


    ¡°Now what?¡±


    ¡°Go to sleep. Or eat a bullet. Job¡¯s over.¡± She clicked off the line. Not even a ¡®way to go¡¯.


    He stepped over the bodies and went through the metal door. It was a small room that smelled like weed and rust and there was a man dead asleep on the couch. In the far wall was another door, plain wood laminate, faux brass handle. Just like any other office door. For no reason he could understand, Gradie opened it.


    It was a long hallway, with dull carpet and flickering fluorescent light that came on automatically. There was a wide tunnel on the other end, unlit, that ran perpendicular to the hallway, and looked like a forgotten arm of the pedestrian tunnels that connected the office parks. It felt like the edge of the world, and the beginning of another one.


    He slammed the door shut. Something about it terrified him, and he had other things to do.


    Inside the fridge, he found a vial of Propofol and some syringes. He got the vein easily. In a few breaths, the world folded in on itself, and something else grew out of the pieces.


    Across the highway, a woman in handcuffs fell asleep in the back of a cop car, and miles away, a wanted scammer took sedatives with her wine and laid down in an attic.

 The Office Job | Chapter 23: Otherworld

    Is this world real, or something more?


    The flickering dance floor stretched endlessly in all directions towards a dark horizon. Countless ceilings of glittering glass, liquid metals, and prismatic lights floated under the starless sky. Gravity existed only in tiny pockets, around the barstools and seats, in the glasses keeping the drinks in place, or inverted and refracted on the walls and ceilings.


    People danced everywhere, upside down and sideways, floating in the air, clothed in starlight and nebulae, wreathed in neon and liquid darkness. They fell in from the sky and stepped out of doorways that blinked into existence on the walls or in empty space.


    The music was what all other club anthems devolved from, perfect and impossible. Each note was forgotten as soon as the next one played, but it drove the people to hysteria.


    Above the throbbing sea of dancers, on a long, roofless platform that floated alongside a swarm of catwalks and balconies, three figures sat across from eight others. The three wore featureless robes severed from the lineage of actual clothes, and masks of dull uncolored plastic. The eight were sitting on or standing around an identical couch that seemed to be carved from the pure black sky, dressed in a style that was half mobster half Wall Street, with touches of cybergoth and paramilitary at the edges. Other than the odd tie, streak, ring, or design on their masks, they were so dark they almost disappeared into the floor.


    ¡°Quite a close call, wasn¡¯t it? I¡¯m told it was your last operative that made the kill.¡± One of the three men said in a voice like a very convincing AI.


    ¡°No. We had two others still active.¡± Michael¡¯s voice came out altered so that a listener would only remember the words and not the sound.


    ¡°Well, it was quite a close call all the same.¡± the man said.


    ¡°Does that mean you won''t be recommending us?¡± Celeste¡¯s voice was like a phone sex operator.


    ¡°Not at all. For the price, I didn¡¯t expect you to do anything but scare him, to be honest. Hopefully bring him to the table.¡±


    ¡°Sounds like we should raise our prices,¡± EP was sitting on the armrest and the rabbit ears on her mask flicked when she spoke.


    ¡°You would have had to track him again if we just scared him,¡± Michael said. ¡°Someone bought him a Doormaker, and Hunters aren¡¯t cheap,¡±


    ¡°Yours was.¡± said the man, with a smile in his voice.


    ¡°Well, it won''t be that way for long,¡± Lindsey said, her voice pitched up and distorted. ¡°We¡¯ve got a few successes under our belts now. Better hire us while we¡¯re still at a discount.¡± She sipped molten silver in a rocks glass.


    ¡°We don¡¯t have any jobs for you at the moment, but we¡¯ll be sure to keep you in mind.¡±


    ¡°In that case, we¡¯ll be leaving.¡± Michael stood up and the others on the couch followed suit. Phillip was halfway to the door while the men were still giving their goodbye bows. As the team walked away, one of the men who hadn¡¯t spoken before called out in a voice that seemed unaltered.


    ¡°Who made the kill?¡±


    Gradie stopped and faced them.


    ¡°That¡¯s me.¡± His voice came out like a speak and spell. Luke laughed into his mask. EP muttered ¡°Jesus¡±.


    ¡°Well played, putting yourself in that building. Staying under until the last moment, quite the trick.¡±


    No one moved besides Phillip, who finished walking to the door.


    ¡°Thank you.¡±


    ¡°If you keep making moves like that, you¡¯ll be worth a lot more.¡± the man said to Michael.


    ¡°I¡¯ll remember that the next time you hire us.¡±


    They bowed at each other, and the three men disappeared into a door that opened in the air behind them.


    Philip waved open a large elevator in the wall. They all walked in and the doors snapped closed. After a moment, Michael waved his mask out of existence and everyone else did the same.Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.


    ¡°So, do I get like a bonus¡ª¡± Gradie started. Philip turned on him and the elevator stopped.


    ¡°You got lucky. Through your own incompetence.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m the one that killed¡ª"


    ¡°After the rest of us handed him to you on a fucking platter. Dropping out the moment you come in and pissing yourself in a call center for half the job isn¡¯t a useful skill in this game. It worked this time. That¡¯s it.¡±


    ¡°He has a point, Gradie,¡± Michael said. ¡°It¡¯s not the kind of thing you can rely on. I need you aware at all times, or I can¡¯t use you.¡±


    Gradie nodded and pressed the *1 button repeatedly. Philip glared at him.


    ¡°Good shooting though,¡± Michael said. ¡°Unfortunately, almost everything else went to shit, which is my fault. Before our next job, there¡¯s going to be some restructuring. We¡¯re still acting like two separate units.¡±


    ¡°Teamwork makes the dream work, baby.¡± Luke grinned as Lindsey and Philip grimaced at him.


    ¡°"Despite that, good work all around," Michael said. "Can''t say we''re lacking in raw effort." Philip sighed as the elevator opened on the office.


    The Allcity skyline rippled outside the massive window. Swarms of people zipped around like insects. Crafts of all shapes and dimensions, free from the restrictions of gravity or aerodynamics, moved at impossible speeds, turned sharply at right angles, and floated by lazily while prismatic lights pulsed inside. The sun beamed down from its permanent three pm position, and the thousands of wild structures and suspended pools reflected it in blazing pieces. As strange as each part was, together it was even more unsettling. Gradie still wasn¡¯t used to it.


    He stepped out into the office, a three-story tall loft with two railing-less square catwalks rising above. A floating spherical garden hovered in the air, a chandelier of flowing water and blooming dwarf trees below a glass skylight that let in the gentle evening of some other world. Doors evenly spaced a foot apart covered the walls. There was a crystal bar off to the side and a half circle of couches, some floating and one made of smoke, in the center of the room.


    EP and Celeste went through two of the doors and Sam waved over her shoulder as she flew up to the second level catwalk and disappeared through a doorway. Luke hopped up on a floating couch and summoned a screen. Philip stopped next to the bar and took a drag on a thick cigar, then frowned at it.


    ¡°Try this one.¡± Michael threw another cigar out of nowhere and it floated towards him like zero g, trailing smoke. Philip caught it and watched Gradie like he was waiting for him to leave. Gradie went behind the bar and looked over the bottles.


    ¡°Why haven¡¯t we mentioned the elephant in the room?¡± Philip said.


    ¡°What are you talking about?¡± said Lindsey, leaning on the other end of the bar, her drink from the club still in hand.


    ¡°Me losing M240 privileges,¡± Luke said. Philip ignored him.


    ¡°Those guys had enough money to hire a Doormaker, but skimped on a bunch of second-rate operators?¡±


    ¡°Those second-rate operators gave us enough trouble.¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t get all touchy. You know they weren¡¯t near the cost of a Doormaker. Not even close.¡±


    ¡°They probably skimped on the hired guns so they could afford the door.¡± Michael said.


    ¡°But why? Who sets up an op skewed towards failure?¡±


    Gradie tried to remember what Michael had told him before the job, about doors and how they work. They linked one Hardworld to another, but only for one person? It seemed like that had been months ago.


    ¡°Maybe they¡¯re just stupid,¡± Lindsey said.


    ¡°Stupid people can¡¯t afford Doormakers,¡± said Philip, pointing his cigar.


    ¡°Says who?¡±


    ¡°All right, whatever. Who cares, we got paid right? I¡¯m just saying, for the record, I smell a method to this madness.¡±


    ¡°Some people just like a plan B,¡± said Lindsey. It¡¯s funny you can¡¯t even comprehend that.¡±


    Philip scoffed and drew on the cigar. Suddenly, Gradie felt the familiar sensation of being pulled by a strange gravity.


    ¡°I¡¯m going out.¡±


    ¡°You don¡¯t have to announce it every time,¡± said Michael. ¡°We won¡¯t even notice anyway.¡± Gradie looked out at the city and felt himself slip away. It always seemed everything was about to move on without him, even though he knew he wouldn¡¯t lose any time.


    The same sad question came to him, and he sighed uselessly, in the absence of air or lungs. He understood now why they took these jobs. In the Hardworlds, he never had time to wonder if all of this was real.


    A fear bolted through him, like the fear of death. In a moment, he wouldn¡¯t remember any of this. Would that other him, on the other side of that vast abyss, still be him if he couldn¡¯t remember? Or would it become just another one of the infinite versions of himself that he stepped into on a job, separate and untouchable? He felt his body and the room fall away and a stranger moved in from the edges, pushing everything out. For a moment, he was one with the nothingness.


    The alarm rose in Gradie¡¯s ears and the last remnants of dreams slipped out of his mind like mist. He rolled out of bed in a hurry.


    * * * *


    Paul was locked into a chair made of numbing vibration, at the center of a lit square of floor floating in solid darkness. A man sat across from him, his face as featureless and immobile as a mannequin, even when he spoke. His voice came from all around.


    ¡°Don¡¯t look so disappointed. We would have gotten you eventually. The team that took you was at our lowest price point.¡±


    Paul didn¡¯t speak and tried not to think. The man sensed it and laughed.


    ¡°Rather than lock you in another Hardworld or ship you off to Nightmare, why don¡¯t we make a deal?¡±


    ¡°Fuck you.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s nothing difficult. We just want you to remember something.¡±


    Paul laughed, hollow.


    ¡°You serious? I¡¯m fucking cashed out. You know that! I didn¡¯t even foot the bill for that off-brand protection your boys tore through.¡±


    ¡°One man¡¯s trash is another man¡¯s treasure. Let us in, and if we find what we¡¯re looking for, we''ll set you up on one of our worlds until you¡¯re forgotten. Maybe even get you a day in Paradise if it all goes well. Deal?¡±


    Paul stared at him and recalled a bit of advice he had gotten years ago.


    ¡°No one gets in for free.¡±


    Some memories really aren¡¯t worth a damn.


    ¡°All right. Deal.¡±

 In The Beginning | Chapter 1: The Gas Station

    A trumpet call on a highway


    The freeway stretched across a dusty concrete landscape between two massive urban centers, fusing them into a single megalopolis. Suburbs, strip malls, and parking lots clung to the highway like growths leeching off a strong blood flow. Seven million people. Isolated inside cars, insulated by their routines. Seven million signals, reverberating as background noise. In a gas station at the edge of an overpass, someone was trying to break out.


    Gradie stood at the register buying nothing, staring at the slim, freckled brunette in front of him. A warm-blooded living thing framed by a frozen mass of shiny plastic packaging in primary and fluorescent colors. He leaned into the counter as if gravity had moved behind her, trying to find a way to get closer. She shifted, smiling under his stare as she talked, and her hoodie rode up at the sides, letting her pale hips peek out like a giggle. He forgot the words the moment they were out of his mouth, and she kept on smiling and talking lightly about whatever nothing he mentioned. He rode it all like a wave.


    Suddenly, he fell out of the cloud and back into the fluorescent glare of the gas station. The girl was staring out the windows as police sirens rose from the highway. A car screeched to a stop outside. She jumped with a cute little yelp, and Gradie took the chance to play the hero.


    ¡°Get down,¡± he whispered to her. She crouched behind the counter and he went out the door like he could do something about anything.


    Beyond the slanted parking lot and slim access road, the concrete prairieland was so flat it seemed that if he tripped he would fly out over the horizon. The muted daylight could have been evening or morning, and the traffic rushing beneath the overpass, either the nine or the five o clock rush, was just light enough to be dying down or getting started. A guy pumped gas next to a corvette and talked on the phone to someone whose income depended on listening, oblivious to the car stopped at the edge of the pumps.


    It was a black sedan with mirror windows. The doors swung open like they weighed a thousand pounds, and the two people who stepped out shouldn¡¯t have been there. A big man, black overcoat over a charcoal pinstriped suit and black running shoes, and a sleek woman, navy suit under a trench coat the color of an overcast sky, both with short assault rifles in hand and plate carriers and mag pouches (color-coordinated with their suits) on their chests. They knew exactly where they were, where they were going, and what they were doing. It made Gradie realize he didn¡¯t.


    He didn¡¯t remember why he was on the highway or which direction he had come from. He didn¡¯t know what day it was or if he should be going to work. He didn¡¯t even know why he had stopped here. All he knew was that these people with guns were coming towards him, and while he didn¡¯t know if they were going to rob the place, he knew that the girl inside would probably think so.


    He went back in and she was still crouching behind the counter. He got down and wrapped his arms around her.


    ¡°Some people coming up with guns. Stay quiet.¡±


    She squeezed him and he pressed himself against her. They stayed like that for a moment, the sirens getting louder by the second. She shivered pleasantly in his arms as the door opened.


    ¡°It¡¯s me. You get confirmation? All right, we¡¯re coming in.¡± It was the man speaking. He sounded calm.


    ¡°You gonna talk to him about that shit?¡± The woman¡¯s voice was enough to make Gradie forget the girl in his arms.Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    ¡°I will, but you need to¡ª¡± The man stopped abruptly. Sirens had stopped right outside. Gradie saw an opportunity and whispered to the girl.


    ¡°They¡¯re gonna shoot.¡± He moved her to the ground and got on top of her. She was breathing heavily and he wondered if he was dreaming.


    ¡°Take him?¡± the woman asked. Before the man could answer, shots broke through the windows. The gunfire was almost deafening, even from outside. Bullets ripped through the shelves and freezers with alien hateful sounds that nothing in Gradie¡¯s experience had prepared him for. The girl squeaked beneath him and he tasted bitter adrenaline.


    ¡°No, let¡¯s go,¡± said the man. A door opened and closed in the back. After a few more breaths from the girl under him, the front door dinged open.


    ¡°Police!¡±


    ¡°Here!¡± The girl yelled. A troubling idea formed in Gradie¡¯s head, but not fast enough.


    ¡°Get the fuck up!¡± The cop was right behind him. Gradie tried to stand with his hands over his head, but he stumbled and the girl had to catch him and help him to his feet. She stammered at the cop.


    ¡°No, no, he was helping me. They went in the back.¡±


    ¡°Face me!¡± The cop yelled like they were a mile away.


    Gradie turned around with his hands in the air and knocked some cigarettes off the shelf. The cop had the gun pointed at his chest.


    ¡°Uh, they¡¯re in the back,¡± Gradie said. ¡°They¡¯re armed.¡± His voice came out steady, calm, surprising him. Something in the cop¡¯s face changed.


    ¡°Shut the fuck up.¡± Gradie saw his finger move inside the trigger guard. Is this really happening? His phone vibrated in his pocket and he jumped. The cop flinched and the girl screamed.


    ¡°It¡¯s my phone.¡± Gradie remembered he had been on his way to work. It was probably his supervisor calling. How did he not remember that before? What time was it?


    ¡°Step away from her and get down on the ground.¡± The cop said, still watching Gradie with that strange expression.


    ¡°No! They¡¯re in the back!¡± the girl said.


    ¡°Oh yea? All right then. You two head back there. I¡¯ll follow.¡±


    ¡°What?¡± Gradie laughed. That did it. Whatever confusion had been showing on the cop¡¯s face broke through into a realization. He aimed the gun at Gradie¡¯s head.


    ¡°This the best you can do? Jump on top of some cashier? How about I drop you out and have my boys trap you in a box for a while? Will your boss come get you, you think? Or will he just pick another crash dummy off the ball?¡±


    Now Gradie was sure he was dreaming. None of the words made sense and the entire situation was wrong. It got more wrong.


    The cop¡¯s brains shot out through his temple and his eyes went in two different directions as a loud snap ripped out of the snack aisle. He collapsed with a wet thud. The slim blonde woman was crouched down with her rifle raised, thin grey smoke floating off the suppressor. The girl whimpered and threw up behind the counter.


    ¡°Thanks,¡± Gradie said to the woman. She looked at him oddly and let a smile break through.


    ¡°You¡¯re welcome.¡±


    ¡°Who are you?¡± The big man asked. He was standing in the center aisle as if he had teleported.


    ¡°Uh, Gradie. I¡¯m no one.¡± The man smiled like he was being told a clever lie. Gradie tried to think of something else to say.


    ¡°Here.¡± The woman handed the man something and he took it from her hand without looking. She brought her palm up to her mouth like she was taking a pill and swallowed.


    ¡°Sweet dreams,¡± He said to Gradie and sat down. The rack of chips crinkled behind his back and he popped the pill in his mouth. The woman sat down next to him and they both closed their eyes. In a few moments, they had slumped into unconsciousness.


    Gradie stared at them while the girl moved out from behind the counter and grabbed a bottle out of the display fridge. More police sirens met up outside and wailed through the shattered windows. The smell of vomit swirled with the scent of gunfire. Insane. Gradie looked at his phone. His supervisor had called him twice. He looked back at the two sleepers and the bottle of pills in the woman¡¯s hand.


    ¡°Are they dead?¡± The girl whimpered after a deep drink.


    ¡°Knocked out, I think.¡± Gradie picked up the bottle. It was unlabeled. The white pills inside looked like the archetype all other pills spawned from. An idea came to him and he couldn¡¯t shake it. It grew in his head like the sirens in his ears. The girl took another drink and spit it out when she saw what he was doing.


    ¡°Hey!¡±


    He opened the bottle and popped one in his mouth. The girl grabbed him by the shoulder and spilled malt liquor down his back. It was cold on his skin and her eyes were the last things to fade away as he fell back into humming darkness.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 2: An Other World

    Who are you?


    Gradie¡¯s chest dropped as the darkness revolved. When it stopped, the gas station returned. He saw himself laying on the floor. Cold linoleum pressed against his face and malt liquor ran down his back. The girl kneeled over him. Warm thighs pressed into his side, hot breath on his cheek. Her fingers dug into his chest as she shook him. Slowly, the sensations faded, replaced by firm ground under his feet and a strange weakness of gravity. He looked around.


    The gas station was the same, but the world outside shifted under his gaze, like the kaleidoscopic tunnel vision after a concussion. Overpasses, shopping centers, parking lots, and highways all shuffled sickeningly. A molten reality. He felt he was going to fall out into it. When he looked away in a panic, the sleeping him and the girl were gone.


    There was a noise from the back room like a door closing on the other side of an empty gymnasium. He knew, somehow, that he was meant to hear it. The sudden knowledge made him certain he was dreaming, and filled him with a desire to wake up, or to force the dream to its conclusion.


    As he walked down the aisle, the chip bags and candy labels winked at him hazily like Christmas lights, and the fridges hummed like things alive. The pressed wood door at the back had a laminated paper sign taped to it that said, ¡°employees only¡±, and an aura of life-shattering importance. He turned the handle, ready to wake up, but when he stepped through, the dream remained.


    The hallway was like someone had taken the interior of the gas station and smeared it in a straight line. Dusty linoleum, rough ceiling panels, flickering lights, all stretched out ahead of him. A liquid piece of the universe. Even the buzz of the lights seemed warped, as if they had forgotten how to sound.


    At the other end of the hall was a door borrowed from a high-end hotel. Dark wood and brass fixtures. He took a step towards it and it rushed to meet him. Another step brought him right in front of it. When he turned back, the door he had come through was miles away. It all seemed normal, to be expected, as if he was the one out of place. He opened the door in front of him in a hurry.


    A long, carpeted hotel hallway stretched out towards pinholes of distant shadow in either direction, with a million doors on each side. He listened for another sound to tell him where to go, but there was only the same buzzing white noise. It occurred to him that he might be stuck here forever. Looking back, he couldn¡¯t even remember which door he had come through. After a brief panic, he reminded himself that he was dreaming, and one of the doors jumped out at him.


    It looked just like all the others, but he knew with that same instant knowledge that it was different. He imagined they were on the other side and it changed into his old bedroom door, off white with a dark bronze colored handle. It opened with a sound distilled from memory.


    It was a large sleek lobby of mirror glass and matte steel, lit by two story high frosted windows. An electric, musical sound, like some lost sibling of wind and rushing water, echoed across the smooth marble. The hallways before had felt buried under a million miles of nothing, but this new space felt connected to a boundless energy, as if crafted of pure possibility.


    They stood next to an elevator on the other side. The man smiled and waved, and the woman glared at Gradie like he had walked in on her changing. She didn¡¯t take her eyes off him as he came over.


    ¡°So, what¡¯s the game?¡± she said. Her gun and armor were gone, and she wore a black robe that defied the ambient light.


    ¡°What?¡± Gradie said.


    The man put a hand on her shoulder. She brushed it off and got in Gradie¡¯s face.


    ¡°What do you think you¡¯re doing?¡±


    He was scared for a moment, until he remembered he was dreaming. He grabbed her by the waist and pulled her into a kiss.


    She hit him with a flurry of hooks from each side so fast they fell on top of each other and he went down in a daze.


    ¡°He¡¯s not with them,¡± the man said calmly.


    ¡°What are you talking about? You believe this act? People don¡¯t just waltz out of a Hardworld!¡±


    The man helped Gradie to his feet.


    ¡°She didn¡¯t hurt you.¡± Gradie realized it was true and his head cleared.


    ¡°Sorry,¡± he said to the woman. She ignored him and faced the man.


    ¡°Don¡¯t buy it.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll handle him. You can go.¡±


    She opened her mouth to say something, but turned on her heel and stepped, gliding weightlessly, to the elevator. It opened as if on command. She glared at Gradie as the doors closed.


    ¡°My name¡¯s Michael,¡± the man said, holding out his hand. He was almost fat, and well over six feet tall, with a baby face and smoky grey eyes. He wore the same clothes as he had in the gas station, minus the weaponry. Gradie shook his hand.


    ¡°I¡¯m Gradie.¡±


    ¡°I remember. We¡¯ve never met before today, right?¡±


    ¡°No.¡± the guy looked familiar and Gradie tried to place him. He noticed.


    ¡°What is it?¡±


    ¡°Trying to remember where I saw you in the real world.¡±


    ¡°Oh. You think you¡¯re dreaming?¡±


    Gradie laughed at the idea that this might not be a dream. He still had the cop¡¯s brains on his shirt.This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.


    ¡°All right, well, you can either stay in your dream, or follow me.¡±


    ¡°Where are you going?¡±


    ¡°To a place we call the Otherworld.¡±


    ¡°What is it?¡±


    ¡°It can¡¯t really be described, only seen.¡±


    Gradie remembered reading that if you encountered a dream guide, you could learn about yourself by following them. He was trying to decide if he wanted to learn anything about himself when Michael went into another elevator. He held the door open and smiled.


    ¡°All right, fuck it.¡± Gradie walked in and the doors shut.


    As the elevator moved, gravity left him and he couldn¡¯t be sure if he was rising or falling. Somehow, he knew that whatever life he had been a part of in the gas station was slipping away, like the elevator was taking him from himself. Michael watched him, waiting for something.


    ¡°You know, dreams are more powerful when you believe they¡¯re real,¡± he said. ¡°Can you try to believe that what you¡¯re about to see is real?¡±


    Gradie tried to guess what a dream guide crafted from his subconscious would want to show him, and came up blank.


    ¡°Depends on what it is.¡± The elevator stopped, and he felt he was finally about to wake up. The doors slid apart with a ding.


    The roof was unspectacular. Manilla cement squares with cigarette butts in the grout and a waist-height wall at the center of a massive downtown. For a moment, Gradie¡¯s brain told him that¡¯s all it was. His brain lied.


    Shimmering buildings budded off at angles, branched out like trees, floated slowly across the sky. Ships, houses, and other unnamable shapes flew from place to place and popped in and out of existence. Light moved in beams, orbs, and holographic iridescence, as if commanded by an invisible hand. The sky was filled with things floating, appearing, disappearing, constantly changing form and color.


    It was too much, felt too real and too detailed to be a dream. He backed up towards the elevator in terror. Michael moved past him, smiling.


    ¡°Some dream, right?¡±


    ¡°Fuck you.¡± Gradie wanted to throw him off the roof. Somehow, this was all his fault.


    ¡°Think you could dream this?¡±


    Gradie looked out at the writhing mass, then dropped his gaze to his feet.


    ¡°I must have.¡±


    ¡°Allow me to offer another explanation.¡± Michael stepped across the roof like the swirling madness around him was a gentle evening.


    ¡°Everything you see around you was made by someone willing it into existence. Do you see them?¡± Michael pointed and Gradie, despite himself, lifted his eyes from the lazy sameness of the concrete roof, back to the insanity above. He saw, as if Michael was guiding his sight, tiny shapes flying everywhere. When one zipped overhead, he realized they were people.


    ¡°All those people were once like you. Scared. Unbelieving. Now look at them. Masters of a brand-new kind of existence.¡±


    Gradie closed his eyes and tried to wake up. He thought of his bed, his room, his life¡­


    He opened his eyes, remembering how much he hated it, how every day he wished it would fall away, replaced by anything else. He looked back out at the city. It was as far from his life as he could imagine, and he saw it with fresh eyes. It was beautiful, and if he could be sure that it was real, it would be paradise. A real world of wonder and possibility, far away from his stagnant existence. But the idea that it was all in his head, generated as a defense mechanism against the unbearableness of his real life, was horrifying.


    ¡°I must be having some kind of break down,¡± he said.


    ¡°Well, while you¡¯re going crazy, why not have some fun?¡± Michael said with the same gentle smile, like Gradie was making a mistake he¡¯d seen a thousand times. In a landscape that seemed crafted of his own instability, Gradie found Michael a beacon of confidence.


    ¡°Like what?¡±


    ¡°Start small. Imagine something in your hand or in front of you, anything you want. Will it into existence.¡±


    Michael pulled a glass of water out of nowhere.


    ¡°Want a drink?¡±


    The water glinted in the light. Gradie counted the crevices in the glass. Its realness was just as terrifying as everything else. He hated it. Each bead of condensation, un-changing and permanent in their existence, mocked him. Without thinking, he pulled a Smith and Wesson 5906, the chrome archetype of all handguns, out of the air and shot the glass to pieces.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Michael jumped back in shock, shaking his hand, and started to laugh. Gradie smiled and fired fifteen times at the skyline. If the bullets had any effect, he couldn¡¯t tell. Disappointed, He dropped the empty pistol on the ground.


    ¡°Now let¡¯s try something else,¡± Michael said. ¡°Imagine a door¡ª¡±


    Gradie hardly heard him, distracted by the shifting horizon of impossible skyscrapers and floating gardens, crushed between its impossibility and its promise. He¡¯d had enough of watching. It was time to break out.


    ¡°I¡¯m gonna destroy it.¡± He raised his hand to the skyline, ready to palm blast it all into dust. If it survived, then it might be real. If it disappeared in a cloud of fire, at least he could wake up.


    ¡°Start with the gun then,¡± Michael said.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°Well, if you¡¯re going to destroy an entire city, better make sure you can destroy something smaller.¡±


    Gradie knew there was a trick in it somewhere, but stopped himself from trying to find it. In dreams, just the thought of failure would bring it about. He decided he would destroy the gun, Michael, then the city, in that order.


    ¡°All right.¡±


    He looked at the pistol and imagined it disappearing. Nothing happened. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like it would exist forever, stuck in his mind, a thought with a barb on the end.


    ¡°Relax. You have to believe that you¡¯ll destroy it,¡± Michael said.


    Gradie tried to picture the pistol disappearing in a puff of smoke, but it was hard to focus, as if the city was pulling on his thoughts. After a few seconds, a handful of white smoke popped into existence around the gun with a crack. When the smoke cleared the gun shined in the odd daylight, mocking him. Michael clapped his hands together.


    ¡°Well, so much for that. Guess the city is safe. Now¡ª"


    Gradie shot a hazy beam of light out of his hand into Michael¡¯s chest. Nothing happened. Michael looked down at the ground.


    ¡°Oh, look.¡±


    There were two pistols.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± Gradie put his hands together and summoned more glowing energy. He made it blindingly bright. It was a sun, real nuclear fission compressed in his hands, ready to destroy everything and return him to sanity. He closed his eyes and saw the city collapsing in the shockwave of a nuclear blast, the glass melting and the ground boiling, all the little flying people blown around like dust. He opened his eyes, squeezed the orb in his hands, and threw it at the ground.


    It bounced off the gun with a clink and sailed off into the sky. Gradie watched it disappear.


    ¡°I think the fact that the first thing you do upon finding yourself in a land of dreams-come-true is try and destroy it, says something about you,¡± Michael said.


    ¡°Fuck you.¡±


    ¡°Also, did you notice that you closed your eyes just now? Can you do that in a dream?¡±


    Gradie watched the city persist in defiance of his inability to comprehend it. One of the things he had categorized as a skyscraper shot off into the sky, lightning-fast, like he was looking at a monitor and some invisible cursor had dragged it across the screen. It was beyond disturbing.


    ¡°So, if this isn¡¯t a dream, what is it? Did I die in my sleep?¡± He was ready to hear anything.


    ¡°It¡¯ll take a while to explain, and I¡¯ll need your patience.¡±


    The horizon continued to shift and seethe. More tiny dots moved around like dust caught on his eyeball. Could it be real? Were they real?


    ¡°You said other people made this?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡± There was silence on the rooftop. Gradie couldn¡¯t begin to filter the noise coming from the city into distinct, identifiable sounds. Michael got closer to him.


    ¡°Would you like to see where they party?¡±


    Gradie waited until he was sure he had heard correctly.


    ¡°Yea, all right.¡± Dream or not, might as well have some fun. A party had to be more bearable, more understandable at least, than whatever this was. He picked up the guns and followed Michael into the elevator.


    ¡°What do you think those are going to do for you?¡±


    ¡°You never know.¡±


    Michael laughed as the doors closed.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 3: The Allclub

    The Rave of your Dreams


    The lights in the elevator car went out and Michael stood there glowing softly as if reflecting a hidden moon, now in a black satin robe trimmed in silver, like a priest of an unknown religion. Before Gradie could say anything about it, the doors opened and he didn¡¯t give a shit about him anymore.


    ¡°Welcome to the Allclub,¡± Michael said.


    There were people everywhere, wreathed in stars, wrapped in nebulae, flying through the darkness and dancing upside down on the countless, glittering honeycombed ceilings that stepped towards the pulsing sky.


    The music was insane. The beat hit all the time with an energy the best club anthems only reach in moments. Running through it all, like a current, was the feeling that he had been trying to get here all his life.


    Before he realized what he was doing, he was out in the middle of it, dancing with the most beautiful women he had ever seen, brushing his hands across every piece of flesh or scrap of light that caught his eye. Time dropped out behind him and felt impossible ahead of him. He could have been in the elevator a year ago or a moment before. Three women moved in and purred at him.


    ¡°Aw, a baby!¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s this outfit? Going to work baby?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s his first day! Look at those eyes!¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s just a dream. Be as dirty as you want to be.¡±


    He touched them all over, and they pressed themselves against him. Suddenly his hand caught nothing but air as they backed up in three different directions.


    ¡°Catch us if you can baby.¡±


    They scattered like hourglass missiles and he couldn¡¯t decide which one to keep his eyes on. The last one twirled in front of him and her clothes vanished in a burst of neon glitter. He watched her ass bounce into the crowd and disappear.


    ¡°They¡¯re fucking with you,¡± Michael said, suddenly next to him, like a bad smell breaking into a wet dream.


    ¡°We¡¯ll see.¡± Gradie flew up in the air and scanned the crowd for any signs of them. The world rolled like an ocean around him, stretching out towards a black horizon between two planes of glittering chaos. Gravity betrayed him and he lost any sense of direction.


    ¡°If you want to get fucked, there are plenty of places to do it here without having to indulge the ego of some glowgirl.¡± Michael was next to him again, standing as if on an invisible floor. Gradie didn¡¯t answer. He remembered one of the girls had green hair.


    Someone tossed a bob of neon green over a pale shoulder at a pink-lit bar across the massive open space. She hung upside down talking to someone. He flew in her direction and dodged other flying dancers, mermaids, beams and orbs of light that looked solid as stone, and rolled in flight to align his up and down with hers.


    ¡°Found you.¡± He landed behind her. She was facing the bar, a shifting wall of shelves that stretched backwards into infinity like a mirror facing its twin. Bottles flew freely off the wall and sailed in every direction. One stopped and tipped above the man next to her. He held his glass up to catch the quicksilver stream and smiled as if Gradie had just mispronounced a very simple word.Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    She took the drink from him and turned her head to Gradie.


    ¡°You found me! Now what are you going to do?¡±


    ¡°Let¡¯s go somewhere private.¡± Gradie leaned in and stroked her chin, imagining that the touch would be electrifying for her. She gasped softly as his thumb traced a curve under her lips. In half a bass beat, she had her smile back.


    ¡°See them?¡± She pointed with her hand next to her face and rolled her big eyes up, the whites flashing in the dark. He followed her gaze reluctantly.


    It was a man and two women, completely nude, floating by at a comically slow speed, fucking like animals. One girl was licking a neon liquid off the other. It was clear from their reactions that whatever it was had a wonderful taste and felt incredible on the skin. It took a few seconds for Gradie to realize the man had four arms.


    ¡°Private places are for talking, baby. We fuck all around.¡± Gradie looked down and something in her smile made the music sour. He tried to push past it.


    ¡°All right.¡± He reached up to touch her again. The man next to her leaned towards him.


    ¡°Let me give you some advice, cause we were all new once; If she wanted you, you would have already fucked her by now. That¡¯s how it works¡ª¡±


    Gradie interrupted him by drawing the two pistols and aiming them at his eyes. He was ready to prove to himself that this was a dream, and killing this guy then fucking this girl would probably do it. The woman, the man, and a few other people around all laughed. Bitter, grating laughs. They cut through the music and broke the beauty of the melody into brittle fragments. Gradie pulled the triggers.


    Nothing happened. The man reached out with a smile on his face and tapped one of the guns. It disappeared with a pop like a bubble bursting in a cartoon. The woman giggled and Gradie realized he hated her. He hated all of them. If they were here, it either wasn¡¯t his dream, or it was a nightmare.


    The man stood up.


    ¡°All right. Now fuck off.¡±


    The tips of his fingers glowed as he flicked Gradie in the chest. It didn¡¯t hurt, but the bar and the woman dropped away to nothing, and he was a mile in the air before he was able to stop himself. The strange world glittered below him, an entire hemisphere of writhing night and pulsing lights. A dance club that stretched out to every horizon.


    Miles away, something massive popped into existence above the glowing curve at the edge of the planet. Woven sunlight, the hue of a summer evening, wrapped around a pillar of whitewashed Mediterranean villas, like someone had crafted a spaceship out of a vacation photo. Other crafts appeared and disappeared, too far away for him to tell anything about them besides that they should only exist as thought.


    Could it be real? A shared dreamworld? A real mental plane?


    No. It¡¯s exactly the kind of fantasy I would escape to, something to believe in just to get through the day. I need to wake up. I need to get out of here.


    He looked down at the maze of lights and darkness below him and let himself fall. A lattice of walkways, glass tunnels, and floating streams of moonlit water rushed up to meet him, then passed without a sound. In the middle of a mass of platforms and lights, he aimed for a catwalk, a solid line of black stillness, over a glowing mesh of people and lights. Another dance floor.


    It was different than the one he had stepped out into. There was a thick fog rolling on the floor, and all the bare flesh glowed as if under a full moon whenever the pulsing lights gave way to darkness. People flew up in pairs or floated down alone in fits of naked beckoning dancing. The music was the world; the bass generated deep in the earth, the high melodies ringing out from the air itself. There was everywhere that same hypnotic energy, that concentrated feeling of promise distilled from a million youthful Saturday nights, but he felt separate from it now. It had spit him out. Flowed around without touching him. He desperately wanted to get back inside of it. Didn¡¯t he?


    ¡°You¡¯re bored of it,¡± Michael said, appearing suddenly on the catwalk.


    ¡°Yea, I guess I am.¡± He must be in my head.


    ¡°You ready to learn what this place is? It will help you get some grounding. Keep you from floating around in a panic.¡±


    A door opened in the air next to them, letting out soft lamplight that clashed with the glowing darkness of the club. It almost knocked Gradie over. He realized how much he longed for something normal, something familiar. He closed his eyes and tried to wake up again, but it was half-hearted and he gave up after two bass kicks. No matter how much those people had disgusted him, he felt something magical was still waiting.


    ¡°Yea. I¡¯m ready.¡±

 In the Beginning | Chapter 4: Genesis

    I will never remember, but I might guess.


    The planet sat frozen in the dark, a hazy curved line of twilight dividing its face.


    On the day side, cities the size of continents and surrealist terrain reflected the steady light of an immobile, moon-sized sun, while across the line of evening, a dark crescent of constant night glittered with glass towers and the pulsing glow of the Allclub at its center.


    Crafts floated by in orbit, zoomed off at multiples of light speed, popped into existence and vanished. They were shaped like serpents of water wrapped around mini suns, cumulus clouds with shards of blue sky and white stone castles nestled inside, and simple orbs of all sizes. The space beyond the planet was washed out like a night sky seen from a suburban backyard, and the sparse lights out in the black didn¡¯t flicker like stars. They watched like eyes and moved like living things.


    Gradie saw it all but didn¡¯t believe it. The idea that this could be real, a world without limits, a dream to be shared and shaped, was so enticing that he was afraid to let himself believe. It would be like jumping off a cliff to grab hold of a friendly dragon you knew couldn¡¯t really be there.


    ¡°Amazing what the mind can create, right?¡± said Michael. They were looking out a massive glassless window in the control room of his crystal craft. It looked like the parlor a 1930¡¯s detective might monologue in.


    ¡°I¡¯m dreaming.¡±


    ¡°Maybe, but you¡¯re not alone.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re a dream too.¡±


    ¡°Do you believe that?¡±


    ¡°It feels like a dream.¡±


    ¡°Does it?¡±


    Gradie watched a craft come to a stop above the Allworld. It was shaped like a massive turtle with a tree the size of Manhattan growing in its glass dome shell. Tiny people flew out of its mouth and zoomed towards the Allclub. It seemed the most natural thing in the world.


    ¡°I¡¯ll wake up soon.¡± As he said it, Gradie realized that this felt like the longest dream he had ever had.


    ¡°You will eventually. But when you do, you won¡¯t remember any of this.¡±


    ¡°Why not?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s just how it works.¡±


    ¡°I thought you brought me up here to give me some answers?¡±


    ¡°I can tell you what, and you can make your own guesses about why.¡±


    ¡°Ok. So, what the fuck is this place?¡±


    ¡°Depends who you ask.¡± Michael smiled. ¡°Some people think it¡¯s a kind of shared dreamworld.¡±


    Gradie glared at him ¡°And that cant be true why? Because dreams don¡¯t last this long?¡±


    ¡°Those who believe this is a dreamworld say it¡¯s manifestated from a deeper part of the brain. A part that perceives time differently.¡±


    ¡°But you don¡¯t believe that.¡±


    Michael shrugged. ¡°It¡¯s possible.¡±


    ¡°Alright, well what else could it be?¡±


    ¡°It could be the afterlife.¡±


    Panic shot through Gradie, until he remembered what Michael had told him earlier.


    ¡°But you said I¡¯ll wake up?¡±


    ¡°Right. The theory goes that the Real is just the memory of our lives, played back to us one day at a time to help us gently transition to existence in a universe beyond time and physics and all that.¡±


    ¡°The Real?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s what we call the real world.¡±


    Gradie tried to remember his waking life, but the other him from the gas station got caught up in it. Still, whatever his real life was, he didn¡¯t want to think he had come to the end of it.


    ¡°But my life isn¡¯t being played back one day at a time. This is my first day in this,¡­¡± He couldn¡¯t think of what to call it.


    ¡°They say that God, or whoever, knows how far back in your life you need to start the transition,¡± Michale said.


    ¡°So, this is either the afterlife or a dreamworld, or all in my head.¡±


    ¡°Right. Well, there¡¯s one other theory.¡±


    ¡°What, that its a simulation?, Like I get plugged into the matrix every night? Or is the real world a simulation too?¡±


    ¡°Oh, I forgot about that one.¡± Michael laughed, as if it was more ridiculous than any of the others. ¡°No, the other theory is that this is a dead universe.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°Well, the idea is that after a Universe meets its end, there¡¯s a kind of shell left over, and this shell has some of the framework of a universe, but all the, meat, I guess you could say, is gone. Essentially, this dead universe is malleable and responds to our thought because it remembers being a real universe, but it¡¯s forgotten the rules, the limits, you could say. And somehow our consciousnesses are slipping through the cracks of the Real and ending up here.¡±


    Gradie felt the words slide into place in strange mockery of logic.If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.


    ¡°The fact that I almost understand what you¡¯re saying makes me even more convinced that this is all in my head.¡±


    Michael laughed, but kept his eyes on Gradie, as if he expected him to freak out again. Gradie looked back out the window and tried to find any holes in what Michael had told him. None of it was as unbelievable as the fact that he was sitting here looking at it.


    But, he still couldn¡¯t remember who he was or how he got to that gas station. He searched for a memory, and got only handfuls of hazy separate images. An office, an apartment, towering grain elevators...


    ¡°Is it normal not to remember who I am?¡±


    Michael studied him. ¡°No, but it might be because you came out of a Hardworld. It puts a distance between your spirit and the real you.¡±


    The word echoed in his head, until he remembered the woman in the gas station. ¡°People don¡¯t just waltz out of a Hardworld.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s a Hardworld.¡±


    ¡°That I can explain. But it will take some time. Are you ready?¡±


    Gradie looked at Michael. He was standing there smiling, so cocky, and obviously excited.


    ¡°All right.¡±


    Michael faced out the window and cleared his throat.


    ¡°In the beginning¡­¡± He waved his hand and everything went black. Gradie gasped as he fell and grabbed at nothing.


    ¡°Just relax. It¡¯s easier to explain it this way. Anyway, in the beginning, there was nothing.¡±


    ¡°There was only the mind. The mind saw nothing, and thought the nothing was a dark void, so there was a dark void, and it expanded to fit the limits of the mind¡¯s perception. Then the mind saw something, and suddenly it was there. Maybe it was light, or water, a glass of good scotch, or a 15 bar espresso machine.¡±


    Gradie saw them all, one by one, appear in the darkness. The espresso machine shot a stream into the void that split into droplets and floated in zero g.


    ¡°Whatever it was, the mind realized that in this place, thought becomes reality. We can imagine their excitement, what they tried to make, how they tested the limits of their own imagination.¡±


    A city street appeared in the dark and dropped off into nothing. Water flowed out of the void and fell for miles at odd angles. Light expanded from a point, surrounded him, then softened into evening sky. A tree grew like a time lapse in the darkness, soil sprouted from its roots and spread like smoke, creating a suburban park from the ground up that blended into the evening.


    ¡°Then, somehow, another mind entered the void and found what the first mind had created. Did it destroy them? Enhance them? Copy them? Did the first mind welcome them, or try to drive them away? We don¡¯t know, but eventually, there were more. People, spirits, souls, all discovering the possibilities of this place, in harmony or in conflict.¡±


    All the things made before were now a tiny smudge, seen from far away. The smudge coalesced and glowed, like a star being formed from gas and dust.


    Suddenly, the Allworld floated in the dark again with its sun, but the nightside glittered feebly without the glow of the Allclub, and the day side shifted like a mirage.


    ¡°The Allworld was the first to be born, crafted from the shared memories of the Real, like the earth reflected through itself.¡±


    The surface rose up towards him in a rush.


    ¡°When you dream, your mind fills in the blanks. In the Otherworld, the universe itself does the same. On the Allworld you¡¯ll find the archetypical mall, arcade, hotel, all a million times larger than life, all constantly changing.¡±


    People ran through malls, kissed in classrooms, threw parties in high-rise penthouses, The dreamy spaces stretched into endless mazes that changed as the people passed through them. It was like a frenzied idealized version of life on earth caught in a feedback.


    ¡°It was unstructured chaos at first, but eventually the rules that govern the Otherworld were revealed.¡±


    Twin figures appeared opposite a chair floating in the dark.


    ¡°The golden rule is that here the mind is king. Two spirits trying to create opposing ideas, contradicting each other on the details of what they¡¯ve created, discovered that the world would side with the one whose will was strongest, who believed the most, and who knew more intimately what they were creating.¡±


    One figure sat on the chair, now a glittering throne, while the other flew away.


    ¡°When the first spirits discovered that not all minds were equal, the nucleus of a society was born.¡±


    A few radiant figures rose above the masses, flying off into the black with others, dim and numerous, following after them. One of the luminant ones created a sun in his hand and held aloft as he flew.


    ¡°Those who mastered the art of creation were sought out for their gift, and inevitably, learned to profit by their powers. But how do you barter in a world without death or flesh? How could those without, pay those with?¡±


    A warm afternoon light shot out of the dark and lit up a window. Inside, a kitchen bloomed into life. A couple moved about in a rhythmic frenzy. Natural, instinctive, creative when called for. They drummed knives across a cutting board, spread bright pieces into hot pans, cast salt and spices like spells. They tasted and savored and smiled at each other. The kisses, hugs, gentle brushes against one another, and the final rest and giggling meal, all flowed in the rhythm of a confident, tested, decades-old love.


    ¡°Memories became the weight at the other end of the scale. Pleasures, understandings, even terrors. In exchange for paradise, people opened their minds to the world, and a trade emerged.¡±


    Suddenly, they were in the cockpit of a 777, landing at DFW airport. It was a bright summer day, and out at the edge of the flat dusty brown landscape coming up to meet them, a cumulus cloud was dropping a quick shower on a suburb. Gradie looked over to see Michael in the pilot¡¯s seat, fully uniformed.


    ¡°If I¡¯ve flown a plane in the Real, it¡¯s easier for me to make it happen in the Otherworld and it will feel a million times more real than if you tried to imagine it yourself.¡±


    Gradie reached out and felt the dials and screens. Each articulated and perfect.


    ¡°With the right memories, you can live a thousand lives. You can go to bed with the love of your life, see your child grow and succeed, watch your enemies destroyed.¡±


    Michael slapped off a warning bell with a practiced flick of the wrist and guided the plane into a perfect landing. When they touched down, it all went black again.


    ¡°The landscape of this world changed, and a structure solidified as people took on the roles required for the new system to work.¡±


    A figure stood in the dark with arms raised. The darkness rippled and fell away like a curtain, revealing a brutalist castle with neon-lit archways that opened its doors to a crowd.


    ¡°Makers create what you see around you. Crafts, structures, entire worlds, and keep them from being destroyed or changed.¡±


    A child ran across an amusement park on a day made perfect by the imperfection of memory. The vision shrank to a single point of light. The light was encased in a crystal, then closed in a fist.


    ¡°Keepers preserve memories, writing them into the fabric of the universe. They are sages and bankers, scribes and guardians.¡±


    A crowd moved through the Allcity, a swarm of people rushing between towering walls of glass and balconies. A voice cut through the noise and one figure stopped mid-flight.


    ¡°Speakers can pick a single person out of the billions in the Otherworld and whisper in their ear. They are our matchmakers, mediators, messengers.¡±


    ¡°With these pieces in place, a solid society emerged.¡±


    Lights appeared out in the black, and the Allworld swung back into view. Crafts orbited its shining surface. Some shot off into the darkness, where new lights blinked into existence.


    ¡°The first signs of the new age were the specialized worlds.¡±


    They floated in the black, teeming with activity and glowing softly. Orbs of blue and green, metal and fire, iridescence and golden light. Each with the distinct feeling of being constructed from a pure primal emotion.


    ¡°The resort worlds; Summer, Hedonisia, Isis. The game worlds; Gunmaze, Dragonplains, The Swarm. The narrative worlds. The Forge worlds. Worlds for any whim and need, where pleasure and pursuit are unrestrained by reality.¡±


    ¡°A thousand geneses. A billion minds let loose on a malleable universe, creating their own versions of the afterlife.¡±


    Gradie saw it from a god¡¯s eye view. An unnatrually shaped galaxy, dancing with a holographic motion more akin to breathing than the dead rotation of stellar bodies. It twinkled there for a moment, then everything went black again.


    ¡°It may have been possible for this golden age to continue forever, or maybe what happened next was inevitable. Maybe it was the price for selling paradise.


    Either way, the age of peace came to an end.¡±

 In the Beginning | Chapter 5: Demons

    Fates worse than death


    A couple dancing in a resort bedroom stopped mid step, smiles melting from their faces, as the music died to silence. The neon sunset in the window vanished, replaced by solid darkness, and the door blinked out of existence leaving only bare wall behind. They held each other, terrified, as laughter echoed all around.


    ¡°The Demons,¡± Michael said. ¡°They came crashing through like Armageddon. Unexpected and irresistible.¡±


    Above the Allcity, the sun dimmed and flickered, swallowed by a great cloud of liquid darkness. In the sky beyond, the stars went out one by one.


    ¡°Powerful makers, keepers, and speakers, they twisted creations into weapons, turned fantasies into nightmares, and trapped spirits in places that couldn¡¯t be found. They proved that if paradise could be bought, it could also be stolen.¡±


    Crafts flashed away from the Allworld like shrapnel and disappeared into the black. On the surface, people huddled together watching the skies, and each other, in fear.


    ¡°There was no escaping them. Those who tried to fight them, outrun them, or buy them off, all met the same fate. The Demons trapped their captives in their own minds, dissected their memories, and vanished, leaving them to claw their way out.¡±


    A woman fell through a circle of shadow that appeared in the ground. When she landed, she was a child, sobbing, wandering among endless rows of towering clothes racks, calling for her mother.


    ¡°Even the supreme makers couldn¡¯t oppose them, so they fled into the black and crafted places outside their reach. The first fortress worlds.¡±


    ¡°Jericho¡±


    An endless mass of gates and doorways floated in the dark, rotating like a slow whirlpool.


    ¡°Chittor¡±


    A kaleidoscope of polygonal slices of glittering ocean and white stone walls, lit by brilliant, blinding micro suns that orbited like eyes of god.


    ¡°Gormenghast¡±


    A woven mesh of hallways, courtyards, staircases, and collapsing rooms, all shifting like a jigsaw as entire sections were created and destroyed.


    ¡°And Paradise, which offered eternal protection and bliss in exchange for a life¡¯s worth of memories. Those who went in during that time never returned.¡±


    It was just a warm glow in the darkness. Figures flew into it and faded hazily into nothing.


    ¡°It felt like the end of the world. But not everyone had given up hope. When those who had seemed like gods abandoned us, new ones arose from the masses. We called them Saviors.¡±


    Crafts like stars hammered into shapes flew into orbit around the Allworld as shadows seethed on the surface.


    ¡°It was the first and only war. The only kind possible here. A war of wills.¡±


    A man stood in a featureless room of stone while a voice taunted him from all around. He closed his eyes and disappeared, then burst back into existence in a flash of light inside an orb of doorways, each reflecting a different surreal landscape. A blurry figure flew through one of the frames in terror and the first, still radiant, followed.This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it


    ¡°Those who had abandoned us, now seeing a chance of victory, returned, and a desperate last stand became a fight for freedom.¡±


    A brilliant figure with six wings and swirling rings of eyes descended upon a geometric structure of black glass. A prismatic light reflected across the surfaces, shattering them, and something screamed.


    ¡°The first battle drove the Demons from the Allworld. The celebration of that victory, held in the massive area cleared by the destruction, is still going strong all over the Allclub.¡±


    The Allworld glowed and pulsed as the starlike crafts flew off into the black, followed by spheres of fire and waves of prismatic dreamers.


    ¡°Unfortunately, the war wasn¡¯t easily won. The Demons proved themselves masters of evasion and surprise.¡±


    A lone light separated from a swirling constellation and blinked out. The other stars doubled back, seeking their lost member. Gradie felt the fear in them, the anguish.


    ¡°Conflict has a way of bringing about change, catastrophic change, that would be impossible otherwise. This war, even in this world, was no different.¡±


    Two starcrafts followed a thing as black as the space around them and only Michael¡¯s vision let Gradie sense it.


    ¡°The last of the demons were on the run. Nightmare had just been created, and they were its first prisoners. Fearing capture, the story goes, one Demon pushed at the edges of the Otherworld itself, and found something more.¡±


    Suddenly, Gradie knew it was gone. The stars zipped around frantically, then flew out of sight. A subtle motion formed out of the darkness. There was a click, and a man sat up in bed, his confused face lit by a table lamp.


    ¡°They thought they¡¯d gotten out. Gone back to the Real, finally able to remember the Otherworld. Many got lost in it and forgot everything else, and some just decided to stay for good, but a few came back to tell the tale. They had found the Hardworlds.¡±


    The man, now dressed in a Brioni suit, walked through brass doors into a marble-floored bank lobby. He took off his sunglasses and smiled like a kid opening a Christmas present.


    ¡°What are they?¡± Gradie asked. His voice broke out through the vision, but Michael didn¡¯t let it waver. The man in the bank drew a pistol and laughed as everyone around him scrambled and screamed.


    ¡°What they are is debated, but they act like alternate versions of the real world. Being in them feels like dreaming you¡¯re someone else.¡±


    Gradie felt a chill as the realization took hold. Michael predicted his question.


    ¡°That¡¯s where I found you.¡±


    Gradie saw himself back in the gas station from Michael¡¯s point of view. He remembered what it had felt like, being that person, and the Hardworlds suddenly made sense. But if that had been him dreaming he was someone else, then who was he really?


    ¡°How did I get there?¡±


    Michael froze the vision.


    ¡°The same way we all get here. Most people appear in the Otherworld when they break through, as we call it, but there¡¯s no reason a spirit can¡¯t be born in the Hardworlds.¡±


    Michael waited for Gradie to probe further, but something about the answer kept him from forming another question. He didn¡¯t want to think about anything other than the story, least of all himself. Michael, as if sensing his apprehension, continued.


    ¡°Finding the Hardworlds was the most important thing to happen since the discovery of the Otherworld, but at first, no one understood them. Only a few could get in, and even less wanted to. A place where all the rules of the Real applied was a place to be feared. Which made them the perfect place to hide.¡±


    ¡°The last demons fled into the Hardworlds and the Saviors found themselves out of their element, unable to finish the war.¡±


    The man in the Brioni suit leaned out the back window of a speeding car and opened fire with an AK-12. He shot the cop in the driver seat of the pursuing cruiser through the face and brains sprayed on the punctured windshield.


    ¡°With a new base of operations, and the ability to come and go as they pleased, the Demons struck back with renewed force. Thousands flocked to the fortress worlds, giving everything to get inside, some becoming little more than slaves. The Allworld became the last bastion and the Saviors ruled it with an oppressive tyranny.¡±


    Defensive crafts and constructs orbited the Allworld, where the sun had returned with a harsh glare and searchlights swept the night side. Towers reached impossible heights from the surface and massive walls dissected the land into a grid.


    ¡°The age of freedom, it seemed, was over.¡±


    Gradie was back in the craft. Michael waved his hand and a bottle of Glenmorangie Signet poured itself into two glasses in front of Gradie. The spirals in the decal rotated slowly and the gold reflected the light of an unseen sunset. They each took one and Michael clinked the glasses. It was dreamworld scotch, afterlife ambrosia. Gradie felt the story didn¡¯t call for it. Michael winked and it all went black again.


    ¡°That¡¯s where we come in.¡±

 In the Beginning | Chapter 6: Hardworlders

    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.¡±Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.


    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.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 7: Return

    More real than Real


    Gradie¡¯s apartment faced the highway over a sliver of woodland clinging to a storm-drain creek. Foot beaten trails cut across the rough grass and tall weeds. Every time he looked out the window, some new scrap of trash, the bright white of a fast-food bag or the shine of a beer can, had sprouted like fungi. He never saw the people that dropped them. He never saw anyone. Living here felt like flying through space in a drywall box, the atmosphere long evaporated into the washed-out sky.


    The ¡°luxury¡± apartments on the higher ridge across the highway showed no signs of life beyond a few warm yellow squares at night. There was a housing development next to his complex, but he could only see the roofs if he looked for them, rough shapes of sandpaper tiles peeking through the branches of a live oak.


    His job was less than half a mile down the highway, but despite spending hours staring out the second-story office windows, he never saw any sign that his apartment even existed. Just strip malls and car dealerships across the six dusty lanes of roaring concrete. Once, he had dreamed of jumping out the window and flying straight up into the air. There had been no sign of his home and nothing but the same scenery out to the edge of the world.


    The Wal Mart and it¡¯s suckling strip malls where he bought everything he didn¡¯t order online was about a mile off the highway, and his best friend¡¯s house another mile past that, but he hadn¡¯t seen him face to face in a month.


    Most days he went straight home, worked out, got online, maybe chipped away at one of his hundred half-finished short stories or the big space opera novel, then a sudden sparse sleep and right back down the highway to work. The weekends were just longer spaces in between.


    So, he sat at the window, when not staring at a screen, watching the headlights stream by, trying to believe there was something more out there beyond his little box.


    He blew the last of the cigarette out through the bent corner of the mesh and finished the whiskey sour. It was almost one in the morning. Officially Monday. The whine of his computer fan died and left him in the silence, laying on the bed staring up at nothing. He had tacked thick sheets over the windows and the room was cave dark. They did the trick. He fell asleep seamlessly.


    He was back in Michael¡¯s craft, drink still in hand, with Michael still in the same spot, watching him. The two fragments of memory on either side of his waking day fused together, and his entire life in the Real, faded, softened, until it felt like a dream. He knew, the way knowledge in a dream came without reason, that just as no time had passed in the Otherwrorld, no time would pass in the Real while he was here.


    ¡°Wow.¡± He had spent his entire day in the Real without ever knowing this place existed, or remembering what had happened to him here. Now that he had returned, it was like he had never left. He felt there were two of him; one in the real, doomed to never know this place exists, and another, here, omniscient in comparison.


    A sadness came over him. A feeling of separation from that other him. Seeing himself move about the real world, ignorant of himself, he felt pity, longing, struck through with something like regret.Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!


    ¡°It gets easier,¡± Michael said, standing, sensing Gradie¡¯s thoughts. ¡°At first it feels like you¡¯re split in two, but over time you find the common ground. The element of yourself that remains constant. What we call your spirit.¡±


    ¡°So, you never remember this place? In the real world?¡±


    ¡°No. It¡¯s not possible once you get down to it. There would be all kinds of violations of causality if you could remember, because of how time works.¡±


    ¡°What do you mean?¡±


    ¡°Forget it.¡± Michael waved out to the window. ¡°For now, it¡¯s better if you just stretch your legs. Get a feel for this world and enjoy yourself.¡±


    ¡°Enjoy myself doing what?¡± He remembered the powerless feeling on the rooftop and the embarrassment of the club.


    Whatever you want.¡± Michael said.


    ¡°Don¡¯t I have to pay? I thought you said memories were like money here.¡±


    ¡°Yea, but we use a unit, mem, that approximates¡ª¡±


    ¡°What if I don¡¯t want to sell my memories?¡±


    Michael studied him again.


    ¡°There¡¯s still plenty of free fun to be had, but you might change your mind when you see what¡¯s for sale.¡±


    ¡°How do I know what my memories are worth? Won¡¯t I get ripped off?¡± It seemed a stupid thing to be concerned with. Shouldn¡¯t a dreamworld be without limits? Maybe that¡¯s how you knew it was real.


    ¡°You can easily find a Mem trader. Might want to shop around for the best price, though. Like I said, lots of freebies. Especially for a newborn like you. They like to get you hooked if they can.¡±


    The world outside rose in the window as the craft descended to the planet surface, glittering and chaotic. Gradie remembered the Allclub, what those other people had felt like. Like they wanted to get inside him and take what they could find.


    ¡°Why did you do this? Help me?¡± He asked.


    ¡°Everyone who comes to this place gets a hand at the beginning. Kind of an unwritten rule, I guess. Paying it forward.¡±


    Gradie didn¡¯t buy it.


    ¡°And?¡±


    Michael smiled. ¡°And,¡± He faced Gradie squarely. ¡°I think I could use you.¡±


    ¡°For what?¡± But he already knew.


    ¡°On the team. I found you in a Hardworld, which is rare. I think you would take to the work naturally.¡±


    Gradie felt himself sinking. Of course. A world of endless possibility and freedom and the leader of a band of gun toting interdimensional assassins asks him to join the team.


    ¡°I am going insane.¡± It didn¡¯t ring as true now, after a day back in his own skin, with the gap of memory between the two versions of himself, and in the persistence of the hallucination. He couldn¡¯t believe he was going crazy, but it felt stupid to believe it was real. Michael brushed off his crisis with a nod.


    ¡°Right, still getting used to it. That¡¯s why I said to take some time to explore, get a feel for this world. Here.¡±


    Michael handed him a business card that read:


    LIQUID LIGHT


    HARDWORLDERS * SEEKERS


    Crystal Fountain Tower, F96 Suite LL


    14:30 X 35, Allcity


    The text seemed to be carved out of the card, and through the cuts, he saw water reflecting a bright sunlight, as if the card was a portal to a midday ocean.


    ¡°What is this?¡±


    ¡°My card. Press the text if you change your mind, and it¡¯ll call me.¡±


    A door opened in the wall and the Allcity glittered outside under a high noon sun. It took a moment for his mind to organize what he saw into near or far, massive or small, moving or just vibrating in place. It all seemed liquid. He felt liquid. Like if he went out there he would melt into it. Once again, Michael seemed to read his mind.


    ¡°Don¡¯t panic, nothing out there can hurt you. But understand, the mind is not confined to its shell. Here it can touch the world directly.¡±


    Which means the world can touch my mind.


    The idea of that writhing landscape slipping into his head like electrified doubt or living memory terrified him, but something else, a hope for what it could be, urged him on.


    ¡°All right. See you later.¡± He leaned forward and fell out the door.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 8: Dreamworld

    Do we build castles in the sky?


    The city flew by in pieces as he fell, floating jigsaw buildings, hovering crafts, and other people, caught in a current he couldn¡¯t even feel, his movement slow and aimless by comparison. He dodged a shining balcony crafted of suspended sea-water and took of towards the horizon.


    He tried to take it all in, but the the city bounded beyond the limits of his mind. Without a sense of direction or location, he spun like a diver in free fall and the city whirled around him.


    A craft he had taken for a palace at the edge of the world, rushed past him in a heartbeat. An orb of water that seemed close enough to touch shot up into the sky, proving itself to be massive and miles away. The sound was worse. All kinds of horns, shouts, music, thunderclaps and explosions scrambled for space in a soundscape as congested as the city itself.


    Despite the unrelenting insanity around him, the fear he had felt on the rooftop was gone, and it took a few mania-fueled moments to realize why.


    He believed. This was another world, another dimension, and these people had travelled through reality into another kind of existence, just like him. That other Gradie in the Real would remember none of this, and that separated them, now and forever. His real self, what Michael had called the spirit, was here, flying through the city. It felt like waking up, becoming lucid in a dream. It felt like being born. Tears fell from his eyes and he tried to look at everything at once.


    He flew past a vertical ribbon of ocean, where people surfed on the waves and danced on the long bands of white sand beach. Towers of sculpted clouds cradled stone castles and swimming pools, and a cluster of crystal skyscrapers pulsed with hologram advertisements for Hardworlders, trips to Vaporworld, immersion in an imperial harem, and memory extraction.


    As he soared between two floating flat plains of double-sided city blocks, things called out as if they had just noticed him. Messages jumped out of signs, dancing lights, and radiated off buildings and sculptures. They spoke with that dream knowledge Michael had used in the vision, promising sex of all kinds, kingdoms to rule, movies and books to live through, people to kill. There were things offered that would be illegal almost anywhere on earth, that just the offering of sickened him, and the messages went silent, as if sensing his revulsion, while others grew louder.


    It was horrifying. Everything was alive. Even the molecules in the floating pools and walls were aware of him. It was a world made completely of living, moving, consciousness, all in motion. Vibration. Information. Assertation of existence. A thing wasn¡¯t just there, it stated that it was. The crafts, the furniture, the lights, the clothes, all constantly communicating.


    ¡°I am being a drop of water.¡± ¡°I am being the light of a winter sunset on this who is being a stone balcony¡± ¡°I am being the softness of a woman¡¯s skin.¡±


    He remembered what Michael had said.


    ¡°The mind is not confined to its shell in the Otherworld. It can touch things directly.¡±


    It was more than that. The mind was made of the same thing as everything else. All connected. All inescapable. It was suffocating.


    He screamed and looked up to the sky, an unwavering plane of blue that also spoke of its blueness. He knew there was darkness behind it, darkness and silence. The sky heard his thoughts and the blue melted away, exposing a black void. He shot up with a pure desire to fill his eyes with blackness, to be alone in a silence that could not speak of its nothingness, or so he hoped.


    The glowing ring of the Allworld fell away. The lights in the void spoke only of a dim light, quietly. He took a deep breath and tried to keep it all out. The breath calmed him before he could remember there was no air here, no lungs. He closed his eyes, and even the subtle whispers of the stars disappeared. The first thing he thought was, if he had no eyelids, how was he able to close his eyes? In a reflex, he tried to look through his eyelids, and panicked for an instant at the thought of being unable to shut out the speaking light of this place ever again.


    Nothing changed. The darkness remained. He opened his eyes.


    The rounded form of the Allworld lit up below and the lights blinked out in the black, but their voices seemed to have faded. He touched his chest. He was once again separate from the rest of it. His relief shocked him. What about this place did he hate?


    It was the people. The magic of a living dreamworld was in its possibility, its potential, but whenever he got close to it, tried to discover what that potential held, someone else had gotten there first, waiting to take something from him. This world felt like other people. Like a loud noise or a bright light that made focus impossible. All of its promises were tainted.


    The line of twilight at the edge of the world reminded him of the gas station, of Michael and the woman walking across the lot, and the blackness beyond recalled the vision Michael had shown him, of Hardworlders, moving with total freedom in a real world. A world resistant to the wills of other people. He saw himself there, free, flying down the highway, like a younger Michael had in the vision.


    The fantasy took over his mind until a craft, shaped like a stone castle swimming on a lava bubble, floated casually up from the planet and broke his focus.


    This is supposed to be a world of dreams made true. Let¡¯s find out.


    He took out the card and pressed the logo. It blinked and a chime, like a bell rung high above a cathedral, echoed in the black dead air around him.You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.


    ¡°That was fast.¡± Michael¡¯s voice came out of the card.


    ¡°Does this god damned city ever get better?¡±


    ¡°What? Oh, yea you get used to it. So, what¡¯s on your mind?¡±


    ¡°I want to be a Hardworlder.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve heard that before, but never from someone with less than a day in the Otherworld. I want you to give it some thought, be sure¡ª¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m sure.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t think you are. Once we do this, you might wish you took more time.¡±


    ¡°Time to do what? It¡¯s all bullshit.¡± He thought about being stuck in this world, dodging spiritual sales pitches for what could be eternity. Fuck that.


    ¡°There¡¯s really nothing out there that interested you?¡±


    He took another glance across the surface of the planet.


    ¡°Flying around is pretty fun.¡±


    When Michael spoke again, there was laughter in his voice.


    ¡°Alright. I¡¯ll be right there.¡±


    Eventually, a light separated from the glow of the Allworld and shot towards him, then split in two. Headlights. The rest of it morphed out of the darkness and slid to a stop next to him, smooth as butter. A midnight blue 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz Convertible. It looked like it had been poured in place. A glittering slab of gloss and chrome, blue plasma glow jetting out of the back grill and lower taillights. The coolest thing in sight for about two seconds.


    There was a woman in the car with Michael. Slim, masked, silver hair like razor straight tinsel, black everything, lace and fur and jewelry like a Viking queen. Eyes like subzero sapphires. The slivers of skin he could see were pale as moonlight on marble.


    ¡°This is E.P.,¡± Michael said.


    ¡°What¡¯s that stand for?¡± Gradie asked. She didn¡¯t even move.


    ¡°It¡¯s her name. Get in.¡± Michael must have heard something in Gradie¡¯s voice, as his own held a warning, but Gradie didn¡¯t care.


    He hopped in the back.


    ¡°Nice to meet you. I¡¯m Gradie.¡± He held out his hand. She took it in hers, fingerless gloves. Warm wool and soft skin. A subtle squeeze. It was really there. Why didn¡¯t their hands just pass through each other? Wasn¡¯t it all just thought and belief?


    ¡°I heard,¡± she said. A conversation¡¯s worth of mockery in two syllables. Some accent he couldn¡¯t place. Those eyes! The car flew off and the Allworld twirled somewhere. She faced the windshield and Gradie looked down to her toes, boots like a witch, then back up again, tights, lace, silver charms on her ears.


    ¡°Can I help you with something?¡± The eyes came back to him.


    Michael looked in the rear-view mirror with an expression like Gradie was twirling a fork around a socket. He thought of what the girl in the club had said. Was EP the type to fuck all around?


    ¡°Yea, how does dating work in this place?¡± He said.


    ¡°How does it work?¡± She said, like drawing a sword stealthily.


    ¡°Yea.¡±


    ¡°For you, probably not very well.¡± She looked away.


    Michael raised his eyebrows. Gradie laughed and didn¡¯t take his eyes off her.


    ¡°Boss, can you stop by a brothel so we can drop this guy off?¡±


    ¡°Does that sound good, Gradie? Or would you like to stop staring at her so we can get to work?¡±


    ¡°Alright.¡± One last look, then his eyes were full of surrealist skyline, slicing by, tinted by some kind of forcefield around the car. They must have been going a thousand miles an hour. If he focused hard enough, could he materialize another EP out of thin air? One with a nymphomaniacal desire, wearing nothing but a...


    ¡°Feels different, doesn¡¯t it?¡± Michael said.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°All of it, out there.¡±


    ¡°Yea.¡± Gradie remembered his tears and flinched at the idea of Michael or anyone else knowing about them. The car was a bubble of silence, despite the open top. Michael seemed to be waiting for him to talk.


    ¡°The signs were talking to me.¡± He couldn¡¯t think of a better way to put it. Michael knew what he meant.


    ¡°It¡¯s the same way you know things suddenly in a dream. You aren¡¯t just seeing the signs as you would in the Real, photons effecting your eyes. You have no eyes here, no ocular nerves, no neurons even. You see with your spirit. With practice, you¡¯ll learn to block them out.¡±


    Gradie thought about that for a bit.


    ¡°Then why can¡¯t I see behind me?¡± Her blue eyes found him again, but he couldn¡¯t decipher the look. Disdain or intrigue?


    ¡°Because your mind has no idea how to process that kind of vision. Think of your spirit like water inside a glass. You take the glass away suddenly, and the water is still in the same shape, just for an instant. But here, the instant can last forever. There¡¯s nothing stopping your mind from expanding. It just doesn¡¯t know how.¡±


    Gradie watched a pyramid of prismatic glass fold open like a paper fortune teller, its insides all green gardens and mirror pools. Is that how they did all this? With liquid minds?


    The car slowed. Below, a suburban spread of pastel houses on a disk a mile wide, every backyard in the middle of a house party, shot off fireworks that exploded below the tires. Michael steered with the old arcade double joystick that had replaced the steering wheel and they approached a glass tower, like an office building stretched ten miles in the air. Waterfalls flowed down the four corners from an unseen font at its peak, and geysers threw rainbows on its base.


    The sun was still again, its previous motion only an illusion caused by their intense speed. Gradie recalled the address on the card, and something clicked.


    ¡°So fourteen thirty is the address, right? Because of the sun?¡±


    ¡°Exactly. It¡¯s at the intersection of the two-thirty pm timeline and the 35 latitude,¡± Michael said.


    They pulled up to a balcony, a wafer thin piece of carpeted floor extending out from the side of the building, as the glass slid apart and a strange soap-bubble-like forcefield expanded out from the tower and enveloped them.


    EP shot up out of her seat and floated inside. Michael snapped and the car disappeared. Gradie dropped to the carpet. He hadn¡¯t felt it while flying, but now gravity was constant and familiar. He rolled up and went inside.


    The office, more like a lounge, was a haven from the chaos outside. Gentle orange light and muffled white noise, as if somewhere out the windows, a gentle stream was echoing off tree trunks. It smelled of pine, crushed maple leaves, sweet spring water. There was a square reflection pool beneath the sunset skylight, a mirror backed bar, and all kinds of floating seats around a sunken oval den near the windows. There were doors all over the walls at even intervals, of different colors and materials. Even the upper loft was covered in them.


    Michael approached one in the far wall that looked like an elevator from Area 51. He pressed a button and three blast doors opened onto a roomy square of metal and glass.


    ¡°Where are we going?¡±


    ¡°Before you can join, I have to clear you with our Keeper.¡±


    ¡°Clear me how?¡±


    ¡°You¡¯ll find out.¡± Michael stood in the elevator and EP floated in beside him. Gradie followed and the doors closed. Inside, his colors clash with theirs in the reflections. He was still dressed in the same light blue oxford and khaki slacks he had been wearing when Michael found him in the gas station. He looked down and focused. His clothes changed color, becoming black and dark grey.


    ¡°She¡¯s not going to judge you on your outfit,¡± EP said.


    ¡°Why are you coming along again?¡± He stared at the side of her face. She turned her blue eyes on him as if being this close was no different than being a million miles apart.


    ¡°We might end up working together. I want to see what Lucy will think of you.¡±


    ¡°What do you think of me?¡±


    ¡°Stop doing that.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°Acting like I¡¯m some girl in your dreams. Waiting for me to fall into your arms or something.¡±


    ¡°Maybe you are my dream girl.¡±


    ¡°Gradie. Save your charm for the Allclub,¡± said Michael.


    EP scoffed, and the doors opened.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 9: Lucy

    What do those glowing eyes see?


    They stepped out onto a platform of midnight blue velvet, scattered with diamonds and floating in endless space. Glittering stars and glowing galaxies orbited slowly. Across the platform, up a wide set of shimmering misty stairs, was a building of solid black stone with faceted columns and a slab roof. Its large amethyst door glowed as if lit by a full moon.


    EP floated up the stairs, her curves silhouetted against the glow.


    ¡°Lucy! We¡¯re here!¡± Her voice echoed in space.


    After a few seconds of silence, the door hummed and faded into nothing, leaving a rectangle of solid darkness. Gradie followed Michael and EP through, and the darkness disappeared.


    It was a minimalist modern penthouse, plucked from a luxury condo and rebuilt with nonexistent materials; Furniture of woven nebulae, tapestries of molten plasma, framed portals to living forests, rolling beaches, snowing tundra. What had been solid black stone outside was transparent from within, and the sparkling stars peeked through the walls, floors, and ceiling.


    ¡°Hey Lucy,¡± EP said warmly.


    A woman appeared while Gradie was trying to get a grip on his surroundings. She was just as disorienting as the rest of it.


    Her skin was porcelain, lifeless and pale, shimmering in the colors of the starry sky. Her eyes were a blue-violet so vivid they seemed to float in the air, and her long straight hair was so black Gradie couldn¡¯t gauge its shape, like a liquid black hole. The stones in her silver jewelry were the same impossible darkness, and her snug cobalt-blue sheath dress shimmered with opalescence.


    ¡°You can barely handle the assholes we have on staff, Michael. Is he getting paid out of your cut?¡± Her voice had a slight twang that Gradie hadn¡¯t expected, and he bit back a laugh. Michael smiled at her.


    ¡°He¡¯ll be paid in experience at first.¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s still that sandy?¡±


    ¡°I found him in a Hardworld yesterday. This is his first time in the Otherworld.¡±


    Lucy looked at Gradie like Michael had said he was a ghost.


    ¡°What¡¯s your name?¡±


    ¡°Gradie.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s your full name?¡±


    He didn¡¯t like her tone, like she thought he was trying to get away with something just by being here.


    ¡°Gradie Miguel Hernandez. So, what are you, like human resources?¡±


    She looked back at Michael.


    ¡°Gradie, just answer her questions,¡± he said.


    ¡°All right. Ask away.¡±


    A door opened in space next to her, leading to a bare room like an apartment freshly cleaned between tenants. The vacuum tracks in the carpet were the most normal thing Gradie had seen since the gas station.


    ¡°After you,¡± she said. Gradie floated through the door and landed hard in the room, where gravity had returned unexpectedly.


    ¡°Fuck!¡±


    Lucy walked in and the door closed behind her.


    ¡°This will go a lot smoother if you kill your ego and do exactly as I say.¡±


    Gradie stood up.


    ¡°Yea, give me a couple seconds to reach enlightenment real quick.¡±


    She got close to him, blue neon eyes taking over the world.


    ¡°The first thing I need you to do, is to make absolutely sure this is what you want.¡±Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    Gradie was silent. Her eyes had him pinned, and her voice worked him over.


    ¡°I know Michael¡¯s little propaganda film can make this all seem very glamorous, but it¡¯s not for everyone.¡±


    Gradie nodded. That annoyed her.


    ¡°I don¡¯t mean like, ¡®you may not have what it takes¡¯, I mean what we do is mostly boring and briefly excruciating.¡± It came out like a well-worn phrase.


    ¡°Okay.¡±


    ¡°There are a million ways to be excited, fulfilled, whatever¡ª¡± She waved her hand like she didn¡¯t really believe it ¡°¡ªin the Otherworld. This work isn¡¯t about that.¡±


    ¡°What is it about?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s a question you have to answer for yourself, but It¡¯s not going to be fun. I¡¯m telling you that now.¡±


    That sealed it.


    ¡°I know.¡±


    She rolled her eyes and motioned to a door.


    ¡°Your bedroom is behind that door.¡±


    Gradie stopped himself from saying the first thing that came to mind.


    ¡°Ok, you want me to go in there?¡±


    ¡°Not yet. When you go in, it won¡¯t just be your bedroom floating in a void. Your entire waking life is behind that door. Do you understand?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°I need to be sure you are who you say you are. This place will draw your memories out naturally. All I need you to do is not fight it.¡±


    ¡°Why would I?¡± Gradie felt sweat on his back, which he hadn¡¯t thought possible here.


    ¡°You don¡¯t need to understand why, you just need to say yes or no. Are you willing to do this?¡±


    ¡°Michael said memories are like currency here. Won¡¯t this be stealing from me?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    There was nothing around to look at but her eyes. He thought of them skimming through his memories.


    ¡°What will you be looking at?¡±


    ¡°Anything I want. Yes or no?¡±


    He told himself this was his dream, that his subconscious wanted him to join this team to teach him something. No one would actually be looking at his memories. She wasn¡¯t real.


    But with her staring at him with those laser beam eyes, he couldn¡¯t believe it.


    ¡°All right.¡±


    The door looked just like his bedroom door, and the knob felt solid and real. When he stepped into his room, everything stilled, as if the world had been spinning since the gas station without him noticing.


    His bed was just how he left it. All the clothes and junk where they should be. Lingering smells of pan seared somethings and coffee. Dust floating in light rays. The glow behind the blinds and tacked-up sheet curtains confirmed his inexplicable feeling that it was about three pm on a Saturday.


    ¡°Show me around.¡± Lucy¡¯s voice had lost its ethereal quality, and she was just as real as the rest of it.


    Her hair was a clearly dyed black. Eyes a more realistic icy blue. Pale skin not without tone and a few freckles. Clothes believable despite being unexpected. Purple acid wash jeans and a black Kalmah t-shirt.


    Her eyes caught him, and she repeated herself.


    ¡°Show me around.¡±


    He walked out into the hall and pointed.


    ¡°That¡¯s the bathroom,¡± Lucy went in and he heard her open all the cabinets and drawers. He remembered, embarrassingly in some cases, what each little space held as she rifled through them, and got the feeling she could look in his mind just as clearly as opening a drawer.


    She went out into the kitchen and dug through everything there. In the front room, she picked some books off the shelves, examined posters, photos, and even counted the weight on his barbells.


    ¡°How long have you lived here?¡± She fixed him with those eyes again.


    ¡°About three years.¡± God damn. Had it been that long? His mind traced the time backwards and his memories played out in front of him. His weight set lost its barbell, his old TV floated into place, the leather duct taped couch he had moved in with, his first bookshelf, only half full. The room shuffled through time in front of him and Lucy studied the changes.


    He sensed the memories laid out in order around him, with the older versions of the room dropping down and away. When he shifted into the past, the newer versions passed behind him and rose above. He moved from one to another at will, like his natural process of memory had been enhanced and made more visceral.


    ¡°Whoa.¡± Gradie let the memories fall away, and the room returned to the present. ?¡± Lucy was right next to him.


    ¡°Where did you live before this The house he had rented with his friends after high school fluttered around him and Lucy scanned it with smooth turns of her eyes and shoulders. It was less vivid than the image of his apartment, like a transparent projection laid over it.


    ¡°And before that?¡±


    Despite his resistance, his last childhood home spread out from him. His view sailed between rooms, and he felt a spatial sense of his location in relation to things beyond the house. His elementary and middle school, the corner store, the wall mart and strip malls, with the video store and the Game¡ª


    ¡°Wait, stop! What the fuck?¡±


    ¡°I told you¡ª¡±


    ¡°What, I have to take you through my entire life just to join? Michael said I¡¯m not even getting paid!¡±


    ¡°He also said you wanted to join, and you have no experience. Have either of those things changed?¡±


    Gradie just stared at her. She moved to the door.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go for a ride.¡±


    ¡°What¡ª¡±


    ¡°Either do as I say, or fuck off, and no one will have to dig through your sad little life ever again. Then you can fly around the Allworld trying to get laid instead of wasting my time.¡±


    Something shifted in the room, as if the process sustaining all of existence had changed directions like an alternating current, and the force that had been drawing out his memories suddenly let something in; A feeling of pride, an anger at an injustice, directed at him. He found it in her eyes, and Michael¡¯s voice rang out in his head from memory.


    ¡°We were fighting for the only place we ever felt at home.¡±


    If she heard it, or sensed that anything had changed, she didn¡¯t show it. He knew, with that same dream knowledge that was becoming a sixth sense, that she would give her life a thousand times for what he was trying to do. In her eyes, he found a passion not weakened by his ignorance of the history behind it. It was proof of something bigger than him, and he wanted more than ever to be a part of it.


    He grabbed his keys off the counter and went out the door.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 10: Gradie

    Have we made it back?


    It was Saturday all right. The parking lot was packed, and afternoon sun glared off the windshields. Hot dusty air scrubbed his face and drew sweat down his neck. He smelled exhaust and oil and fast food scraps sweltering in some sun battered bag forgotten by the curb. The horizon hid behind mud colored apartment faces and a scraggly weed etched slope across the street, and the sky was like a great gradient glass, cloudless and clear. It was all there. Undeniable. Seeing something so real after finding the Otherworld was like coming to the end of an inverted dream.


    Lucy seemed uninterested now. She followed him to his car, an old Camry with cloudbursts of faded paint, without looking around. He got in and started the car as she held her door open and kicked out trash. A bright clear morning had warmed the interior mercilessly and sweat fell in beads under his shirt.


    ¡°Where are we going?¡± He shouted over a squeal from the engine.


    ¡°To your job.¡±


    ¡°Are you going to watch me work?¡±


    ¡°What did I say about questions?¡±


    ¡°If you¡¯re going to actually make me go to work, we might have to call it right here.¡±


    Lucy surprised him by smiling.


    ¡°Just drive. You won¡¯t be there long.¡±


    Lucy rolled down her window and lit a cigarette as he drove out onto the street, letting in a rush of hot air. It was a hot day in a hot state and the asphalt shimmered. He cranked the AC. Lucy blew smoke down her chest at her crossed thighs and turned the vents away from her.


    ¡°You¡¯re not hot?¡±


    ¡°Why would I be?¡±


    ¡°Oh yeah.¡± Gradie turned off the AC and reminded himself it was all in his mind, but sweat bloomed on his face.


    The screeching of the serpentine belt quieted down when he picked up speed. Gravel hit the undercarriage and Lucy smoked silently. They passed the massive empty field he often wished would take over the whole world, and his office came up like it always did, flat two stories of brown and darker brown looking at him like it wanted an explanation. Why do we even exist? He had wondered a million times if living so close to his job, seen as such a good idea in his enthusiastic first year of work, was doing some kind of severe psychological damage.


    ¡°That¡¯s your job?¡± Lucy¡¯s voice melted out of the dry air.


    ¡°You know it is.¡± Hadn¡¯t she teased everything out of his memory already?


    He turned into the office parking lot, shared with an L shaped strip of for-lease retail space that had once held grocery stores, florists, barbers and other things from another age, but now served only a handful of shops so mundane he could never remember what they were. One made t-shirts or posters and two of the others had ¡®solutions¡¯ in their names. He took a right in front of his office, under the sign that said ¡°Northwest Office Park¡±, all rectangles and hard lines like it was designed with crayon, and parked in a far spot close to the field.


    ¡°You want me to go inside?¡±


    ¡°Just think about it.¡±


    ¡°Going inside?¡±


    ¡°Everything. Just think about work.¡±


    His mind responded despite his hesitance, as if her words had struck a tap in his memory. He saw himself in the break room, in a meeting, talking to people who had long since moved on to better things. All the nights he had worked overtime to pay for a new alternator. All the stolen looks at her. Every time he had been on the edge of walking out. Three years poured out like nothing, then ran dry in a breath. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    They sat there with the engine idling in a dusty parking lot where bright sunlight chased shadows to slivers and nothing unordinary could have ever happened to anyone. Lucy flicked the butt out the window.


    ¡°All right. I¡¯m gonna drive now.¡±


    She got out and walked around while Gradie sat there stunned, waiting for more of his mind to bleed out into the landscape. When she knocked on the window, he picked his legs up and hopped into the passenger seat, banging his hip against the gearshift on the way. She got in and adjusted the seats and mirrors, then started up the car and rolled down the rest of the windows.


    ¡°Hand me that.¡± She pointed to his cd case. He lifted it up off the floor-board and she set it in her lap.


    ¡°What kind of music do you listen to?¡±


    His mind spilled out all the CDs he remembered from the case. She opened it and thumbed through it anyway.


    ¡°Which one did you get first?¡±


    ¡°Metal Church.¡± She raised an eyebrow at that.


    ¡°Which album?¡±


    ¡°Also Metal Church.¡±


    She pulled it out and swapped it for the Nightwish cd in the player.


    ¡°I¡¯m surprised you have CDs. A bit before your time.¡±


    He couldn¡¯t tell if it was more interrogation or just small talk.


    ¡°My aux port broke. I got most of those in high school.¡± He saw himself in the back of the mall, clearence sale at a closing Sam Goody, the cd sliding out of the sparse metal section. The memory floated in the air and dissolved, and he felt sure it was being kept somewhere known only to Lucy.


    ¡°Where else do you drive from here?¡±


    The access road split up ahead of them like double vision. A hazy copy of himself drove down to the wal mart, the gas station, and the fast-food places and strip malls across from his work, all at the blistering speed of memory. The world expanded and contracted and they were alone again.


    ¡°What about the weekends?¡±


    A phantom highway, this one in a world of evening, broke off and took another doppelganger to the liquor store, while others, debit cards flush with overtime pay, drove to an organic grocery or the Asian supermarket and disappeared.


    ¡°Where else?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s about it.¡±


    They were on the highway now. The second riff of Beyond the Black chugged in the speakers and memories streamed out with the music. Laying in his bed in the middle of the night with his mp3 player on max volume. Playing the cd in his first car just after buying it, feeling a confidence he realized only now he had forgotten. Writing the first draft of his fantasy novel senior year, seeing the battle play out to the rhythm. The memories started repeating, and Lucy punched off the stereo.


    ¡°Where did you grow up?¡±


    Her voice snaked through the hum of the highway. The first house he thought of was the second one he had lived in. They were parked in his childhood mini-van and the garage was just how he remembered. This time, the memories came without resistance, his spirit soaring through the rooms, falling through time.


    ¡°Fuck.¡± He was crying.


    ¡°Where are we?¡± Lucy¡¯s voice was so gentle he didn¡¯t recognize it at first. ¡°How would you drive to your apartment from here?¡±


    They sailed down the streets and highways in seconds the weight of years. Memories of everything along the way fluttered out like leaves kicked up by the tires.


    ¡°You go to school around here?¡± Her voice was ethereal, distant. His memories had exploded from him and the landscape was made of them. Memories of school he didn¡¯t know he had played out in the halls, the classes. Some of them might have been half remembered dreams.


    ¡°Who was your first crush?¡±


    He saw a smiling face under short hair and a winter cap.


    ¡°Fuck you!¡±


    They were back in the car, parked in his work lot.


    ¡°I need to make sure your past isn¡¯t fabricated. Before we¡ª"


    ¡°I don¡¯t give a fuck you robot bitch! You wanna watch me jack off for the first time too? If you can¡¯t tell whether or not I¡¯m a spy or whatever you think I am after seeing all this, then you¡¯re shit at your job! I didn¡¯t even want to join this fucking team! Michael talked me into it! I thought you were all in my head! I thought this was a dream!¡±


    The words bounced around in the car. Gradie tried to focus on Lucy¡¯s eyes instead of the fact that he had tried to wake up ten times since she had started driving.


    ¡°If you don¡¯t want to join, then fuck off. This isn¡¯t a dream. It¡¯s dangerous. You have no idea how much we risk¡ª¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t give a fuck. Take me back. I¡¯m done.¡±


    She stared at him a moment, then turned and walked through the door. He was standing in the bare room and hadn¡¯t even noticed the change.


    Back in the cosmic condo, Michael was looking out at a frosty forest and EP was lounging on a nebulae cushion talking to someone who wasn¡¯t there. They stood up as Lucy entered.


    ¡°He¡¯s cleared,¡± she said, before Michael could ask. Gradie locked eyes with EP and tried to hide his confusion. She looked away and studied Lucy walking across the room.


    ¡°Congratulations Gradie. Welcome to the team.¡± Michael held out his hand.


    Gradie saw Michael and the woman walking towards him in the gas station, as if his memories were still liquid and free. He realized that everything he had said to Lucy at the end had been a lie. He would have shown her anything to get this. All his memories, his life, which he still felt spread out around him but invisible, seemed worthless beyond their ability to bring him here.


    He shook Michael¡¯s hand and followed him back to the front door.


    ¡°Thanks Lucy. Should have another job within the week.¡±


    Lucy watched them leave. Gradie looked in her eyes for a message, but found nothing but neon.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 11: The Fragment

    Beneath the music from a farther room


    As the elevator moved at some unknowable speed in an undeterminable direction, Gradie was only half there, the rest of him still watching Lucy turn over his childhood bedroom, looking for something they were both afraid to find. Michael had been talking, but most of his words slipped by Gradie unnoticed.


    ¡°Now that you''re on the team, we need to cover some basics. Under no circumstances will you let anyone in the Otherworld know that you are a Hardworlder. Do you understand?¡±


    ¡°Why?¡±


    ¡°Because competition between Hardworlding teams is fierce, and anonymity is our most prized asset. Its the same reason EP was wearing a mask when I picked you up. It¡¯s difficult to change your appearance much when you drop into a Hardworld, and the last thing you want is the other side knowing who to look for.¡±


    Even if Gradie¡¯s head wasn''t spinning from being sliced open like a bag of receipts by some interdimensional spiritual skip tracer, he wouldn¡¯t have followed what Michael meant, but he nodded anyway.


    ¡°Good,¡± Michael said. The elevator stopped moving, as if it had been waiting for him to finish speaking, and they stepped out into a hallway.


    If Gradie had to guess, they were somewhere behind a mall, or deep in the back hallways of a stadium. Rain fell outside the walls, beat on the doors, and struck chimes on something metal above the ceiling. Thunder rumbled, soft and even as the carpet.


    ¡°EP, have the team head to the clubhouse,¡± Michael said. EP nodded like she had been assigned a killing and marched out a door.


    ¡°See you around,¡± Gradie called after her, but his words snagged on the carpet and got slapped around by the rain. She didn¡¯t even look back. The muted roar of the Allcity spilled out the door and snapped off as it closed.


    ¡°What¡¯s the Clubhouse?¡± Gradie said.


    ¡°It¡¯s in the Hardworlds.¡± Michael moved down the hall.


    ¡°We¡¯re going back there?¡±


    ¡°Yes. But not we. You¡¯re gonna go on your own and I¡¯ll meet you there.¡± Michael went through a door and Gradie followed.


    It was just a normal hotel room, but it felt like so much more. For a moment, Gradie felt there might not be any of that quality that made the Allworld feel so ethereal. But as his mind adjusted, he felt on the edges some of that softness, like the instability in a dream, and like that feeling when he stopped looking it, his mind forgot it and everything seemed perfectly real.


    ¡°What is this?¡±


    ¡°A Fragment.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°A piece of the Otherworld so well crafted that it''s almost indistinguishable from the Real.¡±


    ¡°Is that what Lucy uses?¡± Gradie froze, afraid his past would start spilling out again.


    ¡°No. That place uses your own mind, like a parabolic mirror for your memory.¡±


    ¡°So why are we here? I thought the Hardworlds were outside the Otherworld.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s easier to visualize the Hardworlds in a place like this, and in order to get to the Hardworlds, you have to know what they are.¡±


    Gradie dragged his mind back before his time with Lucy, and tried to remember what Michael had told him in the story. It felt like ages ago.A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    ¡°You said they¡¯re like an alternate reality.¡±


    ¡°Right. So how would you get there?¡± A crystal decanter and cup set, complete with an old-fashioned seltzer bottle, stood out of place on the laminate desk, next to a flesh-toned cord phone. Michael poured a drink like he expected this to take a while. Gradie, still shaken from what Lucy had done, wanted to get on with it, to jump headfirst into whatever terror came next. It was the in between places that he couldn¡¯t stand. He felt they could trap him forever.


    ¡°A door,¡± Gradie said. It was how they got everywhere else.


    Michael pulled the black-out curtains aside and the rain got louder. The daylight was a soft grey, like glowing concrete.


    ¡°You have to stop thinking of moving from one place to another as a physical event. Travel in the Otherworld, even to the Hardworlds, is a journey of the mind.¡± Michael sat down and got comfortable, the son of a bitch.


    ¡°So how do I move my mind?¡± Gradie shifted his weight to one leg. The gravity here was constant. Dead. The gravity of the Allworld seemed alive, even mischievous, in his memory. Michael shifted in his seat.


    ¡°I¡¯m going to be honest, Gradie. This is my first time working with someone who didn¡¯t already know how to get in. I¡¯m trying to think of the best way to explain it.¡±


    Gradie sat down on the bed. For a moment, the bounce of the mattress, the shadows of the furniture, the aseptic smell of the room, so like every other hotel room he had ever been in, jumped out of place and became part of a wider world of highways and people and paychecks. Then it was all alone again, encased by the sound of the rain, floating in a universe of nothing else.


    ¡°How did it feel to be in a Hardworld?¡± Michael asked suddenly. Gradie saw the gas station. It was hard to believe it had been a Hardworld. All the times Michael or Lucy had mentioned them, they sounded like some mythical place, not a dingy counter and flickering fluorescence. The feeling of being there returned to him.


    ¡°Like dreaming I¡¯m someone else.¡±


    ¡°Right. When you enter the Hardworlds, you enter an alternate version of yourself. To do that, for the first time, you have to believe that what you are entering is real, and if it¡¯s real, then all of this¡ª¡± Michael spread his arms ¡°¡ªis just a dream.¡±


    ¡°So, what? I have to convince myself I¡¯m dreaming?¡±


    ¡°Yes. And then you have to wake up.¡±


    Gradie waited for Michael to smugly explain why it wasn¡¯t that simple. He didn¡¯t.


    ¡°Are you ready to try?¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s the catch?¡±


    Michael smiled.


    ¡°You think waking yourself up will be easy?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve woken up from this place before.¡±


    ¡°Yes, but not by choice, right? Why do you wake up?¡±


    ¡°I get tired.¡± It was the best way to describe that pulling feeling that had brought him amnesiatically back to his real life.


    ¡°Why? You think you have a body to get tired?¡±


    ¡°Then what would you call it?¡±


    Michael shrugged. ¡°Maybe your spirit here is a kind of reaction, like a flame or a current, and it needs to return to the real to recharge.¡±


    ¡°Can you just tell me what I need to know?¡± Gradie was sick of Michael''s vagaries. At least with Lucy, things were absolute. ¡®Either do this or fuck off.¡¯ Her eyes floated up in his memory, and he found himself missing her.


    ¡°You should relish this, Gradie. After a while, you¡¯ll have your own theories about this place, and you¡¯ll be stuck with them forever.¡±


    Gradie had nothing to say to that. Michael sighed and continued.


    ¡°Let me ask you this, does your life in the Real feel more real, from where your standing now, than anything else?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°Does it? Really?¡±


    Gradie thought about his apartment, his job, and it all blended with the life in the gas station.


    ¡°No. What the fuck? It¡¯s just like the other one.¡± He felt his real life slip away and melt into the other one, and he grabbed on to it in panic, ran his memory over every part of it, rescuing it.


    ¡°What did you just do?¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°You clung to it, your real life, didn¡¯t you?¡±


    ¡°What, are you in my head?¡±


    ¡°No, I¡¯ve seen it happen before, a lot. I did it when I first started. Everyone does.¡± Michael took a drink and swirled it in the glass, watching it like was telling him something. Gradie recovered himself, and thought of something.


    ¡°Wait, then how did Lucy dig through my real life? I never even thought of that other me in there.¡± Despite the agony of having someone else dig through his soul, he had never had this crisis of identity when Lucy had her eyes fixed on him. Again, he missed them.


    ¡°She¡¯s an expert at drawing out the real you. But, the magic of the Otherworld is that here, you get to decide who the real you is. You made a choice, just now, to cling to that version of yourself.¡±


    Gradie was silent as Michael''s words settled in his mind. Wasn¡¯t this what he had always wished for? A way to get away from himself?


    A gentle thunder rolled outside. Michael spoke in the silence that followed.


    ¡°Do you understand what you have to do?¡±


    ¡°I have to let it go.¡±


    ¡°Yes. Here in the Otherworld, you are equidistant from all the lives you could ever live. Once you accept that what you know as the Real is just another dream, your mind will seek out something real. You must open your mind and wake up into that other life. That¡¯s how you get to the Hardworlds.¡±


    He stood up. ¡°And either you can do it, or you can¡¯t.¡±

 In the Beginning | Chapter 12: The Door

    Do I dare, Disturb the Universe?


    Gradie was afraid it would all be for nothing. He saw himself floating around the Allworld, settling for the recycled scraps of other people''s lives while the Hardworlds blazed somewhere out of reach.


    The memory of the gas station pulled him out of it. He had done it before, somehow. He could do it again. Still, better make sure to squeeze every half answer out of Michael first.


    ¡°So, I just sit here and try to believe that my real life is a dream, until my mind wakes me up?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s better if you try and remember your real life and focus on that,¡± Michael said slowly, as if offering Gradie something fragile that might slip through his hands.


    ¡°And what¡¯s my real life?¡±


    ¡°How should I know? I¡¯m a dream, remember?¡±


    Gradie sat in silence with clenched fists until Michael spoke again.


    ¡°This is the final test before you can join the team. If you can¡¯t do this, I can¡¯t use you.¡±


    ¡°I can do it.¡± Gradie snapped.


    ¡°I believe you, but before I leave you to it, a final warning.¡±


    Michael set his glass down and stepped closer to Gradie.


    ¡°The Hardworlds are a dangerous place for the unwary. They pull on your spirit, attacking it, like an immune system attacks a foreign body, because what you are is unnatural to them. If you let them, they will make you believe that the self in the Hardworld is the real you, and you will forget about the Otherworld, about your real life, and you wont be able to escape. We call it dropping out. It gets harder to resist the longer you¡¯re in the Hardworlds, but for a novice like you, even the first hour can be perilous. Do you understand what I¡¯m telling you?¡±


    Gradie felt like Michael had gut-punched him inches from the finish line. He had just gotten used to the idea that this wasn¡¯t all a dream, and now some other layer of it had revealed itself, like reality breaking apart twofold.


    ¡°But, I¡¯ll still go to the real world when I wake up, right? Like I did in your craft?¡±


    ¡°Yes, but the Real will be even less than a dream to your spirit. It can only hold one life as real.¡±


    ¡°So, what? Do I actually become that other me? Does the Hardworld become my real life?¡±


    ¡°I can''t say. I just need to know that you understand the risk. I cant let you join if you don¡¯t.¡±


    Something in Michael''s tone or words filled him with a heavy fear. It was the kind of fear he had thought impossible in this place, the kind Lucy had tried so intently to make him feel.


    It occurred to him that the one pure difference between waking life and a dream was the danger of something you could not recover from.


    A low, cracking thunder gave an unexpected depth to the world outside the window, revealing it in his mind for an instant. Then it was gone, and they were floating in the void, alone.


    ¡°I understand,¡± said Gradie.


    ¡°Are you sure?¡± Michael waved behind him. ¡°There¡¯s always the Otherworld. You can shoot people and steal cars and all that shit there, risk-free.¡±


    For a moment, Gradie thought about it. The advertisements in the city, sending hints of dreamlives into his brain. Wouldn¡¯t that be easier? Wouldn¡¯t it be the same?


    No. The Hardworlds, the gas station, just that small part of it, had been unlike anything this place could ever give him. Even this hotel room, as near perfect and simple as it was, didn¡¯t come close. He wanted a life, a real life in a real world, without restraint, without limits, where he could find out who he was, and what he could become.This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    ¡°No. I¡¯m ready.¡±


    Something in his voice must have done it. Michael could barely keep the smile off his face as he stood up.


    ¡°Good. Don¡¯t say I never warned you. Take out that card I gave you earlier.¡±


    Gradie did, wondering how pockets worked in a world where everything was crafted of thought.


    ¡°Flip it over.¡±


    There was some text that hadn¡¯t been there before.


    ¡°Memorize everything on that. The phone number is the most important. Call it at nine a.m. on the dot.¡±


    It was an eight hundred number with a triplet followed by two doubles. He ran through it a few times.


    ¡°What is it?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s how we¡¯ll synchronize with you.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°You don¡¯t know how to drop into specific Hardworlds yet, so we have to come to you. When you call that number, and I visualize you calling me, the Hardworlds puts us together to make it happen. There are other ways to do it, but this will be the easiest.¡±


    Wouldn¡¯t that mean that until they synchronized, Michael would be in a Hardworld with some other version of him? Another question formed from his confusion. Gradie hadn¡¯t thought about it before, but now as he prepared to throw himself across realities, his ignorance flared up in the dark.


    ¡°How many Hardworlds are there?¡±


    Michael¡¯s answer was surprising and obvious at the same time, a fitting paradox for this place.


    ¡°An infinite number. It''s better to conceptualize the Hardworlds as a field, a meeting of multiple qualities, rather than a series of distinct planes. As Hardworlders, we move between states constantly. Every change we make is done by entering an alternate reality, you could say.¡±


    For once, Michael¡¯s words clicked smoothly into place in Gradie¡¯s mind, eradicating pockets of confusion that had lingered in his understanding, and kickstarting new questions, but Michael interrupted his reflection before they could form.


    ¡°One last thing. Before you call us, you need to do something drastic.¡±


    ¡°What do you mean?¡±


    ¡°Something that makes it impossible to return to your old life. Something you can''t come back from. You need to put as much distance between your spirit and your self as possible.¡± Then suddenly, as if remembering, he added ¡°But don¡¯t kill anyone.¡±


    ¡°Ok, so what should I¡ª¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s up to you, but whatever it is, do it before you call me. I need to know that you believe that the self in the hardworld isn¡¯t the real you.¡±


    Gradie nodded as if he understood and looked at the card again. Michael clapped him on the back.


    ¡°If I don¡¯t see you in the Hardworlds, stop by the office and maybe we¡¯ll find something else for you to do.¡±


    ¡°Fuck that.¡±


    Michael smiled and waved. There was a sound like a trap door opening in an empty theater and Gradie dropped through the floor with his arms flailing at nothing. The square slice of hotel room shrunk into a speck and blinked out above him, and he was left floating in a black void with only distant faint stars for reference. The card floated by him lazily in zero-g.


    ¡°All right.¡± His voice fell flat in the darkness, as if he was tucked away in a carpeted bedroom. Strange. He had expected an echo. Everything Michael had told him rolled around in his head, and he tried to organize it into a plan of action, but kept dropping pieces into the void. The only thing that seemed solid was the phone number.


    Suddenly, something blinked out in the darkness. A light, changing color as it hung among other lesser stars. It held his attention for a moment until he shook it off and looked down to try and think again. Down became forward and the light slid out of view.


    ¡°I¡¯m dreaming.¡±


    He remembered saying the same thing to Michael when they first met, and to himself a million times since then. He tried to believe it.


    He thought of waking up in his own bed and felt that life rising up to meet him. In a panic, he pushed it away and tried to think of something else. The first thing that came to mind was the girl in the gas station.


    That first Hardworld, and the him attached to it, bloomed in his mind and his other life fell away. The sensation was familiar to him now, and he pulled his mind back again. Something in the stars around him birthed a realization. Both lives felt equally far from him.


    Michael''s voice drifted through the dark.


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


    They felt like dim stars, distant and faint. He grabbed onto that metaphor and let it grow, until he remembered the colorful star and rolled it into view.


    It shifted between a bright purple and neon green.


    ¡°That¡¯s my real life, in there, I just don¡¯t remember it.¡± His voice shook out from his head and boomed in the space around him. He held the thought and focused on the star.


    Something flashed across its surface, a line bisecting the blinking orb. It dropped down suddenly and a flat plane rose above. The entire shape came right at him.


    A door. Rolling towards him in the dark. Its edges glowed in the same colors as the shifting star, and it hummed with a vibration he could hear, speaking of memories and another life. He willed it to a stop right in front of him.


    It was off-white with a beige coat of paint peeking through where the top coat flaked away. The knob was a brushed dull copper color and it hung off like the screws needed tightening. A shard of some other life, a weapon to shatter illusion.


    ¡°When I open this door, I''ll wake up, and remember everything.¡±


    The idea became more solid and certain by the second. Everything else faded away into a dull hum somewhere behind him, pushing him towards the door. He grabbed the handle and turned. Light poured in from the edges and the sensation of remembering something made him smile.


    ¡°I cant believe I forgot.¡±


    He opened the door and stepped through.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 13: Awake

    I tried to dream myself awake


    The alarm¡¯s robotic birdsong laser-beamed through his brain, lighting up every memory attached to the sound.


    It was Thursday, and he had requested Friday off. His job was fifteen minutes away in what had once been a grocery store, its blue sheet metal roof a remnant of the age before Wal-Mart. He worked on the phones in the back floor, an area of cubicles where he and twenty-something other people spent eight to ten hours a day making calls to clients, providers, agents, and anyone else connected to the vague field of ¡°healthcare solutions.¡± He had been there for four years and in this apartment for three. His car had three oil leaks and he had two hundred dollars in his savings.


    Other things, his rank on a shooter, the lack of eggs or milk in his fridge, the ignored text messages from the girl he had been seeing and why he was ignoring them, lit up in his memory, like his life was arranged under rows of warehouse lights coming on in sequence.


    Stuck in the middle of it all, like a jeweled crown wedged in with the groceries, was the memory of last night''s dreams. The shared dreamworld, or whatever it was. The gas station. The other half-remembered characters; The guy with a spaceship, the pale girl in all black, and the strange trip through someone else¡¯s memories. That other apartment, like an alternate flavor of this one, with another office job right down the highway, similar in feel to his current job, just with different tasks and people.


    It felt like a dream, had all the qualities of a dream, but was more fleshed out than any dream he had ever had. He lay there thinking about it with the alarm going off, but couldn¡¯t decide if he was really having a crisis of belief or just looking for an excuse not to get out of bed. The alarm snoozed itself then went off again five minutes later while he was running his mind across the fractured memories of those other worlds, trying to find something that stood out as illogical and unquestionably made only of dreams.


    As he got up and got ready, his mind slipped into thoughts of tardies and write-ups. He stopped in front of the door, hand on the knob, remembering dreams of other doors leading to other places, and one final door that lead somewhere he couldn¡¯t recall. The dreams had faded, but when he reached for them, they were whole and vibrant, just below the dark surface of waking. A strange ambiance rose out of them, vibrating the air, the light, his breath. It hummed in his chest and struck adrenaline on his tongue. It was possibility, anticipation, promise. He saw the world through it, changed.


    The room floated, and he felt that when he opened the door, there could be anything on the other side, like the apartment was falling through dreams. Everything about it, the pose of the couch, the rhythm of the flickering kitchen light, the sag of the thumb-tacked posters, were only vaguely familiar. It didn¡¯t feel like his life. It felt like something that had dropped in to fill the void where his life should have been, a stand-in while he groped for reality.


    The dreams, however, still felt like dreams, no matter their energy, no matter how bad he wanted to believe. Lost in thought, habit took over his movements, and he reached for his keys, sighing at the possibility soon to be butchered by work. A voice, echoed through a dual filter of dream and memory, stopped him.


    ¡°Do something drastic.¡±


    Like what?


    The first thing that came to mind was work. He took out his phone. It was seven forty-five and he had to be in at eight. He was on a written write-up, and if he called in, that would be ten points and put him on a final. It wasn¡¯t guaranteed termination, but the thought of a meeting, groveling for his job ( things have been tough lately, it won¡¯t happen again) made him sick. He grasped at the fluttering dream fragments for courage.Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author''s preferred platform and support their work!


    ¡°This isn¡¯t my life. This isn¡¯t real.¡±


    A car honked outside and the noise ripped through everything. It was all real. The tone of the horn, the sound of the ac, the sweat on his forehead. There was nothing else beyond it but a dream of joining a team of dimension-hopping weirdos, exactly the kind of delusion his mind would create out of stress.


    But, he remembered their voices, their smiles, even their insults and glares, and missed them.


    He looked at his phone. Seven fifty-seven. Fuck it. If it came to it, he could probably avoid getting fired. At least this way he could prove to himself it was just a dream, and move on.


    He found the attendance line in his contacts.


    ¡°This is Gradie Hernandez, in the physician follow-up unit, my manager is Casey Lewis, I work the day shift, eight to five, and I won¡¯t be coming in today due to personal issues.¡±


    He hung up and stood there in the silence. A voice whispered in the back of his mind, his own voice.


    ¡°Calling into work isn¡¯t drastic.¡±


    A fear grew out of his delirium. What if it was real? What if Michael walked out of the haze somewhere outside and told him he failed? No retries, no membership, just keep doing whatever it is you¡¯ve been doing for the rest of your life. But what else could he do?


    ¡°Do something that makes it impossible to return to your old life.¡±


    He imagined transferring all his money into same-day-expiry stock options, or driving his car into a police cruiser, or walking into work and writing down every credit card number he could pull up.


    He could imagine all he wanted, the rest of him wouldn¡¯t cooperate. It was all he could do not to drive to work right now and try to explain the call in as a false alarm.


    He checked the time again. Eight o clock. According to the dream, he had to call the mysterious number at nine am on the dot. Then he would find out if he was insane or just stupid. At least he had the day off now. A different kind of excitement jumped up at the thought like a battered dog, pathetic in comparison to that earlier energy.


    His stomach growled. Must have been all the stress. He usually had about three cups of coffee for breakfast.


    He went out the door and found the same overgrown courtyard and black tarred parking lot he had seen every morning for the last three years. The feeling of floating evaporated, leaving him grounded with hunger and regret. His favorite restaurant was a Vietnamese cafe about fifteen minutes away. Remembering he had a favorite restaurant reminded him that this was his real life, and brought on a panic as he got in his car.


    Something shook loose from memory, and he saw two neon eyes glaring at him from the passenger seat, but when he looked over, there was nothing there but the glint of dust in a sunbeam.


    He backed out and headed to the street. The apartment looked across a wavering wood fence at the plaster-colored back of a strip mall and Gradie found he knew every business front connected to the peeling doors. Some girl stood around a squat set of steps and gestured with a cigarette while talking into a phone on her shoulder and he remembered seeing her do it a million times.


    He stopped at the edge of the lot and waited for a chance to turn. Across the street was a steak house with an L-shaped storm drain on two sides of its parking lot, the creek that gave his apartments their name. He remembered slabs of grey sirloin and the highlighter colored garlic bread. Next to it frowned the dead face of an abandoned node of a southern style cafeteria chain, bankrupt for a decade. Scraps of his childhood flowed out through the slivers of windows behind the boards, and he remembered all the Sundays and chocolate pies. He missed three gaps in the traffic sitting there thinking about it. Someone honked and he rolled over the curb and down the road.


    The scenery slid by with a merciless familiarity. Strip malls of renal care facilities and twenty-four-hour urgent cares with slanting parking lots the dim grey color of thirty years. Fast food restaurants in the trademark shapes of other chains that had built them twenty years ago and left them to lease after ten. Hotels that looked over the highway with clean faces free of water stains and ages measured in months. His feeble mantra of ¡°this isn¡¯t real¡± got fainter with every square of sidewalk. This was the most real place on earth.


    When he got to the overpass, the world around him glared through the windows with a realness that couldn''t be questioned. The red light bouncing above him was as obvious as the spit in his mouth and the haze at the edge of the sprawl.


    So he was crazy.


    But he had already called in, so he took the highway onto the loop.


    He had accepted his insanity and the inescapability of his life, when the view from the highway stirred something in the back of his mind.


    It was like laying in bed all morning trying to remember a dream, then having it sneak up and grab you hours later.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 14: Calling

    Decisions and revisions which a minute shall reverse.


    The cracked road crunched beneath the tires and dry oaks bursting out of the storm drain flew past the windows. Something in the clouds and the sunlight and the motion of it all whispered to him, like he had dreamed this moment and it had ended in an explosion. He was going sixty when it came out from behind the trees.


    The mall. It rotated as the road curved and he watched it dance. He remembered going to it as a kid, a smear of shopping trips and Christmas d¨¦cor, scrapped from the years and pressed together behind his eyes. Where the memories ended, something else moved. A memory without definite qualities, a forgotten sensation, reforming in his mind. He was sure of the mall in a way that he hadn''t been sure of anything since waking up, and it made him feel alive. It kept spinning as he came around it, and he wondered if it was going to drop out of the world and leave a gaping tear in reality.


    Without thinking, he turned in at the first entrance and it came towards him like a faded beige horizon. He passed over the storm drain creek and turned onto the road that circled the mall. Faded black lines of the words JC Penny floated ghostlike over the empty lot and vanished.


    He watched the mall dance until it rotated completely and he found himself back where he started. The memories, if that¡¯s what they were, never came to him. It never gave up its secrets, never fell through the earth or told him why he loved it. It just spun at the center of a churning pavement sea, hinting at something he couldn¡¯t even approach. He circled it again without revelation and parked under a leaning light post.


    ¡°Fuck.¡± He leaned back and stretched his legs above the pedals. After staring at the torn sagging fabric over his head for a while, he came to the realization that he was having a mental breakdown.


    ¡°It''s gotta be stress. This job is killing me,¡± he said it to the visor. His voice flattened on the interior, giving the statement a connection to reality that helped him believe it. He sighed and his stomach growled so deep it shook his chest.


    ¡°All right. I¡¯m losing it. I need to eat. Then check myself in, get tested, put on medication, get on disability¡­¡±


    He went halfway around the mall without looking at it until he got to the strip of retail space with the cafe stuck in the middle and pulled into a spot right up front.


    Inside, he pointed the hostess to a table near the window and ordered a coffee over condensed milk and a breakfast B¨¢nh m¨¬. As he waited in the morning silence, the mall stared at him across the shimmering lot.This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    He tried to ignore it. Staring at the glass topped faux wood table, his mind gorged itself on the passing seconds and spat up fears of unemployment and mental health evaluations. The last shreds of dreams slipped away, beaten back by the rushing current of waking thoughts. A sharp bite of longing, cold claws in his chest, struck him as the dreams dissolved, and in a reflex learned from a lifetime of grasping at fantasies for comfort, he wrapped his mind around them. For an instant, they darkened as dreams, and lit up as memories.


    The mall caught his eye again. Some cloud shadow flashing over it. A breeze through the oaks. He suddenly felt that he had dropped into the same strange plane of existence it occupied and they were vibrating together.


    The waitress set his plate down with all the niceties and he nodded without hearing anything she said. When she had gone, he stared out at the clouds and thought of dreamcrafts and impossible towers, of sapphire eyes and whiskey drinking dreamguides, of Hardworlders and a war of light and demons.


    ¡°I don¡¯t give a fuck if it''s not real. They can lock me up for the rest of my life on a Thorazine drip if I can believe in it for just one second.¡±


    The food was incredible. He focused on every flavor and sensation, and in between bites, while drinking deep gulps of the alkali ice water, he searched outside and traced every surface, now lit up with morning sun, trying to find the gaps in all of it, looking for pieces of that otherworld peeking through. Instead, he found nothing but unyielding reality.


    ¡°All right then. I''m crazy.¡±


    The restaurant''s phone rang and Gradie remembered the card from the dream. His phone said eight fifty-seven. He opened up the dial pad and tried to remember the number.


    It came to him instantly. It was so clear he was sure he had seen it somewhere beore and it had slipped into the dream from memory. Weren''t numbers impossible to read in a dream? He thought about the card, held in the gentle light of a thoughtcrafted hotel room, and remembered the numbers shifting.


    Despite this, the number was now right in front of him, typed onto the screen, and he was sure, somehow, that it was right.


    It was eight fifty-nine.


    He put his thumb over the dial button, and stopped.


    ¡°If I call this, and get some random business, I¡¯ll lose it. If I don¡¯t call, I can still believe, just for a while.¡±


    He looked back at the phone. Nine o clock. He hit dial.


    The line rang like funeral bells and the silence between was the stillness of death. A few more seconds, and his life would be over. He felt the dreams fall away into dull dead memory as the ringing in his ear blended with the realness of everything else.


    The line clicked and he gagged on his breath.


    ¡°Hello?¡±


    It was Michael. But maybe it wasn¡¯t. It sounded like the man in his dream, but it was probably just¡ª


    ¡°Hello? Who is this?¡±


    ¡°Gradie.¡± He choked on the word.


    ¡°Why are you calling this number, Gradie?¡±


    He almost threw the phone across the restaurant, but tightened his grip and took a breath.


    ¡°Because you told me to.¡±


    ¡°Oh yeah? What else did I tell you?¡± The voice was mocking, but familiar. The dead dreams flared up like coals in wind.


    Do something drastic¡­


    ¡°You told me to do something drastic.¡±


    ¡°Oh, wow. Sounds serious. And have you done something drastic?¡±


    ¡°I called in.¡±


    There was a pause on the other end, and Gradie felt the breath fall out of his chest.


    ¡°Oh, ok. Well, enjoy your day off. Careful with those strong coffees.¡±


    The line clicked off.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 15: Funeral

    Burn my flesh to ash but set my soul on fire


    ¡°Mother fucker!¡± Gradie yelled into the phone. The hostess up front cleared her throat and someone laughed in the kitchen.


    He called the number again. It only rang once.


    The number you are dialing is disconnected or no longer¡ª


    ¡°Shit!¡±


    He jumped up and ran across the tables and knocked a chair over. Someone yelled as he bolted out the door and the exit bell sounded like a punch line. He wondered if a dine and dash counted as something drastic as he peeled out of the lot onto the access road.


    You son of a bitch. I¡¯ll show you drastic.


    Careful with those strong coffees.


    So, he was watching, somehow.


    An idea bloomed in his head, sudden and irresistible. He merged through three lanes to a chorus of horns pushed the gas until the drive-thrus and strip malls smeared across the windows. That other, frightened, costume of himself fell away with it all and his spirit flared up in the driver''s seat. Five minutes melted away and he pulled into a quick trip.


    In the trunk he found a gas can, and with it the memory of watching a friend dip it in his tank on the side of a hundred-degree highway months ago. The memory grabbed him for a moment, trying to take him down, but dissolved in the face of his belief. There was only one Gradie, and he was here on business.


    He smiled at the camera as he filled the can, thinking of all the crimes solved with quick trip footage. Maybe in a few hours, he¡¯d see himself on the news.


    The can sloshed in the passenger seat as he tore back down the road. He turned back around the mall and the edge of one of its big empty parking lots rose ahead of him. Perfect.


    He parked in the middle of it and got out. Wind blew around him like the top of some urban mesa. There was nothing in sight but mall and suburban treetops, sandwiched between sky and concrete. He dug around in the center console and found a month-old half-smoked pack of Marlboro red 100s that some other him had bought, smoked, and forgot about during a night of drinking. Inside was a quarter full plastic Bic lighter. It glittered in his hand like a token of some other world.


    He rolled down all the windows and left the car running with the AC on full blast. Wind whipped up the fumes as he circled the car tossing amber-colored splashes of gasoline through the windows. When the last half-ounce of gas resisted his efforts, he popped his phone out of the wallet case and set it on the ground, then overturned the gas can and let a last undramatic drip fall onto the card holder. He tossed the can through the window, picked the wallet up by the wrist strap and flicked on the lighter.


    The faux leather caught fire instantly. He ducked back and threw it away in a reflex. It sailed through the air like a spell and flew through the open back window. He had just enough time to wonder if he was far back enough before the gas ignited.Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    He stumbled away from the rush of flame and the heat followed him as it grew. Dark smoke rolled off into the sky. He stepped back until his phone rang. It was an unlisted number.


    ¡°Hello?¡±


    ¡°Congratulations Gradie. Welcome to the Hardworlds.¡±


    ¡°Fuck yes!¡± He yelled and jumped in the air and laughed hysterically. The mania was like nothing else. The universe had split itself open and molten possibility was flowing out through the landscape. He looked around, eager to take everything in, and saw it all with a new focus.


    The sun glared off the flat grey lot and shimmered through the wavering haze around the fire. He traced the lines on all the leaves of a live oak sticking out of the median, listened to the traffic sounds from the distant road, smelled the gasoline and burning plastics, and blinked at the clouds, light and wispy like quick brushstrokes.


    The Hardworlds. It was all real. An alternate dimension. A different reality. Memory of his doubt broke through the euphoria and his breath caught in his chest. What if Michael found out how close he had come to losing it?


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry if it seemed like you made it by the skin of your teeth,¡± Michael said, once again predicting his thoughts. ¡°It always feels like that.¡±


    Gradie laughed into the phone.


    ¡°Alright. You picking me up or what?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. Should be there before the cops. See you soon.¡±


    He hung up.


    Gradie watched his car burn some more. Panic set in again as he thought about the conversation, already hazy, distorted in memory. Did it really happen? He¡¯d never hallucinated before. How would he be able to tell?


    The hood supports blew and it flew open and slammed into the windshield, shattering the glass. A minute later, the tires exploded in hot molten rubber, and a car sped into the lot.


    It was a black early 00¡¯s Jaguar S type, gliding over the warped concrete like a skater on an ice rink. It stopped smoothly in front of him, flames shimmering in its mirror surfaces. The passenger window rolled down and an almost familiar face looked at him, but the voice was different.


    ¡°Get in.¡±


    She pointed at the back seat. Gradie just stood there.


    She was still beautiful, but smaller than he remembered, and definitely real. Her eyes, no longer burning saphires, were a less vibrant grey-blue, protruding doe-like above soft dark bags and below mascaraed lashes. Her pale skin, struck through with blue veins and unlike the porcelain from memory, was mostly hidden under a well-worn black hoodie rolled up at the sleeves.


    Michael looked back at him from the driver''s seat. No otherworldly glow or unnatural shadow around his face. Just a big man pushing forty in a charcoal suit.


    It was ridiculous, and such a contrast to their angelic forms in the Otherworld, that he felt sure for a moment he was dreaming and it was all a lie.


    ¡°You want to stay here and give the cops a statement, or what?¡± Michael said. His voice still held its power.


    Gradie climbed in with a massive smile on his face.


    ¡°Holy fucking shit.¡±


    They sped off across the lot and EP cracked her window, letting in the faint sound of a firetruck clearing traffic.


    ¡°You smell like straight up gasoline,¡± she said


    Gradie ignored her.


    ¡°Where are we going?¡±


    ¡°To the clubhouse,¡± Michael said.


    ¡°What¡¯s that?¡±


    ¡°You will find out when we get to it.¡± Michael made a U-turn on the access road.


    Gradie looked out the window and watched a black finger of smoke rise over the trees as they sped down a back street. Houses flew by and his mind wandered. The memory of his car burning, all the things left in his wallet, came to him with the sirens through the window, and he started to panic.


    I just threw my god damned life away.


    It was just a moment, brief, but terrifying, before he got control of himself.


    No, that¡¯s not me.


    ¡°Gradie,¡± Michael spoke in a warning growl, and Gradie found his steel-grey eyes, like a guard dog on alert, flashing in the rear-view mirror.


    ¡°You need to be mindful here. The self will take over if you let it. It¡¯s the default, the incumbent ruler.¡±


    EP looked back at him, watching him, judging him.


    ¡°I¡¯m fine. I got it,¡± he said, and knew it was true, like the words had been a spell.


    Michael readjusted the mirror and EP turned back around.


    The highway zipped by, that familiar scenery. Everything glowed and even the roar of the traffic was musical. It felt like the ultimate weekend of his life.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 16: The Clubhouse

    Let us go and make our visit


    Gradie had been watching the powerlines go by for an hour when they pulled off the access road and slowed into a turn.


    ¡°This is it,¡± Michael said from the driver¡¯s seat.


    They turned down a dusty street, with low brick walls along the sidewalks, into an unfinished subdivision. Off to the side, a portable office trailer sagged in a sand lot and Texas thistle bowed in bright purple bursts all around it. There were half-built houses scattered across the dirt lots and not a car in sight.


    ¡°Which one?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°Which one what?¡± said EP.


    ¡°Which one is the clubhouse?¡±


    ¡°All of it is the Clubhouse. It¡¯s our home in the hardworlds.¡±


    ¡°Why? Wouldn¡¯t you want like a bunker or something?¡±


    Michael laughed.


    ¡°That wouldn¡¯t really fit with the work we do.¡±


    They passed an empty lot marked off by a rebar and tarp divider, a house with stickers still on the windows and a sold sign on the curb, a golden wooden frame roasting in the sun, houses with faces of brick and faux stone and bare drywall and tacky little screwed in shutters, leaning porta potties, pressed wood boxes with numbers spray painted on the sides, fill rock heaps, fruitless saplings with rebar supports, checkerboards of dead drying grass, and an empty pool complete with waterslides.


    His warm euphoric weekend feeling dissolved, and something else floated out of the air. It flowed under his skin, rolled out with his breath, slid up his spine and spread behind his throat. A feeling between excitement and panic, severing him from himself, like he had popped into existence the moment they entered the neighborhood. That feeling, of being stuck on the edge of something, out of reach of everything else, got stronger as the street rushed beneath him.


    Michael, as usual, seemed to have a sixth sense.


    ¡°Feels strange, doesn¡¯t it?¡±


    ¡°Yeah.¡± He struggled to put the feeling into words.


    ¡°It¡¯s a fragment,¡± Michael said.


    ¡°Like the hotel room?¡± It felt wrong to mention out loud what he still partly believed were his dreams, but it was even stranger to have someone else understand.


    ¡°Yes and no,¡± Michael said. ¡°A fragment can mean just a part of the Otherworld created to look like the Real, but this is more specific. In this case, fragments are places we drop out of the Otherworld and sink into the Hardworlds.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°The Otherworld is liquid, malleable. When we make something there, a portion of it solidifies. If we make something realistic enough, something that conforms to the rules of the Real, it becomes too dense to exist in the Otherworld and drops out. Like a stone formed in the center of a pond.¡±


    Gradie¡¯s focus drifted away from Michael¡¯s voice. Outside, the horizon hid behind a brick subdivision wall and house faces squared off at odd angles under a blazing blue sky. Bright clouds hovered frozen in place and gave neither depth nor motion to the world below. Everything floated alone.


    ¡°Feels¡­separated,¡± Gradie said.


    A Fragment. The name fit like a glove. He felt fragmented from the rest of the world. He liked the feeling.


    ¡°We call it floating,¡± EP said. ¡°You feel it in a fragment because they¡¯re liminal spaces.¡±


    ¡°A what?¡±


    ¡°An in between place, like an empty parking lot, a hotel hallway, or a dead mall. Places that seem cut off from everything else, but also familiar.¡±


    Gradie¡¯s mouth hung open as he matched the feeling with places from his memory. His thoughts drifted towards the mall, but Michael interrupted him.


    ¡°It¡¯s easier, psychologically, to drop a liminal space into a Hardworld. The mind can conceptualize that there¡¯s a wider world beyond it, without knowing exactly what.¡±


    Gradie had gotten used to only one out of any three words Michael said to him making any sense, but somehow, he understood exactly what Michael meant. Portals to other worlds. What else could they be?


    Michael parked in the center of a T intersection facing a massive three-story house. For its size, it wasn¡¯t made of any better materials or style than the rest of them. It looked like four or five of the other houses fused together.


    ¡°They¡¯re pulling in,¡± EP said.


    Down the sand-blown street, a large black SUV barreled over trash and kicked up dust like a Humvee in war footage. Michael opened the door and looked back at Gradie.


    ¡°Time to meet the team.¡± He got out and the car rocked. EP followed him and Gradie sat there a moment, pinned to the seat by the thought of meeting new, and in this case probably deadly, people. Reminding himself that this was another universe where his job would be shooting people, he got out and stood next to the car in a pose he hoped conveyed some kind of confidence.


    The SUV stopped smoothly on the dirt and dried sod front lawn, and the driver¡¯s door opened before it stopped rocking. The driver got out, and Gradie¡¯s nervousness gave way to curiosity, and something else.


    She shook the last drops out of a paper coffee cup and dropped it to the ground. A sudden wind sent it skipping across the dirt and pressed her coverall against her body. For a moment, her swelling curves were silhouetted against the black mirror side of the SUV.


    She locked eyes with Gradie as a gentler breeze threw her short, thick, bright red hair into a dance on top of her round head. Her eyes were a blue grey that made him think of bursting rain clouds lit up by the sun. Pale skin, freckles, perfect round face. She was the cutest thing he had seen in a long time.


    She made a face he couldn¡¯t decipher and broke eye contact, saying something muffled by the wind to a man stepping out of the center seat. Beer bottles tumbled out the door and clinked at his feet.


    He was slim built and just over six feet, with a diamond face and aquiline features. His black eyes scanned everything with calm confident indifference. He nodded at whatever the girl had said and gave Gradie a quick nod before looking around at the half-built neighborhood like there could be snipers anywhere, but he wouldn¡¯t be too concerned if he saw any.Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.


    ¡°Morning,¡± Michael called to them. ¡°Luke, I¡¯m gonna need your speech unslurred today.¡±


    Luke looked down at the bottles then back up with a smile.


    ¡°Oh, it¡¯s more of a hair of the dog situation, man.¡± He spoke with a cadence halfway between smooth and slurred, and the words glided out so easily you worried about them dropping out of place on the way.


    Another man came around the passenger side, shaking his head. He was about average height judging from the SUV, but his squat features made him seem much shorter. Predatory brown eyes looked Gradie over then shot off to find some other prey. Cigar smoke flowed off of him and the cherry made a figure eight as he walked, wrestler like, across the dirt.


    ¡°Where¡¯s our two super models?¡± he said.


    ¡°Shut the fuck up,¡± the girl laughed. He smiled without looking at her and drew off the cigar.


    ¡°Celeste is en route,¡± said EP, tapping on her phone.


    ¡°Getting outta bed right¡­ about¡­¡± Luke said, looking at his watch and holding one finger in the air.


    ¡°¡ªand Lindsey is¡ª¡± EP was cut short by the demonic roar of a motorcycle flying into the neighborhood, engine roar funneled by the two stone walls at the entrance.


    ¡°She wearing one of those latex biker suits?¡± Luke asked hopefully. The girl punched him in the kidney, and he buckled and dropped his half lit cigarette.


    ¡°Shit!¡±


    ¡°We¡¯re gonna put you in one of those, you don¡¯t shut up,¡± she said. The cigar smoking man laughed.


    ¡°Gradie,¡± Michael said loudly, pointing. ¡°This is Luke, our lead operator, Philip our weapons and supply specialist, and Sam our driver.¡±


    ¡°Sup.¡± Luke shook his hand while digging the cigarette out of the dirt. Philip¡¯s handshake felt like an attempt to break knuckles, and his eyes searched Gradie¡¯s for something in the half a second they were fixed on him.


    Sam shook his hand plainly and froze. A heartbeat of grey blue stare, flickering like a car fire, then fluttering lips and words that landed before their meaning.


    ¡°You smell like burnt gasoline.¡±


    ¡°Oh yea, I torched my car.¡± His voice came out just louder than the wind.


    ¡°Oh.¡± Or it might have been just an exhale. She put her hands in her pockets and glanced out at the houses behind him.


    ¡°Sam was our newest member until a few hours ago,¡± Michael said.


    ¡°So, what do you do?¡± Her eyes flicked back to him, and he noticed a ring of another color in the center.


    ¡°Uh,¡±


    ¡°That remains to be seen,¡± Michael said. ¡°We¡¯ll have to see what he takes to.¡±


    Philip made a face like he had something to say about that, but a black Hayabusa growled into the driveway before he could.


    She was not wearing a latex suit, but a black leather padded jacket, dark blue jeans, and worn in black boots. The helmet came off and a bun of sandy blonde hair caught the sun, whisps of gold stretching in the wind. Barely-there eyebrows, freckled heart-shaped face, and green eyes glaring like she was already sick of it.


    Hazily, Gradie recognized her. She was the woman he had seen walking across the lot in that other dreamlike world, who had shot the cop inside the gas station. The one he had kissed and taken a beating from. The memories were soft while the woman on the bike was solid and real.


    ¡°That¡¯s a sick bike Lindsey,¡± Sam said. Lindsey smiled, showing a kindness Gradie had trouble matching with the memories of headshots and a warning to Michael; Don¡¯t buy it.


    ¡°I¡¯m gonna get one of those, and yall are gonna half to squeeze into a sidecar,¡± Sam said.


    ¡°You¡¯ll be driving the bus you try that shit,¡± said Philip.


    ¡°Welcome to the team.¡± Lindsey was suddenly in front of Gradie. He shook her hand. If she remembered or cared about their first meeting, he couldn¡¯t tell. He couldn¡¯t tell anything. She had a wall about her as well-built as Lucy¡¯s. She walked to the front of the house and everyone followed.


    ¡°Waiting on princess, yet again,¡± Philip said.


    ¡°She has a name,¡± said Lindsey.


    There was a raspy meow from the bushes and a stocky brown tabby nuzzled its head on Sam¡¯s calf.


    ¡°Aw, Bojo!¡± Sam picked him up like a baby and he purred loudly and rubbed his head on her chin. Gradie wondered about infinite copies of cats, and whether they would remember the other versions of you, but his head had been spun out so much on the ride over that he tried to focus on nearer things, like Lindsey¡¯s ass or the soft sound of EPs voice as she spoke to someone on the phone.


    ¡°Celeste is pulling up.¡±


    ¡°Whatever the fuck that means,¡± Philip said. Lindsey opened the front door without so much as turning the knob and Gradie followed them inside.


    The entryway, with a four screened camera feed on the wall and an assault rifle slung from a hook in the corner, led to a high-ceilinged hallway lined with three closed doors and a stairwell. The gentle cool stillness felt like arriving somewhere long awaited after the dusty windiness outside, and when he stepped into the living area at the end of the hall, the strange feeling of being stuck between things fell away like a fever braking.


    ¡°Home sweet home,¡± Sam sung, dropping Bojo on the middle tier of a massive cat tree that reached from the floor to the second-story loft railing.


    It was like a house thrown together suddenly at the whims of a strange but driven person, without regard to cost or taste.


    The walls were covered in large TVs and shelves, the shelves in books, guns, photos, blueprints or bare carpet coated in cat fur. The furniture was miss-matched and well-worn, topped with blankets, cushions, and pillows. There were high-backed office chairs all around the table between the living room and the kitchen bar. Gradie smelled rich coffee and a distant grill. It was like a home that had been waiting for him all his life.


    Michael moved around in the sunlit kitchen, full of pastel appliances and hanging stainless steel. The espresso machine started up and Sam watched it intently. The rest of the team found seats or poured drinks. Gradie stood around awkwardly for a bit, watching Bojo move from shelf to shelf across the wall, then sat down in one of the chairs at the table.


    ¡°So, what am I going to be doing today?¡± The chair rolled off towards the couch and he had to kick himself back into place.


    ¡°We¡¯re going to give you an introduction to operating in a Hardworld,¡± Michael said. ¡°And get you familiar with concepts you¡¯ll need to understand when you¡¯re on a job.¡±


    ¡°Oh.¡±


    ¡°You disappointed?¡± asked Lindsey, as she sat down at the bar.


    ¡°I thought we were going to do some training or something.¡± Lindsey took a cappuccino from Sam with an opened mouth smile of feigned surprise that Gradie would never have been able to imagine on her. Sam returned it with a wink. Michael yelled over the milk frother.


    ¡°Most training happens in the Otherworld where we can get you used to not failing. I brought you here because until you get into a Hardworld by yourself, we can¡¯t really teach you anything.¡±


    The doorbell rang.


    ¡°It¡¯s open!¡± Sam yelled from the kitchen. The door slammed shut and someone jingled down the hall.


    ¡°Why is it always like a dust storm out there?¡± She blinked dust out her eyes, batting her long lashes and showing off her nails as she pulled on her lower lids. Her black eyes flicked across the room and found Gradie. A catlike smile made him stop breathing. She was a knockout. Her hourglass figure tested the limits of cutoffs and a crop top.


    ¡°Hi, I¡¯m Celeste.¡± He was still sitting so she had to bend over to shake his hand. He got an eyeful.


    ¡°Gradie,¡± was all he got out, as a deep growl.


    ¡°Stand up when a lady enters the room,¡± Philip barked.


    ¡°Shut the fuck up!¡± Celeste laughed. She set her purse on a stool and bounced into the kitchen.


    ¡°Samantha! I need your coffee! The shit they serve out there is inhumane.¡± She hugged Sam from behind, wrapping her arms around her waist and nuzzling the top of her head.


    ¡°Stop,¡± said Sam, smiling shyly and turning red.


    ¡°What do you want, Gradie? Cappuccino, latte?¡± Michael said, tamping espresso.


    ¡°Uh, however.¡± Celeste still hadn¡¯t let go of Sam and was now swaying her in a kind of dance.


    ¡°Sam special then,¡± she said to the top of her head.


    Gradie forced himself to look away from the girls and saw a shotgun leaned against the wall. A nervous pang twisted his stomach. What if he couldn¡¯t do whatever it was they did? What if he wasn¡¯t cut out for it? He reached for the excitement he had felt watching his car burn, but it was like a mindless mania compared to the calm confidence of the team. He searched through his memories of the Otherworld, but got pinned once again by Lucy¡¯s seeking stare.


    Sam saved him from his reflections with a steaming cup of foam. He took a sip and the world dropped away.


    ¡°Holy shit.¡± It was the best coffee any version of him had ever had.


    ¡°She¡¯s a witch.¡± Celeste bounced by with a latte cupped in both hands. She took a sip and winked at Gradie, but he had no idea why.


    ¡°I thought you would be a flat-white kinda guy,¡± Sam said bashfully as she sat down on the couch. A puffed lens of microfoam wobbled over the rim of her cat print mug but never spilled.


    ¡°All right, let¡¯s get started,¡± said Michael.


    Luke, Celeste, and Lindsey sat on a couch to his left. Michael took a seat between EP and Sam on another couch in front of him. Philip stood off in the corner near a slightly open window, blowing cigar smoke through the crack.


    ¡°Welcome to the team Gradie,¡± said Michael.


    ¡°The first thing I want you to do, is to tell me who you are.¡±

 In the Beginning | Chapter 17: Pushing Memory

    Hardworlding 101


    ¡°What do you mean?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°How did you get here today?¡± said Michael. ¡°Walk me back from the phone call. What happened before that?¡±


    ¡°I was at my apartment. I called in to work,¡±


    ¡°What about yesterday?¡±


    Yesterday felt like another world. The entire day seemed like the archetype of thousands before it. He could slide it into place anywhere in the last three years and watch it disappear like a drop of water in a pool. He tried to describe it.


    ¡°I went to work, came home¡ª¡±


    ¡°Did you?¡± Michael said. The team smiled and sighed.


    ¡°No, I guess I didn¡¯t.¡±


    ¡°Why not?¡±


    ¡°Because it wasn¡¯t really me.¡±


    ¡°How do you know?¡±


    ¡°Because I remember my real life.¡± It was hazy, distant, and the distance was terrifying.


    ¡°You remember this one too,¡± Michael said. ¡°That¡¯s why you¡¯re able to tell me what you did yesterday.¡±


    ¡°What is your point?¡±


    ¡°I want you to be honest about what you believe, right now.¡±


    He wanted to say that he believed, in the Otherworld, in that other life. But he didn¡¯t. Once again, his memories were stronger than the dreams.


    ¡°This is all in my head.¡±


    ¡°As if your mind could contain me,¡± said Philip. ¡°Fuck you kid. You¡¯re in my dream.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s normal to doubt, Gradie.¡± Michael raised his voice over Philip¡¯s. ¡°Especially for someone as new as you. But you need to be mindful of where your head is at, or it will run away from you.¡±


    Michael was, once again, a beacon of stability in a swirl of confusion. His voice, though now pinned in place by reality, held the same force it had in the Otherworld, and that familiarity gave Gradie something to hold on to while another him tugged and whispered at the back of his mind.


    ¡°With time, it will become easier,¡± Michael said. ¡°As your Spirit develops, you¡¯ll be able to change things about your self, and the Hardworlds.¡±


    Gradie felt goosebumps rise on his arm. Here we go. This is what he was here for.


    ¡°So, I¡¯ll be able to affect the Hardworlds like the Otherworld?¡± He imagined being able to summon a pistol at will. The idea seemed ridiculous, and died in the unwavering realness of the world around him.


    ¡°No,¡± said Michael. ¡°The Hardworlds operate on the laws of the Real, and pushing outcomes is always exponentially harder than pushing memory.¡±


    Michael had started speaking another language again, and Gradie stared at him.


    ¡°Pushing what?¡±


    ¡°Fresh as a fucking daisy,¡± Luke said. Philip scowled at Gradie like he was getting scammed. Michael looked around, trying to decide something.


    ¡°What¡¯s on Sam¡¯s cup?¡± he said.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°I saw you looking at it earlier. Look again.¡±


    Gradie looked over, deciding not to tell Michael it wasn¡¯t the mug he had been looking at. There was a cat on the mug, surrounded by motifs of yarn, mice, and fish bones.


    ¡°What about it?¡±


    ¡°Was it always like that?¡±


    Gradie saw the cup flash in his mind with a pattern of cats of various colors, then vanish. The cup in her hand became the only one in his memory.


    ¡°No,¡± he said, barely a whisper. Michael smiled and started to talk, but Gradie interrupted.


    ¡°Holy shit. It¡¯s like the Mandala effect.¡±


    ¡°The what?¡± said Lindsey. Gradie turned red and clenched his jaw, but Lindsey¡¯s look demanded an explanation.


    ¡°The Mandala effect. It¡¯s this, like, meme superstition, where the Berenstein bears are called Berenstain now, supposedly because we¡¯re in an alternate universe¡­¡±


    He trailed off in embarrassment. Philip stared at him, opened mouthed. Sam giggled into her coffee. Michael let only a thin smile loose across his face, but Luke had been laughing since Gradie mentioned the bears and hadn¡¯t stopped.Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.


    ¡°Yeah, bro. That¡¯s it. That¡¯s exactly what we do here. Fuck up your childhood books and shit.¡±


    ¡°What did you call it?¡± Lindsey said.


    ¡°The Mandala effect, like a¡ª¡±


    ¡°Mandala effect?¡± She emphasized the second ¡®a¡¯.


    ¡°Yea, like those repeating pattern things, because of the alternate universes.¡±


    ¡°No, it¡¯s the Mandela effect, like Nelson Mandela?¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s the Mandela effect,¡± EP said, like she was telling Gradie what time it was.


    ¡°Am I needed for this deep investigation, or can I¡ª¡± Philip said. Lindsey spoke over him.


    ¡°Nelson Mandela, the South African leader?¡±


    ¡°Yea, I know who that is,¡± Gradie said coolly.


    ¡°Okay, well, the effect is named after him because people thought he died in the nineties. That¡¯s all that is. People misremembering things, but thinking their memories are infallible.¡±


    Gradie laughed.


    ¡°But you literally jump through universes, right?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s not how it works,¡± she snapped.


    ¡°How do you know?¡±


    ¡°Because I¡¯ve been doing this for years, Mr. first day.¡±


    Gradie took another drink.


    ¡°Getting back on subject¡ª¡± Michael said wearily. ¡°How was I able to change the cup?¡±


    ¡°You imagined it differently,¡± Gradie said.


    ¡°No. I remembered it differently.¡±


    Gradie rolled his eyes.


    ¡°So, you imagined that you remembered it differently then.¡±


    ¡°Yeah, get out of that one Michael!¡± Luke laughed.


    ¡°Despite your sarcasm, they are two different things here, Gradie. When I want to change how things are, I rely on memory. When I want to decide how they will be, I rely on visualization.¡±


    ¡°So, you remembered the cup having a different pattern, and your memory was stronger than mine, so it overpowered mine basically, right?¡± Gradie thought of the two figures in Michael¡¯s story, morphing a chair with thought.


    ¡°What do you mean stronger?¡±


    ¡°You believed it more than me.¡± Gradie shifted in his seat. He could tell the answer was lacking and left him open to more finger-wagging philosophy.


    ¡°Not exactly. The truth is, you probably weren¡¯t even thinking about the cup, right?¡±


    Gradie nodded.


    ¡°So, I remembered the cup having the pattern of the one cat and cat accessories¡ª¡± Sam snorted. ¡°¡ªand I did this consistently, meaning I held the memory of that pattern in my mind as if it really was my memory, and the Hardworlds made it so.¡±


    ¡°How?¡±


    ¡°You could say they put us in a universe where everything was the same, except for now the cup had that pattern on it.¡±


    Gradie looked at Lindsey.


    ¡°How is that different from the Mandala effect?¡±


    She leaned her head on her hand and smiled at him.


    ¡°Do you remember the cup being a different pattern?¡± He felt she was drawing him into a trap, but trying to walk out of it would just give her more satisfaction.


    ¡°Yeah.¡±


    ¡°Do you?¡±


    Gradie caught the second yeah in his mouth. Sam jiggled her cup with a smile, and he tried to remember what it had looked like before, but couldn¡¯t imagine it with any other pattern. He made a face that Lindsey caught.


    ¡°You wanna know what pattern it used to have?¡± She was practically laughing at him.


    ¡°Alright.¡±


    ¡°It was different colored cats, no fish bones or anything, just cats.¡±


    Gradie looked back at the cup and tried to remember it with a different pattern, but instead, saw it in Sam¡¯s hand as she walked out of the kitchen five minutes ago, with the same pattern of a cat and cat accessories.


    ¡°What the fuck.¡±


    ¡°You don¡¯t remember,¡± Michael said. ¡°Because your self was always in this Hardworld, and you¡¯re relying on his memories. Memory is malleable here. You have to know how to move it, and how to preserve it, when necessary.¡±


    Gradie hardly heard him and didn¡¯t understand at all. He kept looking at the cup, thinking of a pattern with multiple cats. It came to him, but not as a memory. He saw Sam holding the cup, saw the tabby and grey next to the calico, but it felt like d¨¦j¨¤ vu, like he was remembering a dream. A cold fear slid up his spine and stroked his brain.


    I could dissolve in this place. Even my memories aren¡¯t safe.


    ¡°Don¡¯t try too hard right now, and don¡¯t worry,¡± Michael said. ¡°It¡¯s a skill that will come to you with time as your Spirit grows.¡±


    ¡°My Spirit?¡± He remembered Michael mentioning his Spirit in that other world, but the meaning was hazy.


    ¡°The real you,¡± Michael reminded him. ¡°The you in the Otherworld. It¡¯s your anchor in the Hardworlds. You have to separate your Spirit from the self¡¯s you inhabit to take control of them. It¡¯s your Spirit that will push memory.¡±


    ¡°Which means¡ª¡± Gradie scowled at his coffee and held one finger up, trying to put the pieces together. Michael helped him.


    ¡°When you drop into a Self, his past isn¡¯t set in stone. In the Hardworlds, you¡¯re connected to a near-infinite number of yous. Pushing memory is how you decide which version of yourself you¡¯re in.¡±


    ¡°So, I can change the past?¡±


    ¡°No. You can only push a memory that fits within the causal chain, meaning something that still resulted in the present circumstances.¡±


    ¡°How do I know if it will fit? Doesn¡¯t every small thing change everything, like the butterfly effect?¡±


    Michael took a breath and formed his mouth into the start of a word, but Philip cut him off.


    ¡°Take everything you think you learned about this shit from movies, TV, fucking memes, and get rid of it. That shit will waste our time and get you killed. You know nothing, understand, until you learn it from us.¡± He finished his drink and stepped into the kitchen.


    ¡°The Hardworlds take the path of least resistance,¡± said Michael. ¡°It¡¯s a concept you will hear repeated and see proved many times before you understand it completely. They want to change as little as possible.¡±


    ¡°Want?¡± Gradie said, before he could stop himself.


    ¡°Jesus,¡± Philip said from the fridge.


    ¡°Like water wants to find the lowest point,¡± E.P. said, in a tone that implied Gradie might find that concept difficult to grasp.


    ¡°Oh, right.¡±


    ¡°Pushing memory is arguably the most important aspect of Hardworlding,¡± Michael continued. ¡°Without it, there are no Hardworlders. But pushing memory while in the Hardworlds is difficult even for experienced operators, which is why it mostly happens before you even enter them. Remember in the fragment when I told you to try to remember your real life?¡±


    ¡°Yeah.¡± That hotel room, the hallways, the woman with the neon eyes. Once again, hearing someone talk about his dreams in real life was unsettling.


    ¡°If you can visualize the self you want to drop into, you can control your past. More importantly, you can control your abilities. Hardworlders do it to ensure they drop in with combat training, funds, connections. Anything they need to complete their job.¡±


    Gradie thought about how much of a struggle it had been just to wake up in a Hardworld in the first place. It seemed a monumental task to do so with any kind of control. In fact, everything Michael had said since he sat down seemed like it would never be anything more than theory to him. That fear of not having what it takes slithered up again and laid its dead weight on his tongue. Michael must have sensed it.


    ¡°I¡¯m introducing you to concepts I don¡¯t expect you to completely comprehend right now, but I need you to be aware of them. Eventually, they¡¯ll be second nature.¡±


    Michael¡¯s words did nothing to the fear, now radiating in his skull, that he had fallen into something not meant for him. He went to drink more coffee, but his cup was empty, so he studied the design, blooming purple irises, and tried to commit it to memory.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 18: The Team

    An odd team of assassins, An Unlikely group of friends


    Luke was playing something on one of the TVs with the volume off and the clacking of the joystick got Gradie¡¯s attention. He didn¡¯t remember seeing him turn it on. Luke glanced over at him and winked, then took a helicopter down with an RPG.


    Michael spoke suddenly.


    ¡°Luke, explain to Gradie what you do.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m a shooter baby,¡± he said without looking away from the TV.


    ¡°Fucking A,¡± said Philip.


    ¡°Come on Luke. I don¡¯t want to be here all day,¡± Celeste purred. Luke turned around and smiled dumbly at her while the screen filled up with the red haze of damage.


    ¡°Where you trying to go?¡±


    Celeste looked away coyly. Lindsey leaned in.


    ¡°Luke, let¡¯s get this done. He¡¯s gonna be going on the next job, and I would like¡ª"


    ¡°For real?¡± Luke looked at Gradie then at Michael.


    ¡°He¡¯ll observe with EP on the next job, then he will be attached to the Operations team,¡± said Michael.


    Philip put out his cigar and walked up behind Michael.


    ¡°And what do you think he¡¯s going to be able to do for us after one observation?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m sure you will be able to find something. I¡¯m not telling you to put him on the front lines. Or to go easy on him,¡± Michael said


    ¡°You can carry my back up guns.¡± Luke smiled at Gradie.


    ¡°Am I getting senile, or does this kid have no Hardworlding experience?¡± said Philip.


    ¡°I think he¡¯ll take to the work naturally. If I¡¯m wrong¡ª¡±


    ¡°What makes you think that?¡± Philip snapped.


    Michael shifted in his chair and raised himself up. ¡°Because I found him in a Hardworld.¡±


    Philip and EP exchanged worried looks, and Lindsey froze solid.


    ¡°What? When?¡± said Philip.


    ¡°At the end of our last job,¡± said Lindsey, like a confession.


    ¡°Are you losing it Michael, he¡¯s gotta be¡ª¡±


    ¡°I had him cleared with Lucy.¡±


    ¡°What in the fuck.¡± Philip asked the ceiling for guidance.


    ¡°It¡¯s not unheard of. Some of my previous associates started out in the Hardworlds.¡±


    ¡°Well, then why are we even having fucking training day. Guy¡¯s a savant!¡± Philip dug a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket.


    ¡°You mean his first time in the Otherworld was two days ago?¡± said Celeste.


    ¡°Yes, but¡ª¡± Michael started.


    ¡°And you wanted to come here? To the Hardworlds?¡± Celeste looked at Gradie and for a moment her flirtatious veil dropped. An expression of realization broke on her face.


    ¡°Oh dude, are you trying to wake up?¡±


    ¡°No,¡± Gradie answered uncomfortably. ¡°I just didn¡¯t like that place.¡±


    A smile spread across Philip''s face. Lindsey gave Gradie the same look of suspicion she had given him in the gas station. EP watched him, expressionless. Celeste stared in disbelief.


    ¡°You didn¡¯t like it? Did you talk to anyone? No one gave you any freebies?¡±


    ¡°None of it sounded as good as the Hardworlds,¡± Gradie said. It was true, but the memories of all the offers of unrestrained sex, thrills and violence seemed lightyears away from sitting here talking new age pseudoscience with a bunch of criminals. A part of him wondered if he hadn¡¯t made a huge mistake.


    ¡°Michael¡¯s little video snagged another one,¡± Philip said.


    ¡°He made his choice like the rest of us,¡± Michael said, sounding, Gradie thought, defensive. ¡°He¡¯s free to sample all the disappointment the Otherworld has to offer when he gets back.¡±


    The team exchanged glances.


    ¡°Let¡¯s move on. Luke, explain to Gradie what makes you such a good shooter, please.¡± Luke nodded, sat up in his chair, put his drink down and faced Gradie.


    ¡°All right, so obviously like Mike said, the me¡¯s I drop into got a lot of time on the range, and lots of experience getting shot at and shooting back. But when it comes to combat from the Spirit¡¯s point of view, it¡¯s all about controlling your expectations.¡±


    ¡°Like you believe you¡¯ll get headshots, so you do?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°Yeah, kinda. So when I let off rounds, I visualize them hitting my target, and I focus on immediate results. See the thing is to know your limits. Like if I try to push too far ahead, visualize where all thirty rounds in a mag are gonna go, the worlds gonna throw a curveball at about round five or something and then the rest of the dream doesn¡¯t play out, right?¡±


    ¡°A curveball?¡±


    ¡°Say I got three guys drawing on me. I see myself putting one in the head and two in the chest on each of them, right after another, right? But by the time I get the first guy, the others are gonna split, move outta the way, or towards me, whatever. So, if I visualized them all just standing there and letting me shoot em, the moment they move it throws everything off and I can¡¯t push anymore. You get what I¡¯m saying?¡±


    ¡°You have to visualize something the way it will happen.¡± Gradie said. ¡°The moment reality diverges from your visualization, it loses its power, right?¡±


    ¡°Exactly. Of course, when you¡¯re doing the shit it¡¯s not that simple. It¡¯s hard to keep your spirit up front when people are shooting at you. And you have to visualize with your big self, your Spirit, or it won¡¯t do shit.¡±


    ¡°How can you tell if you¡¯re doing it with your Spirit?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°It¡¯s hard to describe. Like most of this shit, but uh¡ª¡± Luke exhaled at the ceiling. ¡°If it feels like a daydream, like a fantasy, like some shit you would think up while you were bored at work, then that¡¯s probably your self. But with the Spirit, it¡¯s like¡ª¡± He frowned at the coffee table for a moment. ¡°Like remembering, in reverse.¡±


    ¡°What?¡± Sam laughed. Gradie felt a smile growing on his face, until he saw Philip and Lindsey nodding solemnly out of the corner of his eye.


    ¡°That¡¯s a good way to put it,¡± Michael said. Luke shrugged and picked up his controller.


    ¡°Philip, why don¡¯t you go next?¡± said Michael.


    ¡°Alright. Well, I used to be a shooter long time ago, kinda like Luke here, till I graduated to being a Sage.¡±


    ¡°Graduated to a lame,¡± Luke said with a smile.


    ¡°Explain what a Sage is,¡± said Michael, sounding weary.


    ¡°I¡¯m one of those unicorns Michael mentioned that has no problem pushing memory after I drop in. I effect the Hardworlds the way Luke and Lindsey here effect their bullets.¡± He leaned on the back of the couch just behind EP¡¯s head and Lindsey shot a cold look at the side of his face.


    ¡°For example, I can give you the address of an apartment miles from here, and if you went to it and opened the bedroom closet, you would find it full of weapons, cash, etcetera. Or, I could give you the number to a guy I¡¯ve known for years who owes me a favor and can disappear you in hours.¡±


    An image of the Hardworlds was forming in Gradie¡¯s mind, at once terrifying and exciting. He tried to find the holes, prodding it and running it through imagined scenarios.Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    ¡°So, if you imagined there were a bunch of guns, like in the pantry¡ª¡± he pointed towards the kitchen.


    ¡°There are guns in the pantry,¡± E.P. said.


    ¡°Ok then, if you imagined there were guns in a house down the street, then we could¡ª¡±


    ¡°You keep saying that word, ¡®imagine¡¯,¡± Philip cut in. ¡°I don¡¯t imagine shit. I know that the things I need are where I need them to be.¡±


    ¡°Ok, but they weren¡¯t there before.¡±


    ¡°Yes they fucking were.¡±


    Gradie squeezed his empty mug and Philip smiled at his obvious frustration, which made his words come out like insults.


    ¡°Ok, if they were always there, you don¡¯t really do anything then, right?¡±


    Luke laughed into a beer he had seemingly pulled from thin air and Philip smiled like Gradie had tripped on the way to punch him.


    ¡°Exactly. I don¡¯t do shit. None of us do. That¡¯s the thing.¡±


    Lindsey rolled her eyes and Sam stared at Philip like he had told her his pin number in a language she didn¡¯t speak. Luke nodded like he had to agree. It all made Gradie furious. Wasn¡¯t he supposed to be learning something here? What the fuck could that mean?


    ¡°Be careful about thinking of anything we do as changing,¡± said Michael. ¡°From the perspective of the hardworlds, things have always been the way they are. If you think of pushing as changing reality, it makes it nearly impossible.¡±


    Gradie nodded, but his chest clenched. Every time Michael told him something about what they did, it seemed to reinforce his fear that he would never be able to do it.


    Philip had lit his cigarette and stood staring out the back window, so Michael continued.


    ¡°Lindsey, tell Gradie what you do.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m an Operator,¡± she said flatly.


    ¡°Like Luke?¡± asked Gradie.


    ¡°Nah, she rides a bike,¡± Luke said


    Celeste laughed and Gradie watched her jiggle. Lindsey sat still as stone, until Celeste had got a hold of herself.


    ¡°That¡¯s one difference. But I¡¯m a lot more subtle than Luke. More precise you could say.¡±


    ¡°What do you mean subtle?¡±


    ¡°She lets them shoot first,¡± Luke said.


    ¡°You want to tell him what I do or should I?¡± said Lindsey, without facing him.


    ¡°I actually have no idea what you do, so¡­¡± Luke smiled.


    ¡°I have a knack for going unnoticed. Blending in a crowd, or looking like someone who is supposed to be wherever I am.¡±


    ¡°How?¡± asked Gradie.


    ¡°Depends on the situation. Maybe I just happen to look like someone who works there, or maybe I¡¯ve spent a lot of time in the area recently.¡±


    ¡°So, you hang around until they get used to you?¡± Everyone looked at Gradie like he was the dumb kid in class. Lindsey spoke in an overly measured pace.


    ¡°No, not me as in my Spirit. I remember that my self has been walking around that place recently. Understand?¡±


    ¡°Oh, right. So, wait, you can push memory while in a Hardworld too? Like Philip?¡±


    Philip studied Lindsey from the window. She smiled, like she could sense him watching.


    ¡°In a way. Philip isn¡¯t quite as special as he thinks, but I¡¯ll admit my pushing isn¡¯t as far reaching as his. I can only push that my self has been somewhere, and even then, it¡¯s tricky.¡±


    Lindsey leaned back in a motion of finality.


    ¡°And what about when someone does notice you,¡± Michael said, in an odd tone.


    Lindsey froze for a moment, like she had been caught in a lie.


    ¡°I can also tell when I¡¯m being watched.¡±


    ¡°How?¡± Gradie said.


    ¡°Like a sixth sense.¡±


    Gradie turned to Michael.


    ¡°I thought you said the Hardworlds follow the rules of the real world.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯ve never had the feeling someone is watching you?¡± Michael said.


    ¡°Yea, but usually no one¡¯s even there, and¡ª¡±


    ¡°What about cameras?¡± said Philip. ¡°Can you tell if someone¡¯s watching you through a camera?¡±


    ¡°Sometimes,¡± said Lindsey without turning around.


    ¡°Bullshit!¡± roared Philip.


    ¡°How is that not like magic?¡± Gradie asked Michael.


    ¡°If you were to practice avoiding surveillance, you might develop a sixth sense about being watched. It¡¯s possible, but unusual. That¡¯s what we do. We push the limits of what¡¯s possible.¡±


    ¡°If I hide a camera the size of a grain of rice¡ª¡± Philip started.


    Lindsey nudged Celeste.


    ¡°Huh?¡± She looked up from her phone.


    ¡°Your turn babe. Tell the new guy what you do.¡±


    ¡°Oh, ok. Well, I¡¯m what¡¯s called a Charm, or a Siren. A social engineer. I can make people trust me, want me, love me.¡± She smiled and winked at Gradie, and he felt his face get red.


    ¡°Go easy on him,¡± said Lindsey.


    ¡°So, you¡¯re hot?¡± Gradie said, trying to sound calm. Celeste gasped and pressed her pale fingers to her chest with an open-mouthed smile.


    ¡°Gradie! Are you implying I¡¯m just some dumb bimbo? I don¡¯t think Mikey would let me in his cool little clubhouse if that were true.¡±


    Gradie watched her hoping she would move some more. Instead, she got still and spoke to him in a soft tone like she was sharing a secret.


    ¡°You don¡¯t remember me, do you?¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    She leaned forward and pulled her dirty blonde hair back behind her head and smiled, exposing dark roots.


    ¡°Imagine me with a pixie cut, brunette.¡±


    Her eyes and smile found sisters in his memory. He was in the drug store down the street from his house, in the condom aisle. She had walked up to him with a clack of heels, looked him over, then made a thoughtful face, biting her lip.


    ¡°You look like you should be buying those in bulk.¡± She had winked at him and walked off. By the time he had realized what had happened, she was halfway down the aisle. He tried to think of something to say and just got out:


    ¡°Yea.¡± Loudly, voice breaking. She had smiled at him over her shoulder and turned down the center aisle, ass bouncing like a dream. He had stood there for half a minute before following after her.


    At the end of the row, he found only bare linoleum and undisturbed endcaps. He searched the mirror windows along the back wall, angled down at the rows next to him. Nothing.


    He walked through the store like a maze, turning down random aisles and picking up things he didn¡¯t need. Defeated, he checked out, glancing around the whole time, then walked slowly out the door and across the parking lot, darkening under a black shoe-polish sky and glaring post lamps. He had sat in his car for twenty minutes as the dim fading evening tore thin clouds to shreds at the edge of the world, before driving around the lot looking for her, imagining she was in the back seat of some sedan waiting to take him.


    ¡°Oh, I didn¡¯t recognize you,¡± he said. Everyone looked at him like he had grunted, and Lindsey put her face in her hand.


    ¡°Oh, right,¡± he said.


    ¡°Chance encounters. Missed connections type shit. Gets em every time.¡± Celeste shrugged.


    ¡°So, you can push memory in a Hardworld too.¡± Gradie looked at Philip. ¡°So¡ª¡±


    ¡°So we got a lot of unicorns in this group. Michael¡¯s point was that you won¡¯t be pushing memory in a Hardworld any time soon, so just focus on not dropping out, and not wasting our time trying to be smart.¡±


    Michael shot a look at Philip, and he took another drag on his cigarette.


    ¡°Celeste, tell him about how you use dreams in the Hardworlds.¡±


    ¡°Oh, I can go inside them.¡±


    ¡°What, other people¡¯s dreams?¡± said Gradie. That didn¡¯t sound like ¡®pushing the possible¡¯. It sounded completely impossible.


    ¡°Only other Spirits. Dreams here are connected to the Otherworld.¡±


    ¡°Why?¡±


    Celeste opened her mouth then shut it and smiled sheepishly.


    ¡°Got me. I just work here.¡±


    ¡°Remember the pills in the gas station, Gradie?¡± Michael said. ¡°Dreams and other altered states of consciousness allow the Spirit to move between the Otherworld and the Hardworlds.¡±


    ¡°We all use the Dreamworlds when on an OP for communication,¡± said Philip. ¡°Celeste¡¯s specialty is getting in someone¡¯s dreamworld when they don¡¯t invite her in.¡±


    Celeste smiled bowed her head.


    ¡°Communication?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°Good way to talk where you know no one¡¯s listening. Usually.¡± Philip said, adding the last word with a scowl.


    ¡°EP, please explain to Gradie what you do,¡± said Michael. EP pulled her big bright eyes up from her phone and set them on Gradie. He remembered the more vibrant pair under a mask in the Otherworld, and realized he liked these better, dark circles and all.


    ¡°I¡¯m logistics, information, all kinds. I watch and listen, control the comms, supplies,¡± she said, sounding bored. ¡°I drop into a self with a specific set of skills; Networking, hacking, a background or current employment with intelligence agencies.¡±


    ¡®I thought you all dropped into versions of yourself with skills? Do yall ever trade roles?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°No, I have a natural affinity for the skills I use, just as they have theirs,¡± EP said tersely, as if he had offended some religious sentiment.


    ¡°Our selves aren¡¯t that different from us,¡± Michael said. ¡°It¡¯s easier to push a past that you yourself may have taken, but for a few choices. In EP¡¯s case, she has a knack for dropping into a self with a genius for programming, communication, and surveillance.¡±


    EP stiffened, as if the compliment made her uncomfortable. Michaels words had stirred another question in Gradie.


    ¡°So, you could learn anything? Like if I possess a me in the Hardworlds that knows how to speak Russian¡ª¡± he blushed, hoping no one guessed why he had Russians on the mind ¡°¨C then when I go back to the Otherworld¡ª¡±


    ¡°No,¡± said EP and Lindsey at the same time.


    ¡°Think of your Spirit like a program running on different computers,¡± said Michael. ¡°It has access to different files depending on what computer you run it on.¡±


    ¡°Yea, I got that, but, If I speak Russian in a Hardworld, and my Spirit remembers me doing that, then wont I remember the Russian phrases that I spoke?¡±


    ¡°Knowing how to do something and remembering that you did it are two different things,¡± said Michael. ¡°Also, memories are not as solid as you seem to think they are.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°Let¡¯s say you drop into a self with knowledge of how to crack into a certain kind of database. You do that, using the knowledge in your Self, but when you get back to the Otherworld, you¡¯ll only hazily remember what the screen looked like, or maybe a few keystrokes, but you won¡¯t remember most of the commands, the process, because in the Hardworld you were using your brain, your memory, things that your self had done thousands of times, so that you did them almost without thinking. When you try to do those things later, without the self, you only have half memories of doing those things once. That¡¯s why our training for the Hardworlds is more general, strategic.¡±


    ¡°Oh.¡± Gradie said flatly. His own Self¡¯s memories had been laying at the bottom of his mind like debris in a fish tank, and he felt them stir any time he moved the water too much. The conversation with the team felt like a buoy, keeping him afloat in the realm of Otherworlds and Spirits. They all seemed so relaxed, like it was just another day at the house, that he felt like a sick man among the healthy. His self¡¯s memories called him down, and he struggled to ignore them. He hoped the teams calm was because they no longer heard the calling, and not because they had learned to just live with it.


    ¡°Sam, your turn,¡± Said Michael.


    Sam stopped chewing on her finger and sat up.


    ¡°Ok, um, I¡¯m kind of like EP, what Philip calls a bot. I drop into me¡¯s that can do specific tasks. But I prefer the term monkey. Like a skills monkey.¡±


    She snickered into her coffee. Michael sighed.


    ¡°Explain how you¡¯re different from EP,¡± he said.


    ¡°Oh. Well, I don¡¯t do drones and computers and stuff. I¡¯m more like, mechanic, hands on. Lock picking, improvised bombs. Grease monkey repairman type stuff and all. And I drive.¡± She made a steering wheel motion with her hands.


    ¡°She¡¯s like a gofer,¡± said Philip.


    ¡°Gofer these nuts,¡± Sam yelled at him.


    ¡°Sam is the newest member of our team, before you,¡± said Michael. ¡°So once you¡¯re done observing with EP, you¡¯ll be attached to her.¡± Gradie nodded and tried to keep the excitement out of his face.


    ¡°Your turn Mike,¡± said Celeste


    ¡°I¡¯m the boss. My role is whats called Overlord. I watch from afar and direct the overall strategy.¡±


    ¡°So you¡¯re like a supervisor?¡± Gradie asked. He hadn¡¯t meant it to be insulting, but the team broke out in chuckles, and Michael smiled mockingly.


    ¡°I was an operator for a long time before I went independent. Everything you¡¯ll do in this job, I¡¯ve already done.¡±


    Gradie reflexively expected some comment from Philip, but instead saw that every bit of sarcasm had drained from his face. There was something like respect, lined with sadness.


    ¡°Well, now you know everyone, welcome to the team,¡± Luke said. He unpaused the game and got to cover.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 19: Spirit Rising

    I against I


    ¡°We¡¯re far from done,¡± said Michael. ¡°We still need to explain to him what the job entails.


    ¡°Shooting people,¡± said Luke.


    ¡°Not all the time,¡± said Lindsey.


    ¡°Oh yeah, stopping other people from shooting someone.¡±


    ¡°Also not¡ª¡± started Lindsey.


    ¡°If we¡¯re gonna go over all the operations and shit, I wanna get some food,¡± Philip said, walking to the kitchen. Luke paused the game and stretched.


    ¡°Yep. I¡¯m hungry as hell.¡±


    ¡°All right, let''s head out back.¡± Michael stood up and everyone else followed. Some of them mixed cocktails on the counter or grabbed drinks out of the fridge. Philip took out a platter of dry brined steaks and headed out the door behind Michael.


    Gradie walked through the kitchen and the espresso machine caught his eye. It was the same model he had seen floating through the void in what Philip had called ¡°Michael¡¯s little video¡±. It was just as jarring to see it here, smudged in spots and glaring under imperfect lighting, as it had been to see Michael and EP in normal clothes, moving through a real world like solid echoes. Sam interrupted his reverie by stomping out of the pantry with a bag of chips and a can of dip.


    ¡°Coffee bar is closed. The barista is snacking.¡± She nudged past him and out the back door. He followed her in a reflex, watching the sun set strands of her hair to golden fire, but stopped as he passed the dining room.


    There was a long dining table, covered in cases, bags, guns, magazines, scopes, and other things he couldn¡¯t identify. Four gun safes against the far wall hung lazily open, with other boxes and cases stacked alongside. A large scoped rifle that might have been an HK 417 was leaned against the near edge of the table. Its form had the same effect on him as the espresso machine, reminding him of that other world. The sensation of that other existence poured out from somewhere in the back of his mind and sloshed around the sharp reality in front of him; the light and sounds streaming in from out back, the subtle smell of espresso, the hard lines on the rifle¡¯s Picatinny rail.


    ¡°We¡¯ll play with those later, kid. C¡¯mon,¡± Philip yelled from outside.


    Gradie stepped out onto the covered tile porch where most of the team had already found seats among the mismatched outdoor lounge chairs. Philip was at the large chrome gas grill built into the outdoor kitchen, firing it up and arranging the steaks on the counter. There was another grill under a cover, a massive double-doored wood smoker at the end of the counter, and two large coolers and a wok station off to the side.


    The concrete deck of an L-shaped pool surrounded the porch on two sides. Unkempt grass poked and bowed through the slabs at the far edge. The yard had no fence, and the grass sloped down and away into scratchy woodland where bright limestone and the orange clay of a storm ditch peeked through the trees in colors fueled by the high Texas sun. Far beyond the dusty grey-green haze, blue faces of the downtown skyline shimmered over sand-colored highways. A plane drew a soft white line across the sky, where silver and slate-colored clouds stood waiting, ready to do anything.


    ¡°Nice view, huh?¡± said Michael. Gradie nodded and leaned on one of the support pillars.


    Looking out at the skyline, he felt the world shift. It was like the sensation of coming into the neighborhood, but hopeful and energized with a forward momentum, like driving to a friend¡¯s house for the weekend. An excitement for something yet unknown.


    His giddiness must have shown on his face. Lindsey smiled at him slyly.


    ¡°Feels good, right? The pull?¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s that?¡±


    ¡°An illusion,¡± said Phillip. Lindsey ignored him.


    ¡°It¡¯s the feeling of excitement, possibility. The mind¡¯s reaction to existing in a place that will listen to it. It¡¯s a kind of euphoria unique to the Hardworlds. It''s why a lot of us keep coming back, despite the dangers.¡±


    ¡°Some of us actually enjoy the dangers,¡± said Philip as he dropped a steak on the grill.


    ¡°Speaking of danger,¡± said Michael. ¡°We need to go over what the job is like.¡±


    ¡°Fun as fuck,¡± said Luke, laid back in a long cushioned lounger facing the pool. He held his glass up to the sky and watched sunlight flare off the facets of the carved diamond-shaped piece of ice and the amber whiskey that rolled around it.


    ¡°Not all the time,¡± said EP, sitting cross-legged on a reclining lounger. ¡°It¡¯s a lot of waiting.¡± She flicked her thumb across her phone and a drone whizzed by somewhere above the awning.


    ¡°Do you know why we go into the Hardworlds, usually?¡± Michael asked.


    ¡°To catch Demons,¡± Gradie said, and instantly regretted it. Whoever didn¡¯t laugh looked offended or embarrassed to be next to such unbridled stupidity.


    ¡°Not for a minute, kid,¡± said Philip. We wouldn¡¯t be having a fucking cookout if those bastards were still moving around.¡±


    ¡°We catch fugitives,¡± said Michael. ¡°Who flee into the Hardworlds. Or we defend them from people trying to catch them, depending on the client.¡±


    ¡°So, you help criminals sometimes?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°It ain¡¯t like the Real,¡± Philip said, ¡°Where everyone¡¯s generally on one side of the law or the other. There is no law in the Otherworld, just payment. And public opinion, so to speak.¡±


    ¡°We don¡¯t defend the same kind of criminals that we hunt,¡± said Michael. ¡°When we¡¯re hired to drop someone out, the client gives us a reason, and we check it with our sources. None of that process concerns you, but just know we have agencies that let us know what kind of people we¡¯re after.¡±The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    ¡°So, how does killing someone do anything?¡± said Gradie. ¡°Can¡¯t they just go into another Hardworld? Like one where they didn¡¯t die?¡± He tried to get a handle on the model of the Hardworlds forming in his head.


    ¡°Remember when I said that altered states of consciousness let your spirit travel? Well, when you die, you drop directly into the Otherworld.¡±


    Gradie leaned back and tried to put it all together. Sam set some rocks glasses filled with ice down on the small round side table next to him, along with a bottle of Jameson.


    ¡°Here¡¯s a welcome to the team drink, buddy,¡± she said. Gradie felt his cheeks warm.


    ¡°I want him to remember this, Sam,¡± said Michael.


    ¡°Drink slowly.¡± She poured the drink and left the bottle on the side table, then sat down with her glass and started making ¡®tch¡¯ sounds until Bojo came out through a flap in the back door.


    Gradie took a drink and rolled his understanding of the job around in his head.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you just take them out when they¡¯re dreaming then?¡± he asked. ¡°Didn¡¯t Celeste say she could do that?¡±


    ¡°She can go into their dreams, yes,¡± Michael said. ¡°But the dreamworlds are very secure, like the Otherworld. If we try to fight them there, they can just push us out, or if we do catch them, wake themselves up. And not all of us have the ability to get inside dreamworlds unbeckoned.¡±


    Gradie rolled his ice around while he thought about that, and eventually decided to just ignore it.


    ¡°So, when we kill them, they go to the Otherworld, right? What¡¯s to stop them from going right back in?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s when they get captured.¡±


    ¡°How?¡±


    ¡°Not your job! Let¡¯s move on!¡± yelled Philip, as the sizzling sound got louder and moved through variations of rhythm.


    ¡°He¡¯s right,¡± Michael said. ¡°We have enough to cover without going over things you won¡¯t be involved in. Anyway, the vast majority of our jobs are going to fall into two categories: Dropping someone out, or keeping someone from dropping out. So¡ª¡±


    ¡°What other kind of jobs are there?¡± asked Gradie.


    ¡°Fuck me,¡± said Philip.


    ¡°He¡¯s curious, unlike you, Mr. Boring,¡± said Sam. Gradie looked at her, but she never made eye contact, just kept staring out at the horizon like something was calling to her in the haze.


    ¡°Well,¡± Michael said. ¡°Some people hire Hardworlders to change a world to their specifications.¡±


    ¡°Like make them a millionaire?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°Exactly. Or change world politics, or¡ª¡±


    ¡°A bunch of boring douchebag shit!¡± Philip said. Luke laughed.


    ¡°Yeah, shits lame. Hiring astral warriors to alter reality just so some dude you don¡¯t know can get elected.¡±


    ¡°They might want to live in a better world. Did you think of that?¡± said Lindsey, flicking ash past her foot before bringing the cigarette back up to her lips. Luke smiled at her.


    ¡°How many guys like me and Philip you think it would take to bring about world peace?¡±


    Lindsey leaned her head back and blew a perfect smoke ring into the air. Philip shut the grill and came over with a drink in hand and a cigar already lit.


    ¡°There are also retrievals,¡± Michael continued. ¡°It is possible to take objects¡ª¡±


    ¡°Where''re the steaks?!¡± Luke yelled.


    ¡°They gotta rest,¡± said Philip.


    ¡°Fuck that. Shits a myth!¡±


    ¡°Get it yourself then!¡±


    Luke stayed where he was and finished off the cigar. Gradie was staring over at the counter where the steaks were resting, Michaels words rolling off his hunger-emboldened buzz, when his phone went off. The drink almost slipped out of his hand.


    ¡°Shit.¡± He sat up and banged his glass down on the table, then dug around in his pocket.


    ¡°It¡¯s your baby mama,¡± Luke said, waving his hand like a jedi mind trick.


    It was his sister. Her name floated off the screen and stirred up a flurry of memories that pushed the electric feeling of everything else out beyond his reach.


    ¡°Shit.¡±


    ¡°Answer it,¡± said Michael.


    Gradie tapped the screen without breathing.


    ¡°Hello?¡±


    ¡°Gradie! Oh my god, what the fuck is going on! The cops just called saying they found your car on fire. Where are you?¡±


    Gradie scanned the faces around him, looking for answers to his sister''s questions. Who were these people? He tried to connect his memories to the events of the day, but they missed each other and bounced around in his head. The world spun. Michael, whoever he was, stood up and watched Gradie like he was ready to pounce. The rest of the people set their drinks down, or stood up, or moved out of the way. Suddenly, Gradie remembered them.


    They were drug addicts, deviants, and the clinically deluded. Victims of a collapsed mental health system that had never made the jump from the asylums to whatever should have followed, but instead had slipped down into greasy darkness, taking millions of people with it. Somehow, they had sold him a story designed to drag him into their own delusions. When did he meet them? The question brought out half-remembered hallucinations of floating things and an endless void, then something else. A party at a house clogged with the plastic, paper, and cotton refuse of a life lived at the edge of poverty and beyond the realm of hope. He had leaned against a smoke yellowed wall, over a mound of tied up Wal Mart bags holding bursting bundles of socks, shirts, toys, and scraps of nothing, talking to a girl as the broken world writhed around him, looking for a smile to tell him it would all be worth it in a matter of minutes.


    They had been there, smiling at him, preaching at him, drawing him into their story with an unnatural command of the storm churning around them. That spiraling, sucking whirlpool, like murky day-old dishwater swirling downward after a clog freshly obliterated by a disposal. A ¡®party¡¯. The groaning terminus of broken lives. A sinking spinning thing, taking them all somewhere fast, that only they knew how to ride.


    Now here he was, throwing his life away for the delusions of the mentally ill.


    ¡°Gradie?¡± his sister¡¯s voice crackled through the air. He stepped back and Michael put a hand up. Philip waved with a smile.


    ¡°Bye-bye, kid.¡±


    ¡°Shut up,¡± Lindsey snapped.


    ¡°He¡¯s outta here,¡± said Philip.


    Gradie took another step back. He had to do something, or these people would bury him out in the woodland. Probably cut him up in the bathtub. Like they had done with whoever was living or squatting here before them.


    He looked down at his phone, and froze. A memory floated up through the panic, of another phone call hours ago, and watching his car burn to ash and sludge. A voice screamed, but another whispered.


    Hardworlder.


    He threw the phone at the pool and it skipped once before dropping below the glittery surface, becoming a warped parallelogram-shaped shadow sliding towards the bottom.


    He collapsed into the chair and looked back at the team. Everyone but Michael looked confused.


    ¡°Good job Gradie. You just avoided dropping out.¡±


    ¡°I thought y¡¯all were meth heads I met at a party.¡±


    ¡°Oh yeah, that was a good one,¡± said Philip with a smile.


    ¡°You remember it?¡± Gradie asked, spilling his drink.


    ¡°Yeah, now that you pushed it.¡±


    ¡°Wait, I pushed memory?¡±


    ¡°Your self did,¡± Michael corrected. ¡°Your mind will try and reconcile your memories with your past, if you let it. It rationalized our conversation as drug-induced ravings. Sometimes it''s acting, or role-playing. Remember, the self wants to stay in the Hardworld, and to dissolve the spirit into itself.¡±


    Gradie had thought of his selfs as mannequins or costumes he slipped into. Michael speaking about them as if they were alive sent a chill crawling up his neck.


    ¡°Normally, on a job, the rest of the team will have already pushed enough memory that it will be impossible for your selfs to have ever met, to avoid being tracked. But this time I wanted to leave you out in the tide. See how you did.¡± Michael¡¯s smile was the best congratulations Gradie had ever gotten.


    ¡°How did you get out of it?¡± EP asked.


    ¡°Uh, I just remembered how it felt before. How certain I was it was real, I guess.¡± Gradie flushed and reached for the bottle.


    ¡°Good job bud.¡± Luke patted him on the back and headed towards the outdoor kitchen.


    ¡°Where¡¯s the greenery, Philip?¡± said Sam as she walked up to the counter.


    ¡°There¡¯s mint in the fridge if you want a mojito or something.¡±


    ¡°With the steaks, idiot! It¡¯s your turn! You have to make sides too!¡±


    ¡°There¡¯s potato salad right there!¡±


    ¡°Oh my God!¡± She slid open the back door.


    ¡°What, are you worried about your health?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s for my soul, Philip!¡± She yelled from the kitchen.


    Gradie sliced into his perfectly medium-rare steak and looked back out at the flashing skyscrapers on the horizon, weaker forms of the crystal towers and suspended water pillars floating above another world. He watched himself gun down targets in a thousand different lives while another voice, rambling about family and jail time, died in the background. He took a bite of the steak, and his Spirit savored the flavor.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 20: Anamnesis

    Does the soul remember what the mind has forgotten?


    Gradie had a smear of steak sauce and a few leaves of Sam¡¯s salad left on his plate. He reached down for his phone to check the time, and remembered it was at the bottom of the pool. So, he set his plate down on the deck under his chair and poured another drink. As he sat back to watch the sunlight die in the mid-afternoon distance, something hit him in the chest.


    ¡°Here, kid,¡± said Philip. Gradie looked down at what had landed on his lap. It was a wrapped cigar with a red label that said ¡®Cuesta-Ray¡¯ and ¡®Centro Fino¡¯.


    ¡°Try that with the Jameson.¡±


    ¡°Oh god, Philip. Don¡¯t get him started on that shit,¡± said Celeste.


    ¡°We¡¯re gonna be hunting targets in a cloud of smoke,¡± said Luke.


    ¡°That''ll work to our advantage, cause they won''t be able to get a bead on us,¡± said Philip. Luke laughed and tried to blow a smoke ring, but only managed an oddly shaped cloud.


    ¡°How the fuck do you do that, Lindsey?¡±


    ¡°Like this.¡± Lindsey was sitting at the edge of the pool with the water up to her knees. She leaned her head back and blew a ring that caught the dappled sunlight. Luke swore and blew another blob of smoke.


    ¡°I need a lighter,¡± said Gradie. Everyone looked at him. Michael''s eyes flashed.


    ¡°Are you sure you don¡¯t have one?¡±


    ¡°Oh. Right.¡± Gradie reached into his pocket, and found nothing.


    ¡°Shit,¡± he whispered.


    ¡°Damn. I really thought he was gonna do it,¡± said Luke.


    ¡°In the Hardworlds, you have your self¡¯s memory to contend with,¡± said Michael. ¡°Even if you don¡¯t remember if you had a lighter in your pocket, he does.¡±


    ¡°So how do I change anything then?¡±


    ¡°Overpower him.¡±


    Philip tossed over a torch lighter and then a cutter. Gradie cut the end off of the cigar, tossed the cutter back, then rolled the end of the cigar over the flame.


    ¡°You have to start small,¡± said Michael. ¡°Slowly build up your belief in the malleability of this place.¡±


    Gradie blew on the cigar and watched the cherry blaze to life, then took a draw. Philip was right. It went well with the whiskey.


    ¡°Start with this,¡± Michael took a coin out of his pocket.


    ¡°Aw shit. Memories,¡± Luke said.


    ¡°For you maybe. It wasn¡¯t a fucking coin my first time around,¡± said Philip. Even through the whiskey haze, Gradie could hear the acid in the words.


    ¡°Not mine either.¡± Michael smiled. ¡°But, we have a better understanding of best practices now, so¡ª.¡± He flipped the coin at Gradie. It struck the armrest, bounced once, then landed perfectly flat on top of it, with barely a quarter of an inch to spare on either side.


    ¡°Heads,¡± said Michael, without looking. It was. Gradie glared at it and drank some more whiskey, had more of the cigar, then went back to the whiskey.


    ¡°What am I supposed to do with it?¡± He asked, when those hadn¡¯t dampened his irritation.


    ¡°Make it land on tails,¡± said Michael.


    ¡°Ok,¡±


    ¡°Three times in a row.¡±


    ¡°All right.¡± He sat up, took the coin in his hand, and looked it over.


    ¡°Does being drunk help with this stuff?¡±


    ¡°No,¡± said Philip and Michael at the same time.


    Gradie got the coin over his thumb and forefinger. He imagined it landing on the ground and coming up tails, then flicked his thumb.


    It sailed through the sky and clattered down on the tile. He sat up until he could see it.


    Heads.


    Luke made a ¡®waw-waw¡¯ sound.


    ¡°I still can¡¯t do it,¡± said Sam from somewhere behind Gradie.


    ¡°You¡¯re not supposed to tell him that!¡± Philip Laughed.


    ¡°Why not?! I still do my job!¡± Sam yelled.


    ¡°I never saw the point of it,¡± EP said.


    ¡°The point,¡± Michael said, wearily. ¡°Is to remind you that the Hardworlds are responsive. It¡¯s a simple trick you can do at almost any time to prove this isn¡¯t the Real.¡±


    ¡°Oh yeah, but I know I¡¯m not this cool in the Real,¡± Sam said, dead serious.


    ¡°What was your plan, Gradie?¡± Michael asked.


    ¡°I imagined it landing tails.¡± He knew instantly the words would come back to bite him.


    ¡°Remember, don¡¯t think of it as cause and effect,¡± Michael said. ¡°You don¡¯t imagine something happening to make it happen. You have to exist in a reality where it will happen. It has to be a state of mind, not just a thought.¡±


    ¡°Alright.¡± Somehow, that made a kind of sense to him, but it didn¡¯t make it feel any less impossible.


    ¡°Try it again.¡± Michael tossed him the quarter.Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    ¡°Gimme a sec.¡±


    He blew cigar smoke at the coin and searched for that elusive feeling that anything was possible, that he had stumbled onto the kind of molten reality he had been waiting for all his life. He remembered the voice that had whispered Hardworlder as he held the phone in his hand. How confident it had been in a world beyond this one, and his place in it.


    He thought about flying in the Allworld, EPs legs in her black tights, neon eyes and floating doors, riding down the highway with the smoke from his burning life fading in the mirror, and the fact that he was sitting here, in an alternate universe, with a bunch of ¡®astral warriors¡¯.


    He remembered how sure he had been that he was going to be good at this. How despite the moments of overwhelming confusion and fear, everything Michael had explained to him felt right. How it had all found a place in his mind like he wasn¡¯t learning, but remembering. Anamnesis, it was called, some part of him knew. Was that part of him the self, or the Spirit?


    ¡°You¡¯re overthinking it,¡± said Michael. His voice echoed in another world.


    Gradie rolled the coin in his hand, and thought about it landing on heads, shattering his belief in his own Spirit, and throwing him back down to this dull plane of reality, forever.


    But Michael was right. It didn¡¯t matter how the coin landed. He would never go back, never again be satisfied with the self, now that the Spirit had risen.


    ¡°I give up.¡±


    Philip laughed and someone mumbled something.


    ¡°Gradie,¡± Michael began.


    ¡°Fuck you,¡± Gradie kicked his feet up on the table and felt something roll out of his back pocket. Michael got out half a syllable before being interrupted by the sound of change hitting the concrete. Gradie didn¡¯t look at it, but he couldn¡¯t keep the smile off his face. Somehow, he knew.


    ¡°O.K. That¡¯s pretty good,¡± said Philip. Gradie heard EP shift in her seat to look, then scoff.


    ¡°So fucking dramatic.¡±


    ¡°Oh come on!¡± Sam yelled.


    Michael walked over and Gradie finally allowed himself to look down. Three quarters. All tails.


    ¡°Good Job,¡± Michael said dryly. ¡°Normally, you would be asked to have it land on tails another three times, but I think you made your point. Just remember, the coin test is the first one we give because all in all, the Hardworlds don¡¯t give a fuck what side a coin lands on.¡±


    ¡°So, you¡¯re saying it¡¯s no big deal?¡± Gradie snapped, then glanced at EP. She bit back a smile as Michael sighed.


    ¡°It¡¯s important. First steps always are. Without them¡ª¡±


    ¡°Then what¡ª¡± Gradie was getting sick of Michael¡¯s air that what he and the rest of them did was something Gradie would have to crawl through glass to achieve. Hadn''t he found him a fucking day ago? Philip cut him off.


    ¡°He¡¯s saying don¡¯t get a big head just cause you pushed some coin flips, and go out on a job and try to dodge bullets.¡±


    ¡°More or less.¡± Michael smiled.


    Gradie finished the whiskey and watched the cigar¡¯s cherry glow orange in the sudden shade of a passing cloud. Despite Philip, the smile was still stuck to his face. A Hardworlder. A master of realities. Downtown¡¯s sprawl caught his eye, and he daydreamed of car chases and gunfights, repelling down skyscrapers, dinner at a high-dollar steak house and paying the check with stolen crisp hundreds¡­


    ¡°Wait. Were the quarters in your pocket the whole time?¡± Sam said, frowning.


    Gradie¡¯s answer died as his mouth opened.


    ¡°Uh, I actually don¡¯t remember.¡±


    Philip bent over in laughter.


    ¡°But do you remember pushing that¡ª Shut up Philip!¡± She threw an ice cube at Philip¡¯s head, but he just kept laughing.


    ¡°I got change at a gas station near work yesterday that only took cash,¡± Gradie said, working through it out loud.


    ¡°Jesus Christ,¡± Lindsey said, smiling into her drink.


    ¡°You know what I mean! My self!¡±


    ¡°But do you remember if you really did that, or did you push¡ª¡± Sam said.


    ¡°He won¡¯t be able to tell you!¡± Philip said, recovering somewhat. ¡°If he did push it, his self won¡¯t know, and his Spirit¡¯s too weak to tell the difference.¡±


    ¡°One of those paradoxes I¡¯ve heard tell of,¡± Luke said with a smile.


    Gradie tried to remember if he had realized the quarters were there, or just decided that they were, and got tripped up in his whiskey haze. Michael stood up with a defeated look.


    ¡°That¡¯s about enough for today. But one last thing.¡± He took a piece of paper out of his jacket.


    ¡°When you speak to or about another member of the team in the Otherworld, unless you¡¯re in the office or somewhere we¡¯ve told you is secure, you need to call us by our codenames. Here.¡±


    The paper had a list of seven initials with dashes and code names after.


    M ¨C Halberd


    P ¨C Outlaw eleven


    Lu ¨C Mr. MOA


    Li ¨C Nomad Nine


    C ¨C Bluebonnet


    S ¨C Monkey too


    ¡°Memorize them, with your spirit. I¡¯ll quiz you on them back in the Otherworld. And come up with your own. Something short. Word and a number is an old standby.¡± Michael walked around to the counter and opened the mini-fridge.


    ¡°What about EP?¡± Gradie said


    ¡°EP is my code name,¡± she said, like it should be obvious.


    ¡°Then what¡¯s your real name?¡±


    ¡°You don¡¯t need to know.¡±


    ¡°Then why¡ª¡±


    ¡°I need to know your real names to find you when we drop in. You don¡¯t need to know mine.¡±


    ¡°What if we drop into different names?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s impossible, unfortunately,¡± said Lindsey. ¡°Names and Faces.¡± She said the second phrase like it was a common expression.


    ¡°I¡¯m gonna head back.¡± Celeste took a bottle of pills out of her purse.


    ¡°Y¡¯all have fun. Welcome to the team, Gradie.¡± She tussled his hair as she strutted by.


    ¡°Make sure you take enough!¡± Philip yelled. She just waved.


    ¡°You need to drop that shit, Philip,¡± said Lindsey. She tossed her ice in the pool and stood up.


    ¡°Then you handle it If she wakes up.¡±


    ¡°You didn¡¯t have to handle it last time, you could have¡ª¡±


    ¡°What happens if she wakes up? Will she remember, like¡ª¡± Gradie trailed off and made a vague motion with one hand, drawing shapes of smoke in the air.


    ¡°No,¡± said Philip. ¡°Her self¡¯ll freak the fuck out. Not know how she got there.¡±


    ¡°Just as our Spirit won¡¯t retain the skills or knowledge from our selves when we return to the Otherworld,¡± said Michael ¡°Our selves won''t remember our Spirit when we leave.¡±


    ¡°So wait,¡± said Gradie. ¡°When I leave, this me will just be at some strange house, called out of work, cops looking for him, and he won''t know why?¡±


    ¡°No phone too,¡± said Luke.


    ¡°Won¡¯t he remember what I did?¡±


    ¡°Maybe,¡± said Philip. ¡°He might remember it all and wonder what came over him, or just have blacked out, or rationalize it some other way. There¡¯s no normal reaction to this shit.¡±


    ¡°Jesus,¡± said Gradie. When the thought of all that stilled in his head, another question came to him.


    ¡°What about if I die, like on the job? Then what, he¡¯s just dead?¡±


    The wind ruffled the leaves and Celeste¡¯s car beeped as she unlocked it on the other side of the house. Ice clinked in a glass and someone flicked a lighter. Only Michael, at last, dared to break the silence.


    ¡°You have to accept that your selves may die. How you make peace with that is up to you. Some say that the self without the spirit is just a shadow anyway,¡±


    ¡°Or that infinity minus one is still infinity, so it doesn¡¯t matter how many yous die, there''s still too many,¡± said Philip.


    ¡°Maybe the Hardworlds don¡¯t even exist unless we¡¯re in them,¡± said Lindsey.


    Gradie felt a tension in their words, even through the whiskey haze, that told him this was not the first time they¡¯d had this debate.


    ¡°Brain hurty,¡± said Sam, rubbing her temples. Luke choked on his drink and Philip cackled like a maniac. Gradie thought of his doppelganger waking up miles from anything, with no phone and a hangover, and an arrest warrant for arson. He let his arm hang down and the glass clink on the deck. Now fairly drunk, his mind wandered back to the Otherworld. Somehow, the freckly face of the gas station girl came to him.


    ¡°Hey, when we first met, I was already in a Hardworld, right? How does that work?¡±


    Even in his drunken state, he noticed a few of the team members cast uneasy glances at each other.


    ¡°Most people slip into the Otherworld the first time,¡± Michael said from the counter. ¡°You just happened to slip into a Hardworld instead.¡±


    ¡°So¡ª¡± Gradie started, but Philip interrupted.


    ¡°You asking if you¡¯re some Hardworlder savant because you followed Michael back to the Otherworld like a dog?¡±


    ¡°Yeah.¡± Gradie smiled at him. The whiskey was really getting to work now.


    ¡°Guess we¡¯ll find out when you get shot at,¡± Philip said.


    Bugs and birds made a clamor in the quiet. Gradie traced the lines on the leaves and dared his mind to prove he was dreaming.


    ¡°Now what?¡± he said to no one.


    ¡°Now we get shitty and fuck around till tomorrow,¡± said Luke. ¡°Wanna try and shoot EP¡¯s drone?¡±


    ¡°What are we betting this time?¡± EP said.


    ¡°How about¡­¡±


    ¡°No live rounds!¡± Lindsey reminded him.


    ¡°Does a .22 count?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know. Would you let me shoot you with one?¡±


    Luke smiled at Gradie.


    ¡°I¡¯ll get the paintball gun.¡±

 In the Beginning | Chapter 21: Journey of Souls

    I think love might be a river


    Gradie looked up and saw the sky above the clubhouse dripping with stars. Night had come out of nowhere sometime during the hazy peak of his drunkenness. He wasn¡¯t sure when he¡¯d passed out, but he knew lucidly that he was no longer awake.


    ¡°C¡¯mon kid. Time to go back,¡± Philip said.


    Gradie looked over and saw them all standing there. They were not of this earth.


    Their faces were lit by a hidden light, like an old silent film, and they floated like gravity had taken a nap. Philip had on a black metallic overcoat over a dull silver jumpsuit. Lindsey looked like an elven ranger, all wool and leather. The pinstripes on Luke¡¯s three-piece suit panned and jittered like TV static. EP wore a short tunic with black lace and silver accents, pulled tight with a chainmail belt. Sam was dressed as a sci-fi fighter pilot. Black vinyl jump suit and mirror visored helmet. Gradie looked down at himself.


    Old t-shirt and sweats.


    ¡°Shit, let me change.¡±


    ¡°What for?¡± said EP. She walked to the edge of the pool and a strange shimmering light rolled across it. When he was able to tear his eyes away from her, he looked down at his clothes and willed them to change.


    The cloth rippled and dissolved, giving way to a black silk outfit complete with boots and gloves. He stood up and walked toward the pool. Philip shook his head at him.


    ¡°Too dark. Rookie mistake. I can barely see you. Girls in the Allclub will ignore you even more than usual.¡±


    Gradie looked at his clothes again, dark as a starless night sky, and got an idea. He reached out to the impossibly bright and colorful stars and smeared some onto his hand. He ran his hand through his hair, dabbed some of the glittery brilliance on his coat buttons and shirt, then clapped his hands together and let the rest fall to the ground.


    ¡°Better?¡± he said. Philip rolled his eyes.


    ¡°We¡¯re not really going clubbing. There¡¯s work at the office.¡±


    Gradie¡¯s stomach rolled, until the sparkling door-covered office Michael had taken him to replaced the other one, with quality reports and staff meetings, in his memory.


    ¡°Do you remember the hallways after the gas station, Gradie?¡± said Michael. Gradie hadn¡¯t even noticed him. He looked like he had stepped out of a space opera. Polished black armor plates over grey cloth, and a dark blue cloak draped across his shoulders.


    ¡°Yeah,¡± Gradie said. ¡°The ones that looked like a big hotel.¡±


    ¡°That was my own personal exit route, you could say. The Hardworlds and the Otherworld have their own kind of gravity, and the Spirit needs help reaching escape velocity. The hallways act as a mental buffer, allowing you to conceptualize leaving the Hardworlds.¡±


    There was a loud splash and Gradie turned in time to see the top of Philip¡¯s Head disappearing beneath the prismatic shimmering surface of the pool. Sam cannonballed right behind him.


    ¡°Wait, I need one of you to guide him out,¡± Michael said.Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.


    No one volunteered. Gradie felt like a little brother tagging along.


    ¡°I¡¯ll do it,¡± EP said without looking at him.


    ¡°Good. Meet me at the Office.¡± Michael and the others jumped into the pool until it was just the two of them standing at the edge of the glowing water. The way the colors moved reminded Gradie of what he saw after pushing on his eyelids with the palm of his hand; formless and ethereal, but able to become identifiable shapes if he focused on one spot long enough.


    EP grabbed his hand.


    ¡°Ready?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. What do I need to do?¡±


    ¡°Just hold on and don¡¯t fight it.¡±


    ¡°Alright.¡± Gradie let the smile slip into his voice and EP sighed.


    ¡°Three, two, one.¡±


    She pulled him by the hand and they stepped off the edge. The glowing surface rose up to meet them, and for a moment was the world, then shined above him in the light of an orange sun. The water was warm, like a tropical ocean (so he imagined, having never been in one) and a strong current pushed them along. EP let go of his hand and shot up past him towards the surface, where a slab of shadow moved across the light. He got the briefest glimpse of her legs shining under her billowing skirt before she disappeared above the water.


    He kicked after her and popped up in the middle of a wide river rushing under an orange sky, streaked by threads of pink and purple neon clouds. Dense jungle foliage draped over the far banks, and EP kneeled in a dark wooden canoe.


    ¡°Get on.¡±


    He struggled to pull himself up as the water moved him sideways. EP watched him with sapphire eyes, and he remembered this was the Otherworld. He pulled himself up and onto the boat in a gentle floating arc.


    ¡°Look behind you.¡± He did, and saw the river stretching back for half a mile before snaking behind the trees. He tried to see whatever it was he was supposed to be looking at, but there was only jungle, river, and sky.


    ¡°What is it?¡±


    ¡°Nothing. You just need to show your mind that you¡¯re actually somewhere else.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°You have to put mental distance between yourself and where we were before, so your Spirit can break free of the Dreamworlds and get to the Otherworld.¡±


    ¡°Is that what I did with the hallways?¡±


    ¡°Yes, but that was Michael¡¯s Dreamworld. I prefer a river. The momentum helps with the transition.¡±


    Gradie watched the jungle fly by and let his hand down into the foaming refracted starfield below the boat. While the hallways had felt like Michael, a convoluted landscape with a childlike mischievous energy, this world was EP all the way through. A focused river of violent white water, snaking around where it had to and rushing straight where it could. Dark unknowableness pressing in at the edges, protecting it. The current, an unstated desire propelling it along. The orange sunlit air, a warmth just out of reach. It felt like loneliness.


    EP¡¯s frown and tone reminded him he had been staring.


    ¡°See that waterfall ahead of us?¡±


    About a quarter-mile downstream, the land dropped away and gave a heart-quickening view of the horizon.


    ¡°Yeah.¡±


    ¡°Falling also helps with the journey. We¡¯ll drop through the mist and come out over the office.¡± She held out her hand without looking at him, and he took it. It was cool and soft, glowing like moonlight against his suntanned hand.


    A wind came and blew her long, white-blonde hair straight back, exposing the gentle profile of her face and the soft skin of her neck and chest. She frowned at him, and he realized he had summoned the wind with a thought.


    ¡°Here it comes!¡± He braced himself for a jump and looked ahead at the waterfall, still twenty yards away.


    ¡°If you say so,¡± EP said. The boat rocketed forward like a bass boat and skipped across the water.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Gradie fell back in the hull. EP kept hold of his hand, and looked down with a smug smile as he rolled to his feet. It was too much for him.


    She was standing on the boat like a surfer, her curves silhouetted by the golden sunset. Wind whipped her orange-tinted blonde hair into a frenzy around her catlike smirking face. Her soft little hand held his with impossible strength. Overcome by the electric sensation squeezing his chest, he smiled at her and saw hers falter.


    As the boat sailed out into the air, he pulled her by the hand and caught her in his arms. Gravity returned with a vengeance, and they dropped down towards the white mist headfirst. He held her just for a moment, as the cold water spraying them violently, accentuating the warmth of their bodies, before letting her push him away.


    Her eyes flashed a warning as she disappeared in the mist. He rolled over and over in the endless glowing grey and lost all sense of direction. Suddenly, the sensation of falling left him, and he was floating in a familiar black void.


    The glowing crescent of the Allworld slid into view, but EP was nowhere to be seen.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 22: Masquerade

    A face to meet the faces that you meet


    In EP¡¯s absence, Gradie noticed a change in himself. That other Gradie, who¡¯s life was now melted to the parking lot of a half-empty mall in some millionth alternate Texas, fell away from him. Like waking up from a dream. The fragments of that life, the other office, that other apartment, dissolved into something less than memory. Like a daydream or half-remembered imagined scenario. Stale thoughts that crumpled and flaked to pieces in the rushing wind of experience that was the Otherworld.


    Would all his selfs fade like this? How did anyone ever bring back memories from the Hardworlds if they disappeared this easily? He thought back to the meeting at the clubhouse, and found the conversation unexpectedly clear. Each word was preserved, and the whole day, from getting in Michael''s Jag to the drunken nap near the pool, stuck in his mind while the other memories faded. Why?


    Disappointedly, he found himself missing them, their confidence and ease. Less than a minute back in the Otherworld, and he was already floundering in confusion.


    But, as the memory of EP¡¯s touch and glare and echoes of her voice rose again in his mind, the one remembering them asserted himself. The spirit was here, now without a self to shade him.


    All right then. Let¡¯s get to work, Hardworlder.


    He scanned the glittering surface of the Allworld and his mind got lost in the chaos. How was he supposed to find the office?


    ¡°You want some help?¡± a voice said in his ear. He looked around, but saw nothing but empty void.


    ¡°Down here.¡±


    There was a flash on the surface of the planet, a small blinking light.


    ¡°See it?¡±


    ¡°Yeah.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s the office. See you soon. Oh, and wear a mask.¡± He felt the presence leave his head, and a terrifying thought occurred to him. Could anyone speak right into his mind whenever they wanted? How did anyone ever get any privacy in this place? Another question for Michael, unfortunately.


    He rolled forward until the humming orb of the Allworld vibrated in his face and took off towards the blinking light. The Allcity rose up and slowly revealed its texture, like a reverse optical illusion unfooling his mind. Things jumped out at him as his sensation-smacked brain fit them into rough categories. Crafts. Hotel/condos. Shopfronts. Giant self-contained spiritual playgrounds. Restaurants?


    This time, his flight was controlled, and he batted away the thinking speaking adverts with ease. As he swooped by a mirror-faced tower, he saw himself briefly. A black blur just like all the others. A risen spirit. A freed soul. He laughed into the rushing nonair and flew faster than sound towards the blinking light.Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.


    It was intoxicating, watching all the strangeness that had nearly driven him insane just a few days ago fly by like a mirage. Like any good drug, he quickly wanted more, and racked his brain for ways to go faster. He guessed that his speed was limited only by his imagination. His perception. If he went higher, farther away from the surreal cityscape that betrayed his speed, it might be easier to visualize increasing it.


    He took off at an upward angle. In a moment, the sky had gone black and he was rushing off towards a distant curve of darkness. A few seconds later, the light on the surface flashed again, hundreds of miles closer.


    ¡°Don¡¯t forget to make a mask.¡± The voice returned, then snapped off.


    He stopped dead still. The voice had been such a shock in the first place that he had forgotten about the mask. But what was the point? He had already been to the office and hadn¡¯t worn one then. Must be another test.


    All right. Whatever it takes.


    EP¡¯s mask, a masquerade in pearls and black diamonds, came to mind, but he knew nothing like that would suit him. Holding his hand in the air, palm up, he visualized a hockey mask.


    Slowly, and only after he had cleared all non-hockey mask thoughts from his mind, it faded into existence.


    Jesus Christ! It had taken more effort than he had expected, and he realized the only thing he had ever made in this world was the gun on the rooftop, which had come so easily, and instantly. Why?


    Looking at the mask, he knew it wasn¡¯t right. Didn¡¯t match how he felt about this new him. Too 90¡¯s bank heist, maybe. It was wrong in a way that was difficult to express, in the same way it had been difficult to create. He let it fall to the chaos below. Watching it disappear, he felt a sudden sense of awe.


    ¡°Everything you see around you was made by someone willing it into existence.¡±


    Michael¡¯s voice rang around him, as if the memory had returned to life.


    Someone made all of this, focusing their quasar-like minds on acts of pure creation, not of simple common things, but impossible objects and never imagined worlds.


    All he could manage was that mask, and it had taken so much effort he now regretted letting it go. What was wrong with it? What did he want to look like anyway?


    A glass fractal tower, like a skyscraper ripped off the ground and twisted, passed by in orbit, and he caught sight of his reflection. Black clothes still glittering with starlight collected from a Texas sky that existed only in dreams. An idea crawled out of the memory. He reached up to the blue sky, closed his fist around a cloud, and grabbed nothing.


    The Otherworld must be more solid than the Dreamworlds.


    His realization gave him another idea. He flew over to the mirrored tower and ran his hand across its surface. His fingers glided over the glass, slick as ice.


    Come on. I¡¯m not destroying you. I just need a little bit.


    The tower or his mind yielded, and he peeled off a rough plane of mirror crystal. He floated it in the air over his hands and began to shape it.


    It only took a few moments. When he was done, the mask was transparent from the inside but mirrored on the outside, a trick that had taken less effort than he had expected. Working with ready materials must be easier than creating from nothing.


    The glass was faceted and slightly tinted in a dark sky blue. He put it on his face and it wrapped itself around the back of his head. His vision was unchanged, and he reached up to make sure it was still there, then examined it in the reflective glass it had spawned from.


    The effect was jolting. For a moment, he looked headless.


    ¡°Did you get lost?¡± the voice said without even a hint of mockery.


    ¡°Sorry. On my way,¡± he said out loud.


    ¡°You don¡¯t have to speak, sweetie. You can just think.¡±


    A chill rolled over him.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, I can¡¯t hear all your thoughts. Just focus on my voice when you think them.¡± The presence left his head again, and he was as confused as ever. Down on the surface,the light blinked impatiently. He took one last look at himself, now just as bizarre as the world around him, and took off toward the light.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 23: Speaking

    She talks to angels?


    Gradie dropped through a swarm of crafts and spirits and glided over the shuffling skyline towards a waterfall and rainbow draped tower, like a ribbon of mirror glass coated in soap-bubble iridescence, where the blinking light flashed one last time.


    As he approached the side of the tower, he threw his arms and feet out and skidded on the air, knowing no other way to slow himself down. The iridescent force field expanded and enveloped him and the glass slid apart. He dropped onto the balcony and walked inside, still unable to fight the native gravity of the office.


    Most of the team were already lounging on the ring of seats or at the bar, but Michael stood near the front with a woman Gradie didn¡¯t recognize.


    ¡°Welcome Gradie,¡± he said. ¡°How was your trip?¡±


    Despite the gentle golden light of the room, Michael looked like he was standing in a dark alley with only the radiant glow of streetlight bouncing off concrete to keep him from being lost in darkness. His mention of the trip reminded Gradie of EP flying through the air, wind billowing her skirt, and he was glad the mask kept his smile a secret.


    ¡°It was good. How do I learn to make the journey by myself?¡±


    ¡°With practice, like all things. This is Klara, our speaker. I believe you¡¯ve met¡±


    She was blonde and slightly tanned, with angled features just on the edge of youth. Her aqua blue wrap dress shimmered with water-reflected light. Gradie was about to tell Michael that they had never met, when she spoke.


    ¡°Welcome to the team, Gradie.¡± It was the voice that had guided him to the light. She smiled and shook his hand.


    ¡°Thanks.¡±


    Michael put his first two fingers together and a small silver orb appeared on them.


    ¡°Here. Put it in your head.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s a communicator. It will let you talk on our network.¡±


    Gradie took the small orb. It felt like he imagined a bead of liquid mercury might feel.


    ¡°You said put it in my head?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s the best place to put it. Your mind naturally doesn¡¯t have awareness of your brain. If you were to put it in your ear, your mind might decide that you can feel it, that its uncomfortable, or that it only affects one ear. This way, you can keep it without any issues.¡±


    Gradie nodded more to let Michael know to stop talking than to indicate any understanding. He pressed the orb to his forehead and imagined it slipping through into his brain, and it did. There was a brief sensation of cold metal, then nothing.


    ¡°EP. Say something on the network, please,¡± Michael said.


    ¡°Hi.¡± Her voice came through like she was right beside him, though not in any definite location, and her tone was completely without emotion. Like she was activating a voice responsive appliance.


    ¡°Can you hear her?¡± Michael asked. Gradie had been standing like a statue, lost in thoughts of dripping waterfalls.


    ¡°Yeah.¡±


    ¡°To speak on the network, you have to imagine the communicator activating,¡± Michael continued. ¡°Whatever mental imagery you want to use is up to you. Give it a try.¡±


    Gradie looked off into a corner of the room and imagined the strange bead of liquid metal somewhere in his head molding into the shape of a small bowl.


    ¡°Hi.¡± He thought, and imagined the silver bowl vibrating from his voice.This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.


    ¡°Got it,¡± EP said.


    Gradie pictured the bowl forming back into an orb, and then closed a box around it for good measure. Thoughts felt more liquid here, and ever since Klara had spoken to him, the fear of his inner voice leaking out into the world had nagged at him. He was thinking about what divided an inner image, like the communicator bead locked in a box in his mind, from the physical thought-things in the rest of the Otherworld, when a door opened in the wall.


    ¡°All right, what do we got?¡± Philip walked in with a drink in one hand, an espresso sized steaming something that smelled of chocolate and cardamom, and a cigar in the other. Sam came in behind him, puffing on a hookah hose that disappeared into her pocket. When she exhaled, neon bubbles flooded out of her lips and popped in the air with a scent like peach rings.


    ¡°Where is Luke?¡± Michael asked.


    ¡°He had to make a deposit, or a down payment or something,¡± said Philip. ¡°Guy owes interest on his interest.¡±


    Luke!¡± Michael''s voice was in Gradie¡¯s head this time, loud and stern. He wondered if he could tweak the box to mute the communicator completely.


    ¡°Yea, boss, sorry. On my way.¡± Luke¡¯s voice had more distance to it. A haze that Gradie instantly matched with his personality.


    Gradie found a seat next to the bar and watched Sam puff on the hookah. Lindsey was off in the corner smoking a pipe like Aragorn, and she and Sam traded for a bit and whispered to each other about the flavors. Celeste sat nearby on a cushion of cloud, her dress like liquid mother of pearl molded to her body, leaning in to take the pipe from Sam. Philip must have noticed him staring, despite the mask.


    ¡°You can take that off in here.¡± He pointed his glowing cigar at Gradie¡¯s face and he got a whiff of tobacco and allspice.


    ¡°Oh yeah.¡± He took it off with his hands and Philip shook his head.


    ¡°No, I mean like get rid of it. Watch.¡± Philip swiped his hand over his face and a mask, like a blued steel hockey mask with rivets and deep gouges, appeared over his face. He swiped his hand again and it disappeared.


    ¡°Where does it go?¡± Gradie asked. Philip looked to Michael for help.


    ¡°We all have personal items we can summon at will,¡± Michael said. ¡°It helps to imagine a vault somewhere that no one else can get to. Or if that¡¯s too much, just imagine it disappearing into your pocket.¡±


    Gradie looked at the mask and remembered how hard it had been to try and disappear the gun. Michael guessed where his mind was.


    ¡°Don¡¯t destroy it, just put it away.¡±


    Gradie nodded, then after some thought, crumpled the mask in his hands like it was made of aluminum foil. When he took his hands apart, it was gone.


    ¡°That¡¯s one way to do it,¡± Philip said. Gradie summoned it again, this time it unfurled like a sheet of foil from an infinitely small point in space, then snapped back into shape. He looked it over to see, or to prove to himself, that it had survived the process unchanged, then crumpled it back into whatever phantom zone he had got it out of.


    ¡°Celeste keeps hers in her cleavage,¡± Sam said. Klara raised her eyebrows and Philip smirked into his cigar.


    ¡°Ok,¡± Lindsey said smiling, trying to hand the hookah back.


    ¡°Really. She puts everything in there. One time we were on Sugarsands and she¡ª¡±


    A door opened and Luke walked in. His mask, a smiling mardi gras in green and purple, dissolved off his face in a cloud of smoke.


    ¡°Sorry boss. This guy¡ª¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t let it happen again. Let¡¯s get started.¡±


    Michael motioned to the windows and they disappeared behind falling darkness. Gradie¡¯s chest fluttered as he dropped in the dark, and he understood instantly that they all had moved a great distance.


    His shoes struck a marble smooth floor with a sound that echoed and mixed with the others. Celeste¡¯s heels, Sam¡¯s sci-fi flats, Luke¡¯s metal-capped cowboy boots. EP floated down from somewhere, soundlessly. They were now eight glowing figures standing with him on a circular wafer of mirrored marble, floating in a darkness that gained an immense depth as stars flickered to life all around.


    A ninth figure walked out of the black.


    ¡°Yall ready to make me some money?¡± Again, her voice clashed with her visage. Liquid nebula skater dress and skin like molded moonlight, and of course those same neon eyes.


    A few of the team nodded or mumbled in agreement, Sam said ¡°sure¡± in a drawn-out pained tone. Gradie just stood there.


    ¡°God damn Michael,¡± Lucy said. ¡°You gotta work on that esprit de corps.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m ready to make you some cash, Lucy goosey!¡± Luke yelled.


    ¡°That¡¯s the spirit, but do not fucking call me that!¡± she yelled, unable to keep from smiling. Most of the team returned her smile and traded polite greetings. Philip even made a joke Gradie couldn¡¯t hear that flared Lucy¡¯s smile into a grin he would have never expected. EP even gave her a full on hug.


    It was like he had stepped into a house he didn¡¯t belong in. The worst part was when she smiled at him, almost feebly, as if she knew he had been terrified of her. Instead of smiling back, he looked away, and instantly regretted it. Obviously, she had just been doing her job, and now that he was on the team, there was no need to rip into his buried memories or accuse him of not knowing what he was getting into. When he looked back at her, half a second later, she was carrying on with the team as if nothing had happened.


    Klara spoke through the laughter.


    ¡°Let me introduce you to the man of the hour.¡± She flicked a light out of her hand and it exploded in the center of the floor. A window, like a hole in space itself, opened on a man sitting in a lounge seat talking to a girl. He wore the military uniform of a nation that never existed and sipped lava out of a black marble goblet. He locked eyes with Gradie and the vision froze. Gradie knew it was a memory of someone who had seen the man in the Otherworld.


    ¡°His name is Paul.¡±

 In the Beginning | Chapter 24: His Name is Paul

    Have you ever felt someone watching you in your dreams?


    The client gave us little to work with, but I was able to get a lock a few days ago. Here''s what I¡¯ve scraped so far.¡±


    In the window-portal, Paul walked down an aisle between rows of cubicles, looking for someone. Suddenly, he knew the person he was looking for was in the back office, and Gradie knew it too, like they were having the same dream. The vision took over his senses. The team faded into the background, and their words broke apart before he heard them. There was only Paul, walking across that nightmare office, trying to get to the people who had got him caught up in this shit in the first place.


    Before Paul got to the door, the vision changed. He was dancing in a club, high on ketamine, grinding on some faceless woman. Another shift, and he was driving to work, very late, sun blazing at the top of the sky. His car lost its grip on the road and flew up into the air, like some mad god had entered a cheat code.


    ¡°Got his city,¡± Lucy said. The vision froze, freeing Gradie from his trance. He caught enough of Lucy¡¯s tone to read something in it, like an old bitterness, that gave the city a bad name.


    The window-portal vanished and a floating 3D map rotated in its place. Subtle beams of light shot from the surface to the faces of the team members, and they began moving their hands in quick motions.


    Gradie tried a touchscreen zoom-in pinch in front of his face and the map shrunk to a single street in the center. It was so detailed, he would have thought it was a live camera feed if not for the complete absence of people.


    ¡°That¡¯s half the hassle right there,¡± Philip said. No dropping in and dealing with fucking airports.¡±


    ¡°Can you get his POE from what we have?¡± Michael swiped his hands rapidly and searched whatever he was seeing for a sign.


    ¡°No,¡± Lucy said. ¡°He never actually makes the trip. Gonna have to get it from the inside.¡±


    Michael nodded. ¡°Ok, I¡¯ll put together the assignments once we locate him.¡±


    ¡°One last thing.¡± Klara banished the map with a flick of her wrist and brought up something else. It took a moment for Gradie to register what he was seeing.


    A door. Plain wood laminate, simple knob. Could be in any office, back closet, or apartment in the country.


    ¡°I¡¯m almost certain he¡¯s got a Doormaker.¡±


    ¡°This from his dreams?¡± Michael sounded disappointed.


    ¡°Yes. Repeated, unprompted, promising escape and truth.¡±


    ¡°If the defense has a door, they¡¯re probably one of the bigger corps,¡± said Lindsey. ¡°Most Doormakers are on contract nowadays.¡±


    ¡°Well, at least we know where he¡¯s headed if he gets spooked,¡± said Philip.


    ¡°Whats a door? Does it let him come back to the Otherworld?¡± Gradie asked.


    The team looked at him like they had forgotten he was there. Klara smiled softly.


    ¡°No. A door allows travel from one Hardworld to another. It¡¯s a hack, you could say, invented by a very crafty Hardworlder long before your time.¡±


    ¡°So, we would have to follow him through, or¡ª¡±


    ¡°No, it only works for him. It only really exists in his mind.¡±


    ¡°Cant you just find him again. With his dreams?¡±


    ¡°Good question, but it¡¯s not that easy. The secondary Hardworld will have a pull that¡¯s much stronger than the first, as a result of the priming that makes him drawn to it in the first place. He won''t stray outside of it even into the Dreamworlds. It would be a lot harder for me to scrape anything from there, so please,¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t let him get to it. I got you, Ma¡¯am.¡± Luke nodded like it was a challenge.


    ¡°If it''s so hard to get to, why not just put him in that second world to begin with?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°Because no one wants to stay dropped into a Hardworld forever,¡± Philip said. ¡°Whoever is guarding him presumably would like to be able to bring him back to the Other once the heat dies down.¡±


    ¡°Does the heat ever die down?¡±


    Philip smiled. ¡°Not usually.¡±


    ¡°So, is he up?¡± Lindsey asked.Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    ¡°My guess would be no,¡± said Klara. ¡°but I cant say for sure.¡±


    ¡°Do we have no intel on who¡¯s running the defense at least?¡±


    Klara answered her, but Gradie¡¯s mind pulled on him in a way that was becoming familiar. Time slowed, Klara¡¯s voice stretched into white noise, and¡ª


    He got up late. Snoozed the alarm three times. No coffee. Walked into the office completely uncaffinated, miserable. Thursday. Missfire of the week, sputtering day. LCD screens that burned the eyes, devouring vision over decades. Pinching headset. Stale air and voices but no speaking. Outside, sunlight stretched its legs in a full dance, pale morning to bright blue noon, a brief exhale, then back down to rumbling evening orange, shadows slipping from its grasp and hiding in the corners, between the keys, down the hall. The drive home, smell of office clinging to him, dying on the way. Through the door into that other titled existence. Hours evaporate, sliced seconds of distraction and a scrambling search for purpose, now that the mold and vice were gone. The bed, resisted, until ¡°might as well¡±. Dark sleepless tossing, too late for any hope of a full eight hours, besides calling in on a Wednesday. Unthinkable. At last, two am¡ª


    ¡°No idea,¡± Klara said. Her voice snapped out of the fog, an echo becoming present sensation. The two parts of his memory fused just as before, the Otherworld rolling over the Real, the memory of his waking life subdued beneath it, complete but totally apart. Before he knew it, he wasn¡¯t even thinking about it. Left with only a sensation like being well-rested, but from a different kind of weariness.


    ¡°But we can assume it¡¯s a serious outfit if they have a Doormaker,¡± Lindsey said. It was only a question on the edges.


    ¡°Not necessarily,¡± Klara said.


    ¡°I¡¯m sure they¡¯ll introduce themselves eventually.¡± Philip flicked his small espresso cup out into the black. Lindsey twisted towards him.


    ¡°Be good to have an idea before that, don¡¯t you think? Maybe prevent a repeat of¡ª¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m sorry Lindsey. I wish I had more for you.¡± Klara said.


    Lindsey¡¯s face froze in embarrassment. ¡°No, that¡¯s fine, Thank you Klara.¡±


    ¡°Any other concerns? We need to drop in ASAP.¡± Michael¡¯s voice boomed in the darkness.


    ¡°Let¡¯s do it.¡± Luke smiled with more enthusiasm than Gradie had thought him capable of. The rest of the team nodded and the map collapsed into a small light and flew off into the sky, becoming just another star in the night.


    Suddenly, Gradie recognized the starfield. The same constellations had orbited above Lucy¡¯s home. The memory of her digging through his mind still disturbed him, and he struggled to meet her eyes as she called to him.


    ¡°Gradie,¡± She flicked something across the room and he caught it, then almost let it go. It was dripping wet. A small matte-blue crystal. The rest of the team took theirs with the same air they might accept a handgun.


    ¡°What¡ª¡±


    Lucy got ahead of him. ¡°Memory crystal. Has all the info we have on his hardworld. It¡¯ll help you drop in.¡±


    Luke held the crystal up to his face and it blinked with a dappled light, like a projector lens seen from an angle. He flickered and dimmed for a moment, like a hologram, then the light stopped and he put it in his pocket, now again a solid form.


    Sam studied hers like a puzzle, the light flickering in random rhythms. Gradie looked down at his, still dripping a tingling blue liquid, like Listerine with an electric charge, down his hand.


    ¡°Why is it wet?¡±


    ¡°They¡¯re dissolving,¡± Lucy said. ¡°In an hour they¡¯ll be gone. It''s to keep the intel secure.¡±


    Gradie nodded, again avoiding those eyes by staring at the dripping crystal. He tried to guess how to use it. Sam held hers like a game boy, and Luke had looked through his like a rifle scope, but no two team members used it the same way. Lindsey pressed hers to her forehead and her eyes flashed, Celeste popped hers in her mouth and rolled it around like a hard candy while looking thoughtfully at the sky, and Philip hadn¡¯t even touched his beyond slipping it in his pocket.


    Gradie guessed it was one of those things where only the intent matters, like so much in this place. He squeezed one half of the crystal with his fingertips and the facets on the other half opened and fanned out, exposing a blazing dot of sunbright light inside the hollow interior. He pointed it at his face and the light blinded him to everything else.


    A gentle whine like a jet engine grew in his ears, then the noise of traffic and muffled stereos. He was floating above a packed highway, cars creeping by below him, brakes squeaking at the stop-and-go pace. Dark clouds swarmed in towards the orange evening on the horizon, preparing for rain.


    ¡°It defaults to a projection of last night¡¯s weather,¡± Lucy said, her voice breaking the vision from a fully immersive experience into something between a video and a daydream. The dark astrolarium returned in his peripherals.


    ¡°But you can roll it back to the day before if you need to.¡± She was standing very close to Gradie, watching him, like she might watch someone she was instructing take shots on a range. He scanned the projection of the city to distract himself, zooming in on a coffee shop he¡¯d gone to last weekend. What were the chances the target was also in the metroplex? The clubhouse wasn¡¯t even twenty miles away.


    ¡°Essentially, I¡¯ve distilled all the real memories from his dreams and arranged them into a projection fragment,¡± she continued. ¡°You need to focus on dropping into a self in the Hardworld with those features so you can link up with the team.¡±


    ¡°Can¡¯t I just call Michael? That¡¯s what I did last time.¡±


    Michael stepped into his peripheral vision, the sliver of black and stars framing the window to the concrete world. Gradie let the crystal¡¯s vision fade away and Michael stood there glowing in the dark.


    ¡°That time we were dropping into your Hardworld. This time you need to enter the one the target is in, which may have been changed by the defense in ways to make merging more difficult.¡±


    ¡°What does that mean?¡± Gradie felt that fear of failure creep into his mind, coloring his words with anger. Here he was moments from ¡°dropping in¡±, and he still had only the flimsiest grasp of what the hell he was even doing.


    ¡°The Hardworlds want to accommodate your mind,¡± Michael said. ¡°They will default to putting you in your own Hardworld when you drop in. You need to force them to put you into the target¡¯s world.¡±


    ¡°What if I cant?¡±


    ¡°Then I¡¯ll come find you,¡± Klara said softly. ¡°But don¡¯t worry. This is mainly a precaution. Your Spirit should gravitate to the right world when you focus on the projection we¡¯ve given you. The mind fears the unknown, and will naturally run from it towards something familiar.¡±


    ¡°Half this shit works best when you don¡¯t think too hard, bro,¡± Luke said over his shoulder. ¡°See ya in there.¡± With a wave, he stepped through a door that disappeared with a slam behind him. All around Graide, the rest of the team made similar exits, and he felt a sinking fear that they were going somewhere he would be unable to follow.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 25: The Office Job

    And how should I begin?


    ¡°Good luck Gradie.¡± Klara glided away towards a doorframe covered with a sheer curtain that glowed and pulsed like a rave, where Celeste stood waiting.


    ¡°They¡¯re going Dreamwalking?¡± EP said. Gradie hadn¡¯t even seen her move out of the dark.


    ¡°Yes. Celeste will pass the intel to you in the chat,¡± Michael said.


    ¡°Dreamwalking?¡± Gradie asked, desperate to talk about something other than his own impending failure.


    ¡°Remember a few hours ago, at the clubhouse, when Celeste told you she can go into a Spirits Dreamworld uninvited?¡± EP said dryly. Had it only been that long? It felt like ages.


    ¡°She can also enter a dreamworld straight from the Otherworld,¡± said Michael.


    ¡°Can¡¯t everyone do that?¡±


    ¡°No. It¡¯s actually an unusual ability.¡±


    ¡°Why? Wouldn¡¯t that be easier than just waking up in a Hardworld?¡± Gradie thought of the hallways from the gas station. Why hadn¡¯t he thought to get into a Hardworld by doing the same thing, only backwards?


    ¡°No. The dreamworlds are connected to the self, and are thus closer to the Hardworlds than they are to the Otherworld. Getting to them from here is impossible for most, as the Otherworld pulls on the spirit the same way the Hardworlds pull on the self. Which reminds me, this time, I want you to try and prime a self to drop into.¡±


    ¡°Prime what?¡±


    ¡°Rather than just jumping into the Hardworlds, try and have a clear idea of the self you¡¯re waking up into; His job, hobbies, where he lives. You want to make sure he¡¯s armed, and that his life fits in with the target¡¯s Hardworld. It¡¯s better to keep it more of a vague¡ª¡±


    Gradie had lost focus partway through. EP was bouncing towards a doorway, her black lace skirt floating up, stopping just short of exposing anything above mid-thigh. A shame.


    An unexpectedly banal sound interrupted Michael and broke through the hazy air of the astralarium; A metal door opening on an echoing empty space. Philip finished swinging it open and stood in the plane of grimy fluorescent light that reached out from its frame.


    He was back in his normal Hardworld clothes, this time a Burberry trench over his Adidas track suit, and looked, with the door stood open beside him, like he had taken a break in a dark dreamworld and was now returning to work via a maintenance entrance in a shopping mall or some kind of storage facility.


    ¡°See ya in there.¡± He smiled at Gradie, like he doubted he would, and went through the door. It slammed shut behind him and vanished.


    ¡°One last thing, before you hop in,¡± Michael said. ¡°You¡¯re our newest operative, and though you shouldn¡¯t be getting into any exchanges on this job, you need to know our rules of operations. First, never call any team members their real name. EP will give you code names when you contact her, which is the first thing you¡¯ll do.¡±


    ¡°How will I¡ª¡±


    ¡°Just wait. Second, you will, under no circumstances, purposefully or accidentally, harm anyone other than our target and his defenders during the operation. Any collateral damage is unacceptable. Is that clear?¡±


    Gradie hadn¡¯t even considered that as a possibility. All his imagined scenarios of hunting their targets had involved him landing a flurry of shots center of mass on a surprised man (who now looked like Paul) and the rest of the team being overcome with awe at his ability. At that point, EP, Sam, Celeste, or all three, would throw themselves at him. He hadn¡¯t gotten the hang of imagining Lindsey as the swooning admirer yet, but¡ª


    ¡°Is that clear?¡± Michael said.


    ¡°Oh, yeah. Why would I kill anyone else?¡±


    ¡°Haste, or just apathy. Most Hardworlders don¡¯t even consider the people inside real.¡±


    Gradie¡¯s mind went to work on that. Did he believe they were real? The world of the burning car and the clubhouse, the girl in the gas station. Reflexively, yes. Yes he did. The thought of gun-toting astral assassins rampaging through those worlds with no regard for any life sickened him, and a dark fear at the thought of the gas station girl gunned down by forces she could never understand woke a raw hatred in him. It must have shown on his face.


    ¡°It¡¯s half the reason I came back,¡± Michael said. it sounded like a confession, and he scrambled over it before Gradie could ask what the other half was.


    ¡°Third, death is better than capture, if it comes to that. The spirit is bound to flesh in a Hardworld, and many of our opponents will have no problem exploiting that, which brings me to my final point.¡±


    He took a breath and spoke in a softer tone.


    ¡°Lucy surely warned you, and by now you¡¯ve seen how dangerous the pull of a Hardworld can be, but I¡¯m going to give you one last chance. There is every possibility of you experiencing unbelievable pain in our job. It won''t harm the Spirit, any more than torture in a dream would hurt you after you¡¯ve woken up, but in the moment, the pain is very real. Are you sure you want to do this?¡±This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    ¡°Yes.¡± Gradie thought about taking his time, pretending to be conflicted, giving the impression that he was pondering what Michael was saying, but he couldn¡¯t even wait to do that. Despite the real blood-chilling fear Michael¡¯s words stirred in him, it didn¡¯t matter. This was his purpose. Somehow, the last few days, especially the slips into his ¡°real life¡± and the Otherworld''s ability to smooth over it, had removed any doubt that had remained after Michael¡¯s story.


    This was what he had been waiting for all his life.


    ¡°All right. Then it''s time to drop in,¡± Michael said. ¡°In the crystal, you¡¯ll find a file on contacting EP. Just pull up the projection and take out your phone. You¡¯ll find a message from EP with a URL and a password. When you wake up, post on the website to let us know you''re in, then EP will get you set up. She should have already found your self and pushed something mailed to you. Get to her asap and she¡¯ll either have you observe the job from her HQ or provide you with a feed, depending on how this plays out. Any questions?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. Is everything going to be in DFW?¡± He almost hadn''t asked, but the question felt like the last nagging bit of an old argument. Michael surprised him by laughing.


    ¡°I was wondering if you¡¯d noticed that. No, but a lot of our jobs might be. It¡¯s not as odd as it may seem at first. When I found you in the Hardworld, you were near your home in the Real. The clubhouse is in the area because it¡¯s a part of the world I have a lot of experience with, which is also why we¡¯ve taken a lot of jobs there, and also why I ran into you. A lot of Hardworlders take work based on geography. Knowing about the reality of where you operate lets you spot changes more easily, among other things.¡±


    ¡°But you didn¡¯t know where the target was until Lucy found his city.¡± Gradie had a sinking feeling that he was desperate to be rid of.


    ¡°No, but it''s possible the client knew and had their own reasons for withholding that info. They often don¡¯t disclose anything they don¡¯t think we need to know, or in this case intel they expect us to find out on our own. A lot of our work involves an uneasy cooperation.¡±


    Michael''s confidence was once again contagious, and Gradie was left feeling that the entire situation wasn''t a hallucination, but a strange result of forces and processes beyond his understanding.


    ¡°Anyway, if you find it hard to drop in from Lucy¡¯s domain, just summon a door to the void. Even those with minimal experience here can do that. Then just drop in like we¡¯ve told you.¡±


    Another door opened next to Michael, this time the back entrance to a chain motel. Inside, a carpeted hallway stretched under yellowed lights.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t I just go with you?¡± Gradie vaguely remembered Michael explaining how fragments were used to drop into Hardworlds, and the idea of just walking through a hallway felt a lot better than trying to wake himself up into one.


    ¡°Because I want you to be able to do this on your own, the right way. You¡¯ll learn to use fragments eventually, but right now just do it the way you know, like we said¡ª¡±


    ¡°How do I learn to use them?¡±


    ¡°With practice, you can still your mind enough to ride the fragment out, but it takes time. Right now, your mind is constantly pressing outwards, even if you don¡¯t notice it. It¡¯s the nature of the Otherworld. In order for the fragment to become solid enough to slip out, it must be still, so to speak, and your mind is constantly moving it.¡±


    ¡°So how do I make my mind still?¡± It didn¡¯t sound like a quality his mind could ever have.


    ¡°Spend time in the Hardworlds. Let your Spirit develop a sense for how they feel and operate. Then, once you can get your mind in that mode at will, fragments should work for you.¡±


    ¡°Should?¡±


    ¡°Some people never learn to use fragments. But then again, some people can never get to the Hardworlds at all.¡±


    Gradie glanced longingly at the hallway and its warm flickering light, and dreaded wrestling his mind through a floating door he hoped like hell would take him to the right place.


    ¡°Oh, one last thing,¡± Michael said. ¡°Don¡¯t forget to see Lucy after you get back here. She¡¯ll need to pull your memories of the job while they¡¯re still fresh.¡±


    Gradie¡¯s stomach sank, but he just nodded without expression.


    ¡°I¡¯ll see you in there.¡± Michael kicked the doorstop off the ground and stepped inside. The door did the same slam-shut and vanish trick Philip¡¯s had, and Gradie was left alone in the darkness.


    He felt the stars watching him. Ghosts, memories, fragments of worlds or moments. He couldn¡¯t focus with them around, so he reached out and tried to summon a door in the air, but nothing happened. It seemed he lacked the control over the Otherworld that let the team move about at ease. His desire to hurry up and jump into a Hardworld crept up his spine and rattled his head.


    Fine. I¡¯ll have to do it my own way.


    He kicked the ground and felt it shake hollow beneath him. Another stomp and he felt a latch spring open at the jam. The final stomp dropped him down through a trap door into darkness. His fall felt supernaturally accelerated, as if Lucy¡¯s astralarium was ejecting him, and he floated out into a now familiar void. His Spirit told him that the star room was now infinitely far away, and he could try for a thousand years and never get to it from here.


    Good. Got other places to be.


    He pulled the crystal out of his pocket and the blue wetness dripped off into the black. It opened on command and he found himself floating above the highway, rain-gorged night spreading over a familiar city.


    Now that he was here, the instructions given by Michael, Lucy, even Klara¡¯s words of assurance, seemed totally inadequate.


    He took out his phone, and sure enough, a notification blinked a message at him. A URL for a website called ¡°allcityhovercrafts¡± and a password: gradiecheckinginnumber8.


    All right. Time to do this.


    He told the projection to show him around. It felt like an instinct. Now that he was fully immersed in it, the dream knowledge that spoke from the signs in the Allcity and little pieces of the Otherworld was everywhere in the projection. Navigating its stored memory came as naturally as wanting to.


    He studied the highway, the weather, dropped into a car, and turned on the radio.


    This is real. This is what I heard on the radio yesterday, on the way home from work.


    The thought became knowledge in his mind, and the world pulled him towards something unknown. The feeling reminded him of the door flying out of the star, the one he had stepped through into that other Hardworld. He remembered his job there, his torched car, those drug addicts¡­


    No! I need to drop into Paul¡¯s world!


    The projection reacted to him before the thought had finished. The dream office formed around him, but this time it felt wrong.


    A door slammed somewhere and the noise was flat and real. He panicked. The dream knowledge screamed at him in his own voice.


    Run.


    Someone was coming after him. Someone who didn¡¯t want him in that Hardworld.


    Footsteps out of the far office. He turned and bolted across the floor, feeling them spring after him. He made it to the stairwell door and threw it open and rolled through, half falling down the stairs. At the bottom, as the squeak-slam of the door shutting above echoed down the shaft, he clawed at the back of his pants for his pistol. He got it out, safety off, racked the slide, front dot lined up between the rear two, aimed at the door above, just as the handle turned. He squeezed the trigger as the door swung open, but the gun didn¡¯t fire. He screamed, rolled over, and ran.


    Then he woke up.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 26: Flesh and Spirit

    If paradise can be bought, it can also be served with fries


    It had been a week since the Office Job, though time was hard to gauge. The days in the Real felt less and less like they were being lived and more like they were dissolving directly into memory. His life in the Otherworld rushed in to fill the gap. He spent most of it flying above the Allworld, letting his mind wander as the bizarre landscape sped by, as it did now.


    He had felt ecstatic after the job. Looking back, it felt like he succeeded where the rest of the team failed, using instinct and quick thinking to turn a shitty situation into a win. Michael and the team didn¡¯t agree. They gave what he did a name, freefalling, or trancing or something, maybe each had given it a different one. They said it was dropping out and letting the subconscious of the spirit guide your entry into the Hardworlds. It rarely worked and wasn¡¯t reliable. Essentially, he had gotten lucky, just as Philip had said. But it hadn¡¯t felt like luck. Up until Paul dropped dead, he hadn¡¯t really thought he could do it.


    Either way, he had to agree with them. Spending most of his time in a Hardworld believing he was about to get written up at some shitty job wasn¡¯t the way he wanted to operate. He wanted the freedom, the electrifying knowledge of who he was, and why he was there.


    He wanted, even more now that the first job was over, to be a real Hardworlder. It still felt like something just beyond his reach.


    Michael had promised him more training after they were done restructuring the team and setting up the next job, but that had been days ago. He had started to worry, imagining scenarios where he was hung out to dry, not part of the team but unable to be let loose due to his knowledge of their identities, until Philip contacted him an hour ago.


    ¡°Gonna pick you up today. Be ready.¡± His voice came through like a track phone, not the crystal clear ¡®right in your thoughts¡¯ way that Michael and the rest of the team sounded on the communicator.


    ¡°When?¡±


    ¡°Today.¡±


    He had dropped off the call, or connection, or whatever the strange telepathic link could be called, and Gradie had left it at that. Whatever. It¡¯s not like he needed to know a time anyway.


    All he ever did was fly.


    A red glow floating up from the Allworld caught his attention. Neon letters the color of bright hot heating elements. Ray¡¯s. A memory, a few days old, bubbled up in him.


    Sometimes he did more than fly. His third day soaring around, just after zipping through the maker stalls and warehouse portals of the Allmall, but before finding the lagoons of Sunset, where orange sun melted forever on the horizon, Ray¡¯s had floated out from behind a tower of jungle bungalows and given Gradie his second hard lesson about Otherworld advertising.


    Hunger was at least partially a function of the Spirit. The scents and sights of the dreamworld meals were just as gut pulling as they were in the realm of flesh and blood. He had to focus on the fact that he had no stomach and needed no food, or the slight hunger would devolve into brutal starvation cravings. It was written into the smells themselves by the makers somehow. The people of this place really were a special kind of evil.


    Of course, Ray¡¯s had floated out at him before he learned this lesson. He spent ten mem on the meal, (Michael¡¯s promise to pay him only in experience must have been another kind of test), and the food had been amazing. The archetype of all burgers and a pile of late-night-commercial fries, with a chocolate shake that kept its temperature, flavor, and texture constant right to the last sip. Somehow, his Spirit remembered how to feel full, and the meal progressed from a desperate attack on hunger, to a leisurely observation on flavor, and ended as the familiar ritual of picking at the last fries and slurping loudly on an almost gone shake.


    Strangely, yet thankfully, his spirits grasp on digestion ended there. As he flew away from Ray¡¯s, the feeling of fullness dropped away like a bad dream, and he was left just as un-hungry as he had been before the god damned diner had got in his way in the first place.


    Now, here he was, once again flying towards it. The memory of that meal brought on the memory of the hunger, which of course brought on the hunger itself.The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    God dammit.


    He dropped down toward the door and the wrap-around deck¡¯s gravity stuck his shoes to the concrete. No one floated in Ray¡¯s. The makers had done their best to make it feel as much like an ¡®aw shucks, just good eatin¡¯ diner floating in a dreamworld as possible. Even the sun, which Gradie never noticed flying around the Allworld normally, lay on his face and coaxed up sweat from his neck in a distinct summer way.


    He pulled the door open and the hot metal handle stung his hand. Inside, the cold air smelled of AC, but mouthwatering beef fat and the sweet tang of ketchup and grilled onions pushed in at the edges. White noise conversations echoed on the checkerboard tile floor. Spirits crowded into turquoise booths and fire-engine-red stools. Fluorescence and neon glared off road signs and other kitsch on the walls. He stood in line like everyone else, wondering if this was as close to a Hardworld as any of these people ever got to.


    He paid at the counter. The cashier, a pouty freckled redhead in a low-cut apron, gyrated patiently as he brought up his wallet, slower than the other customers. The mem Michael had paid him in took the form of digital numbers in a clockface he could summon at will. He thought of the memories, childhood pleasures and visceral adult panics that were quantified and represented by the dull orange digits. The stuff with which makers crafted all the oddities of this thoughtformed dimension. Were they cutting up the old world and regrowing it piece by piece in the new? What was the point?


    As he was eating outside on the deck, about halfway through his meal, just as frustratingly fantastic as last time, something strange, even for a dreamworld diner, caught his attention.


    A man in pajamas, royal blue pants and shirt, with silver star and moon motifs, landed between the tables with his arms folded behind his back.


    ¡°Oh brothers and sisters, if you only knew the glory of the Spirit, you would throw the dust in your hands away in an instant!¡±


    Someone laughed. ¡°Oh shit, it¡¯s one of those guys.¡±


    Everyone else had about the same reaction. The man scanned the faces with contempt, until he saw Gradie, who, having never seen anything besides unrestrained pursuit of satisfaction in the Otherworld, was watching him with too much interest.


    Fuck. The guy locked eyes and walked over, waving his hands and preaching and shit.


    ¡°The Spirit must learn the truth! That it is no longer confined to its shell!¡± Here he swept his hand at Gradie¡¯s burger, fries, and (this time, cookies and cream!) shake.


    ¡°Each time you give in to the phantom song of the flesh, you bind your Spirit to it ever more strongly! Chained to your false form, you will never learn the great pleasures of existing as pure Spirit, without need or want or pain!¡±


    Here, he broke eye contact with Gradie and looked at something towards the front door.


    ¡°And more doomed still, are those who go to those so called hard worlds. Truly, the land of the dead!¡±


    Gradie froze, then remembering the man wasn¡¯t even looking at him, relaxed and followed his gaze.


    A man in a bright red smoker¡¯s jacket and a mask made of neon-green plasma walked away from the counter with a half-gallon root beer float foaming in a frosted mug. The two women on his arms, each in dresses like colored plastic wrap, ate Tom-and-Jerry-sized ice cream sundaes suggestively and fought for his eye contact.


    ¡°I am the land of the dead, baby!¡± the man yelled, and raised his float in the air, spraying the girls with dark soda and golden foam. They laughed and pressed against him. He looked like something out of Michael¡¯s vision. Gradie tried to imagine Philip or Luke wasting mem on dreamgirls and too-perfect fast food. He couldn¡¯t even picture them inside the diner.


    The pajama man piped up again, louder.


    ¡°Seek the Spirit! Seek the edge! The abyss! Only there will you find yourself!¡± Gradie looked back to see pajama man staring him down again. Before he could decide how to respond (taking another bite of the burger was in the lead) a big guy in a greasy apron stepped out of nowhere and kicked the man in the stomach. Pajama man went flying out into the glittering swarm and the guy in the apron wiped his hands together dramatically and wagged a finger at the empty air.


    ¡°And stay out!¡±


    The diner erupted in laughter and applause. The apron man pushed through a swinging pair of kitchen double doors and disappeared with them.


    The strange event dissolved into the atmosphere of the diner, which continued un-deterred, front door dinging open and orders being called and all that, and before Gradie got another bite down, it was like he had dreamed it.


    As he picked at the last fries and wondered if there was a way to put some kind of tracker on Ray¡¯s, (He had bought a responsive map from a floating stall, the seller picking him out of a swarm as a newborn. He had set it to pop up when he made a right angle with his thumb and index finger) Philip called him on the communicator.


    The early 00¡¯s Nokia-style ring tone was a welcome change from the gentle dream knowledge prodding that usually let him know a team member was trying to talk to him.


    ¡°Yeah?¡±


    ¡°Training day, kid. Don¡¯t make me wait.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m at Ray¡¯s.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t give a¡ª That fucking place?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. Do you know if there¡¯s a way to see where it¡ª¡±


    ¡°Finish your chili dog and meet me in the black.¡±


    ¡°Where?¡±


    ¡°Just flap those little wings and head straight up. I¡¯ll find you.¡±


    The dial tone was almost pleasant compared to the sudden-absence-of-another-presence-in-my-head that ended most conversations on the comm line. Gradie stood up and dusted crumbs off his cloak and kicked off into the air.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 27: Philips

    Last gas for a million miles


    After the Office job, when Gradie had found his way out of the Dreamworlds (then manifested as maintenance hallways and pedestrian tunnels, which he had later learned were Philip¡¯s route out of the Hardworlds, and exited via trap door that spit him out in some forgotten alley of the Allcity) Philip had been waiting for him. The team was to meet with the clients in the Allclub ASAP, and Gradie had to be instructed in proper Hardworlder etiquette, in about five minutes.


    ¡°First of all,¡± Philip had said, lifting one finger in the dim alley, like an unmade space between two parts of a video game, lit only by the cherry of his smoking cigar.


    ¡°Always wear a mask when entering or leaving the Office, unless going from or to a secure location. Don¡¯t put your mask on or take it off outside of your own private realm or the office, and two, change your fucking clothes when you change your mask. If anyone gave a shit who you are, they could easily look for the guy with the same clothes and build as the disco-ball-faced mother fucker they saw flying out of the office earlier. Which reminds me, make sure your mask changes your voice too. Not that you should open your mouth in the meeting, but better safe than sorry.¡±


    So now, as Gradie flew up into the black to meet Philip, he wondered if it mattered that he was maskless. He had hadn¡¯t said anything about it when¡ª


    His communicator rang in plastic tones again.


    ¡°Hello?¡±


    ¡°I see you. Stop moving and I¡¯ll be there in a second.¡±


    ¡°Do I need to mask up?¡±


    ¡°What? Hell no. Never put on your mask outside of a secured location like the office. Didn¡¯t I tell you that? Anyway, this craft¡¯s clean.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s that mean?¡±


    ¡°Means I don¡¯t take it to the office or fly any masks in it. No one can seek where we¡¯re going anyway.¡±


    Philip hung up and Gradie got an ear full of dial tone until he snapped off the connection. A moment later, a star slid off a constellation and came toward him. It split into rows of lights, shining over a dark plane of something solid. It rotated as it approached, fast enough to break the sound barrier multiple times over in the Real, and Gradie found something familiar in the emerging shapes. Then it hit him.


    It was a gas station, complete with parked cars and an air pump, pulled off of the earth by some mad god, with pipes and wires still sticking out of the inverted cone of topsoil beneath its concrete lot. Fluorescent light flickered in just the right way and blackened the sky as it got closer. According to the signs, it was a Philip¡¯s 66. Of course.


    Gradie floated over the edge and its gravity pulled him down to the ground. As he walked to the front doors, he examined the finer points. Oil stains in the parking spots. One pump with a plastic bag over it. Trash in all the cans. If he dumped them out into the black, would the cups and bottles fall down to the Allcity and stick in the crevices of someone''s dreamlair? Empty fry boxes drifting in the Allclub? It was tempting.


    The doors slid open and he walked into a glaringly bright store that smelled of heavy-handed chemical cleaning. The fridges hummed. Hot dogs and taquitos rolled. Slushy machines spun tanks of red cherry and blue raspberry. Philip was next to the counter, matte steel trenchcoat over a charcoal suit, swearing at the register screen.


    Gradie, having found the gravity here was mostly a suggestion, jumped twenty feet over a kiosk of mixed nuts.


    ¡°This is exactly how I pictured your craft.¡± He landed on the countertop, knocking a display of tacky lighters and a dust filled take-a-penny bowl to the ground.


    ¡°Watch it!¡± Philip said, without looking up. ¡°Do I go into your ship and kick all your fucking anime dolls around? And go ahead and get all your best jokes out. I¡¯m sure I¡¯ll be surprised. Ha ha, a gas station, am I right?¡± He tapped the screen, which was realistically finicky, and kept pulling up the same menu.


    ¡°God dammit.¡± He tapped harder and Gradie looked around to hide his smile. Whatever training he was about to get, it wouldn¡¯t help to have Philip pissed at him the whole time.


    ¡°Kinda cool though. Better than another space ship or¡ª¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not fucking cool, and I didn¡¯t pick it. Michael insisted I get one of these things and the Twins made this one as a joke. Finally!¡±


    A menu came up on the panel, titled ¡°Travel Items¡±. There was a large square labeled ¡°Allworld¡±, with buttons inside for the Allclub, the Office, Mem traders. Other icons outside the Allworld box were labeled ¡°Lucy¡±, ¡°Gunmaze¡±, ¡°Memulacron-3¡± (in a red-orange starburst that said ¡°special item!¡±). Philip tapped a green orb marked ¡°HQ¡±. The store rumbled and snacks slipped off the shelves. A little receipt came screeching out of the till and Philip snatched it away and crumpled it in his fist. Gradie reached down and picked up a can of pringles that rolled to his feet.The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t,¡± said Philip. ¡°Everything in here is stale or flat. Another one of the twin''s little jokes.¡±


    ¡°The twins?¡±


    ¡°Our makers. Who we¡¯re going to see.¡±


    ¡°They made this?¡±


    ¡°Yeah.¡±


    ¡°Whats the joke?¡±


    ¡°That I cant stand this fucking place. Said they gave me a ship more like the Hardworlds. Like they would know.¡±


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you like it?¡±


    ¡°The ship?¡±


    ¡°No, the rest of it.¡±


    Philip looked at him for once, and reached in his jacket for a cigar, taking his time to consider his answer, or Gradie, or both.


    ¡°You see that girl at Ray¡¯s? The cashier?¡± He lit the silver foil wrapped cigar on the jet of flame that shot out of his ring, and the cherry glowed with sparks at the edges like it was half firework.


    ¡°Yeah.¡± Gradie glanced out the window and noticed the stars had disappeared.


    ¡°Why do you think she''s spending her time in this fucking wonderland taking orders?¡±


    ¡°Uh,¡± Gradie had wondered that himself, but for all he knew she might have been an illusion or something.


    ¡°She¡¯s hooked on something. Some simulated life, gameworld tokens, or maybe one of those pure vials of concentrated pleasure these wonderful makers excel at creating.¡± Philip ashed on the floor, glanced out at the rushing emptiness, then back at Gradie, with a weary hatred in his eyes.


    ¡°This world gets its claws in you just like the other one. Seen it a million times.¡±


    ¡°Oh.¡± Gradie was glad all he tried was a burger.


    ¡°Why do you think Michael hired you so fast?¡±


    ¡°Because,¡± Gradie¡¯s words got left behind by his thoughts. Had it been fast? It had felt like Michael was hesitant to let him on at first, before he had spent some time in the Otherworld. Maybe that¡¯s how it was supposed to feel. Gradie probed the edges of his memory, trying to find the line between what Michael had wanted him to do, and what he had ended up doing, and decided that, although their goals had lined up nicely this time, the big bastard was more conniving than he seemed.


    ¡°Cause he saw potential in you and wanted to get you before the Otherworld did,¡± said Philip.


    ¡°Potential?¡± Gradie asked. Philip ignored him.


    ¡°Did you pick a code name yet?¡±


    ¡°Oh, no. I was thinking¡ª¡±


    ¡°Easiest is a noun and a number. Don¡¯t overthink it. Too many assholes try to spell out their whole personality and they all end up sounding the same.¡±


    He chuckled to himself. Gradie decided not to mention any of the names he had come up with so far, and quietly put them in a mental shredder.


    ¡°So what do you got?¡± Philip asked.


    ¡°I¡¯ll have to think about it.¡±


    ¡°I said don¡¯t¡ª"


    Gradie felt a nudge on his communicator and Philip lifted a finger to his temple.


    ¡°Hello?¡±


    ¡°You got him with you?¡± It was Lindsey.


    ¡°Yeah.¡± Philip''s voice dropped a few octaves.


    ¡°I¡¯m coming aboard.¡±


    Gradie looked out the windows and saw the stars had returned. An airship floated by in the black. Ebony wood hull, golden sailwings, and a glittering gem-encrusted half-dragon-half-woman figure on the bow, blowing a horn and holding a flaming sword. It was not what Gradie had imagined Lindsey¡¯s craft would look like, and he wondered if she too had gotten it from someone else.


    The door to the back room opened and Lindsey walked in, giving Gradie flashbacks to another gas station between worlds. Her clothes killed the d¨¦j¨¤ vu and made him second guess his assumptions about her craft. Bronze armor over red dragon hide. He had forgotten about her elven get-up after the clubhouse. In this world, it suited her.


    ¡°You taking him to the Twins?¡± she asked.


    ¡°Yep. Perks of the Job,¡± said Philip. Gradie was more shocked that Philip didn¡¯t comment on Lindsey''s outfit than he had been by anything since the Hardworlds.


    ¡°I¡¯ll go with you,¡± Lindsey said. ¡°Want to see what I¡¯m gonna be working with.¡± She smiled at Gradie, and he managed a nod before looking away.


    ¡°Don¡¯t be nervous,¡± she said. ¡°This¡¯ll be fun. You¡¯ll love the twins.¡± She clapped him on the shoulder. He still remembered the way she had glared at him that first day with Michael, the feeling of her lips, and the way she knocked him to the ground. If she thought about any of it, he couldn¡¯t tell.


    A planet rolled into view, its lush green continent encircled by a deep blue.


    ¡°Whats this?¡±


    ¡°Our HQ.¡± Philip tapped on the screen.


    ¡°You guys have an entire planet?


    ¡°Yeah. It was a gift, apparently.¡± Philip tapped again and the ship warped to the surface. A massive building of stone, silver, and glass struck up out of the jungle. It looked like a cluster of basalt columns hollowed out into an office tower. They landed on a thin waver of matte silver that fanned out to meet them.


    ¡°If this is your HQ, then what¡¯s that building in the city?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s more like our front office,¡± said Lindsey. ¡°Where we meet most of our clients. This is more secure.¡±


    ¡°Why didn¡¯t we just use a door?¡± Gradie said, remembering the ease of getting to Lucy¡¯s realm the first time. Philip tapped another button and the front doors slid open with a ding.


    ¡°Mike wanted you to make the trip see it from above and get its layout in your memory. Makes it easier for you to get to it if you ever start flying one of these things.¡±


    Gradie hoped Philip meant a craft in general, and not a floating gas station.


    ¡°Where¡¯s Michael?¡±


    ¡°What, you miss him? He¡¯s handling business. I¡¯m Captain now, so I¡¯ll be responsible for your development, such that it will be.¡±


    ¡°Captain?¡±


    ¡°Last job we were all stepping on each other''s toes,¡± said Lindsey. ¡°Philip has been moved to a more hands-off role.¡±


    ¡°A management role,¡± he corrected.


    ¡°A supervisor, even,¡± Lindsey said, with a grin at the edges.


    Philip managed a smile around his cigar and marched out the doors.


    ¡°So what will I be doing here?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°Getting ready for the Hardworlds, ideally.¡± Philip flicked his cigar off the side of the mirror ramp.


    ¡°Uh, I think I¡¯ve been there already.¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t get smart.¡±


    A crystal pane in the tower melted away and they walked inside.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 26: Makers

    He did his very best to make the billows smooth and bright


    They walked into an open marble lobby surrounded by towering glass and stone. Half of the windows gave a view across the green horizon, while the other half, acting like parabolic lenses, showed scenes miles away. A nest of birds, a hot spring, a smoking volcanic vent. A bar glittered off to the side, backed by bottles of every color and shape. A waterfall poured down the far wall into a pool., and the crystal water flowed in a curving path across the floor and fell out below one of the massive windows, reflecting sunlight and spraying up droplets of rainbow.


    The walls twisted up into a shaft half a mile high towards a round disk of blue tropical sky. Something snaked and shined like a ribbon of diamond caught in the wind. The stream that fed the waterfall, running in twisting paths of its own gravity.


    Philip snapped his fingers under Gradie¡¯s face.


    ¡°Remember how we got here and what this place looks like, so next time you can take a door.¡±


    Gradie had another idea. He pointed his index finger and thumb and his map popped up. A dim transparent square like a CRT screen on channel 3, black with a white frowny face in the center.


    ¡°That shit won''t work in here,¡± Philip said. ¡°Those things usually have skimmers hidden inside. Tells the maker where you go. Let the twins get you an actual map.¡±


    ¡°Speaking of the twins, where are they?¡± Lindsey said.


    ¡°They were supposed to be here waiting for us.¡± Philip glared at the bare walls, daring the twins to step out from nowhere. Lindsey smiled softly.


    ¡°Doesn¡¯t sound like them.¡±


    ¡°They knew I was coming!¡±


    ¡®Oh, well that¡¯s a bit different, isn¡¯t it? Did they say, ¡°Yes Phillip, we will be standing around at the lobby when you get here¡±, or¡ª¡±


    ¡°Klara told them we were coming to train the fucking new hire, where else¡ª¡±


    ¡°You know why Michael is always telling Klara ¡°tell the twins¡±? Because he doesn¡¯t want to have to track them down.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m so glad he let me know about their little arrangement.¡±


    A window floated out of its frame in the far wall. Lindsey kicked off the ground and floated toward the sunshine.


    ¡°They¡¯re probably at the castle.¡± Her voice echoed in the hall.


    ¡°God forbid they leave their toyhouse,¡± Philip said, walking leisurely after her. Gradie, never missing a chance to fly, shot over Philip¡¯s shoulder and out the window. He rolled to a stop on a silver platform spreading like mercury at Lindsey¡¯s feet. Her shoulders sagged as she watched Philip.


    ¡°Do you have an aversion to getting anywhere fast or something?¡±


    He pointed his chin at her and blew smoke out his nose. ¡°Never got the hang of flying.¡±


    Lindsey sighed and a puddle of the liquid silver shot across the floor. It pooled at Philip¡¯s feet and carried him to the platform in a heartbeat, leaving a trail of cigar smoke behind him.


    ¡°Thanks darling.¡± He smiled at Lindsey. To Gradie¡¯s shock, she smiled back. Philip, for once, was speechless.


    Gradie looked down at his legs, which had gone suddenly cold, and guessed what was hidden in her smile. The silver platform had flowed up to his thighs, and Lindsey¡¯s waist, but left Philip untouched. It shot off at a speed impossible anywhere else and Philip barely had time to flail his arms before he slipped off and dropped to the jungle below.


    ¡°Oops.¡± Lindsey smiled at the rushing canopy for a moment, then went all stoic again and turned on Gradie.


    ¡°Pay attention to the route. Remember where the Castle is in relation to the tower.¡±


    ¡°The Castle?¡±


    She didn¡¯t answer. Gradie looked back just in time to see the tower disappear behind the horizon.


    ¡°There.¡± Lindsey pointed ahead of them, where an ocean broke out under the sunset sky, and something on the beach flashed then went dark. In another heartbeat, it grew angles and its shadows differentiated. A castle, exactly how any kid would picture one, turned up to eleven. Dark grey stone with spire towers. It took over the horizon and broke out across the sky. They dropped down suddenly into the trees and landed in a clearing. The silver platform flowed into a pouch on Lindsey''s belt and Gradie¡¯s feet sank into soft soil.


    It was a dense temperate forest that to Gradie looked distinctly American, the kind he would have waged airsoft battles across as a kid, but struck through with impossibly tall pines and oaks. There were things hidden in the trees. Simple buildings and ornate elvish complexes, stuck up in the branches like massive wasp nests, covered in burn marks and bullet holes. The ground was littered with craters and broken barricades.If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    ¡°Thought they¡¯d be out here,¡± said Lindsey, marching towards a black marble bridge. Gradie followed, the gravity too assertive for him to even consider flying.


    ¡°Cant call them on the coms. They say it''s too distracting.¡± Her words were muffled by a white water roar rising up the canyon. Looking down from the bridge, Gradie saw the land around was at least a hundred feet above the water. A twisting river rushed by in rolling rapids far below.


    A raven cawed high above the castle. Gradie barely had time to reflect on the first animal he had seen in the Otherworld when the big wooden doors groaned open and Lindsey disappeared inside. Left alone on the bridge, for a moment, that feeling of everything speaking to him that had taken him in the Allcity returned, but this time, it was a gentle song, an offer to join in, rather than a negotiation for payment. Still, it felt like being left with someone else''s pet. He hurried in through the door.


    Lindsey led him down a high ceilinged stone hallway, lit by a glow just brighter than moonlight and lined with tapestries and paintings, moving portals to other lands, much like the living art pieces in Lucy¡¯s home. Gradie got the feeling the hallway, and probably everything else in the castle, had been severed from any permanent location. He was sure that it wasn¡¯t always right inside the front door, but whether he knew this because of a subtle dream knowledge being communicated through the walls, or by a now more experienced sense of how the Otherworld operated, he couldn¡¯t be sure.


    A wooden door creaked open at the end of the hall and a warm light flooded into the dim hallway, cramping its style.


    The room inside felt like a suburban living room deep into an all-night gameathon, suddenly thrown into a castle and given room to grow beyond its wildest dreams.


    Marble pillars and smooth tree trunks reached towards the ceiling, where overcast-heued daylight glowed through a central skylight. The walls were covered with shelves, and the shelves with books, game cases, weapons, and other unidentifiable things behind glass. The floor was covered in thick carpets, futons, mattresses, cushions, and sank towards a curving couch at the far side of the room, facing a massive screen. Gradie blinked at it twice to make sure he wasn¡¯t mistaken. SSB Melee, Fox vs Link.


    Someone was reclining on the couch, their long dark hair flowing over the back.


    Philip walked in through a door that opened behind a swinging bookshelf.


    ¡°Hey Turl! Where¡¯s Klaupaucius?¡± The guy on the couch floated up and spun around.


    ¡°What?¡± He was in his early twenties, with hair a maroon so dark it was almost black. He had on black robes and silver jewelry, and a sword on his hip with no scabbard, its blade made of pure emerald.


    ¡°Never read Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem?¡± said Philip. ¡°Thought yall were into all that sci-fi shit.¡±


    ¡°Sounds familiar. I¡¯ll try and find it.¡± His fingers fluttered and small lights flashed on the tips.


    ¡°Gradie, this is Angel,¡± said Lindsey. ¡°Gradie is our new recruit.¡±


    ¡°Cool! Welcome to the team,¡± Angel said, shaking his hand. ¡°You an operator or what?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. I think so.¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s the one who made the last kill,¡± said Lindsey.


    ¡°Oh yeah! Now I recognize you. That was a clean kill.¡± He smiled and leaned in like they were sharing a joke.


    ¡°And Lucy was pissed you were able to drop in through the projection. Michael was giving her shit¡ª¡±


    ¡°So where¡¯s Nova?¡± Philip said quickly.


    ¡°Oh, outside.¡±


    ¡°Nova! Get in here!¡± Philip''s voice came in on the comm channel, his lips locked in a scowl.


    ¡°You know he doesn¡¯t use that thing,¡± Angel said, laughing. ¡°Come on.¡±


    A wooden door in the wall swung open with a horror movie creak. Angel and Lindsey went out talking about something and an orange light bloomed from the other side.


    Gradie followed them outside and onto a set of natural stone steps that winded down over aquamarine tidepools towards a white sand beach that seemed hundreds of miles away from the climate of the castle, but when he looked back towards the door, as it disappeared in the cliff face, the castle towered above.


    ¡°There he is,¡± Angel said, nodding out towards the beach.


    The horizon was a psychedelic kaleidoscope of sunset hues, and the sun pulsed in time with the music that came from everywhere, like a nuclear-powered subwoofer in the sky. The rolling ocean shimmered from gold-orange to deep blue, lapping into a lazy turquoise as it met the sand. With a gentle wind, it was a perfect temperature, just far enough into the heat of summer.


    A tall, tan man with silver and gold spikes for hair was surfing a wave on a board made of crystal. Something glittered on his neck as he cut towards the beach. The music picked up as he approached.


    ¡°What¡¯s this song?¡± Gradie yelled out. His voice reverbed and melded into the music.


    ¡°Listening Winds by Khetzal. Encoded into the fabric of the universe! A million times better than vinyl! Woo!¡±


    He did a flip into the air and surfed an unseen wave over their heads, all in time with the beat.


    ¡°Can you come down out of the clouds for two seconds so we can get this done?¡± Philip yelled. His voice was forcefully discordant with the music, which dropped in volume after he spoke.


    ¡°I was hoping I¡¯d get to see you dance, Philip.¡± The man smiled as he landed on the beach. His board melted and flowed down the sand to join the rest of the crystal water. A necklace of galaxies trapped in marbles and planets with spinning rings and raging eye-storms orbited his neck. His hair and shorts flowed as if gravity had abandoned him. It was like looking at a carbon copy of Angel, with all the color and personality swapped around.


    ¡°Nova. Nice to meet you Gradie.¡± He held his hand out and Gradie shook it.


    ¡°Answer your comms next time,¡± Philip said. ¡°I¡¯m not Michael. Any time I waste trying to track you down, I¡¯ll be taking out of your cut.¡±


    The twins just laughed. Nova put a hand on his shoulder.


    ¡°Philip, bro, we like you, but we¡¯re not gonna put some dinger in our head for anyone. Michael shoulda told you that.¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s busting your balls, Nova,¡± said Angel. ¡°I was right there when they walked in.¡±


    ¡°Bullshit,¡± Philip said. ¡°We went to the tower¡ª¡±


    The twins cackled.


    ¡°There¡¯s your mistake bro!¡± Nova yelled. ¡°I¡¯m not trying to even be seen at that tacky fucking lobby!¡±


    ¡°You built it!¡± Philip boomed. Nova looked offended and Angel raised his eyebrows.


    ¡°Bro don¡¯t remind us. Klara wanted some place to make clients think Hardworlding is like running a hedge fund.¡±


    ¡°Next time just come to the castle.¡± Nova shook his head. ¡°I don¡¯t know why you haven''t been by anyway. We got a bunch of gear we need¡ª¡±


    ¡°Can we focus on the task at hand, please?¡± Lindsey¡¯s voice came in like a cool breeze. The twins nodded.


    ¡°All right, let''s do it.¡± Nova slapped Gradie on the shoulder.


    ¡°So, you ready to learn how to be a real Hardworlder?¡±

 In the Beginning | Chapter 27: Methods

    Of Hardworlders and Kings


    The music faded to birdsong and beachnoise like a DJ had switched tracks. All the psychedelic colors flowed out of the sky and drained back into the sun. In the soft blue left behind, shapes the dim grey color of distance, buildings and orbs and castles, were frozen in place as if left there to be played with whenever some weird god got the whim.


    ¡°First things first,¡± said Philip. ¡°Let¡¯s talk about your fuck up. You dropped in and immediately started freefalling because you didn¡¯t push a self to drop into like Michael told you.¡±


    Gradie glared at Philip. He had already pleaded his case in the debrief, but If Philip wanted to rehash this shit, he could too.


    ¡°I told you, I dropped into that crystal thing and it put me in some kind of dream. Which Michael said wouldn¡¯t happen because only Celeste can walk into dreams.¡±


    ¡°Sounds like your spirit is pretty dense,¡± said Angel.


    ¡°Dense?¡±


    ¡°Ah Jesus, not that shit,¡± said Philip


    ¡°Means the Hardworlds pulls on you more than the Otherworld,¡± said Angel, looking off into the trees. ¡°Would explain why Michael found you in one.¡±


    Gradie didn¡¯t feel like the Hardworlds had pulled on him. Quite the opposite. Getting in the first time had taken all of his focus and he had still almost fucked it up.


    ¡°He¡¯s dense alright,¡± Philip said. ¡°No, you got caught up in the projection and dropped in with no anchor so the Hardworlds put you wherever they wanted.¡±


    ¡°Right next to the target,¡± Gradie said. Philip¡¯s face flared into a snarl.


    ¡°You keep on about that shit and I¡¯ll wash my hands of you, kid. You got lucky. It¡¯s not repeatable, it ain''t how the fucking job is done, and if you try it again, the only job you¡¯ll have on this team is getting EP¡¯s Red Bulls outta the fucking fridge. Do you understand me?¡±


    ¡°God, don¡¯t be such a¡ª¡± Lindsey started at Philip. Gradie snapped before she could finish.


    ¡°I didn¡¯t even know what the fuck Michael was talking about! If Hardworlding is so god damned special, why am I expected to be able to do it right the first time when the only training I had before this was setting my car on fire and listening to yall talk about it in a living room?¡±


    The wind blew salt-scented air into the silence. Philip¡¯s face softened.


    ¡°He¡¯s got a point, bro,¡± said Nova.


    ¡°I know he¡¯s got a fucking point,¡± Philip snapped. He sighed and turned back to Gradie. ¡°Look, I think we all forgot how much a jump priming a self is from dropping in cold. None of us have dealt with a first-timer in years, even decades. We went too fast.¡±


    Philip¡¯s tone had turned paternal, and Gradie dug his shoes into the sand. It was unsettling. Yelling and shit-talking fit Philip like a glove. This felt like an apology born out of a frustration he shouldn¡¯t be seeing.


    ¡°Michael, in his infinite wisdom,¡± Philip continued. ¡°Decided that you should tag along on the next job, which unfortunately for you was about two days after you popped into the black. I guess he thought you should see a live job as soon as possible.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s how it used to be done,¡± Lindsey said. ¡°Michael¡¯s old school.¡±


    ¡°Yeah, and so am I, but I also know how to use an advantage. Which is why we¡¯re here.¡±


    ¡°What advantage?¡± Gradie asked, ready as hell to move on.


    ¡°Our Vault,¡± said Angel.


    ¡°What¡¯s a Vault?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s a box that streamlines priming a self. It¡¯s loaded with memories, so you can construct¡ª¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s a box?¡± Gradie remembered the cop in the gas station threatening to lock him in one, and wondered what the fuck Philip and these kids had in store for him.This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    ¡°Oh,¡± said Nova. ¡°A box is an enclosed portion of the Other that keeps the Spirit in place and affects the mind. Most of the sims and sins out there are modified boxes.¡±


    ¡°Sims?¡±


    ¡°Simulations and Scenarios. All those goofy rides they try to sell you out there,¡± Nova waved at the sky. ¡°But our Vault is way more responsive than that shit. Taps into your working memory, meshes it with¡ª¡±


    ¡°Is it like Lucy¡¯s thing?¡± Gradie cut in. If whatever was in the Vault was anything like having Lucy peel his childhood apart, it made sense that most people weren¡¯t signing up to be Hardworlders.


    ¡°Nah man, Lucy¡¯s box is something special,¡± Nova continued. ¡°It digs through every bit of the Spirit, even the¡ª bro really?¡±


    Angel had broken into stifled laughter. ¡°Stop talking about Lucy¡¯s box man.¡±


    ¡°Shut the fuck up,¡± Philip snapped. ¡°There¡¯s a lady present.¡±


    ¡°Never say that again,¡± Lindsey said, slow and sharp as drawing a knife. ¡°I grew up with brothers. These kids can¡¯t shock me.¡±


    ¡°Anyway, The Vault is more additive,¡± Nova continued. ¡°It taps into our mem banks and lets you construct the self you want to drop into from the ground up.¡±


    ¡°How?¡± Gradie felt that electric excitement flare up at the thought of creating another life like setting up a character in a game.


    ¡°In the Hardworlds,¡± Nova said. ¡°The mind has trouble telling the difference between your real memories, what you¡¯ve done in the Otherworld, and your dreams. It all kind of blends together. We use that to our advantage¡±


    Angel saw the glaze in Gradie¡¯s eyes and helped him out.


    ¡°You go in our little simulator, imagine another version of yourself, piece by piece, then convince that little animal in your head we call your mind that what you see are not projections, but memories. When you drop into the Hardworlds, you wake up into that self.¡±


    He said it like it was the easiest thing in any world. Gradie, however, had learned not to trust other Spirits when it came to what he would find simple.


    ¡°Why didn¡¯t I do that before?¡±


    ¡°Michael didn¡¯t want you to use it,¡± Lindsey said, skipping a stone across the water. ¡°He thought it could be a crutch if you used it too soon.¡±


    ¡°And he¡¯d be right,¡± said Philip.


    ¡°Why?¡± Gradie didn¡¯t feel like losing his mind in a dead mall parking lot or spending half a day making phone calls while freaking out about a gun in his bag had really prepared him to be an interdimensional assassin. Philip disagreed.


    ¡°There are Hardworlders, then there are Hardworlders, kid.¡±


    ¡°What does that mean?¡±


    ¡°Most people get into the Hardworlds by trap doors,¡± said Nova. He saw Gradie¡¯s question forming. ¡°Fragments crafted to help them slip into the Hardworlds, convince them this is a dream and they wake up. Basically, trap doors do what you did the first time, but automatically.¡±


    Gradie felt like kicking Michael in the teeth, but found a flaw in the trap door idea.


    ¡°Won''t they drop out and think the Hardworld is real? Getting in is only part of the issue, right?¡±


    ¡°Yeah,¡± said Angel. ¡°That¡¯s why they have some veterans on the other side to get them up. ¡®Wake up number eleven¡¯ and all that shit. Usually about one for every ten crash dummies¡ª¡±


    ¡°Please, no more of this shit,¡± Philip said, like Angel was describing how to eat roadkill raw.


    ¡°Also, I probably wouldn¡¯t have let you use it the first time anyway,¡± said Nova. ¡°The Vault is kind of like our trade secret.¡±


    ¡°Other Hardworlders don¡¯t do this?¡± If the vault was as simple as the twins claimed, Gradie was sure all those powerful, ancient Hardworlding groups Michael had hinted at would be all over it.


    ¡°Oh yeah, they all do it,¡± agreed Angel. ¡°But each org has its own memory bank. Unless they¡¯re in a Corp or a collective or something where they pool their archives. Or if they lease out a generic stream. But the Vault would put a lotta them to shame, thanks to Michaels¡ª¡±


    ¡°It does not fucking matter and he won¡¯t remember anyway,¡± said Philip. ¡°Today you will push a basic self, drop into a Hardworld and make contact, then Lindsey and I will run you through a basic wargame. That¡¯s it. Then we can leave.¡±


    ¡°Philip doesn¡¯t trust the Vault either,¡± Nova laughed.


    ¡°You don¡¯t use it?¡± Gradie asked. Was there some third or fourth way to¡ª


    ¡°Fuck no,¡± Philip snapped. ¡°I¡¯ve got two decades of memories stored right where they should be,¡± He tapped his head. ¡°I prime the old-fashioned way. There wasn¡¯t any of this shit when I started.¡±


    ¡°Bullshit,¡± said Nova. ¡°The Gods invented priming with a membank.¡±


    ¡°The Gods invented Hardworlding and sliced bread and sticking two mags together with cardboard and duct tape. You believe that shit too?¡±


    ¡°Can we get started sometime today or,¡± Lindsey called from the beach. She had a bow and arrow in hand and was taking shots at a balloon-animal sea monster as it dove in and out of the water, three segments of its body already deflated and trailing behind it. Philip clapped his hands.


    ¡°Sure sweetheart¡ª¡± an arrow flew past his head. ¡°¡ªLet¡¯s get to it.¡±


    Nova stared at the ground in front of him and a trap door popped open in the beach, flinging up sand. Philip jumped into the black square and disappeared like the liquid darkness was flush with the beach. Lindsey followed right after, her cloak disappearing last.


    Angel smiled at Gradie.


    ¡°Your turn.¡±


    Gradie approached the trap door and looked down. The solid blackness seemed to tug at him. He stared at it for a while before realizing he had absolutely no intention of going in. It had all the signs of another Lucy situation.


    ¡°You want a green light? Like the paratroopers?¡± Gradie looked up and saw Nova smiling and two glass hemispheres in a metal box hovering in the air in front of him. The red one went out and the green one lit up. Gradie didn¡¯t move.


    ¡°Get off my plane bitch!¡± Angel yelled from behind and kicked him hard in the back. Gradie went flailing into the hole and the last thing he saw before everything went black was Nova¡¯s laughing face.


    He rolled as he fell. Down became up over and over again, as if the source of gravity was rolling in the opposite direction he was. Just as soon as he had lost all spatial awareness, and the beach felt just as far away as his home in the Real, light returned.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 28: The Vault

    Searching the Akashic records for more ammo


    Gradie had landed, suddenly, on his feet. Soft light poured through a wide viewport into the strange room, halfway between a sci-fi ship deck and an early 00¡¯s home theater on a rap stars budget. It took him a moment to recognize the source of light as something familiar.


    ¡°Is that earth?¡± A blue and white hemisphere floated in the starless black outside.


    ¡°You don¡¯t recognize it?¡± said Philip. ¡°School nowadays as bad as they say?¡±


    ¡°I thought the Allworld was this world''s version of earth?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, kinda,¡± said Nova. ¡°But this is something else. Our own creation.¡±


    ¡°How?¡± Gradie asked. Nova seemed to misunderstand his question.


    ¡°If your intent is specific enough, the Other will create whatever you want, not just cram you in the Allworld with all the archetypes.¡±


    Gradie remembered how hard it had been just to make his mask. The thought of these two twenty-year-olds crafting a duplicate earth made him feel just as insignificant as he had that first day with Michael, watching crafts move into the Allworld from distant unknown places. Despite his days flying around the ball, he knew he had only grazed the surface of this new world, and the true depth of it all still evaded him, like the dim lights out in the black.


    ¡°Think of it like a 3d map,¡± said Angel. ¡°It¡¯s a responsive fragment, crafted completely from memories. Really, it¡¯s an illusion. Just a convenient way for us to organize memories from the Real and the Hardworlds.¡±


    ¡°God damn. I thought Michael was exaggerating,¡± Lindsey said, in awe.


    ¡°Thought you makers were supposed to be all about expanding the boundaries of hyperreality and all that shit,¡± Philip said. ¡°Would think working with some Hardworlder¡¯s memories of waiting in a parking lot for an afternoon would put you to sleep.¡±


    ¡°Hell no, I love working with the Hardworlds,¡± said Nova, his eyes lit up by some kind of monitor invisible to Gradie. ¡°Keeps you grounded. The goals are more concrete. ¡®I need a gun¡¯. ¡®Make me a bomb that does this¡¯. ¡®Prime a self that did this here¡¯. None of that ¡®build me a space that entices the Spirit to reflect on its childhood¡¯ bullshit. Or ¡®I need this craft to have a presence of immense age.¡¯¡± Nova had put on a voice, an imitation of some former client, that sent Angel into a fit of laughter.


    ¡°Yeah, man. Not to mention how fucking batshit crazy makers get when they only work with the Other. Spend every day reworking memories ten times removed from any reality, and it''s like your mind expands so much you''re just a vapor in the void.¡±


    ¡°Sounds fun,¡± said Philip.


    ¡°What Philip? You hate all that shit!¡± Nova laughed.


    ¡°If I was not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°Ignore him,¡± Lindsey said. ¡°He wants you to ask about it. Are you going to drop Gradie into this?¡± she waved at the non-earth, still gawking at it like it was singing to her.


    ¡°Yeah, but we gotta ease him into it. Get a lock on how his Spirit eats. I¡¯m bringing up his room right now.¡± Nova¡®s eyes fluttered and his fingers moved subtly in front of his chest.


    ¡°So, Philip says you¡¯re pretty new,¡± Angel said. ¡°How much do you know about the Otherworld?¡± He flicked his hand across his face and the earth outside rotated. Lindsey swore.


    ¡°Just what Michael told me,¡± said Gradie. ¡°I¡¯ve mainly just been flying¡ª¡±


    ¡°Oh yeah? Did he show you that little movie?¡± Nova yelled from his seat.


    ¡°Yeah. Why? Is it bullshit?¡± Gradie remembered how emotional and inspired the story of underdog dimensional travelers versus astral demons had made him, and felt a wave of embarrassment.


    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t say that,¡± Angel said. ¡°But there is a lot more to it than just what it shows. I think one of his old friends made it back in the day.¡±


    ¡°Let me guess,¡± Philip asked, smirking. ¡°Did it have an overwhelming stench of new-age bullshit clashing with a hardcore Christian certainty?¡±


    ¡°Uh,¡± Gradie tried to put the feeling of the ¡®video¡¯ into words, but the only ones that came to mind were ¡®hopeful longing¡¯.


    ¡°You knew Michael back in the day?¡± Angel asked, sounding suddenly animated.Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.


    ¡°We were acquainted.¡±


    ¡°How long was he operating? We looked through all the mem he gave us and I couldn¡¯t figure out¡ª"


    ¡°Room¡¯s ready,¡± Nova said.


    A door lit up in the wall with a sound like deep-set locks opening in a bank vault. It was a plain door, plucked out of any office building Gradie had ever been in, and he wondered if even now the twins were drawing on his memory to create it.


    ¡°All right bro,¡± said Nova. ¡°We need to get a lock on you, so get a clear image of what the room on the other side is like, something simple, but make sure it has shelves or something so I can load the constructs into it.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°Just imagine a room and open the door,¡± Angel said, shaking his head.


    Gradie looked at the door and tried to imagine a room. The first thing that came to mind was his bedroom in the Real, but he tore his mind away from that in a hurry. It was harder to do than it should have been. He got the feeling everyone was watching. It got worse.


    ¡°Are we just going to be standing here watching you two wave your hands around,¡± Lindsey said.


    ¡°Nah. Once I get a lock on him I¡¯ll pull his feed up,¡± Nova said.


    ¡°Meaning,¡±


    The light in the room changed and Gradie turned around. The earth and space had disappeared from the viewport, and it was now a massive screen of TV static, with a neon green CH 03 in the corner.


    ¡°Once he goes in, this will show what he sees. First-person style,¡± Nova said proudly. Gradie felt whatever was standing in for his heart in a world of thought shake in his chest.


    ¡°Which hopefully will be this year,¡± Philip said, glaring at him.


    ¡°All right.¡± Gradie turned back around and faced the door.


    A room. Ok. A room to help me go into the Hardworlds.


    Guns. A gunroom.


    It flashed in his mind and he held the image. A carpeted room lined with glass-covered shelves, filled with guns, and a large work table in the center.


    Annnnnggggg


    It sounded like he was being buzzed into a gated condo and a light over the door went green.


    ¡°Got him,¡± said Angel.


    ¡°All right bro. Go on in,¡± said Nova. He sounded excited, and Gradie tried to feel some of his positivity, but the memory of neon blue eyes burning through his past weighed him down. He nodded like a doomed man and grabbed the handle.


    ¡°Gradie,¡± Angel called. Gradie turned around.


    ¡°We¡¯re not gonna be digging into you like Lucy did. This is gonna be fun, alright?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, bro. Get excited! You¡¯re about to do some interdimensional assassin shit!¡± Nova made a fist and Angel shook his head with a weary smile.


    Gradie nodded and turned back to the door, and took a breath. His own voice boiled up from the rolling boil of his fears.


    Whatever it takes, you¡¯ll do it. Whatever comes, you¡¯ll be ready, Hardworlder.


    He opened the door and stepped into the gunroom.


    It was almost exactly as he had pictured it, but infinitely more tangible. The experience of having something imagined just moments before burst into life as a complete reality was overwhelming. He laughed and fought back tears. His mind danced like a lottery winner and he felt an intoxicating sense of power.


    ¡°Holy fuck!¡±


    ¡°I told you it would be fun,¡± said Angel, his voice coming in through a loudspeaker in the ceiling.


    ¡°Step over to the table. There¡¯s something for you.¡±


    While the Vault control room and the beach before it had only highly suggested walking, the gravity of the gunroom demanded it. Gradie approached the table, and noticed that not everything here was as he expected.


    There was a single pistol on the table. An old friend.


    ¡°Is that¡ª¡±


    ¡°Your Five seven from the last job,¡± Angel said. ¡°This is your record room. It will hold all the mem from the selves you drop into, after Lucy processes them.¡±


    Gradie remembered Michael taking him to Lucy¡¯s floating palace immediately after he had made it back from the Office Job. She had told him to remember everything, and the first thing that had floated out at him was the gun firing in his hand. The rest of that other him had poured out backwards from that moment, flowing into the dark sky above him. A single star had bloomed in the dark, then the sky had rotated and he lost it forever. All in all, it had been a far more pleasant experience than their first meeting.


    ¡°Oh yeah, speaking of Lucy,¡± said Nova. ¡°She gave us your readout, and I gotta say, I like the way your mind arranges memory. Very tactile. And time has a spatial component to it. Almost synesthesia-like. Really strong creative visualization too. Could be a damn good maker if you put the work in.¡± He spoke more to himself than to Gradie at the end.


    ¡°Based on her analysis, object-bound memories in a classic mem palace structure work best for you,¡± said Angel. ¡°But if that¡¯s not the case we can always try something else. Every Hardworlder stores their mem differently. I¡¯ve seen rooms, sounds, flavors, outfits, videos, even Polaroids.¡±


    ¡°Why can¡¯t I just remember them normally? Like keep them in my head?¡± Gradie felt the question was so obvious he almost hadn¡¯t asked it.


    Count yourself lucky, kid,¡± Philip said. ¡°Most Orgs cut their Hardworlders off from the mem completely.¡±


    ¡°What? Like erase my memories? How?¡±


    ¡°Memory from Hardworlds isn¡¯t static,¡± said Angel. ¡°If you can pull it and get into it, you can change it. That¡¯s kind of the trade-off. Memory from the Real is more boring, but it¡¯s also more concrete and immovable.¡±


    ¡°But why erase them? Isn¡¯t the point of this that I need¡ª¡±


    ¡°Most teams do it as a precaution,¡± Angel continued. ¡°So their agents don¡¯t go spilling memories of their jobs all over the Other. But we don¡¯t really have that issue. Benefits of a smaller more dedicated team. You got lucky, man. Your teammates are here for good. If you could talk to other Hardworlders, you¡¯d hear some horror stories.¡±


    ¡°No shit,¡± said Philip.


    ¡°But you still lock them in this Vault. Isn¡¯t that kind of like keeping them from me?¡±


    ¡°No, cause we¡¯re not keeping shit from you,¡± Nova snapped. ¡°The Spirit doesn¡¯t mesh well with memories from the Hardworlds. They dissolve and decay almost immediately. Which is why you have to go to Lucy right after you drop out, when they¡¯re fresh.¡±


    ¡°But Philip keeps his in his head, right?¡±


    ¡°My methods are beyond your understanding and far beyond your ability.¡±


    ¡°If you want to hoard your job records in your head,¡± said Lindsey. ¡°Where Lucy and the twins can¡¯t use them or help you analyze them, then go ahead and try. But keep in mind that Philip is Philip, and I¡¯d prefer not to have another one on the team.¡±


    ¡°One of a kind.¡± Philip had laughter in his voice.


    ¡°You use the Vault too?¡± Gradie asked Lindsey, looking up uselessly at the speaker.


    ¡°Not like this. The twins secure my mem, but I have a hardline into it from my realm. I prefer to drop in without anyone watching.¡±


    ¡°Alright bro, enough theory,¡± said Nova. ¡°Pick up that pistol.¡±

 In the Beginning | Chapter 29: Memory and Metamorphosis

    See a gun, pick it up


    Matte blackness under fluorescent lights. A shape that promised violence. He felt the memories waking up just looking at it. But Nova was right, they were hazy and vague. Dreamlike. Muzzle flash in dusty darkness. EP¡¯s voice in his ears, words unintelligible. Blood and brains, and the smell of them.


    He picked up the gun and remembered it all, instantly.


    But something was different. The memories were dead. He could recall in bright detail everything that happened from the morning panic to the shooting and right up to the cold plunge of the Propofol, but, the memories were¡­ lonely. They were just images. The feelings that had engorged them in the moment were replaced by a dull nostalgia.


    The self, that voice whispering to him all day long, interjecting its concerns, fears, desires, and at the end, begging for its salvation, was gone. His spirit was alone, free to analyze without distraction. As exciting as it was to run through the memories undisturbed, it felt like entering the empty house of a dead friend.


    ¡°Fucking Christ.¡±


    ¡°You alright, bro?¡± Nova asked.


    ¡°Yeah. It¡¯s just¡­ god damn.¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s seeing them for the first time with just his Spirit,¡± Lindsey said. ¡°It¡¯s jarring, but you¡¯ll get used to it, Gradie¡±


    ¡°Your Spirit will absorb some of the memories,¡± Angel said. ¡°But it will distort them with time.¡±


    ¡°So, can my Spirit remember?¡± It seemed a stupid question, but with the memories of the office job still lighting up in his mind, everything was suspect.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know,¡± Philip laughed. ¡°You remember walking into that room?¡±


    ¡°Yes, your Spirit remembers,¡± Lindsey said wearily. ¡°But like Angel said it¡¯s resistant to holding memories from the Hardworlds. Your memories of the Real get in the way, especially for a Spirit as new as yours. It doesn¡¯t like remembering two lives. But, if you review the memories here in the Otherworld, the Spirit can remember experiencing them. They become a memory of something that happened here, in a way.¡±


    ¡°Exactly, which also makes them more fluid,¡± Nova said. ¡°So you gotta be sure to check at the source from time to time. Try and catch any changes.¡±


    Gradie accepted that explanation more because he needed it to be true in order for his Hardworlding career to progress, than because he actually understood it.


    Absent-mindedly, for no other reason than he was holding it, perhaps, he aimed the pistol at the far wall and fired.


    The noise was muffled and cut off in the center, as if he was still wearing the earbuds, but the flash was just as massive as it had been in the basement, though not quite as brilliant due to the overhead fluorescent lights. The casing went rolling off across the polished concrete floor and shattered glass dropped out of a shelf in the far wall.


    ¡°Having fun?¡± Philip asked dryly


    ¡°Yeah bro, I know what you¡¯re thinking. It¡¯s all accurate,¡± Nova said proudly. ¡°You can get a feel for almost every gun on the planet here. It¡¯s pretty¡ª¡±


    ¡°Better off shooting in the Hardworlds,¡± Philip grumbled.


    ¡°So yall make the guns we use?¡± Gradie asked, ejecting the mag and running his finger along the top brass.


    ¡°They don¡¯t make shit in the Hardworlds.¡± Philip sounded offended.


    ¡°As pissy as he is, Philip is right,¡± said Angel. ¡°We don¡¯t make the guns the way you¡¯re thinking. We provide you with the memory to help you push a self with experience using them. We make them in your mind, I guess you could say.¡±This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.


    It was Nova¡¯s turn to sound offended.


    ¡°At least we would make them in your mind, if Philip or anybody besides EP ever came around.¡±


    ¡°I was just here for that bomb!¡± Philip snapped. ¡°And what do you think you kids can show me about guns? I know about every gun that¡¯s ever thrown lead.¡±


    ¡°Yeah, but you didn¡¯t even touch the Vault last time! And It¡¯s not just guns!¡± Nova sounded like he was jumping around. ¡°We¡¯re working on anti-IR shit, drone jamming¡ª¡±


    Gradie picked up the casing and felt the warmth in his palm, letting their discussion fade into white noise. He stepped over to the glass at the far wall and ran his finger along the frayed wood around the bullet hole. A question snuck up on him.


    ¡°Why doesn¡¯t it drop out?¡±


    ¡°What?¡± Angel asked, Nova still gabbing on behind him.


    ¡°Like a fragment,¡± Gradie said. ¡°If this place is so realistic, shouldn¡¯t it drop out into the Hardworlds.


    There was a pause and some whispering. Gradie thought he heard Michael¡¯s name.


    ¡°Fragments don¡¯t actually drop into the Hardworlds,¡± Angel said. ¡°It¡¯s the spirit that moves. You just happen to drop into a part of the Hardworlds that looks exactly like the fragment you used to make the jump.¡±


    ¡°And it ain''t the fragment that does the work,¡± Philip said. ¡°You would have to know that the room is already in the Hardworlds. These kids can make the room as real as they want, it won''t do shit if you don¡¯t have an iron grip on your Spirit. Which you won¡¯t have for a long time, so just forget you ever heard about fragments.¡±


    Gradie felt a similar annoyance. Once again, it seemed Michael had simplified things and misled him. Maybe it wasn¡¯t his fault. From Michael''s point of view, with his years of experience, it all probably did seem that simple. And he had admitted to having no idea how to deal with newbies. Then why take him on?


    ¡°Ok, next up is some basic ops shit, bro,¡± Nova said. ¡°There¡¯s some other stuff on that table.¡±


    Gradie set the gun down in the broken case and felt the memories settle. It was like having a nagging thought or worry go silent in an instant. He could still remember that day, but it was more like remembering himself thinking about it moments ago, than remembering experiencing it. The images and sensations had lost their edge. He found himself reaching back for the gun. Nova stopped him.


    ¡°Hold up, man. We¡¯re onto something else now. Lingering and getting all nostalgic is not a good habit to get into.¡±


    ¡°Grab the keys first, please,¡± Angel said, his tone a bit too much like commanding a dog for Gradie¡¯s liking. The more they talked, the more Gradie sensed that degree of separation he felt when EP spoke to him over the earbuds, a separation that Philip and Lindsey lacked.


    A key fob on a ring waited for him on the table, next to some other things he hadn¡¯t noticed in his excitement at seeing the gun. He picked up the keys and his mind took off.


    He remembered the locations and contents of every compartment, saw the back hatch rise and fall, felt the weight of the doors in his hands as they swung open, an urgent sense of danger humming in the back of his mind. He saw rounds paint white circles on the windows, heard them strike the body and clatter around the undercarriage.


    With the pseudo memories came the feeling of discovery, concentrated and distilled, like learning to drive and taking the cops on a chase all in the space of a heartbeat. It was ecstasy. He laughed out loud.


    ¡°Yeah, bro, I know,¡± Nova said. ¡°Better than sex and drugs and all that shit.¡±


    ¡°Take some time and really run your mind over it,¡± Angel advised. ¡°The Spirit can absorb mem instantly, like the memory of a day in the Real, but you need to experience the memory for it to stick. Can you remember all the entering and exiting procedures?¡±


    The word ¡°procedures¡± stuck in Gradie¡¯s head and latched on to memories of leaping out of the SUV at 40 mph, sliding into the back seat with a weapon and firing out the door, even rolling into the back as the hatch slammed closed. Those memories latched on to others like a thing building itself, and he saw himself lay down cover fire as another operator (who started out faceless, but morphed into Luke) slid into the driver¡¯s seat, dropped behind the door to reload, and countless other scenarios, all in an instant. It seemed too easy.


    ¡°It¡¯s like I dreamed it¡ª¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s a good sign,¡± said Angel. ¡°We scrub the memory down to its essentials. Helps the Spirit create a narrative around it to give it context. Think of it like¡ª¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t think of it like shit,¡± Philip said. ¡°Let¡¯s move on.¡±


    Gradie set the keys down on the table. As the memory of the SUV faded from vibrant daydream to hazy echo, a question jumped into the gap.


    ¡°Why the fuck didn¡¯t I do this before?¡±


    ¡°When?¡± Nova asked.


    ¡°Before the first job!¡±


    ¡°Cause you need to get the basics down first,¡± Philip snapped. ¡°Like not dropping out the moment you drop in. I still think this shit is premature.¡±


    ¡°Philip¡¯s kinda right bro,¡± Nova said. ¡°You need both. If you try to run and gun just based on what your spirit remembers, it¡¯ll be like trying to crack a safe because you saw someone else do it. You need to push a self with that knowledge, and this training gives you something to build a self around.¡±


    Once again, Gradie was sorry he¡¯d asked. He resolved, then and there, to just do what they said, and not think twice about anything until he was the best Hardworlder any of them had ever seen.


    ¡°Alright, what¡¯s this?¡± He picked up a black nylon strap with a stick on the side, and instantly knew.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 30: Reflex and Recall

    Remembrance of shootouts past


    A Tourniquet. Again, the memory sparked a chain reaction that lit up others;


    Trauma medkit. Quickclot. Israeli bandage. Chest seal. CAT and RAT tourniquets. Epinephrine. And other more improvised devices and methods.


    He started to set it back on the table.


    ¡°Don¡¯t rush it,¡± Angel said. ¡°Remember, you have to experience the memories here for the Spirit to remember. Take your time and really put yourself there.¡±


    Gradie ran his mind over the rough new memory until it blended with his imagination, creating daydreams that played out with familiar faces.


    Lindsey tightening a tourniquet on his arm. Luke¡¯s leg shot to shit and Gradie dealing with the wound in the back of the SUV, sirens wailing. Gradie alone, a bullet in his gut, trying to get the needle in.


    Then, unprompted, dreamlike;


    Sam with a sucking chest wound, shirt torn open, him fumbling with the package.


    ¡°Alright dude, damn,¡± Nova said, almost a whisper. Gradie froze.


    ¡°Can you see in my head?¡±


    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t say that. I got a skimmer on you. Lets me know how you¡¯re processing¡ª¡±


    ¡°You can see my thoughts?¡±


    ¡°Kinda,¡± Nova said sheepishly. Gradie groaned. It was Lucy all over again.


    ¡°Don¡¯t get all self-conscious,¡± said Philip, voice cracking in the loudspeaker. ¡°These guys spend all day looking at other people¡¯s memories. Completely desensitized.¡±


    ¡°Do you want to stop, Gradie?¡± Lindsey said. Her concern was so unexpected, so genuine. His anger and embarrassment died in its cool waters, and he was ashamed of his own weakness.


    ¡°No, I¡¯m fine thanks. Let¡¯s keep going.¡±


    Gradie set the tourniquet on the table, and this time the memory, though faded at the edges, still held its shape in his mind as daydreams. Would that be enough?


    ¡°All right! It¡¯s all you, bro!¡± Nova said with an enthusiasm that Gradie suspected was an attempt to hide his own guilt. Gradie picked up the earbuds,


    Comms, alerts, sound dampening, tapping his table in code at a restaurant, analyzing touchtone sounds from across a crowded room, voice recognition, EP directing him through a darkened warehouse,


    Then the phone,


    GPS, encrypted system, key fob spoofer, RFID scanner, magspoofer, ATAK, Geiger counter, bug detector, and on and on¡­


    Another set of keys, Toyota logo, plastic cats-head self-defense tool and grocery store membership cards on the ring,


    Native vehicle, defensive and combat driving, pit maneuver, controlled collisions and injury avoidance, stealing a car unnoticed from a parking lot, driving a sedan through a dirt lot, pistol in one hand¡ªThe story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    A voice came over the loudspeaker, quieter than the others, as if distant from whatever passed as a microphone in the Otherworld.


    ¡°Sorry to keep yall waiting. Where do you want me?¡±


    Gradie matched the voice to a face, and his heart jumped.


    ¡°All right, time for a little test,¡± Nova said. ¡°When you¡¯re good and ready, pick up any gun you feel like, and step through this door.¡±


    A portion of the shelves swung open, and another plain door waited behind it. Gradie set the keys down and marched to the door in long strides and grabbed a Knights Armament SR-15 off the shelf.


    Fire selector manipulation, sight alignment, tactical reload, low ready, flinch response, firing from a vehicle, engaging targets in a McDonalds, clearing rooms in an apartment and seeing muzzle flash burst out of a closet¡­


    ¡°Fuck yes.¡± Gradie squeezed the rifle in his hands and bounced on his feet.


    ¡°Ok then, killer,¡± Angel said. ¡°Step outside, please.¡±


    Gradie held the gun at low ready, turned the knob and kicked it open and came out scanning for targets.


    The sunlight was blinding. When his eyes adjusted, it looked like any suburban street he had ever seen. Wood laminate sides and brick faces over close-cut lawns and cars packed in the driveways and along the street. Police sirens wailed down the road, and the SUV sat there waiting for him like a glossy black apparition.


    The engine started with a sound that lit up supercharged 5.3L V8 in his memory. A familiar face smiled at him from the driver¡¯s seat just before disappearing behind a rising plane of mirror tint. Gradie¡¯s heart jumped again.


    ¡°Cops coming up the road, bro,¡± Nova said calmly, his voice now coming from all around. ¡°You¡¯re gonna take fire from one of the houses. Return fire, get in, engage out whatever window you feel like, cover Sam¡¯s exit when you stop, and then we¡¯ll run through some other shit just to make sure the memory¡¯s maintained.¡± He said it like it was no big deal, but the sun glaring off the SUV, the wind on his skin and the smell of gunpowder with it, made it impossible for Gradie to remind himself that nothing here could hurt him.


    ¡°You said I¡¯m gonna take fire from where?¡±


    Bullets skipped off the ground and gunshots bounced off the house faces and driveways. Gradie brought the rifle up in a reflex and fired off five rounds in semi-auto at a window a few houses down, where he had seen the flash in his peripherals. Only immediately afterwards did he realize it felt like something he had done a thousand times.


    ¡°Good shit bro!¡± Nova yelled.


    OOOOHHHHNNNNNN


    Sam lay on the horn and Gradie threw the door open and slid into the center seat.


    ¡°Moving!¡± she yelled, and Gradie braced himself with one hand on the seat in a completely mindless reflex. The SUV barreled forward and the door slammed shut.


    ¡°Reload.¡± Philip¡¯s voice came out of the radio. Gradie reached down reflexively and found a mag pouch now strapped to his chest. The memories came after the motion, and he didn¡¯t realize what had happened until the bolt was already sliding closed and the other mag was bouncing on the floorboard.


    ¡°Good,¡± said Philip, with the least enthusiasm possible.


    ¡°Left!¡± Sam yelled and Gradie saw himself brace against the seat again for a sharp left turn, for a moment unsure if it was memory or happening in the present. As she barreled down the next street, he realized that here, there was little difference.


    ¡°Behind us!¡± Sam yelled.


    Someone leaned out of the side of the cop car behind them in a very non-LEO way and let loose a burst of full-auto fire. Bullets smacked into the exterior glass of the back hatch. Gradie slid the interior slot open and pressed a button in the wall. The exterior window eased open and he put his rifle barrel through the slot.


    He braced himself with his hip against the wheel well and a foot in the rubber stomp built into the floorboards and opened fire.


    The guy leaning out of the car dropped his rifle and fell out of the window as rounds sparked off the door frame and shattered the windshield. Gradie pivoted and put two controlled bursts into the driver''s side. The car swerved and crashed into a parked truck on the road with a satisfying crunch.


    ¡°All right, good shit. Let¡¯s speed it up,¡± Nova said. The world dimmed and they were swerving downwards through a parking garage. From the slice of downtown skyline that glowed between the dark planes of cement, Gradie knew they were at least ten stories up.


    ¡°Uh-oh!¡± Sam said, in a tone that made Gradie picture her ¡°accidentally¡± spilling a drink in someone¡¯s lap. Before he could wonder if Nova could see that far into his head, the SUV came to a sudden and violent stop.


    He flew through the air and slammed into the door.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 31: Simulacra and Shots Fired

    Is ammo cheaper in the Hyperreality?


    For a moment, he felt something like the shadow of pain, and knew the impact of his head hitting the triple-thick window should probably have killed him.


    They had slammed into a car that had backed out into the center of the row, and was now crumpled into the wall ten feet ahead, with no driver. Sam turned in her seat and looked back at him. His heart jumped.


    Blood was pouring out of her nose. She smiled.


    ¡°I think this airbag just deviated my septum. Guess I¡¯ll have to¡ª¡±


    Bullets struck the back window like hail and muzzle flash blinked down the row.


    ¡°Coming!¡± she said, sing-song, and stepped out the door. More gunfire raked the SUV and she dropped to the ground.


    ¡°Owie!¡±


    ¡°Sam, cmon,¡± said Angel. ¡°At least act like¡ª¡±


    ¡°You just gonna sit there!¡± Philip growled.


    Gradie sprung up and threw the center passenger side door open.


    Four guys moved down the row, leapfrogging to cover behind pillars and cars, muzzles flashing relentlessly. The SUV shed bullet fragments and the cars next to Gradie coughed up glass.


    ¡°Shit!¡±


    Fire, cover, fire, a voice in his mind reminded him. He raised his rifle and fired as he stepped out, as he moved back toward the front of the SUV, even as he threw open the passenger side door. One guy dropped dead and the others snapped down, becoming just dots of muzzle flash peeking over cover.


    ¡°I think we got an oil leak,¡± Sam said from under the SUV.


    Gradie got behind the center door and reloaded quickly, then stepped up on the rail, and returned fire through the gap between the center door and the doorframe. One shooter dropped back behind a car, but the other two kept up the pressure.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Gradie ducked back into the SUV as a round took his ear off. Most of the window glass was solid white, but the fire didn¡¯t let up.


    ¡°Did you get em?¡± Sam whispered in his earbuds. Through the foggy fractal haze of the SUV¡¯s back windows, guns flashed and dark figures emerged slowly from cover.


    Gradie clawed at the memory of every pouch and object in the SUV. One caught his attention, and a plan formed around it.


    He took the rifle sling off his shoulder and reached into the bottom compartment of the center console. When he had the new weapon in hand, he let go of the sling and the rifle clattered to the ground outside. As he crawled between the seats and along the floorboards, he heard one of the men shout and the gunfire lessened. He raised his head just enough to see the dark silhouettes marching confidently down the row, and put the barrel of the GM94 up to the slot in the back window.


    He pulled the trigger. A blazing flash of fire lit up the crystal white window and the bang set off car alarms and shook the air. Two of the guys died instantly, but the last one sprinted towards the SUV with his rifle raised.This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.


    ¡°I got him,¡± Sam said. A gun went off under the SUV and the guy dropped. The gun kept going for a few more seconds, then Gradie heard it smack against the concrete.


    ¡°Help,¡± she said dryly.


    Gradie rushed out of the side door and drug Sam out from under the SUV. The empty CZ slid out with her and blood smeared behind her.


    ¡°She¡¯s bleeding out,¡± Philip said.


    Memories of first aid and trauma drills, and then of the real thing poured out of his head, but they banged against something else. Fear.


    ¡°These are a little squirrelly,¡± Nova said.


    ¡°He soaked the gun stuff up like a sponge,¡± Angel noted. ¡°Medical¡¯s gonna take a little work.¡±


    ¡°He¡¯ll need to prime all that anyway,¡± Philip said, with something like sympathy.


    Gradie had strapped two tourniquets on, administered an injection, applied seals and pressure and quickclot, but had done them in the wrong order. It was like his mind had reached for the knowledge, but found only shadows.


    ¡°Might be just panicked,¡± Lindsey said.


    ¡°Hey, just relax, focus on¡ª¡± Sam said. Nova interrupted her.


    ¡°Why are you talking? You¡¯re dead.¡±


    ¡°Oh.¡± Sam rolled her head to the side and stuck her tongue out, then dropped through the floor, leaving only a smeared puddle of blood behind.


    ¡°What¡ª¡±


    ¡°Ok, she¡¯s dead,¡± said Nova. ¡°Now you gotta get out of there without being seen. Extraction procedures, go.¡±


    Police sirens echoed from outside and jammed with the car alarms. The word ¡®extraction¡¯ lit up wisps of memory like a flare in the fog.


    Look uninvolved.


    He dropped the medkit, pulled his bloody jacket off and dropped it on the ground, then stepped all over it to get the blood off his shoes. In a side compartment at the back of the SUV, he found an old wrinkled hoodie and pulled it on.


    Get clear.


    He sprinted to the concrete barrier at the core of the garage, grabbed the low wall, flipped around, and lowered himself down. He swung his legs above the next level barrier and let go. Ten stories glared up at him as he fell, and for a moment everything was as real as anything he had ever known. Half a second later his feet met concrete and he eased himself down into the space between two cars.


    ¡°Oh shit, nice!¡± Nova said. ¡°Where''d you get the parkour from? I didn''t feed you any of that?¡±


    Gradie realized he had no idea. It had felt like something he had done a thousand times, but he couldn¡¯t put a finger on where the memory had come from.


    ¡°I left some supplementary mem in the framework,¡± Angel said. ¡°He must have tapped into the contextual¡ª¡±


    ¡°Cops up the ramp,¡± Lindsey said.


    Sure enough, sirens rose through the center shaft. Now what?


    Get gone.


    He got out the phone and looked around.


    Shit.


    ¡°Uh, which one of these cars, has like,¡± he whispered as the sirens beat against his eardrums.


    ¡°What are you trying to do?¡± asked Lindsey.


    ¡°Use this, uh,¡± Even with the phone in his hand, the memories were hazy. Wasn¡¯t there some kind of app to unlock cars? Which one was it? None of the icons looked like anything that gave him any clue. No keys or masked chibis or anything.


    ¡°You¡¯re in the wrong OS, first of all,¡± Nova said. ¡°But you got the right idea. Look for the¡ª¡±


    ¡°I think this has about run its course,¡± Philip cut in.


    ¡°Oh, yeah, sure. I¡¯ve got all I need. You good bro?¡±


    Gradie almost answered, but Angel beat him to it.


    ¡°Yeah, let¡¯s cut it here. One sec.¡±


    The world stuttered and Gradie saw himself bring up the hidden OS, navigate to the parking spot marked by EP, press the keypad command to spoof the locks on a mid-''10s hatchback, slide into the driver''s seat and hook the phone up to the vehicle''s dashboard. In a few minutes, the software had started the engine, killed the gps, and even canceled the owner¡¯s phone plan. Then Gradie pulled out of the garage and mapped himself to the nearest swap point.


    It all happened in a few seconds, like someone was fast forwarding through the unimportant parts, and his mind reeled from the sickening onslaught of information. When everything settled, it felt like dream knowledge, and his brain found it familiar.


    ¡°Good shit, bro.¡± Nova clapped him on the back and he realized he was back in the satellite-esque control room. Angel¡¯s eyes fluttered and reflected a prismatic light. He nodded and smiled at Gradie.


    ¡°So, now that we have a baseline of how your Spirit contextualizes memory, and you get the general idea of how eating mem works, we can move to the actual priming.¡±


    ¡°What?¡± Gradie had been looking around for Sam, some part of him still screaming that she was bleeding to death on a concrete slab, and hadn¡¯t even tried to understand what Angel had said.


    ¡°He¡¯s saying here comes the hard part,¡± Philip said. Angel and Nova nodded. Before Gradie could ask what they meant, another door appeared in the wall.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 32: Prime Self

    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¡ª¡±


    ¡°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¡ª¡±


    ¡°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¡ª 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,¡±Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.


    ¡°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¡ª¡± 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¡ª No. A condo. A big expensive one, over downtown¡ª


    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¡ª


    ¡°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.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 33: First Day on the Job

    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¡ª¡±


    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.Stolen novel; please report.


    ¡°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.¡±

 In the Beginning | Chapter 34: Kenopsia

    When walking a labyrinth goes wrong


    He got the syringe plunged and fell back like some magician had tablecloth-pulled the car seat out from under him. After dropping through a familiar darkness for a bit, rolling and grasping at nothing, he landed on his ass in the empty parking lot.


    It was just as he had left it seconds before, but Lindsey, the car, and Philip were nowhere to be seen. Somehow, they had kept him from ¡°hitching a ride¡± as Klara had put it. Just another thing he still didn¡¯t understand about all of this.


    Out beyond the weed-burst edge of the lot, empty highways and black windowed buildings stretched out to the horizon, dead still. Strange. It didn¡¯t writhe like the land outside the gas station had that first day, and he wondered if that had been something unique to Michael¡¯s dreamworld.


    He looked around for an exit. This was his dream, right? So, if he just expected an exit to appear, maybe¡­


    A fluorescent buzz, like a lightbulb in a cartoon, drew his attention to the abandoned fast-food place at the other end of the lot, which he now recognized as an old Taco Bell. A red EXIT sign had appeared above the plywood-covered door. It was the only unreal thing in sight. The molten-red letters glowed like thin slivers of the Otherworld.


    Ok, here we go.


    As he walked across the lot, his footsteps echoed flatly and there was an ironclad absence of wind, like the entire world had dropped onto a sound stage. The grey overcast sky was a single gradient that might have been just inches above the light poles. Despite the total stillness, or perhaps because of it, he felt someone was watching him. He suspected it might be himself.


    The plywood door swung inward with a nudge.


    It was pitch black inside, besides the slice of grey light diffusing against the rust-colored floor tile, and he knew it was because he had forgotten to imagine the interior lit-up. He fumbled on the dusty wall and found a light switch. Half a row of cracked fluorescents flicked on above him and the dining area lit up reluctantly, pastel blues and oranges winking among a toppled dusty ruin, like fine china in a deep ocean wreck. The room retreated into a rainstorm dark phantom of itself in the plywood-backed window glass.


    A doorway next to the kitchen resisted the light and remained a solid pane of black as the overheads hummed. His way out.The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.


    He felt around on the wall for another light switch as darkness pressed against his face, unyielding. He found it as soon as he expected to, and the darkness vanished with a clack.


    More flickering light fluttered down a concrete staircase with a chain drooped across the top step. A yellow and black metal sign hanging on the chain advised ¡®CAUTION¡¯. It stirred up a memory, and a nervous fear, but he wasn¡¯t sure if it was something he had seen in the Real or one of his other dissolved distant lives.


    He unhooked the chain and let it clatter to the stairs, and the sound echoed after him as he skipped down. The concrete was wet in places and there was a smell of bleach from somewhere that kicked up more frayed bits of memory. He turned at the landing and went down again, then again, and again. There were no doors, and a fear chased him down, the kind of fear that appears suddenly in dreams and explodes instantly into truth.


    There would never be a door, and if he went back up, he would find nothing but endless staircase and bare concrete wall.


    Bullshit. The Otherworld is right outside. I just have to get to it.


    He took the stairs three at a time, as another dream-fear clawed at him.


    The Otherworld is a fantasy. There¡¯s nothing here but nightmare. The only way out is to wake back up and run far away from those drug addicts sleeping¡ª


    He brushed it off and took the next steps with a gravity-defying leap, and found a door waiting for him, ignorant of his lapse of faith, shaming him with its dumb straightforwardness.


    All right. I¡¯ll step out of this door and into the void above the Allcity, just like I did with EP.


    Another voice advised him that EP was a figment and the Allcity didn¡¯t exist in this dream, sorry. He pushed through the door before it could say anything else.


    It was essentially the exact opposite of the Otherworld¡¯s void. A long, wide, cement hallway, strewn with debris that evaded identification in the darkness, with walls of bare beams and decaying drywall. Pipes and wires. A strange arched ceiling. Lit by a full-moon glow coming from nowhere. There was a sound of running water that might have been rain falling far above, or a deep lap pool draining or filling in some hidden chamber behind the walls.


    He knew with his dreamsense that somewhere along this maze of tunnels was every abandoned place he had ever seen, waiting in buried darkness, waiting for him. Somewhere in the maze, the Mall rotated and called his name. But this time, its call was faint.


    He exhaled, and it was mist in the air. The cold worked its way in through his skin, and he knew that there was a massive frozen thing somewhere in the sprawling maze of tunnels. Its coldness had spread to the ends of the earth, and he had to go to it. It was the only thing that could wake him up.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± He shook himself and his voice echoed in the tunnel, then came back, altered. A memory shook out of part of him.


    ¡°The Dreamworlds are connected to the self¡­¡±


    Michael¡¯s words brought a revelation. The anger in the walls and the hate in the cold was the self speaking to him just as much as the fear in that other voice and the desperate plea to wake up. This place was made of him, and he didn¡¯t want the Spirit to leave it.


    A cold fear rose from his chest.


    This might be what it feels like to drop out.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 35: Gradie in Dreamland

    Till human voices wake us


    He moved down the dim dripping tunnel at a pace just below a run, knowing that if he ran, that was it. It would all become real and he would be running for his life, and then this place would take him.


    He tried to pull the memories of his other trips, Luke¡¯s lambo ride and EP¡¯s river, out of the swirling panic in his head, but other, more tangible memory got in the way, slicing them into hazy fragments of dreams.


    Just wake up!


    He froze, but the sensation of moving continued, as if the tunnels were flying through space. He reached out and grabbed a pipe to steady himself.


    ¡°You need something to hold on to.¡±


    Philip¡¯s warning in the Vault returned to him, feeling more like a taunt than salvation. Still, it reminded him.


    That feeling, now so far away, chosen as his anchor so long ago. He needed it now.


    He saw them walking across the lot, felt the longing in Michael¡¯s voice as he told the story of the Hardworlds war. He felt the energy in his chest as he dropped out of the ceiling, Five Seven screaming, as he showed EP his kill, as he stepped into Hardworld after Hardworld ready to face whatever Philip had to throw at him, and he felt that nameless, indescribable feeling on the edge of each vision, that hybrid realization-remembrance, that Anamnesis, his light in the dark.


    No. I¡¯m not asleep. I''m not you. I''m something more. I¡¯m a Spirit. A Hardworlder. And I have a job to do.


    As if aware that he had found a weapon, the Dreamworld around him lashed out in desperation, striking him with a mocking doubt.


    How can you believe that? Are you going to run from your problems with fantasy and delusion forever? Pushing 30 and playing pretend hitman? Have yourself committed. It¡¯s not too late to salvage some semblance of a normal life!


    The voice followed him as he moved, his own voice, dragging him away from the light. He tried to beat it back.


    Yes, I¡¯m delusional, insane. A failure, unfit for normal life. Yeah, I¡¯m chasing shadows just to feel alive.


    No, I won''t go back. I¡¯m going to find a door to take me deeper into my delusions. I''m going to find that energy, that feeling of something beyond all this, and sink into it. So fuck off.


    He searched the walls desperately for a door, holding the memory of the hallways, and the Allcity just beyond, in his head, but all he found was more bare wall, exposed pipes, disused fuse boxes¡­


    Sounds echoed from unseen endless tunnels, slithered through the walls, vibrated in his teeth. The world grabbed at him, tackled him, threw him down, closed in on him. There was nothing but this dark forgotten left-behind place, and he¡ª


    ¡°There you are!¡±


    She stepped out of a door in an angled shaft of light that broke the dark tunnel in half. The cold melted away and a moist coconut-scented summer air moved in with her. For a moment, she stood there lit up, an explosion in human form, then the door slammed closed and the light vanished, but its sibling remained.


    The tunnel lost its edge. No more ¡°moon/street-light snaking in from some unseen cluttered grate¡±. The light came from hazy, dim fluorescent tubes flickering in the ceiling. The phantom water sounds were replaced by the distinctive noise of ¡°a boiler or pumproom or something¡± behind the walls. Even the chill was gone, cut off suddenly by her voice.This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    Celeste stood there beaming, in a floral sundress and flip-flops. The actual last person Gradie had ever expected to see.


    ¡°Klara sent me to get you. She saw you were having trouble.¡±


    ¡°Uh yeah, a little bit.¡± He was still reeling from the contrast of it all.


    ¡°Normally, it''s best to just let you struggle through your first time, but we¡¯re on a deadline, so let''s go.¡± She motioned to the door she had come in through. Gradie was too caught up in her cocoa butter and tequila scent and tan-lined soft hourglass-ness to wonder what was behind it, and when he pulled it opened and stepped through, realized the trick.


    He knew, instantly, what this new hallway was. Where the dark ice tunnels before had screamed their identity like a battle cry, this one revealed itself to him instantly and gently like an expression of affection, communicated with that same dream knowledge.


    It was an underground access tunnel, connected to a massive sprawling dream mall, ready to take him anywhere. He knew of trap-doors and stairwells, hallways hidden behind maintenance closets and bathrooms, new-deal-era tile giving way to concrete steps and freedom. This was his dreamworlds, which meant the place before must have been some kind of personal nightmare realm, conjured by the Self.


    And Celeste had tricked him into finding it by letting him open a door without remembering to be afraid he wouldn¡¯t find it on the other side.


    ¡°Thanks,¡± he said. She smiled knowingly as she passed him.


    ¡°It was all you, don¡¯t forget it.¡±


    He tried to believe it as he followed her down the hallway, trying not to stare at her ass. It seemed wrong after such a deep personal experience.


    ¡°It was too much me,¡± he said, his mind returning to thoughts of the nightmare tunnels once he stuck his eyes on the ceiling.


    ¡°Yeah, that other you can get really clingy. You kinda gotta make peace with your self before you go. Let her, uh, him know that it''s okay for you to leave. If that makes sense. Or you can just brute force it like Philip I guess.¡±


    She made it sound so simple, and he guessed for her it might be, but for him ignoring the self completely, as difficult as it had proved, seemed the only way he would get anywhere.


    ¡°Ok, where¡¯s the exit?¡± She had stopped dead in the hallway, facing him. He stared at her fluttering black eyes.


    ¡°Uh,¡±


    ¡°So you got away from yourself, which is half the hassle, but now you need to imagine a path to the Otherworld, or else you¡¯ll just wander around in circles in the Dreamworlds.¡±


    ¡°I thought the Spirit wanted to get back to the Otherworld? Why would it keep me,¡± He struggled to finish his thought. His grasp on how it all worked was hazy even before his descent to self hell, now it was like combining Escher-shapes in his head.


    ¡°It does, but you¡¯re not totally separate from your self until you get out of the Dreamworlds. Bits of him are still stuck in you, if that makes sense. This is the part where you have to convince the Spirit that it¡¯s moved away. Get it?¡±


    He looked around the hallway with what little focus he could collect while the rest of him thought about Celeste¡¯s purring voice and the way her dress lay against her body in all the right places, and opened another door. Inside was another stairwell, but this one lit by silver morning sunlight bursting through thin frosted windows above. They climbed to the next landing and their steps echoed musically. The next door opened with a playful squeak.


    It looked like another hallway at first, but when the rest of his focus caught up with him, he realized it was a stretching arm of a dead mall.


    ¡°So now you want to focus on the fact that you are getting closer to the Other,¡± Celeste said to him, softly, like she was sharing a secret. It did not help his focus.


    ¡°Keep your destination in mind, keep moving, and never doubt,¡± she said, counting the three rules on three slim neon-capped fingers.


    He nodded and looked around, caught between the panic of the ice tunnels, the promise of the Otherworld, and Celeste¡¯s unfair hotness.


    She must have sensed his struggle.


    ¡°Ok, don¡¯t stress it. This time we¡¯ll take my way and you can just focus on how it feels to make the jump.¡±


    It felt like being babied.


    ¡°Nah, just give me a second. I think I can¡ª¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t stress it, dude. It took me going with someone like twenty times before I got it.¡± She lay a hand on his shoulder and laughed in an ¡°I¡¯m sharing a really embarrassing secret with you¡± way that disintegrated all his mental progress.


    ¡°I¡¯m sure you¡¯ll get it, but the meetings starting and Philip¡¯s giving me shit,¡± she sighed and bounced towards the door of a closed down shopfront that stuck out suddenly from all the others. The sign above the grated windows said ¡°Seaquest¡± in darkened bubble letters with a seahorse for an ¡®S¡¯.


    She unlocked the door with a deep ¡®chunk¡¯ sound that echoed through the dead mall, changing it in a way he couldn¡¯t explain. Another sound, rushing water behind glass, poured out the door and echoed on the tile.


    ¡°Everybody I¡¯ve taken says my path is really fun, anyway. Even EP came out smiling.¡± She grinned at him and a smile exploded on his face as he followed her inside.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 36: Aqualove

    We have lingered in the chambers of the sea


    It was an aquarium, closed for the day or forever, lit only by the wavering glow of the fish tanks. The interior was oriented lengthwise towards a door in the far wall, a metal hatch with a wheel in the center. The arch of frosted glass around it let in dappled, fluttering light from the sunlit ocean outside.


    As Gradie passed one of the tanks, he noticed it didn¡¯t have a back, but stretched endlessly across an ocean floor. The other tanks were similar portals, one opening on a vaporwave ocean of pinks and neons, another on a reef of crystalline coral.


    The wheel spun on its own and the door swung open as they approached. The doorway was a solid curtain of falling water, backlit by the same dappled blue light as the glass arch.


    Celeste smiled.


    ¡°Might be a good time to change into something waterproof.¡±


    Gradie noticed that, once again, he was wearing the same clothes his self had worn in the Hardworld. He grabbed the belt loops and ripped the entire outfit off in a single motion, revealing a black scuba suit underneath. He kicked his boots off and found watershoes instead of socks.


    Celeste stepped through the curtain of water, her ass disappearing a second after the rest of her, and he followed. The sound of the rushing water as he passed and the sensation of being suddenly drenched acted as a break between worlds. The drone of the fish tanks and the hum of the mall vanished instantly and he came out on the other side feeling that everything had changed all at once.


    It was an arched glass tunnel stretching across a sunlit ocean floor. Everything sparkled and the colors pushed the limits of hue. The water churned with dolphins and fish and other creatures that had never lived, and something else it took him a moment to identify.


    Glitter. Multicolored wafers that completed the nostalgic familiarity foaming over in his mind. It was like being inside one of those snowglobe cups he had as a kid. As he stood there staring, one of the fish swam up and ate a piece of glitter, and he noticed a similar meal happening everywhere. A larger fish brushed the tunnel and it swelled and swayed in the wake, proving it wasn¡¯t glass, but a kind of flexible plastic.


    ¡°Look behind you,¡± Celeste said, pointing. It took him a moment. The water had soaked her dress and it stuck to her in the best way. Her big black eyes flashed under dripping waves of bleached blonde hair.


    He looked back reluctantly, and the curtain waterfall died to a trickle, just two faucet-streams of water on either side. The clear sea tunnel extended back endlessly towards a hazy ocean-hued point.


    Deja-vu. He saw EP sitting on the riverboat, telling him to do the same thing with a look of bored annoyance. The memory struck a realization in him. While Celeste¡¯s overt friendliness seemed designed to mask an uncomfortable shyness, EP¡¯s wall of disdain hid something else, something he couldn¡¯t put into words, but was drawn to anyway.


    He looked back at Celeste, her arms crossed, waiting.


    ¡°Got it?¡± she asked.


    ¡°Yeah. Let¡¯s go.¡±


    Celeste looked behind him and gasped dramatically.


    ¡°Uh-oh!¡±


    Gradie spun around and saw water spraying out of the two spouts that had fed the waterfall. The water flowed down the floor and over his feet, just a few inches deep.


    ¡°So, what¡ª¡±


    ¡°Come on!¡± Celeste grabbed his hand and took off at a run down the tunnel. He ran after her, but the water was rising, and his steps became sloshing struggles. Celeste seemed immune to the water¡¯s resistance, bouncing over the rising stream like a nymph. Some massive kraken-esque thing floated over the tunnel and he barely noticed.


    God damn, just look at her.


    In a flash, her dress dissolved and she was leaping through thigh-high water in a yellow and white polka-dot bikini.


    She has got to be doing this shit on purpose.


    A breaking roar behind him drew his attention sluggishly backwards. A wall of white water barrelled down the tunnel.


    ¡°Oh, is this¡ª¡±


    ¡°Get on!¡± Celeste yelled. He found her sliding into one half of a two-seater inner tube, teleported from some unseen water park. He scrambled into the other hole, almost slipping off with a loud rubber squeak, and had just enough time to notice a decal on the black tube that said ¡°Wet n¡¯ Wild¡± before the wall of white water caught up with them.


    They shot down the clear tunnel with the inner tube angled forward enough for Gradie to see the path ahead. It ended abruptly in a wall of clear glass. He wondered if they were going to break through it into the Allcity Allaquarium or something, but at the last moment, the tube dropped down into a dark tunnel and his stomach flew up in that distinctive roller-coaster feeling.


    ¡°Woooo!¡± Celeste yelled, hands in the air, as they snaked through the most violent, twisted, and impossibly loop-de-loop filled water slide he had ever seen. It was like dropping off the river craft ten times a second, Celeste¡¯s whoops and the water¡¯s roar echoing off from every direction, exacerbating his disorientation. The feeling of falling morphed into a sensation like flying, until¡ªIf you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.


    Suddenly, sunlight, shimmering on the other side of a massive wall of water. They broke through it and dropped into a cliff ringed lagoon fed by the roaring waterfall. The water snaked out at the far end between two sheer fingers of stone and flowed into an ocean that glittered with multi-colored figures, crafts, sails, and floating-barge-dance-clubs.


    Instantly, he recognized the Allworld.


    ¡°Let me guess. The Allbeach?¡±


    ¡°You got it!¡± Celeste laughed. She stood up and shook out a fabric something Gradie thought he might have seen her pull out of her cleavage, then threw it on. Another curve-clutching dress. She smiled at him.


    ¡°See, wasn¡¯t that fun? A little falling and excitement goes a long way. The way back doesn¡¯t have to be all boring hallways and old basements.¡±


    Gradie thought about the contrast between Celeste essentially throwing him out into the Otherworld, and his struggle in the ice-cold subterranean maze, and frowned. Celeste noticed.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°Nothing. I just don¡¯t remember exactly when he left. You know, the self?¡±


    ¡°You didn¡¯t notice?¡±


    ¡°I was a little distracted.¡± He smiled. She grinned and rolled her eyes.


    ¡°Sometimes it helps to be a little distracted. Especially if you¡¯re the type to be in your head too much.¡±


    She froze and turned on him like she had remembered something awful.


    ¡°Oh! But¡ª¡± She pressed her finger to her lips and gave him a serious, pleading look. Michael¡¯s voice returned to him.


    Never let anyone know that you¡¯re a Hardworlder.


    He didn¡¯t see anyone else around, but remembering the Speakers from Michael¡¯s story and how easily Klara had found him, he realized with a cold shiver that in this world, very few places were free from supernatural prying eyes.


    Celeste marched across the sand and knocked on the face of the flat rock face that spiraled up and enclosed the lagoon. Her third knock rang hollow and a door shaped slab of stone swung outward, revealing a bead curtain strung with pearls and silver shells.


    She looked back at Gradie and shrugged.


    ¡°I never got the hang of summoning a door in thin air, even on the Allworld. Guess the Prince doesn¡¯t jive with me.¡±


    She disappeared through the curtain and he followed. Inside was a kind of multi-storied foyer, stretching up towards a skylight where sherbert-colored clouds rolled by at a pace that promised rain. The walls were white wood and wicker. There was a faint scent of coconut and burning citronella. Waves crashed somewhere with a cadence different from the Allbeach. A stream of blue water rolled over white stones and tiny fish under the glass floor.


    ¡°The Prince?¡± he asked, when his eyes found her again.


    ¡°Oh, prince means Principality. Like the principality of the Allworld.¡±


    Gradie continued to stare.


    ¡°Oh, wow I thought Michael explained everything to you.¡±


    ¡°It was mostly about the demons and the war¡­¡±


    ¡°Well, a principality is like a maker that builds a place in the Other and sets its rules. Like this is my realm, and I made it so you could say I¡¯m the prince¡ª¡±


    ¡°You made all this?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. Well, the twins gave me some mem but, it¡¯s not that¡ª¡±


    ¡°I could barely make a fucking mask,¡± Gradie said in awe.


    ¡°Oh, that¡¯s cause you made it on the Allworld. The prince is really strict about making on the ball. It¡¯s a lot easier out here.¡±


    Gradie stared at her some more.


    ¡°Oh, right. The princes. So, I made this realm, so I got to decide what¡¯s allowed here and what it connects to and all that. But even when I¡¯m gone, the rules I set up are still in effect. My rules are simple, cause it¡¯s just a small little realm, but for something massive like the Allworld, the rules are complex. Really complex. So, the rules kind of take on a life of their own, like they¡¯re living things. So even though the makers that set up the Allworld are long gone, the rules themselves are still there. Making decisions. One of the rules lets people summon doors at will to get around easier, without having to put a lot of focus into making them. I don¡¯t know how it works, but it never worked for me.¡±


    Gradie stared some more and nodded as a cold fear shook itself awake somewhere inside of him. Makers crafting worlds. Their ghosts still ruling them. Something in it made everything here, even Celeste¡¯s sexy little beach house, feel menacing.


    She took his staring for boredom or dumb horniness and waved her hand like she could banish all her words and the effort she had put into them.


    ¡°Anyway, it¡¯s been a while since I learned about all that. I had a friend that was super obsessed with the history, would never¡ª¡±


    Something else that had bugged Gradie about her explanation caught up with him.


    ¡°I thought the Allworld was made by everyone, like it¡¯s a bunch of collective archetypes, like if everyone dreamed they were in a mall, or a school¡­¡± He reached for his concept of the Allworld and found it lacking. Michael had said something like that, but hadn¡¯t he also said someone made it?


    ¡°Oh yeah. But there¡¯s a bunch of different stories about it and like I said,¡± She shrugged with the full range of her shoulders and made a face. Adorable. He forgot all about the mystery and menace of¡ª


    ¡°Hello?¡± She put her hand up to her ear. ¡°Yes, we¡¯re back. Ok, walking in now.¡± She made a motion with her hand like pressing a button on an invisible phone, then looked back at him.


    ¡°Philip¡¯s getting antsy. You should change clothes. We can take my door to the office.¡±


    She took a ring of keys out of her pocket and opened the front door.


    ¡°It¡¯s in here. I also never got the hang of making one door go to multiple places.¡±


    Gradie followed her through the entryway and glanced across a wide windowed den of marble and cozy furniture. Outside, the ocean stretched towards a shuddering orange horizon. It was completely barren of craft, structure or Spirit. A few lone palms nodded over sandbars and small isles.


    ¡°Did you make the ocean too?¡± he asked.


    She froze again in another ¡°oh shit I forgot¡± pose.


    ¡°Um, so that¡¯s the HQ ocean. The twins knew I liked beaches, so they kind of stuck my realm on the other side of the planet. It¡¯s like a little cove.¡±


    She said it like she was confessing to petty theft.


    ¡°Oh cool,¡± Gradie said. She bit her lip and he wondered for the fiftieth time if she was just accidentally sexy.


    ¡°I hate to force you into a secret, but please don¡¯t tell Michael or anyone. The twins said it¡¯s kind of against the rules.¡±


    ¡°I promise.¡± Gradie held out his pinky and she locked hers around it with a smile.


    ¡°Thanks. Oh! Shit the meeting. Cmon, change! Change!¡± She waved at his outfit and power walked to a closet door stuck in the wall on the side of the stairs. Gradie looked down at the scuba suit until it fluttered and shifted into a familiar all-black outfit of leather boots and silk clothes under a matte-cloth overcoat, halfway between a trench and a priest''s robe. He started to pull his mask out of the air when Celeste stopped him.


    ¡°Oh, you don¡¯t have to mask up. My realm is screened from seers.¡±


    ¡°Uh,¡± the mask rules were getting more confusing every time he encountered them. Celeste sensed his dilemma.


    ¡°If you¡¯re coming in from or going out into un-secure places from the office, wear a mask.¡± It sounded like something she had forced herself to memorize.


    She pulled open the door and the seating area of the Office waited on the other side. Philip¡¯s face turned around over one of the floating couches and smoke rolled off of him.


    ¡°God damn, where have yall been?¡±


    ¡°Wet n¡¯ Wild,¡± Gradie said. Philip narrowed his eyes and Luke raised his eyebrows.


    Celeste grinned back at Gradie with flushed cheeks and scrambled in through the door in an uncharacteristic lack of grace. He let his mask sink back to its unseen nether zone and followed her inside.

 In the Beginning | Chapter 37: The Thief

    Scratch a liar


    They had dropped out of the office back into Lucy¡¯s astralarium, but there was no floating window or rotating map this time.


    Michael stood before the half-circle of astral assassins and clapped his hands. His white robes, like a kimono and haori designed for an interstellar age, glowed as if he was projecting from a midday desert.


    ¡°All right, before we get to the briefing, I just want to go over some structural changes.¡±


    He motioned towards Philip, palm up, in a gesture Gradie found formal and well-practiced.


    ¡°Philip will now be acting as Captain.¡±


    ¡°Woohoo! Yay Philip!¡± Sam shouted and clapped.


    ¡°I quit,¡± Luke said with a smile.


    ¡°What¡¯s a captain?¡± Celeste asked.


    ¡°He¡¯ll be in charge of operations,¡± Michael said. ¡°Coordinating attack plans, tactics, and moment to moment decisions in the field.¡±


    ¡°Uh,¡± said Sam.


    ¡°And if we disagree with his judgments?¡± Lindsey said, Gradie felt, in an as neutral a tone as she could muster.


    ¡°Then you¡¯ll tell me immediately,¡± Philip said, for once without even a trace of mockery or pride.


    ¡°I¡¯ve been around the block a few times,¡± he continued, some of his old edge returning. ¡°Though I waste my breath saying it again. And I know that iron rulings and deaf ears bring failed jobs. If I¡¯ve been too bristled as an operator, don¡¯t hold it against me as a Captain. I know an operator¡¯s job is to question everything, and a leader¡¯s job is to have all the answers.¡±


    Lindsey looked at him in a way that, essentially, let the words ¡°we¡¯ll see¡± bleed out of her eyeballs.


    ¡°So, we call him instead of EP, or¡ª¡± Sam frowned in a way that Gradie found unexpectedly endearing.


    ¡°It means I¡¯ll tell you where to go and what to do,¡± Philip said.


    ¡°Oh like you do already?¡± Sam said with a sneer. Lindsey glanced at Michael, who started up again.


    ¡°Also, Gradie will now be assigned to the operations team, supporting Sam.¡±


    ¡°Oh, what?¡± Sam said.


    ¡°He¡¯ll be riding with you as an extra gun. Mainly to observe¡ª¡±


    ¡°So, I¡¯m like her bodyguard?¡± Gradie said.


    ¡°Ha!¡± Sam laughed at the sky and Luke snickered. Philip raised his eyebrows at Gradie like he was a six-year-old who said he could fly.


    ¡°No, you are to observe and engage only if directed,¡± Michael said. ¡°Think of this as your probationary period.¡± Michael¡¯s use of familiar corporate terminology struck a sore spot in Gradie. He did his best to nod and stare blankly.


    We¡¯ll see about that. The last time I was supposed to observe, I took the target solo.


    ¡°Can we get him a ¡°trainee¡± name tag?¡± Sam said.


    A door-sized slice of the black swung open a few yards from the team¡¯s half-circle huddle and Klara and Lucy walked in. A hallway of lavender-veined white marble and mid-morning sunlight stretched behind them into an atrium of pillars and dense garden foliage. Water rushed somewhere, and Gradie smelled incense and sea air. Like all realms he had been to, it felt like it was made of someone, and even in the brief glimpse before the door shut, he knew it was Klara.


    ¡°All right boys and girls, we¡¯re in the money this time.¡± Lucy¡¯s crimson qipao had embroidered serpentine dragons that flew slowly across the fabric. She stepped up next to Michael and flicked a bare arm at the team. Seven shimmering crystals floated out of her hand towards them. Gradie caught his, and noted that it felt even more electrified than the last one.


    ¡°God damn, what are we missing?¡± Philip said, tossing the crystal in his hand.


    ¡°Not much,¡± said Lucy. ¡°This one¡¯s been dropped in straight up. No Spiritualist.¡±


    The team made various sounds that indicated a positive relief. Gradie felt once again like the new guy, but asked anyway.


    ¡°What¡¯s a¡ª¡±


    ¡°Spiritualists drop Spirits into the Hardworlds,¡± Philip said. ¡°Like a trap door, but more hands-on. Put them into selfs that have almost nothing in common with the Spirit¡¯s Real. Makes them harder to track. Also known as cleaners.¡±


    ¡°Why didn¡¯t they use one, then?¡±


    ¡°Could have been a rush job.¡±


    ¡°Or they¡¯ve got secrets,¡± Klara said. ¡°Spiritualists need access to your entire memory to work effectively. Which means by using one, you are giving them everything they need to track you indefinitely. It¡¯s why their vows are important.¡±


    ¡°Vows?¡± Gradie said.


    ¡°Yes, Vows,¡± said Philip. ¡°Raise their right hand, some Keeper standing by, and all that shit. So, moving on¡ª¡±


    ¡°Is that why yall took my memories? So you can track me?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°One of the reasons,¡± Lucy purred. An old annoyance clearly flaring up.


    ¡°What are the others?¡±


    ¡°None of your god damned business,¡± Philip said. ¡°Moving on!¡±


    ¡°So we¡¯ve got a full read on the guy,¡± Lucy continued ¡°But this time, the target isn¡¯t the target.¡±


    She flipped a coin up into the air with a metallic sound that echoed in the void. It fluttered above their heads, then hung in place, still spinning, and expanded until it was large enough for Gradie to read the year. A grimy Washington quarter with the eagle reverse. It was the most ridiculous thing Gradie had seen in the Otherworld yet, and he looked around with a laugh bubbling up on his face.


    The rest of the team wore expressions of dead seriousness. Lindsey and Philip looked like they had just learned the target was going to be Godzilla or something.The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    ¡°God dammit,¡± Philip muttered to himself, apparently forgetting his new leadership role.


    ¡°So, bad news first,¡± Klara said gently. ¡°The target is a polytope. It¡¯s pushed as a fairly mundane item, and the client wants it found and returned immediately. Any delay on our part will result in them sending in a reserve team, which of course would mean a failure and no payoff.¡±


    ¡°Fucking beautiful,¡± Philip muttered and looked at Michael like he had dumped all of his cigars in the toilet.


    ¡°And we have been advised the, uh, courier, has been in about a week already.¡± Klara continued.


    ¡°Hope he doesn¡¯t like gumballs,¡± Luke said. Philip not only did not laugh, he glared at Luke like he had started pissing in Michael¡¯s cigar-filled toilet.


    ¡°Now for the good news,¡± Klara said. Gradie thought of every manager he had ever known to deliver the bad news first, then temper it with the good. They had all been awful at it, but somehow Klara was so damn endearing he wanted to let her make him feel better.


    ¡°There is no defense team. The target, I mean the courier, is obviously dropped out, and we have enough intel on him to make some good assumptions about how he will act, however this goes down in the bricks.¡±


    ¡°Should I skim his dreams, or do you have enough¡ª¡± Celeste asked, but Klara shook her head.


    ¡°I went walking already. You won¡¯t get anything, unfortunately. His Dreamworlds are overgrown with the self and highly erratic, even for a submerged Spirit. The self is some kind of addict or worse. And there¡¯s been some work done to beef up the defenses.¡±


    ¡°Wait, someone fortified his Dreamworlds, but didn¡¯t run him through a Spiritualist?¡± Philip said.


    ¡°I will admit this is a bit of a strange job,¡± Klara said, with enough distant neutrality in her tone to make Gradie think she was hiding something.


    ¡°Focus on the hard facts,¡± Michael boomed. ¡°This is a simple job, or a complicated one, depending on how we act. All we have to do is locate the object.¡±


    ¡°Which could be anywhere,¡± said Lindsey softly.


    ¡°And if the target is not handled correctly finding it may be impossible,¡± Michael continued. ¡°This will be a test of our finesse.¡± He smiled at the team like they were all about to break some kind of record.


    ¡°Any questions?¡± Klara asked.


    ¡°What¡¯s a polytope?¡± Gradie had held onto the question so long he felt it might burn a hole in his excitement.


    ¡°A polytope, sometimes called a tesseract, is a physical manifestation of an object in the Otherworld,¡± said Klara. ¡°In this case, it¡¯s a memory cache.¡±


    ¡°Wait, like mem?¡± Gradie frowned. The idea of taking anything from the Otherworld into the Hardworlds struck a bad sensation in his brain, like nausea brought on by learning about some dangerous new virus that spread via eye contact.


    ¡°Yes. As you know, mem is fused to objects by Keepers. In this case, the courier either pushed or was suggested into believing that the memory cache would come with him into the Hardworlds.¡±


    ¡°So, you can take memory into the Hardworlds?¡±


    ¡°Few can,¡± Lucy said darkly. ¡°It¡¯s a closely guarded art. Which tells me he probably had some help.¡±


    ¡°Everything in this world responds to intent and belief,¡± Michael said, seeing Gradie¡¯s persistent confusion on his face. ¡°He believes the mem is stored on that quarter, so the client is unable to retrieve the mem without retrieving the quarter.¡±


    ¡°What happens if we kill him and bring him back to the Other? Can¡¯t they just make him believe the memory is here now?¡±


    ¡°No. The process of infusing mem into an object can only be undone by a Keeper with the object in hand. It would be like trying to unmake an object in the Otherworld you couldn¡¯t even see.¡±


    ¡°Once you have the quarter in your possession,¡± Lucy continued. ¡°You¡¯ll simply need to drop into the dreamworlds with the expectation that it will come with you. Then return as normal. At that point it will behave like any other item in the Other.¡± Lucy spoke like she was trying to convince Gradie of something he might find difficult to believe. The concept felt like something made of air and shadows in his head, but he nodded and looked away from her neon gaze.


    ¡°Any other questions?¡± Klara asked again. Sam raised her hand.


    ¡°So if there¡¯s no defense, are we running like just pistols or¡ª¡±


    ¡°Hell no,¡± Philip snapped. ¡°Treat every job like there¡¯s an army running defense, no matter what the intel says. Or learn that lesson the hard way.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m assuming the client still wants the courier dropped out?¡± Lindsey said.


    ¡°Yes, after you¡¯ve located the quarter,¡± Klara said.


    There was a silence. Some of the team members had already started reviewing the mem crystals.


    ¡°All right then, see you all out there,¡± Michael said.


    The team started going through doors and murmuring amongst themselves. This time, Gradie watched them without fear of being left behind. The training had done its job. This time, he felt ready to take on the world. Any world.


    ¡°Gradie, I assume you¡¯re going to the Vault,¡± Michael said, suddenly next to him.


    ¡°Yeah.¡±


    ¡°After this job, get with the twins and set up your home realm, so you can access the vault without going to the HQ. Even if you don¡¯t care for the Otherworld right now, you need to start putting down roots. Whatever else you think of it, the Otherworld is the protector of the Spirit, and you need to carve out a piece of it for yourself.¡±


    Gradie nodded and wondered what his own dreamhouse might look like. It was an enticing thought. Lucy¡¯s black house and Celeste¡¯s beach resort home had felt as severed from the Allworld as the Vault did. It might be nice to have somewhere to go where the signs didn¡¯t scream at him and the Twins weren¡¯t watching.


    A voice jumped out of memory.


    Seek the Spirit! Seek the edge!


    ¡°Oh, and this time, you¡¯re going to have to find the way back yourself,¡± Michael said. ¡°You should have seen enough of other''s Dreamworlds to navigate your own.¡±


    Gradie nodded again, but the memory of that cold tunnel and whispering voice made his hair stand on end, somehow, even in this world beyond flesh.


    ¡°Good. Let¡¯s get to work.¡± Michael slapped him on the shoulder and smiled like they were about to steal a million dollars, then turned and stepped through a dingy back door into a long hotel hallway. The slam echoed long after the door had disappeared.


    Gradie stood alone in the dark starlit circle and let the excitement pulse through him.


    This was it. No fumbling over his self or shooting chalk rounds this time. This time, he would be in control. This time, he would move through that familiar world of concrete and gravity and flesh and fear, not as a piece of it, but as a visitor. An awakened spirit. Walking on the water of the world while others swam below.


    A Hardworlder.


    He squeezed the crystal in his fist and flicked open the door to the vault with a wave of his hand.


    Epilogue


    ¡°I don¡¯t like the ramifications of this.¡±


    ¡°You can just say that you¡¯re scared. I won¡¯t tell anyone.¡±


    ¡°And I don¡¯t think you understand the ramifications, hence your confidence¡ª¡±


    ¡°I am never confident. I have seen enough to know that the highest god and the lowest spirit have about the same level of clairvoyancy. I find my peace, what you mistake as confidence, in the uncertainty of¡ª¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not interested in your fucking philosophy. I¡¯m trying to make you aware of something, because good allies are a luxury in our line, and I¡¯d like to see you¡ª¡±


    ¡°Well then, out with it. We don¡¯t have much time, as you¡ª¡±


    ¡°All right, all right. Listen, this project isn¡¯t as isolated as they would have us believe. Understand?¡±


    ¡°I understand that nothing is isolated in this¡ª¡±


    ¡°Oh Jesus Christ, Listen! I¡¯m seeing layers of abstraction and compartmentalization magnitudes higher than I¡¯ve ever seen them¡ª¡±


    ¡°Aren¡¯t you always bitching and moaning about the lack of¡ª¡±


    ¡°Yes, which is exactly why this is all standing out to me. This kind of obfuscation¡ª¡±


    ¡°Cut the corporate jargon, dear god. What, do you believe, are they hiding?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know, but¡ª¡±


    ¡°You are a tedious asshole, and I have to¡ª¡±


    ¡°Look! I know you! We¡¯re not like them, neither of us¡ª¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t fucking¡ª¡±


    ¡°The other guys want to be part of it. The legends. The war stories. Even the fucking skimmers and keepers down in the halls, they all want¡ª¡±


    ¡°I have to go. This has been¡ª"


    ¡°But you don¡¯t, and I don¡¯t. So what I¡¯m saying to you is be on the lookout for an exit, because the kind of shit I¡¯m seeing gets Spirits put away. You know what I do in this company, what I have access to. I¡¯m telling you, this is a ripple, and whatever stirred it up smells like thirteen years ago. Maybe even twenty years ago. You understand?¡±


    ¡°¡ª¡±


    ¡°I know it sounds¡ª¡±


    ¡°It sounds like you are projecting. You are the one who wants to be part of something big and important, so you see it closing in on you. It¡¯s not. You are at the center of nothing. You are a quintessentially peripheral person. You¡ª¡±


    ¡°Fuck yourself then. And if you tell anyone we talked about this, I¡¯ll stash the full mem of the Alton job. You know I have it.¡±


    ¡°I know that if you threaten me again I¡ª. Hello? Delusional little twat.¡±


    The connection was severed, and a third party stored the mem of the conversation away, in a rather peripheral section of the archive.

 The Bounty | Chapter 1: Cooper

    Straight up, no spiritualist


    His steps beat dull sounds out of the carpet as he ran down another hallway. This one was all grey and steel, but it felt just like the others before it. The bent-off hallway at the edge of an old motel, broken lights and hanging numbers. A long vacuum streaked strip at the center of a multistory chain hotel, sterile and breathless. The one with a mirror ceiling and maroon carpet, amber light sparking off brass fixtures. And others. His memory had lost hold of whatever had been before them, and his life was now enclosed by their walls. He took doors at random, trying to break out, but they didn¡¯t lead to the kinds of rooms they should have.


    They lead to suburban homes flush with midday sun. They threw him into a superstore frozen food section, where he scampered across linoleum towards the back stockrooms. They opened onto alleys behind strip malls, and warehouse rows between looming pallet racks. Empty, watching places, that always ended in another door, another hallway.


    And there were always his pursuers.


    He tried not to think of them. If he did, and remembered or realized who they were, their solidity in his mind would create their solidity behind him. Now, they were only unnamed unformed things which could never get as close as the definite objects and scenery he ran past. He hoped.


    Then there was the voice.


    ¡°Hurry the fuck up and use one! I can¡¯t make forever! They¡¯re on you!¡±


    He knew what that meant. He clutched the coin. He told himself the same thing he had told himself in every hallway in his entire life.


    The next door will wake me up.


    But this time, he said it not in panic, but in relief. Like ¡®oh, that¡¯s right.¡¯


    And it did.


    The alarm screamed in scratchy chimes. A default tone, broken into something original by the shattered state of the phone. He had been having the same dream for weeks. Sometimes it was just one hallway that went on forever. Sometimes he would get stuck in one of the spaces, and the world would roll up on itself, trapping him in a single layer of darkness.


    But he knew the dreams were just copycats. His mind was afraid of that other dream, the first one, and was recreating it in pieces every other night, maybe as some kind of coping mechanism. The one thing it could never get right was the voice. Now, it was usually just his own voice. He couldn¡¯t remember what it had sounded like the first time, or what it had told him.


    The dream fell out of his mind during the first seconds of waking and was gone by the time he had tapped off the alarm. Hunger, and that vague irritation, like being squeezed by your own thoughts in opposing directions, moved in and kicked out the dreams and anything even remotely dreamlike. He got ready for work.


    His apartment was furnished in plastic and glass. Bottles and containers. There was a bare spot on the carpet where the Playstation had been before he sold it. Looking at it reminded him of the break-ins he had done the past week. Minor, stupid shit. He had taken just enough to put some weight in his bag. It was all still in his trunk. He had dreamed, or maybe just imagined one time near sleep, that someone had broken into his car and taken all of it. It hadn¡¯t bothered him. Once it was his, he didn¡¯t care about it. Having something stolen from you makes it yours, even more than owning it does. When it had been in his trunk, it had belonged to the people he had taken it from. When it was taken from him, it was his, and he couldn¡¯t value anything he had, not even in dreams.


    But the stuff was still in his trunk, for now. So it wasn¡¯t his yet. But the idea that it could be his so easily took some of the value out of it. Cheapened the things.


    He shut the gun in the center console and drove out of the lot. Dying scattered fragments of last night¡¯s rain clouds, purple fingers with silver bottoms, flaked off the sun, and the sky vibrated like something wonderful was going to break out of it at any moment. Maybe to tell him his life had been a joke that was coming to an end. But all the buildings and lots and cars were still grey in the dimness, and the sky sealed up as he drove.Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    Work was a discount department store next to a gym in a long strip of storefronts. Pan Asian restaurant. Nail salon. Cell phone store. Another smaller strip right-angled the lot, and shedding tree tops and a blade of horizon bridged the gap. The lot was on an elevated piece of land, and Cooper wondered if a thousand years ago, murderous nomads had camped here, eyes and arrows facing outward. He had often imagined, in the 2pm boredom of the workday, the strips transformed into a post-apocalyptic fort of salvaged rifles and shackled sex slaves, and himself in command. It was something to do, at least.


    He parked in the center of the concrete dip and his boots were good and muddy by the time he got to the door. They were still opening inside and he passed Drew and Micah stocking shelves. He waved at them with a bag of breakfast burritos.


    ¡°You late as fuck and coming in here with donuts?¡± Micah yelled. Drew tried to glare, but could only manage enough testosterone for a frown borrowed from a worn out divorced dad watching his kid ignore him.


    ¡°Whataburger don¡¯t sell donuts, girl, you know that.¡± Cooper kept walking and shook the greasy bottom of the bag at her.


    ¡°What do you mean ¡®I know that¡¯?¡± Micah was way on the heavy side, but her smile said she knew some guys liked it. Cooper didn¡¯t, but he smiled like he did.


    ¡°You the Whataburger expert, girl!¡±


    ¡°What the fuck does that¡ª¡±


    He turned down the aisle before she was done and her voice faded to mumbles that Drew answered with some pathetic attempt to endear himself to her. Cooper laughed at the empty rows, and the sound bounced off the far wall and came back broken. It reminded him of the dreams and his hair stood on end. He made it to his desk in the backroom at just short of a jog.


    He clocked in at the buzzing twenty-year-old desktop. Eventually. The cursor lagged like a crippled dog straining against a leash and he thought about putting his heel through the CRT screen for the hundredth time. While he was scrolling through emails and closing out of antivirus alerts, his manager Jefferey stood droning in the doorway, his voice about as attention grabbing as the overhead lights or the film of dust on the filing cabinet. But Cooper got the gist of it.


    Finish the returns and reports from Wednesday and yesterday before anything else. A couple O.K.s and a weak ¡°my bad¡± and then Jeff was fucking off down the hall.


    Cooper gave it a second, then slipped a folded sticky note with SKU numbers out of his wallet, and got to work.


    The game was simple. Steal shit, get paid, stuff the evidence where it can¡¯t be found. There were a few ways to go about it, but he had his down comfy.


    Hire a junkie or two. Let em do their thing, for a while. Get all your ducks in a row, paperwork wise. Warnings. Write-ups for tardies, no call no shows, sleeping in a stall for half an hour. Things that show the new guy is one of those people. A puzzle where the only missing piece is theft shaped. Even a child could put it together. And the best part is, they put the last piece in themselves. All that¡¯s left after a few months is to roll all your theft into their theft and have it stamped by LP and the higher ups. Damn, what a shame. But, just the way it is now. No one wants to work, and the ones that do, well, good eye anyway, Cooper.


    It was a good deal all around. The junkie gets a few months of paid role playing, even gets to keep a lot of the shit if they¡¯re smart, and the cops don¡¯t even get called most of the time. Maybe unemployment gets signed off on accidentally too. Nothing to sniff at. So good, if they were brought in on it, they might¡¯ve even agreed to it. ¡°Oh hell yeah, lets do it!¡± Only loser is some corporation. Maybe the store cuts overtime for the tryhards. Tough shit. It was so easy, Cooper had started having visions of other him¡¯s running the same game in every discount outlet in the country.


    And that¡¯s not even counting all the shit he rolled into ¡°shrinkage¡± or their almost weekly snatch and runs. Shit, half the boosters running out the doors probably used the same reseller he did.


    It was going pretty good.


    A noise down the hall turned his spit to battery acid, till he realized what it was.


    God damned Drew slamming the fucking bathroom door like a little bitch.


    But, it hadn¡¯t sounded like that at first. It had sounded like the door to something, some indescribably empty and endless place, shutting forever, trapping him inside of it.


    Whatever the fuck that means.


    It had been like that the past few weeks. The whole world had felt sloped downward, like some big bad god was sitting on the end of the table, trying to send him rolling off towards a dark pocket without an exit. Maybe it was being clean. He had heard you could only do it for so long, despite what the NA guys told everyone. Had to do it in stretches, like fasting. A little bit longer each time. The weed and coke just weren¡¯t really doing it anymore, and every time some wrinkle faced booster wandered in to cash out a gift card, he felt meth at his shoulder.


    Or was it something more?

 The Bounty | Chapter 2: Push

    Strangers among us


    He tapped off the alarm and took the phone apart, then ran the pieces under the tap and left them in the sink. With the blackout curtains opened, the house revealed itself in descending memory.


    Two-story late aughts construction. White noise carpet and off grey walls. The upstairs like a single space, with rooms that gave easily to doorways. From the bed, he could see clear across the hall into the office, where window blinds glowed overcast grey. Mortgage signed three years ago. Lately, a steady stream of offers by pickup truck investors with warehouses full of new kitchen tile and adhesive backsplashes, all ignored or laughed at or cussed out. Home. A piece of a distant, fragmented childhood recycled into the afterlife. That he loved it made the abandoning of it more powerful, a more fitting sacrifice towards the birth of a Spirit.


    He got dressed in dark clothes with lots of pockets, very unlike the suits and athletic wear and Dallas nightclub douche attire that made up the rest of the wardrobe. They stuck out like something willed into being. He felt electrified putting them on, and leaving the rest behind.


    It had been a rough awakening. Dropping into a specific Hardworld was more complicated than the free-form priming he had done in training, and he found many of his abilities hazy or out of practice. This self owned an assault rifle, a pistol, and a Mossberg pump for home defense, but hadn¡¯t been to the range or done any force on force in months. The market had just been too crazy.


    This Gradie had made a small fortune trading cryptocurrencies with ridiculous names, a skill developed during a period of righteous solitude, and which had allowed him to live the kind of life Gradie dreamed about in the Real. The memories pulled on him as he walked through the house. The trips, the girls, the messages from high school acquaintances looking for advice or something else. His upcoming two week Maldives vacation, the plane boarding in an hour, primed to prevent any contact from his few friends and long ignored family during the job. He stuffed the shredded tickets under the trash and thought of aqua beaches and how long it had been since he had called his sister.


    The SUV honked outside, and the memories lost their power. His spirit jumped up at the sound, eager to charge out into whatever waited in this new world. Being in a Hardworld on a job was nothing like dropping in for training. It was like the whole world was open to him. Like his real life was about to begin. He sped out the door in a way that stirred up hazy memories of flying through an impossible city at impossible speeds.


    Outside, a soft morning was breaking on a suburban street that could have been anywhere in the state. The sky hummed a weak blue between fragmenting clouds, and a silver-grey brilliance smoldered just over the roofs across the street, either an invading overcast or the last remnants of the retreating storm. Dog barks and kid¡¯s shouts zipped through the cool air like bullets let out blindly. House faces held pieces of last night¡¯s shadows in their grouts and under their gutters. Hedge bushes and fruitless trees only ten years free of their metal stakes sang in sunlight tones from wet leaves on their heads, while their undersides grumbled in sleepy darkness.


    The horn honked again, and Gradie thought he saw the sun jump two inches up the sky as the sound rattled his joints.


    The SUV was all black with silver trim, like one of its parents had been a hearse, and parked in the driveway at an angle, unable to fit otherwise, with the driver¡¯s window facing him. The window rolled down with a billow of smoke like a magician was going to pop out of it. Sam let her cigarette tipped hand hang down while the last of the smoke slithered out the side of her face.


    ¡°What are you wearing!¡±


    He was wearing a black trench coat over black pants and a dark navy oxford. The twins had told him to dress for rain, because it created a natural liminal moment that made using a fragment easier for some Hardworlders. Now, Gradie thought they might have been fucking with him. No one else had ever said anything about Hardworlders being able to affect the weather, though there had been a rainstorm the night before the office¡ª


    ¡°You look like a flasher!¡± she laughed and shook her head, drawing lines of smoke in front of her face.


    Unable to think of a good enough comeback about her mechanic coveralls, he smiled as if she was only mildly annoying and walked around to the passenger door. It didn¡¯t open. He stood there looking at his reflection for a bit before the window rolled down.


    ¡°Why did you wear that? You¡¯re gonna blow our cover!¡± She looked up at him with those grey-blue eyes, the same color as the departing storm, and he realized it was too hot for the fucking jacket.


    ¡°It¡¯s supposed to rain,¡± he said.


    ¡°So wear a poncho or something!¡± She smiled like he was telling a joke just standing there, and he felt his cheeks warm.


    ¡°This is what I¡¯m wearing. You gonna open the door?¡± He was suddenly terrified his daydreams of trench coat shootouts would spill out of his eyes, so he made them hard. She looked away and put out her cigarette.


    ¡°The center doors unlocked.¡±


    ¡°All right.¡± He was fine with not sitting near her, if that¡¯s what she wanted.


    He pulled himself in and slammed the door.


    ¡°So what, do you have a chauffeur fetish or something?¡± he said into the awkward silence.


    ¡°What?¡±


    Gradie started to repeat himself and she gunned the gas. He realized as he was flying into the center console that he should have buckled in before trash talking the driver. The SUV slammed into the garage door and Gradie ended up with his face an inch above the cupholder ashtray and Sam¡¯s latte. His knee burned from the impact with the ac vent in the console.You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.


    ¡°That¡¯s why you wear a seatbelt,¡± Sam said softly. He heard her throw it in reverse. The garage door groaned and the tires yelled as they shot backward. Gradie guessed her next move and grabbed onto the passenger seat just before she slammed the brakes again.


    ¡°Oops. There¡¯s some play in the breaks,¡± she said. Gradie reached forward and pulled the lever to drop the passenger seat back and climbed into the front.


    ¡°Hey! No! Bad!¡± Sam slapped the top of his head as he got into the seat. He reached up and caught her wrist. She made a face like a statue and moved her other hand onto her lap, where a pistol waited under her thigh.


    ¡°Let go.¡±


    She pointed the gun at his gut. Gradie winced.


    ¡°Are you fucking crazy?! You never point¡ª¡±


    ¡°I know. Let go.¡±


    He did but kept his eyes on her. A honk from the street made them both jump. A mom in a coupe was waving out the window behind them.


    ¡°Look, if you don¡¯t like that I¡¯m on the team¡ª¡±


    ¡°Oh my god, I don¡¯t care.¡±


    ¡°Then why do you care if I sit¡ª"


    ¡°Because Luke is sitting up front.¡±


    ¡°I got here first.¡± It sounded juvenile the moment he said it, so he looked off down the street, hoping the words had broken apart on the way to Sam¡¯s ears. They hadn¡¯t.


    ¡°That¡¯s nice. He¡¯s sitting up front because if someone shoots at us, he can drop five of them before they finish aiming. Can you do that?¡±


    ¡°Maybe.¡±


    ¡°Well, maybe babies get in the back.¡±


    ¡°All right, Chives.¡± Gradie started to open the door and saw Sam speeding away, leaving him on the road. He looked back at her and made a face like his hate was becoming too much for him. While she was raising her gun and looking him in the eye, he grabbed her latte and got out.


    ¡°What the fuck?!¡±


    He pulled on the middle door and found it locked. Sam groaned and the lock chunked in the door. He got back in and tried to hand her the cup.


    ¡°Sorry, needed some collateral in case you¡ª¡±


    ¡°You can keep it.¡±


    He shrugged and took the stopper out. It smelled like peppermint.


    The SUV lurched forward again and stopped suddenly. He slammed into the back of the passenger seat and the lid popped off the latte and spilled it down the front of his shirt.


    ¡°Shit!¡± He puffed his chest out to keep it from getting on his jacket. His hand was burning.


    ¡°Hole in your lip?¡± Sam asked.


    Rather than say something that would get him shot, he opened the door with his clean hand and threw the cup on the road. He shook off his other hand and wiped it on his shirt, then carefully took off his jacket and tossed it on the seat. His hand was red and stung like hell. He swore at it.


    ¡°There¡¯s a first aid kit under the seats.¡± Sam said, sounding just a bit sympathetic. Gradie shut the door and put his seat belt on with his burnt hand. The pain shouted at every movement. He sat there and stared at his hand while Sam sighed and started driving.


    ¡°This isn¡¯t my body. This isn¡¯t my pain,¡± he thought to himself. When that didn¡¯t work, he thought about how his hand had felt before the burn, and imagined opening doors and reloading without feeling anything. The pain lessened, but he couldn¡¯t be sure it wasn¡¯t just the endorphins. He thought about what it would be like to get shot in a Hardworld and swallowed.


    ¡°There¡¯s aloe vera in the kit,¡± Sam said.


    Gradie got the box out and put some on his hand. He noticed as he moved that his chest stung too, so he took his shirt off.


    ¡°You are a fucking mess,¡± she said.


    ¡°Thanks.¡±


    ¡°Sorry I ruined your hitman aesthetic. Should we stop and get you some actual clothes?¡±


    Gradie looked out the window. Wood-paneled apartment buildings and water-stained corner stores ringed by the husks of old gas pumps zipped by. He got an idea.


    ¡°Turn right up here.¡±


    ¡°Why?¡±


    ¡°I need a shirt.¡±


    Sam looked at him in the rear-view mirror but didn¡¯t say anything. He reached back in his memory, suppressing the fear it wouldn¡¯t work this time, and planted a subtle image, a sedan he had seen a million times driving to work, but kept the form vague. That was the paradox of pushing on a Hardworld. Pushing just enough to tell them what you want, but not so much they refuse to give it to you.


    He saw it.


    ¡°Here, that green Geo.¡±


    She pulled up next to it and he got out. The car had something stacked in the backseat half blocking the rear window, and he already knew it was laundry. He felt goosebumps roll over him.


    ¡°I¡¯m actually doing this,¡± he thought. It had been so long since his win at the office, he had almost forgot, even without the sensation that it had happened to someone else.


    He opened the back door and got in the seat with his legs hanging over the street. In one of the stacks, he found a heather grey shirt. Medium, mens. He pulled it on and closed the door.


    Back in the SUV, he put his coat back on. Sam was watching him in the rear view again.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°So you just knew some dude left his laundry there?¡± She sounded jealous, or maybe just doubtful. He thought about saying something like ¡®it¡¯s easy¡¯ but nodded silently instead. He could see in her eyes that she really wished she could do it. Strange. She could make herself an expert driver, or a master mechanic, but couldn¡¯t make a t-shirt appear in an old car. The self he had dropped into would probably have trouble changing a tire.


    As he watched the apartment complex slide away, he took one last look at the sedan, and a stream of memories poured out at him.


    He really had seen it a thousand times. He had even seen the owner open the doors without a fob. As far as his memory was concerned, nothing unusual had happened. Something about it made him uneasy, and he reached out for something beyond the Self. It was like resisting the urge to touch a wound for so long that you eventually do it with gusto.


    His new memories flared up at him when he tried to remember the Real, and it seemed at the other end of a long hallway, dim and faint. The hallway was made of the Otherworld, and felt just as much like dream as the real did, so that he had to put effort into categorizing his memories.


    ¡°Oh, here.¡± Sam threw something back at him. It bounced off his chest and rolled into his lap. A small plastic case. He opened it up and pressed the earbuds in place one at a time, waiting for the chime that told him the seal was set. Something about the sound afterward was different.


    ¡°I think these are glitching.¡±


    ¡°Nope. New hardware. Zoey and the boys worked their magic and now they amplify natural hearing. And they don¡¯t go all quiet during gunshots.¡±


    Gradie noticed there wasn¡¯t an echo of Sam¡¯s voice either, another upgrade since the last time he had worn them in training, when they had mainly served as a convenient way for Philip to berate him.


    Now, driving down the highway on a mission, the earbuds directly connecting him with the rest of them, he felt like he was part of the team. His heartbeat quickened and he smiled out the window.


    They exited suddenly and pulled off the access road into the drive-through line at Starbucks. It was packed.


    ¡°Johnny! I¡¯m making a stop! Are you up yet?¡± Sam whispered a melody and her voice was in stereo around Gradie¡¯s head. He looked at his knees and focused on not getting red in the face. There was no answer in the earbuds.


    ¡°You owe me a coffee.¡± Sam motioned with her hand, and he took his card out, then thought about it.


    ¡°Don¡¯t you guys have millions in your account?¡±


    ¡°Them¡¯s my millions.¡±


    He handed it to her and leaned back in the seat, trying to reclaim that feeling of rushing excitement and being a part of something strange and mysterious, but all he could think about was the sound of her voice in his ears.

 The Bounty | Chapter 3: Soldier

    t¡¯s a living, but not for you


    Back in the day, when he was first getting started, Luke had found it necessary to drop into the Hardworlds with a singular, focused affirmation.


    ¡°I don¡¯t wake up hungover.¡±


    Despite focusing more feeling and effort into priming sobriety than any other aspect of his self, he woke up with a pounding headache every time. Once, he had worked through an entire job withdrawing from opiates, and another time he had lost a job with SYS after throwing up in the point man¡¯s interceptor ten minutes into an hour-long chase. Eventually, he had given up trying to fight or even understand it. Now he just dropped in with a simple prayer.


    ¡°Let the hangover not be that bad.¡±


    Sometimes it did the trick, but he wasn¡¯t sure if it had this time because he hadn''t moved. He knew that only when he stood up, threw open the blackout curtains, and started moving around, would he discover the full extent of the hangover.


    So, he was still in bed, after three phone alarms and two wake-up calls.


    ¡°Joey¡­We¡¯re waiting.¡± Sam¡¯s voice came out of the speaker phone on the nightstand (courtesy of EP) and stabbed him in the eardrums.


    Annoying little bitch. What good is a redhead that cut it all off and hid her tits under coveralls?


    ¡°No fucking good at all,¡± he said to no one. Something moved in the bed, and he froze.


    ¡°No fucking way.¡±


    ¡°What?¡± she said. It was a cute voice, almost as cute as EP¡¯s, which helped him keep from kicking her off the bed right there. Cute or not, it still knocked his brain around.


    He closed his eyes and focused.


    ¡°The body does what it¡¯s told. The spirit demands, the flesh be damned.¡±


    The iron chains on his head fell away. The aches left his muscles. The dryness in his mouth faded. Or at least they all shuffled off to somewhere he could ignore them. Sam said something through the phone again, but this time she was just a kid he worked with, almost a friend.


    He got up and threw open the curtains.


    ¡°Fucking shit!¡± The girl pulled the covers over her head. Luke grabbed the bottom of the comforter and yanked it off the bed. She almost came with it and ended up sitting in the middle of the mattress.


    A short-stack brunette with rug burns on her knees and red marks in other places.


    ¡°I¡¯m checking out,¡± he said, but she had already slithered under the sheet. It clung to her body in a way that finished waking him up, and he wondered how long Sam¡¯s stop would delay her.


    ¡°Unless you want me to stay for a bit?¡±


    ¡°Fuck you, I want to die! How do you drink that shit?¡±


    Luke looked at the various bottles around the room and wondered which one she was talking about. A few of the labels triggered primal sensations of nausea and weakness that cut through his Spirits control and made him shudder.


    He grabbed the one with the label facing away and took a few swigs. That¡¯ll have to do.


    He got showered and dressed while the girl snored softly. His clean clothes were hung with his pistol in the empty closet. He pulled the earbuds out of the envelope shoved in the chest pocket of his plaid flannel button up and squeezed them in. A call chimed in his ears before he got his shoes on.


    ¡°Yep.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re late.¡± It was EP.Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    ¡°I didn¡¯t get a time. Thought we were just doing recon today.¡±


    ¡°Maybe not. Boss is seeing some activity he doesn¡¯t like. Maybe another team. Might have to jump on it.¡±


    ¡°Aight.¡± Sure enough, the promise of ¡°simple job, no defense, no other teams¡± turned out to be a pie in the fucking sky. Not to mention the god damned quarter.


    ¡°Alan and Kate are out front.¡±


    ¡°Alright, I¡¯m coming out.¡±


    ¡°Files are on your phone.¡± She beeped off. Her voice had been rough and terse this time, as if she was trying to disguise it. He vaguely remembered telling her that having a little dove cooing in his ear all job was one of the perks, or something like that, in some resort bar one time after a client meet-up. But that had been aeons away in another world, and was even less than a dream here, and what with the hangover¡­


    He went out the back door to the lot, and after stumbling a bit into the blazing daylight, he found himself up on a hill, like he had stepped out of an old horror movie castle, but instead of flying buttresses and machicolations, there was just the flat drywall of a hotel chain.


    The land around was an alluvial plain of retail space. Concrete caught and expelled by the flow of the nearby interstate, formed into strip malls and mid-range restaurants. Luke took note of the important details, landmarks, weather, and filed the rest of it, memories that sprang up out from the self, away as trivia. He had been trained to move through the Hardworlds under the belief that it was something between a hallucination and a dream. It worked through a kind of brute persistence that fit some of the old-timers like a glove, but was only just good enough for him. Luckily, he didn¡¯t need much. Even in the Real, he and his thoughts had never been close. What really worked for him, was the work. On a job, in a gunfight, giving chase, he never had time to get all philosophical.


    The SUV waited at the edge of the lot, looking down on the sloping plain like a mirror-polished panther watching gazelles pull into drive-thrus. Sam unlocked the center door and he slipped inside.


    ¡°There¡¯s our sleepy boy! Did you forget we had work today?¡± Sam said. Luke had found it best not to acknowledge when she seemed unusually pissed about something, so he went with the ¡°joke about it and hope she gets distracted¡± strategy.


    ¡°Them hotel beds are just too comfy.¡±


    He stopped halfway through climbing over the center seat when he noticed Gradie siting across from him, all black pants and combat boots and an actual trenchcoat over his wrinkled grey shirt.


    ¡°Should I stay home from school today, bro?¡±


    ¡°She already made that joke.¡± Gradie sounded disappointed.


    ¡°No I didn¡¯t!¡± Sam said. ¡°And I wasn¡¯t joking!¡± ¡°We¡¯re supposed to be low profile!¡±


    While the two of them went at it, Luke moved into the back, where the last row of seats had been taken out, and went through the compartments, pulling things out of bags and stashing them on his person. He got his plate carrier on between his undershirt and his button-up and found his SIG Rattler in a backpack with his mag pouch. As he was going for the pistol case, he noticed Gradie looking at him.


    ¡°What guns do we have?¡± he asked, like a kid asking about cheeseburgers.


    ¡°Who said you get guns?¡± Sam said.


    ¡°Oh, I forgot I killed our last target with my bare fucking hands.¡±


    ¡°Here it is.¡± Luke handed him a holstered Five-seven and a mag pouch. Gradie took it religiously and smiled in a way that set Luke¡¯s hair on end.


    ¡°Damn boy, are you in love?¡± said Sam. Luke started closing everything back up.


    ¡°Wait, is my rifle back there? Shouldn¡¯t I get some plates?¡± Gradie asked. Luke stopped and faced him.


    ¡°Nah, just put that on your hip, cover it with your matrix coat, and if any shooting starts get to cover-


    ¡°What¡¯s the point of¡ª¡±


    ¡°Look, I¡¯m not trying to box you in, man. Really. But I¡¯m the shooter, alright? If shit gets bad enough where I can¡¯t handle it, you and her need to get moving, cause you¡¯re the backup.¡±


    ¡°I wasn¡¯t the backup last job,¡± Gradie said, obviously before he had thought about it.


    ¡°Yes you were!¡± Sam cackled.


    ¡°Look, really, I¡¯m not putting you down or being a dick or anything,¡± Luke continued, headache flaring back up. ¡°One bad fight and we all lose, right? Just stay safe, take some shots if you can. I¡¯m not saying don¡¯t shoot. Shit, let em get it if you can, ok? But just be ready to duck out, you know, blend in with the crowd and get away, gotta be smart about ¨C¡±


    He took an aspirin and more whiskey and cracked open an energy drink as he talked.


    Gradie could tell he was being serious. Thinking about it, he had never heard him put anyone down without a playful smile on his face. He had started nodding and saying ¡°alright¡± over and over partway through Luke¡¯s explanation, and felt like shit by the end of it. Like he was a kid who had to be shown why he couldn¡¯t drive until his feet could reach the pedals. Sam made it worse by laughing almost in his face, twisted out of her seat, stretching the seatbelt to its limit.


    ¡°How¡¯s he supposed to blend in dressed like that!¡±


    Gradie didn¡¯t look at her. Luke looked at Gradie¡¯s jacket with a wince and started making motions with his hands.


    ¡°Yeah, maybe next time don¡¯t, you know, maybe just wear like,¡±


    ¡°Alright, got it.¡± Gradie turned around in his seat and put the holster on his hip and got his coat around himself. He hoped that by the time he was done pretending to adjust himself, Sam would be turned back around, but she just sat there, slanted over the center console, grinning.


    ¡°I know I¡¯m cute, but¡ª" he started.


    ¡°Yes, you¡¯re very cute, I¡¯m just messing with you.¡± She patted his knee. ¡°You look very dapper in your lil¡¯ outfit.¡±


    ¡°Let¡¯s go.¡± Luke got into the passenger seat and shut the door. Sam spun around, still giggling.


    Gradie looked in the back and tried to guess where the assault rifles were stashed.

 The Bounty | Chapter 4: Vacation

    Get away from yourself


    The automated curtains parted at seven on the dot. Soft daylight glowed through the smart blinds, falling on the straight planes and polished surfaces of the wide master bedroom. A laptop shined its log-in screen on a corner end table. The wall-mounted TV displayed weather forecasts, market prices, and email notifications in a tight grid. Bright mirror-reflected light and radiant steam poured in from the open bathroom. The shower died and a gymnast-bodied blonde marched out, throwing a towel around her glistening body.


    In the back corner of the walk-in closet, she found a dark leather motorcycle outfit, just barely broken in by a few casual night rides. It was the only thing not fit for a senior staff meeting or an all-management cocktail party. She knew that the person who owned it had been dreaming for years of throwing it on in the dead of night, setting the rest of the clothes on fire, and shooting off down the interstate to anywhere else.


    Today was the first day of a two-week vacation, she was as single as anyone could be, there wasn¡¯t a friend in her life she didn¡¯t cc on company emails, and her family, what little of it there was, had long since gotten used to her months of silence and excused absences from all the usual get-togethers.


    Lindsey laid the memories away like the corpse of a loved one, and got dressed.


    The house was all glaring white walls and polished concrete. Everything in the kitchen retracted into the counters or hid in seamless cabinets. The fridge flashed push notifications as she filled the last wine glass from the rack with ultra-filtered water. In the den, with its enclosed bookcases, exposed beams, and marble fireplace, the other glasses reflected tinted daylight through syrupy slivers of Boudreaux onto the wide flat coffee table and ring of couches, where someone who was almost Lindsey had spent the evening ¡°celebrating¡±.


    A thick manilla envelope stuck out of the mail slot, double sealed with tape and urgent markings. She ripped it in half, enjoying the orange specks that fluttered everywhere, and took out her new phone, the earbuds, a set of motorcycle keys, and her Walther PPQ sub-compact. From half a life away, her teacher reminded her ¡°Every second awake in this place without a gun in hand is time you¡¯re offering up to someone else.¡±This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    She smiled and put the pistol in her jacket pocket. He had been from that age, somewhere between five and twenty-five years ago, depending on who you asked, where ¡°If you lasted a day in the Hardworlds, you were steamrolling through the gig.¡±


    She raked her eyes over the house one last time and wished that glares could tarnish, then left it all behind with a goodbye door slam that clashed against the atmosphere of not just the house, but the whole god damned neighborhood.


    The front lawn was a half-circle of razor-cut zoysia grass with a great sugar maple at the center, surrounded by a crescent-shaped pebble-paved driveway. Shrubs and flowers posed in their beds over lava rocks that crunched under her boots as she cut a direct path to the portable storage pod sitting halfway up one side of the driveway. She opened it with one of the keys, flicked on a hanging bulb, and closed the door behind her.


    She threw off the motorcycle cover like it was Christmas. Suzuki Hayabusa, all black, full helmet on top. She squeezed the handlebar and let her heart jump around a bit before moving to the rest of it.


    A backpack, a purse, and a plate carrier hung on the wall. Inside the backpack was her custom Galil ACE in .300 blk, with a suppressor, two sights, white and IR lights, and eight mags, all secured in the custom interior. The purse had three mags for her PPQ, a decoy phone, a pocket drone in a faux makeup case, medkit, bump keys, monocular NVG, and other various tools of the trade. She put the low-profile plate on under her jacket, slipped one of the pistol mags in her other pocket, and locked the purse in the seat compartment.


    She opened the pod and hit the street at forty mph. For half a mile, she thought about nothing but the electric morning feeling that always accompanied the first few hours of a job. When it had settled in her toes and floated in her lungs, she got to work.


    ¡°Call HQ.¡±


    The earbuds chimed twice.


    ¡°Morning,¡± said EP


    It had taken EP less than two hours to wake up, get settled in, and locate the target. She wasted no time checking that Lindsey had dropped in clean and sending her the address. Another job that seemed too simple to be true. They had his name and POE, and the rest was surely being scraped into EPs files and databases like so much icing on the proverbial cake. It beat spending days dropped in, staking out old addresses and harassing exes, or waiting for Celeste and Klara to skim enough from some wet dream to put a profile together.


    A voice in the back of her mind reminded her.


    ¡°It¡¯s never that simple, darling.¡±

 The Bounty | Chapter 5: Strip Mall

    Look but don¡¯t touch


    Gradie had spaced out a few minutes into the trip and was daydreaming about a shootout atop a five-way interchange when an auto shop to his left stopped sliding past them and rotated.


    They had been driving through the part of town where vacant buildings stayed vacant for decades and empty lots shattered into patches of weeds and scraps of concrete. Used car dealerships blended into auto mechanic shops, little more than sheet metal awnings for the jacks, and the pattern paused only for cracker-jack bars that didn¡¯t even bother announcing their names.


    Now, as they rolled through an intersection surrounded by a fifty-pump gas station and drive-thrus almost on top of each other, the rest of the team shifted in their seats and scanned the scenery.


    Gradie didn¡¯t need to. He¡¯d been here before, in another life. Michael¡¯s explanation that he and the team had a ¡°geographical predisposition¡± to the metroplex didn¡¯t satisfy his suspicion of the fact that all their jobs and training, so far, had taken place in the same metro area he had grown up in. However, like so many other nagging doubts about his new existence, he decided to ignore it.


    They pulled into a massive parking lot, separated from the road by at least a hundred feet of bare dead grass, a landing zone prepared for drive-thrus that never came. At the other end of the lot was a wide strip of shops, half of which was an off-price retailer that had clearly once been a grocery store, and the rest of it was divided between a gym, a Medicaid dentist office, and a pan-Asian restaurant. There was another small strip of shops off to the right. Nail salon, auto insurance office, medical clinic. Gradie fell into fantasies of drawing his gun, running head first towards the target, and gunning down his connection to places like this forever.


    They had parked at the far end of the lot and could see the storefront over the tops of the cars due to the slope. Luke cracked the window and pulled out a cigarette.


    ¡°Aight Zoey. You got eyes inside?¡±


    ¡°Yep. Ashley got me in,¡± said EP in the earbuds.


    Earlier in the morning, about an hour after opening, the associates in the front of the off-price store had watched an aqua green VW beetle roll into a spot in the middle of the empty lot. Some of them wondered why it hadn¡¯t been parked closer to the front, while the others barely registered its existence beyond a dim understanding that a car in the lot might mean work at a register, which prompted an exodus to the back isles and the storeroom.


    Then the driver got out.


    Even through the streaked windows and from across the dusty lot, she was a knockout. Hourglass shape busting out of cutoff shorts and a tube top, bouncing across the cracked concrete on heels that carried her like magic. Despite the potholes and crevices, she might as well have been walking on a runway carpet thrown over the laser-leveled surface of a NASA factory floor. The morning sun flashed off her square white sunglasses, went soft on her skin, and cut swerving shadows around the swells of her body, a body that might have never seen a gym and would probably never need to, poured into place in exact proportions.


    The clack of her heels was the hardest thing about her.


    ¡°Morning!¡± she said, to no one in particular, as the doors slid open. Her voice was like a beach vacation without clothes. Drew felt dirty just hearing it. Like porn had started playing over the loudspeaker. The doors slid shut behind her with the same dingy sound it made for geriatrics and meth heads shuffling in with pockets full of gift cards and faded receipts. The contrast between the sound and the sight of her was too much for Drew, doing recovery at the cell phone cases, and he chuckled thoughtlessly. She glanced at him, and his smile melted off like it had never been. He couldn¡¯t bring another one up to meet hers, so he just watched her strut towards the copy print like she had his only hope of ever getting laid in her purse.


    Matt had thought that adding a copy print kiosk to a store that sold mostly shitty pillows and reject father¡¯s day gifts was about the dumbest fucking idea corporate had ever shit out to push sales, but watching this busty bimbo bounce over to him like a mobile porn ad, he understood the genius of it.You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.


    ¡°Yes mam, what can I do for you?¡± He almost shouted. Micah groaned and swore from electronics.


    ¡°Um, can you print stuff off of this?¡± She held up a cherry red flash drive and looked at him like he had the keys to the fucking kingdom.


    ¡°Yeah. That¡¯s what they pay me for!¡± He laid it on too thick and his voice came out like gravel. Shit.


    ¡°Oh, good.¡± She looked around for a second. ¡°Do I stick it in somewhere, or¡ª¡± She laughed sheepishly, and he almost tripped over himself standing still.


    ¡°No, I¡¯ll put it in.¡± Jesus Christ. There has to be a hidden camera or something somewhere.


    She leaned over the counter to hand it to him and he got an eyeful. She didn¡¯t even try to hide it. Just that same smile, like he was buying her a house. He looked away and studied the monitor.


    ¡°Oh my god!¡± she gasped, and for a terrifying yet electrifying instant, he thought she had somehow read his thoughts.


    ¡°I¡¯m sorry! Not that one!¡± she leaned over the counter again, this time bouncing frantically, and grabbed his hand, still holding the flash drive uselessly. He stood stunned as she snatched the drive away and pulled another one out of her purse.


    ¡°I''m sorry, oh my god. Here it''s this one. This one.¡± She whispered the last words to herself and handed him another drive, graphite grey.


    ¡°Sorry,¡± she said one more time, and smiled meekly at him.


    ¡°tsohkay,¡± he mumbled and, after four tries, got the USB in the slot.


    It was a simple black and white job, and before he knew it, she was scanning her card and he was thinking of ways to get her number, dredging up every pick-up artist video he had ever seen. All he got out was the total.


    The silence was squeezing the life out of him by the second, but she didn¡¯t leave.


    ¡°Do you have it?¡± she looked at him like the world had just fallen away from her.


    ¡°Uh,¡±


    ¡°The other drive. Um, the first one¡ª¡± She looked around, under her purse, even patted her tits. He spun around and lifted up his keyboard just to be supportive.


    ¡°Shit. Oh fuck,¡± she said to the counter, then snapped her big round eyes up at him.


    ¡°Um, really, if you¡ª¡± Her phone buzzed and she exhaled at the screen.


    ¡°Shit! I have to go. If you find it, please¡ª¡± she scrawled a phone number on the back of her receipt and slid it over to him, tits to the counter.


    ¡°If you find it, please call me. I will be extremely grateful.¡±


    He almost drooled on the counter nodding.


    ¡°Ok, great. Thank you!¡± She turned and bounced out the door.


    He watched her all the way to the lot and stared at the bare concrete long after she¡¯d left, fantasizing.


    ¡°God damn dude. What did that fine bitch want?¡± Drew came around the counter.


    ¡°Uh,¡± Matt snapped back to reality and looked down at the keyboard.


    There it was. Cherry red flash drive. Peeking out from behind the point of sale terminal.


    ¡°I¡¯m going on break.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s fucking eight-thirty dude!¡± Drew whined. Matt somehow made it to the training computers, in the far back of the dead empty break room, without melting into the ground. He plugged the drive into the corner pc, the one he knew was just out of camera view.


    It was more than he had ever hoped for. Three full shoots worth. Two different penthouses and one yacht. By the second time he looked over his shoulder, EP had all the access she needed.


    ¡°I thought you could get in anyplace?¡± Luke said. ¡°It¡¯s just a retail¡ª¡±


    ¡°Well, that takes time, and I¡¯m kinda swamped tracing this junkie back three months. Anyway, she¡¯s afraid of getting rusty.¡±


    Luke thought about some training he¡¯d like to put Celeste through, but did his best to focus on the task at hand.


    ¡°So, any ideas where it might be?¡±


    ¡°Not really. If he stashed it here, he hasn¡¯t touched it.¡±


    ¡°Aight. What¡¯s our move then?¡±


    ¡°Watch and wait. That¡¯s all were cleared for.¡±


    ¡°Got it.¡± Luke took out his phone. Sam watched him until she realized he was done talking.


    ¡°What, we¡¯re just gonna sit here?¡±


    ¡°Yep.¡±


    ¡°But¡ª¡±


    Luke looked up from his phone and explained to the dash.


    ¡°I know we¡¯ve had some rough jobs since you joined, but you gotta get used to sitting around and waiting.¡±


    ¡°Ok, but we¡¯re right here, and he¡¯s in there scanning fucking barcodes¡ª¡±


    Luke cut her off with a dramatic sigh.


    ¡°It¡¯s probably not on him, so we gotta wait to see if upper management can find out where it could be, then we make moves. And before you get all excited, those moves might not even involve gunfire.¡±


    He went back to his phone. Gradie looked over his shoulder and saw him playing chess on his browser.


    ¡°Well, why don¡¯t we just grab him and ask him¡ª¡± Sam said.


    ¡°Cause he can just lie.¡±


    ¡°Ok, so we just rough him up?¡±


    Luke looked at Sam with a glazed smile.


    ¡°Think it through.¡± He went back to the chess.


    ¡°So, ok, we would have to get him without getting arrested, which wouldn¡¯t be hard because this is the kidnap mobile¡ª¡±


    Luke nodded along, but didn¡¯t look up.


    ¡°Then we just get him to tell us where he put it.¡±


    Silence.


    ¡°Gradie, what do you think?¡± said Luke.


    ¡°Boss is not gonna ok torture.¡±


    ¡°Bingo.¡±


    ¡°Wow, that¡¯s it?¡± Sam said. ¡°He¡¯s not a civilian! If it was a hit, we¡¯d just kill him anyway! What¡¯s the difference?¡±


    ¡°Besides our boss being a bleeding heart, torture is a no-no.¡±


    ¡°What do you mean? We¡ª¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s one of those old Hardworlder codes you might have heard a certain recently promoted member of our team going on about.¡±


    ¡°Oh ok, so dumb rules just cause. Got it,¡± Sam said.


    ¡°Yep.¡± Luke smiled at his phone and the computer took his rook.

 The Bounty | Chapter 6: Warrant-y

    Fly on the wall, fly free


    The first two hours of reviewing the reports, and not reviewing the reports, and of thinking about getting high, and not thinking about getting high, wore on like a car alarm in the middle of the night. Annoying, but how long had it been going off anyway? The text on the printer paper sheets floated in the air. Melted into everything else. All one feeling. The almost-white flickering dusty drone of ten in the morning. A weekday in a life scrubbed raw of any peaks and valleys.


    His eyes found a glob on the cinder brick walls, where the white paint had made one desperate attempt to do something beyond itself, and stuck there. It was all like that, he thought. All of his life was one big thick syrup smeared on the flat face of time.


    Wallpaper paste. The words drifted out of his mind, summoned by the blob, or maybe it only seemed that way after. The words had bits of his childhood stuck to it, like the flecks of white stuck to a badly peeled cough drop.


    Wallpaper paste.


    They had been on their way out the door, heading to a fried chicken chain, when one of his mother''s boyfriends stopped him with a yellow-toothed warning.


    ¡°Don¡¯t eat too much of that gravy, little dude. Them Mexicans put fucking wallpaper paste in it.¡±


    It had drawn a lot of what the man would have called sass from Cooper¡¯s mother, but while her words faded to a vaguely vanilla-scented yellow-gold glow in his memory, the boyfriend¡¯s warning had lodged behind his tongue and sent jumpy tendrils down to his stomach as the car ride progressed, becoming a sensation like fear teamed up with nausea by the time they arrived at the fried chicken chain (which in his memory was all white besides the red lettering on the ketchup packets) and made even the soda taste somewhat like ¡°wallpaper paste¡± (a flavor his mind concocted from half dissolved memories of tasting Elmer¡¯s glue as a toddler). Everything but the gravy, which he had refused to even have on his plate, no matter how much his mother pleaded and mocked and finally sulked.


    The memory, despite the power he was sure it once had over him, was now just as flat as the rest of it. The only things that stood out in the not-quite-white drone of his life were the dreams and the drugs, and he had the same apprehension about pursuing either. Like their pull canceled out to zero, leaving him floating in an off-white void. A sister void to the dark one in his dreams.


    Someone coughed or dropped a box somewhere and the glob on the wall slipped its grasp of his focus, and the clock picked it up. Break time.


    He went through the receiving area, a cement tomb with a cardboard infestation, and out the back of the store. The door slammed shut and the sound echoed back the way he had come, like the building was falling apart without him. He saw, briefly, that the inside was now just a pile of rubble and cardboard and his break would last forever.This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    He took a cigarette out of the pack and fumbled around for the lighter. A few yards in front of him, past the cement half alley, the land dropped down sharply to a woodland ravine that separated this retail zone from the suburbs. A plastic bag hung to a thistle and waved above the drop. Downtown looked like a cluster of toys in the distance. There was a smear of clouds jutting past him at an angle that took no notice of the direction of everything else. And that was it.


    He smoked his cigarette with the cement and the sky and the trees and with the towers if he noticed them. His mind kept falling back towards the night before and other robberies, as if his life was stood upside down. He pulled his thoughts against the gravity, back to the cigarette and the shipment of Fitbits he had seen in receiving. He saw them on the shelves, then shoved into a cart and sprinted out the door, thrown into a backseat and vanished from the universe of the store, from its ecosystem of shifts and reports, to that other world of cash and your-cut-my-cut, and e-sellers, little more than fences with a tax id. He counted the prices in his head. Divided, added, and rolled the final number around like it could find a crack in his imagination and fall out into the real world.


    Something in the daydreams disturbed him. A sensation that this was all coming to an end. The feeling of ¡°this can¡¯t be all there is?¡±, the base flavor of a life measured in hourly wages and apartment leases, cranked up to the point that the feeling became sickeningly physical.


    The door scraped open. Jeff leaned into it and twisted the handle nevously.


    ¡°Phone for you. Something about your car.¡±


    Cooper saw the stolen things glittering in his trunk, laughing at him. He stamped the two-thirds cigarette out and went inside.


    ¡°It¡¯s in my office,¡± Jeff said.


    Cooper walked down the hallway and a new scenario where the phone call lead to his arrest jumped up with every step.


    Someone saw my car leaving the neighborhood.


    Someone saw me loading the stuff into it or out of it.


    They want me to bring the car down to the station to do one of those forensic files tire tread comparisons.


    My fence got caught and he had my name and number on him. He¡¯s too small time to stand up to the heat. Should have gotten someone like that guy in Dallas who had an elevator in his house to move all the shit.


    He walked into the small humming linoleum office that smelled like hash browns and picked up the ass-colored desk phone. Every benign sight and smell reminded him of freedom, as if he had already been in prison for years.


    ¡°Hello?¡±


    ¡°Yes, may I speak with Mr. Davidson? Cooper Davidson?¡±


    They sounded nervous and he heard the drone of a call center behind the voice. He exhaled with relief into the mouthpiece and it whooshed in his ears.


    ¡°Yeah, this is him. What do you want?¡±


    ¡°Good morning, Mr. Davidson. I¡¯m calling about your vehicle warranty. I¡¯m showing¡ª¡±


    Cooper slammed the phone down.


    ¡°Everything all right?¡± Jeff had followed behind him. Nosy fuck.


    ¡°It¡¯s a telescam, man.¡± Cooper shook his head and walked to the door. Jeff¡¯s face wrinkled and writhed like a paper towel crumpling itself and he stammered.


    ¡°Oh, sorry Cooper, I thought¡­ They sounded like¡­¡±


    Cooper shrugged and went out to the floor.


    On the other side of the city, Sergeant Garcia smiled as he hung up the phone.


    ¡°He¡¯s there. Call it in.¡±

 The Bounty | Chapter 7: Loss Prevention

    A counterfeit life, spent


    EP¡¯s voice broke through the stale air of the SUV like a cold shower.


    ¡°He got a call from the cops. They used a cell, but I traced the¡ª¡±


    ¡°I coulda told you that,¡± Luke said.


    ¡°What?¡±


    Luke rolled up the window, put his cigarette out and shook his head.


    ¡°I¡¯m watching three cop cars pull into the parking lot, Zoey.¡± He sounded like he had found EP¡¯s math homework crumpled up in the desk.


    ¡°Shit. One sec, Calling Boss.¡± EP chimed off and Luke shook his head smiling.


    ¡°Now what?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°Now nothing. Boss won¡¯t clear a shootout with the cops.¡± Luke shifted in his seat and got comfortable.


    ¡°Cause of the collateral,¡± Gradie said out loud.


    ¡°Wouldn¡¯t do anything anyway¡± Luke added. ¡°This isn¡¯t a hit. Guy gets taken out before we can find out where he put it, we lose anyway.¡±


    ¡°But If they put him in jail it¡¯ll be a million times harder to get to him, right? So wouldn¡¯t it be better to move now?¡±


    ¡°Nope,¡± said Luke.


    ¡°Why?¡±


    ¡°Cause boss won¡¯t clear an attack on the cops.¡± He handed Sam the lighter and she raked the end of her slim cigar with the flame.


    ¡°But if they take him in, we¡¯ll have to hit the cops eventually anyway, right? That or give up on the job.¡±


    ¡°Can you stop making sense for a bit?¡± Luke said. ¡°I¡¯m trying to believe in the dream.¡±


    ¡°Great so now what?¡± said Sam. ¡°We¡¯ll have to go digging through his trash and all?¡±


    ¡°Could he have it on him?¡± Gradie said to the window, watching the banal storefront like it could give him a hint.


    ¡°If he was that stupid there¡¯d be no reason to hire us in the first place,¡± said Luke.


    ¡°But if he knows we wouldn¡¯t expect it¡ª¡±


    ¡°We wouldn¡¯t expect it cause it''s dumb!¡± Sam said. ¡°Also, the cops are probably frisking him right now, so if it is on him¡ª¡±


    ¡°Zoey, you got eyes on the lot?¡± Luke¡¯s tone and posture changed like a flipped switch. He snapped open the bag hanging under the glove box and pulled his Rattler out.


    ¡°Yeah, Boss has me getting the faces of the cops,¡± EP said, her voice a bored contrast to Luke¡¯s energy. She hadn¡¯t seen whatever he had. Gradie glanced out the window and saw two sedans turn off the street and pull into the lot, one through each entrance. If it hadn¡¯t been for Luke¡¯s reaction, he wouldn¡¯t have thought anything about it.


    ¡°Max is gonna push¡ª¡± EP continued.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± Luke mashed the window controls as one of the sedans revved down the center row.


    ¡°Cooper. I need you to come up front please.¡±


    Jeff sounded like he was afraid Cooper might bite him.


    ¡°What is it?¡±


    ¡°I just need you to come to the front now please, ok?¡±


    Cooper looked up from the flickering monitor and saw his future spelled out in sad wrinkles frowning at him from the doorway. They probably already had the back door covered. It was just niceties at this point.


    ¡°Why?¡±


    ¡°Uh, the uh, the police would like to speak to you.¡±


    There it was. Cooper felt everything around him shift, like reality had been sliding off its foundation since he woke up and had now dropped wetly onto some new level of existence. He would have sat there forever, which in this new reality could have actually been an eternity spent sitting in that humming office, but he was disgusted by the way Jeff was looking at him, like Cooper had taken his wallet and all he could think to do was ask for it back nicely.This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    ¡°About what?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know, Cooper, I¡ª, they just asked for you, I didn¡¯t ask¡ª¡± He backed up into the hall and shook his head like he was being physically pelted with accusations. It doubled Cooper''s desire to punch him in the face, so he stood up and walked out the door without looking at him.


    Jeff¡¯s wrinkled face faded into the texture of everything else as Cooper walked down the hall. The walls moved past him and the store came towards him from the end of the hallway, but he felt like he was standing still, like a mouse on a wheel or an actor miming in a car while a repeating background fluttered by.


    ¡°It¡¯s a dream.¡±


    He tried to push out and find the edge of the dream, that border that had to be torn through to wake up, but it was all the same numbness everywhere in all directions. His feet took him down the aisle toward the front.


    ¡°It¡¯s a nightmare.¡±


    He saw the cement interior of a jail cell and the next decades of his life crumpled into it like an old water hose stuffed into a plastic bag. He decided or realized that he had only stolen it all because he had thought he was dreaming. Or did he just think he was dreaming now? It was impossible to tell, as if his past and present had been blended up and smeared onto the same plane, leaving room for only one dimension of feeling.


    ¡°Shit,¡± he breathed to himself when he got to the front. Two cops leaning near the customer service desk watched him walk up. Drew and Micah stood at their registers with their mouths open. Matt was peeking over copy and print with a big smile on his stupid flaccid face. There was one customer, some old guy getting aggravated that Drew wasn¡¯t listening to whatever stupid shit he was saying. Cooper felt a pang of embarrassing regret that he would never again experience some delirious boomer haggling for off-brand oxfords. Outside, it was a bright day that begged for a road trip.


    None of it seemed real. He looked the cops in the eye, one after the other, and knew for sure that they were demons. Phantoms that knew, like him, that it was all a dream, but were coming to arrest him anyway because, for some reason, they had to play by the rules of the fake world. He knew all this the way he knew things in dreams without learning or being told, which proved to him it was all true.


    It also made him stop walking and laugh.


    ¡°Cooper Davidson?¡± The older cop spoke like a gym coach that Cooper faintly remembered. Cooper just stood there smiling at him. Of course he would dream of a cop arresting him with that voice.


    ¡°C¡¯mon Cooper, don¡¯t make a scene please, I told them you¡¯re a good kid.¡±


    Cooper hadn¡¯t noticed Jeff walk up. He looked at him, standing there like a disappointed father, and realized he was made of the same grey slithering stuff as the rest of the world. His thoughts had been bouncing around in his head and he felt no hesitation about voicing them to the potbellied dream character standing next to him.


    ¡°They¡¯re not real, man. They¡¯re phantoms. Trying to trick me.¡±


    Jeff¡¯s frown deepened.


    ¡°That¡¯s my cousin¡¯s husband, Cooper.¡± He pointed to one of the demon cops and made eye contact, then kept talking to Cooper without looking at him. ¡°Known him for years. He¡¯s a good guy, I told him you wouldn¡¯t cause any trouble.¡±


    Cooper looked back at the cops. It was the eyes that ruined their disguises. Unassuming fast food and weightlifting once-in-a-while physiques, numbered buzzer haircuts, faces worked into authoritative blank expressions perfectly matched to their strip mall domains. But the eyes were from somewhere unseen. So real they seemed to float in the rolling sludge of everything else.


    ¡°If I run yall¡¯ll catch me anyway, huh?¡± he asked the phantoms.


    ¡°Yeah man. All you¡¯ll get is some extra charges,¡± the younger cop said.


    ¡°Run for it, Cooper!¡± Matt yelled from copy and print. The older cop glanced at him and his laughter died.


    ¡°All right let¡¯s go,¡± Cooper said and put his hands in front of him.


    The younger officer stepped up and swiftly moved Cooper''s hands behind his back. He felt the cool metal on his wrists and the scraping click of the cuffs bounced off the soft dusty surfaces like a bad joke. Some words were said, or maybe he imagined them. You have the right to remain silent or something, like on tv. Hadn¡¯t he been arrested before? The memory was hazy, blended into everything else, lost in the sound of some other part of him, screaming that the danger in their eyes was real.


    The older cop nodded to Jeff and the three of them went out the door. The old man had finished at the register and had to jolt to a stop mid-stride to let them out before him. Someone said ¡°excuse me¡± and Cooper wondered if it had been him.


    There were two cop cars out front with lights silently taunting. The sun glared off the windshields in the lot and cars drifted by in the street beyond. Some drywall-colored sedan pulled out of one of the spots and braked suddenly as a truck came the wrong way down the lane. It all had a mechanical feel to it. Cooper felt if he reached out and touched any of the things in motion and stalled them in their cycles, the whole thing would seize up and collapse into nothing and leave him floating in a void. But he was caught in the motion of it all, connected by the metal rings on his wrists which he now pictured as toothed gears turning in time with everything else.


    The younger cop held Cooper against the side of the cruiser while the older one searched him. They got his phone, cigarettes, knife, lighter, but kept searching, even lifting one foot after the other and turning out his socks. He remembered something faintly and chuckled.


    ¡°Laugh while you still can, man.¡± The younger cop said, and his voice was suddenly like his eyes.


    They put him in the back of the car and he saw two cops who had been waiting outside stop the other two and ask them something. The two new cops glanced at him but their eyes were like everything else. He was tired of looking at it all, so he slumped onto his side in the seat. He had a few peaceful breaths staring at the matte grey panel separating him from the front seat, before something cracked outside and the stuff inside the cop¡¯s eyes poured out into the whole world like burning thermite.

 The Bounty | Chapter 8: Crossfire

    Truly the land of the dead


    Luke brought his rattler up as the heavy armored window crept down. He kept mashing the button, but it stopped after dropping six inches.


    ¡°What the fuck!¡±


    ¡°They don¡¯t go down all the¡ª¡± Sam yelled. Luke was already out the door.


    The sedan speeding down the center row erupted in muzzle flash and gunshots. One of the passengers had opened up right through the windshield and the cruisers at the front of the store came alive in sparks and breaking glass. The sedan squealed to a stop inches from the second cruiser and three men stepped out with rifles raised.


    They didn¡¯t have the chance to do much else. Luke dropped two before they saw him and the last one managed to roll one eye in the general direction of the SUV before his neck exploded.


    It was lightning fast. Until then, Gradie hadn¡¯t truly understood what Michael meant that day in the clubhouse when he said ¡°we move at the edge of what¡¯s possible¡±, but in the one and a half seconds it took Luke to put eight rounds into three men standing mostly concealed behind a vehicle fifty yards away, he realized what it meant to be a Hardworlder.


    Something moved in the smoking glitter-windowed sedan. The driver climbing over the seat towards the passenger side. Luke¡¯s rattler hissed out some more suppressed slaps and the movement stopped. There was about half a second of silence, which to Gradie seemed might last forever, before the air cracked open again, this time from the second sedan which had slammed into a space across the lot.


    ¡°Get to the target!¡± Luke yelled. He dropped down and moved to cover behind a car, legs flying like a Russian dancer. The other sedan flashed and rippled. Bullets cracked in the air, sparked off the SUV and smacked the ajar door. Sam flinched backward.


    ¡°Why is he out in the open!¡± EP yelled in the earbuds.


    Gradie scrambled into the passenger seat and pulled the door closed.


    ¡°Drive!¡± He pointed to the main line of store fronts across the lot. Sam floored it and they barreled down the row as more rounds smacked into the SUV and dotted the windows in little white circles. Gradie glanced back and saw that Luke had taken the opportunity to pop up and fire. Another gunman dropped dead behind the second sedan before Sam turned hard to the left.


    ¡°Stop!¡± Gradie yelled and Sam slammed on the breaks. He looked back at the muzzle flash breaking out over the lot, some part of him screaming that flesh was real and death final, trying to get up the nerve.


    ¡°Why the fuck are you giving orders?¡± Sam yelled scanning her mirrors, all the more pissed off because she had listened to him. Gradie froze for a second, then remembered his earbuds.


    ¡°Luke, cover Me.¡±


    He saw Luke pop up again behind a different car and start firing, as if he had burrowed under the lot. Gradie threw open the door and sprinted to the glass window. He heard the sliced-off edge of Sam¡¯s shout as he ran and the crack of a round moving through the air somewhere behind him. He aimed the Five-seven at the glass and pulled the trigger.


    Nothing happened. Another round cracked nearby and Sam gunned the SUV''s accelerator. He flicked the safety off and fired through the window at a bare section of floor tile. The flash was massive and the window poured out in a splash of white. He jumped through the frame before the glass settled.


    He slipped on the glass but rolled with it and turned it into the scooby doo start of a sprint across the store. He ran in a low half crouch, dodging around racks of clothes and abandoned shopping carts.


    He cut right and ran towards the other side of the store, with the men''s clothing section and front registers between him and the windows. The air cracked and glass crinkled on the linoleum somewhere as rounds zipped in through the front windows. Screams came from all around, but one of them stuck out. A guttural, masculine scream from outside the front of the store. One of the cops had taken a hit.Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    He got to the far wall of the store and followed it up to the front windows.


    ¡°Moving up. Watch the crossfire,¡± he whispered


    ¡°Watch your ass! I¡¯m fucking busy here!¡± Luke yelled back.


    A truck revved its engine in the lot and accelerated down the center row towards the cop cars parked out front. The windshield cracked and someone shot out of it from the passenger seat. Another gunman fired out the back window and the cars around Luke (or the last place Gradie had seen him) lost their windshields or sagged as their tires popped out.


    ¡°I¡¯m coming around, Johnny!¡± Sam yelled, and the massive engine roared out in the lot like a dragon.


    Gradie moved as fast as he could in his low crouch toward the shattered front windows facing the cop cars. Two cops were crouched down behind their cruisers with their backs to him. Suddenly a strange motor sound erupted from across the lot and they jumped up and started firing. The noise was so sudden and desperate that even with his earpieces muffling the gunshots to whispers, it turned his stomach and spiked more adrenaline on his tongue. Half a second later their target swung into view, black sudden shadows just outside the frames, spitting fire and screeching to a stop. Gradie dropped to the floor in a reflex, the self saving his life.


    While the truck had come charging down the center row, another group had swooped in on ATVs from behind the strip of shops to the left and hopped the curb before the cops had time to see them.


    It was quick and awful, even though Gradie could only see half of it with his face pressed to the linoleum.


    The two ATVs came screaming up the sidewalk from the left, two riders each, and the passengers half standing on the back fired short-barreled ARs and Dracos in full auto. Rounds sparked off the concrete, scraped paint off the cruisers in long spears, and disappeared oddly into the blue-black uniforms. It was like an old action movie. No blood or gore at all. Just muzzle flash and sparks and falling bodies. One cop, at the far end of the group, managed to throw himself behind his car screaming, but the rest died quietly. The passengers ran dry before the drivers hit the brakes, but that hadn¡¯t been an end to the shooting. The drivers drew pistols out of chest holsters just as soon as the ATVs rocked to a stop and mag dumped into the men falling in front of them.


    In another odd silence, the gunmen sat calmly dropping empty mags and grabbing at ammo pouches as the truck moved down the lot.


    Gradie watched them for half a second before he remembered something.


    ¡°Oh.¡±


    He said it out loud as he got up. One of the gunmen looked over at him through the empty window frame and clawed at his mag pouch. It didn¡¯t matter. Gradie had never holstered his pistol.


    The Five-seven has a lot of three things and almost none of a fourth; Muzzle flash, noise, ammo (twenty in a magazine, thanks Belgium), and recoil. Gradie put five rounds into the two riders of one of the ATVs before they realized he existed. The flash was amazing, reflected in the windows of the cruisers and all the million little pieces of glass scattered everywhere. The other two gunmen grabbed their magazines as Gradie turned the pistol on them. The driver never had a chance, seemingly having forgotten which side he had put his pistol magazines on. The backseat shooter would have just about gotten his magazine home and had the bolt dropped by the time Gradie got done shooting the driver out from under him, but something magical happened.


    He froze, made a face like Gradie was casting spells and kept it like that while Gradie put three shots around his belt, just below his plate carrier. The last two shots through his face cleared the expression away, but Gradie felt afterward that if he were to go over to the body and wipe all the blood and gore off the face, it would still be looking at him like he had confessed to being a vampire.


    ¡°Huh,¡± Gradie said to no one as the bodies collapsed. He heard the shuffling sound of the cop that had gone around the other side of the car, then remembered the truck. Rather, the truck reminded him of its presence. Its passengers opened fire at him through the windows of the police cruiser.


    ¡°Shit!¡± He dropped down flat on the ground as the air cracked and screamed above him. A bag of caramel popcorn got knocked off one of the impulse-buy racks near the register about five yards away, and he thought that this is what it must sound like to be inside a bag as its being microwaved.


    Suddenly, another gun hissed into the air from the west side of the lot and rounds cracked outside the window.


    ¡°Watch the crossfire.¡± Lindsey¡¯s voice came through the earpieces clear as an asmr video and Gradie looked stupidly around for her.


    ¡°Sure thing miss.¡± Luke¡¯s gun joined Lindsey¡¯s with his distinctive bursts of ¡°semi-auto so fast it''s almost full auto¡± fire and Gradie lay there, leisurely loading a new magazine, and enjoying the noise. The metal sounds of rounds striking the vehicles. The barely audible crinkling of the glass. The very satisfying screams and thuds as the gunmen were themselves gunned down.


    It gave Gradie a pause to piece together the flow of the shootout in his head, a habit he had picked up reviewing his training torture sessions with Philip.


    Lindsey must have sped down the alley behind the store. By the time she got set up, Gradie and Luke had already killed a few of them and the shooters were too engaged to notice her lean around the corner of the building, probably using that small set of cement stairs Gradie had noted as they drove up, and she dropped three of them before the gunfire finished bouncing off the walls. The moment the rest of them pivoted to her, Luke popped up in the background like a gag and now they were just cleaning up.


    Gradie slid the mostly empty mag into his pocket and the gunfire stopped. Sirens echoed in the distance, and someone nearby yelled into a radio.

 The Bounty | Chapter 9: Joyride

    Nice ride, is it bulletproof?


    ¡°Back up. Cops moving in,¡± Luke said.


    ¡°What cops?¡± Gradie asked. He sat up and saw for himself. Two of them. They moved out from behind the concrete pillars at the edge of the sidewalk in front of the store.


    ¡°You didn¡¯t see them during the fight, man?¡± Luke said with a laugh in his voice. ¡°They were doing all kinds of analysis behind those pillars.¡±


    ¡°Target?¡± Lindsey said abruptly.


    ¡°Get to cover, bro!¡± Luke said just as quickly. The cops were moving toward the center cruiser with their guns raised. Gradie remembered he was laying there in a pile of shells with a hot pistol in his hand, so he scampered to get behind a nearby shelf.


    ¡°Target?¡± Lindsey repeated. ¡°He¡¯s in that cruiser, correct?¡±


    ¡°Yep,¡± said Luke.


    ¡°Let¡¯s extract.¡±


    ¡°Negative. Disengage and fall back.¡± It was Michael.


    ¡°He¡¯s right there! There¡¯s only two of them!¡± she hissed.


    ¡°He is not the objective. We take him now, the house tracks you and you¡¯ll be on the run with limited options, if you even manage to get him out of the area.¡±


    ¡°Boss,¡± Luke started.


    ¡°Disengage. Over.¡± It was Philip this time, and he sounded defeated. Michael wasn¡¯t budging on this.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± Lindsey whispered.


    Gradie peeked around and watched the cops move up to the right cruiser. One of them looked in the back seat and said something to the other one. He didn¡¯t respond, but got in the passenger seat in a hurry and scanned the lot. The other cop got in the driver seat and started the engine.


    The cruiser pulled away from the curb and around the blood-splattered sedan. The tires crunched on glass and shells with a sound like a monster chewing. One of the cops spoke into the radio in a voice edged with authority. The sounds glided over the silence.


    ¡°Hey!¡± It was another cop who had appeared out of nowhere. He waved his hands in the air, but the cruiser accelerated down the row. Gradie realized it was unlikely that police procedure was to leave a scene like this. The cop looked confused and started stuttering into his radio.


    ¡°I think those two cops are Hardworlders,¡± Gradie whispered.


    ¡°Yep,¡± Luke said. The cop moved out into the street and looked back at the carnage around the other cruiser in shock. He put his hand up to his mouth and Gradie could see in his eyes that he had never seen anything like this. He talked into his radio some more, then a loud crash drew his attention out to the street.


    The cruiser was stopped in the middle of the road and taking fire from men in two other vehicles in the oncoming lane.


    ¡°It¡¯s another fucking team!¡± Lindsey said on the channel.


    ¡°Get out of there.¡± Philip said.


    ¡°We just gonna let them take¡ª¡± Luke said.


    ¡°They¡¯re not taking shit,¡± EP said. ¡°More cops are moving in now.¡±


    Sirens echoed down the main street and red and blue lights flashed from behind the auto parts store.Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.


    The lone cop stood there watching the gunfight. A particularly loud burst made him flinch and he dropped down into a crouch and moved to cover behind a parked car.


    Luke popped out from behind another row and jogged across the front lane towards the store. Gradie couldn¡¯t see his gun or mag pouches, but his shirt had a distinct bulge to it. There was a glitter on his clothes that he realized only as Luke got closer was broken glass. The cop didn¡¯t notice this and motioned at him to get down. He somehow hadn¡¯t seen him firing earlier or the shock had made him forget.


    ¡°Is anyone hurt? I¡¯m a nursing student!¡± Luke yelled with faked panic in his voice while jogging faster. The cop waved in the general direction of the store before more shots drew his attention back to the street, where swarms of blue and red lights were now converging from both directions on the carnage in the middle of the road. He stood there shellshocked while Luke sprinted toward Gradie and smiled at him. He came around the cruisers and nodded at him.


    ¡°Let¡¯s get outta here bro.¡±


    Gradie¡¯s body stayed locked in a crouch, and he realized that some part of him had been afraid to turn around, convinced that if he turned his back to the bodies and the gunfire, it would eat him. As if it was all made of the same substance. A pure liquid violence waiting to take him.


    Luke, as far from that kind of fear as anyone could be, pulled a corpse off one of the ATVs and nodded for Gradie to get on. The liquid feeling of danger drained away as Gradie watched him, and he realized it had just been his self screaming at him. Asshole.


    Gradie scrambled over the glass and got on the back of the ATV. Luke gunned it and they zoomed down the lot toward the side of the store and cut down the alley behind the building. Lindsey and her Hayabusa were already long gone.


    A quarter of the way down the back alley, Luke drove through a gap in the curb and Gradie¡¯s stomach flew up rollercoaster style as they dropped onto a dirt path winding down the hill, worn into place by a million smoke breaks and a few night shift blow jobs. Gradie couldn¡¯t even see ten feet ahead of him, but Luke guided the ATV down the steep wooded hillside like a slice of cardboard down a grass slope.


    Gradie sectioned his breathing into sections of four counts, trying to keep himself aloft under the weight of the adrenal dump. He remembered the day in the clubhouse, when Philip had set of a chime in his earbuds at random times, and he would have to box breathe until the chime sounded again. The intent, he was told, was to make the breathing second nature. Now, a million realities away, in another version of himself who viewed the Clubhouse training like a reoccurring vivid dream, it worked. The breath came easy, and Gradie wondered to what extent the Spirit could truly override the Self.


    Suddenly, they were weaving through the brush and roaring up a creek bed, Luke laughing and whooping with every jump, diesel motor drowning out the sirens. It was like Gradie had teleported out of a warzone into a carefree Saturday. EP directed Luke across a creek, down a trail, and through a dense cluster of mesquite.


    ¡°Stop there. Kate¡¯s on the street about twenty yards ahead.¡±


    Luke killed the engine and they started walking. After a few minutes of pushing through the dry brush, a street corner came into view. It was like the neighborhood had never gotten up the courage to cross the street so the Texas brush built up the lots instead. The houses were sixty years old at least and the one on the corner looked like a shed that had gotten sick and spit up a brick addition. The SUV waited on the street with its bullet wounds, only visible as tiny white dots on the glass, facing them.


    Luke got in the center door and Gradie followed. Sam sped off the moment he shut the door and he fell hard into the seat. It pissed him off, and reminded him of something.


    ¡°So why did you leave the scene while we were getting shot at?¡±


    Sam whirled on him and the car swerved in the road.


    ¡°Because Max told me to get clear so the cops wouldn¡¯t be chasing us right now. And what about you? Who the fuck told you to run in like that you god damned idiot?¡±


    ¡°It worked out. I shot¡ª"


    ¡°No, it didn¡¯t! Did you find the prize in there and not tell us? And your supposed to cover your fucking face when you¡ª"


    ¡°Johnny didn¡¯t have a mask on either so what¡¯s it¡ª"


    ¡°Oh yeah, Zoey, cop saw me,¡± Luke said. ¡°You get the cameras inside?¡±


    ¡°What? Yeah, I¡¯m getting them wiped now. Which cop saw you?¡±


    ¡°One of the natives. He looked shell-shocked though, so I don¡¯t think.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯ll stay out of sight for the duration.¡± Michael''s voice came in, harsh-edged.


    Luke nodded.


    ¡°My bad boss.¡±


    ¡°Alan,¡± Michael continued. ¡°If you engage, it¡¯s important to cover your face so you can remain off the radar. This isn¡¯t a hit, remember. These jobs are more prolonged, and we need to maintain flexibility.¡±


    Gradie doubted that repeating the fact that Luke hadn¡¯t covered his face would get him out of the lecture so he tried something else.


    ¡°No one in the store saw me. And I didn¡¯t have a mask.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s because you weren¡¯t supposed to leave the car!¡± Sam yelled. ¡°We told you¡ª¡± Michael cut her off.


    ¡°Enough. Get clear of the scene and Max will give you a location. Boss out.¡±


    The ride was silent for a while. Sam checked every mirror and window five times at every turn.

 The Bounty | Chapter 10: Aftermath

    Like ripples in a pond


    Two cop cars with sirens screaming passed them going the other way. Luke stopped stashing his gear and looked up at the windshield.


    ¡°They don¡¯t even notice me,¡± Sam whispered under her breath.


    The sirens screamed then faded. Luke finished changing out his gear and moved into the passenger seat like a ghost.


    ¡°You¡¯re getting superstitious with it,¡± he said without looking at her. ¡°Those cops weren¡¯t stopping for shit. They got officers down in the street. Turn Here.¡±


    She turned onto a gravel road surrounded by warehouses and industrial buildings. Two guys in front of a construction equipment place watched them pass.


    ¡°They¡¯re not gonna call the cops. They don¡¯t trust cops.¡± Sam said in the same whisper, like she was trying to assure herself.


    ¡°You don¡¯t know that,¡± Luke laughed. ¡°But they probably stare at every car that goes by. Bullet marks are on the other side anyway.¡±


    Their earpieces chimed.


    ¡°I got a body shop a little ways from there.¡± Philip''s voice pounded through with a familiar rock melody behind it that Gradie couldn¡¯t place. ¡°Zoey sent you the address. Leave the machine there and split up for a while before you meet us at the post. I left your rides in the bays. Keys got your names on em. Max out.¡±


    Sam followed the dash navigator through five blocks inhabited mostly by Pitbulls boxed into front lawns. The shop was a white sheet metal building surrounded by brick walls topped with razor wire. Sam punched in a code and the black gate rolled open.


    Gradie saw Luke doing something on his phone and took his own out of his pocket, trying to remember everything about it.


    It was bulletproof, but that was its least interesting feature. There were apps to spoof key fobs, put a tracker on any cell phone in range, drop devices off wi-fi, crash any security camera you pointed it at, and a million other things that Gradie wasn¡¯t aware of. It was also linked to his watch and would automatically overheat until everything inside was melted into slag if it was off his person for more than a few minutes. Usually, the earpieces worked off of it, but they could operate even if it was destroyed.


    Gradie opened the map. EP had added a new pin labeled ¡°Shop¡±, right in front of him, and another labeled ¡°storage¡±, a few miles away. ¡°The Machine¡± was labeled right beneath him, and he could request to ping the location of his other teammates, draw a route, and request a full data mine, names and wifi networks and tax history, of any address he chose. At least he would have been able to, if EP hadn¡¯t locked half the functions.


    Sam drove into the open garage and tapped her phone. The doors rolled shut and they sat sighing in darkness for a few seconds until the lights came on. The garage was a fully stocked auto shop with tools and jacks everywhere. The sheet metal walls had been reinforced with cinder blocks and gunslits, and screens halfway up to the ceiling played camera feeds of the lot around, one of which was a drone shot at least three hundred yards up in the air, circling.


    Luke stepped out of the SUV and glass and shell casings crinkled on the concrete floor. Sam rolled down the driver-side window, popped the hatch, and left the keys on the driver''s seat as she got out.


    ¡°Bye bye baby!¡± She patted the side of the SUV and pouted at the mirror windows.


    Luke walked around back and refilled his mag pouch then put it in his backpack and set it on the edge of the floorboard. He took off his flannel shirt, tossed it on the ground, and dug another button-up, this one a dark grey, out of one of the bags and put it on. Gradie remembered his own gun.This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    ¡°Where¡¯s the Five seven mags?¡± he asked. Luke opened up one of the cases and handed him two.


    ¡°Just so you know, Max is gonna give you shit about running out into it like that.¡±


    ¡°I got four of them.¡±


    ¡°Doesn¡¯t matter. It¡¯s not a kill count game. We don¡¯t get that token, we don¡¯t get paid.¡±


    ¡°So what? I shoulda just waited in the car while you got shot at?¡±


    ¡°You asking me? No, I appreciate the help, I¡¯m just letting you know Max is gonna give you shit so you don¡¯t jump off and get yourself killed just cause it worked out this one time.¡±


    Luke shut the hatch and led them towards a door in the back.


    ¡°He care if I get killed?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°Yep. Think of it like this. We¡¯re his guys, his pieces. You get killed he can¡¯t maneuver you how he wants to.¡± Luke made a motion with his hand like playing invisible chess.


    ¡°I¡¯m the horsey,¡± Sam said. Luke snickered.


    The door crunched open like a seal had been broken. The dry air of the office felt like it hadn¡¯t moved in days. Sunlight glowed at the edges of the blinds and drew beams in dust. Luke looked around for a bit.


    ¡°Call Max.¡±


    A few seconds later he asked the dusty air where the keys were. After a moment, he nodded and pulled the top drawer out. There was a small envelope stapled to the back of it.


    ¡°Yeah, got it. Out.¡±


    Inside were three sets of keys. Each had a small colored tag on them with names written in sharpie. Luke handed one to Gradie. The tag said ¡®kid¡¯. He ripped it off the ring. Sam ripped her tag off and let it fall to the floor. It said ¡®Monkey¡¯. Luke left his tag on the ring and put them in his pocket. Gradie thought his said ¡®buddy¡¯, but he couldn¡¯t be sure.


    ¡°Let¡¯s see what he got us,¡± Luke said.


    The cars were parked outside on a shaded gravel lot under a sheet metal awning. A jeep chirped as Sam pressed her fob.


    ¡°See yall at the base.¡±


    There was a gunmetal grey Dodge Charger, a hail-damaged white sedan, an old purple Ford ranger, and a turquoise minivan. Luke slipped into the Charger. Gradie sighed and unlocked the sedan. He sat there waiting for the AC to kick on as the other two squealed and roared out onto the road, but it never got below ¡°somewhat less hot¡±, so he cursed and backed out. Next time he¡¯d just steal his own fucking ride.


    ****


    It was absolute carnage and eerily silent. Detective Williams wasn¡¯t used to the quiet. The EMTs were all long gone, their sirens faded. A detour routed traffic away from the main road. The scene was blocked off and the last screaming, crying bystander had been sent home or brought down for statements. Normally, this was the time in the investigation when the scene was alive with chatter. Detectives throwing out theories, comments, observations, all peppered with gallows humor and dry laughter.


    But there had been four cops lying dead in the street and their blood and brain matter still stained the ground, and the cruisers, inside and out. The men standing around now drove cars just like them. Carried guns just like the ones that had failed to defend them. Would have died just the same. Or would they? Surely every cop here was looking for answers in the gore. Something to tell them how the deaths could have been avoided, how they would have survived in their shoes, or how they could survive if it happens again.


    ¡°Twelve five seven casings inside the store, multiple five five six and nine mil on the east side of the cruisers.¡± Fritz, the other detective rattled off. It seemed a therapeutic exercise for him.


    ¡°A trail of .300 blackout over next to those cars. Another cluster of .300 next to those little stairs. 7.62 and 5.56 all down these rows. Most of it shit not sold to civilians. Twelve-gauge shells¡­¡±


    ¡°Who the hell were they arresting?¡± Williams cut in.


    ¡°Uh, Cooper Davidson. Cashier slash B and E guy. Robbery picked him up, if you can believe it.¡±


    ¡°Who¡¯d he rob? Anything that would explain this?¡±


    ¡°Nothing I know of would explain this shit, short of an international fucking incident. This screams cartels or something.¡±


    ¡°Anyone they picked up got ties across the border?¡±


    ¡°Well, everyone they picked up¡¯s dead, besides the fucking cashier.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s taking prints so long?¡±


    ¡°Nothing. They came back with a bunch of goose eggs in half an hour.¡±


    ¡°What do you mean?¡±


    ¡°I mean so far it looks like a bunch of guys who¡¯ve never been picked up for anything worse than half an ounce of weed, got together on a Friday to shoot a bunch of giggle-switched fun guns at each other over a shoplifter who occasionally breaks into houses.¡±


    Fritz had been getting excited all night. Probably his way of coping, but Williams tried to reel him in.


    ¡°So were they from across the border, or¡ª¡±


    ¡°David said they all looked very American.¡±


    Detective Williams let the next series of questions forming on his tongue stay there. For the third time that night, he felt the scene demanded silence.

 The Bounty | Chapter 11: Boss

    Head weirdo in charge


    He looked like a big kid. Sitting there shoveling orange chicken and drinking so much Dr. Pepper that the waitress had given up on refills and brought him a whole plastic pitcher of it, the kind they normally used for tea or ice water. Philip could see the fizz from where he was parked, second row from the front. Michael had a window seat and had looked out and made brief eye contact with Philip when he pulled up, but beyond that had done nothing else in the past ten minutes besides eat an ungodly amount of that shiny chicken and check his phone. The whole god dam city was lit up over the shooting, cop cars squealing down all the highways and black-tied feds flying in from everywhere while the media sent its sneakered foot soldiers crawling all over everything even somewhat linked to the gun play, and here this fat fuck was having an early lunch. He was always like that. Aloof as can be until something made him mad. Philip hadn¡¯t seen anything make him really mad in years, and he tried to convince himself that he wasn¡¯t afraid of seeing it again.


    Michael got up and laid a wad of cash on the table and grabbed his big coat. His oxford hung down untucked and Philip saw the edge of his pistol press through it as he threw the coat around himself and walked out the door. He stood there, well over six feet tall and an easy three hundred pounds, with hands like oven mitts and a face like the kid in class that tells too many fart jokes, smiling and holding the door open for some mom and her bouncing kids. Made sense why he worked alone. Going unnoticed looking like that wasn¡¯t even an option.


    He got in the passenger seat and the smell of wok-fried candy chicken made Philip reach for a cigar.


    ¡°What¡¯s the next move, Boss?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s what the meeting is for,¡± said Michael


    Philip finished lighting his cigar and hid his sigh in the smoke. Heavy weighs the crown. Michael had made Philip his right hand but still had to be cautious. Couldn¡¯t let the supervisor think he was better than the rank and file. Too bad for Michael, Philip would have thought that even if his job was just filling their sippy cups.


    ¡°Shouldn¡¯t we meet in the dark?¡± Philip asked. Most teams Philip had been on, meeting up in the dreamworlds had been near impossible, but with Klara¡¯s ability to link them all together, he would have thought it would be the default method of communication.


    ¡°No. Good to meet face to face when you can. Keeps back the doubt.¡±


    Philip wanted to say that any team member who couldn¡¯t hold their spirit on their own should be out on their ass, but he knew better than to try and hash that out again. Whatever his reasons, Michael had decided the kid was staying.


    ¡°Anyone in particular you want me to push on, other than the target?¡± Philip asked.


    ¡°No, better not. Keep your connections tight for right now, besides the necessary logistics.¡±


    Philip understood. Pushing was a two-way street. Anyone he knew about could also know about him. No telling what kind of Operators or even Sages were on this job.


    He stopped at the end of the lot and looked for a pause in the traffic.


    ¡°So the client didn¡¯t mention any other teams?¡±


    ¡°If they had, I¡¯d have charged them more,¡± said Michael, acid on the edges of his words.Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    They moved into traffic and Philip let the city slide by around him without arousing any memory. If his own mother jumped in front of the car, he¡¯d run her over without any recognition. Pure spirit. An old-school professional from another time. Here with a bunch of amateurs, save one, getting played by clients he would have laughed out of the office years ago. Maybe his pride really was misplaced.


    ¡°So, what¡¯re your thoughts on dropping out then?¡±


    ¡°How¡¯s that?¡± Michael opened a bag of neon disc candy.


    ¡°Either we go through this thing, and let it be known we can be worked into doing extra for free, or we drop out and get it understood that we don¡¯t take jobs sold underhandedly.¡±


    ¡°Or that we¡¯re afraid of complications.¡±


    ¡°This isn¡¯t complications! This is fucking fraud!¡±


    Michael chewed his candy and the bright faux citrus dueled with the tobacco in the air. At the stoplight, he took a soda out of nowhere and twisted it open.


    ¡°Let me worry about our reputation. I know how to maintain one.¡±


    Philip had some replies for that, but he let them smolder out at the end of his cigar. He had decided he didn¡¯t want to remember what Michael was like when he got angry.


    Michael felt the city. It spoke to him in memories, pulled on him with its scenery, bounced his past self across its surface like a magician rolling a coin on his knuckles. He let it. Others of his breed had learned to become deaf to the self, to silence it completely. Not an easy thing to do, and for Michael it had proved impossible. Eventually, he had been forced to admit that it wasn¡¯t due to any lack of trying on his part. It was just the way he was made. So, he listened to the self, asked him what he felt and not just what he knew, and often learned things that raw knowledge might never have divulged.


    ¡°Sometimes, you just know,¡± someone had said aeons ago. His positions in his heyday had been less than managerial, and he had always felt, looking up from the trenches, that the real struggle of a leader must have been dealing with all the people under you, their oddities and complexes. But from the top, he could see that was far less than half the struggle. The team he loved. Truly. It was everyone else that gave him a fucking headache.


    The first jobs back in the saddle had been simple enough. Less choice. No shopping for clients. If they were looking for work, Michael was working. Then as his horizons broadened, he remembered what he had hated about all of it. The politics. The networking. Nothing was ever just a job for a price. The interlocking meshes of alliances and rivalries that formed the Hardworlder ¡°community¡± had done nothing but get more tangled since he left it. Everyone was thinking about their place on the pile, and the clients had to be just as shrewd. Slip the best jobs at the best rates to the teams they didn¡¯t want on the other side of their endeavors. Another abstraction. Professional headhunters, Hardworlder talent agencies, hustling for their cut between hired and hiree. Michael had tried to cut them out, with limited success. Thank God for Klara. That was her world, and she had kept him out of it since he brought her on. Finally he had found a groove, free to focus on the jobs themselves, which had gotten tougher but more streamlined. Until the last job.


    Nothing about the office job had felt right. That old sixth sense had gone off the moment he dropped in. It felt like nostalgia. That¡¯s how he knew. Gradie¡¯s last-second stumble onto greatness notwithstanding, it felt like a rigged deal from the jump. In hindsight the kill itself even added to the sensation. Something forgotten returning. An old friend who hadn¡¯t aged.


    Then there was the client¡¯s insistence on the debrief at the Allclub, some ancient custom older than most Hardworlders working now, a trust in the Principality of the Allworld and its ability to broker a neutral secret meeting free of recording eyes no matter how powerful the Speaker or the Maker, and an old superstition about meeting face to face, at both ends of a job. He hadn¡¯t been to a meeting like that in twenty years. Even at the end they had been out of style. The questions. The undertone of distrust. As if despite everything that had happened over nearly three decades, Hardworlders were still just oddities with a novel use, little more than demons gone corporate.


    He had tried to shake off the feeling, get away from it, slip back into the groove, but it was thrown off for good. And wouldn¡¯t you know it, the moment he got up this morning, there it was again. That nostalgia. Like his life had picked up a story he had stepped out of years ago. Like unpausing a video.


    He was unnerved, but he wasn¡¯t surprised.


    After all, they were working for the same client.

 The Bounty | Chapter 12: Hunters

    A needle in a haystack, under fire


    The instructions had been simple. Drive around. Do some shit your self might do. Maybe get something to eat. Wait for the word, then meet up.


    It had proved to be a test of Spirit. Gradie drove around, replaying the shootout in his head, letting the memories that jumped out of the landscape flow past like scraps of someone else¡¯s trash. He thought about testing his phone on one of the parked cars, particularly the ones with more than four cylinders, but decided against it. Philip would probably call the cops on him and fry all his tech before leaving him to drift on his own while they finished the job. Then he would be stuck on energy drink duty with EP for the foreseeable future. Well¡­


    The world skipped and an hour broke apart as he drove around making left turns once in a while and imagining being trapped in a remote apartment with EP and all the sexual chaos that would obviously lead to. It was well into the afternoon when his map pinged a new location labeled ¡®meeting¡¯ and brought him back to reality.


    It was in the part of town he usually drove through to beat the highway traffic. Massive rolling parking lots, built for crowds of single-income nuclear families thirty years gone, flowed out from ancient pebble-faced strip malls and wrapped around pawn shops, cash advances, discount furniture stores and fast-food restaurants occupying buildings in shapes distinctive to some other chain. It all felt forgotten, as if time was struggling to push it along. Years and decades building up in its creases like grime, until one day it would pass a breaking point and drop out of history entirely.


    Mostly, the area just made him nostalgic. Memories came in the windows from two different pasts, and he ran his finger along the underside pistol rail to drive them away. His GPS told him to turn in at the last Long John Silvers in the city and the self-storage slinked out from behind it. It looked closed down. He pulled around to the gate across from a line of houses.


    ¡°Zoey, I think I¡¯m here.¡±


    ¡°You think? Let me- Yeah, one sec.¡±


    The gate rolled open and he drove down between the storage units until he got to the little office at the back. One of the units next to it was open and a solid black Hayabusa slept in the shadows.


    The small office smelled like old dust and something hummed behind the counter. There was no one inside. Philip called from the back room and Gradie found him sitting with Michael in two out of place gaming chairs, picking at one of the Styrofoam BBQ containers on the table. Luke was leaning out the back door holding it ajar with the tip of his foot and blowing smoke outside. Lindsey was standing against the wall with a can of Arizona green tea.


    ¡°Heard you got in a little shoot-out this morning,¡± Michael said.


    ¡°Yea. It was alright.¡± Michael¡¯s tone told Gradie he probably shouldn¡¯t gush about how much fun it was.


    ¡°If you had gotten shot, would that have been alright?¡± Philip said.


    ¡°Uh, no?¡± Gradie said. Lindsey laughed into her tea and Luke made a De Niro-esque frown and nodded.


    ¡°I¡¯m not here to help you get your fucking adrenaline fix,¡± Philip said. ¡°Do that on your own time. You¡¯re on this job as back up.¡±


    ¡°I got four of them.¡±


    ¡°And if this was a video game, you¡¯d have the high score¡ª¡±


    ¡°Well,¡± Luke raised an eyebrow at Lindsey who rolled her eyes.


    ¡°But this is a job with a clear success point,¡± Philip continued. ¡°We¡¯re not here for a body count.¡±


    ¡°All right. So, next time Johnny gets shot at¡ª¡±


    ¡°You stay fucking put.¡±


    There wasn¡¯t anything to say after that, so Gradie just nodded. After a while, Luke flicked his cigarette out the door and sat down on the carpet.


    ¡°That was some pretty good shooting though.¡± He shrugged at Phillip and took out his phone. No one said shit.


    ¡°Ashley and Kate are pulling up,¡± EP said in the earbuds. Gradie heard car doors outside and remembered something.


    ¡°Why¡¯d you give me that shitty car?¡±


    ¡°That shit was rough, Max.¡± Luke laughed.


    ¡°You mean the same kind of car you and every other office monkey drives in the Real?¡± Philip said.


    ¡°I¡¯m not going to work, last time I checked.¡±


    ¡°You going racing? That car blends in. Unlike your wannabe matrix get up.¡±


    ¡°Oh so is that how this works? The cops just pull over everything with more than four cylinders and ask ¡°Are you a dimension hopping assassin?¡±


    Luke laughed and Philip, to Gradie¡¯s surprise, let a smile slide across his face.


    ¡°All right kid. Maybe next time I¡¯ll get you a car without hail damage.¡±


    ¡°God damn Mr. Max. You always get the dustiest fucking places as an HQ.¡± Celeste bounced in from the front with an iced drink that smelled like Hibiscus and was less than a quarter inch below the lid, and dropped a paper bag that smelled like tacos into the trashcan.


    ¡°Got here in a hurry I see.¡± Philip said.


    ¡°What, are you thirsty?¡± Celeste batted her eyes at him and he just blew air out of his nostrils like a cartoon bull.


    ¡°Did you stop and get some bleaching done?¡± Luke said from the floor, looking up the back of Celeste¡¯s barely-there shorts with fake curiosity.


    ¡°Oh my god Johnny!¡± Celeste cackled.


    ¡°Jesus.¡± Lindsey sighed into her tea. Sam slid in the side door with a fast-food cup in her hand and leaned against the wall. She had traded her coveralls for a stripped shirt and pair of worn-in jeans that showed off her unexpectedly full hips¡ª


    ¡°Cooper Davidson is in custody downtown,¡± Michael said suddenly, now standing. Gradie almost jumped out of his shoes and hoped Sam didn¡¯t notice.


    ¡°So, we gonna bust him out?¡± Celeste said.


    ¡°We?¡± Lindsey said to the back of her head.


    ¡°No, we''re going to search for the cache,¡± Michael said.


    ¡°Which could be anywhere, right?¡± Sam said.


    ¡°He¡¯d want it somewhere he can access it,¡± Michael said. ¡°So he can try and negotiate. Also, we know a few things we didn¡¯t this morning. First, we know that Cooper isn¡¯t lucid, and second, there are more teams in play than just us.¡±


    ¡°Third, our client is an asshole,¡± Luke said.


    ¡°Aren¡¯t there usually multiple teams on a job?¡± Gradie said. Philip almost growled.


    ¡°No, if you remember, this was a simple retrieval job. All we were hired to do is find the cache, return it to the Other, then drop the guy out. He didn¡¯t even have a guard¡ª¡±


    ¡°He does now,¡± Luke said with a smile.


    ¡°So why are they here then?¡± Gradie said.


    ¡°Someone ran their mouth in the Allclub,¡± said Luke.


    ¡°And now we¡¯re working a fucking bounty,¡± Lindsey said to the ceiling.


    ¡°Don¡¯t bounties usually get messed up?¡± Celeste said.


    ¡°Bounties always go tits up,¡± Luke said.


    ¡°What do you mean a Bounty?¡± Gradie asked.


    He got another one of those silences that implied they had forgotten he existed, until Lindsey helped him.


    ¡°It¡¯s when more than one party has stake in one side of a job. Means someone else found out about the cache and put a price on it.¡±


    ¡°Or the client themselves put it out,¡± Michael said.


    ¡°Why the fuck would they do that?¡± Philip snapped.This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    ¡°To obfuscate something about the job¡­¡±


    There was a silence as Michael looked out the window thoughtfully, apparently unaware he had been talking to anyone. The quiet drew his attention back to the present.


    ¡°Forget it. Beyond our pay grade. We still have a contract, and despite some new obstacles, the goal hasn¡¯t changed.¡±


    Luke stood up and stretched.


    ¡°All right then, so what¡¯s the next move?¡±


    ¡°The POE is still swarming with cops,¡± Philip said, addressing the group. ¡°Zoe¡¯s got eyes on his apartment, and there¡¯s been no action there, which means our newly found opposition is too cool to get on hands and knees and start turning over couch cushions.¡±


    ¡°Or they¡¯re being cautious,¡± Lindsey said, as if Philip had never heard the word. He smiled and shook his head.


    ¡°No, trust me. Every other crash team has the same play; Get hands on the dude and get him to give up a location.¡±


    ¡°And we¡¯re not gonna be doing that?¡± Luke asked, hoping to be wrong.


    ¡°Nope.¡± Philip¡¯s smile boiled up to his eyes. ¡°We¡¯re gonna turn over some couch cushions.¡±


    ¡°We need to check all the obvious places,¡± Michael said, with less animation. ¡°His house, work, then push out and get a feel of his recent whereabouts and check anywhere else he might have put it.¡±


    ¡°You want me out there?¡± Luke asked. ¡°You said something about laying low.¡± He didn¡¯t sound pleased about it.


    ¡°You will stay in the area, unseen, in case you¡¯re needed. Try and stay equidistant from his house and the POE.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll take his home,¡± Lindsey said. ¡°You sure they haven¡¯t searched it?¡±


    ¡°Zoey¡¯s sure,¡± Philip said.


    ¡°Kate, once they drop the tape, you and Alan will take his POE,¡± Michael said.


    ¡°The tape?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°It¡¯s a crime scene, at the moment. As soon as it¡¯s not, you¡¯ll go inside, alone.¡±


    ¡°What, I¡¯m just gonna wait out in the car?¡± Sam said.


    ¡°If he gets caught, leave,¡± Michael said, like he was letting Sam in on a joke. Gradie nodded.


    Alright then. More punishment for actually using my fucking weapon.


    ¡°So, I¡¯m gonna break into what is now a crime scene and look for a quarter?¡±


    ¡°If you¡¯re not up to it, just eat a bullet now so I can be rid of your whining,¡± Philip said.


    ¡°Zoey will get you in and Kate will be your lookout,¡± Michael said.


    ¡°But, he could have put it anywhere, right? Like down a drain or¡ª¡±


    ¡°No, remember, path of least resistance. It¡¯s just a quarter. He may have left it in his locker¡ª¡±


    ¡°What if he used it to buy a Twix?¡± Gradie tried to understand how this job wasn¡¯t completely nonsensical. The soul-shattering coolness of jumping through realities to shoot at people was dampened by the reality of searching for pocket change.


    ¡°You¡¯ll check the vending machines too,¡± Michael said. Gradie exhaled and tried to find the right words. Lindsey stepped up and turned her sunglasses toward him, so he had to look at two warped reflections of himself being confused.


    ¡°Look, don¡¯t overthink it. It¡¯s just a quarter that some dude had on him in the past two days.¡±


    ¡°But he could have spent it somewhere and it could be locked in some cash machine or a bank¡ª¡± Gradie rubbed his temples.


    ¡°And if that¡¯s the case, what could we do?¡± Michael said.


    ¡°Nothing! Unless we want to search every¡ª¡±


    ¡°Exactly, so we¡¯ll take the only action left to us, which assumes that isn¡¯t the case,¡±


    ¡°Okie dokie, you got it? Let¡¯s go.¡± Sam waved to Gradie from the door.


    ¡°Even if the tape comes down, wait till dark, both teams,¡± Michael said.


    ¡°So, what do we do until dark?¡± Sam glanced at Gradie for a split second before searching the rest of the room for an answer.


    ¡°Nothing,¡± Michael said. ¡°Max will get you geared up, then Zoey will route you to a safe house. She and I are working on IDing the other teams so keep an ear out for intel.¡±


    ¡°Ok, sounds good. Have a fun productive day everyone!¡± Sam moved to the side door and Philip stood up.


    ¡°You pull your jeep in?¡± He pulled a manilla envelope of keys out from somewhere.


    ¡°Yep,¡± Sam said.


    ¡°All right. April, your shits in the unit to the left of your spot.¡± He tossed one of the keys to Lindsey, who was out the door before they were done jingling. Gradie picked up one of the unopened bbq clamshells and started to follow them. Michael stopped him.


    ¡°Alan, wait one second.¡±


    ¡°Yeah?¡± Gradie asked. He hoped the rest of the team would rush out the door, but they all stopped and watched Michael expectantly.


    ¡°How are you feeling?¡± Michael said.


    ¡°Uh, hungry.¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s a natural,¡± Philip said. Two brain cells just like Johnny boy.¡±


    ¡°Well, the one you got is putting in work,¡± Luke said.


    ¡°Any sense of dropping out? Any disconnect at all?¡± Michael said.


    God damned Michael. Gradie had just barely gotten over his disappointment about being assigned the job of digging for the quarter in some dingy store, and was now thoroughly engrossed in fantasies of a rooftop shootout with cops who had Sam¡¯s jeep surrounded in the parking lot.


    But now, at Michael''s question, his mind turned to thoughts of the Self, those other memories that floated at the edge of his mind, like shimmers cast on the wall of a pool. He found them less enticing than the fantasies. Since he had gotten used to priming a self, they had become far less powerful than the ones that had pulled him out at the clubhouse, and the experience of burning through a hundred different versions of himself had brought on a realization.


    The real world, at least his past in it, had never felt any more real to him than the lies other people told him about it or the daydreams he made up to get through it. He had always seen the world as a kind of persistent dream.


    He understood, looking at the concern on Michael¡¯s face, that this was not normal, and that this mental state, or detached perspective or whatever it was, guided him through the Hardworlds without getting snagged on the barbed edges of his identity.


    ¡°No, not really. Too focused on the job, I guess.¡±


    Understanding came into Michael¡¯s face and Gradie saw he had ignored the words and found the truth.


    ¡°All right, good to hear. Don¡¯t hesitate to ask for help if you start to feel uneasy.¡±


    Gradie followed the team out through the back door into a double-wide storage unit, where a parked Mercedes SUV reflected the shelves, cases, and gun safes lining the walls. The SUV had to be at least a hundred grand even un-armored and Gradie, remembering the hail-scarred whining sedan he had driven up in, brushed the polished side of it with a single outstretched middle finger as he passed, and reminded himself that it was here by Philip¡¯s will alone, and that clean laundry found in a backseat was among the lowest of the gifts of the Hardworlds.


    They marched out into the Texas sun and crossed the glaring cement row towards another double unit with one door rolled open, where Sam¡¯s Jeep lurked in the squared darkness. They squeezed, single file, between the front corner of the Jeep''s bumper and the door frame and Philip flicked on the lights.


    The Jeepless unit had a large bare table in the center and walls lined with more safes and cases. Luke was already opening one and loading magazines and small pouches into a duffle bag.


    ¡°Jeep¡¯s armored at a B5, so try not to sit and soak it up,¡± Philip said. Sam nodded.


    ¡°Oh hell, I¡¯d rather have some get up and go anyway,¡± She looked around at the lockers and safes on the wall.


    ¡°Which one?¡±


    ¡°That one, I think,¡± Philip said, pointing to a gun case just past the Jeep¡¯s taillight. Sam gave him a shy smile


    ¡°You think?¡±


    ¡°I could always be mistaken.¡±


    ¡°Ok.¡± She said under her breath. She drummed on her thighs with her hands while approaching the case.


    ¡°So can I get something bigger than a pistol?¡± Gradie asked. ¡°Since I¡¯m gonna be¡ª¡±


    ¡°Shut up.¡± Philip snapped. He watched Sam like he had sent her on a scavenger hunt.


    Sam stepped in front of the safe and put her hand on the handle. She sighed and said something to herself and closed her eyes.


    ¡°It¡¯s not magic, sweetheart,¡± Philip said suddenly.


    ¡°Shut the fuck up!¡± Sam yelled.


    ¡°You¡¯re not casting a spell, if it¡¯s in there then it¡¯s in there, nothing special about it, just means that¡¯s where it¡¯s always been.¡± Sam glared at him with her eyes, but her mouth was curved at the edges.


    ¡°If it¡¯s in there,¡± he said. Sam sighed and yanked open the safe. It was full of ammo boxes.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± Sam said.


    ¡°You can¡¯t change the past, kid. Stop trying to cast spells and just remember.¡±


    Sam sighed, red-faced, and stepped towards the next safe, then stopped.


    ¡°I told you what I wanted, right? Days ago, I called you.¡± She was speaking to the second safe. ¡°So you must have got it. Where is it?¡± she was almost whispering. She opened the second safe and there was a duffel bag on its end and a large toolbag on the bottom. The shelves were full of magazines.


    ¡°See, no magic. You sent me the order on Tuesday, and I got it for you. Cause and effect.¡±


    ¡°Oh, that¡¯s right,¡± Sam said, like she had just remembered, the smile draining off her face.


    ¡°It always feels like that,¡± Gradie said.


    ¡°What?¡± Sam looked at him with those blue-grey eyes, pure and without suspicion. He wanted to tell her everything, but he could only tell her what he knew.


    ¡°After you push, it feels like remembering. You can¡¯t even tell you did anything. Just like priming a self¡ª¡±


    ¡°You should be able to tell, if you want to get anywhere in this game,¡± Philip said. ¡°If you can¡¯t tell the difference between the actions of the Spirit and the dumb events of the Hardworld, or someone else¡¯s pushing, you¡¯ll always be working with a handicap.¡±


    Sam was looking through the bags like Christmas.


    ¡°Plate carriers in the back seat,¡± Philip motioned with an unlit cigar and took out a lighter.


    Gradie looked at one of the safes. They had only been in a day, which mean Sam¡¯s self had told Philip¡¯s self what guns to get her.


    ¡°Wait, so you two know each other?¡± he said to Philip. ¡°I thought that was against the rules? Couldn¡¯t she just tell you what she wanted before¡ª"


    ¡°So now you give a shit about the rules?¡±


    ¡°Uh¡ª¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about how I train your teammates. Just practice sitting still in the passenger seat.¡±


    ¡°I think Kate¡¯s gonna be the one sitting in the car this time.¡±


    ¡°Uh, not if you get in trouble again!¡± Sam yelled.


    Gradie looked over at her, leaning out from the back of the jeep, impish smile on her face, and felt something roll over him, like a magnetism that rattled pieces of his body, but rooted him to the ground, unshakable.


    ¡°How much trouble you think I could get into?¡± He smiled slyly and the words slithered across the room.


    Sam rolled her eyes, which made the whites flash spectacularly.


    ¡°Oh yeah, you¡¯re so cool.¡± She disappeared behind the Jeep, but Gradie had seen something else in her eyes that bristled his flesh like charged iron shavings.


    ¡°Try and check your ego before the bullets start flying again,¡± Philip said. Gradie just nodded, unphased.


    A gun safe caught his eye, and that magnetic feeling whispered to him.


    ¡°I think I¡¯ll need something bigger than a handgun if we¡¯re going to his work.¡±


    ¡°Bullshit,¡± Philip said. ¡°If you need even need that you¡¯ve fucked up. You¡¯re going to search and evade and that¡¯s it.¡± Gradie pulled on the safe door and almost popped his wrist out.


    ¡°Guess somebody locked it.¡± Philip lit his cigar


    ¡°Let¡¯s go!¡± Sam yelled, shutting the back door of the jeep. Gradie looked at Philip, standing there smoking like a demon.


    ¡°Guess I do enough work with a pistol anyway.¡±


    ¡°Keep bringing that up. Might be the only thing you ever do.¡±


    Gradie marched off towards the Jeep.


    ¡°Don¡¯t bring that in here,¡± Sam said, pointing at the BBQ container in Gradie¡¯s hand.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s all new car smell in here.¡± She was sitting in the driver¡¯s seat with the door open and the AC going. Gradie looked around and sat down at the big table.


    ¡°Why didn¡¯t you eat before?¡± Sam asked. ¡°You were driving around for an hour.¡±


    Gradie thought about his drive from the auto shop, how he had drifted around the city, looking at every cop car that went by with his palm on his pistol. He decided not to mention that in front of Philip and shrugged and started forking the brisket.


    ¡°Oh my god!¡± Sam slammed the door and the muted sounds of KMFDM¡¯s Symbols album vibrated out through the windows.


    ¡°You got any water?¡± Gradie said to Philip. He just made more smoke then turned and left. Grade heard a mini fridge open somewhere behind him and then felt a pat on his back. Luke set a water down on the table and smiled at him. He threw a duce at Gradie and the windshield of the jeep then slipped out the slab of light between the front of the Jeep and the wall. Gradie sat there eating and tried to decide if the locked safe looked familiar.

 The Bounty | Chapter 13: Division

    When the mind is a prison, who pays for commissary?


    Cooper had been sitting in the cell for hours, maybe even days, wracked by a constant stream of daydreams and nauseated by a gurgling of contradictory memories, squeezing his eyes closed against his headache and trying to wake himself up. His ears were still ringing from the gunfire and he could smell it everywhere, despite the change of clothes (his own clothes, splashed in dried blood had been placed in a plastic evidence bag), so the smell must have seeped into his skin and hair. Every time a cell door slammed shut, he heard a gunshot. At some point, he might have made a phone call, but at least six different conversations with as many contacts, from family to street associates to pledges, jostled for legitimacy in his memory. A few times, he called and got a machine or a dial tone that got louder until he hung up the phone. One time, it had been himself on the other line, trying to warn him about another world and hunters who didn¡¯t believe in dying.


    Eventually, the cops came in. Their stoic entry, the solid sharp metal screech of the door, flattened by the painted concrete bricks, even the angular scents, cologne and gasoline, that they brought with them, all broke the soft, ephemeral, surfaces of his hallucinations, which dissipated like soap bubbles and left Cooper alone in the square space of the room.


    ¡°Alright Mr. Davidson,¡­¡±


    The cop''s voice seemed to suck the reality that had so exactly filled the room moments ago right back out again, and Cooper was filled with the idea that outside the walls was an endless dark void, and the view through the small glass rectangle that seemed to show a hallway and at times a passing head, was really a small screen beyond which was, of course, the void. The cops were agents of this void. If they stepped out again, they would be void once more, melting into it.


    ¡°Right down the hall¡­¡± The cop grabbed him by the elbow and lead him towards the door. He didn¡¯t feel himself stand and it seemed the room dropped down and the door came towards him. Suddenly, He got the idea that he was made of the same stuff as the room, as the cop¡¯s clothes, as the dust in the corners, and that under their skin they were just more void. The universe, it seemed, was made of two kinds of matter; Void and Cooper. This sensation persisted as they drug him out in the hall, where, after the shock of finding the hallway just as the screen had portrayed it subsided, he realized that because he was made of the same stuff as everything else in the world, he was thus bound by its rules. Therefore,


    ¡°I¡¯m going to fucking prison.¡±


    The interrogation room reminded him of community college. Carpet patterned like an image zoomed in too close. Card table desks topped with laptops, pens and coffee cups in various stages of their life cycle on the cop side, bottled water and tissue box on his. They sat across from him in frayed creaking office chairs that may have even done time in an academic advisor''s office, and spoke in the same condescending authoritative tone as every desk monkey he¡¯d ever interacted with, from high school to the court system, just enough niceness on the edges to let you know there¡¯s another level we can go to if you don¡¯t play ball.


    ¡°Are you familiar with this house?¡±


    Computer paper photo of Jo Jo¡¯s cousin¡¯s ex¡¯s place. Memories drifted out of it like an old smell kicked up by digging through the back of a closet or something. He and Jo Jo had gone in while Jo Jo was on lunch break from that bar on 7th, or maybe it was the chicken place off Magnolia. Either way, it hadn¡¯t taken long. Chris, Jo Jo¡¯s cousin¡¯s ex, was out with Sophie (Jo Jo¡¯s cousin, hot little Latina who had said Cooper had ¡°wounded eyes¡± or some shit) at a work thing, and Jo Jo had called Cooper the moment he heard about it.Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.


    ¡°This TCU dipshit threw a Yeti cup at her fucking head and now she¡¯s out with him ¡°networking¡±.¡±


    So, they had gone in, got two laptops (one Mac they had mag wiped while still inside), some watches, Playstation, colognes, rings, something Cooper had thought was a router but Jo Jo recognized as a Hydrogen crypto miner or some shit, and anything else they could fit in two backpacks, including a half-gone bottle of scotch with a name that made Cooper want to rob the guy just for making him try to pronounce it.


    But, Cooper just shook his head, said No sir, and tried to steer the conversation towards the violent shootout that had left multiple cops dead and had seemed to center around him.


    For some reason, the cops weren¡¯t interested.


    ¡°We brought Jo Jo in for assault last week, so cut the shit¡ª¡±


    They walked him through how Jo Jo had run his mouth to some friends, how the Mac had been harder to fence than he thought, how Jo Jo had told his cellmate (sure he had. And the cellmate had just been conveniently looking to lighten a sentence, right?) about a friend of his who beat some old boomer in the head with a flashlight in the middle of a b and e.


    They had shown him photos of the guy in a hospital bed, which was kinda pointless because it had been pitch black when Cooper bopped him with the Maglite so he wouldn¡¯t know him from anybody anyway, but it got the point across.


    Then, suddenly, the conversation had turned, like a dog stopping to sniff something that to everyone else looked like just another patch of grass, and not just any dog but a police dog, maybe one that had been previously running after a serial killer or something, towards the topic of the flashlight bludgeoned boomer¡¯s coin collection.


    ¡°Does this look familiar?¡± The cop said it like laying a trap. Like tying Cooper to the leather and felt book of quarters he was now displaying a picture of was the height of police cunning, despite the action movie shootout he had just been plucked from and homeland security level threats surely moving around the city right about now.


    ¡°I¡¯m fucking dreaming,¡± Cooper laughed.


    ¡°Keep telling yourself that,¡± The cop or detective or whatever he was, said. His voice was made of the same stuff as the void, but energized, like sand swept up from around your feet and melted into a razor.


    The other guy, maybe deciding that things weren¡¯t confusing enough yet, went on to tell Cooper that they could get his sentence reduced if he let them know where he had stashed the quarters. The old man was ready to drop the charges. He just wanted his coins, honest.


    He had gone quiet, so the first cop with the void voice had said his name, like a punch.


    ¡°Cooper?¡±


    Something in it broke everything in half. While one half went off and muttered to itself about plea deals and snitches, the other Cooper tried to remember how he got here.


    Who was I?


    Asked like, ¡°Now where was I?¡±, after being interrupted, as if the cops and the murder were just loud noises out in the street breaking up a gentle night''s rest. He saw himself robbing houses and beating seniors for half dollars and shook his head.


    ¡°No, who was I? I¡¯m not a thief, I don¡¯t even speed, I¡ª¡±


    He saw another him, somewhere quiet, the same way this world was loud, terminally online, waiting for something, hoping for something, and for an instant he stepped inside that other him, like putting on an old jacket, and the feelings, if not the memories, were kicked up like old smells and swirled around him. Like stepping into a quiet room in a raging party, and realizing you weren¡¯t as drunk as you thought. Like dreaming your life had gone to ruins, then waking¡ª


    ¡°All right, you just wanna sit there and laugh, we can let you laugh in your cell,¡±


    The other him vanished, like shapes seen in the dark of near sleep, banished by an involuntary jolt.


    The cops or detectives or whatever they were said things about assault and attempted murder being worse than breaking and entering, and the fleeting kindness of the battered boomer, and how this deal has an expiration date, and Cooper¡¯s inability to do hard time, and so on, but none of the words struck him as hard as the loss of that other him, like the death of a loved one, or the sudden realization that the onset of a terminal illness has severed your lives into two halves, forever.


    He found himself back in his cell, the cop¡¯s warning that ¡°We¡¯re getting a warrant¡± bouncing in his head, like the whole thing had been a bad dream. Maybe it had been a dream. If they were gonna search his house for the quarters, why try and make a deal? The quarters were there,


    weren¡¯t they?

 The Bounty | Chapter 14: Safehouse

    Home is where the guns are


    The downtown skyline slid across the distant horizon as they drove over the curving ramp. Clouds swirled in the wide open sky above, trying to bind into a storm, and a green bowl of fluttering grass cradling the interchange rolled slowly far below them. It felt like flying.


    Another slice of concrete grey rushed over them as their ramp dropped towards the dusty world of ten-lane highways and access roads and gas stations, and the glowing sky with its humming horizon fell backward into memory. Gradie let the inertia of the turn press him into the door, and a question slipped out of the sensation.


    ¡°Who¡¯s feeling this? Who¡¯s looking at the highway, the sprawl, the sky? Is it my Self, or my Spirit? Is my Spirit now separate from¡ª¡±


    He hesitated to call the him that lived in the Real ¡®himself, not just because the word self was now attached to these other doppelgangers he drove like stolen cars, but because that him felt more distant than even the Otherworld.


    Unlike his awakening in the office job, his disconnect from this reality wasn¡¯t a sudden jolt that brought clarity, but a revelation drawn out maddeningly into a fragile sensation, like becoming aware of the cadence of his own breathing and feeling he might suddenly be unable to do it automatically. Below him, he sensed the self, waiting to take him if he fell, stretched out like a plain of quiet sand.


    ¡°You all right dude? Don¡¯t drop out on me.¡± Sam¡¯s voice brought him out of the trance. He saw her in the Otherworld, in the Clubhouse, and here next to him, and his universes aligned bilaterally, with those she inhabited on one side, and the Real on the other, distant and hazy.


    ¡°I¡¯m fine,¡± he said. ¡°Just enjoying living in a world where I never have to work again.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re gonna be doing some work tonight buddy. Don¡¯t get too comfy.¡±


    The GPS told them to merge onto the access road and Sam tossed her empty can at his feet. EP had sent them the address of a safe house where they would hide out till nightfall. A parade of dirty fantasies all proceeding naturally from Gradie being shut in with Sam for the evening had rattled his brains for a good portion of the car ride, but they had all slipped out quietly to make room for the big hulking elephant in the brain; Gradie was nervous about tonight¡¯s raid.


    He had finally got his panic beaten down to just a vague unease by reminding himself where he was.


    I¡¯m in another dimension, another universe, packing a pistol, riding around in an armored car with a hot tom-boy assassin, and tonight I¡¯m gonna break into my target¡¯s work and look for something that Spirits from another world are killing to get their hands on. And if I die, I¡¯ll just pop back into the world of limitless imagination and go have a drink at the dance club continent. I¡¯m going to have fun, I¡¯m gonna shoot back, and It¡¯s going to be fucking amazing.


    Then the depersonalization atop the ramp had shaken his fragile confidence. Maybe he wasn¡¯t as prepared as he had led Michael to believe.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got the floor plans and cameras for the POE loaded up on the PC upstairs, so when you get there start studying them.¡± EP¡¯s voice, sexy even in its gruff professionalism (or even more so because of it?) crashed his reverie and the word ¡®study¡¯ got lodged somewhere he couldn¡¯t think it out of. Before he could get back to the good thoughts, they were slowing into a turn up a suburban driveway.


    The house was a familiar two-story brick box with blackout solar screens on the windows and a front lawn you could hop over. The only thing that made it stand out among the other homes was a lack of wood paneling, as if it had siphoned the brick from all the other houses and they had to make do.


    The garage door rose slowly, revealing walls lined with cabinets and cases that had the same look as the ones in Philip¡¯s storage unit. They stepped out into the chemical-smelling garage as the smooth armor plates at the back of the garage door slid into place and the last slice of sun-warmed suburbs disappeared. It felt like standing in a bomb shelter.


    After the ammo cases and boxes marked ¡°explosive¡¯ in the laundry room, the kitchen was mostly unassuming, besides the brushed steel and bullet-resistant glass of the back door. Sam set her bag on one of the seats in the breakfast nook and started up a massive espresso machine on the counter. It looked like a piece of hospital equipment from the eighties with a bowl of whole beans stuck on top. A memory snaked its way up from the sleeping subterranean of his self. La Marzocco GS3. Attached were the spindly whisps of a meeting at an associate¡¯s house, the cautious texture of his portfolio (a cultish devotion to the index), the self-assured tone of his voice, and the rising question; ¡°If you¡¯re so god damn satisfied with your returns, then why did you ask me for a consult?¡± and the memory of the answer, revealing itself over the course of an hour. ¡°No, I don¡¯t have any insider knowledge of some unicorn you can short.¡±


    ¡°You want one, or you just looking?¡±


    Sam¡¯s voice and look brought him back. The Gradie that had moved from trading shitcoins to hedging with options and worried about the Monday ahead dropped back down into the soft sand of the Self.


    God she¡¯s cute.


    ¡°Yeah, can you do a flat white?¡± he asked.


    ¡°Boy, I don¡¯t think you know what a flat white is, but I¡¯m gonna show you.¡±


    It was perfect. He drank half of it while she sat in front of the massive wall mounted TV in the sleek furnished living room. She had a PC controller in her hand and was scrolling through the game library.


    ¡°The plans are on the computer in the upstairs bedroom,¡± EP said in his ears. Sam looked at him and smiled.Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    ¡°Have fun.¡±


    The menu theme for Rainbow Six Siege chased him up the stairs. There was a game room with a pool table, covered in gear. Both windows had low wide shelves in front of them. One of the three doors stood open and a rectangle of gently carpeted room lit by softened sunlight beckoned him inside.


    The floor plans, satellite views, folders, and other documents were arranged neatly across two monitors on a desk against the wall. Besides a twin bed in the corner, there was only another low shelf, this one just wide enough to span the window. His steps bounced on the thick carpet as he moved to the window. The drawer didn¡¯t pull out and he remembered they filled these with sand. There was an M27 leaned against the wall with a shoebox full of magazines next to it.


    He felt it in his hands, the recoil in his shoulder. Brass clattered against the wall as he fired out the window at faceless assassins advancing across the lawn, their rounds thunking in the brick walls and cracking into the sand behind the drawers. He crouched down, reloaded, and was letting out a full auto mag dump when EP cut his daydream short.


    ¡°Are you gonna just stand there all day?¡±


    ¡°Do you ever stop watching me?¡±


    ¡°Oh! Cause I have a crush on you, right? That¡¯s the joke? Not that you¡¯re standing there drooling all over yourself?¡± EP¡¯s voice dripped acid and he was halfway back to the desk when she finished.


    ¡°All right. What am I supposed to be looking at here?¡± The floor plans were meaningless boxes and the gallery of photos, taken from the phones of anyone who had snapped a photo inside the store in the past few months, didn¡¯t point towards any secret hiding place for a magical quarter.


    ¡°Know the layout, know where the exits are, and know where you need to search. And read the document. I already did most of the work for you.¡± She chirped off the line.


    Gradie spent the next few hours looking over the images, reading EP¡¯s write-up of the job, (where she thought the coin might be, what to search in what order, best escape routes if the cops came,) and falling into daydreams of late night shootouts, most involving a swarm of well-armed but hive-minded gunmen descending on the store, being dropped in twos and threes by Gradie¡¯s supernaturally accurate fire, culminating in a high speed drive off into the night with Sam at the wheel, staring at him in awe. The last fantasies ended in a romantic downpour as the rain fell on the window at the edge of the room.


    After the hundredth review of the files, the minutes spread torturously and his daydreams dried into still collages. He changed tabs mindlessly and something in the motion made candle charts and spreadsheets flash on the screen. The months and years spent by that other him tracking volume and sentiment and all the highs and lows that came with it spread below him suddenly like a great open space he was floating over.


    He looked away from the screen and found a nickel-plated Smith and Wesson 5906 set next to the mouse pad, reflecting the monitor in bright lines. Its twin fired at Michael on the rooftop in the Otherworld and that other person fell away as if banished, but the feeling of office work remained. The dual monitors showed, in his peripherals, the programs and notes from his work in the Real. The intrusion was repulsive. He stood up and walked out of the room.


    ¡°Zoey, how much time till we leave?¡±


    Rainfall roared into the now dark game room and lightning flashed neon blue in the windows. Digital gunfire and studio screams bounced up the stairs. He rested his hand on the pistol holstered on his hip.


    From out of the darkness, it came to him. Just as it had poured out of the landscape that day at the clubhouse. He recognized it as the magnetism he had felt looking at Sam in the storage, the energy that had carried him away from his desk and down into the tunnels in the office job, and the exhilaration of the falling and the kill.


    What Lindsey had called the Pull. He focused on it, hoping that if he committed the feeling to memory, he could summon it at will.


    Whatever the night brings, I can take it. This is my world now.


    EP chimed on. ¡°We got lucky with the rain. Tape came down about ten minutes ago. Be out the door in half an hour.¡±


    ¡°Got it,¡± Sam said in double, first crystal clear in his ears, and a muffled stairwell-shaped echo an instant after.


    In the bathroom, Gradie found a Benelli M4 leaned against the toilet, an RPK 16 with a 14-inch barrel on a pile of ammo in the bathtub, and, while washing his hands, a Glock 17 by the soap. His mind drifted to fantasies again, but now with the job close at hand, they had an edge he wasn¡¯t in control of.


    The roar of gunfire at the strip mall echoed at half-strength in his head. The idea of getting into a gunfight here, in a house that so resembled all the houses he¡¯d ever visited or lived in, made his heart beat in a strong upward direction, as if it could lift him into the plane of reality where the guns had already come alive. In a moment of absent-minded panic, he looked out the window.


    Nothing but dark outlines of lawns and cars, struck out for a moment in bright fragments by a silent flash of lightning.


    Halfway down the stairs, he suddenly felt that he was the only person in the house. Every room stretched dark and empty in his mind like things revealed by some threatening force, and he almost missed a step. Every bullet in every casing in every magazine in the house felt pointed at him. Just a mass of flesh on a staircase waiting to hurt.


    He took the last steps two at a time and when he turned at the bottom, Sam¡¯s face floated in TV light in the living room. She looked over at him, eyes glowing like moonstones. Nothing but pure curiosity in them. A thing to be protected, just as exposed as he was. Stepping into the dark living room, the fear remained, a thing to be endured.


    ¡°You ready? You weren¡¯t just up there beating it were you?¡±


    ¡°No, I like to go into these things fully loaded.¡±


    ¡°Nice.¡± She winced at him and left the controller on the table and her immobile avatar got gunned down by a figure bunny hopping across the screen. In the kitchen, they got two water bottles out of the fridge. Gradie noticed a Jericho 9mm in the door shelf and five frag grenades in the crisper. Sam took her bag with her into the garage.


    ¡°Are we coming back here afterwards?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°No. Never want to go to the same place twice in one day, at the least.¡± She set her bag in the back seat and opened up one of the shelves.


    ¡°So, what? Another safe house?¡±


    ¡°One thing at a time. Here.¡± She passed him a plate carrier, a soft armor low profile kind the twins had cooked up, and put the plates on a small table. He took his jacket off and started putting them on.


    ¡°Shouldn¡¯t we have a place in mind?¡±


    ¡°No, because we might end up trying to lose the cops and wind up on the other side of town anyway,¡± Sam said.


    ¡°Or one of you might get shot and we¡¯ll need a place with a sterile room.¡± EP came in suddenly.


    ¡°How many you think are gonna be there?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°Hopefully zero. If any show up, run.¡± She clicked off the line.


    Sam chambered a round into something and shut the passenger door. She came around to the driver''s side door with a pistol in her hand, a subcompact Beretta PX4 Storm with the stealth decockers. She put it in her coat pocket and got in the jeep.


    ¡°Get in the back.¡± There was no taunting in her voice this time and Gradie got in without a word. He saw the stock of a weapon over the edge of the passenger seat. The garage light went out as the door went up and Sam¡¯s face was lit up like an angel as she watched a rearview camera in the dash.


    Gradie looked out the back window. A solid sheet of rain. The streetlights floating in clouds of chaos. They backed out and the downpour took over the windows and everything was water until Sam flipped on the front and rear wipers, then it was like moving through a tunnel.


    Sam flipped on the stereo and Juno by ASC gave the entire ride an extra otherworldly feel, but it was the reality of the situation that had Gradie¡¯s heart beating out of his chest.

 The Bounty | Chapter 15: April Showers

    Fears in the rain


    Cooper¡¯s apartments were a single row of two-story eight-unit buildings a few blocks away from the POE, in a neighborhood where micro churches and sheet metal body shops and empty lots moved against sixty-year-old houses, like the last stages of a decay that could only end in some distant gentrification. The land sloped to the south towards the strip mall white noise of the main road, and downtown popped up to the east, just a glittering promise in the rain.


    Nothing moved anywhere besides a hazy pair of headlights, swimming through the static shadows.


    Lindsey killed the headlights and drove her bike up onto the darkened sidewalk under a broken streetlight and parked it beneath a massive bush of scarlet runner beans draping over a corner of plywood-paneled privacy fence that surrounded the back lot of a used car dealer. Sheltered under the dense fairyland boughs of the bush, she locked her helmet on the bike and waited as her eyes adjusted to the dark.


    There was an empty corner lot with sloping sides like a ziggurat between her and the street below Coopers'' apartments. Rainwater roared down a densely wooded gulch between one sloping side and back fence of the car lot, rushing into a storm gutter entrance sloshing below the sidewalk at her feet.


    Rain pelted the sheet-metal covered parking with so much noise she expected it to cut off suddenly at any moment. A sound too heavy to sustain. The steady current of water streaming down to her from miles above felt like eyes watching. She checked in with her own eyes in the sky.


    ¡°Babe, I¡¯m moving out.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re clear,¡± EP said.


    She stepped out onto the sidewalk and the rain hit her like she had dove into some lively body of water. She tightened her poncho¡¯s hood, pausing for a second to glance at the sky, hoping to see any of EP¡¯s drones. She didn¡¯t, and hadn¡¯t expected to, but in the daytime those little black dots were always comforting. A shame EP had gotten better with the camo recently.


    The empty lot was a dense mass of darkness on her right, and the distant streetlights could lay only broken shreds of amber at her feet, where water flooded down the thin weed-choked sidewalk and rolled over her boots. The road to her left was wide and dark, and not a single car passed from either way as she trudged uphill.


    The apartments were across the street, up on a raised lot over ten feet above the street and sidewalk below, the earth boxed in by a flat concrete wall topped by steel railings and covered in rough amateur murals of cowboys and low riders, now only visible as memories of the surveillance photos. The flat boxes were framed against the sky by a light glaring in the back lot, and the amber squares of the windows, some showing the telltale signs of tweaker torn blinds, were the only signs she was still in the land of the living.


    She crossed the street and continued uphill alongside the apartments in total darkness, another dead streetlight testifying to EP¡¯s preparation, until she came to the half-lit parking lot at the back of the complex. She kept to the shadows and scanned the cars for tells that someone was waiting for her as she walked towards the back of the units. The parking lot was raised above the apartment ground level and separated by a low chain link fence.


    She hopped down a cracked set of concrete steps and stopped in the walkway between two units. Water streamed off the clogged gutters above and splattered on the slim sidewalk and grass at her feet. She took a breath and scanned for signs she had been followed or noticed, and when she found none started up the metal steps towards unit 2676.


    She had made it up two stairs when someone screamed in the downstairs unit, distinctly female. A man¡¯s voice broke out in measured shouts that could have been matched to blows. She waited. Rain sound washed away the noise of the shouts. Lightning flashed and the sky was bright for a moment. Flowing streams of mirrored purple and dripping lines of silver marched towards some unseen darkness below the concrete. Then it was all dark again, the instant of light becoming a wall between the moment of the screams and now. It was too much.


    She held the Walther in her hand and took up a bump key in the other. Bottoms of her shoes meeting flat faces of cement like praying hands and just as silent. Up against the door, she stopped. Her ears filtered through the storm sounds and singled out the voices. The mans, different now, a rolling anger, but even and un-pressurized. The woman repeated a handful of syllables like a reflex. She shook them at him in a linoleum sounding room, then closer to the door, then far away again.Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!


    The Walther¡¯s safety moved under Lindsey¡¯s thumb. The man began repeating a name. His tone built up like a bomb falling. He said it like a thrust and Lindsey had the gun out. Her nerves set to that gyroscopic sensitivity. She felt a raindrop fall on the slide and traced it in her mind as it dripped down and off the point of the trigger guard. The bump key met the lock like completing a circuit. Then the sounds from the door, two-fold, changed in every way and Lindsey stepped past it, gun in pocket and bump key hidden, just as the woman opened the door and stepped out.


    ¡°Fuck you!¡± Her scream bounced off the walls and was chased by the door slam. A few seconds later, the man opened it and stood there with his chest leaned out, back of a bald head presented to Lindsey like a target.


    ¡°Venessa! Venessa! Fucking stupid¡ª¡± The last words were a whisper and he disappeared like one back into the door. Lindsey stood in the rain, the world once again as it had been before the scream. Lightning flashed again like a sign.


    ¡°You ok?¡± EP Said, her voice unlike anything else in the world. Born into a soft room far away.


    Lindsey didn¡¯t want to speak. She didn¡¯t feel she could whisper low enough. Remembering EP was watching, she looked up at the dense dripping black and made a thumbs up then went to the stairs. The rain opened up as she reached the top. She heard it spray the street and hum on a thousand roofs. The wind rushed through branches and wires and loose siding. The tops of cars gave up aluminum tones. In a few seconds, the lock gave and she was inside.


    She flicked on her flashlight and scanned the living room with red light. Once she was sure it was clear, she locked the door behind her and moved to the other rooms. In about five minutes she was certain she was alone in the apartment, and she took it in.


    The apartment was familiar in that distant way. Collapsing decades-old Ikea furniture and random pieces that stuck out like a kidnap victim at a rager. Wooden dresser in the living room. Tableless dining chairs in every corner piled with laundry and boxes of canned goods and other distinctly food bank borne groceries. The way the dishes were stacked in the kitchen, the way the bathroom had been meticulously packed and soiled, the cigarette burns and smoke stains in all the right places, the things taken in a moment of manic appraisal and left forgotten. Four vacuum cleaners. A multitude of framed hotel art. Solar panels ripped off attic fans. All the smells that came along expectantly like lyrical themes demanded by the rhythm. It all reminded her, nudged lose the memories.


    Those hellish years glared at her, laser-like, from the dim smudge of memory now locked in the Real and lit up siblings in the slumbering history of the Self. Though for her Self, it had only been a few months at that house. She had been able to push at least that much.


    Slowly, with focus, she wrapped the feelings up in the annoyance that the clutter would make the search that much worse, and wiped them away. The memories fell away like whispers in the rain, and there was only the Spirit, searching.


    He could have left it anywhere. She reached out with her Spirit and tried to push it everywhere she looked. She picked up and shook every beer can, hoping to hear a quarter rattling inside, ripped open every fast food bag, turned over every couch cushion, opened up every game case and DVD. The mattresses, pillows, and other places that called for it, she used a Garrett handheld metal detector. Twice, she found other quarters, both with the wrong year. Here she was, an embodied Spirit crossing planes of existence like stepping through doors, hunting, and it all could be undone if he had stuck the quarter in a hot pocket package she neglected to check. She almost laughed out loud. If any of her mentors could see her now.


    EP scanned the monitors and typed commands that sent the drones in pre-scripted flight routines. Her buds were tuned to the police radio. She picked up chatter of a possible break-in at the ¡®burglary suspect¡¯s home, and advice to proceed with caution.¡±


    ¡°Shit.¡±


    She watched from an orbiting drone as two cop cars came down the main street about half a mile away. Typical. She had spent till 10 pm waiting for buzz on a search warrant and then they pull this shit. Definitely other Hardworlders in the police force.


    She buzzed Lindsey.


    ¡°Cops coming down the street. Get out.¡±


    Lindsey had moved into the bedroom, leaving the bathroom and hall closet disemboweled behind her, and started pulling drawers out. If it was here, leaving now would be a total waste.


    ¡°You sure they¡¯re not just coming down the street?¡± she asked.


    ¡°No. I got the radio chatter¡ª¡±


    ¡°Shit.¡± Lindsey drug the mattress off the box spring.


    ¡°April,¡±


    ¡°If they¡¯re coming it might mean it''s here.¡±


    ¡°It might have been a trap. They might have a lookout somewhere that I missed. Someone called it in¡ª¡±


    ¡°No one saw me,¡± Lindsey hissed. Must have been a camera, or some kind of sensor she missed. If it had been a lookout, she would have felt it.


    EP didn¡¯t respond. Probably just as skeptical about Lindsey¡¯s sixth sense as Philip had been.


    She moved to the closet. Pockets and shoe boxes, battered luggage, gym bags.


    ¡°One parked in the street, south,¡± EP said. ¡°Other two pulling in the lot.¡±


    ¡°Shit!¡± Lindsey put the light and detector in her pockets and got out her mask.


    It was definitely a trap.

 The Bounty | Chapter 16: POE

    Dead end job


    Streetlights sprayed bursts of stretching dappled amber that flared on the windows and floated softly across the empty seat next to him. The traffic had that Friday night feel of urgency. It broke through yellow lights and spilled into red, showed no care for speed limits or the slick and flooded roads, and bulged at every intersection, swelling until the green lights exploded into the shining darkness like gunshots and started it all off again.  The city was bursting at the seams.


    Twice, a car horn blared just feet away as a would-be bar fly tried to rely on Sam¡¯s hesitance and found the Jeep unwilling to give a scrap of acceleration. She was an absolutely maniacal driver, but she knew exactly how much road she could take down to the inch.


    After about half an hour, Sam turned down the stereo and the amber swarmed sky gave way to a wide darkness where the lights flickered few and farther up, struggling against rain. The long shadowed face of the strip mall slid across the windows. Gradie thought of the Titanic, seen from that little diving pod, at the bottom of the sea. Still, dark, waiting. He had watched the videos over and over as a kid. Or had that been the other¡ª


    ¡°We¡¯re good to go, right girl?¡± Sam said.


    ¡°Yeah, all clear,¡± EP said, industrial metal thumping behind her. ¡°Alan, mask up, and if I call out cops, it means they¡¯re turning in the lot, and you have about half a minute to get out and down the slope. Understood?¡±


    ¡°Got it.¡± Gradie pulled the stocking material out from under his beanie and down over his face.


    Sam killed the headlights and pulled around to the back door. The windshield was half solid darkness, half glittering distant lights hovering over the treeline.


    ¡°Timer starts now. Move fast,¡± EP said. Gradie jumped got out into the rain and Sam took off before he had the door shut. The lights in the back alley were all dead and the Jeep seemed to melt into the darkness. He felt suddenly that she would never come back, but the thought of being left on his own was electrifying despite being terrifying.


    He got the key out, freshly milled at the safehouse by some wizardry courtesy of EP and Philip, and turned it smoothly in the lock. Water dripped down his mask and streamed between his leather gloves and his sleeves. The door opened into solid dry darkness, and he looked back one last time.


    Beyond the flat blackness of the alley, where rainwater gushed out of the gutters and pooled in the drains, headlights moved in streams behind the trees and city lights smeared a glowing line halfway up the humming charcoal sky. He took a humid breath, smelled the rusty scent of the wet alley, and tried to preserve the feeling of being a shadow in the night, armed in all black, a soul skating across universes, a real¡ª


    ¡°Get the fuck inside!¡± EP said. He stumbled in and closed the door. Inside, the rainsound was hollow like it was making way for something. He stood there, trying to remember what to do. He had instantly forgotten all the details and steps memorized at the safe house.


    ¡°Please, don¡¯t make this hard,¡± EP said.


    ¡°Sorry.¡±


    The map came hazily to mind.


    Light switch in the receiving bay had been, where?


    He got the flashlight out of his chest bag and waved a circle of light across the back door to the light switches and hit them all at once.


    WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP


    ¡°Fuck!¡± Bag dropped, gun drawn, he blinked around at the bright room and the alarm sound died suddenly. His brain caught up with him and he realized the sound had come from inside his ears.


    ¡°You awake now?¡± EP said.


    ¡°I almost let a round off!¡±


    ¡°Is that code for something?¡±


    Gradie laughed. So, she did have a sense of humor.


    The adrenaline boiled over and jostled loose everything he had gone over at the club house. The maps and routes rolled out of memory and guided him through the receiving bay.


    The searching was monotonous, but the feeling of the gun haunted his hands and he was severely aware of every exit at all times. The intruders never solidified into a daydream, but remained as a prickly sensation somewhere behind him.


    At first, there was only the rain on the roof, storm sounds slipping through the door jam and shaking through the bay doors, and the shuffling of whatever Gradie was looking through, but eventually EP started helping.


    ¡°Look behind it too.¡± ¡°Ladders in the corner to your left.¡± ¡°The ones at the end of the row just got here.¡±


    Gradie rolled over the idea that a quarter stuck behind a box or wedged under a pallet in the back of a discount department store could be of lethal importance to hyperdimensional Spirits with access to obscene amounts of Otherworld wealth, until it was no longer novel enough to dampen his annoyance.


    ¡°This is probably just me being new,¡± he said, when his gloves had gone from night assassin black to dusty shelf-stocker brown. ¡°But this seems like a huge waste of time. Is there any chance I actually find this thing here?¡± He popped open the second vending machine and got the coin mechanism in his hand.


    ¡°Yes, or we wouldn¡¯t have you come here,¡± EP said. ¡°We don¡¯t know how far back he pushed possession of it, and he¡¯s not what you would call a stable individual. Could be anywhere.¡±Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.


    Gradie finished checking the years on the quarters and moved down the dark hall into the break room. An unreasonable panic shook over him before he could get to the switch. The lights came on in patches, and the last row flickered for a breath, like the room resented being woken up.


    There was an eeriness to the place in the stillness of night. The fluorescent glare was different, somehow, this late. The chairs all askew like limbs locked in rigor mortis. The microwave and fridge held the light like dead vessels fated to stand unused for empty hours with the texture of tomb air. His implied reflection stretched across the linoleum like a ghost in the corner of a photograph.


    He remembered working late one night in the Real, the month of unlimited overtime. The rows of fluorescent lights reflected off the floor-to-ceiling windows, creating a ghostly mirror double of the office that floated out over the dark parking lot towards the flickering highway. He had watched that mirror world slide by as he walked to the break room near midnight, and found the break room itself just as inverted as the mirror office.  A thing out of place. Light shining where only dark belonged.


    The memory flared up and dissolved into another memory smoldering in the memory of his Self, another him, another office, another late night shift, and another humming break room, the same feeling in both, and here. It all felt like him. A Spirit seeing where there should be only blind ignorance, an entire world that shouldn¡¯t exist.


    ¡°So what are the odds of me finding it then?¡± he said, to drive it all away. ¡°You think like fifty-fifty, or¡ª¡±


    ¡°Why, you want to bet or something?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, sure. If I find it, we go dancing in the Allclub, just you and me.¡±


    The breakroom was dead quiet as he got the lock open on Cooper''s locker and dumped the stuff on the floor. Did he piss her off again?


    ¡°All right, but when you don¡¯t find it, you have to give me half your pay.¡±


    ¡°Fine. I don¡¯t do this for the money anyway.¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t let Boss hear you say that. Then you¡¯ll really be working for free.¡±


    ¡°I mean it. I don¡¯t know what the fuck I¡¯d buy in the dreamworld anyway.¡±


    ¡°Careful calling it that. If you start to think of it as a dream, you might drop out.¡±


    ¡°Tsh. I don¡¯t think I¡¯d ever dream that fucking place.¡±


    More quiet. He got the lock off the other lockers on the list, then started digging through the pile.


    ¡°You really telling me you haven¡¯t found anything worth paying for on the ball?¡±


    He thought about it. All the flying, watching.


    ¡°Maybe like a really nice craft.¡±


    ¡°There you go. People spend fortunes on those.¡±


    The silence stretched until he couldn¡¯t stand it.


    ¡°I still don¡¯t understand why anyone ever buys anything there.¡±


    ¡°To experience things they can¡¯t in the Real,¡± EP said in that explaining tone she loved to use. ¡°To see¡ª¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m doing that now.¡± He meant it, but EP saw him digging through the trash and laughed.


    ¡°Oh yeah. You¡¯re living your best life.¡±


    Gradie looked up at the security camera and scratched his mask with one finger.


    ¡°I was agreeing with you. I can see you pouting through the mask.¡±


    Gradie left the trash on the floor and moved to the fridge.


    ¡°I meant like the shootouts and all the life and death shit. Oh but I guess you wouldn¡¯t know about that, being a desk jockey.¡±


    He liked it when she got mad, but she didn¡¯t rise to the taunt.


    ¡°Oh yeah. You¡¯re in the trenches. Hey, I think that ranch might have gone bad.¡±


    He had most of the lunch boxes dumped out and realized the fridge was probably pointless. Cooper didn¡¯t seem like the kind of guy to pack a lunch. He went out in the hall and started picking the lock on the office door.


    ¡°So, what do you buy in the Otherworld?¡±


    ¡°None of your business.¡±


    ¡°That dirty huh?¡±


    ¡°Just because the extent of your imagination is getting a nut, doesn¡¯t mean everyone else is so simple.¡±


    ¡°What? How is that a dig against me? I was just saying I can¡¯t understand why, in a place where you can fly and make things appear from nowhere, you would pay anyone else for anything.¡±


    He got the door open and the lights on and found the dingy office waiting there with half of its walls covered in file cabinets like a fucking punch line.


    ¡°What if you wanted to do something crazy, something impossible,¡± EP said.


    ¡°I¡¯ll just imagine it.¡±


    ¡°You actually think it¡¯s that easy?¡±


    ¡°Yes,¡± he said, thinking about how hard it had been to make the mask. He was too far in it to turn back now.


    ¡°Is that why you spend all your time flying around and getting scammed by Ray¡¯s?¡±


    He started going through the drawers.


    ¡°You sure do keep tabs on me. Why don¡¯t you just come along next time?¡±


    He thought the pause was a bit on the long side this time.


    ¡°To eat some bullshit burgers?¡± she said.


    ¡°Yeah. You¡¯re gonna be starving after I get done throwing you around the Allclub.¡± He let the smile slip into his voice.


    ¡°Now I¡¯m really glad you won¡¯t find it.¡±


    A muffled thunderclap broke behind her voice.


    ¡°It¡¯s raining there too? Are you close by?¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t be a creeper.¡±


    ¡°Maybe I can swing by tonight.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m tempted to give you the coordinates. Be funny to watch you trip a claymore.¡±


    ¡°Might be worth it.¡±


    ¡°Really?¡±  Her voice came out like an answering machine, and he wondered if she was trying too hard to keep something out of it.


    ¡°Depends. What are you wearing?¡±


    A loud fast busy signal screamed in his ears.


    ¡°All right! Jesus! Worth a shot.¡±


    The sound didn¡¯t let up.


    ¡°Ok, Zoey. You got me.¡±


    Still the fast busy. He popped the earbuds out and put them, still screaming, in his inside coat pocket.


    The office was stripped open around him. All that was left was the safe. He found the combination in the intel folder on his phone and opened it.


    Cash and slips. No quarter. He ran his hand through all the bills. Hundreds, twenties, all there in crisp reality. He counted out eight hundred dollars and held it in his hand. More than a full week¡¯s take home in the real. The numbers on the paystub, remembered as if through fog, wavered, and the memories of the Self flexed their gravity.


    Here, his Self made that much in a day. The amounts and shapes of his balance sheets floated in is mind with more clarity than anything remembered from his Real life. He remembered all the options he should have sold or exercised today, all the charts he should have checked, the earnings reports coming up next week, and panicked. What was he doing thumbing cash in a fucking retail safe? At a crime scene?


    The thoughts fell short, their energy wasted against a wall of another idea: ¡°This isn¡¯t the real me either.¡± The Real felt unsubstantial because of its hazy distance, but this life failed to hold him because of some unnamable quality. It just felt wrong.


    The pull of the Self faded back to a whisper beneath the sand, and he was left alone in the dusty quiet.


    Wow. All that talk and warnings about him dropping out, the draw of the Self, and here he was looking that other him dead in the eye and feeling nothing.


    Is it me? Another sign of my Spirit being abnormal? More evidence of my hopelessly separated relationship with reality. Even among dimension-hopping assassins, I¡¯m the odd one out.


    His phone vibrated in his pocket. The screen said it was Kate.


    ¡°Hey, I¡¯m still looking. Nothing¡ª¡±


    ¡°Holy shit dude! Did you take your earbuds out?!¡± Sam yelled.


    ¡°Yeah, Zoey¡ª¡±


    ¡°She¡¯s working on April. Cops rolled up on the apartment. I¡¯m watching your drones. Good thing the cops didn¡¯t drop in on you while I was trying to call you!¡±


    ¡°One sec, I¡¯m putting them in.¡±


    The earbuds beeped in his ear when he sealed them and then went quiet again.


    ¡°Kate?¡±


    A long, dead pause, then a burst of driving and rain sounds.


    ¡°Two cars pulling into the lot! Get the fuck out!¡±


    Gradie looked around, for a moment forgetting where anything else, including the exit, was in relation to the office, as if the universe outside the peeling walls was just a void dotted with cops.

 The Bounty | Chapter 17: Slipped

    Evasive maneuvers and look good doing it


    EP watched the complex rotate on the monitor. She had scanned the area for hours before Lindsey arrived, taking out lights, spoofing key fobs, looking for any lookouts or plain clothes cops. It might have just been bad luck. On one monitor, she watched the police helicopter, miles away, hover over a traffic accident, and hoped like hell it stayed there.


    The cruiser parked in the street below the apartments aimed a spotlight up at the south wall of Cooper¡¯s unit, sweeping it to the balcony on the east side of the building, then back again. A slice of the beam shot past the roof and into the rain. The other two cruisers pulled into the lot.


    EP gripped the mouse and dug her heels into the chair mat.


    ¡°They¡¯re coming up, lights on the south wall. Go out the west window.¡±


    Inside, Lindsey pulled her mask down and flicked off the flashlight as the living room window lit up. She stepped over trash and clothes on her way to the west window at the back of the bedroom, screwing a suppressor on her Walther as she went. The blanket curtains came off the window with a clattering of tacks and the blinds rose with a slap. There was no screen. She got the window up quietly, tapping into distant teenage memories of sneaking out through a similar window, and the heavy sound of rain broke the silence.


    Somewhere a car door slammed, distinctly police-like, and she paused just long enough to inhale, look for anyone below, and holster her pistol, before slipping out the window in a single step. Even in the wet solid blackness, it was a perfect roll. She stuck the landing without sliding in the mud and came up silently in a low crouch, hidden in solid darkness. EP had been thorough with the outside lights, at least.


    Behind her, the air glowed above the street, where the cop pointed his spotlight towards the back window. In front of her, at the end of the space between the units, the sidewalk led up a few stairs and through a fence to the raised parking lot.


    ¡°Move up and go right behind that apartment,¡± EP said.


    Lindsey put one hand on her Walther and stepped through a sheet of water pouring off the clogged gutters above, then hugged the side of the unit and moved in a smooth crouched stride towards the lot. Another car door slammed, and she heard the distinctive sound of police gear moving on a belt and the murmur of a voice speaking into a radio. Flashlights shot suddenly out of the misting darkness above the parking lot, glittering beams seeking between the two walls of solid darkness, like a ufo was landing just out of sight.


    ¡°Get in that gap, get low, stay still!¡± EP said. Lindsey went right to the side of the small staircase and got in the gap between the back wall of the unit and the side of the raised lot. The slim crevice was solid black and streaming with water. She crouched down and pressed against the cement barrier as heavy falling footsteps approached from the lot.This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    ¡°He doesn¡¯t see me,¡± she thought, mantra-like. She waited for that telltale feeling, like someone whispering wordlessly in her head, that she was being watched, that someone had seen her.


    A cop came down the steps pointing a flashlight at his feet. He traced the cement walkway with it once, then flicked it up to the side of Cooper¡¯s apartment, probably aiming at the window she had just come out of. She heard more cops move up the metal staircase on the other side of Cooper¡¯s apartment, and then muffled shouts as they announced themselves.


    ¡°Hey, got this back window open,¡± The flashlight cop said into his radio. His voice was broken in places by the rain, but Lindsey got the idea.


    ¡°Move as fast as you can,¡± EP Said.


    Lindsey timed her escape with the reply on flashlight cops radio, and in a few seconds she had put another unit between her and him.


    Just as she made it past another two units, EP came on the line again.


    ¡°They know you¡¯re not inside.¡± She was obviously trying too hard to sound calm. Another spotlight broke across the dark and scanned the lot.


    ¡°Right, hide. I¡¯ll distract.¡± EP said. Lindsey turned in between two units and ducked down behind an AC. The cop down on the street flashed his spotlight up over the fence just a few yards away from her, washing out the distant city lights for an instant. The other cops shouted somewhere. Thunder clapped and the sidewalk in front of her lit up in blue. A window slid open and she heard drunken voices.


    An engine started up in the parking lot and revved repeatedly as the cops shouted for the driver to get out. The spotlight in the lot froze. They yelled some more, useless. There was no driver. EP¡¯s drone had spoofed the remote starter.


    ¡°They think you¡¯re in the lot.¡± EP sounded proud. The spotlight from the street vanished as the cruiser sped down the road to the back of the lot. Lindsey exhaled. A way out.


    ¡°They¡¯re moving down the lot,¡± EP said. Lindsey was already halfway to the fence, preparing for the drop down to the street, when she saw the light and EP hissed.


    ¡°Wait! Cop, coming down the south side.¡±


    Lindsey watched the light spread across the grass between her and the fence. She hugged the wall and holstered her pistol, and got her baton out of an inside pocket. Somewhere a door opened, and Lindsey noticed with an adrenaline spike on her tongue that the cops had stopped shouting at the phantom driver. The light grew on the grass and footsteps squished under the rain.


    ¡°He¡¯s gonna shine it at you,¡± EP said.


    Lindsey saw herself flick the baton open, saw the cop turn at the sound, the metal rod flash in a swift arc, crack him on the bridge of his nose, saw him crumple, and felt the fence in her hands. The vision was vague in all the right places, the cop just a silhouette, shifting in height and weight, but the baton finding the nose every time.


    A boot squished into the sod just behind the brick and the front of the light came into view. The vision played one last time, this time half a second before reality obeyed.


    The crunch was a bit louder than she had imagined, and he made a sound, almost like a burp, that she never would have expected, but he went down just the same. Gun and flashlight still in hand, to his credit. He fell backward and his flashlight rolled off behind him. She was over the fence and in the air before he had settled.


    It was like flying, for a few glorious seconds. The land dropping down in front of her into dripping darkness, the distant fairy lines of headlights, a flash of lightning illuminating purple puffing clouds, the black street coming up to meet her like death, and the deep darkness of the empty lot in front of her, like a piece of the Otherworld, breaking into this world to comfort her.


    She rolled on the asphalt and took a beating on her back and hands, but shot up sprinting and cleared the street in a few strides. The lot wasn¡¯t paved and there could have been anything on the ground to trip her, but she never so much as stumbled, feet landing right where they needed to.


    EP watched the motorcycle burst out of the bush and curve onto the road, a bit of blackness fighting against amber. Lindsey was off into the night at double the speed limit before the cops had cleared the parking lot.

 The Bounty | Chapter 18: Nightride

    Visions in infrared


    ¡°Cut the lights!¡± Sam said in his ears. Gradie threw his hand down the switches and the office went dark. He fumbled in his pockets and got out his flashlight and flicked it on the low light setting. The flat office looked altered in the red light, unstable, like it might change or disappear at any moment. He drew his pistol and went out into the hallway. A small light blinked in the top corner of the ceiling, and he almost shot it. A security camera.


    ¡°Just calm down, Ok?¡± Sam said. ¡°Wait. Wait a second.¡±


    Gradie stood at the back door and listened to the noise slipping in through the bottom seal. Rain slapped on concrete and rushed out of gutter spouts. Slowly, another sound moved in. A car pulling up.


    ¡°Shit.¡± He aimed at the door and backed up into the office doorway.


    ¡°They¡¯re parking,¡± Sam said. ¡°A car at each door. No one¡¯s getting out. Maybe they don¡¯t know you''re¡ª shit! They''re getting out.¡±


    He was going to have to shoot his way out. Reflections of daydreams flashed in his head, but couldn¡¯t survive in the red grainy hallway. They fizzled out as he tried to quiet and control his breathing and remember that none of this could hurt him.


    ¡°Where are you?¡± he asked.


    ¡°Down in the woods! Fuck! Ones getting something out of the trunk.¡±


    He saw an AR sweeping through the rain in his head, and he saw Philip smile at him at the storage. Son of a bitch.


    ¡°Ok, they¡¯re talking. Ones shining a flashlight around.¡±


    ¡°Are they cops?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t think so. Nothing on the radio.¡±


    A dumb panic scampered up his back and he shined the light down the hall behind him. Just dead empty walls. Lines that had seemed so insignificant on the blueprints, now the difference between life and death.


    That reminded him.


    ¡°Wait. The Gym.¡±


    ¡°The what?¡±


    He went into the office and shined the light from the desk up to the ceiling. The floor plans flickered in memory.


    No. Don¡¯t just remember, choose.


    He let the memory play again.


    The entire building had been a grocery store a decade ago, and now the only thing between him and the gym''s back offices was a single wall.


    ¡°They didn¡¯t seal off the ceiling.¡± The floor plans solidified in his mind and became just another memory. A breath later, he couldn¡¯t tell he had done anything at all, and his pride withered under the weight of doubt.


    A strange cousin to adrenaline bathed his brain. He stepped up on the desk and pushed the foam ceiling tile up and out of the way. He holstered his pistol and bit the flashlight. Somewhere, in a distant dream or memory of a dream, another him climbed into another ceiling, and the twin Gradie¡¯s were linked by a common sensation. A feeling that the world was more liquid than it seemed.


    ¡°They¡¯re moving to the door,¡± Sam said.


    He was up grabbing onto anything and shuffling into the ceiling before he had time to freak out. He stepped along a beam and stopped. He had stepped blindly, but the beam had been under his feet just where he needed it. The thought that he had shuffled the universe by will alone shook his mind, made the dust taste good and the dry air sweet, but it didn¡¯t last. He still couldn¡¯t be sure he had done anything. From where his Spirit stood, it could all be just luck and a faulty memory.


    ¡°They¡¯re got a fucking key!¡± Sam said.


    He caught his breath and stepped onto a ceiling tile like a soldier stepping off a plane. He fell through with a sound of cracking Styrofoam and rolled across the carpet into a file cabinet. Red light flashed all over everything until he steadied it. A hairless abdomen popped off a poster and he almost mag-dumped it.A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    ¡°Be louder, god damn,¡± Sam said. ¡°They¡¯re inside.¡±


    He breathed in dust and bits of foam ceiling as he rolled up and stampeded for the door. The handle didn¡¯t turn. He almost pulled his arm out of the socket. There was another blind second of panic until he shined the light on the handle and saw the lock was engaged.


    With a minute movement compressed to ridiculousness by his gloves and the circumstances, he turned the tiny button till it clicked and pulled the door open. The backward step taken to pull the door inward felt like a step towards death.


    The gym was a long tomb where treadmills waited to return to life. Rain pelted the roof, reminding him the shelter was temporary. When the floorplans in his memory lined up with his surroundings, he sprinted across the carpet, dodging racks and rowing machines, towards the exit at the back wall. He put his head to the door and listened. There was only the sound of the rain. He killed the light and grabbed the handle.


    ¡°Wait, did EP cut the alarms?¡±


    EP herself answered him on the line.


    ¡°Yes! Get the fuck out now! And put your fucking monocle on!¡±


    He threw the door open and stepped out into the rain. The back lot was a right triangle of dark water and still forms, and the only light came from the distant glowing sky, until he got his NVG monocle on, and the world split in two. One of darkness, and one of silver illumination.


    Something flashed on the tree line, where the lot dropped away into woodland.


    ¡°Head for that light and go straight down,¡± EP said.


    He moved low and fast across the wet lot. The wind rushed in his ears and the rain slapped his face and streamed down his neck. Lightning flashed silently far beyond the tree line and he felt like he was running towards the edge of the earth. In the silver land seen through the monocle, the lightning glowed like magic. For a moment, after the successes and excitement of the night, it felt like the Otherworld was finally breaking through.


    Suddenly, the flat black face of the store slipped away to his right, and he saw the dark form of a parked car sitting in the alley behind the store. He watched it do nothing while the edge of the lot moved closer in the silver world seen through his left eye. Then the lights came on.


    He couldn¡¯t tell if it was just the headlights or if they had caught him in the spotlight, but he squeezed his right eye shut and dropped into a head-down sprint towards the curb. The engine revved and tires screamed on the wet concrete. The car had seemed so far away in the dark, but now the headlights came at him so fast he had to throw himself over the curb to avoid being run over. He heard the car roar past as he dropped into the brush.


    Still blind from the sudden lights, he fell more than ran down the hill side as the car screeched to a halt somewhere above him. Something cut his face and knocked the NVG off his head. He rolled, hopped, slipped, swung himself around trees and broke painfully through branches. It was the same path Luke had taken him down on the ATV, but this time he felt every bump.


    When the ground leveled out, he tried to sprint again, but could only hop around the foliage in a somewhat forward direction. Flashlight beams scattered in the trees and rain around him as he clawed at his chest for the monocle swinging on its lanyard.


    ¡°Get down!¡± EP said in his ears.


    He stopped and realized the trees had opened up onto a creek bed where Sam¡¯s Jeep blocked off a patch of shadow in the center of the clearing. He dropped down to the wet earth as a flashlight beam raked the front bumper on a pass and doubled back. Before it could find the jeep again, a shadow moved in front of him. There was a loud smacking sound and a softened flash just above his head. Small hot bits of metal landed on his back and legs, hissing. The spotlight shining on the front of the jeep snapped off suddenly. Somewhere up on the lot, one of the gunmen fell into the brush. Lightning flashed and splashes of blue light lit up part of the shadow. Sam, recognized only by her shape, with her face covered by NVGs and a mask, scanned the hill with a suppressed 7¡¯ AR and an IR illuminator as she backed up to the Jeep.


    ¡°Get in the fucking car!¡± EP yelled. He got up and scrambled to the Jeep. Before he could get the door open, gunfire cracked from the strip mall above. He swung his pistol arm back and up. All he saw was solid darkness under glowing night, until a flash lit up a dark figure and the outline of a car. Rounds cracked in the air and disappeared into the earth and foliage, but one skipped off the roof of the Jeep. The sound of Sam¡¯s suppressed shots was completely lost in the echoes of gunshots and rain sounds, but Gradie saw sparks on the car and wall behind the shooter. The windows and windshield shattered, and he disappeared behind the vehicle.


    ¡°He¡¯s down!¡± EP hissed.


    Gradie threw himself into the Jeep and pulled the door shut. Sam slid into the driver¡¯s seat, tossed the still steaming bolt open SBR into the passenger side and tore ass down the creek bed, into solid darkness. The dash lights and IR headlights were invisible to him without his NVG, and every time Sam took a sharp turn, which was about every few seconds, he felt like he would be thrown out into the dark void where gunmen live.


    Streetlights broke the darkness as they came up a mud road onto an empty lot and white starbursts lit up the rain above a gas station at the edge of the lot. Sam took off the NVGs and harness and set them in her lap. She tugged off her mask and pulled the beanie off her head and her red hair was the only color in the world.


    ¡°Any birds up? Am I good to go?¡± she said loudly to EP, then quieter, almost a whisper, she turned back to Gradie.


    ¡°Get up here.¡±


    He climbed over the center console, getting mud everywhere and avoiding stepping on the laptop mounted on it. He put the SBR on safe and held it between his knees and pulled his mask off.


    ¡°No,¡± EP said. ¡°The one still standing was trying to call dispatch on his phone, but I killed his service. They were off duty.¡±


    ¡°Fucking A.¡± Sam flicked on the headlights and drove across the lot to the street. She turned on the stereo and Speed by Atari Teenage Riot started up. She bounced in her seat to the beat. A few heartbeats later they were cruising along with the rest of the Friday night traffic, unassuming and completely content.

 The Bounty | Chapter 19: Ghosts in the Rain

    Time flows, memories fracture, I remain


    The rain was a thing with many faces, all speaking. It roared on the cracking tar and gravel roof above her head, gurgled out through a drain spout and splashed across the cement in a flat cracking sound outside the barricaded back door, and on the other side of her monitor-covered wall, in the thick darkness of the abandoned grocery store, it streamed through the roof into what had once been the frozen food section, falling, frothing, whispering, into a puddle that had flashed like a mirror found in the dark when her drones had made their last security sweep.


    Snuggled into a soft armored office chair, in the center of what had once been the loss prevention office, EP¡¯s fingers clattered across a keyboard and three separate keypads and she sent her drones off on new routes. Some would fly to the self-storage for recharging, some would track the operators on the road, and others would move to landing zones, unoccupied or abandoned buildings, safe house backyards, even stash vehicles, ready to be recharged and deployed if needed. Others would fly to a remote area and melt from the inside out, their feeds fizzling to black. She had about a hundred fielded right now with about twice that in reserve, stashed on other landing zones throughout the city, powered down and undetectable. One of the massive screens covering the wall in front of her was dedicated to her drone map. On it, the metroplex looked like an irradiated ant hill.


    Outside, the rain had died to a drizzle. On the camera feeds that monitored the operators, it still came down in sheets.


    ¡°You wouldn¡¯t know about that.¡±


    Years ago, when, for the first time, a computer had given its secrets to her completely, revealing a hidden world, and the knowledge of its operation had sprung up from the Self¡¯s memory into working knowledge without hesitation, she had lost herself in the excitement. Now, she felt, and not for the first time, that something had been lost along the way.


    She had envisioned moments of hacking security systems followed swiftly by the thrill of moving, personally, into the now exposed areas, gun in hand. Then she had found out about the Hardworlding division of labor, and her performance during the first shootout had placed her decidedly into a single sector of operations. Like a lot of things, she could never point to a single choice that had brought her here. It felt like her present position must have always had a kind of gravity to it, and every step from there to here was only part of an arc.


    She loved what she did. The planning, the control, the feeling of being everywhere. But sometimes she just wanted to run out into that wide world of direct fire and hands-on everything. Sometimes being everywhere felt like being nowhere.


    Out in the rain, a million traps and sensors lay in wait, dividing her from the world she watched and studied so closely. The Uzi in the drawer gathered dust. Her pistol slept on the base of a monitor stand, waiting to get buried under scratch paper or crushed cans. She had long since given up wearing it on her hip. It made moving comfortably in her chair impossible.


    Her earbuds chimed and Michael¡¯s voice came through with the sound of heavy rain.


    ¡°How are we doing?¡±


    ¡°They got out clean. Didn¡¯t find it, of course.¡±


    ¡°Good. Well, we know where it¡¯s not, that¡¯s something.¡±


    She nodded, then remembered he couldn¡¯t see her. Somehow, she always felt like he saw everything. Like these calls to check in were only out of courtesy, or some kind of test.


    ¡°You had Kate on overwatch for a bit, correct? With Alan?¡± He wasn¡¯t angry or even accusing. That was the worst part.


    ¡°Yeah, I had to watch April.¡±


    ¡°You didn¡¯t ask me.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m sorry.¡± She immediately knew it wasn¡¯t what he wanted to hear.Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    ¡°I¡¯m asking why.¡±


    ¡°I figured you were busy.¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t figure. Don¡¯t assume. Don¡¯t guess. Know. That¡¯s your purpose here. To know.¡±


    Soft words, gentle tone. Sometimes she wished he would just scream.


    ¡°Alright. I understand.¡±


    ¡°How¡¯s Johnny?¡±


    ¡°Sleeping, finally.¡± Michael had refused to let Luke anywhere near either search, instead attaching him to guard duty at Philip¡¯s storage, and ordering him to give his Self a full eight hours of sleep. When EP asked about it, Michael had only said ¡°Disengaging isn¡¯t his strong suit.¡±


    She logged it away as a lesson. A good leader knew what his people would do, and it didn¡¯t take more than a few jobs with Luke to know that if anyone shot at Sam or Lindsey, he wasn¡¯t likely to lie down until every shooter was dead and sorry. Not to mention that he¡¯d already taken a liking to Gradie.


    ¡°Good,¡± Michael said. ¡°I have a feeling tomorrow he¡¯ll be glad he got some sleep. Unless he¡¯s plastered.¡± He chuckled.


    EP found Michael¡¯s marker on the map and pulled up a drone feed. He was walking through an abandoned park at the edge of downtown, a cluster of grey rectangles and trees stuck between a bridge and a parking garage, like it had been trying to slide into the river when something stopped it. Brutalist cement walls, square stepping slabs over flooded mud, and concrete rooms, all water stained and disused. Dead leaves tried to form carpets. The troughs and spouts meant for piped fountain water, clogged by the leaves and dirt of decades, now rushed white again in the rain, sloshing with angry chaos in places designed for calm reflection.


    EP¡¯s file told her it had been closed to the public for ten years. A chain link do-not-enter fence blocked it off from the street. He always found the strangest places.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got background on the cops,¡± she said. ¡°Still scanning the buzz for anybody else.¡±


    The buzz was a general term for talk on a variety of mediums; radio chatter, chat rooms, messenger apps, phone calls, and other tapped personal communications. EP had a knack for mining the buzz for info. Some sources got fed into crawlers that looked for specific speech or text strings, others she reviewed herself, or kept on as background noise, her subconscious picking up on things she might have otherwise missed.


    Hardworlders could be anyone and anywhere, and like the team, they tried to stay hidden. But unlike the team, they didn¡¯t have Michael¡¯s experience to guide them. They also didn¡¯t have EP.


    ¡°Good,¡± Michael said. ¡°Keep an ear open, but stay low energy. And get some rest soon. I¡¯ll need you at full throttle tomorrow.¡±


    EP dropped off the line. For a while she watched him walk through the concrete park. With a touch of guilt, she zoomed in on his face with a micro drone and got the feeling he was seeing things there that were invisible to her, as if ghosts walked near him. It felt like spying on someone at a wake, so she closed the feed and went back to monitoring the buzz.


    Lightning flashed out over the river, beyond the Main Street peninsula, and the land glowed in his NVGs like some lost third sibling to night and day. He remembered, with a crystal clear recall that only the most experienced of Spirits possess, another storm years ago, over the same city. Even now, he could feel the drop in his chest, that electrifying feeling of flight.


    When the thunder had passed, he listened again to the water. It rushed down the troughs and overflowed in the square pools. It dripped off the oaks and splattered on the concrete. It stung him to hear everything lit up in sound, like it was just as alive as it had ever been.


    He had walked the entire park. The elevated walkway, high above the sloping river bank, where the crowns of oaks stretched over the railings and flicked rain at him when the wind blew. The once named waterwall, its fountains now dead, its pools trash filled. The covered spaces, where rain sounds echoed and the dead stillness was so thick he could barely breathe. The square stepstone paths. The staircases.


    He let the memories flow out of every inch of concrete. The ones he could still call on. The ones they hadn¡¯t taken. He needed them now.


    He flipped up his NVGs and sat on a bench, breathing in the wet smell of everything. The square slabs of dark cement stood solemnly while the Oaks and the water and the leaves danced without care. Lightning flashed again and pieces of it glowed everywhere, like shrapnel that dug itself in so deeply he felt it even when everything had passed back into darkness.


    He exhaled, closed his eyes, and found the park waiting in his mind. It was dry as a Texas day could be. The sun broke through the tall oaks in thick beams that flashed off the yellow concrete like glass. They were arrayed around him, standing, squatting, sitting, reclining. All six of them. Like nothing had ever happened. Like he had never left.


    They smelled of soda, sweat, and gunfire. They celebrated a job well done. They laughed and gave each other shit over the fuckups and under played or over played the successes. They smiled at each other. They said with everything they did that they knew it would last forever.


    He held the vision for a breath, long enough to repeat the same promise he had made all those years ago, and let it fade.


    The cold and the wet returned, his tears disappeared in the rain pouring down his face, and the unbearable, merciless weight of twenty years rushed back in, filling the space between here and then, and he was left alone again.

 The Bounty | Chapter 20: Takeout

    Take me to your other self¡¯s house


    The wiper blades chopped against the rain like measured gunfire, smearing the liquid world of headlights and knife-blade reflections across the windshield. Heavy droplets, unseen in the blur, but pictured in Gradie¡¯s mind as the size of gumballs, sang on the roof of the car.


    They had left the jeep under a tarp in a mud covered back yard turned used car lot tucked away on the north side, one of Philip''s assets. A Honda fit with the back seats already down stood waiting one spot over and they had loaded everything into it in near-solid darkness, just before the rain really picked up. Out in the wet distance, amber street lamps and streaming headlights had glowed like holograms. Gradie had felt completely severed from it all, immersed in a world of darkness. Once again, he felt like a ghost walking beside the living.


    But being a ghost wasn¡¯t good enough for Philip.


    ¡°Yo, Max. Are we heading back to the storage place or what?¡± Sam asked her earbuds.


    ¡°No. The girl driving that car has never even been there. Got it?¡±


    ¡°Ok, so where does a girl like me go to get out of the rain?¡±


    ¡°How should I know? I¡¯ve never even met her.¡±


    ¡°Maybe like a safehouse, or¡ª¡±


    ¡°Wherever her little heart desires. She surely isn¡¯t worried about the cops.¡±


    ¡°Ok, got it, thank you Max.¡± She dropped the line with a sigh that boiled into a groan.


    ¡°Mr. Teacher man loves to teach.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s the lesson?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°Become your disguise. So, I¡¯m just a lil¡¯ party girl in a Honda Fit. Out too late and very sleepy.¡± She made a big fake yawn sound. Gradie laughed, still giddy from the shooting.


    ¡°So where would miss party girl go to sleep?¡± he asked. ¡°A hotel?¡± Scenarios of the two of them sharing a hotel room were already playing an encore in his head.


    ¡°Nope, somewhere that would make Mr. Max very grumpy if he knew I was going there, but party girl doesn¡¯t know that.¡± She leaned over towards Gradie and grinned impishly at the windshield. ¡°Party girl has never met Max and just wants to go home cause she¡¯s been out drinking and needs snacks.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯re going to your house? Like your self¡¯s¡ª¡±


    ¡°Yep, and It¡¯s a big ol¡¯ mess, so if you make any comments you¡¯ll be sleeping in the car.¡±


    ¡°I thought Boss said to avoid places associated with your Self?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s mostly because you don¡¯t want any family members or friends dropping in and getting the self all stirred up and dropping you out. I don¡¯t have to worry about that.¡±


    Gradie let the noise of the rain, road, and breathing fill in the silence. He nodded when he felt her glance at him then looked out the window like he didn¡¯t care. He searched the glass for fragments of her reflection, until he felt he had to break the silence.


    ¡°You got anything to eat there?¡±


    ¡°Not really. I¡¯m gonna order something.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s a Chinese take-out kinda night.¡±


    ¡°What does that mean?¡±


    Gradie looked her in the eye for a second before she looked back at the road. She was eager to draw the talking away from her home, towards anything else.


    ¡°You know, it¡¯s raining, were out here working a case and getting in shootouts. Very noir.¡±


    The pause that followed left him wondering if she would take offense to him being too nice to her. She seemed the kind to hate people being careful with her feelings, and he might have let too much of his own seep into the words.


    ¡°Oh, you mean like in an old movie? So you wanna share some lo mein and talk about the case? Maybe fall in love?¡± She drew the last word out like a taunt.


    ¡°Oh, I¡¯m already in love with you,¡± Gradie said. Sam laughed like a scream.


    ¡°Shut the fuck up! And keep your hands to yourself or I¡¯ll put a bullet in your head.¡±


    ¡°Which head?¡±


    ¡°Uh, which one would you rather I shoot you in?¡±


    ¡°Not the one I do my thinking with.¡± Gradie made sure he had a big smile on when Sam looked over.


    ¡°You are such a doofus!¡± She cackled into the steering wheel.


    ¡°Zoey likes me,¡± he said with mock pride.


    ¡°No she does not!¡±


    ¡°Oh yeah she does. She was whispering all kinds of dirty things in my ear when I was looking¡ª¡±


    ¡°You asked me what I was wearing, you creepy little¡ª¡± EP¡¯s voice rattled his ear buds. Sam laughed and almost swerved out of the lane.


    ¡°You¡¯re listening in on us? Is it jealousy?¡± Gradie whispered with mock concern.


    ¡°MPEEEEEEEEEEEE¡±The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± Gradie threw his hands up to his ears instinctively, but the shrill siren was coming from inside his head. EP cut it off suddenly.


    ¡°Did you buzz him!?¡± Sam yelled and laughed into the steering wheel.


    ¡°Yep. Oh, and for the record, Alan, I¡¯M WEARING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!¡±


    Gradie threw his hands up again as EP¡¯s voice battered his ear drums. There was a chime and she dropped off.


    ¡°Your ears ringing bud?¡± Sam said.


    ¡°Now I have to find out where she is.¡± Gradie sighed.


    ¡°She will fucking kill you!¡± Sam laughed. Gradie smiled and bounced his eyebrows.


    ¡°Don¡¯t do that, oh my god!¡± Sam laughed. There was another rain spoken silence until Gradie felt a responsibility to break it.


    ¡°Hey, remember that time you shot those cops?¡± He said suddenly, deadpan. Sam laughed at the overhead visor, then at him, then ran a red light.


    ¡°Shit!¡± She looked around in a panic. Gradie drew his pistol. Nothing happened. No sirens or flashing lights. Only afterward did Gradie remember where he was.


    ¡°Fuck.¡±


    ¡°What?¡± said Sam breathlessly.


    ¡°I should have just pushed that there were no cops around.¡±


    ¡°You really think you could have done that?¡± Sam laughed.


    Gradie just looked at her.


    ¡°That¡¯s a lot bigger than finding some clothes in a car,¡± she said, and shook her head at the road.


    Gradie holstered his pistol and stared out the window. Soon he was lost in thought experiments that tested the malleability of the Hardworlds and the theoretical power of his Spirit. Before he could decide to what extent Sam was right, the car slowed into a turn.


    They pulled into a small apartment complex and lightning flashed behind the wooded area at the other end of the parking lot, silhouetting the jagged arms of forgotten oaks against billowing storm clouds.


    When they had parked, Sam leaned her seat back and jumped into the hatch and started moving things around. Gradie just sat there trying to get a look at her ass till she snapped at him.


    ¡°Come around and fucking help me with this! And keep your gun in reach.¡±


    He got out into the rain, and even with his jacket collar buttoned tight, he felt the water run down the back of his neck. Raindrops popped like the wet sounds of bullets hitting flesh and he remembered the men he had gunned down over their ATVs. Somewhere, his Self screamed.


    At the back of the car, Sam shoved a heavy pocketed tool bag into his chest. He found the strap and got it over his shoulder while she hopped out with a canvas rucksack on her back and a large satchel purse over one shoulder. Her other hand was firmly in her jacket pocket and stayed there as she shut the door and walked up the stairs to the second-story unit.


    As he waited for Sam to unlock the door, Gradie scanned the parking lot for any sign of danger, but the street beyond was liquid black besides a mist-ringed streetlight and the few fragmented slivers of glare that zipped by on a passing car. Sam got the door open and slipped inside. She shut he door so close behind Gradie when he came in that she almost caught his jacket in it.


    He stood there dripping while she set her bags down on the ground and took her jacket off.


    ¡°Hang your trench on that rack so you don¡¯t get water all over my house please, thank you,¡± Sam said. She put her own jacket on the coat rack hanging off the closet door and took the Beretta out of the pocket where she had been holding it and put it under her waistband, showing the outline of her hip and the soft skin of her stomach. Gradie gawked but she didn¡¯t notice. He had only ever seen her in baggy coveralls. Even in the Otherworld, she had dressed like a retro-futurist bomber pilot.


    By the time he had hung up his coat and picked the bags back up, he had collected himself.


    ¡°This way! Tour time!¡± Sam said in a sing-song voice and led him down a small hallway, with a bathroom on one side and another closet then the kitchen on the other. The space at the end was divided between the living room and what should have been the dining area.


    ¡°Bathroom, bedroom, living room, kitchen, ok done!¡± she said pointing and bouncing as she went.


    Gradie looked around without being too obvious about it and let a smile snap across his face. This place was made of Sam.


    The mismatched couch and lazy boy looked like they had fallen asleep years ago and never gotten up. The coffee table was covered in bottles and cans, game cases, ash trays, controllers, and ammo boxes. The walls were lined with shelves holding books, games, more bottles, and trophies (some with pistols on them). The top shelves and upper surfaces of the fixtures all held folded towels, cushions, or small beds. In one of them, on top of a half-height bookshelf in front of a window, a cat stirred and started to watch them.


    ¡°Say hello Bojo.¡± Sam set the bags on one end of the couch.


    ¡°Holy shit, is that the cat from the clubhouse?¡±


    ¡°Yep. That¡¯s my baby. Set it there.¡± Sam pointed at an old office chair leaned against the wall below the bar counter between the dining area to the kitchen. The round kitchen table was covered in laundry and there was a Mossberg Shockwave hung from its sling on a command hook on the wall and he spotted at least three other guns peeking out under the clutter.


    Sam must have seen him staring.


    ¡°Yeah, I know it¡¯s a mess, don¡¯t judge me, Mr. suburb McMansion.¡±


    Gradie smirked at her.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, I don¡¯t give a shit. I was just counting the guns.¡±


    Sam met his eyes for a second, a confused look flashing across her face, then turned away and picked up a phone charging on the counter. She thumbed through it for a second while the thunder grumbled outside, and Gradie watched her, wondering what she had seen in his eyes.


    ¡°All right, well, drinks in the fridge, pick what you want.¡± She handed him the phone. A Chinese place was already pulled up on the delivery app.


    ¡°I¡¯ll be right back.¡± She turned without looking at him, and he watched her bounce back down the hallway.


    ¡°Zoey. Can you have Max¡ª¡± She opened the door at the other end of the apartment and slid in sideways and closed it fast.


    The daydreams came back with a vengeance and he looked for something to distract him. He read the menu so hard he absorbed nothing, and it took him ten minutes to pick the kung pao chicken and char siu bao. The phone was in a wallet case and he found himself staring at the distorted image of Sam¡¯s head and whispering her last name like it might tell him something about her.


    A stomp in the back room broke his focus and he set the phone down and walked up to Bojo. Was it really him, or Sam was just fucking with him? Can you push animals? If she could do that then why did Gradie finding clean clothes in that car surprise her so much? Maybe it didn¡¯t and she was fucking with him then too. He could think it, but he couldn¡¯t believe it. The idea of Sam being anything less than straightforward to a fault dissolved in his mind.


    Bojo trotted away from him when he held out his hand, stopping just out of reach and looking back, so he studied the room again.


    In between a dusty peg and board display of medals, all for competitive shooting, and a floating shelf that seemed installed purely to collect cat hair, a framed photo caught his eye. He smiled at the face looking at him. Sam standing with a group of other people, her hair an un-styled orange clam shell, medals on her neck reflecting summer sun, open side by side shotgun in her arms, holding a plaque.


    He looked around and saw other photos. Sam aiming a pistol, completely focused, captured from a low angle. Winner¡¯s photos for competitive driving, off-road driving, archery. The photos were framed, and stood up, but not displayed in any kind of vanity, more like they had been put up out of respect for the people who had given them to her.


    A low bookshelf sagged under the weight of thick textbooks. Car manuals, HVAC maintenance, Electrician courses, locksmithing, gunsmithing, bristling with rainbow page tags peeking out of the dust.


    He tried to look past the objects of Sam¡¯s career and skills, and focus on other things. Band posters, manga, dust-stained stuffed animals, sketch pads and pencil cases, to find what parts of her Real self she had let slip through the crafted, primed fa?ade of her Hardworlding avatar.


    The door down the hall opened suddenly and Sam marched towards him. Her eyes darted from him to her display wall and back to him, and her mouth made a slight pout, but she didn¡¯t say anything about it.


    ¡°Ok, time to prepare for the worst. Follow me.

 The Bounty | Chapter 21: Soft Targets

    Flesh and blood and misconceptions


    Sam led Gradie down the hall and into the back bedroom.


    ¡°If the cops or any other baddies show up, EP will set off an alarm on your earbuds,¡± she said.


    The door opened against the left wall, and two bookshelves struck out into the room, flush with the door jamb on the right, making a kind of second hallway inside the bedroom. Gradie followed her through to a window in the back wall, between a cluttered work desk and a makeup and product topped dresser.


    Gradie looked around the room and saw a boxspring and mattress against the wall on the other side of the bookcases. If anyone broke through the door, they wouldn¡¯t have line of sight on Sam in her bed, and he would bet money she knew which part of the bookshelves to shoot through.


    ¡°If that happens, we¡¯ll come in here, quickly, and grab the AR. I¡¯ll put it right here.¡±


    She pointed to a bare space of wall next to the open door.


    ¡°Then I¡¯ll pull on this.¡±


    She touched a piece of orange extension cord striped with red reflective tape hanging next to the window, with the pull cord for the blinds wrapped around it. It disappeared inside the curtain rod, which sagged in the center and was held up by two rings bolted to the wall. If the cord was pulled, the curtain rod would collapse and the curtains would fall, while at the same time the blinds would fly up.


    ¡°And you do this.¡±


    Sam stood a few steps back from the window and aimed an invisible gun out toward the street, then moved up in a low stride to the bookshelf on the right, which held file boxes that he guessed were filled with sandbags.


    ¡°And I¡¯ll move out the window with this.¡± She lifted a rope off the ground. There were two of them coiled up next to the window, sprouting out of a polygonal hole cut through the carpet and floorboard. She held another invisible gun in one hand and made a motion like knocking the screen out, then squatted down.


    ¡°Cover me while I drop down, then I¡¯ll cover you and give you the all-clear. Then you grab the other one and come out after me. All the lights are dead out there so be sure you have your nods on. Then we¡¯ll head that way down the side of the creek.¡± She pointed towards the right wall of the room.


    ¡°It goes behind the houses, and we¡¯ll come out on Churchill. Zoey, or Max I guess, will have a car waiting on the street. Ill drive it dark with the nods, like we did at the POE, until we get to the highway.¡±


    She got quiet and stared at him. Sometime during her explanation, his imagination had taken off and he was already halfway through a scenario that involved carrying a tourniquet legged Sam to the getaway car while landing precision shots on shadowy gunmen as the rain fell without mercy. The rain-soaked Sam in his head looked at him in a way at odds with the Sam in front of him, who had the signature disappointed stare of someone who had realized they had been talking to no one.


    ¡°All right, anyway!¡±


    She waved him out of the bedroom and shooed him down the hall. He clenched his fists as he walked, glad to have his back to her.The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    You stupid fuck. You want to be the hero? You really want to save her? Then keep your head in the game and be ready to do it for real.


    Somewhere, he could feel Philip shaking a cigar at him.


    ¡°Oh, I forgot about those buns!¡±


    They were back in the living room. Sam was swiping through the menu on her phone. Bojo meowed at them.


    ¡°What? Do you need water?¡± she said, picking up a ceramic bowl in the kitchen.


    ¡°Is that really the same cat?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. He was my cat. In the real.¡± She said the last part reluctantly, as if she had already said too much.


    ¡°Was?¡¯


    ¡°Yeah,¡± she sighed.


    He would have left it at that, but the implications had already set his brain to work.


    ¡°So, you push that he¡¯s still alive? Before you drop in?¡±


    ¡°No. It just happens. Philip used to give me shit about it. They were trying to find out what I was good at, and every time we dropped in, he would be at my house. I was shit at everything else, but Bojo is ol¡¯ reliable.¡±


    She looked at Bojo like he was doing something impressive just by laying there. Gradie watched him flick his ears and got lost in thought.


    If someone died in the real, could you go into a Hardworld and find them? If I die, can they find another me in here?


    Sam popped the top on a can and brought him back to reality. She was squatting in front of the open fridge, her body a cluster of tight curves, silhouetted against the bright shelves. She hadn¡¯t turned on the kitchen light, and the fridge light back lit her face and made her hair glow. It reminded him of the Otherworld. She seemed to be floating in space. Her eyes shot to him, and he knew she had seen him staring, but she didn¡¯t react at all.


    ¡°You want a drink?¡±


    ¡°Ill take a water.¡±


    She nodded and came out of the kitchen with a Dos Equis and a Fiji.


    ¡°You can drink if you want. Might help you calm down.¡±


    ¡°Thanks. I like being sober.¡± Sam opened the bottle with a knife from the coffee table and took a drink.


    ¡°Wait till you get in a gunfight.¡±


    ¡°I did already.¡±


    ¡°That wasn¡¯t really a gun fight. Hand me that box.¡± She pointed to an empty amazon box.


    ¡°What? What defines a gunfight, then?¡±


    ¡°You get shot at and you shoot back. For longer than ten seconds.¡± Sam started dumping trash from the coffee table into the box.


    ¡°I¡¯ve had plenty of training with Max.¡±


    ¡°Oh, so you¡¯ve never been afraid in a Hardworld?¡± she said, like he was trying to lie to her.


    He thought about getting shot at by the cops at the Clubhouse. He thought about the fear that had taken him at the POE. It had been like dreaming he was about to die, then waking up moments later. Had that been real fear? Had it taken any control away from him? How bad could it get?


    ¡°A little, but¡ª¡±


    ¡°Well, it won¡¯t be a little if you get in a real gunfight. So just be ready¡ª¡±


    ¡°What, you think I¡¯m gonna freak out?¡±


    ¡°Everyone freaks out. That¡¯s why we prime a self that can deal with adrenal dumps and all that. Bring that bag over and stack all these games in the chair.¡±


    He set her bag next to the couch and started clearing the game cases and disks off the coffee table and moving them to the couch. The cover of Splinter Cell Chaos Theory reminded him of Sam in the rain, and the dusts on his hands reminded him of searching the POE. Other vague memories floated out of the nostalgia kicked up by the PS2 games, but he pushed them away and went back to the couch.


    Sam was already getting guns and ammo out of the bags. The coffee table was bare now, but not clean. There was a layer of thin black film on the top of it and in the recesses of the curves on the lip around the edges, years of spilled drinks and dust combined into something uniform and final. It made him nostalgic again, but he had no idea why, as if the memory was locked in some untouchable other him.


    He got sick of the quiet.


    ¡°An adrenal dump¡¯s a physical reaction, though. I¡¯m talking about my Spirit. It¡¯s hard to be really scared if I know I can¡¯t actually die here.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s cause you haven¡¯t been shot yet,¡± Sam said. ¡°Trust me, it¡¯s not fun. Your only options are to push the pain out of your head, which only Boss and them know how to do, or just deal with it, or drop yourself out.¡± She made a gun out of her hand and pointed it at her temple.


    ¡°And if everyone did that every time they got a booboo, we wouldn¡¯t get any jobs done. So, you¡¯re probably gonna have to suck it up. And you won¡¯t be saying ¡®oh it¡¯s just a physical reaction¡¯ if that happens.¡±


    He couldn¡¯t think of anything to say to that, so he just watched her move. She set a box of ammo on the table with a soft rattle, and he felt that every bullet was searching for him, as if the Hardworlds wanted to make him pay for taking them so lightly.

 The Bounty | Chapter 22: Reload

    Savants, Suppressors, and riddles of the Soul


    Sam pulled the Beretta PX4 storm out of her waistband and set it on the table next to her beer. The rest of the table was already covered in magazines, pouches, and ammo boxes. She got the AR out of her toolbag and popped the mag out. Empty. She set the gun down and started loading the magazine. Gradie sat down next to her.


    ¡°There¡¯s a CZ and an MP5 in that tool bag,¡± she said. ¡°Can you make sure all the mags are in there? It¡¯s my Self¡¯s stuff and sometimes the ammo is dug into.¡±


    Gradie found them in separate sections of the tool bag, strapped in and protected, with magazines in orderly pouches next to them. The MP5SD had a push in stock and a sling folded up with it.


    ¡°This shit¡¯s old school.¡± He hadn¡¯t even trained with one in the clubhouse, although he had requested it out of video game nostalgia. Philip had just told him, ¡°Get good with the guns we actually use first.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s good for a quiet spray, and when I don¡¯t want to worry about a stray round killing someone a block away,¡± Sam said.


    Gradie savored the feel of it for a bit then checked the mags. Every one of them was topped off, so he moved to the CZ, which caught the light when he took it out of its case. It was all custom work with scarlet grips and bronze inlay on the ¡°Shadow 2¡± on the slide. It stood out among the matte black and scuffed weapons that made up the rest of her arsenal.


    ¡°This seems a bit fancy for you.¡±


    ¡°Max gave it to me when I finished my training cause I kept pushing my Self as a competitive shooter. Guess he thought it would be funny if I killed people with a competition pistol.¡±


    Gradie remembered Philip looking at him as he got into the jeep with Sam before they left the storage. Retroactively, he noticed a paternal shade to his stance and tone.


    ¡°How long did you train for?¡± Gradie said. He checked the mag on the CZ and rolled it in the light.


    ¡°With Max? A few months. He¡¯s the one who found out I could drive. I was Hardworlding for a bit before that, but it was just talking into a radio, so it didn¡¯t really count. Then when we joined Boss I got some more training at the clubhouse. That was about¡ª¡±


    ¡°What do you mean you joined Boss?¡±


    ¡°Oh, I was with Max and Johnny on another team with two other guys first. Then Max got the offer from Boss, and we joined up. He put Max and Johnny on operations right away, but I had to do a few months in the vault before he made me the main driver. First couple of jobs I hung out with Zoey and watched cameras. But it was fun.¡±


    ¡°Oh.¡± Gradie tried not to put any meaning in the word.


    ¡°Yeah, you skipped over all that though, huh?¡± Sam said.


    ¡°I guess so. Not intentionally.¡±Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.


    ¡°That¡¯s why Max is so mean to you. Boss told him you don¡¯t need to waste time with easing into things and all since you already capped a target on your own.¡±


    Gradie stared at the side of her head. It didn¡¯t seem like something Michael would say about him.


    ¡°It would have been nice to see it from Zoey¡¯s point of view,¡± he said, in a hurry to clear the air. ¡°I think he just rushed me out cause he knew I was too cocky.¡±


    The pieces fell into place in his head and the explanation felt right.


    ¡°Probably wanted to humble me.¡±


    ¡°Or he thinks you¡¯re like a savant.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s what Max thinks. Boss found you in a Hardworld, so he thinks you¡¯re a natural.¡± Sam hadn¡¯t looked at him since he asked about the gun, and he worried there was resentment for his moving ahead so fast. Was it ahead? He was still riding in the back of the fucking car and only packing a pistol.


    ¡°I thought it wasn¡¯t uncommon to find someone in a Hardworld.¡±


    Sam looked at him like she was trying to tell if he was being sincere.


    ¡°No, I think he said it¡¯s not unheard of, but I asked April about it later on and she said she had never heard of it ever happening. Most people get born on the Allworld somewhere and have to put effort into getting into a Hardworld.¡±


    Gradie finished checking the mags and then pretended that the water had a really interesting taste while Sam¡¯s words bounced around the room.


    ¡°I guess I do take to the Hardworlds,¡± he said. ¡°It¡¯s the Otherworld that¡¯s hard to figure out for me.¡±


    ¡°Why?¡± Sam looked at him with that dead honest stare, and for a moment he forgot lies existed. He tried to answer her with some of that honesty.


    He saw the billboards, the messages shouting out of every piece of the Allworld. All the promises for every kind of experience, cobbled together from the memories of other people. He understood, though maybe from a different perspective, why Philip hated the place. To take a place like that and fill it with all the cheapness of the real¡­


    ¡°I guess I don¡¯t see the point. It¡¯s supposed to be this dreamworld, but all anyone seems to do there is pay someone else to run them through some funhouse.¡±


    ¡°You sound like Max. He hardly even goes there.¡±


    ¡°Goes where?¡±


    ¡°The Otherworld. Unless it¡¯s a meeting or something. He spends most of his time in the Hardworlds.¡±


    ¡°I thought you couldn¡¯t stay in a Hardworld for more than like a week?¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s a pro. He can stay in forever.¡±


    ¡°Is he working solo?¡±


    ¡°No. That would be moonlighting.¡±


    ¡°So what does he do?¡±


    ¡°Whatever he wants.¡± Sam smiled and Gradie¡¯s mind went wild with all the possibilities, twisting off into different lives and places; a bank robbery in a dusty south Texas town, base jumping off a skyscraper after a gunfight, the waters of Fiji and a million dollars close at hand. Here he was, looking for a greasy coin and dodging street cops. At least Sam was fun to be around.


    ¡°You ever go with him?¡±


    Sam pushed down the stock on the MP5 and slid it into the.


    ¡°No, that¡¯s his thing. I¡¯m usually in Gunmaze or¡ª¡± She stopped and pretended like she was looking for a magazine.


    ¡°One of the gameworlds or something.¡± Gradie tried to imagine what Sam would do in the Otherworld and couldn¡¯t. It got quiet again, besides the sound of her zipping up the pouches, so he said what he was thinking just to say something.


    ¡°It¡¯d be cool to be in Hardworld without having to do a job.¡±


    ¡°Yeah, but you have to be careful. You could drop out.¡±


    Gradie remembered thinking dropping out was game over, after Michael had let him believe it, and wondered if Sam hadn¡¯t gotten the memo.


    ¡°But Klara will just find me and pull me out if that happens, right?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, but it doesn¡¯t always work. Also, if she finds you, she¡¯ll have to convince you the Hardworld isn''t your real life. Or she¡¯ll have to kill you. And apparently getting killed while you think the Hardworlds are real is really traumatic for the Spirit.¡±


    Sam took the bags back to her bedroom and left him alone with his thoughts. If he dropped out, and believed the Self¡¯s life was his real life, wouldn¡¯t it eventually become his real life? What¡¯s the difference if he had all the same memories? Would his Spirit just stop existing? Wouldn¡¯t it be superfluous? Would he dream of himself in the Real?


    Someone knocked on the door and he jumped up, pistol in hand.

 The Bounty | Chapter 23: Real You

    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.This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    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¡ª¡±


    ¡°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¡ª¡±


    ¡°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¡ª


    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¡ª


    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.

 The Bounty | Chapter 24: Mouse Trap

    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.The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.


    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.

 The Bounty | Chapter 25: Reality Check

    What is never known and never seen?


    Gradie threw the blanket off and it dissolved into the darkness. He pulled on one of the gloves and got his pistol in hand. Spotlights lit up the windows and the blinds and curtains glowed like plasma. He grabbed his phone but left his shoes behind and scrambled over the couch.


    They yelled ¡°police¡± again as he flew down the hallway. The front door banged in the entryway, testing the hinges like a tornado was trying to break through. White light laser-beamed through the peephole and streamed through the gaps in the frame.


    He found Sam¡¯s door open and slammed it shut behind him and dropped the bars. The room was silent and dark, and he didn¡¯t see her anywhere. He guessed that she was crouching somewhere in the shadows, maybe behind the bed, waiting to surprise anyone who made it through the door before he got out the window.


    Behind him, the banging sounds were joined by the snapping wood sound of the front door starting to give. He moved to the window and groped at cold bare wall for a few panicked heartbeats before he found the cord as it flashed in the sliver of light from the edge of the curtain. He pulled it with both hands as hard as he could.


    The curtains collapsed to the floor and the blinds shot up. Fear crackled up the front of his body as he stood, completely exposed, before the full length of the window. Across the storm creek and past the grass and sidewalk on the other side, two cop cars with their sirens flashing were parked on the main street. The rain fell in a steady roar, and the blue-red light died on the grass in broken patches.


    He put his pistol in his waistband holster and fanned the street and lawn and rushing foaming creek with the AR, but nothing moved or fired at him. He held the gun in one hand and grabbed the rope with the other and went out the window from a squat, shoulder first and taking the screen with him.


    The rope came alive in his gloved hand and he was soaked by the time he hit the ground. Before he could move down into the cover of the small ravine, a spotlight snapped on atop one of the cars, just as blinding and pitiless as it had been behind the store, and the cops started shouting. He started shooting.


    His first burst took out the spotlight but he was still almost blind. Somehow he had forgotten his NVG. He emptied the rest of the magazine in bursts, aimed in the general direction of shadowy upper torsos, or just where he thought they might be.


    They returned fire and bullets cracked all around, slapped into the brick behind him, and splatted off the mud, but the sudden dull punch of a gunshot never came. He jumped down into the creek and the water went up to his hips. He reloaded and the empty mag floated downstream like a leaf. Flashlights and another spotlight lit up the misty windblown air above the ravine. He waited for the blazing bulbs, and the gun barrels attached to them, to breach the edges of darkness, but they stayed out of sight, their beams swinging like pendulums over his head.


    A golden light flashed on the water and the beams focused at something behind him. Gunfire cracked again. He turned around and saw Sam¡¯s bedroom light was on. The window was open but unbroken. Panic shook him and the whole world seemed to vibrate. He must have left her inside, missed her in the dark.


    He scrambled up the muddy slope and lost the AR along the way. As gunfire exploded and cracked behind him, his fingers and shoes found the mortar between the bricks and he floated up the wall. The golden square, now foreshortened to a yellow slice of soft light, with a cloud of amber rain fluttering in front of it, came towards him as he was lifted upwards as if on a wire. His chest rolled over the windowsill and the world spun. He landed suddenly on the carpet.This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.


    The room was dry and warm, and the dusty bulbs in the ceiling fan sprayed a vanilla-glow on everything. The shooting and the night melted into unmemory. Sam stepped out from behind the bookcase wearing nothing but a towel. She saw him and screamed. He knew that this was her real life, and that she didn¡¯t remember him or anything about the job, but he still felt she was in danger. He grabbed a blanket from the bed and threw it around her. She squirmed inside of it as he held her to him.


    ¡°They¡¯re going to kill you!¡± he said.


    ¡°I¡¯m going to kill you!¡±


    He looked out the window. Nothing but black rain and streetlights wavering in the night. He knew that there were no cops outside, and his greatest fear suddenly was the embarrassment of explaining to her how he had gone through her window to escape an imaginary fugitive squad. He let her go suddenly and she pushed him away from her with a scream. He tumbled and fell backwards out the window. The world rolled over him and dark mud spread across the sky.


    A thought broke out of his mind and got between him and the ground coming to crush him.


    ¡°This can¡¯t be real.¡±


    An electronic tone rang out from all around, like a chime inside his head. He realized it had been ringing for a while, and he had just missed it in the chaos, dismissed it as some other sound. A car alarm during the shooting. An alarm clock in Sam¡¯s bedroom.


    He remembered it all suddenly. It was the chime EP would play in his earbuds to help him go lucid.


    ¡°It¡¯s not real.¡±


    He broke through the ground like the world was hollow and brittle. Everything rolled again and he landed on the roof of Sam¡¯s apartment. It was an island in a sea of insanity.


    He could see for miles, but it was a different kind of vision. Everything around him was shifting and ghostly, blurry, like it was hard to remember, dissolving into unrealness the moment his focus shifted somewhere else. He tried to find an anchor, to remember what he had been thinking just moments before, to find his way through the writhing world into something solid, but his thoughts had a weight and velocity here more extreme than even in the vault, and they threw him across the landscape instantaneously, as if distance here was as restrictive as smoke against the solidity of thought.


    He thought of Sam and was in her bedroom. He thought of their drive together and was out in the parking lot. He thought of the SUV and was next to it, under bright lights in a sheet metal garage, half of its windows vacant and dark. It reminded him of gunshots and bullet holes, and he was thrown into a wood-paneled bedroom that smelled of cigarettes and chemical smoke. A man leaned over an old oak desk, turning the crank on a piece of black metal machinery clamped to the end of it, loading rounds the size of his index finger into a belt.


    The cranking sound remained while the room dissolved and became the sound of a man ratcheting a pallet jack in a warehouse. The dust and the echoes took his mind to a tunnel beneath the ground, and the darkness and fear he found there whisked him back into the night, standing at the edge of a multistory building, looking out over the glittering city, fearing the fall.


    It had all happened in an instant, and the sensation reminded him of Lucy¡¯s mind stripper. In a panic, he wondered if some unknown Spirit was combing his mind. He focused on the sensation of his feet on solid ground, counted the siren-like chimes in his ears, and tried to steady the dream.


    His mind found something solid miles away, or something solid found his mind.


    A figure, at the edge of it all, looking right at him. He knew it was watching him. The city between the two of them shifted like tv static. He knew that it knew he could see him, and that it was surprised. A fear broke through everything, a real nightmare fear, the kind that comes from knowing with a certainty only found in dreams of a danger that could only exist in one. The fear either gave way to, or was the cause of, a strange anger. He took a step towards the figure, forgetting the edge, or knowing the fall could no longer harm him.


    Klara¡¯s voice caught him mid-step, right in his ears and gentle, and the thing was gone like she had banished it. He knew, somehow, that she hadn¡¯t seen it.


    ¡°Gradie, imagine a door with Michael and the team on the other side of it.¡±


    He was stunned for a second at her using their real names, but it grounded him. He could feel the Otherworld cracking open in his mind, and his Spirit reasserted itself.


    ¡°You¡¯re late for the meeting,¡± she said.

 The Bounty | Chapter 26: In Dreams

    From up on high, with hateful machinations


    He felt his Self drift away into some powerless corner of the world, and he knew his Spirit was in control again. It was like stepping into a cool, still room after sprinting and stumbling through the Texas heat. The electric feeling of potential power that defined existence in the Otherworld returned to him, but it was diffused, as if its peaks and valleys had been flattened out. Like a butane torch compared to bursts of muzzle flash.


    The door came to him easily, popping into existence at the edge of the roof, a dead thing compared to the doors given by the Allworld. When he could sense Michael and the rest of the team on the other side of the door with his dream knowledge, he opened it.


    They stood around in a circle on an invisible floor, with the metroplex floating half a mile below. He looked down as he walked over to them and his stomach fluttered.


    ¡°You¡¯re late,¡± Philip said. ¡°Get lost in a sewer again?¡±


    ¡°It wasn¡¯t a sewer,¡± Celeste hissed. Gradie felt the color swell in his face and wished for his mirror mask. Their trip through the dreamworlds had felt so personal he hadn¡¯t even considered anyone else would ever know about it.


    ¡°How am I late?¡± he snapped. ¡°No one told me about a meeting. We just had one like six hours ago.¡±


    ¡°I forgot to tell him,¡± EP said, before Philip could form whatever dig he was working on. Gradie met her eyes but she looked away like he was the most boring side of a brick wall and stared out at the skyline. He wanted to say something about her acting too uninterested, but his words caught in his throat. He didn¡¯t want her to move. Her blue-grey eyes reflected the city lights, her soft mouth was held in a slightly contemptuous pout, her pale skin was exposed by the almost plunging neckline of her black lace dress¡ª


    ¡°Wait, are we back in the Otherworld?¡± He noticed the rest of the team was also in their Otherworld meeting clothes, and the way they stood around him in a circle reminded him of Lucy¡¯s Astralarium. He glanced down at his own clothes and realized he was wearing the same pants and shirt he had slept in.


    ¡°This is my Dream realm,¡± Michael said. ¡°You can¡¯t return to the Otherworld without leaving your Self behind. We use the dreamworlds for secure communication, especially in the case of emergencies or when other forms of contact are impossible.¡±


    ¡°And to train any combat skills we might need during the day,¡± said Philip. ¡°Which is why dream control is so important to a Hardworlder. So why didn¡¯t you induce a lucid dream like you were trained to do?¡±


    ¡°I did.¡±


    ¡°Oh yeah? Then why did Klara have to snatch you out of your night terrors?¡±


    Gradie thought about the dark figure and the strange anger returned, stoked on by Philips grilling. Michael must have seen the glare in his eye and interjected.


    ¡°Enough. He¡¯ll get the hang of it.¡±


    Philip must have seen the flash of anger too, from the way he smiled.


    ¡°So I¡¯ve been told.¡±


    He stepped to the center of the circle and motioned down past his feet.


    ¡°Alright, here¡¯s the plan.¡±


    The land below them shifted and the sun started to rise like a time-lapsed video. Downtown stopped below them. Cars and people moved like ants. Gradie found if he tried to focus on one individually it shuttered and popped out of his focus.


    ¡°Here¡¯s the jail.¡± Philip pointed and a laser shot out of his index finger and painted a wide red circle on the roof of the tall brick building.


    ¡°After we bail him out, Celeste is gonna pick him up and take him down Henderson.¡± He highlighted a road that went out of downtown and across the river. It ran alongside a massive construction area where a bridge was being built over train tracks, and past a sheet metal roof that when seen from above had the shape of a step pyramid that Gradie knew to be a flea market.


    ¡°Bail him out?¡± Is that gonna work?¡± Gradie said. Philip didn¡¯t even look at him.


    ¡°Above your pay grade, kid. Save your burning questions till the end.¡±


    ¡°Why not go through downtown and get on the highway?¡± Lindsey motioned with her hand and a spotlight traced a path through the towers and out to one of the freeways that snaked around the edges of downtown.


    ¡°Too much collateral,¡± Philip said, disappointedly.


    ¡°You¡¯re expecting them to attack us on the road?¡± Lindsey asked.


    ¡°Yeah. From the chatter, it looks like at least two distinct teams. One¡¯s LE and the other one looks like a mix of dummies and hardheads.¡±


    ¡°Dummy?¡± Gradie said.


    ¡°Crash test dummies,¡± Philip said. ¡°New blood. Addicts usually. Dropped in via trap doors. Used to brute force a job with numbers. The ones that tried to snatch our guy on four-wheelers, that type of shit. Hardheads just means guys with experience.¡± Gradie vaguely recalled the twins saying something like that.


    ¡°The LE team is probably watching the same channels we are and know these bliss heads are gonna jump off the moment we take the guy down the street,¡± Philip said. ¡°They¡¯ll be watching for it, probably look to take Cooper back into custody if anyone even lets off a round next to him.¡±


    Gradie had figured out that LE probably meant law enforcement, so he asked one of the other six questions bouncing around his head.Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    ¡°How do we know? Don¡¯t the other teams use encrypted calls and shit like we do?¡±


    ¡°Oh no, I¡¯ve spoiled him,¡± EP said, still not looking at him.


    ¡°Not every team is lucky enough to have the skills we do,¡± Philip said. ¡°Think about that next time you act like you¡¯re owed something here.¡±


    ¡°The dummies think burner phones are encryption,¡± EP said. ¡°The LE team is smart enough not to talk about anything suspicious on police channels, but their movements give them away.¡±


    ¡°The dummies know if we get him on the highway, there¡¯s a good chance they never lay hands on him,¡± Philip continued. ¡°They don¡¯t have the scope of the LE team, but what they do have is manpower and firepower, and they¡¯ll want to use it the only way they know how. Directly. They¡¯ll probably jump them the moment Celeste gets him out.¡±


    ¡°Almost sounds like you¡¯re actively trying to bait them,¡± Lindsey said.


    ¡°Im saying all these guys have are hammers, and the route I¡¯ve picked is gonna make Celeste and the dude look a lot like nails.¡±


    ¡°So you are¡ª¡±


    ¡°No, if we get them to the safe house without incident, so be it. But I want you all to be prepared. Anyway, a shootout may have some upside to it.¡±


    ¡°How?¡± Lindsey drew the word out long and slow. Gradie got the feeling she had just started to believe Philip wasn¡¯t just a bullet junkie itching for a firefight, and was now angry at herself for being so na?ve.


    ¡°We¡¯ll let the mad dogs get up to the glass, let Cooper see their teeth, then smack them away and explain his options. He¡¯ll be more likely to give up the location.¡±


    ¡°So, the plan is to get in another shootout to scare the guy into complying? Wasn¡¯t the one gunfight enough?¡± She said, squinting at him.


    ¡°No, because he was face down for most of it, and Celeste wasn¡¯t there by his side working him over the entire time.¡±


    Gradie saw Celeste off to the side talking to Luke. She pointed down to something and gave it a glowing, smiling review. Luke nodded and pointed somewhere else, then outlined a massive plate in his hands. Gradie¡¯s gaze drifted over to Sam. He was directly across from her and had been trying to catch her eyes since he entered the circle, but she had been studying the city intently the whole time. Now she met his eyes for a moment, then looked back down. He got absolutely no information from the look, but it kicked up his heartbeat anyway.


    ¡°What about taking him through here?¡± Lindsey said. ¡°Looks like less risk of collateral.¡± She highlighted a road that went down the center of a peninsula formed by a curve in the river. It looked like a bombed-out ruin from above. Empty cement rectangles that were either old parking lots or the remaining foundations of demolished buildings or a combination of both, as well as an abandoned baseball field. The only things active on it were the renovated drive-in, a few wrecking lots, and a brewery


    ¡°Because it¡¯s not the quickest route to his apartment.¡±


    ¡°She¡¯s taking him to his house?¡±


    ¡°No, but we want the LE team to think so. They¡¯ll think the coin¡¯s there somewhere and everybody missed it. That way when the dummies hit us, the LE team will have to split up and cover Cooper and his house.¡±


    Lindsey glared at the city below as if it was conspiring with Philip. He continued.


    ¡°So, Celeste pulls him out, keeps in under control. Sam, Luke, and Gradie will follow behind, out of sight in the SUV. Lindsey will be on the bike playing safety. Mike and I¡¯ll be in the area to fill in any gaps. Here are the swap points so far.¡±


    Flashing dots sprouted up on the map.


    ¡°Swap points?¡± Gradie said.


    ¡°You drop your brain in Sam¡¯s couch and forget all that time I wasted training you? Swap points. Vehicle swaps. Since I¡¯m goin¡¯ over day one shit again, remember to coordinate all swaps with EP so she can make sure there are no birds watching while you do it.¡±


    Gradie stared for a bit.


    ¡°Birds meaning police choppers,¡± EP said, sounding tired.


    ¡°And look out for cameras and looky lous, and park out of sight of the new ride when you do it, ok?¡± Philip said with mock gentleness.


    ¡°Aight,¡± Gradie said flatly. Luke laughed at the side of Philip''s head.


    ¡°Alright, then,¡± Michael said. ¡°Everyone clear?¡±


    Everyone made general motions of affirmation.


    ¡°Alright, see you all in the morning.¡±


    The team started disappearing and Gradie got deja-vu. He had no idea where he was going.


    ¡°Uh, so do I wake up?¡±


    ¡°No. What the fuck did I say earlier?¡± said Philip. ¡°Use your dreamworlds to Train.¡±


    Gradie stared at him. Philip laughed and shook his head.


    ¡°I gotta spell it out for you? Thought you were Mr. gung ho? Think of your dreamworlds like that vault you use, but your Self is along for the ride. Run through whatever applicable skills you were able to prime, dig up the memories and play them out. This is your chance to patch up whatever deficiencies slipped through when you dropped in.¡±


    The fear and anxiety from the dreams before slipped away as Gradie realized what Philip was talking about, and he started nodding along and bouncing on his heels as a big smile spread across his face.


    ¡°Yeah, I got it. Ok.¡± He was itching to step out the door and run his Self through a lucid dream boot camp. Philip laughed at him again, but he let something slip through the fake derision. It was something Gradie had picked up on late in his training in the clubhouse. Whenever Gradie would get a concept, not just blow through it but really understand why something was done, and what it could be used for in the Hardworld, the feeling of power, that feeling of unlocking some secret part of these words of endless possibility, would rise out of his chest, and Philip would notice.


    At those times, Philip''s smile would soften, his eyes would lose their edge, and Gradie knew that Philip had one love in this world, Hardworlding, and his love was reserved for those who loved it as much as he did, just as his hate was marked for those who disregarded it. It made it hard to hate him, because Gradie felt the same way.


    ¡°All right, enjoy your wet dreams,¡± Philip said. He turned and a big metal door opened behind him onto a fire escape stairwell. Somewhere in the world beyond, police sirens screamed. He stopped and looked back.


    ¡°Oh, and from now on assume we have a meeting every night. And be on time.¡±


    ¡°How do I know what time it is?¡±


    Philip flashed his wrist and a projection of red digital numbers about the size of a dinner plate shot out of it. 12:25. Just like telling time in the Otherworld. Philip stepped through the metal door and it slammed shut and was gone.


    ¡°While you¡¯re in the dreamworlds,¡± Michael said suddenly. Gradie had forgotten he was there and jumped. ¡°There will be a kind of time dilation, due to how the Spirit reacts when the Self is completely unconscious outside REM sleep. Just don¡¯t get too concerned about it.¡±


    Gradie nodded and Michael summoned a door with a flick of his wrist, but the door was next to Gradie.


    ¡°This will take you back to your dreamworld,¡± Michael said. ¡°Try not to slip out again. It¡¯s never guaranteed that Klara will be able to catch you.¡±


    Gradie tried to shake the horrifying scenarios that statement brought on out of his head, and get back to the excitement of using his dreams as an assassin''s playground as he stepped through the door.


    He came out the other side right where he started half a mile above downtown. Only now Michael was gone, and the city shifted under him, as if its framework had been pulled out from the inside.


    He reached out for memory and his Self answered. In an instant, he was dropped down to the street below, into the driver''s seat of his Self¡¯s Tesla. He had summoned his X95 and manifested a few gunmen peeking out of the cars ahead of him, when he started to feel that strange sensation of fragility, like all of reality was built on shattered pieces stacked together, and collapse was only a matter of time.


    His Spirit was about to make its daily contact with the Real.


    Though he knew it would take no time, and his Spirit and his new Self would quickly smooth over it, a part of him wished he could be free of it forever. As he slipped away, wondering if that desire made him a monster, he thought he saw a figure in his peripherals, watching.

 The Bounty | Chapter 27: Awakening

    In the pause between breaths, are you dying?


    The other Gradie woke up to the sound of his alarm. In his dreams, he had eaten at a Laotian restaurant with a woman with long purple hair, red at the roots. Afterwards, they had gone to a thrift store in a strip mall that had once been a grocery store. The land behind it dropped away into dense woods, and they had driven around back to look at it, wondering if there were any trails down in the brush.


    Most of the dream fell away with the sheets, washed off in the shower, got broken apart and diluted by the flow of moments pouring into the new day, but strands remained, like dust on the eye. He saw the woman as he drove to work, tried to gather the shuffling buzz of her face into a definite set of features, and failed. At work, near lunch, he started to see the fried somethings they had eaten, the small dots of red heat floating in the soup, the shafts of lemongrass. He tried again to see the woman, but by then there was only the memory of his attempts to remember her.


    The rain from last night steamed off into clear skies through the day until the last bits lingered in little clouds and shimmered in the cracks of concrete. Evening orange spread like something melting over the parking lot and darker rain clouds gathered at the edges far out past the low bows of highway ramps. He stood there next to his car, nestled in the first moment of real peace in nine hours, listening to the wind blow in the rumors of more rain. Then a silent car ride. The eight hours of work fell out like a hard mass of oxygen-starved flesh, un remembered, leaving no mark on any part of him, only evidenced by the hole it had left between the two periods of being alone. An utter and complete waste of time.


    The stillness of his apartment had turned stale during the day. He beat life into two alcoves in the dead air; the cleared space of carpet in the living room where he pounded out weighted push-ups and ab wheels, and the cone of light around the computer where another short story cracked into a few thousand words, but was then dropped into a folder and left there to cool, though the other rough globs of prose waiting there whispered that the hammer and file would never come.


    Near midnight, he lay down with music playing too loud in his headphones. As he drifted off, he tried one last time to bring back the face of the woman with the purple hair, but only saw a collage of coworkers, porn stars, exes, and a few fuck buddies, one of who smiled long enough for his brain to remind him she had OD¡¯d last summer, before she dropped away to some unseen darkness, or maybe flew off to some other guy¡¯s dreams.


    The dreamless sleep was never broken, but somehow, from some other plane, a contact was made. The connection lasted no time, and thus measuring zero in duration, could be said to not exist in the world with the sleeping Gradie, but the world on the other side knew how to use moments that had no measurable size. It could be said to be made of them.


    The alarm tone came in through his earbuds. For a moment, the Self rose up and a great wordless, groan racked his head; a lament against missed work and capital murder charges, a squirm against a life thrown away. It lasted until Gradie traced the shape of a soy sauce container on the table, and walked his Spirit through other memories, of Sam and their conversation, until it rolled over the Self and dropped it back down into that still silence.If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    ¡°I¡¯m up,¡± he said to the empty living room. The alarm stopped. A soft morning light tried to wiggle into all the corners and gaps between things. As he lay there, the Gradie in the Real faded to less than memory, an echo buried beneath the Self


    His hands were greasy from sleeping with the repel gloves on and he pulled them off. In the bathroom past his feet, the shower was going and he stared at the golden light leaking out of the edges of the door while picturing Sam inside, soapy and glistening.


    The vision made his heart race and seeing her in fantasy made his memories of her blend into it. What had been real? Their talk last night he could remember clearly, and the meeting felt as solid as a dream could be, but the Otherworld was a dream now days old, the meeting in Lucy¡¯s astralarium already curling at the ends like a drying thing that only held its image when wet and new.


    As for the Real, it was less than a dream, less than a memory. There was an idea of a him far away, living another life, but the pieces didn¡¯t connect. He could see the office and an apartment, but the fragments blended in with other places from this other self.


    That other him had been falling away ever since his first day in the Otherworld, and now, he thought about him as little as the Gradie in the Real thought about the sun rising every morning. It was just something that happened.


    The office of that distant Gradie meshed with the brokerage he had worked in years ago, the other apartment blended with Sam¡¯s, as if his mind was trying to rebuild the life of that other him out of pieces of this one. The ceiling flickered in faint shadows. The shower sounded like it might have been running since the beginning of time and showed no signs of coming to any resolution. In the disconectedness of it all, he couldn¡¯t find himself. Couldn¡¯t be sure what he remembered and imagined.


    ¡°Alan.¡±


    Michael¡¯s voice rang in his ears, and instantly, everything rolled into place. While his own past shifted like a dream in his memory, and even the rest of the team felt different in the Hardworlds than they did in the Otherworld, Michael was the same no matter what reality he was in. Still, after all these months growing into his Spirit, Michael was his anchor, his constant.


    It was as humbling as it was frustrating, and Michael''s overly concerned tone didn¡¯t do Gradie¡¯s ego any favors.


    ¡°Yep,¡± Gradie said.


    ¡°Do you remember why we¡¯re here?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, trying to get a coin off this guy.¡±


    ¡°Why?¡±


    ¡°Because we¡¯re dimension hopping astral projecting people from the Otherworld, and going into a Hardworld is what we do. That good enough? I¡¯m fine.¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t get defensive. It¡¯s normal to feel untethered here. The longer you do what we do, the more distant the Real starts to feel. Hardworlding is, by its nature, depersonalizing¡±


    Gradie had opened his mouth to say he was fine again halfway through the little speech, but it had started to scare him. Being cut off from the other him, from himself, felt like it might be a kind of dying. He remembered all the other things Michael had told him about going into a hardworld and it took on a new danger, like looking back and seeing hidden blades on a path already taken. Dropping out, getting lost in a Hardworld, thinking this Self was who he was. Not being able to remember the real, maybe not even reach the Otherworld. Forever?


    But he remembered the desire, though brief, he had felt the night before, to be rid of his Real self for good. Would it be so bad?


    ¡°Alan?¡±


    ¡°Yea. I¡¯m fine. I got it.¡±


    There was a pause and Gradie realized the water had stopped. He wanted to think about Sam in there dripping and nothing else. Michael sighed softly.


    ¡°All right then. See you out there.¡±

 The Bounty | Chapter 28: Threads

    I need something that says, I¡¯m ready for my funeral


    Gradie breathed in the stale apartment air, now livened with tropical shower scents floating on whisps of steam. Soft grey light poured out the tops and sides of the curtains, which in the light of day he saw were thick holiday-themed blankets hung on nails. The steady lazy light drew thick bands across the debris in the living room, and made a mockery of the spotlights that had blazed like lasers in his dream, but even still, he reached over and got his pistol in his pants holster as soon as possible.


    The shower stopped suddenly. A vinyl curtain slid on plastic rings. A towel came off a rack that banged on the back of the door. Feet pattered across cloth and tile. Every sound whispered to him of Sam¡¯s wet nakedness. In this little one-bedroom just larger than an efficiency, she sounded close enough to touch.


    The bathroom door swung open and a bright misty light flooded the ceiling. He smelled more tropical scents and knew that somewhere under it all was the scent of Sam, wet and fresh. He kept looking at the ceiling so she couldn¡¯t read anything in his face.


    ¡°Shower is open,¡± she said. ¡°And there¡¯s a suitcase with clean clothes right here next to the door.¡±


    ¡°What kind of clothes?¡± he said to the ceiling.


    ¡°Just some random stuff. You might have to wear the same pants if none of them fit but try and make your outfit look different.¡±


    She lingered in his lower peripherals, but he kept his eyes on the ceiling, waiting for her to walk away. If he got up and saw her standing there in a towel he would probably let something show on his face or say something without thinking.


    ¡°Did you fall back asleep?!¡± she snapped.


    ¡°No!¡± he rolled up into a stretch and pretended to study the floor.


    ¡°Hey,¡± she sounded concerned.


    He finally faced her. A sliver of red gold hair peeked out from under a white t-shirt folded on her head. Her face was soft and round as white polished stone flecked with cinnamon freckles and flushed with rose-hued warmth, while her eyes shined a deep blue-grey like distant storm clouds. She had a towel like a shag carpet wrapped around her that hung down to her knees, a far cry from the nipple to upper thigh paper-thin towel he had imagined her wearing in his head. Still, he kept his eyes locked on hers.


    ¡°You ok?¡± She looked at him like he was turning green.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°That was your first night over in a Hardworld, right?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, but I¡¯m fine. Boss talked to me.¡± He looked at the wall and pressed his lips.


    She¡¯s going to think I needed Michael to keep it together.


    She just stood there like she thought he was about to freak out or something, so he looked her in her eyes again and let every dirty thought he¡¯d had since waking pour out of his.


    ¡°If you keep standing there, I¡¯m gonna pull that towel off.¡±


    She took a step back and let her mouth hang open for half a second. Despite the hot shower, she could get redder.


    ¡°Wow, like you would survive that! Sorry I emasculated you by asking if you were ok!¡±


    She was halfway down the hall before she was done and had to yell the last few words. She yelled some more.


    ¡°And if you jerk it in my shower, I will drop you out with a double buckshot!¡±


    He watched her walk the rest of the way down the hall before he stepped into the bathroom. EP buzzed his eardrums into his brain as he went through the doorway, and he almost collapsed onto the tile.


    ¡°Fuck!¡±


    ¡°Leave. Her. Alone.¡±


    ¡°What, still jealous?¡±


    ¡°You need a new line. That one¡¯s used up.¡±


    ¡°Ok. Hey, so do you have cameras in here?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, but they can¡¯t zoom in that much.¡±


    He froze, halfway undressed already. Was she serious?


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°Enough to see it.¡±


    He cackled into the mirror and she beeped off the line.


    Taking a shower felt strange, vulnerable. He left the curtain cracked so he could see the black grip of his pistol on the back of the toilet. Flashes of last night''s dreams and fragments of the two shootouts the day before kicked around in his head, and his stomach churned. He remembered the shakes afterwards, in the SUV and Sam¡¯s Jeep, and the waves of fear that had electrified the air around him as he walked down the stairs in the safe house and when the delivery driver had knocked on the door last night, and his stomach churned. These were the Self speaking to him. The language of the flesh.


    He responded with the song of the Spirit, remembering the gun kicking in his hand, the way the enemy Hardworlders had fallen, the way he had disappeared into the night and met with his teammates in the dream, reminding himself that the Otherworld was here with him, and it was eternal. His stomach settled and his breathing slowed, and he tried to believe it would be like that forever.This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author''s work.


    After he showered, he wrapped a towel around himself and brought the suitcase, an aluminum Trek roller, in from the hall and crouched down in front of it on the tile.


    He placed his fingers on the latches and stopped. The thought began as a fleeting question and morphed into a determination. He was going to push the clothes inside.


    Since he didn¡¯t know where Sam got the suitcase, he wouldn¡¯t be able to push a past that fit with what the Hardworlds had already established, and he knew better than to try and push against anything connected to the team. Every time he had tried in the clubhouse, the Hardworlds had proven to be just as unyielding as the Real.


    He would have to simply push that what he wanted to be inside just happened to be there, which seemed impossible.


    With the clothes in the sedan that first morning, he had an idea how they had ended up there, that someone had been doing laundry and been too tired to bring them in, that his Self had seen them stacked in the car the day before. But did it really matter? Maybe that¡¯s not why they were there at all, maybe the person was moving out or living out of their car. Maybe it was just a story to help him believe they would be there, and it was the belief that actually moved the universe.


    He tried to believe that the clothes in his mind would be found in the suitcase, and Philip''s words floated back to him.


    ¡°You keep saying that word, ¡®imagine¡¯. I don¡¯t imagine shit. I know that the things I need are where I need them to be.¡±


    But how could he know?


    He stared at the luggage for a few agonizing minutes, trying to wrestle his mind from playful imagination to that mundane certainty that always accompanied a successful push, before it dawned on him.


    He couldn¡¯t do it. These clothes were completely unrelated to his Self. It was too much of a jump. Pushing outcomes, as Michael had called it, was still far beyond him. He needed something connected to his Self, but he couldn¡¯t get any of his Self¡¯s clothes from his house. Could he?


    It became a puzzle in his head. How do I get the Hardworlds to give me the clothes I want? He looked at it from different angles, shifted his Self around in time and space to see what would work, until¡­


    He pulled out his phone and made a quick phone call, then started to shave.


    When he leaned out the bathroom door, Sam was dressed and sitting on the couch. She had on black Piloti racing shoes, charcoal and grey acid wash jeans, and a leather jacket over a houndstooth button-up. Bojo was on the couch next to her rolling around.


    She looked over at him, impatience and weariness floating off her glare like the steam that had carried her scent to him earlier.


    ¡°Boy, if that towel so much as slips¡ª¡±


    ¡°Can you get my clothes? They¡¯re outside.¡±


    ¡°What?¡± She looked at him like she was trying to figure out how he was making fun of her.


    ¡°I had some dry cleaning dropped off.¡±


    ¡°You what!¡± Her face shifted from confusion to shock breaking at the edges into a laughter she tried to suppress.


    There was a silence as he tried to think of how to explain, but he really just wanted to keep watching her.


    ¡°You god damned fucking idiot,¡± EP said, like loading a magazine. Gradie gave Sam a slowly unveiled, overly pained smile, heavy with the gums, and to his relief, she busted out laughing. It was a wonderful sound. A dorky cackle.


    Catching herself, she shot up and stomped towards the front door.


    ¡°Oh my god, what the fuck did you do! Zoey, are there really clothes out there?!¡±


    ¡°I should have put a fucking parental lock on your phone,¡± EP hissed.


    Sam stopped with her hand on the door handle and her other in her waistband.


    ¡°Uh,¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re clear,¡± EP said, defeated.


    Sam stepped out the door and said something that got broken up by the distance and the outside noise, but even the broken sound of her voice floating back to him was enough to bind up his chest. He tried to beat down a smile.


    ¡°Ok, are you fucking with me?¡± Sam said, holding up the plastic wrapped clothes by the hanger.


    ¡°Gotta look good,¡± Gradie said, with another goofy smile and a flurry of eyebrow raises.


    ¡°This is not funny!¡± Sam said, laughing.


    ¡°You could have blown this fucking op,¡± EP said.


    ¡°Holy shit come on,¡± Gradie laughed at the ceiling, as if EP lived in some goblin hovel above the drywall. ¡°We had fucking takeout dropped off last night!¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s because this is my house!¡± Sam said, collecting herself. ¡°Now your self is connected to My house!¡±


    ¡°So? What, are the crash test dummies going to randomly hack my dry cleaners or something?¡±


    ¡°Minimize contact between Selves as much as possible,¡± EP said. ¡°Did Max forget to tell you that? I guess I¡¯ll have to remind him.¡±


    ¡°Ok. Whatever. Can I get dressed now?¡±


    There was an awkward silence, until Sam realized she had been staring at him.


    ¡°Here you go! Hurry the fuck up please!¡± She came towards him bouncing the hanger on her two outstretched fingers.


    ¡°You know,¡± EP said. ¡°I¡¯m actually gonna do you a favor and not tell him about this. Just because having him shoot you in the face right before an op would kind of kill the mood.


    ¡°You can just say you would miss me.¡± He took the clothes from Sam and she shook her head.


    ¡°Please tell me it¡¯s a clown suit!¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t ruin the surprise!¡± he said with mock panic, and went back into the bathroom.


    It was one of his Self¡¯s weekend suits. His cleaners had gotten used to dropping them off at various apartments and hotels around the city, and he paid a little extra for the convenience. You couldn¡¯t put a price on looking as good as possible, as soon as possible. It was just the kind of pointless extra mile his Self would go. One of many on a path that ultimately led nowhere. As he buttoned the last button, he realized that his Self was miserable, directionless. The success with the crypto and the day trading had only made him more afraid of failure in other areas. He hadn¡¯t written a single word in¡ª


    He shook it all off and looked in the mirror.


    That¡¯s not me.


    He searched his own eyes, till he could see the Otherworld blinking back, then stepped out the door.


    It was a black suit and a charcoal shirt, with a black and emerald tie he had been told brought out the flecks of green and gold in his eyes. His hair was slicked back with a pomade that smelled of bay rum, and most of his curls were tamed into slight waves, but one lock twisted into three-quarters of a circle over his right eyebrow. He couldn¡¯t remember a time when he had looked this good.


    Sam laughed at the ceiling when he walked out of the bathroom.


    ¡°What part of that outfit is gonna help you blend in?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll be like, a distraction.¡± He smiled.


    She got up with a sigh and shook her head at him.


    ¡°One day you¡¯re gonna realize you¡¯re not the main character of this movie. Here, make yourself useful.¡±


    She shouldered her satchel and pointed to her toolbag. Gradie got his trench off the hook.


    ¡°No rain today,¡± Sam said. ¡°Please throw that in the trash. It¡¯s bad enough being seen with Max¡¯s jumpsuits.¡±


    ¡°You never know.¡±


    ¡°You do if you look at the doppler,¡± EP said in his ear.


    He folded the jacket and put it under his arm anyway and picked up the tool bag. Sam locked the door behind them and marched down the stairs without looking at him once.


    ¡°I thought you were supposed to limit your expectations and your intel, stay open to possible outcomes?¡±


    ¡°You can¡¯t push the weather,¡± EP laughed.


    That made no sense, and not the same type of no sense as everything else.


    ¡°The twins said most jobs start in the rain, cause it¡¯s like a natural liminal moment to¡ª¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s on old wives¡¯ tale and completely different than pushing it once you¡¯ve dropped in.¡±


    ¡°You sure?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know. Why don¡¯t you try and make it rain? Take your time, by the way. Bail might take a while.¡± She beeped off the line.


    ¡°Good, cause I¡¯m fucking hungry!¡± Sam shouted in the parking lot.

 The Bounty | Chapter 29: In the Day

    Can a reflection kill?


    The morning sun, soft and glowing, beat the last of the rain towards the golden horizon, where pure light and the strong shapes of clouds floated slowly over sharp shadowed buildings. The hard details formed a ring around them that cut through the dull blur of everything else, like jaws closing in. He felt something was coming with the day that would slice his soul neatly into two pieces, the worthless and the invaluable.


    They ate breakfast at a caf¨¦ in a shopping center just a few blocks away from the apartment, and Sam ignored him the entire time. She stared at her phone and talked to EP on the earbuds until the food came. Gradie looked around at the packed Saturday crowd and tried to push on the Hardworld in little ways it might let him get away with.


    A woman spilled iced coffee down the front of her chest and stood up in a hurry, pulling on her white t-shirt while dabbing her tits with napkins. A man got a call from a telescam company three times in a row. A waitress sensed him watching her and shot him a smoldering smile over her shoulder.


    But, he was never sure any of it was out of the ordinary, couldn¡¯t even be sure if he had been thinking anything at all before they happened, and other events were absolutely opposed to his intents. The brunette in the crop top wasn¡¯t seated across from them. The food didn¡¯t come out of the kitchen when he commanded it to. Sam never remembered last night fondly and decided to forgive him for threatening to rip her towel off.


    After a while, upon reflection of his memory, he was sure he had about as much control over the world around him as the coffee cooling in a forgotten mug on an empty table. His electric sense of power ignited by the shootouts and the clothes evaporated. The chain of events leading to his suit being dropped off was laid out perfectly logically in his memory, and his Spirit was too beaten down by something to argue. That something, he realized as the waitress set down their food, was Sam¡¯s coldness. He tried to push her out of his mind as he ate, to gather all the memories that had enlivened him earlier in the morning, but it wasn¡¯t the same. The Otherworld seemed a dream, while Sam was very real and very close.


    He looked out across the tables, out to the teeming dawn breaking over the road, and reached his hand, almost reflexively, to his hip, where his pistol rested under his coat. He pressed the fabric with his hands until he felt the polymer of the grip, and tried to remember what it had felt like to¡ª


    ¡°Hm-mm,¡± Sam cleared her throat. He moved his hand away and went back to eating, half-formed confidence fluttering in his head.


    Out on the fractured concrete lot on the way to the car, Philip came over the earbuds.


    ¡°How¡¯s the date going?¡±


    Sam just groaned.


    ¡°Hot and heavy,¡± Gradie said. ¡°Taking a water break right now. But I think we need something with more electrolytes.¡± Sam glared at him.


    ¡°Oh yeah, he took his shirt off and I threw up, really took¡ª¡± Philip interrupted her.


    ¡°Whatever, listen. Johnny and I are over at the bail bonds finishing up. Come pick us up.¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t you have your own car?¡± Sam snapped.


    ¡°What, worried I¡¯ll stink up your little Honda? I showered today. I promise.¡± He sounded like a dad teasing a child.


    ¡°All right, see you in a bit.¡± Sam¡¯s voice was like a bad script reading.


    EP added the address to their phones and Gradie added another marker that popped up on the dash navigator as Sam pulled out of the lot.


    ¡°What the fuck is that?¡±


    ¡°A coffee shop. That stuff at the caf¨¦ sucked ass.¡±


    Sam was quiet for a bit.


    ¡°Yeah, it did.¡± She pushed past the speed limit and rolled through a freshly red light. Gradie exhaled sharply and she laughed.


    ¡°Just close your eyes if you¡¯re scared, little buddy.¡±


    ¡°Are you still upset about the towel thing?¡±


    ¡°Holy shit dude I don¡¯t care.¡±


    ¡°I wasn¡¯t used to seeing you out of those coveralls.¡±


    ¡°Yeah I know, you almost had a heart attack.¡±


    He heard the smile in her voice, and stayed quiet the rest of the way to the Coffee shop, instead focusing his mind on what he could remember about it.


    The shop was at the edge of the gentrification near the hospital district. Opened two decades ago by a former Mexican lawyer with an obsession for coffee and handloading. Photos of him in front of a loading press and a La Pavoni Europiccola lever espresso machine, the same look of loving focus in both, hung on the wall over the green recliners and couches in one of the seating areas. The woman at the counter may have been his niece or granddaughter and mirrored the look of focus from the photos when she pulled the shots. Gradie ordered the drinks and let the world move, like a thing he had been pushing against, and now released to sail somewhere wonderful.Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.


    Back in the car, he handed her her drink and looked away, pretending to watch the lot thoughtfully.


    ¡°I miss pronounced Cortado and everyone laughed at me,¡± he said suddenly and Sam half choked on her drink laughing. Then she got still and smacked her tongue in her mouth.


    ¡°Oh my god finally,¡± she whispered.


    ¡°I said it like Potato.¡±


    ¡°Shut up!¡± She let her laugh slip in and he smiled at the side of her face.


    ¡°This coffee is unbelievable!¡±


    ¡°I know,¡± Gradie spoke in a tone like sharing a secret. Sam looked at him with an expression of pure surprise. It was so endearing he almost squeezed the lid off his cup.


    ¡°What, you pushed it?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. You needed some good caffeine.¡±


    Sam gave him an ¡®I don¡¯t know about that¡¯ sideways glance and patted him on the thigh.


    ¡°That¡¯s sweet, but how do you know it¡¯s not a coincidence?¡±


    Gradie smiled and sipped his flat white. It was perfect.


    ¡°I don¡¯t.¡±


    The bail bonds office was stuck on the end of a former macaroni factory (still proudly announced in faded stencils on the side) wedged between the highway and a triple-tracked vein of the railroad. The parking lot was shadowed by the curving arm of a ramp at the edge of the mix-master, where two highways webbed over the intersection of two rail lines. The nexus thus formed had the feeling of some great exposed organ, at times alive and throbbing, and other times dead still like a dusty museum piece. Sitting in the lot, Gradie had the sensation of being at the edge of some strange explosion or conflict that had just missed him.


    Philip came out the door smiling in a navy tracksuit and a cloud of cigar smoke. Luke followed in skinny jeans and a hoodie that bulged slightly from his plate carrier and a backpack hanging from one hand.


    Sam nodded at Philip.


    ¡°You see that smile? There¡¯s gonna be some shooting today.¡±


    Philip squinted in the open passenger window at Gradie.


    ¡°What the fuck are you wearing?¡±


    ¡°My Sunday best.¡±


    ¡°Cute.


    ¡°Thanks baby.¡±


    ¡°All right kid, get in the back.¡± He motioned to Gradie while Luke came around to the back door.


    ¡°Did you bring enough to share?¡± Sam said. Philip''s smile turned up his cigar and Gradie had the feeling of being privy to a parental apology as he pulled a pack of Marlboro red 100¡¯s out of his jacket and shook them at Sam.


    ¡°That will do, pig.¡± Sam took them and started packing them against the steering wheel as everyone got situated. Luke got his own cigar lighted and offered one to Gradie with the torch lighter.


    ¡°Thanks.¡± Gradie rolled the end over the flame, regretting he had finished his coffee. The pairing was a favorite of his Self, and he felt he owed him at least that.


    ¡°You know I wouldn¡¯t let anyone else smoke those things around me,¡± Philip said to Sam.


    ¡°What, ''cause they¡¯re not hand-rolled by starving Cuban kids?¡±


    ¡°Dominican grandmas, actually.¡±


    ¡°Mi Abuela!¡± Luke raised his cigar in a toast and they drove off towards the highway with smoke billowing out the slightly open bullet-resistant skylight like the car was on fire.


    An orange mustang with the top down shot out of the neighborhood onto the access road and Sam had to slam on her brakes and blare the horn, getting ash all down the front of her shirt. Her middle finger rose up from the car like a salute.


    ¡°God I wish I could shoot his fucking tires out! Sam reached for something in the center console, then pulled her hand away and returned the finger through the windshield.


    ¡°Ok asshole, just thank Jesus when you get to the strip club that my boss considers you collateral!¡±


    Philip chuckled.


    ¡°Shit, back in the day, he would have dumped a mag through this motherfucker¡¯s back window for less than that.¡± He glared at the Mustang¡¯s rearview mirror and took a slow drag on the cigar so that the end of it flared up like the fires of hell.


    Sam looked over at him, confused.


    ¡°Boss?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. Why do you think he¡¯s so hung up on this shit now?¡±


    Gradie tried to imagine Michael letting out machine gun fire in anger and couldn¡¯t. But why would Philip bullshit about something like that?


    The Mustang revved its engine and there was a painful pop. It decelerated suddenly, but not slow enough to have braked.


    ¡°Go around him,¡± Philip said with a smile. Smoke was rising from the hood.


    ¡°Thank you Maxie!¡± Sam went around him on the right shoulder and pressed her middle finger to the window. Gradie heard the driver swear as they drove by.


    ¡°How did you do that?¡± he asked.


    ¡°Do what?¡± Philip said slyly. ¡°Didn¡¯t you hear that sound when he gunned it earlier? Shit was ready to go.¡±


    Gradie remembered the sound, the subtle metallic grinding at the edges. Had it sounded like that at first? Of course it seemed that way now, but his Spirit went wild at the possibilities.


    ¡°So what, you knew Boss before this team?¡± Sam said.


    Philip took a drag on his cigar before answering. Maybe he hadn¡¯t meant to mention it.


    ¡°Yep.¡±


    ¡°How long ago was that?¡±


    ¡°Years.¡±


    ¡°Being vague doesn¡¯t make you seem mysterious.¡±


    ¡°Look, kid,¡± he said so gently that Gradie thought it was someone else at first.


    ¡°I can¡¯t tell you anything about what we did before this team. Its company policy.¡±


    ¡°What the fuck ever, Mr. secret agent.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m serious. And don¡¯t go asking the twins¡ª¡±


    ¡°I won¡¯t, I believe you. You and boss were a big deal back in the day.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not fucking talking about who we were. Fuck that. I¡¯m talking about what we did.¡±


    Philip¡¯s tone had lost some of its paternal softness, and there was a pause where no one else did so much as breathe. Even Luke was paying attention, his cigar smoldering in a half-raised hand.


    Sam broke the silence first.


    ¡°What, so, you used to be the bad guys?¡±


    Philip Laughed. ¡°There are no bad guys in this game, unless you count the guys we go after, and even that¡¯s neither here nor there. The guys shooting at us this job might be on our side the next time or swapping war stories with us in the Allclub tomorrow.¡±


    ¡°So, then who would come after you?¡±


    ¡°People who keep grudges.¡±


    ¡°Over what?¡±


    ¡°Nothing. Drop it.¡±


    ¡°I want to know if I¡¯m working for a mass murderer or something.¡±


    Philip scoffed. ¡°You¡¯re not. You¡¯re working for the guy who won¡¯t even let us shoot at the cops.¡±


    ¡°But he wasn¡¯t always like that,¡± Sam said, half asking, fumbling for another cigarette as the car stayed center lane like it was on a rail.


    ¡°No. No he wasn¡¯t.¡± Philip said it with a tone of finality and Sam didn¡¯t say anything else. In the ghostly reflection of Philip in the passenger window, seen through the sliver of space between the seat and the door jam, Gradie thought he might have seen a smile flutter across Philip¡¯s face, one with the same kind of sad longing Michael¡¯s voice had held when he told Gradie about the first Hardworlders. But it might have just been a trick of the glass.

 The Bounty | Chapter 30: New Blood

    Generational differences with live ammo


    When they got to the storage, Sam pulled into one of the units and the door rolled down automatically. To Gradie, it felt like it had been weeks since they had left the place in separate cars, and he was shocked when, after doing the math in his head, he realized it hadn¡¯t even been a full twenty-four hours.


    They went out through another connected unit and followed the outside row to a gap between two of the storage buildings, where they would have formed the corner of a right angle. The space cutting through the corner was zig-zagged, as if the square storage units that should have been there had been plucked out of existence, and the quasi-lightning bolt-shaped concrete space had a liminal feel to it.


    Philip unlocked a gate in the metal fence bridging the two buildings and lead them across a backyard inside the L formed by the outside fence of the storage. There was a small house across the yard, with a square brick garage addition almost as large as the original house, and a wide back porch and an outside grilling station that reminded Gradie of the clubhouse. He counted six cameras on the way, and his hazy dream filtered memories of training in the clubhouse and the way the others followed Philip in a near single file told him there were probably explosive traps buried in the yard.


    Inside, the house had a firearm infestation. Boxes of ammo sprouted everywhere, and all the tables and shelves bristled with firepower. Philip got a canned coffee out of the fridge and sat down in a recliner in the corner of the living room. He pulled his phone out and started skimming through something.


    Sam looked around, disappointed, and sighed.


    ¡°So, how long is it gonna take?¡±


    ¡°A couple hours, kid, chill out. This job should be done today anyway.¡±


    ¡°Can¡¯t you push that his bail goes through sooner?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s not the way my thing works, but it''s charming that you think it¡¯s that simple, or that I¡¯m that good.¡± He held his phone up to his ear.


    Luke came out of the kitchen with a handful of energy drinks and nodded at Gradie and Sam.


    ¡°PS5 in the back room.¡±


    ¡°Uh, ok. Y¡¯all have fun.¡± Sam didn¡¯t even look at them. She grabbed some keys off the coffee table.


    ¡°Max, which unit is ol¡¯ girl in?¡±


    ¡°Hold on, man.¡± Philip tapped the screen. ¡°Sit down and wait, you¡¯ll get behind the wheel¡ª¡±


    ¡°I wanna see if they fucked up the handling again, or would you rather I found out while¡ª"


    Gradie followed Luke to the back room, where a small couch and some bean bags were set in front of a massive TV that took up the entire room and told a story of burglary just by sitting there. The only other decorations anywhere were the fractured drywall, water stains, and black lines of bars stenciled by the sun through the bent blinds. The low wide shelf on the opposite wall was an armory that promised the TV wouldn¡¯t be stolen a second time.


    The hours melted away, the weaklings, unable to keep their structure against the steady procession of thumbs and fingers moving on the controllers like bees at a hive. Time was broken into rounds, beaten further into gunfights, and shattered into 60 frames a second.


    The red dash in the corner of the screen, signifying a single round, became five dashes, then ten, then twenty-something, then one, again and again. They were on round ten or so, for about the hundredth time, at that point feeling like a walk to the corner store, when Gradie brought up Sam and the highs and lows of the last 24 hours with her.


    ¡°She¡¯s just suspicious of anyone that likes her,¡± Luke said.


    ¡°How do you know? You tried to move on her?¡±


    ¡°Nah, I don¡¯t shit where I eat.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve seen you talking to Ashley and April.¡±


    ¡°Yeah, I¡¯ll flirt, you know. Keep things light. Some girls, if you stay quiet and act all monkish, they¡¯ll assume you¡¯re hiding a secret crush. But I don¡¯t let it go beyond that.¡±


    ¡°So, if Ashley walked in that door and threw herself at you¡ª¡±


    ¡°Well,¡± Luke smiled ¡°I guess I¡¯d have to start shitting then.¡±


    There were a few moments of silence and digital violence, trying to get back into it, but now Sam¡¯s pink face fresh from the shower floated above soft sloping shoulders and goosebumped flesh somewhere in a corner of Gradie¡¯s mind, like a glare coming through a crack in the blinds, and you have to move around till it hits you in the eye again to find it.


    ¡°You think she was flirting with me, standing there in the towel?¡±This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    Luke smiled. ¡°Mute me.¡± He glanced at Gradie.


    ¡°Mute me.¡± A few seconds after he said it, there was a chime in his hears he had never heard before. Of course, she hadn¡¯t taught him that function.


    ¡°Yeah, I think she was. But I think she thought you expected her to give it up right there, and she got all offended.¡±


    ¡°Shoulda just smiled or winked or something.¡±


    ¡°Maybe. Gotta remember, for a lot of people this is their afterlife, they treat everyone like props and girls are really sensitive to it, if it¡¯s not their thing,¡± Luke said, with weary annoyance.


    ¡°So¡ª¡±


    ¡°So now she knows you wanna fuck, and the next move is to not deny it when she brings it up, cause she will. If you try and hide it, you¡¯ll be playing catch up forever.¡±


    Something about the way Luke said it reminded Gradie of walking through the backyard. Worrying so much about what Sam thought felt like something he might do in the Real, the opposite of that electric freedom he was trying so hard to preserve.


    ¡°I¡¯m not even sure I care,¡± he said after a while. ¡°Lots of other girls dancing around out there.¡± Gradie watched the words drop down like paper airplanes that had caught the air wrong.


    Luke smiled at him sideways.


    ¡°That¡¯s the spirit.¡±


    As the game continued, and time resumed its slippery slide, Gradie floated back into visions of the foreshadowed gunfight and tried to perfect the scenarios that ended with him saving Sam from a storm of gunfire and them making out on a pile of corpses.


    Sam shouted something a few rounds later and they walked back to the front room, stretching against the mummification of their spinal cords.


    Gradie hadn¡¯t heard a car pull up or even a door open, but there was Michael, standing in the center of the room like a ghost. Philip was still sitting in the chair, almost defiantly so, watching as Sam flipped a coin in the air. It landed on the table and she leaned over to look at it.


    ¡°Fuck!¡±


    ¡°I told you, give it a break for a while and come back to it,¡± Philip said.


    ¡°I thought that was the first thing we learned,¡± Gradie said. Sam flashed him a look then frowned at Philip.


    ¡°It¡¯s pointless. When am I ever going to need a coin to land one way up?¡±


    Philip shrugged. ¡°Then forget it.¡±


    ¡°Fuck you!¡± Sam said, maybe only half joking.


    ¡°I mean it. Pushing outcomes isn¡¯t necessarily a good gauge of your skill as a Hardworlder right now,¡±


    Sam flipped it some more, ignoring him, so he continued, louder.


    ¡°¡ªAnd it¡¯s a double-edged sword anyway. If you nail it, you feel more secure in the instability of the Hardworlds, sure, but If you fuck it up five times in a row, you start to lose faith you can effect anything here.¡±


    Sam flipped the coin over in her fingers like it was hiding something from her. Philip stood up and looked at Michael.


    ¡°Time to gear up?¡±


    Michael smiled and dumped some tropical skittles into his hands as he walked to the door at the end of the den that used to be a back door before the construction of the brick addition. It beeped and security locks whirred out of place.


    Inside was a long garage with the SUV taking up one end of it, clean and menacing, now a grey that reminded Gradie of rain clouds ready to burst. The hatch came up slowly and Luke started loading things from the shelves and the bags nearby into its compartments.


    Sam had a locker open and was loading her kit. Gradie looked around and reached for an AR that had a tag reading ¡®.300 blk¡¯ hanging from the grip, and Philip barked.


    ¡°Won¡¯t be needing that this time around.¡±


    Sam looked at Gradie without a hint of mockery, just a doe-eyed face of pure surprise, that was somehow worse than a mocking grin or something. He looked at Philip, trying to ignore her.


    ¡°Why the fuck not?¡±


    ¡°Cause last time we got into some action you ran off and almost got dropped out next to a battery kiosk. This time will be a learning experience for you, just lay low¡ª¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve had enough learning experiences, thanks.¡±


    Philip smiled as if he had fallen into a trap and stepped up to him.


    ¡°You think so?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, I learned if I¡¯m gonna get shot at, I¡¯d rather shoot back with an AR. I¡¯m not going into another fire fight with a fucking pistol, despite how much I¡¯ve earned for this team with one.¡±


    ¡°Earned for this team?¡± Philip drew the words out like he was pulling them out of Gradie¡¯s bullet wounds.


    ¡°Alan,¡± Michael started, but Philip stopped him with a motion like readying a knifehand strike.


    ¡°I¡¯m in charge of handling personnel, so let me handle personnel.¡±


    He stepped closer to Gradie, took a deep breath, and met his gaze like Gradie had a gun on him but he knew he was bulletproof.


    ¡°Look, I¡¯m gonna waste my time giving you a dose of reality, out of the kindness of my own heart. Let me tell you how it goes for most Hardworlders, meaning most of the people in this room, and most of the guys you plan on shooting at.¡±


    He pointed a single thick finger at Gradie, and smiled.


    ¡°You start out lower than dirt, driving around delivering guns to guys worth even less than those ATV wastoids we saw yesterday. Or maybe you just shoot a few cops while the real ones do the real shit. Then once you can stay in for more than a day, you get to watch a building with a radio for a week, or run more guns, or whatever else someone with a pulse and a body to burn can do. And you do that for a year, at least. Following so far?


    ¡°Ok, so I didn¡¯t¡ª¡± Philip snapped the finger up again and cut him off.


    ¡°Now notice I didn¡¯t mention anything about training, because there is none, beyond getting shot by your own guys if you become too much of an inconvenience, and even your mem of the job is property of the corp you sold your ass to, so no frolicking in some Vault worth more than you could earn in ten centuries. Oh, and the pay is shit¡ª¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t give a fuck about the pay, I told¡ª¡±


    ¡°Yeah you say that, but you¡¯ll need the money if you want to buy any mem to help you prime, cause remember, no vault. And on the off chance you get out from under the org and freelance, you¡¯ll need to pay a Keeper to preserve your Hardworld mem, so you can actually gain some experience, cause otherwise, you¡¯ll never even learn enough to have the opportunity to catch a stray round from the caliber of people that make up this team, much less get close enough to jeopardize them by running out¡ª¡±


    ¡°Well, I was never given a choice to do any of that,¡± Gradie snapped. He glanced at Michael, who said nothing, watching the two of them like they were all just something on TV, so he returned his gaze to Philip.


    ¡°And maybe that¡¯s the way I should have done it, maybe I shouldn¡¯t be here, maybe I should have told this big asshole¡ª¡± He waved at Michael, who smiled big but stayed quiet ¡°¡ª to go fuck himself with his propaganda videos and his friends who wanna dig through my childhood. But I¡¯m here now, and if you don¡¯t trust me to handle an actual weapon, then cut me lose, or I¡¯ll do it myself.¡±


    Philip had been smiling and moving is jaw the entire time, just waiting to say something, but Gradie was done with it. He put his pistol to his head and set his finger in the trigger guard.

 The Bounty | Chapter 31: This is my Rifle

    High Caliber Friends


    Philip''s speech had ignited fantasies that were still burning through Gradie¡¯s head. He saw himself leaving the team and joining some random low-level outfit, riding side by side with addicts and psychopaths, grinding his way up the ladder one kill at a time. A real Hardworlder earning his bones. The fantasies were all the more enticing because he knew that if he didn¡¯t pursue them soon, he would never get the chance. If he got any more experienced, he might blaze through the ranks of amateurs, and he¡¯d still be in Michael¡¯s debt.


    Sam broke his reverie, and the still silence, with a groan.


    ¡°So fucking dramatic!¡±


    Philip was finally about to say something, but Michael beat him to it.


    ¡°Alan, put that fucking gun down and grab the rifle.¡±


    Philip glared at Michael like he might shoot him, and Sam turned right around and faced the inside of the locker, pretending to load something.


    ¡°But, if you in any way endanger anyone else on the team, or don¡¯t pull your weight, or don¡¯t snap to it when Max gives you an order, you¡¯ll be working the next job as Zoe¡¯s personal barista.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll just lock you in a closet,¡± she said in his ears, softly, as if afraid Michael might overhear her from a thousand miles away. Gradie smiled, thinking of EP pushing him into a closet with her head barely coming up to his chin. Michael mistook the smile for something else. His voice was like thunder, low and distant but felt in the air all around.


    ¡°I¡¯m serious, Alan. Maybe I¡¯ve let too much slide. Maybe you really did just get lucky last job, but now¡¯s the time to find out. Don¡¯t fuck it up.¡±


    He was absolutely terrifying when angry, big kid face notwithstanding, and Gradie just nodded repeatedly, feeling embarrassed, like a kid that had thrown a tantrum and handed what he had cried for. Maybe that was the point. Or maybe Michael had known how close he had been to leaving.


    Philip had lit a cigar, probably to have something to bite that wasn¡¯t his tongue, while Michael was talking to Gradie, and now blew smoke between the two of them, and looked Michael dead in the eye.


    ¡°Thought I was in charge of the operators.¡±


    Gradie had to give him credit, he didn¡¯t even flinch when Michael turned his glare on him. Gradie got the feeling he was watching something that had a long history.


    ¡°You are.¡± Michael¡¯s face and voice softened suddenly. ¡°But it¡¯s up to me who gets to be one.¡±


    Michael glanced at Gradie then turned back to Philip.


    ¡°We¡¯ll need the extra rifle, I think.¡± There was a softness to it close to an apology, adjacent to a request. Philip''s face fluttered through something that might have been realization. He turned on Gradie.


    ¡°I hope you remember some of that shit I tried to teach you in the clubhouse, because if you so much as flag¡ª"


    ¡°I know how to stay on my line,¡± Gradie snapped, and realized in the same instant, that he did.


    Stay on your line!


    He remembered Philip yelling the phrase a thousand times in the clubhouse, though his mind tried to convince him they had been nothing more than dreams. He remembered, even more hazily, those other Gradies that had eventually come to the clubhouse with years of experience staying on their line, and he remembered, like an echo of the other memories, that he had stayed on his line multiple times in training last week.


    There was another refraction of the memories, more solid but somehow more dead. Another Gradie that had practiced not flagging his teammates in MilSim airsoft, paintball, and force on force. That Gradie was his Self.


    The memories and dreams radiated around him, and he saw himself, like he was standing between two mirrors, staying on his fucking line over and over again, and suddenly knew he could do it here, now, if asked to.


    Philip let something like the larval stage of a smile flash across his face before he caught himself and put forward the same old sneer. It was too late. Gradie knew Philip¡¯s pride when he saw it.Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.


    As if sensing he¡¯d been found out, Philip spoke in a teeth-clenched growl.


    ¡°You¡¯ve got five minutes to get geared up.¡±


    Gradie nodded, turned to grab the rifle off the shelf, then remembered.


    ¡°My gun¡¯s in the unit from yesterday.¡±


    Sam froze and he heard Philip exhale. Luke¡¯s shoes slapped concrete as he hopped out of the SUV.


    ¡°You push a mini gun?¡± He smiled over Philip¡¯s shoulder and Gradie couldn¡¯t help but return it.


    ¡°Just grab the one off the shelf,¡± Sam whispered to him like a hiss. Philip pointed at her and boomed.


    ¡°No, I wanna see what he¡¯s got, cause it¡¯s the only gun he¡¯s getting.¡±


    Gradie shut the locker and smiled to himself.


    *****


    Gradie sat awkwardly next to Philip in the center seat while Sam drove the SUV out of the garage onto the residential street then back around into the storage complex. They parked in the middle of the row and Philip marched up to the unit. The door rolled up and the lights flicked on, and he waved Gradie inside.


    ¡°Alright. Show me.¡±


    The rest of them stood outside the door like Gradie was going to pull a tiger out of somewhere and he felt his hair stand on edge. Everything inside was as it had been yesterday, besides the diamond silver Mercedes-Maybach S Guard parked where Sam¡¯s Jeep had been, but for a moment, he forgot everything and was sure he had fucked up.


    Then he saw it.


    He walked over to the large safe he had been looking at yesterday, snug between two other gun safes. After a pause, more for dramatic effect than anything else, he leaned over and started turning the combo lock.


    ¡°Hmm,¡± Luke grunted. Philip laughed.


    ¡°Oh, this¡¯ll be good.¡±


    The lock disengaged and Gradie grabbed the handle.


    ¡°Bullshit!¡± Philip barked, but he let some of the edge come off of his voice. Luke cackled.


    ¡°Ok bro, pull an RPG out of it for me.¡±


    Gradie pulled open the safe door, and there it was. Sitting in the dark, leaned in the back, surrounded by magazines. Suppressor and the other attachments already on. He pulled it out, chambered a round, and held it in his hands.


    Luke sucked his teeth.


    ¡°A bullpup? Whack.¡±


    ¡°What is it?¡± Sam said, coming up behind him.


    ¡°X95 in 300 blackout.¡±


    He rolled it in his hands and let it catch the light. He had asked the twins for an AUG in 300 blk, but they had said some things about gas blocks and Austrian police imports, and suggested this instead. It didn¡¯t have the video game nostalgia factor of the AUG, but it still looked pretty cool, and had served him well in the clubhouse.


    He looked up and found Sam smirking at him, far from impressed.


    ¡°Oh, so now you¡¯ll be like unkillable, right?¡±


    Philip stepped between Gradie and the door, casting a shadow over him. His words came out like an interrogation.


    ¡°How did you know it was in there?¡±


    ¡°I put it there.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s my safe. That¡¯s how I knew the combination. I¡¯m guessing one of the home invaders you have on payroll took it out of my house when I was robbed last month and it got mixed in accidentally with the rest of your safes.¡±


    In the quiet, the wind blew a piece of trash, maybe an old soda can or a plastic bottle, scratching down the concrete row outside.


    He had pushed memory of the gun while priming in the Vault before dropping in, but hadn¡¯t thought about the safe until he had seen Philip¡¯s stash the other day. He hadn¡¯t been sure it would work, and like Philip said, it hadn¡¯t felt like doing anything. A brief, unrememberable moment of belief, and the Hardworlds had closed around his action, covering it with hard facts and dull memory. Maybe he had pushed the robbery, but no matter how much he stretched his mind, it really felt like he had just remembered it.


    Philip nodded and sneered at him.


    ¡°Good job kid. Now you¡¯ve tied me and your Self to a robbery. Why don¡¯t we just take a group photo and post it online?¡±


    Gradie let his excitement get the better of him.


    ¡°I thought you said this would be over today?¡±


    Philip pointed at him.


    ¡°I¡¯m getting real sick of you making excuses for your own fuck ups by trying to throw my words back in my face.¡±


    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t have had to push shit if you would have just armed me correctly.¡±


    ¡°If the bullets start flying today, we¡¯ll see if you¡¯re armed correctly or not. And another piece of advice that¡¯s probably wasted on you, there¡¯s more to being well armed than what caliber you¡¯re carrying. And in the spirit of your education, some of the most high value kills of all time in this game have been clinched with a pistol. It¡¯s the god damned fundamental weapon of Hardworlder! Maybe if you weren¡¯t so caught up on inches¡ª¡±


    Michael stood next to them.


    ¡°Alan, it¡¯s bad etiquette to push on other operators without their knowledge.¡±


    Gradie thought it was bad etiquette to send someone into a possible warzone with just a pistol, Philip¡¯s treatise on the importance of one be damned, but he just nodded and squeezed the grip on his rifle, feeling its weight. Armed and ready to shoot something, he was done with any conversation that involved or included Philip.


    Michael smiled like he always did, like he knew what everyone was thinking all the time, and waved them outside.


    ¡°All right let¡¯s move. We¡¯ll take 199, you take the loop. Good luck out there.¡±


    He got in the Mercedes with Philip, and they roared off down the row.


    Gradie got loaded up, each magazine adding to the electric hum behind his ears. When he closed the suit button over his plate carrier, he remembered he had it tailored to fit best when fully loaded. Everything, it seemed, was coming together. He grabbed a shoulder bag with more ammo and got in the SUV.


    Somewhere beyond the fence of the storage, an engine roared as Philip and Michael took off towards the highway. Gradie stared out the window as the orange sheet metal walls and sand-colored concrete rushed by, and rolled his mind over the days his Self had spent at a multitude of ranges, running thousands of rounds through the X95, until suburban trees gave way to fast food signs and then to wide open cloud-brushed blue as they looped onto the highway. Out across the city, the edges seemed to bristle like blades, and his plate carrier pressed against his chest as he breathed.

 The Bounty | Chapter 32: Other People

    Through a distant mirror


    He figured it must be the drugs, or the lack of them. He couldn¡¯t remember what the movie had been called. Maybe it had been a book? Or a comic. He couldn¡¯t remember any of the scenes, or panels, or chapters or whatever they had been. He only remembered the idea. Another world, with its own time, like that book with the girl who went through the closet his mom used to read to him. Narnia. But in this book, you go there, and it¡¯s all dreams. Anything you can think of, you can do if you think hard enough, but people still wanted things, to go places, to have something.


    It didn¡¯t make any sense, but he was sure that had been how it worked. Couldn¡¯t remember the name. The square of floor in the corner of the pod, flanked by two planes of wall rising upward, told him nothing, but he kept staring at it anyway, searching. He could see himself there, in that other world. Must have dreamed it. Read it, watched it, played it so much while getting loaded that he misremembered being there.


    Or¡­


    JP. Rowland. Zipper. All caught, one by one. No word from Ooma, but she couldn¡¯t have been long behind them. JP had been put in a Hardworld. Heard they shot him in front of a Door. Imagine, an absolute poverty case like JP being escorted to a Door. Maybe it was a lie, the Door. Darla said they couldn¡¯t exist, just a legend that some Hardworlder had made up to boost his own ego.


    Probably right. She had always been the smartest one, in her own way. Maybe her storming off just before they had gone out and found the mouse trap had been more than just luck. Maybe she had sensed something.


    Must have been a book. He saw some faces he recognized but couldn¡¯t place. He must have read it and given random faces from the streets or work to the characters. But how did it end? What did the cover look like? Couldn¡¯t even remember the title or¡ª


    All those others flying around, smiles shining on their faces, had seemed like holograms projected from a place he could never go. Their smiles were the stars of that world, where all was black void without them. He had gone into the void to try and find something meant for him, but only found old resort worlds, and more drugs.


    He had never found any real happiness in that world. Darla had said that people like them could never find happiness in the afterlife (she was one of those people) because their souls were tarnished. We brought Hell here with us, she said. Maybe if that first dreamer had remained alone it would have been all right, but with two people it was impossible and any more didn¡¯t make much of a difference. A paradise forever denied because when people get together, they become the devil tryin to get to heaven, as her mother or someone used to say.


    ¡°We get in the way of each other, and us especially, we get in the way of ourselves, like those Chinese guys with the long chopsticks.¡± (whatever the fuck that meant).


    She had said all this after getting back from selling every last memory she had of ¡°anything getting within an inch of my pussy.¡± She had been crying and naked, saying it was all for the best she wanted to make new memories here. But when he went to touch her, his hand went right through her or past her and she screamed and he wanted to drop out of that god damned dreamland and never return, but eventually it worked, and she was just as flesh and solid under his hands as anything else and she kept on whispering ¡°I can feel it¡± like a mantra to make it so.


    The hotness of that memory, or fantasy or cutscene or whatever it was, burned itself out and she started talking about heaven and hell of our own making again in his head.


    At the time, when she had been sobbing about memories and pulling her clothes off, he had ignored her. She might as well have been talking about particle physics, struggling with that last button, as he wondered if her tits were that big in the real, and why she had any problems taking off clothes that, essentially, weren¡¯t even there. But, now here he was, in a life gone wrong as if by sentence, hunted by demons armed with guns and arrest warrants.


    He let his life expand to its full breadth in his mind, and tried to find a way out of it, tried to get that sideways-angled view on it that had shown him something else just hours ago.


    And there it was, for an instant. That other him. The one he had seen briefly during the interrogation. Not an addict or a thief, but something else, mundane. That other life felt like waking up, like remembering, but he could only see it in pieces, through angled mirrors, a memory of a recollection of other already worn-out memories, distorted by the facets and density of another version of himself, standing in the way.


    This time, he remembered talking to his uncle when they had gone for visitation, his cousin stone-faced on the ride over and crying like a baby on the way back, and his uncle had asked him, through the cracking phone, face half hidden by a glare in the glass, what he wanted to do with his life, and Cooper, that other Real Cooper, had skimmed through his life in an instant, like looking in a book for a sentence he had misremembered, and unable to come up with an answer, had realized just how lost and dull it all was.Stolen novel; please report.


    And in an instant, it was gone, like how when looking through a slim gap in a fence, you can see everything on the other side if you move back and forth, but the moment you stop moving there¡¯s only a single line again, unrecognizable.


    Someone laughed loudly and he glanced at the rest of the pod. Men sat at the tables or on the bunks, but no one looked at him. When he had come in, someone had asked him ¡°how much they got on your head, bruh?¡±, and someone else had talked loudly about the news that might have been meant for him, but that was it. Now the bunks and tables and jumpsuits seemed to be the only things in existence.


    He felt time drop away behind him and stretch out in front of him. How did he get here? The last few days were blotches of a bland work week broken up by nonsensical dreams.


    ¡°You¡¯ll forget, think it''s real down there, but you have to remember, alright? Or else they¡¯ll get you before I can set up a deal. Just remember, man, all this, there¡¯s no way you coulda made all this up,¡± The man had said, before sending him running down a river of hallways.


    The man was right. There was no way he could have made it up.


    Cooper leaned back on the bunk and tried to recall the name of the book, and figure out how he had been able to read in the middle of such a bad trip.


    ****


    The clouds rolled overhead like things sent from some other world where concrete was unknown and reflections fluttered on water without ever knowing the smooth sterile touch of glass. They were parked on a sloping cracked parking lot at the center of downtown and the slant of the lot and the angled levels of the parking garage ahead of them made it feel like the whole city might go sliding off to the side at any moment, leaving bare earth alone again next to the river.


    The exposed faces of cars floating on thin lines of concrete, held back only by steel cables, stacked on top of each other, seemed poised for tragedy. The jail, all brick with coin slot windows, rose behind and to the side of the garage like it would laugh when it all came crashing down.


    ¡°Any action, Zoey?¡± Michael said in their ears. They were all in a single voice room for now.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got some that look suspect. Haven¡¯t moved since I started watching, and the plates pull up the usual rap sheets. No radio chatter but that will probably pick up after we get him out.¡±


    ¡°All right. Ashley says it should be any time now.¡±


    ¡°Good Girl!¡± Luke sat up in his chair and popped his back by twisting to one side then the other. They had been sitting there for almost an hour, mics on mute, Sam and Luke talking about anything from Gunmaze, to real guns, to the best hidden nooks in the Allclub, while Gradie chimed in when he could.


    Sam cracked her knuckles. ¡°You think he¡¯ll tell her where it is?¡±


    ¡°Shit, I would.¡± Luke winked at Gradie.


    ¡°That would kill me,¡± Sam said.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°If after all this shit, Ashley clutches the job with her tits.¡±


    Luke laughed. ¡°Wish she would clutch me¡ª¡± he trailed off.


    Gradie wondered at the possibility it might all be over soon, and something in the thought of dropping out and letting all this wash away unnerved him.


    ¡°We would still have to go get it right?¡± he said.


    Luke shrugged.


    ¡°Zoey would just send her little drone, play some claw game and bring it back. Be kind of a waste. Wouldn¡¯t even have to shoot anyone.¡± He prodded his riflebag with his shoe. Sam gave him a look.


    ¡°Don¡¯t you get enough of that in Gunmaze?¡±


    ¡°Nah. Don¡¯t even piss myself there.¡±


    Sam stretched up in her seat.


    ¡°Well, I hope he just hands it over nice and easy and we can all leave.¡±


    ¡°Are you worried about getting into a shootout?¡± Gradie asked.


    Sam turned back and gave him a look that he couldn¡¯t decipher.


    ¡°No, I¡¯m just not as big a fan of shooting at people as you psychos.¡±


    Gradie found that hard to believe, but Luke butted in before he could prod her more.


    ¡°What you gonna do when we get back, man? And please don¡¯t say train some more, cause Max told me they can¡¯t keep you out of the damn clubhouse.¡±


    ¡°Maybe I¡¯ll come back on my own.¡± Saying it out loud felt wrong. He had been thinking about it since his talk with Sam last night, and even more so after Philip¡¯s lecture, but it seemed like the kind of impulse he shouldn¡¯t admit to.


    Luke looked at Gradie like he was expecting a punch line.


    ¡°And do what?¡±


    ¡°Whatever I want. You never wanna just drop in a Hardworld and rob a bank? Or be a millionaire and go to Vegas or something?¡±


    Sam smiled at him and bounced in her seat.


    ¡°Oh my god, you make it sound so easy! You¡¯d probably just end up waking up as a desk monkey a hundred times.¡±


    The words ¡®desk monkey¡¯ stung him.


    ¡°Why, cause all you ever wake up as is a chauffeur?¡± Gradie glared into the rear view and Sam met him with flashing grey eyes that shifted from shock to anger. Luke tried to get between them with a calm tone.


    ¡°We¡¯ll if you do go in solo, you should find Max.¡± He looked from Gradie to Sam. ¡°That would be funny as¡ª¡±


    ¡°Max would kill him,¡± Sam said.


    ¡°You really buy all his bullshit?¡± Gradie snapped.


    ¡°Hey.¡± Luke was no longer a peacemaker. ¡°The dude¡¯s not bullshitting. He¡¯s just giving you shit because he thinks you¡¯re not taking it seriously.¡±


    ¡°What the fuck do I have to do to¡ª¡±


    Sam cut him off.


    ¡°Also, Boss just threw you onto the team with no notice, and then you act like this.¡±


    She sounded like a disappointed teacher. It was infuriating.


    ¡°Act like what?¡±


    ¡°Talking shit about Max, whining cause you can¡¯t have the gun you want, going behind his back and putting one in his safe.¡±


    ¡°I had a problem, I let them know, its resolved. Why do you care?¡±


    ¡°Because I have to deal with it.¡±


    ¡°Oh yeah, you have to deal with me actually being armed if someone shoots at you.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t need you to defend me!¡± Sam whirled around and had her head and shoulders over the center console. Luke backed up towards the window so he wouldn¡¯t ash on her.


    ¡°Alright, c¡¯mon Yall,¡±


    ¡°Ashley¡¯s coming out with him. Get ready to move.¡± EP said on the line.


    Luke snapped his hands down to his rifle and scanned the mirrors and the rear camera feed. Sam put it in drive. She looked in the rear view and caught Gradie¡¯s eye.


    ¡°Ok, now let¡¯s see what a big boy you are with that gun.¡±

 The Bounty | Chapter 33: Free Man

    Sometimes, you take it with you


    The hours in the cell had felt like years, and only when they were over did he realize how wrong they were, like a dream that seems rational when you¡¯re in it.


    Some detectives had come in and asked him about the shootout, about who he knew that might want to do that too him, about who he owed, then they got quiet and let him theorize, then they did it all over again. The weird thing was, they hadn¡¯t seemed nearly as interested as the guys from robbery who had tried to get him to confess to robbing that old boomer.


    If he had to guess, they had taken him out of his cell for questioning ten times, but he knew that was impossible. Sometimes they had asked him about a quarter. Sometimes they didn¡¯t have any eyes. Sometimes the interrogation room had no walls, just a floor floating in endless black.


    One time, they brought him into the interrogation room, and it had just been him sitting on the other side of the table from himself, berating him for ruining his life. He had tried to convince the other him that he was the real Cooper, but the other him, his hair cut like a boy scout wearing a fucking anime t-shirt, had shaken his head and said, ¡°No, I¡¯m the Real Cooper, you just don¡¯t remember,¡± and somehow Cooper had felt that he was right.


    The shootout was often irrelevant to these hallucinations, and at times he had been sure it had never even happened. His lawyer (if he really had a lawyer) hadn¡¯t even mentioned it, seemingly more concerned with the speed of his bail proceedings, asking him if he had friends in high places. He had spent a few hours convinced he had made the whole thing up and had really just been brought in for boosting or a B and E or something, until it came up on the news, but eventually even that sunk beneath the churn of delusion and paranoia.


    His time in the pod unfolded, not linearly, but in airburst fashion, like an explosion folding back in on itself. An onslaught of unending false awakenings. Sometimes he would jolt awake in the pod, or wake up with his head on the table, the detectives staring at him, or the darkness closing in on him, or the demons with otherworld eyes laughing at him. Sometimes he woke up ten times in a row.


    At the end, it was all he could do to sit there and wait for the next one without screaming.


    When they told him he had posted bail and his girlfriend was waiting for him, he knew he was dreaming, but the world outside the pod was rougher than any dream he had ever had.


    His clothes, freshly returned to him, smelled like gunfire and blood, even though he had been on his side in the seat during all the killing. Maybe it had been in the air when they took him from one cruiser, punctured and broken and spilling gore, to another, crisp and detergent-smelling inside, like a dumb animal that didn¡¯t know where it was or what it was made for. Maybe the smell had stuck to his mind, his soul. That idea felt so good, so right, that it burst out in front of him like a real thing and he walked into a chair in the waiting area.


    A voice almost finished knocking him down.


    ¡°Cooper!¡±


    She was wearing poured-on jeans and a crop top. Her purse hung on a spaghetti strap so even it wouldn¡¯t get in the way. Everyone was looking at her and she strutted over to him with her eyes all big and wet and lips parted just right.


    ¡°Oh, fuck, baby. Oh my god.¡± She hugged him like she would collapse if he didn¡¯t hold her, so he did. She was softness pressing out in full curves and pulled taught in between. The memories came back all chopped up, as if the drugged-out days had been woven into a mesh in his mind, a clear stiff uniform plastic that sliced the soft textured time with her into scattered chunks unconnected to anything.Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    Still, there it was.


    He hadn¡¯t been on anything but weed and molly back then. Just a 19-year-old with no concept of ¡°now that high school is over, I should¡ª¡±. She had known him senior year, and afterward, when she was still looking at colleges and the space between their respective social circles hadn¡¯t yet reached an unsurmountable distance, like two pellets fresh out of a shotgun barrel.


    They had become fuck buddies. Then one screaming night after he had seen her getting out of another guy¡¯s car, and he had to explain why he was mad because he couldn¡¯t just leave her with holes all in her wall, something had started that had the same size and momentum as a relationship, but was more like two people rolling down a hill.


    It had ended abruptly his first time in jail, something about her parents and they even took her phone and watched her like prison guards (yes, she had actually said that). Ended but not died. There were the random calls, often months apart and always with that slurring sob and the sounds of bars or apartment parties muffled by a door behind her. He put them out of his head as quick as he put down the phone and didn¡¯t remember a word of them now, six years later. But here she was.


    The sign-out process, if there was one, dissolved on the hot surface of his memory like spit on the glass bulb of a pipe, and suddenly they were walking out.


    ¡°Come on, let¡¯s go. Come on.¡± She pulled him by the hand and smiled through tears like they were going for a day at the beach but would be machine gunned into the sand at the end of it.


    He went out the door and down the steps with her soft hand pulling him and he squeezed it out of some fear that if he let go he would slip right back into the churning disjointed time that had filled his cell, or maybe even farther and end up in that endless void of his dreams, where men who moved through it like fish in water hunted him in ways he couldn¡¯t remember for reasons he didn¡¯t understand.


    The world slid past him, all concrete and sunlight, and he felt it was only his physical connection to her that allowed him to move. If he let go, it would all go still and cold again, and he would be frozen in place in a dead world.


    She let go of his hand when they got to the forest green VW beetle parked next to a meter, and the world kept on rolling as it had been, car horns bouncing off the high downtown walls and everything. This jostled something loose, and he stood still thinking about it.


    ¡°Why did you bail me out?¡±


    She fumbled for her keys, made eye contact once, big black orbs of hesitation like just before fucking, then sighed like they had just finished.


    ¡°Cause no one else would. I don¡¯t know. I guess I¡¯m hoping that now that you know all those people don¡¯t care about you, things will be different.¡±


    He didn¡¯t tell her that all his friends that she had known were gone. That now it was just him doing it all. Did she really believe it was just bad influence? If so, she deserved whatever he decided to do. She held his hand again and his bitterness wavered.


    ¡°And you can¡¯t skip, because I can¡¯t pay it back. I¡¯ll lose everything.¡± He felt her searching his eyes for signs this meant something to him. Afraid she might find some bit of him peeking through, he looked down like he was ashamed.


    ¡°I¡¯ll make it up to you. I¡¯ll earn it back.¡±


    She squeezed his hand then let go again and he was left feeling like he had jumped a gap. She stood there staring at him like she was feeling everything he was, then her eyes disappeared under her lashes, and she opened the door.


    ¡°Come on. I have to tell you something.¡± She got behind the wheel and he pushed her door closed in some half-minded gesture of chivalry, like a child imitating TV courtship.


    He stared at her pouting face through the windshield as he walked around and felt the pit in his chest at her words. Stupid. What could she say to him that would matter now? Probably some insignificant female confession, some trinket she had kept that he would have to pretend to remember.


    He walked around to the passenger side and felt the expanse of downtown at his back, like a magnet pulling metal shavings in his skin. Suddenly, he was ready to run. She popped her head down towards the seat and smiled at him through the window and he sank in through it somehow and was sitting there watching her as she twisted and bounced and pulled into traffic.

 The Bounty | Chapter 34: Lost Soul

    Like some kind of spiritual probation


    The cracked concrete popped under the tires and all the sounds of the city became razor-sharp. Gradie¡¯s ears picked up gunfire, but half a second later it was just the rev of an engine, or a piece of gravel hitting the undercarriage. As he wrestled with his breathing, EP¡¯s voice came over the earbuds, soft as a shadow on snow.


    ¡°Radio chatter the moment he walked out the door. Trying to pin down their locations right now.¡±


    ¡°Stay about a light behind them,¡± Michael said, like ordering lunch.


    ¡°Roger roger,¡± Sam said, and swung the SUV out of the lot. On the navigator in the dash, Celeste¡¯s Beetle was marked by a blinking dot, stuck at a light. Philip and Michael''s vehicle, marked by another dot, was pulling around the back street between the college and the river, heading towards the road a few blocks ahead of the Beetle. Gradie gripped the stock of his rifle through the bag and looked out the window.


    His legs were half numb from sitting so long in the SUV, and he was thirsty and had to piss, but the adrenaline rising up his tongue pushed every other feeling down somewhere ignorable. He was acutely aware of his flesh and unable to separate himself from it. If a bullet ripped into his leg, could he pry his mind away from the agony? Could he handle being trapped in his body, locked in with the pain, unable to retreat to the winding hallways and the ghostly flesh of the Otherworld?


    Luke spoke suddenly and Gradie almost pulled his rifle up right there.


    ¡°Alan, keep an eye on our six.¡±


    There was none of the smooth playfulness in his voice that Gradie had grown used to, and somewhere in it, Gradie was reminded of his own mortality.


    He turned and looked out the back window, scanning the stream of traffic behind for the sudden appearance of gun barrels, trying to remind himself that his own mortality had nothing to do with this world.


    ****


    Cooper stared at the window glass without seeing anything but the swirling mess in his head, trying to separate the memories from the dreams. All the days spent skating around that parking garage. The half a semester flunked out while talking up girls and selling drugs at community college. The two years trying to play gangster or underworld shaker until a brief flash of violence had scared him back to rehab and his parent''s condo and a string of retail jobs.


    Someone had done all that. But someone had also been flying around a dark void in a ship made to look like a strip club folded in on itself, wrapped around a core of couches and cages.


    He let that dream-memory ride for a moment.


    The girls had been phantoms. Their skin and sex only felt real when he focused, when his mind could be coaxed to squeeze out memories that grafted themselves onto the ghost girls like fondant on a frame. Like liquor spilled on a marble counter, at once brilliant and aromatic, the memories evaporated once spent and left the ghost girls dancing their programmed routines, by now committed by all passengers to memory, until another dose of memories, maybe a girl seen yesterday behind the counter or waiting tables, was pulled out and fed to them.


    One of the girls had been given the look and gestures of a college chick one of the guys had sold Adderall to one evening, the orange light on her skin clashing with the dark and neon of the ship, when that guy, one of their first marks, had warned Cooper of the Hardworlders.Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    ¡°They can make you think they know you, right? Like you¡¯ve known them forever. They can be your brother, sister, even your mom. Lethal shit.¡±


    ¡°They can¡¯t do that,¡± someone, maybe Rowland, had said. ¡°You can¡¯t fuck with genetics. Names and faces, man. They can¡¯t be blood-related unless it¡¯s that way in the Real.¡±


    It felt like a dream barely remembered. Cooper let it slide out of frame while the woman driving in the seat next to him glanced over and worked up the courage to tell him something.


    ¡°So, some people asked about you about a week ago,¡± she said eventually. ¡°They came to my work twice. Parked outside my house and waved at me when I came home, and then they just drove off.¡±


    Who? His fence¡¯s guys? Did Jared have guys? He thought about Jared sitting at the dining table of his cookie-cutter McMansion, pile of meter-long receipts and SKU tables next to him, and doubted he could even get his kids to grab him a beer out of the fridge.


    ¡°And now you¡¯re taking me to them.¡± He said it without any malice, like he was announcing the next obvious plot twist in a movie they were both watching, but she freaked out anyway.


    ¡°Oh my god baby no! I just spent every dollar I had saved and took out all kinds of loans to bail you out! How can you say that?¡±


    The car swerved in and out of the lane.


    ¡°Sure, whatever.¡± He counted the floors on a parking garage. It was the same number every time.


    ¡°God dammit Cooper!¡± she swerved into the far lane in a storm of horns and slammed on the brakes. Cooper looked out the window and sucked his teeth.


    ¡°This the place? I coulda walked.¡±


    She made a kind of yelp and beat the steering wheel with her fists.


    ¡°I shouldn¡¯t be doing this! I saw your job on the news and I just¡ª¡± She twisted in her seat and bit back tears at the window. Her curves, intensified by her posture, and her soft cheek and slightly fanned out ears lifted old memories out of deep places, memories that melted and smoldered all around him. He shuffled in his seat. She froze suddenly.


    ¡°Just get out. If you don¡¯t trust me, if you think I¡¯m trying to sell you out, just go. I can¡¯t handle it if you¡ª¡± She dropped her chin and cried for real this time. He took his hand off the door handle and leaned closer to her.


    ¡°You didn¡¯t have to do this. You should¡¯ve just left me in jail. They can¡¯t get me in there.¡±


    ¡°They said they could.¡± She sobbed.


    He moved her hair behind her ear and she looked at him. He realized that until that moment they hadn¡¯t really seen each other. They had made eye contact, said some words, but this was the first time it was just them, and not two masks.


    He broke the silence first.


    ¡°So, where are we going.¡± He put some softness in his voice.


    She wiped her face with her hands, took a breath and flicked on her blinker like she was arming a bomb.


    ¡°Someplace safe. I have a relative that deals with this type of stuff.¡±


    ¡°Who?¡±


    ¡°An in-law. Ok?¡± She pointed her glittering eyes at him. ¡°Will you let me do this?


    ¡°All right.¡± He squeezed her hand and she smiled at him.


    They pulled back into the traffic and it embraced them like forgiveness. For a blistering moment he felt safe, swaddled in layers of everyday normalcy. The drifting stupid clouds sliding somewhere oblique to the direction of the streets, the cars, even the lines in the buildings. Radio noise and bass thump, horns and breaks and engine groans, all blended throughout the jigsaw grid of cars. Saturday afternoon. Smell of grills and exhaust. Nothing violent could happen in a moment like this, he felt. It would be like an office cubicle spontaneously sprouting in a forest. The carnage back at the store was out of his memory, held back by the supremacy of the now, unable to shatter the sensation.


    His phone buzzed in his pocket. She cut a sharp glance sideways as he took it out and her movement was predator like compared to the softness before. He had a text message from a number he didn¡¯t have saved. He read it in the push notification and the world shifted again and his reality was wholly separate from the gentle banality of two seconds ago.


    Kill that bitch next to you. We will take you in. You will tell us where the coin is. Then you can leave this Hardworld and spend the rest of your life fucking resort sluts instead of being trapped in the tunnels of Nightmare. Wake up! Otherworld. The Allclub. Hardworlders.¡±


    He turned the screen off and set the phone down on his lap. They were stuck at a light, another fucking parking garage to his right, tacky new condos with fake faded brick to his left, and just the wide flat expanse of the river and the land beyond it ahead of them. He felt if they made it over the bridge they would keep on sliding across the surface of the earth until they glided off into the sky and eventually the Allclub would pop into view.


    He took his knife out of his personals bag, tore the tape off, and flipped it open. Her voice was soft and scared, but there was something inside it that spoke of cold lethality.


    ¡°Baby, what are you doing with that knife?¡±

 The Bounty | Chapter 35: Contact

    Like a match and gasoline, baby


    Cooper looked over at her and all the memories, of sex and screaming and calling her a thousand times, fell out of her face and rolled around in the car. He ignored them. Something else was burning in the center of his mind now, like hot coals given fresh air by the text message.


    Darla. Her face, her voice, her motions and the noises she made. And all the rest of it. That hollow world that had somehow eclipsed this one. The first time he had ever flown. The first time he had sold a memory, the feeling of worthlessness that followed. Every disappointing ¡°night¡± in the Allclub.


    An echo broke through it.


    ¡°Baby, what are you doing with that knife?¡±


    ¡°Making sure I don¡¯t forget, baby.¡± He spat the last word and pressed the blade into his forearm.


    Celeste had been reaching her left hand towards the gun stashed in the door. She froze and watched him cut a circle in his arm but couldn¡¯t speak. After that came a cross shape, then one long cut joined with two smaller ones. Then four slashes forming a W.


    ¡°Baby,¡±


    ¡°You can cut that lovey-dovey shit out now, Hardworlder. You want the coin? You¡¯re going to have to deal with me on the level.¡±


    Two lines for the r and a quick cut for the l. The tip of the knife twisted his skin around as he cut the D and she looked away.


    ¡°Baby, there¡¯s a first aid kit in the glove box.¡± She was crying now, and he couldn¡¯t shake the feeling that it wasn¡¯t an act. He tried anyway, and stared at the word bleeding in his arm.


    Othrwrld


    ****


    EP flicked her eyes across the screens in practiced patterns. Separate video feeds from her day drones, (generally, smaller models with sky-colored bellies and urban camo tops) were filtered and distilled in her head into a complete visualization of the ground below. Some part of the back of her mind tracked the movements and locations of the various actors and suspicious vehicles.


    The scare with Celeste and the knife had been handled with less panic than she expected (the text tracked to a virtual number with no leads, surely the work of some other team unrelated to the crash dummies), and she realized she was starting to fall out. The feed felt more and more like something distant, a livestream or a game, something that could never touch her. The longer she stayed in the Hardworld, the more she felt she was really all alone in a box, the world outside only a simulation. The images on the screens became the echoes of ghosts. The people less than characters.


    She had come to see it as her penalty. Every Hardworlder had one, usually specific to their job. Operators got bogged down by the fear of their Self, always placed in danger by the Spirit. Sages got caught in the tangle of their own connections. Charms, like Celeste, often became too attached. Overlords and Spiders, like herself, became more distant, less connected to their friends and partners. It followed a predictable process, usually. She probably had about three more days before it would become severe and dropping out would be a constant risk. Funny. It used to happen a lot faster. She really was becoming a veteran.


    Radio chatter overlapped itself in her ears. She could set one channel to priority and still have up to three others active in descending volume under it, her mind automatically picking up choice words while her hand flicked one or another to the top of the list to single it out. At the moment, she was cycling between walkie-talkies and burner phone calls, intercepted by one of her drones, and all talking about the same thing. The VW beetle moving down the road.This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.


    ¡°What the fuck is this, bait car?¡±


    ¡°Moving down Henderson. Fuck are they going? Back to the dude''s house?¡±


    ¡°I aint touching that shit.¡±


    Then something stood out.


    ¡°-type like ass, dude. Can you¡ª¡± ¡°Shut the fuck up!¡±


    The hairs on her neck stood up. The voice chats were cover for an encrypted text chat. Shit. These dummies weren¡¯t so dumb. She scanned the vehicles linked to the phones and radio chatter for any wi-fi or Bluetooth that looked promising and found a few. She set a few choice programs loose and turned her fractaled yet focused attention to other things.


    The road Celeste was on crossed over the river via a bridge and continued onto a rectangle of land with the river on three sides, north south and east. It was a sad industrial area the city was trying to drag into something else, with towing lots, buildings repurposed into trendy gyms, a big sheet metal roofed flea market, a disused police training center now stuffed with records and desk cops, and a massive construction area in the center where disjointed streets were being twisted into two new half-completed cement avenues that had just begun their leap over the train tracks that bisected the slab, running northwest to southeast. It was a cluster fuck.


    At least two vehicles were following the VW; A sedan and an SUV. She was moving some micro drones in for a closer look at, when movement from across the river to the east caught her eye, on the old main street peninsula formed by a bend in the river. A region of bare foundations and vacant buildings that she noted, sadly, would have been a much simpler place for a shootout.


    A squad of dirt bikes flew out of the partially built condo complex across from the abandoned power plant and took off towards the river. She alerted the team.


    ¡°Hostiles moving out on Main street. Crossing the river.¡±


    ¡°How?¡± said Luke.


    ¡°Dirt bikes, pedestrian bridge to the south, part of the park trails.¡±


    ¡°All right,¡± he said. In the dash cam, EP saw him sit up and slip the bottom of his mask from under his baseball cap, ready to pull it into place.


    She looked back to the other feeds and tracked the dirtbikes as the descended the grass berm that served as a flood break to the river.


    So, they had at least one ambush set up beforehand, and now that they knew the Beetle¡¯s direction, they were consolidating their forces. But how many other routes had they covered? And how many operators did they have converging on the beetle right now? What if Celeste had taken the highway, would they have¡ª


    Something tightened her chest and put tension behind her jaw. She had become so trained at sensing danger and developments by distilling a platter of various senses, that it took her brain a bit to catch up.


    In the center of the cluster fuck zone, a white Toyota pickup with a canvas top had driven into the construction site and turned up the half-built ramp with its back aiming down the road, toward the beetle, now under four hundred yards away and stuck at a light. She froze watching the truck for a second, expecting gunfire to erupt out of the back of it at any instant, trying to form the words to tell the team, when that sixth sense drew her eyes to a small sedan speeding out of a gas station across the intersection from the beetle.


    ¡°Heads up!¡±


    *****


    Cooper found that the silence was, for some reason, unbearable, so he tried to break it.


    ¡°Remember the first time we fucked?¡± He smiled at her but she didn¡¯t look over.


    ¡°That wasn¡¯t us.¡± She had gotten ahold of herself, and her voice was now cold. The jig was up. Now that it was gone, he missed the game. He tried to bring it back.


    ¡°It looked like us. And we both remember it, so, wasn¡¯t it us?¡±


    The light turned red before she could get through. Of course it did. She scowled at the intersection.


    The cross street coming from the left dead-ended into a building on her right that had once been a motel but was now some kind of charity housing. The half a street was the only reason for the light, barely went a few hundred meters back before cutting another left behind some body shop, and there wasn¡¯t a single fucking car on it. It was the most pointless red light she had ever been stuck at.


    And Cooper wouldn¡¯t shut up.


    ¡°So where are you really taking me? Gonna let some big guy dunk my hand in acid till I tell you where the coin is?¡± He watched his blood blot the gauze.


    Celeste winced at that, or maybe her Self did.


    ¡°No, if I was gonna do that, I¡¯d have the big guy here with me.¡±


    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t have gotten in the car.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m gonna take you someplace safe. To talk.¡±


    Cooper scoffed just like he used to, and it still infuriated her.


    ¡°What? You¡¯d rather be somewhere else? There really are people out there who would dunk your hand in acid.¡±


    ¡°Ok, then what? You gonna fuck me until I tell you where it is?¡±


    The light turned green and she floored it, but it was no good. He was still in the seat next to her.


    EP¡¯s voice broke in on her line, shrill and panicked.


    ¡°Heads up!¡±


    It was a second too late. She been trying so hard not to look at Cooper, she didn¡¯t see the car ahead swerve into her lane until it was already crunching all around her.

 The Bounty | Chapter 36: 7.62x54

    Gunfire is like music to us


    The distinct metallic balloon-popping glass-breaking sound of a car crash drew Gradie¡¯s attention to the front of the SUV. They were coming over the bridge and the cars ahead of them screeched to a stop in a flutter of brake lights.


    ¡°Hey yo, what¡¯s up?¡± Luke pulled his rifle up to his shoulder.


    EP¡¯s shrill yell cracked in their ears.


    ¡°Car crashed into Ashley! Move up!¡±


    ¡°Shit!¡± Sam whipped the wheel around and started to pull into the turn lane. Luke stopped her with a bark.


    ¡°Bikes, right! Engaging!¡± He pulled his mask down, kicked open his door, and leaned out with one foot on the running board. He opened fire through the front door jam and shells bounced off the inside of the passenger window.


    Out across the river, five dirt bikes zoomed down the sidewalks that ran alongside the berm. One of the riders wiped out in a cloud of dirt, and the other four tore ass back up and over the berm. They dropped down out of sight as rounds kicked up dirt around them and sparked off their bikes.


    Gradie¡¯s attention had been drawn by the crash and held by Luke¡¯s gunplay, so he almost missed the other SUV swerve into the far oncoming lane just behind them. It parked at an angle with its front bumper even with theirs, and something moved from around the driver''s side before it had finished rocking. A helmeted head with glaring sunglasses and an AR barrel swiveling into place next to it.


    Gradie jerked in his seat and frantically tried to get his gun shouldered while searching for words to tell the team what he was seeing. All he got out was:


    ¡°Hey! Hey!¡±


    Sam did a better job of it.


    ¡°Contact left, oncoming lane!¡±


    The man Gradie had been watching fired off a burst into Sam¡¯s window and she flinched back as three white circles the size of fists clouded the glass. Gradie got his rifle up and kicked the door-open lever.


    All the doors in the SUV had been set up with kick controls so they could be opened without the operators having to take their hands off their weapons. Though it had seemed strange during training, he was grateful for it now. The door opened about a foot and Gradie put the end of his suppressor on the hinge between the door frame and the t-post and started firing.


    The first round caught the guy square in the chest and ripped apart his jacket, exposing the armor plate beneath. His next two shots went high and hit nothing but blue sky as the shooter ducked back behind the engine block. The sound of the shell casings clattering in the cab reminded him of dropping things in the car a million times throughout his life, and his mind had trouble squaring the two sensations.


    The window in his open door went white in big splotches and the air filled with gunfire as someone either inside the SUV or on the other side of it shot through their center windows at Gradie. Instinctively he ducked down. In the same instant, he saw through the open side of his door that another shooter had stepped around the back end of the other SUV. The sudden, unavoidable knowledge that he was about to get shot racked him like an electrical charge as he twisted and pulled his rifle toward the gunman. It felt like he was dragging it through molasses, bullpup be damned.


    Luckily, the gunman hardly had time to raise his rifle at Gradie before his head exploded. Luke had whipped around and shot the guy over the roof of their SUV, responding to a scream from Sam that Gradie only heard seconds afterward like an artifact his ears had plucked out of the air but his brain had had trouble immediately identifying.


    ¡°Fucking thank you!¡± Gradie yelled, still crouched down and facing the crumpling body.


    ¡°No shit! Let¡¯s go!¡± Luke said, letting loose at the other vehicle and sending casings clattering onto the roof of their SUV. Gradie dove back inside, and realized with a shock of embarrassment more electrifying than the near-death moments before, that he had done it again. He had gone out on his own in a flash of instinct. Luckily, the team seemed to have more pressing concerns.The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    ¡°Close the fucking door!¡± Sam screamed. Gradie slammed it shut and looked up in time to see a form, partially obscured by the frosty disks and cracks in the window, step out from behind the other SUV.


    ¡°Fuck him. Drive.¡± Luke said as he got in, like Sam had spaced out at a light on the way to the park. More gunfire cracked down the road and Luke changed magazines.


    ¡°Shooters on Ashley,¡± EP said.


    ¡°Coming!¡± Sam shot the SUV into the center turn lane and revved the engine. The other SUV roared behind them.


    ¡°Yeah and fuck you too.¡± Sam pressed a button in the dash. Something clanged on the street behind them and a second later the other SUV screeched to a stop on bare rims and smashed into a parked car.


    Through the windshield, Gradie saw four men in combat gear and face masks circling the Beetle with weapons raised, their muzzles flashing haphazardly, turning the windows white but unable to do much else.


    ¡°Fucking easy mode,¡± Luke said softly as he snapped the bolt release.


    The one on top of the car leaped off like he was on fire and the other ones backed up quickly.


    ¡°What¡ª¡± Sam started.


    Something twinkled and for a moment Gradie thought the stoplight had exploded, then the rounds slammed into the beetle, and the most terrifying roar he had ever heard echoed from down the road.


    ****


    EP watched the gunmen circle the car, fire off rounds and yell, saw Celeste glare at them like a cheetah being taunted in a zoo, and through the cars outside mic heard the dipshits with guns try to figure something out.


    ¡°Get the fuck out!¡± one barked at the windows, voice cracking.


    ¡°Its fucking armored!¡± another one whined.


    ¡°Move! Move! He¡¯s gonna hit it with the emgee!¡±


    They scattered like rats, and sure enough the PKM in the back of the pickup had opened up like a machine that had learned one human emotion; hate. Whoever was on the trigger was lightyears ahead of these other guys. The rounds all landed on the driver¡¯s side of the windshield in a group just over a foot wide.


    ¡°PKM!¡± She yelled at the same time as Luke, who actually said ¡®jinx¡¯ with a smile on his face. She tabbed to her gun drone and watched its elevation counter drop drastically. The camera view looked like World War two dive bomber footage.


    ¡°Cease fire! Hold up, Target in danger!¡± One of the dipshits screamed into his radio, echoing from two sources in her ears. She glanced over at the feed from the beetle¡¯s interior camera, and gasped.


    ¡°Aww.¡±


    Cooper had thrown himself on top of Celeste with his back to the widening mass of white in the windshield. The PKM paused.


    ¡°I¡¯ll be damned,¡± EP whispered.


    ¡°Car!¡± one of the dipshits yelled, but the PKM gunner had already seen them. Red tracers zipped towards the team¡¯s SUV as he corrected his fire.


    ****


    ¡°Cut left! There!¡± Luke screamed at Sam. EP saw him point wildly in the SUV feed out of the corner of her eye. The SUV swerved off the road and into the lot of a small, single-story red brick office building, where live oaks cast harsh midday shadows. The PKM found its mark at last, and turned half the windshield white and gnawed the entire driver¡¯s side flank into ripped metal and bursts of polycarbonate as it turned desperately into the lot. Sam zig-zagged as a trio of oak trees screened them momentarily, but it didn¡¯t stop the gunner from laying into the trigger. Car windows exploded all around them and the live oaks broke open in bursts of bark and wood and sprays of shredded leaves.


    ¡°Get under the covered parking!¡± EP screamed.


    ¡°April, move up behind the machine gun position and look for an opening,¡± Michael said, like he was teaching her to dance.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got it!¡± EP yelled. Her drone was about to drop into the bed of the truck. They had popped the canvas top off and one man was prone in the bed firing the PKM, while another, crouched down at his feet, shooting a 16-inch AR loaded entirely with tracers, directed his fire and, at times, slapped him on the legs in some kind of code.


    She landed the drone on the bed right next to the gunner. He looked over, and she saw the pitiless lens of the camera and the 5.7 barrel next to it reflected in his sunglasses just before she fired.


    Two rounds of AP 5.7 tore into his forehead and the blast sent the drone flying backward until it slammed into the steel plate they had placed behind the sandbags lining the edge of the truck bed.


    ¡°Drones! Fuck you!¡± The spotter put three tracers through the drone, and one of them ricocheted and stuck, glowing, in the bicep of the dead gunner before the camera feed died.


    Her other gun drone was less than 20 meters above the truck when it got taken out. She backed the other nearby drones off in evasion paths as more rounds zipped past them.


    So, the truck team were the real operators.


    ¡°Gunners down!¡± she told the team, but her pride was out of it. She hadn¡¯t fielded near enough gun drones, and the ones she had were built from frames that were too big for any real surprise. All eyes and no bite, she watched from a distant drone as tracer guy threw his rifle to one of the men next to the truck. The hacked phone mics told the rest of the story.


    ¡°Jackson, spot me!¡±


    He rolled the corpse to the side of the bed in a perfect dead-man roll, then scampered back over and snapped down into a prone position. His hands started moving over the PKM like the feelers of some horrible insect. The gunman near the truck scanned the sky while Jackson shouldered the tracer rifle and climbed into the bed.


    She growled through her teeth.


    ¡°PKM¡¯s coming back up, look out!¡±

 The Bounty | Chapter 37: Near Death

    Your shadow rising to meet you


    The chainsaw roar, like metal teeth speed-eating hand grenades half a mile away, and the slap-cracking sound of the armor piercing finger sized rounds snapping through the air above had stopped suddenly as the SUV squealed into the corner of the L-shaped parking lot, next to a row of covered parking.


    In a moment of relative silence, Gradie took in his surroundings, his mind ravenous for information, like some dying starving thing that knew, in this panicked raw open state, that the smallest sliver of ignorance could kill.


    The lot opened up onto the main street to the west, where gunmen circled Celeste¡¯s Beetle like a pack of frenzied dogs, and onto another angled side street to the north, where the bare concrete street was as untouched by the carnage as a cloud drifting by a mile overhead.


    Across the side street, he could see the corner of a gas station parking lot, which he knew, his memory somehow intact enough after the machine gun fire to remind him, was a triangle-shaped slab of concrete on the edge of the whirl surrounding the construction zone, and was also occupied by a small German restaurant.


    Sam had parked the SUV with its flank toward the intersection, rear bumper toward the bridge, and other flank facing the covered parking and the brick wall that backed it.


    The two cars parked in the lot and the three oak trees spaced across the squarish grass lawn between the L lot and the intersection added some extra cover from the gunmen scampering around the Beetle. As far as positions go, it was almost a picnic.


    As Gradie was conducting his topographical survey with his mouth hanging open, Luke opened the door while the SUV was still rocking from the brakes and stepped out into his element.


    Muzzles flashed from all along the main street like cameras for his red-carpet premier. Low run, swift as an Olympian, shifting his shoulders from target to target like automated hydraulics, his rifle hissed in a staccato of doubles and triples so fast they sounded like automatic fire sliced into neat portions and given out to his enemies.


    Two of the gunmen dropped before the rest got everything but their gun barrels behind cover and lay down a wave of rounds. He dropped down and moved around to the back of the SUV as rounds slammed into the side of it like a hailstorm. Gradie just watched, surprised he even had time to close the door behind him.


    ¡°You gonna get out there or what, killer?!¡± Sam Yelled at him, lifting her short AR and lowering the seat. After a quick slap of the window controls, she was shooting through a six-inch gap between the white polycarbonate and the door frame, and he was left feeling like the new guy on a job site.


    A round smacked into the window and Sam made a squealing sound she managed to turn into a snarl by the end, and he snapped out of it.


    He opened the door and shot out the safe side of the vehicle with his rifle raised, stomping toward the front bumper.


    ¡°Engaging!¡±


    ¡°Got you!¡± Luke responded, his voice heard only in the earbuds, his rifle a muffled restrained rhythm playing on the walls. Other sounds flooded in as Gradie anticipated exposing his head and shoulders past the windshield.


    Rounds prodded the SUV and fell among the parked cars, cracked through the air and smacked against the brick wall backing the covered parking, the metal awning giving the sounds ghostly echoes. Someone in a car near the intersection was screaming, a thought-splitting shriek that rose and held like a machine had hijacked her vocal cords. More masculine yells came from the bridge where men motioned others out of the cars and to cover on the trail down below.


    Somewhere, under the ground, in the air, just behind his ears or stuck below his jaw, another Gradie was freaking out, trying to explain to the only one who could hear him that this was insane, and death was final.


    But Gradie dragged his feet across the concrete until he had cleared the windshield, and scanned for a target.


    The beetle had one car in front of it and numerous others behind it. The first group of shooters had been joined by the survivors of the dirt bike cavalry. Muzzles flashed and heads moved behind the cars. He turned on the one closest to his red dot, moving it smoothly over the area below his target''s chin, and in a spasm of instinct forged by months of range course runs shooting similar silhouettes, the trigger pulled itself three times.


    Luke responded by instantly letting loose a rapid sustained burst and the gunmen across the street erupted with more flashes as if Gradie had kicked off an explosive chain reaction. His target dropped behind the car, either dead or very lucky. For a moment, Gradie waited for him to pop up again, until the other gunmen corrected their fire and rounds started glancing off the hood right next to him.


    He fired the rest of his magazine in a blur, the memory of one moment dissolving into smoke and panic as the next instant crashed into him. That other him, who had spent all those hours on the range, running through force on force, took over. The Spirit could only watch, blind, hoping for the best.


    Suddenly, he was empty, and muzzle flashes from far to his left sent more rounds glancing off the hood. The knowledge that he was empty had already fizzed out of his mind so he turned and clicked the trigger three times at the flashing fluttering figures.Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.


    ¡°Reload!¡± one of the Gradies said, and he dropped down behind the tire.


    In the relative calm of cover, his senses caught up with him, along with the memory of who he had been shooting at.


    ¡°Shooters to the northeast, the restaurant!¡± he shouted as he pulled another magazine out. He froze with it in his hand and realized something was out of place. The hours practicing the reload at the range had somehow come up short. He stared at the magazine sticking out of the rifle next to his elbow like it had snuck up on him till he realized he had forgotten to eject it.


    A round skipped under the SUV and rang on metal like a death bell.


    ¡°You hit Alan?¡± Luke said in his ear. His rifle never stopped, and the steady sounds seemed to scold Gradie.


    Gradie finished the reload without breathing and released the slide catch.


    ¡°Reloaded!¡±


    The word sounded awkwardly alone and he realized he hadn¡¯t called out his reload when he went empty before, but had only thought it in his head. His shame made him move and again, his Self tried to reason with him, but his body rose up like some other third force was lifting it and he came up firing.


    There was a fresh body near the restaurant and one of the gunmen behind the cars was screaming about something. Gradie only got off a few rounds before the two parked cars in front of him lost their windows in bursts of glass and red tracers tore through the lot like neon lightning. An instant later the sound of the PKM bounced off the walls.


    The gunman behind the cars fired in unison, surely trying to take advantage of any effect the burst might have had. There was none. Grade had somehow got the idea that he was immune to bullets as long as he kept firing and Luke had actually moved up as the PKM was laying into the lot, and was now crouched behind one of the windowless cars a few yards in front of the SUV.


    ¡°They¡¯re trying to walk the fire to you on the radio, but you¡¯re screened by the gas station,¡± EP warned. ¡°Just don¡¯t move up.¡±


    ¡°Shit,¡± Luke said like he had dropped his keys, the mic in his earbuds struggling to pick up his easy tone amidst the sounds of all hell breaking loose. He caught one of the gunmen in the face as he came up behind the crumpled car in front of the beetle and arterial spray landed on the windshield.


    Gradie felt a pang of jealousy for a few seconds, then had a moment of elation as, shortly after placing the red dot over the neck of a man using the beetle for cover, he sent three rounds out in a tight group, the last of which tore off his targets jaw. The moment was cut short by a sharp, burning metal something ripping his head apart.


    He dropped back behind the SUV and rolled back on his ass. He knew he was dead. The knowledge filled him with fear, and the fear gave life to that other him, as if the Self was a kind of fossil that only fear could revive. The Self, now flush with the pulsing energy of the fear, tackled the Spirit to the ground.


    You stupid fucking piece of shit! You joined up with some god damned wanna-be hitman you met online because you blew all your fucking money on ¡°combat¡± classes and tacticool bullshit! This is your only life! God damn you, get¡ª


    Suddenly, the fear made him check his head. He patted slick pomaded hair and sweat soaked forehead, and found nothing. No gaping wound, no slick flowing blood, not even a scrape. Then he found it, a chunk of lead wedged into the side of his ballistic sunglasses. Lucky ricochet. He hadn¡¯t even felt it. It had been the sight of the sparks and the sound of it skipping off the hood that had sent him flying backward. A misplaced reflex.


    ¡°Alans Down!¡± Sam yelled. Gradie heard her start firing out of the SUV.


    What? I can¡¯t go down. I¡¯m not even here. I¡¯m floating around the Allworld. I¡¯m projecting from a place this world can¡¯t even contain.


    The thought gave him relief, and something close to courage. He rolled back onto his feet and loaded a fresh mag.


    ¡°I¡¯m up!¡± he yelled. Sam looked at him through the windshield as he came up, her face morphing from panic to disbelief to something else, before she jerked her head back towards the enemy and started spraying shells inside the cabin.


    ****


    EP had put Celeste¡¯s mic in a separate room so that the operators wouldn¡¯t get distracted by her shrieking. The new PKM gunner was less accurate than the one she had killed, but made up for it in other, crueler ways.


    He had been peppering the Beetle with bursts, mostly around the front end, and even shot off the side mirrors. Celeste screamed every time. The other shooters warned him to watch his fire almost constantly, some almost catching a ricochet, and EP could read in his shot patterns a rising frustration and a seething bloodlust, as if he was speaking to her in gunfire.


    ¡°Going for the MG,¡± Lindsey said on the line, a cold statement of fact. EP pulled up a drone she had set to track her motorcycle and watched her fly down from the northwest. She had been far ahead down a side street when the shooting started and was outside the combat zone. EP hoped it would give her the edge.


    ¡°Watch for an opening,¡± Philip said.


    ¡°No time,¡± she said flatly.


    She came down the road along the construction site at about a hundred mph. The half-built ramp passed overhead to her right, all bare steel and wide cement Vs, desperately trying to meet itself across massive gaps, like a great dragon she was destined to fight. Its head was a clod of green where the earth rose up and ejected concrete slabs and plywood-sided steel girders down its spine. There were men on top of the earthen head, in or around a white truck that, fittingly, was spitting fire.


    Her Ducati Multistrada roared under her as she gunned the throttle. She visualized coming up the side of the dirt slope, far outside the fan of the machine gun, surprising the gun-deaf men up top, and swung her Galil around on its sling and lay it on her chest. As she slowed and turned onto the dirt lot alongside the ramp, one of the men up top turned on her.


    ¡°April!¡± EP shouted, uselessly. Lindsey zig-zagged rapidly as he opened fire, still hoping for a chance, maybe if he let out all thirty rounds before she got too close, to take it down. Instead, he stopped firing and moved his gun in a horrifyingly familiar way; A minute movement that, despite the distance of a hundred yards, made her body react on its own.


    ¡°Shit!¡± She tapped the brakes and pulled the bike into a tight right turn that had her almost scraping against the ground. She heard the telltale ¡®chunk¡¯ of the m203 being fired a hundred times in her head before it finally launched, silently, an exploded about thirty yards behind her.


    ¡°Lucky, so lucky,¡± she thought in a calming, confident tone, and visualized her skin, every inch of it, completely unscathed by the shrapnel. Half a heartbeat later, after the boom had bounced off the underside of the bridge and the shrapnel had kicked up dirt around her, she felt it was true.


    A flash on the slope. Another gunman joined his friend.


    ¡°Break off! Right! Under the arch!¡± EP yelled.


    Lindsey turned under the cement and steel at the last second, like the bike had a mind of its own and wanted revenge. Rounds sang off the concrete and metal and cracked in the air, then it all came back in echoes as the gunfire bounced back from the far slopes.


    ¡°I¡¯ll come back around!¡± she promised, more to herself than anyone else.


    ¡°You hit?¡± EP asked.


    ¡°Just my pride.¡± She swerved behind a mound of fill dirt as a round smacked into the side of it and kicked up an infuriating little cloud.

 The Bounty | Chapter 38: Captain

    A leader who gets his hands dirty


    Once again, a feeling of helplessness washed over EP. She often told herself that the intel was her weapon, much like how the pen was theoretically mightier than the sword, but sitting there watching Celeste trapped in the crossfire, Lindsey dodging grenades, and even Gradie flying back in a burst of fire, it was a hollow sentiment. When he got back up, she let herself hate him for being so useless, and the anger ignited into something that beat back the fear, and she soldiered on.


    The gunmen positioned in a half moon among the crashed and abandoned cars around Celeste were using a tactic of overwhelming fire that was terrifyingly effective given its simplicity. It was contested by Luke¡¯s supernatural accuracy and knack for being where the bullets weren¡¯t.


    When he had stepped out the hot side of the SUV, directly into enemy fire as opposed to the side facing the covered parking, she had screamed at the monitor, but the unexpectedness of it had served him well enough that he was able to drop two gunmen and get to cover before they realized what was happening.


    The ring of shooters had lost four men in the past minute, three of them from his rifle, but now that they had gotten into position he was met with a torrent of rounds every time he came up from cover. One slip, and their heavy hitter would be out of the fight.


    Cops on the bridge triggered her alerts. A drone tracked the flashing lights speeding down the turn late and weaving around the parked and abandoned vehicles.


    ¡°Cops coming down the bridge,¡± she said on all lines.


    The PKM roared at varying levels in five of her audio channels and the barrel flashed in one of the drone feeds on her center screen. On the bridge, red tracers fell in a five-meter splash around the cops, and the gunman around the flat-tired SUV stranded on the bridge joined in mercilessly.


    One of the cruisers stopped abruptly. The other lost velocity rapidly and coasted into a parked car at about 15 mph. The suddenly predictable movement made her stomach drop. It was now just a hunk of metal with nothing pressing the pedals or turning the wheel.


    ¡°Did he get them?¡± Philip asked flatly.


    ¡°Yep.¡± The word stuck in her throat as she watched the silver Mercedes sail down the back roads. A few half-formed ideas popped into her head, strategies they might use to change the tide, but she knew better than to try and share them with Philp or even Michael right now. Whatever could be done, should be done, they would do, or die trying.


    She returned her focus to the shootout between the Beetle and the SUV, and making sure any cell phones in the area got bricked before they could stream anything.


    ****


    Philip and Michael had taken a U-turn on the main road when the MG opened up, and pulled onto a back street that ran parallel to it to the northeast along the disused police training center and administration building. The line of trees planted decades ago to screen the facility from the surrounding area kept them from drawing PKM fire.


    Philip wondered, absently, if any good Samaritans would join in the fray, and that kicked up something he wished it hadn¡¯t.


    ¡°You¡¯re in Texas, remember, so if any boy scouts step up with their own guns, do your best to convince them you¡¯re one of the good guys.¡±


    Advice from another age. Advice that, he realized with a sinking gut-tugging pain that seemed a side effect of old age, he had neglected to pass on to the team before this fire fight. That¡¯s all he needed. If some good ol¡¯ boy grabbed his truck gun and decided to hop to it, the kid would probably try and blow his head off.


    ¡°Shooters moving up from the bridge,¡± EP said in his ear. ¡°From the SUV.¡±


    Philip squeezed his rifle. Luke and the kids were in a bad enough spot as it was. If those other shooters got into the fight, it might be lights out.


    ¡°Where you at, bro?¡± Luke asked, gunfire bracketing the question.The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    ¡°Going around back,¡± Philip said, pulling his mask down and squeezing his rifle between his knees. ¡°It¡¯s nice on this side. No big ass PKM rounds flying around.¡±


    ¡°Neato.¡± More gunfire. ¡°I¡¯m jelly.¡±


    They turned right onto a street that ran south towards the intersection at an angle, with a charity housing on the right side and the grass and trails coming up from the river on the left. At the end of the street, the shooters around Celeste were screened by the housing, and Philip saw only empty cars, but the gunfire was rising.


    Movement caught his eye on the bridge.


    Men advanced in fast, jumpy runs with weapons raised towards the brick office building across the street, trying to get a shot on Luke, oblivious to anything else. Might as well have big ¡°trainee¡± name tags on their heads.


    ¡°Get up on that curve,¡± Philip said to Michael. A road running from an old brick government building topped with a cooling tower to the north passed alongside the river atop the berm. The road, more like a long driveway connected to the river trails, curved onto their street in cracked neglected concrete.


    Michael turned onto it smoothly with one hand and pulled his mask up from his collar with the other. Then he whipped the car back to the right and hopped the low curb onto the grass between the road and the river trail. He came to a stop with the driver¡¯s side door facing the bridge. The last two gunmen in the group of four coming off the bridge spotted him and turned and aimed at the car. Michael smiled and waved at them from the driver¡¯s seat while Philip slid out of the car like smoke and shouldered his HK 417.


    They had stopped to stare at Michael just long enough for Philip to get a bead. By the time they realized what was happening, the 7.62 NATO was already ripping through them. The shots echoed off everything and one of them spun as he fell, almost action-movie style. Philip couldn¡¯t help but smile.


    The other two disappeared behind parked cars and sent bullets flying in Philip¡¯s general direction while screaming at the gunmen near Celeste to look ¡°Behind! Behind!¡±


    Then, Philip and Michael started to dance. Michael eased the car forward and turned to the left while Philip marched behind the bumper, firing at the last two bridge gunmen who dropped down behind the abandoned cars on the road and scampered towards the office building. One of them shot out a window and slithered inside the darkened office while Philip was shooting at the other, who disappeared around back of the building.


    ¡°Two on your river flank, Joe,¡± Michael said. ¡°In the Office building.¡±


    The rear bumper slid past Philip as Michael turned the car and their first movement ended with the front end facing towards the bridge and the passenger side presenting towards the intersection. Philip, now next to the back driver side tire, aimed over the roof looking for a target as more of the street slid out from behind the city housing.


    The first gunman he saw was crouched down and jerking his gun left to right wildly, looking for whoever had killed the two coming off the bridge. Philip shot him through his chest and he died holding the trigger down on his AK, 7.62x39 spraying in an angsty arc, shattering the hanging stoplight. Michael matched Philip¡¯s slow march with the Mercedes as he continued to put rounds among the cars like a god casting judgment.


    Luke, Gradie, and Sam opened up from across the street, and another gunman dropped to the ground, his head snapped sideways by the round and his body freezing in denial for a moment before giving in. The rest of the gunman had found cover and Philip saw only cars and the beetle as the crash site slid out from behind the housing.


    ¡°Keep em down! Engaging the MG!¡± he said, and the suppressed slaps from the office parking lot went wild. At least the kid knew how to pull a trigger.


    Philip scanned the road with his x4 sight until he saw the land rise roughly 300 yards down the street. By the time it came into view, he and Michael were almost in the road, and there had been no gunfire besides the slaps of the team¡¯s suppressed 300 blackout for about four seconds.


    Just when he got a bead on the truck, the silence broke with a vengeance.


    Philip visualized his rounds going through the head of the gunner, while their tracers missed him high and to the left. He got the first round off with the dark mass in the truck bed right in the center of his sight, and finished squeezing the trigger again half a second later, still visualizing his rounds finding their mark, but the pkm muzzle flashed softly out on the hill and instantly a screaming storm of  red tracers slammed into the Mercedes, joined a quarter of a breath later by neon yellow rounds that cracked so close he could have reached out and caught one.


    The gunmen around the beetle, now emboldened by the relentlessness of the PKM and unfazed by the rounds that zipped just above their heads, popped up and joined in. The one thought, that his rounds would fall true, crumpled under the hellish gunfire and he held onto the other idea, that their rounds would miss him, like a life saver.


    Somehow he got out two more rounds before throwing himself back behind the car. He hit the ground hard as tracers and sparks burst off the roof and knocked chunks of snow-white glass powder off the windows.


    ¡°Reversing!¡± Michael said in his ear. The car jumped back across the grass and Philip had to leap up into a low sprint to keep pace as a stream of red and yellow tracers chased them until they got back behind the city housing. Immediately, brick and glass and drywall exploded off the building in bursts and the hailstorm sound on the Mercedes died away.


    Then the rounds stopped, and it was like they had teleported to some strange world where you could hear the wind in the grass and someone far away was screaming for no reason at all.


    ¡°Confirm kill?¡± Philip asked the silence more than EP. The PKM answered him by firing again, but maybe the gunman was just bleeding out¡ª


    ¡°No!¡± EP said.


    ¡°Well, can¡¯t win ¡®em all,¡± he said to no one as Michael whipped the car around and brought the passenger door alongside him. He ejected his empty mag and got back in, and Michael sped off down the road.

 The Bounty | Chapter 39: Firestarter

    Too hot to handle, too hot to ignore


    ¡°Torch that bitch!¡± someone yelled outside the car. Celeste was curled up on the driver seat, which Cooper had dropped down and rolled back as far as it would go, afraid the windshield would give out any second. All the windows were solid white except for the passenger side, and it reminded her of winter, of being in a car with all the glass fogged up or covered in ice, the world outside moving along in muffled sounds and hazy forms, disconnected from the coziness inside.


    Except now the world screamed and exploded and showed itself in fatigues and gunmetal through the window just behind Cooper. He was up on one knee in the passenger seat and had mostly gotten off of her, but his other leg was still thrown over her knees and he had one arm across her chest and was white knuckling his headrest with the other, as he looked from window to window like he had some x-ray vision she didn¡¯t know about. It felt like they had been in the car for hours since the crash, but the clock in the dash said it had only been a few minutes.


    There was a thump on the passenger door glass.


    ¡°You see this, bitches?¡± A red gas can was pressed against the window and Cooper snarled at it like the two of them were about to get into a fistfight.


    ¡°Better get out, it¡¯s about to get toasty!¡±


    Something sloshed overhead for a few seconds before more bullets cracked everywhere and the gas man ducked down with a ¡°shit!¡±


    ¡°They''re gonna try to burn us out,¡± Celeste said calmly as more rounds cracked outside. EP didn¡¯t respond, though she seemed to have been the only one listening. She was alone, it seemed. Time to take matters into her own hands. She took her pistol, a Beretta PX4 Storm compact, out of her purse. The gas guy was taking cover next to the passenger window, sunglasses and bandanaed face bobbing in fear, his movements screaming ¡°meth and adrenaline¡±.


    ¡°Hey!¡± he yelled suddenly and showed off a plastic lighter with a flame two inches long. Celeste pulled Cooper to her chest and put the gun to his head. Cooper was still and quiet as a corpse but the guy outside started jumping around.


    ¡°Shit! This bitch is gonna kill him!¡±


    No one was listening. The gunfire had whipped up again like a sudden downpour in a drizzle. The machine gun burped up on the hill and something cracked away from the car.


    During a chance lull in the gunfire, one of the gunmen close by moved positions and their boots crunched on a pile of auto glass. The sound, heard clearly in the strange silence, once again reminded Celeste of a snug winter day. The feeling was snapped up as the roar resumed and she wondered if it had been real at all.Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.


    Something cracked and the back window was smeared with blood as a body fell onto the bumper.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± More scrambling of feet as fresh gunfire, this one made of single, controlled shots that spoke like commands, erupted from the direction of the river.


    ¡°East! East!¡± someone shouted into a radio, his voice down low like he was talking to the ground.  The guy who had poured the gas was now crouched down right outside the passenger door, with the front tire of an abandoned car between him and the river. Rounds were cracking through the air at a steady pace.


    Gas man glared at her through the clear part of the window, and she smiled at him. He snarled like a dog and yelled things that made Cooper move toward the door. For a moment she thought he really would open it, but the machine gun started again, and he moved back and grabbed her in his arms.


    Out the back window, she saw the square of sky between the roof of the beetle and the top of the car that had rammed into them, fill with red and yellow tracer fire. Shouts of joy and whoops came from all around her and her heart sank. She had thought Luke would have shot more of them by now.


    The guy outside got up and she saw his arm pat a front pocket for something before picking up the gas can. He was yelling something at her, but the gunfire drowned most of it out. She got enough to know he was sick of getting shot at and ready to do something about it. More fire from Luke¡¯s direction made him crouch down again and start yelling for someone to give him a light. Celeste decided she was just as done with this shit as he was.


    ¡°Baby. I need you to do something for me?¡±


    He looked at her with sad eyes and she didn¡¯t know why.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think I can shoot you, girl.¡±


    ¡°No, I want you to open that door really fucking hard when he steps in front of it.¡± She was almost whispering and wasn¡¯t sure if he heard, but a head bobbed in the window and Cooper sprang into action.


    He threw his entire body into the heavy armored door and it opened halfway before slamming into gas guy with a crunching thud. Gas guy grunted and Cooper, now hunched down on the passenger side floorboard, started to move outside, snarling like a dog. Celeste grabbed him by the ear and shoved him down, and he responded to her pressure like a trained dancer and put his chest flat on the seat.


    Gas man was flat on his back just outside the door, glaring at them. His hand went to his rifle and Celeste screamed. She pulled the trigger as fast as she could. Rounds sparked off his chest plate and the road, but he took two in the groin, one in the shoulder, and one right through the eye before she went empty. Her earbuds were the stealth model, unable to dampen the sound, and her ears started ringing immediately. Again, the world took on a nostalgic muffled aura as the sounds died away.


    ¡°Close it!¡± She pushed Cooper toward the door, shell casings rolling off his back. He reached out, and bullets ripped into the door as he slammed it closed. One of the gunmen broke into a sprint when he saw the door open, yelling at anyone who could hear to catch it. He skidded to a stop in front of the door and punched the window.


    He took a round through his head as he stood there and crumpled into the street. Celeste laughed out loud, blinking back tears, and then the god damned machine gun started again and pelted the roof in glancing shots.


    ¡°Can I leave please?!¡± Celeste screamed.


    ¡°Working on it! And don¡¯t open that fucking door again!¡± EP yelled back.

 The Bounty | Chapter 40: Darkness and Light

    A projection from an unseen dimension


    After at least ten rounds sparked off the cars and a few red-hot tracers scraped the side of the beetle with no effect, EP was convinced the gas can had been full of water. Clever, and it had almost worked. If Cooper had been half a second slower with the door, it might have been game over.


    She pushed the thoughts out of her head, and let the map become the world. She knew the battlefield by heart but scanned the map anyway, drawing lines of sight from the PKM¡¯s position to everywhere else. One of her camera drones watched Lindsey, lying in wait next to a big mound of fill dirt, looking like an android designed to kill, all black leather and gunmetal and full-face helmet.


    She stared in the direction of the PKM, screened by the dirt mound, and clenched the grip on her ACE every time a round cracked anywhere.


    ¡°I¡¯m moving on the gunner,¡± she hissed. EP tabbed onto her line frantically.


    ¡°Wait, I¡¯m trying to put¡ª¡±


    ¡°You got one minute!¡± Lindsey hissed.


    ¡°Fine!¡± EP said. ¡°Joe, Max, I need you to suppress the MG!¡±


    ¡°Uh, how¡ª¡± Luke started, between bursts.


    ¡°Move West, keep low, get up on one of the buildings or something. Ill tag one for you. Max¡ª¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll be in position, just call it.¡± Calmly, in an ¡®oh these kids¡¯ tone.


    Lindsey scraped the ground with her boot and exhaled like a bull. EP would bet her cut of the payout that she was counting down the 60 seconds in her head.


    ¡°Moving out!¡± Luke shouted, and dashed around the back of the SUV.


    ¡°What!?¡± Gradie yelled, firing at the intersection as he disengaged. There were at least three shooters left in the street, hidden among the windowless cars. They hadn¡¯t approached or even shot at the Beetle since Philip had pinned them down then vanished, but now that Luke was leaving him and Sam to fend for themselves...


    ¡°I gotta sneak,¡± Luke said, suddenly right next to him. ¡°Just keep firing like there¡¯s three of you!¡±


    He flung open the driver¡¯s side center door and ripped open his shirt, exposing the Velcro patch on the front of his plate carrier, and slapped on a full mag pouch. He ejected his mag and loaded a fresh one from the under-seat storage and clapped Gradie on the hip.


    ¡°Keep their heads down so they don¡¯t see me!¡±


    Then he was gone, vanishing behind the dumpsters next to the covered parking. Between shots, Gradie heard him sprinting down the slope of Asiatic Jasmine into the road on the other side of the wall behind the covered parking.


    Taking Luke¡¯s advice to heart, Gradie put an entire magazine into the cars he had last seen the gunman hide behind. As he ejected the empty mag onto the concrete and pulled a fresh one from his belt pouch, he felt the pouch hang weightless on his hip. Last mag. He would have to grab another pouch out of the¡ª


    ¡°Alan! You¡¯ve still got two on your left somewhere!¡± EP said in his ears, like she had reminded him his fly was undone, then snapped off the line.


    Gradie had spent what felt like hours engaging the guys in the street since Philip had engaged the PKM and had completely forgotten Michael had warned him of the two guys going around. Now, down to his last mag, with all his cover between him and the street, and his body exposed to the face of the office building, a chill ran up his back and screwed his jaw closed.


    The office was made up of two small brick buildings with a walkway between them. The building closer to the bridge was shaped like three boxes staggered in a zigzag, and the one closer to Gradie and the SUV was a plain rectangle, it¡¯s long end facing the dead-end alley-street Luke had just disappeared down.If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    A window at the far end of the zig-zag building, shaded by a tiny spindly oak tree, dropped like a waterfall and a muzzle flashed in the dark as the distinctive report of an AK echoed in the lot and rounds hit the back window of the SUV inches away from Gradie¡¯s face.


    ¡°Right!¡± he yelled, and dropped back behind the driver''s side flank of the SUV and tried to get a bead into the window. ¡°The building!¡±


    Sam¡¯s gun rang out again but the fire from the window didn¡¯t stop.


    ¡°Keep firing god dammit!¡± She yelled as the fire from the street rose. Gradie realized, sickeningly, that if the gunman figured out they were down a shooter, they would be in serious trouble. He snapped his rifle up to his shoulder and started to come back around the rear of the SUV. As he did, he saw his reflection in the window. Mask pulled up over his face, black ballistic sunglasses reflecting a warped world, X95 gliding like an arrow, suppressor still smoking.


    ¡°This isn¡¯t real. That¡¯s not me.¡±


    His Self had been too preoccupied with the fire fight, too laser-focused on the gunsight and his practiced movements, to give the Spirit much trouble, until Gradie took cover to reload. It had created a strange dichotomy of experiences, a dual-sided orientation of reality that had pushed Gradie to spend as much time up and firing as possible, at least then facing off against enemies he could see and fight.


    When behind cover, while reloading or repositioning, the Self had leaped up and tackled him, every time, only falling silent when Gradie threw them both into the crucible of gun fire.


    But now, as he was just two steps from getting back into the fight, the Self made a final mad charge, and the two Gradies met in conflict.


    The Self¡¯s weapons were simple. Fears, memories of its own simple life, now being ripped to shreds, and the flat dry knowledge that this was illegal, and dangerous, and would hunt him for the rest of his life, and above all, was absolutely pointless.


    The Spirit responded, and Gradie saw the Allcity slide beneath him, Michael in his craft, the twins working their magic, Sam looking at him across the Astralarium, EP glaring at him in Michael¡¯s car, Lucy¡¯s impossible eyes dissecting his secrets, and a thousand other Gradies in the clubhouse, all sacrificing their existence for this moment, all giving real blood sweat and tears to learn lessons Philip had driven, somehow, into the fabric of his soul. And finally, a million lightyears away, he saw himself, in a small apartment, watching another Saturday burn by, safe, untouchable, immobile.


    ¡°Are you sure this is what you want?¡± Lucy had asked him, and his soul had answered, his Spirit, the real him, and now, it spoke to the Self, reminded him that all he had ever wanted was to step beyond the world he knew, to find a real kind of magic, to believe in something more, and that this was his dream, and all these other shooting fucks were just in it.


    Suddenly, the Self¡¯s cries went quiet, and something else rose up from it, a pleading, a demanding, a promise.


    ¡°I¡¯ve been waiting for this all my life, and there¡¯s nothing I wouldn¡¯t give to have it. I¡¯m ready to live. I¡¯m ready to die.¡±


    The Self and the Spirit fused, like two tones matched in pitch, indistinguishable, their volume more than the sum of their parts, and Gradie stepped out from behind the SUV.


    The window across the lot flashed, and the air cracked. The bullets missed him just as he imagined them doing so, and he fired into the center of the black window, and was overcome with the supernatural knowledge that he had killed the gunman.


    Half a heartbeat of euphoria later, the AK clapped again and proved him wrong.


    ¡°Fuck You!¡± He kept firing, using the flash of the AK to find the shooter in the dark square, until something stopped him. The AK hadn¡¯t flashed in what seemed like ages but had only been enough time for him to fire five times. The shadowy square was silent and still, another eon passed, then suddenly, the office lit up.


    Gradie almost fired reflexively, then breathed relief. One of EP¡¯s micro drones was shining a high-powered flashlight into the building. Through his sight, he saw the body of the gunman crumpled next to a cubicle wall about ten feet from the window frame. His relief was short lived.


    ¡°That¡¯s why you bring white light! Where¡¯s the other one?¡± EP hissed, almost to herself, as the micro drone flicked off its light and zipped over the building toward the river. In half a second, Gradie¡¯s brain kicked two thoughts at him.


    One, there was another gunman somewhere close, trying to kill him. Two, the wide black window of the rectangle-shaped building to his right, just fifty feet away, would be the absolute worst place for the shooter to be.


    He was bringing his weapon around, with that same ¡®dragging it through molasses¡¯ feeling he had felt on the bridge, and dropping down into a low crouch, when the glass dropped out. He watched the muzzle flash out of the window for an eternity, helpless, before he got his own gun around and fired. His own suppressed semi-automatic shots seemed weak against the full auto blast of the gunman¡¯s Draco, but the attacker dropped in a heap just a few seconds after the glass finished waterfalling.


    Only afterward did Gradie realize how fast it had all happened. What had felt like a slow movement had really been a quick drop down to one knee while snapping his rifle up and firing before the window was done breaking, all while rounds glanced off the SUV above his head.


    There was a moment of silence, of only his newfound Spirit Self synchronicity singing in the air, and he noticed the wind rustle a piece of the dead shooter¡¯s shirt.


    Then the air cracked open and buzzing rounds sparked off the concrete in front of him, and an instant later the gunfire echoed from the street. The gunman there tasted blood, or sensed an opening, or had seen their comrade die.


    Gradie shot up and got behind the SUV and changed mags in a single breath, then stepped around the front end, high on adrenaline and victory.

 The Bounty | Chapter 41: Rise and Fall

    Ride well, shoot straight, and speak the truth


    Luke sprinted down an alley between two sheet metal and brick buildings, old auto shops turned office space for new money startups. It felt wrong, relying on EP to check his corners, like running naked through a hostile jungle, but he had to move fast.


    He paused in a gravel lot between the two clusters of buildings and hugged the corner wall.


    ¡°Use that dumpster to get on the roof,¡± EP said before his feet had settled. He nodded a yes mam, as if she could see him, and bolted up the dumpster against the building in the northwest corner of the lot.


    ¡°Stay low when you get up there and don¡¯t move up too much,¡± EP said. ¡°The west half of the building is higher. You¡¯ll have some cover.¡±


    He got up on the roof and sure enough, the other half of the building was about four feet higher than the roof he was on. Directly to the southwest, across a half-built wide road and the east corner of the construction site, the truck with the PKM sat idly on the unfinished ramp. It looked too calm, too mundane, just a pickup truck with some guys squatted around it, to be the cause of all the hell he had witnessed over the past few minutes. Then the muzzle flashed, and the familiar hateful crack and roar bounced off the lot behind him a moment later.


    ¡°Fuck¡¯s he shooting at?¡± It had only been a short burst, maybe as little as three rounds.


    ¡°The Beetle,¡± EP said. ¡°Risking a kill out of desperation. You got a shot?¡±


    ¡°Yep.¡±


    ¡°One sec, Max¡ª¡±


    ¡°On your mark, dude,¡± Philip said, voice like a racked slide.


    In the brief pause between lining up the sight and pulling the trigger, he regretted that he wasn¡¯t allowed to use the M240 anymore. If ever there was a time for it, this was it. He and Philip had pleaded their case, that every single round that job had gone exactly where they wanted them too, but big Mike had just laughed.


    ¡°If that were true, why did you both end up dead before the target?¡±


    The man had a point, so here he was, trying to fight a PKM with a six-inch barrel.


    Oh well. He braced his rifle on the edge of the higher roof and placed his dot just to the left of the muzzle flash. He fired three shots before Philip¡¯s 417 joined in with mildly suppressed barks from somewhere across the main road.


    ¡°Moving!¡± Lindsey said suddenly in his ears. In the background, he heard her bike scream.


    A stream of yellow tracers shot over his head, but he kept hammering away at the truck bed until it erupted in flashes and a hail of rounds and red tracers skipped off the roof in front of him and cracked past his face so close he could feel the heat.


    ¡°Shit!¡±


    He dropped down as the concrete flaked off all around him and pressed his forehead to the roof. Suddenly, the bullets stopped, but the PKM kept screaming at something.


    He came up and saw gunfire twinkling on the distant hill like fireworks, and Lindsey¡¯s bike went silent.


    ****


    Lindsey had shot out from behind the fill dirt the instant Luke and Philip started firing on the truck. She weaved under the shadowy weblike frame of the ramp¡¯s skeleton at almost 80 mph. She had visualized her path countless times while waiting in silence, and now it was flawless. She braked and drifted into the right turn out from under the ramp, then hung left and came right for the dirt slope.


    Red tracers were streaming out of the back of the truck towards the north side of the road and two gunmen, one crouched down in the bed and one on the ground beside the truck, were firing away in the same direction. This time, neither noticed her as she accelerated towards the sloping earth and grass below them.


    In the few seconds she had, climbing the slope, now unable to see the truck or gunmen, she pushed an outcome onto the Hardworlds, felt them give and bend, wrap themself around her, and propel her smoothly up the side of the ramp without so much as a bump. Then the feeling vanished, and it was like nothing had happened at all, and the world was once again solid and sterile.


    But as she cleared the top, she saw the two gunmen firing desperately, completely oblivious to her existence. She cranked the throttle and the gunman on the ground turned at the sound and fired just over her left shoulder. She leaned to the right and slammed her bike into him before he could correct his fire and sent him flying into the truck.If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    The bike bounced to a stop and she snatched her ACE off her chest as the gunman crouched in the truck bed turned towards her. He might have beat her to the draw, but Luke or Philip caught him with a single round through the base of the skull and he tumbled over.


    She put two rounds through the face of the gunman she had hit with her bike as he clawed for his rifle. More rounds from Luke or Philip cracked through the air and the PKM let out a sustained chainsaw roar. She fired into the side of the truck bed, hoping to silence it for good.


    ¡°Sandbags!¡± EP yelled in her ear. She hopped off the bike and the truck¡¯s windows exploded towards her as someone shot through the cab. She dropped down into a crouch and stepped up to the tire as bullets ripped through the doors, then stepped and pivoted in front of the engine. She put five rounds through his neck and jaw as he came around the passenger side firing. Before he had hit the ground she was aiming through the windshield at the truck bed, her senses alerting her to a sudden movement.


    She didn¡¯t even get a round off before everything exploded.


    The PKM gunner, now half standing in the bed, held the trigger down and swept the cab like he was trying to cut it in half. Lindsey got off two rounds amidst the cyclone of glass, bullets and tracers before dropping down to the ground below the bumper. He unleashed a geyser of supersonic metal into the engine block that ripped the hood and grill to shreds as Lindsey slithered under the engine, grateful the truck was lifted.


    The shooting stopped abruptly, and the truck bobbed above her. For a brief sweet second, she expected to see him hit the ground face first, taken out by another well-placed shot from Luke or Philip.


    Instead, two boots crunched into the gravel to her right. Her Ace was wedged between her chest and the ground, so she reached for her pistol, but the boots moved down toward the front of the truck. She could either try to get a shot from here, which would be an act of contortion in itself, or risk getting out into the open.


    His boots kept on crunching, and she decided dying under some god damned suburban cowboy¡¯s extended cab cope-mobile wouldn¡¯t be worth the trouble!


    She shimmied out to the right as the gunner stepped around the truck screaming like a demon.


    ¡°God dammit, I can''t see him!¡± Philip hissed in her ear. She grabbed a fist full of dirt as she clawed herself out from under the truck, dimly aware of a steady stream of blood flowing out from the bed somewhere ahead of her and a small taunting voice in her head reminding her how she had thought it was hilarious when Philip had been forced to crawl under fire on the last job. The boots crunched somewhere down past her feet like something out of a horror movie.


    She rolled out onto her back as he stepped one boot around the passenger side of the engine. Her Ace was pinned to her chest awkwardly and she knew in a nano-second that she would never get it up in time. She watched in slow motion as the PKM¡¯s smoking barrel came out from behind the truck and her right hand, already down at her hip, came up with her Walther before her mind realized what it was doing. The gunman''s head popped up and snarled and the PKM¡¯s barrel exploded in a flash of fire.


    Her first shot got him right through the neck, and in the slow-motion pace of it all, she waited an eternity for the PKM to stop right there, but its fire only intensified as he brought the barrel around. Her second shot took off his ear, and the PKM barrel kept swinging towards her like an executioner¡¯s flaming sword.


    A stray round caught him right under the jawbone and exploded out below his eye, and suddenly his face was hanging half off his head. Still, the PKM fired away, now manned by an undead horror.


    One part of her screamed while another put three rounds of 9mm through his face. The ground next to her erupted and a red tracer skipped off over her head and bounced off the side of the truck harmlessly. It was still rolling through the air when the gunfire stopped and the faceless gunner collapsed to the ground, and Lindsey watched it tumble like it was a sign from God.


    ¡°Got him!¡± Philip growled, and Lindsey, despite everything else, felt a pang of disappointment that the face-removing headshot had been his.


    ¡°April!¡± Luke screamed in her ear. A second later, rounds pelted the bed of the truck.


    ¡°Hold fire!¡± EP yelled. ¡°She¡¯s fine! MG is down! Move!¡±


    ¡°All right, Kate, Get Joe and move to Ashley,¡± Michael said, calm as the ice-chilled soda he was surely sipping, miles away.


    Lindsey stood up, holstered her pistol and shook the dirt off her ACE. There was a brief moment of calm before EP shouted at her again.


    ¡°More shooters coming over the bridge!¡±


    EP¡¯s drone had picked up an SUV and a hatchback sedan moving across the massive empty parking lot across the river and tagged it with a warning while Lindsey was dancing with the MG. Now, EP watched them fly under the bridge and whip around the loop onto the road.


    ¡°How long does it take the cops to set up a god damned roadblock?¡± Philip said.


    Lindsey looked out and saw the two vehicles, small angry things at this distance, swerving around other cars on the bridge. The cop cars still sat there, riddled with holes from the¡­


    She let her Ace hang on its sling as she sprinted to the dead gunman and snatched the PKM off the ground. She ran to the back of the truck while fanning out the ammo belt. The empty links dragged on the ground and there was only about a foot of brass bouncing on the other side. The front vehicle, an SUV, was almost to the end of the bridge when she got down on one knee, shouldered the gun, and let off the rest of the belt.


    It was a strange kind of justice, being on the other end of the firestorm of red tracers and angry 7.62x54, the SUV coming across the bridge now playing the role of Sam and the gang from under five minutes ago, swerving to the right to avoid the fire, only now the SUV was unarmored, and the belt was frustratingly short. She made it count. The first tracer glanced off the street ahead of it, but she walked the rest of the fire up and put every god damned round in the belt into the engine block and driver''s side.


    The sound of the belt hitting the ground was the saddest thing she had heard all day.


    ¡°Reloading!¡± She set the PKM down and climbed into the truck bed for more ammo. The blood was an inch deep, and the two bodies lay crumpled among brass and spent belts. She grabbed a hundred-round box from the row stacked on the side and hopped back down.

 The Bounty | Chapter 42: Ghosts and Smoke

    It¡¯s getting away with it that¡¯s the trick


    An SUV shot off the bridge and barreled towards the intersection under a hail of red tracers, shedding chunks of tempered glass and fragments of the grill. Its speed dropped suddenly and the engine made a squealing, grinding sound that rattled Grade worse than the gunfire. It swerved sharply and crashed into the side of the far office building as its tires exploded and the last of its window glass dusted down to the concrete.


    Gradie emptied his magazine into the black square that had once been the windshield and reloaded without taking his eyes off it, but it wasn¡¯t showing any signs of life. As his mind caught up with him, he realized he had seen another car, a small grey sedan, swerve off the bridge in the opposite direction and disappear down the berm.


    ¡°Shit. I think¡ª¡±


    Sam put the SUV in gear and revved the engine.


    ¡°Hurry the fuck up!¡± she yelled, her voice going all squeaky in a way that made him smile, despite the circumstances, as he dove into the center seat. Sam pealed out of the lot before he had the door closed.


    ¡°You want to stick around and take on another squad by yourself?¡± She yelled back as she took a sharp left turn that threw him off the seat. ¡°Boss says move, fucking move!¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m gonna have to shoot them later anyway!¡± he said from the floor.


    ¡°No you won¡¯t,¡± Michael said. ¡°Joey, pop a smoke on that office building when you get in. We need to move the fuck out.¡± The Mercedes roared under his calm voice.


    Sam made a U-turn and screeched to a stop in the middle of the street as Luke sprinted out from a side alley. Gradie kicked the center door open and Luke jumped inside.


    ¡°All right, you studs gonna cover me while I smoke these guys out?¡± He grabbed something out of one of the storage spaces as the SUV roared towards the intersection.


    The gunmen around the beetle opened fire on the SUV, but before they could get more than a few shots on the windshield, the PKM roared on the ramp. Strange green lights flashed among the cars, glowing like rays from heaven in the smoke. The red tracers found their way to the targets marked by EPs drones and it all looked like Christmas.


    ¡°Get em girl!¡± Luke growled.


    By the time the SUV pulled up to the intersection, the last gunman around the beetle had been cut down. There was a single, eerie moment of silence, a humming softness with sirens at the edges, between the time Lindsey stopped shooting, and the moment the shooters in the office building opened fire.


    ¡°Cover me!¡± Luke said, as the familiar hailstorm sound of rounds hitting the windows kicked up again. He kicked the door controls and hopped out with a grenade launcher in hand.


    Sam had parked at the intersection with the SUV facing the bridge and the passenger side towards the office building. The Mercedes rocked to a stop on the other side of the Beetle and Philip was already out firing. Gradie followed Luke out the driver¡¯s side center door and opened fire over the hood, as Luke peeked around the rear end and shot the grenade with a ¡®chunk¡¯. A thick grey smoke spread out across the parking lot as Lindsey emptied the PKM into the office, giving the glowing crimson bolts a misty backdrop.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go!¡± Michael yelled, sing song-ish. Hearing his voice outside the earbuds was jarring, but it was nothing compared to watching him walk in long relaxed strides, like he was immune to bullets, towards what was left of the Beetle.


    They had got to it just in time. The windshield was completely white and half the paint was gone. Everything from the headlights to the tires to the door handles had been shredded by the PKM in the machine gunner¡¯s attempt to scare them into doing something stupid, and a black hole the size of a tennis ball near the top of the windshield testified to a final desperation.


    Michael opened the rear driver¡¯s side door with his back to the office buildings and pulled Celeste out with one hand like she was weightless. Cooper came after her, attached at the wrist and trying to shield her by waving his arm. Michael swung them around and put his hands on their backs and marched them to the Mercedes. At two heads taller than them, he looked like an angry parent picking up his kids from school.


    ¡°Let¡¯s fucking go!¡± Sam yelled and Gradie realized he had been staring. After all the struggle to get to them, he had half expected a stray bullet to put them down at the last second. He threw himself back in the SUV and slammed the door. Sam whipped the SUV around and gave the V8 every bit of pedal she had. Before they had gone fifty feet, the sound of a police chopper rose faintly from the south.


    ¡°Zoey, you got that chopper?¡± Sam asked.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got his feed,¡± EP said. ¡°He¡¯s watching the smoke.¡±


    The Mercedes turned off the main road ahead of them and pulled into an overflow parking lot for the Bazaar ahead. Within seconds it was just one car amongst a hundred, its bullet mangled side hidden from the street. Lindsey¡¯s bike rumbled somewhere in the construction zone and faded away.


    ¡°Zoey, get our friends to shoot at a drone if you can,¡± said Philip. ¡°Kate and friends, pull into the Bazaar and ghost. Zoey can guide the wagon after you bail. The swap car is in the back left lot.¡±A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    ¡°Just one?¡± Sam asked.


    ¡°Oh, sorry, next time I¡¯ll have a couple limos waiting.¡±


    ¡°Oh hell yeah!¡±


    He dropped off the line.


    The Bazaar was up on the right, past the train tracks that ran across the street and under the rising metal ramp. The parking lot out front, running parallel to the road, was packed with the Saturday crowd. Luke had already gotten his plate carrier and ammo pouches off and was in the process of pulling a wrinkled old Volcom hoodie out of a duffel bag full of clothes. Gradie tried to claw off his own gear and fell over on his side as Sam swerved to the right.


    ¡°Take your phone and pistol, leave everything else!¡± she shouted. Gradie sighed at his X95 on the floorboard and pulled on a faded Nightwish sweatshirt.


    ¡°Here.¡± Luke handed him a ball cap with a bottle opener in the brim. ¡°And ditch the shades.¡±


    Gradie let his ballistic sunglasses, with the fresh notch from the ricochet, fall to the ground next to his X95. It looked like the real him had vanished in smoke and left only two artifacts behind.


    ¡°Excuse me!¡± Sam climbed over the seat, and the SUV kept going as she shed her plate carrier, mask, and top all in one go. After she had pulled on a knit sweater and a beanie and finished with a pair of circle-rimmed sunglasses, even Gradie had to wonder if she had ever been involved in a shootout.


    ¡°Get out and split up,¡± EP said. ¡°Remember the drill.¡± The word ¡°drill¡± kicked up flashes of dream-blurred romps through a half-built housing division in Gradie¡¯s head.


    The SUV stopped suddenly in a patch of dirt and gravel just off the train tracks, with two parked vans and a transformer screening them from the Bazaar and the main lot. Gradie went out the driver¡¯s side center doors while Sam and Luke dissolved out the others.


    ¡°Let the SUV go for a bit,¡± EP said. The SUV drove ahead on its own and revved its engine as it moved down the main row of the parking lot, and Gradie felt a tang of loss watching the big friendly storm cloud, that had been his only salvation from a hail of bullets for what felt like an hour, roll off into the sunset.


    Luke was already nowhere to be seen and Sam¡¯s hat bobbed over the brush as she marched across a storm drain creek to his right. The sirens were raging out somewhere across the river and the chopper sounded like it was right overhead. He stomped towards the lot with his head down.


    As he came out from behind a van, the SUV¡¯s horn started blaring, drawing the attention of the crowd that had gathered in the main lot. Gradie noticed quite a few of them had handguns out and a few even had short ARs, probably freshly pulled out of their vehicles, and vaguely remembered the twins saying something about jobs in Texas carrying a higher fee.


    ¡°How¡¯s that bird doing?¡± Luke said in his ear.


    ¡°Still watching our friends,¡± EP said. ¡°I bricked their sedan so they¡¯re trying to find a car with the keys still in it.¡±


    ¡°Fuck,¡± Gradie hissed, feeling the absence of his rifle and armor.


    ¡°Oh God, relax,¡± EP said. ¡°Boss is already on the road, and they don¡¯t know what you look like, even if they were going to come looking, which they aren¡¯t. They¡¯re just trying to get out and stay in the game.¡±


    ¡°Hard parts over man,¡± Luke said.


    Gradie tried to believe it. But if it was over, where would he be tonight? And who would he be? The idea of returning to the Otherworld and leaving this self to continue on without him, forever, seemed paradoxically both unpleasant and impossible.


    He tried to remember what it had felt like there, but the memory was as hazy as a stale dream. He looked for a sign, somewhere in memory, of what it would be like to look back on this world from there, but found only confusion. He was dimly aware of the fact that his Selves faded like vapor the moment he stepped back into the Otherworld, and though it had never concerned him before, the idea seemed a bitter tragedy now.


    He shook himself away from thoughts of identity and focused on the electric adrenaline still pumping through him. Walking through the rows of tables, trailers, and wooden stalls, listening to the sounds of people moving and speaking and the smells of the street food all bubbling beneath the sheet metal roof, felt like a Saturday out. But at the edge of it, all the sirens kept blaring and some of the voices around him were panicked and questioning.


    Still, he felt powerful, untouchable. Everything that had brought him here was worth it. To be among the living, but beyond them. To be part of the world, but above it. This was everything he had hoped the Hardworlds could be.


    Being a ghost, it turned out, was kind of easy. Most of the stalls were abandoned and most of the bazaar goers were clustered at the edge of the lot, watching. Of the few left behind, no one paid him any attention anyway, and it occurred to him, finally, that he probably looked like the last person on earth to have done what he just did. The hardest part was keeping the smile off his face.


    He came out of the Bazaar onto a thin alley that ran alongside it. Cars and trailers were crammed in a line against a chain link fence, and just beyond it the ground rose into a grassy berm that guarded against the river and gave the strip of gravel that familiar, liminal feel. Sirens and the sound of a second helicopter skipped off the top of the berm and bounced over his head. Untouchable.


    ¡°I see you,¡± Sam said in his ear. A dark blue hatchback came down the row from the back of the lot. Luke was already in the passenger seat, smoking out the window. Gradie got in the back and Sam turned down the music.


    ¡°We¡¯re getting some food,¡± she said, as if shootouts only happened in movies. ¡°Do you have any preferences?¡±


    ¡°Fuck no. I could eat anything. Can I get a cigarette?¡±


    Luke smiled and handed him the pack with the lighter on top. Sam complained loudly about the driver in a lifted dodge ram not letting her into the stream of cars fleeing out of the lot. Luke waved through the windshield at the driver in the car behind the truck and they braked and let them through. Sam and Luke waved thanks while Gradie lit the cigarette.


    By the time he had blown all the smoke out the window and handed Luke the pack and lighter back, it already felt like another world. The day was giving way to soft evening, and the sun was sliding out toward the horizon like a thing rolling off the edge of a slick dome. The night gathering at the edges, unseen, felt as likely to hold violence as the sun was to bounce back and blaze overhead.


    Sam and Luke bartered restaurants like old friends. The constant police sirens had become background noise, screaming at someone else that Gradie would never meet. But, the bridge was blocked off and glittering in red and blue, so they followed the traffic out of the lot as it crossed over the road that rose into the half-built ramp to their left, now like the ruin of an old warship.


    The detour took them and a hundred other cars through an industrial zone of warehouses and small factories, and during his last quiet drag on the cigarette, he glanced at the clock in the dash and almost choked on the smoke. It had been less than ten minutes since he had been sitting in the SUV with his X95 between his knees, watching their twelve-o clock, waiting for all hell to break loose.


    A helicopter swooped by overhead, then died into distant silence. Gradie joined in the talk of BBQ versus Mexican and tried to stop seeing muzzle flash every time the sun flashed off a windowpane.

 The Bounty | Chapter 43: Senses

    To see is human, to comprehend divine


    EP sat back down in her chair and took a long deep breath with her eyes closed before scanning the screens again. It felt like the first time she had been out of her chair in days, but it had really only been about an hour. She cracked open an import Monster and watched the cops try and salvage some scrap of peace from the wreckage of the fight.


    A second police helicopter was in the air, their infrared and standard cameras now supplementing her feed. She was careful not to let her drones fly into frame. After she had played target practice with the remaining gunman for a few minutes, swooping down with expendable micro drones, flashing their high powered lights, and then going into avoidance maneuvers, SWAT had moved in. When one of her drone¡¯s tagged the BearCat armored vehicle rolling toward the bridge, she dismissed her fleet, leaving only a few solar drones parked on rooftops for surveillance, while the rest flew off toward one of her recharge points or wiped into the river.


    The gunman opened fire on the BearCat, but quickly realized it was pointless and scattered in opposite directions. One grabbed a dirt bike off the street while the other two got into cars left idling by fleeing civilians. Within five seconds, one of the cars was crushed half into scrap, and the other was riddled with so much 5.56 that it looked like it had been hiding sparklers under its paint. Motorbike guy was tracked by one of the choppers and zipped down the road right into a police roadblock. He skidded to a stop, raised a pistol, and collapsed in a rain of bullets.


    Now she watched the cops move in to secure the area while ambulances waited flashing on the side lines. Her adrenaline was fading, and she felt like sleeping for a long time, Monster be damned.


    She had sent out phishing texts disguised as law enforcement and media agencies promising cash rewards for footage of the shootouts, and her worms were already working their way through hundreds of phones and deleting any recently captured pictures or videos from the scene. All the security cameras had been wiped, and she was monitoring the social media feeds for anything that might have slipped through. Hopefully, it was a needless precaution. Soon Michael would know where the coin was and it would be just a matter of getting one of her drones out to get it.This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.


    The cops had been all over Cooper¡¯s POE and apartment the instant the warrants had gone through. She wondered where he could have put it, but didn¡¯t have the energy to give it much thought. Best leave that to Michael. As the ambulances started streaming in across the bridges and cops shut off the traffic from the Bazaar, just under five minutes behind the team¡¯s departure, an alarm chime sounded in her ears. One of her scanning programs had picked up something in the buzz.


    It was a phone call, placed from inside the police line, located via an ultrasonic tone emitted by one of her landed drones. She pulled up the call and muted everything else.


    ¡°Fucking amateurs. While we sit with our thumbs up our ass.¡±


    ¡°Shut the fuck up about it. Can you get out?¡±


    ¡°Nah, they got it all blocked off. It¡¯ll be a while. What¡¯s next?¡±


    ¡°Not a damn thing over the phone. Just keep an eye out. They¡¯re making moves.¡±


    ¡°So where am I going?¡±


    ¡°They¡¯ll find you.¡± The caller clicked off the line.


    ¡°What the fuck¡ª¡± and the call ended. EP snagged the phone numbers and sent programs to compile the usual data into new files. A second later she was watching the caller inside the police line from a camera drone at the back of the admin building. He  got out of a dark sedan parked in the lot and waved to a cruiser driving down the back road. Buzz cut, Carhart jacket, black boot stamping out a cigarette.


    The License plate number got sent along with the other data, and sure enough the files confirmed he was one of the cops from the strip mall shootout, now on admin leave. Standard procedure as he had fired his weapon. It didn¡¯t take any software to know the other caller was probably the other cop who had fired a gun and lived to tell about it. She tagged them as Hardworlders in their files and tried to see if she could get eyes on the other one.


    She glanced over at the micro drone feed watching the shootout scene from across the river. Red and blue lights poured across the bridge now that SWAT had it secured, reminding her of the cops rushing down to their doom minutes earlier.


    The memory flicked a switch, of other vehicles rushing over the bridge minutes before. The way the gunmen had rushed in at the end. Desperate. Unprepared. Like they had been ordered. The way the entire shootout had felt like twenty crash dummies under three officers. The PKM, right where it needed to be.


    It all felt like expendables deployed by higher forces. It felt like pawn sacrifice.


    Something told her this job wasn¡¯t as tied up as she had hoped.

 The Bounty | Chapter 44: Golden Hour

    Your eyes, reflecting twilight


    Celeste was in the back seat, leaning towards Cooper in a way that made Philip throw a look in the rear-view mirror. Despite what Philip might think, it wasn¡¯t out of any affection. She was a professional. She just couldn¡¯t stand being close to the window right now. At any moment, she expected to hear the loud crunching thump of a round striking the glass, and this car wasn¡¯t even armored.


    Though it seemed like it had been hours since she had scampered over Cooper into the back seat as the PKM rounds ripped through the windshield, the fear lingered behind her ears like an infection.


    As she had been balled up on the floorboard with Cooper, for some reason, on top of her, she had felt the vibration of the machine gun fire through the car-frame and heard the rounds cracking right above her head as they shredded the seat. If she had been able to move she would have thrown the door open and run out right there. Maybe it was the shame that kept the fear around.


    The new car smell of the swap sedan seemed to float over a scent of gunpowder and sweat. Philip had kept his rifle in his lap as they drove away from the lot but had since broken it down and put the parts in a shoulder bag Celeste had handed him from the backseat. Just doing that had taken a lot of effort, and she looked out the windshield as he took it so he wouldn¡¯t see the exhaustion in her eyes. They already thought she was so God damned pampered.


    The car stopped in a lot behind some craft brewery where a white hail-damaged hatchback was parked alone. Sirens rang out faintly from all around and the police helicopters chugged without pause somewhere overhead.


    ¡°Good Luck,¡± Philip said as he got out, and Celeste wondered which one of them needed it the most.


    As he beeped the locks with his phone, the sound had such a comforting nostalgic tone, reminding her of getting into her car after work or at the end of a shopping trip, that she felt a sudden urge to run after him and take the car for herself.


    ¡°Sit up here, Ash,¡± Michael said, and brought her Spirit out of her Self¡¯s nostalgia. She gave Cooper a loving glance as she stepped out, but he looked at her like he had come home and found her rifling through his shit, then laid down on the full length of the backseat before she had the door closed.


    As she opened the passenger side door, she sensed rifles aiming at her from hidden places all down the street, and a shiver rolled over her bare skin. She looked back just in case, and smiled. They were in the middle of a disused industrial zone gentrified into caf¨¦ workspaces, yoga studios, and resale shops. She pictured a gunman taking aim from behind the Tesla supercharger or the gravel-bedded yuccas. What a way to go.


    As she got in Michael was giving her the old ¡°I am concerned about you, my little fragile siren,¡± look. She adjusted her fake glasses and knit cap in the mirror and spoke without looking at him.


    ¡°Don¡¯t look at me like that Boss, I¡¯m fine. Could use a drink but¡ª¡±


    ¡°Boss?¡± Cooper said from his seat. Celeste froze.


    ¡°You¡¯re in good hands, Cooper,¡± Michael said, as at ease as ever. ¡°Just relax and stay down,¡± He pulled smoothly into the street.


    ¡°This is starting to feel like a fucking arrest,¡± Cooper said. Celeste looked back at him.


    ¡°I¡¯m joking,¡± he said. ¡°Can we get some music?¡±


    Celeste thumbed the radio knob and Semi Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind floated through the speakers. Celeste sighed, and Michael started humming. A few seconds later, Cooper was laughing hysterically. Celeste took out her phone, switched her low-profile earbuds for the full-size models disguised as air pods and queued up ocean sounds, expecting Michael or EP to give her shit about tactical awareness. They didn¡¯t, which somehow frustrated her even more.


    Sometime before the final chorus, Cooper drifted off, and saw himself being taken by masked men and driven down the highway. One opened the door and dangled him out over rushing concrete the same texture and motion as a high-speed sander.


    ¡°Where is the fucking coin?!¡± The horizon flew by, inverted, skyscrapers and overpasses floating over a sea of sky.


    He tried to tell them they had the wrong Cooper, that he was really the other one, but his voice wouldn¡¯t work. He knew, somehow, with that dream knowledge, that if he could just find the Cooper they were after, they would let him, the real Cooper, go.


    Something exploded, like an RPG had hit the car and vaporized his attackers, and he was left to float outwards like a leftover birthday balloon. He knew suddenly that if he could only get the world right side up again, he could go back to his real Life. But his struggle to right himself was wasted. He could only flail around and try uselessly to swim in the air as the ground drifted further away. The horizon went askew, halfway between vertical and horizontal, then stopped.This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.


    He reached in his pockets for the coin, ready to give it to anyone if they could save him from drifting into the sky forever, alone. But all he found was his phone.


    An idea, salvation. He called his mom. She could drive down the highway and Jared could throw a cable or something up and catch him.


    ¡°Hello?¡±


    Her voice brought it all back. The Real Cooper. Not a thief, not a drug addict, at least not a meth addict, but still¡­


    He watched porn and did weed in various forms constantly. He had lived with his mom and stepdad for two years now, after college, and was no closer to any kind of real employment beyond a shitty part-time retail job he skipped constantly and the occasional delivery driver work. He owed every friend he had money, at least the ones he hadn¡¯t paid back with dispensary weed he had gotten from his aunt, who was convinced he needed it to not become another online extremist.


    So, in a way, he was a thief in that world too, stealing from himself every second of the day, robbing his life of minutes, hours, days, and leaving in their empty spaces something that he hoped might have the same weight as a life, maybe trick the scales, but he knew would dissolve under any kind of scrutiny.


    So, he floated, turned, faced the sun, which he knew would burn him to¡ª


    The car came to a stop and Celeste nudged his knee. The strange dreams dissolved, the other him not even remembered, and he tried not to laugh at the only fragment he could catch, a phone call to his mom that had actually been answered.


    He glanced out the window.


    The sky had turned an evening orange and the sun was hiding playfully just behind the trees, setting random surfaces alight in flashing patches of gold.


    It was a small house on a big lot, the way they used to build them. Someone had added a big sheet metal awning to the driveway, but the rest of it remained un-modernized. He knew without looking there was an alley out back that ran down the center of the block. He¡¯d grown up on a street like this, walked the back alleys till the furrows were worn from his feet as much as any tires, and used them as escape routes, in and out.


    Somehow, even in all the haze of unreality, caught in the choppy tessellation and non-personhood of the Hardworlds, he was sure of this. The memories of the Real shone bright and proud like a high sudden sun, brought back from the dark murk of the dreams by this sudden wave of nostalgia. Looking back, from ten years into adulthood, it seemed his childhood had been one long golden evening.


    The other him, the half-recovered meth addict, the full-blown thief, whose childhood had been nearly as golden but broken off much sooner, stood aside, trying to get a look at this other, more put-together him, and quickly found the creases in the fa?ade, the shared warp, and scoffed.


    Celeste placed a hand on his back and the big guy led the way, unlocking the door and holding it open for the two of them like they were all about to catch up over dinner. Inside, the house was furnished like an Airbnb that catered to bachelors who¡¯d seen Scarface too many times.


    ¡°Have a seat. I¡¯ll get you some drinks,¡± the big guy in the grey overcoat said.


    Cooper sat down on the black leather couch and wondered for about the fifth time since the shootout if the guy had a learning disability or something. Singing along goofily to ¡®90s radio rock on the ride over, eating fucking gummy worms like he didn¡¯t just drive through gunfire, and now trotting off to the kitchen like his mom had a PB&J waiting for him or some shit.


    Cooper stared at the wood panel cabinets through the doorway and imagined him coming back to the living room with big cartoonish ice cream floats in both hands; soda glasses, hot rod cherries, red and white spiral straws.


    Celeste leaned against him on the couch and he reflexively reached in his pocket for his phone. The absence of it spooked him for a second, and he remembered the other guy with the widow''s peak had thrown it out the window on the ride to the parking lot.


    ¡°That¡¯s ok bitch. You can stop pretending to be my girlfriend now. I¡¯m ready to talk turkey if the jolly grey giant can get me the fuck out of here.¡±


    She stayed right where she was and batted her big black eyes at him and smiled.


    ¡°Maybe I fell in love with you in the car. You were so brave throwing yourself over me like that.¡±


    Cooper thought about throwing himself over her again, but not in any way that would get him commended for his bravery. She squeezed his arm and leaned her soft cheek on his shoulder. He didn¡¯t know what her game was, if she really expected the flirting to have any effect other than getting him horny and stupid, but she gave off the distinct aura of someone who knew exactly what they were doing and had everything under control. Another Cooper, now done glaring at the rest of him, screamed out for her in a way that made him bat away memories like flies coming to bring him into the next stage of decomposition.


    ¡°Scotch and Soda.¡±


    The big guy came back with two highballs the same color as the sky outside and set them down on the coffee table. No straws. Lemon wedge garnish. Bubbly as hell. Cooper took a drink and his opinion of the big guy skyrocketed.


    ¡°So, Cooper. I want the coin. I¡¯m sure there¡¯s something you want. How can we help each other?¡±


    ¡°I want to get the fuck out of here.¡±


    ¡°Out of where?¡± The Big guy studied him.


    ¡°Out of this Hardworld!¡± Cooper hissed.


    ¡°I can arrange¡ª¡±


    ¡°And I don¡¯t want to drop out into a sifter or get locked up in fucking Nightmare forever.¡±


    Michael smiled. ¡°They wouldn¡¯t keep you there forever. It¡¯s not like a room you can just close. Someone has to keep your cell together while you¡¯re in there.¡±


    Cooper thought about the black box. How they had screamed, and the fear the guy had tried to hide under all his arrogance. There had been no one around working that thing. He didn¡¯t buy that old adage about the Otherworld being ¡°ultimately harmless.¡± Not anymore.


    ¡°So just a short stint then, huh? Something I could do standing on my head.¡±


    Michael¡¯s smile was smoothed by pity. ¡°It wouldn¡¯t feel short.¡± Cooper''s stomach turned and he tried to smother it with more scotch and soda. It worked. He got the idea that the big guy had somehow made it magic and his mind played with the thought obsessively.


    ¡°I give up the coin and you keep me out of Nightmare. That the deal?¡±


    ¡°Yeah.¡±


    ¡°How do you do that?¡±


    ¡°By leaving you here.¡±


    Cooper hadn¡¯t expected that and looked at the words from every angle trying to find the catch. It was like a chess move from a section of the board he had been neglecting. He was about to clarify what ¡°here¡± meant, when Michael cut his eyes to the kitchen and Celeste stood up straight like they had both heard some invisible whistle.

 The Bounty | Chapter 45: 10mm

    Like riding a bike, right?


    ¡°Car just dropped two off in the alley,¡± EP said on the line. ¡°Now it¡¯s coming around the block.¡±


    Michael stood up and faced the back door.


    ¡°You two go lay down in the bathtub.¡±


    Celeste got up and grabbed Cooper, but he shook her off.


    ¡°Fuck that. Give me a gun.¡±


    Michael glared at him, and he stared back like Michael had sprouted wings. There was real murder in that stare. He couldn¡¯t believe it was the same guy who had handed him drinks a few moments ago. He was so stunned he let Celeste walk him into the bathroom without saying a word. She moved quiet as a cat and breathed like a corpse. Her stealth was infectious, and he tried to make all his movements hushed as he lay down over her in the tub. She reached down her back and drew her pistol.


    Out in the living room, Michael was still as death.


    EP watched the two gunmen come down the back alley as the car screeched to a halt on the lawn out front. Smoothly, calmly, as if grooving to piped-in music while waiting to be seated, Michael took his phone out and flipped on the house¡¯s camera feeds, then drew his pistol.


    Despite all their jobs together, it was the first time EP had ever seen him draw his sidearm. Even through the fuzzy camera feed, it was beautiful. A big, polished, nickel-plated handgun that said, ¡°MEGASTAR 10¡± on the slide. It fit him like a glove. Her weapon ID algos filed it away.


    He glanced at his phone and aimed the gun one-handed through the kitchen. The two alley shooters were setting up around the back door. Two more gunmen had jumped out of the car on the front lawn and were moving to the front door with weapons raised. She stopped herself from saying anything, afraid to disturb what seemed to be in perfect balance, like silently watching a wild animal prepare to pounce.


    It all happened so fast that she didn¡¯t even take another breath until it was over.


    A flashbang crashed through the kitchen window and fizzled on the floor with an anticlimactic ¡®pshuh¡¯. A dud. In the same instant, Michael¡¯s gun erupted with fire and ear-shattering noise, and drywall puffed off the wall to the right of the door. Outside, one of the gunmen fell back as his head splattered open all over the grass. The second shooter didn¡¯t even have time to pull the trigger. Another scream of fire, another headshot through the wall. The two shell casings fell within the same heartbeat.


    The men at the front door heard the gunfire and rushed in, hoping to overwhelm the shooter, surely engaged to the rear, with some good old-fashioned violence of action, but Michael had about-faced before the first two were done dying in the backyard.


    He dropped his phone, grabbed his pistol with both hands, and stepped to the left just as point-man kicked in the door and put one foot over the threshold, his AR sweeping the right side of the room.


    Before his phone had even hit the ground, Michael put a single round through the door, still swinging towards him, and splattered point man¡¯s brains on the curtains of the window to the right of the door. As it finished swinging inward to the left, Michael stepped to the right, ducking low into the dead man¡¯s line of fire, somehow concealing his massive frame as the other shooter came in like clockwork, sweeping his rifle across the left side of the room.


    Michael shot over the dead man¡¯s shoulder and got shooter number two in the side of the head before he even realized his partner was falling.


    As the shell casing tumbled in the air, Michael shifted his weight back onto his left foot, glided in front of the door frame, and fired through the wide-open front door, putting a final bullet through the passenger window of the car outside and out the top of the driver¡¯s head. There was a brief shout of gunfire, the only shots the five-man team ever got off, as the driver squeezed the trigger on his drum-magged AK as he died and put a burst through the car door and into the lawn.


    Then the bodies settled, and everything was still again.


    Michael stood there in the quiet, looking up and down the street. A bird chirped and a dog barked and the sounds zipped like arrows through the cool air. He went back inside and pushed the door to, having to kick a pair of legs out of the way first.


    He holstered his pistol over the corpses.Stolen novel; please report.


    ¡°Cooper,¡± he called like a dad with a report card in hand.


    A few moments of squeaky scrambling on porcelain and linoleum later, Cooper and Celeste stepped in cautiously.


    ¡°Where is the coin?¡± Michael said.


    Cooper stared open-mouthed while Celeste looked away from the bodies and covered her face.


    ¡°Boss, you need backup?¡± Philip said in his ears. Michael held a finger up to the couple.


    ¡°No, all good here. I think I¡¯m done being rusty.¡± The smile that broke out over his face made him look even more like a big kid than ever, and for some reason that scared Cooper worse than the bodies.


    ¡°Next time put some better doors on,¡± Michael said, pleasantly. ¡°It¡¯s supposed to be a safe house, after all.¡±


    Cooper slid into the couch and went back to work on his drink, still spitting fizz. A shell casing had landed on the coffee table and laid sideways, spent. Celeste watched him drink like he had his straw in one of the bodies.


    ¡°Still waiting for an answer, Cooper.¡± Michael pulled up a leather slipper chair from the half wall under the kitchen counter and sat down opposite the coffee table.


    ¡°Should we leave?¡± Celeste said suddenly. Michael didn¡¯t even look at her.


    ¡°We can leave when I know where we¡¯re going.¡±


    Cooper held the drink on his thigh. ¡°How do I know that if I tell you, you won¡¯t¡ª¡±


    ¡°You don¡¯t,¡± Michael said. Celeste had to look away from him. She had never seen him like this. Evil in his eye, taunting. The gunfire had shaken up something in her that had only just settled after the earlier shootout, and she felt that other self, the strong one, fall away from her like it was escaping.


    Cooper tried to regain the conversation. ¡°Then why should I¡ª¡±


    ¡°Because I get paid if I kill you right now, but I get paid more if I get the coin.¡±


    ¡°So I tell you where it is, you kill me¡ª¡±


    ¡°And the coin isn¡¯t there because you lied to me.¡±


    ¡°So you keep me alive just long enough to make sure I¡¯m not bullshitting you, then you kill me.¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°Why not? That¡¯s what I¡¯d do.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s because you¡¯re a small-time thief. I¡¯m running an organization. I have to look ahead.¡±


    ¡°What¡ª¡±


    ¡°If I kill you after you tell me where it is, then you run and tell everyone you meet how I fucked you over, the next time I get sent to collect something, no one¡¯s gonna want to play ball and I¡¯ll have to do everything the hard way.¡±


    ¡°But won''t word get around that you only do half a job? Didn¡¯t someone hire you to get the coin and kill me?¡±


    ¡°They also told me we would be the only team on the job. You¡¯ve seen how that turned out. Getting the coin and letting you slip out would be a nice way to tell them to go fuck themselves while still getting paid.¡±


    Cooper watched the golden bubbles rise to the surface and disappear. Where did they go, when they left this god-forsaken place? Did they appear in the drinks served in the Allclub? Celeste was looking at him now, and he found something in her eyes he hadn¡¯t seen before, at least not in years. He felt sure that the girl from his memories had come back and was trying to say how sorry she was about how long she had been gone with only one look. Cooper squeezed her hand and looked back at Michael, suddenly feeling like he had someone on his side of the table.


    ¡°All right. Let¡¯s go.¡±


    ¡°Tell me where we¡¯re going, Cooper. I need to get people on it as soon as possible. We don¡¯t want to walk into another ambush.¡±


    It was an odd silence with the bubbling of the drinks and the muffled suburban ambiance. To Celeste, it felt like the past two days were balancing on this thin sliver of a moment, and she was getting pinched somewhere between.


    Cooper came to the conclusion, like rolling to a stop in a dead car, that his choices were between getting shot here in this house or maybe getting shot later and probably getting sent to Nightmare anyway. He didn¡¯t trust the big guy, but he wasn¡¯t ready to leave yet, now that he had found something worth looking at.


    ¡°It¡¯s at the DC.¡±


    ¡°Distribution Center. Got it,¡± EP said on the line.


    ¡°Where at the DC?¡± Michael said.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°I slipped it into the returns. I¡¯ve never even been there.¡±


    ¡°Fuck,¡± EP said. Michael unrolled his bag of neon Trolli gummy worms and ate two without looking away from Cooper. EP clattered away on a keyboard in his ear.


    ¡°When did you do this?¡± Michael asked, after he had chewed the worms for a bit, clearly working out some frustration.


    ¡°Thursday.¡± Cooper shifted in his seat. Maybe he shouldn¡¯t have told him until they got there. Would that have worked? He probably would have just got shot anyway. He pulled Celeste into a sideways embrace on the couch and felt her warm full body conform to him. He looked her in the eyes and the look was still there. This is the way to go out, if he had to do it.


    ¡°Found it,¡± EP said through clenched teeth. ¡°Thursday at eleven in the morning. He just slipped a box onto one of the pallets!¡± She was on the verge of screaming. Michael puckered from the gummy worms and the thoughts zipping through his head.


    ¡°What box?¡± he asked EP, but Cooper answered.


    ¡°A Go-pro. It¡¯s in the little booklet thing.¡±


    Michael crushed the candy bag back into his pocket and stood up.


    ¡°All right. Let¡¯s go.¡± He waved towards the kitchen. Celeste squeezed Cooper and they rose shakily off the couch like a newly formed creature learning to stand.


    ¡°We taking a different car?¡± Cooper asked.


    ¡°Yep. One parked down the alley. Can you hit the lights?¡± Michael took his phone out. ¡°We clear outside?¡±


    Cooper left Celeste with his hand trailing behind him, slipping off her outstretched arm. Like two cells coming apart. He stepped over the bodies across the room to the light switch.


    ¡°Can we grab a bite somewhere?¡± He asked. ¡°I haven¡¯t had shit to eat since¡ª¡±


    The room exploded in a flash and the 10mm round caught him in the back of the head and splattered his face all over the curtains with the rest of the gore. Celeste hadn¡¯t even seen Michael draw the gun. She stood there, watching Cooper become just another object in the room, as Michael ejected the magazine and loaded a full one. After he had put both the pistol and half empty mag under his shirt, she drew her own gun and aimed it at his head.

 The Bounty | Chapter 46: Departure

    An alley runs through it


    He didn¡¯t reach for his gun, though he could have. He could have batted her gun away, punched her lights out, kicked her across the room, anything. He was close enough, fast enough, definitely strong enough, but he didn¡¯t. Instead, he raised his hands like he was under arrest and looked her in the eye.


    ¡°Celeste¡­¡± he whispered. She hadn¡¯t heard her real name spoken since she dropped in, and the sound of it cut through her anger, her fear, and even her fresh boiling guilt. It brought her out of the world where Michael was a crazed drug addict who killed Cooper because a voice in his head told him to, and back to the domain of the Spirit.


    She saw him smiling in the Allclub, grey eyes flashing, remembered him taking her to that garden for their first meeting when he pitched the job to her, the one hidden in a mazed cube of brick walled buildings, that reached up to a single square of bright spring light, where they served drinks crafted from memories of soda fountains extinct for half a century.


    ¡°We want to do this thing in a way that¡¯s less destructive. Less cutthroat. I think you can help with that.¡±


    She remembered his encouragement, his understanding. And she remembered the other her, the one that had listened, the one who had hoped, the one who had believed.


    She let her gun hand drop to her thigh and sobbed. He wrapped his big arms around her and let her cry for a bit, then moved her pistol back into her holster.


    ¡°Ready to go?¡± he asked.


    ¡°Yeah.¡±


    He squeezed her once then pulled away.  To her surprise, she stayed on her feet. He slapped the light switches on the wall and the house went dark. Thank god. The last thing she wanted to see was a reflection of the gore-stained curtains in some piece of glass. Michael pulled open the door and she followed him out into the powder blue twilight.


    All the lots on the block had been built in the shape of piano keys. The long backyard stretched ahead of them beneath the deep shade of wide live oaks. Shadows bloomed in the stagnant light, spread at her feet, and pooled under the dense foliage clinging to the tall chain-link backed wooden fence lining the yard. Orange light flashed above, on the tips of the darkened tree-branch arms framing an oblong slab of sky. She felt the world was winking out, and every time she blinked sweat off her eyes, it seemed a miracle that light returned at all.This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    Their legs whooshed through the tall grass and her brain played sirens in her ears, but they never got any louder. She knew they were just as much phantoms as the feeling that Cooper was still walking, reluctantly, behind them. She found her voice as Michael creaked open the chain link door to the alley.


    ¡°Won¡¯t he tell people, like you said?¡±


    ¡°Doesn¡¯t matter. No one will believe him and the chances of it coming up on a later job are slim.¡± He shut the gate softly.


    ¡°I¡¯m done with this job,¡± he said to her, quietly. ¡°Something smells bad about it.¡± His voice was bitter.


    ¡°What do you mean?¡±


    ¡°How could a guy like that get his hands on anything worth hiring all this muscle?¡±


    Celeste, now free of the haze of Cooper¡¯s entanglement, listened to Michael with her Spirit, and agreed. Robbery in the Otherworld was essentially unheard of. Of course, there were always the schemes and scams, the lying and manipulation, the bliss and sim peddlers, but actual thievery was usually reserved for the espionage and corporate- wars of the greater powers. The average Spirit never encountered it, and Cooper was nothing if not average.


    Most of their jobs, and most of the jobs taken in the Hardworlds in general, involved finding some member of the upper echelon who had tried to advance his station with brute force or deception. The lower-level thieves usually got dealt with by the Princes before they ever had a chance to even think about running to a Hardworld. This job was odd, and the more she thought about it, the last one had been odd as well, in the same way, like she had now seen two parts of the same beast, just before it sank beneath the waves.


    Normally, the Hardworlds were a haven for her, free from the politics and machinations of the Otherworld, but here, now, it felt like the Other was right outside the alley.


    It was little more than two tire tracks of compressed gravel grit, with a strip of grass running down the center, framed by low chain link fences enclosing painfully suburban backyards, cradling BBQ grills, above-ground pools, leaning sheds, old dog houses, trampled trampolines, overgrown swing sets.


    It sank in the dim twilight and was completely silent besides their footsteps, like the neighborhood had fled indoors from the gunfire. The opening at the far end was a dim orb of orange-hued suburbia, and when she glanced back over her shoulder, she saw essentially the same thing. A true liminal space. It all seemed to float in the endless void of the Otherworld, which now felt full of unseen conspiracy.


    Michael led her through a gap in the fence and into an empty lot where the ghost of a foundation spoke out in irregular shapes of concrete through grass and brush. They made the long walk across the lawn while Celeste waited for more gunmen to swoop into the street on the other side, but it was quiet evening all the way across.


    A small dark nineties sedan waited at the curb, coated in a layer of dirt. The doors came open with a cracking reluctance, and the inside was almost as dusty as the outside. It smelled of stale air and old cigarette ash. Michael held the key down for almost five seconds before the engine turned over. He cracked the windows and put it in gear with a groan from the transmission, and they were off down the road, the smell of blood and dust rushing out into the cool air.

 The Bounty | Chapter 47: Chariot

    that chariot resembling a bright cloud in the sky


    It sat in the garage under all the lights and eyes like an alien artifact lying in wait. A Chevy Suburban, supercharged V8, drive flat tires, grey as a thunderstorm, with deep tint windows and riddled with impacts, none of which penetrated, thanks to the armor. VPAM VR 10, rated to withstand even the potent 7.62x54r round. A protection level which normally would have been overkill in a US city, but seeing as how the PKM up on the hill had been putting the rounds out at 250 a minute, showed quite a bit of forethought. Whoever had brought this thing had known they would be playing with some serious fire.


    Inside, it was an armory on wheels. Over two thousand rounds of ammunition, armor plates, all kinds of explosives, smoke grenades, gas grenades, flash bangs, gas masks, enough medical equipment and controlled substances tucked away in tightly organized compartments to set up a small field hospital, and a seemingly random collection of clothes that upon closer inspection proved to be intelligently chosen for disguise.


    There were also a few laptops and phones. Of course, they were fried, and probably encrypted before that anyway. Same thing with all the internal computers, many of which had to be welded open. The biggest scare came when a compartment of high explosives was found under the floorboards, wired to something. It had been an hour of the squad checking it over before they were allowed to return to the garage, and by that time Detective Williams had gotten some updates.


    The fingerprints had come back. Only one match, though they had found at least three distinct sets. Some guy from Saginaw. His only arrests were for drunk and disorderly, disturbing the peace, and possession of drug paraphernalia. He worked night security six days a week and had no known criminal connections. Another fucking mystery. Now with the FBI on hand maybe something would come of it. Lewis had thought it might be some cult shit, or some gang recruiting known nobodies with clean records or something.


    Two other armored vehicles had been involved, one of which was captured on the downtown cameras picking up the robbery suspect, and both of which, like the SUV, had been armored by unknown persons using state of the art techniques after being passed around used car lots and marked as salvage titles, then registered to drug addicts and inmates with credit scores in the double digits. Like they had been willed into existence just to get shot at next to a flea market.


    The Beetle had looked like a bomb was dropped on the roof, and the Mercedes had bare metal and white windows on one side like someone t-boned it. Looking at the three-inch-thick window glass rolled part way down in the door of the SUV, he tried to imagine the pointless carnage that had broken out on that irrelevant intersection. The gas station had been shredded. Hundreds of machine gun rounds shot blindly in the general direction of the SUV, he was told, when it hadn¡¯t been gunning down his brothers in arms or drilling through the Beetles armor. It was a miracle the gas pumps hadn¡¯t gone off.This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    He knew a lot about what happened, by now, but a handful of nothing when it came to why.


    Detective Martinez slapped him on the back with a folder as he came up to gawk at the SUV.


    ¡°Gat damn, I want one. Gonna feel like I¡¯m driving around in a tin can after seeing this shit.¡± He shook his head at the SUV, where a tech was adding another Cuesta Ray to the ¡°miscellaneous pile¡± of cigars and liquor and water bottles and even bags of fucking gummy worms.


    ¡°You see that Bearcat ride in?¡± Williams asked, just to say something, without looking away.


    Martinez whistled. ¡°I sure did. Almost makes me wanna start kissing ass so I can get on the team.¡± He smiled and looked around to see if anyone had heard.


    ¡°Oh!¡± he slapped the folder on his hand. ¡°Patrol found your robbery guy dead in some Grandma¡¯s house on the eastside.¡±


    ¡°What the fuck?¡± Williams took out his phone.


    ¡°Oh yeah, I was supposed to call you but¡ª¡± He gawked at the SUV some more and watched a technician gingerly remove a pistol from under the cupholders.


    ¡°Ten-millimeter casings, like the guy was hunting bear, and get this shit. Jacksons says five casings, five headshots.¡± Martinez held up his open hand and gestured for effect. ¡°Two of em through the wall, one through the front door, one through the passenger window of the car on the lawn, right through and got the driver. Like they all stood still for it. You believe that?¡±


    They were walking back towards the offices now. Williams looked over his shoulder one last time at the SUV.


    ¡°Hell no. Jackson made that shit up.¡±


    ¡°Maybe. Oh, and here.¡± Martinez handed him the file. ¡°I know you like paper when you¡¯re thinking. I had Roberts Jr. type this up to keep him busy. Kid¡¯s gonna have an aneurysm if he sees one more fed. Thinks we¡¯re on fucking Narcos.¡±


    ¡°What is this?¡± Past the sheets of stuff he knew, mostly hand typed bullet points, was a printout of a driver¡¯s license photo and some demos.


    ¡°Some guy turned himself in,¡± Martinez said. ¡°Claiming to be part of the team that shot up the party wagon in there. Says he knows where they¡¯re gonna hit next. A hundred dollars says he¡¯s a schizo that saw it on the news and flew over, but the FBI¡¯s talking to him anyway. Fucking National Guard will be here at this rate.¡±


    Williams opened the file under the fluorescent light in the hallway while the words ¡°flew over¡± looped in his head. A door creaked behind him, the sound romanticized into an echo by the garage on the other side, while voices murmured from the offices. It was like the turning point in a horror movie.


    ¡°Shit. Did you say fly?¡± Sure enough, the guy had no record, no known associates, worked a dead end nine to five at some call center, and lived a thousand miles away in some suburb near Columbus, Ohio. Financial statements showed no firearms or ammo purchases ever, unless you count every Call of Duty in the last ten years, and a plane ticket three days ago. Family worried sick, supervisor preparing termination for no call no show, no signs of emotional disturbances, besides the general malaise of a disappointed existence common to almost every wage slave across the nation. It was the kind of file that was becoming disturbingly familiar in this case. The dots were connecting, but they weren¡¯t pointing towards anything he could see. It felt like watching some unknown force build a highway on the moon.


    ¡°What? I didn¡¯t see anything interesting,¡± Martinez said, watching him frown.


    ¡°Exactly.¡±

 The Bounty | Chapter 48: Banquet

    Pass the hollow points, please


    They found the bar and grill twinkling in a mostly vacant shopping center, floating between the matte black plain of a poorly lit parking lot with slices of car shine stuck in it here and there, and the vast purple-orange twilight darkening above, broken in places by sodium bulbs the color of melting evening.


    Lindsey met them in the parking lot, brand new Hayabusa and fresh clothes, flawless makeup. She looked like she was already celebrating a job well done and her smile was still burning off the adrenaline from the fight with the MG. As they found their seats at a window booth, Gradie wondered aloud what there was left for them to do.


    ¡°Wait for Boss and miss lady to finish the job,¡± Luke said. ¡°Then cyber girl will send one of her little bots in, and boom.¡±


    ¡°Hopefully,¡± Lindsey added.


    EP reminded them in the earbuds to watch their opsec, so Gradie kept quiet after he ordered, and watched the Saturday crowd stream through the door, remembering the screaming people fleeing the firefight after the PKM had opened up. They wore it on their faces. It could never happen to them. Two shootings in twenty-four hours, but surely the third would be far away.


    The table disappeared beneath all the food. Platters of ribs, brisket, cole-slaw, Potato Salad, fries, sauces and pickles, surrounding Lindsey¡¯s chicken fried steak plate like a siege. The brightly colored drinks stood like Christmas trees in a flood. When it was all done, Gradie could have laughed out loud at the idea of eating in the Otherworld.


    A guy at the bar cranked the news on the tv, like a scene out of a cheesy eighties movie, and there was the SUV, riddled with bullet marks and all of its doors open. It felt like seeing an old friend on Cops.


    ¡°It was all over in about ten minutes, police said today, about the absolute carnage that erupted near downtown this afternoon.¡± The newscaster cadence barely crackled out of the speakers, but Gradie read the closed captions in the stereotypical bouncing rhythm. Footage of the intersection rolled across the screen, then it cut to the truck on top of the hill, dripping blood and shell casings.


    ¡°That¡¯s fuckin nuts!¡± Luke said, and someone at the bar looked around. Sam snickered into her margarita.


    ¡°Gunmen armed with automatic machine guns, military grade assault rifles¡ª¡± Luke cringed over his drink. ¡°¡ª and bulletproof vehicles, exchanged deadly fire that turned this street near downtown, into a war zone.¡±


    The camera stopped on a handful of graphite colored shell casings laying on the ground near one of the cars.


    ¡°They shot us with fucking steel case ammo?¡± Philip said in their ears, the segment echoing behind him.


    ¡°Disrespectful,¡± Luke said softly and shook his head.


    ¡°Over fifteen gunmen are dead at the scene. Three officers were killed, and one is in critical condition. Shockingly, police have made no arrests but are still looking for at least two people believed to have some connection to the shooting.¡± Coopers mug shot came up on the screen.


    ¡°It all started when the man at the center of yesterday¡¯s deadly shootout was released on bail. Cooper Davidson was arrested on burglary charges Friday at his work, when a gunfight erupted that left twelve people dead, including four police officers, and many others wounded.¡±


    Gradie got still as the faces of the dead came up on the screen. The drink was heavy in his hand. Which ones were Hardworlders? Which ones would never wake up anywhere? Even if they were Spirits, wasn¡¯t it death for someone? That Self was gone forever. They just went to sleep one night and never woke up, and here he was drinking a gin and tonic. Celeste¡¯s face joined Cooper¡¯s on the screen, clearly taken from some Instagram vanity shot. It stood out of tone with the rest of it.This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    ¡°Police say they are not charging Cooper or the woman, who posted his bail and was with him at the time of the second shootout, with any crimes as a result of the shootings, but they do ask that they turn themselves over to the police for questioning, and their safety, as well as the safety of the community.¡±


    The newscaster rambled about cartel violence, the president, and something about an update at ten, and the possibility of a curfew and checkpoints, before they broke for a commercial. It didn¡¯t seem like there would be any other story featured, and Gradie hoped the cheesy local dealership ad would last forever.


    He looked back at the table until the question broke out on its own.


    ¡°Do yall think this place is real?¡±


    Luke made a kind of wincing sound that felt like ¡°maybe¡±, Sam smiled at him like she was waiting for a punchline. Lindsey looked at the tv behind him and got an expression of understanding.


    ¡°You don¡¯t need to feel guilty about them. The ones who dropped into them would be more at fault than anyone.¡± Her words didn¡¯t do much for him, but her tone and the way her eyes let something out that they seemed weary of holding, made him feel he wasn¡¯t alone in his thoughts. That was enough.


    ¡°Not that it matters,¡± she continued, after a long pull on her drink. ¡°Despite what boss thinks, this place probably doesn¡¯t exist after we leave,¡± she said, stirring her drink.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s what all the old-time guys think. Our consciousness being here is what generates it. Without us, it doesn¡¯t exist.¡± She waved her black tipped fingers at the room.


    ¡°Well, I hope yall didn¡¯t eat too much,¡± Michael said in their ears.


    ¡°I¡¯m getting a bad feeling¡ª¡± Luke started.


    ¡°Coins at a distribution center. He snuck it in a returns pallet.¡±


    ¡°So, I guess Zoey¡¯s got her work cut out,¡± Luke said hopefully.


    ¡°This has to be hands-on.¡±


    ¡°I fucking knew it,¡± Lindsey said, and picked up her water cup for the first time since they sat down.


    ¡°Coulda told me,¡± Luke said at her forehead.


    ¡°By the way, Joey,¡± EP said. ¡°They got your prints off the SUV.¡±


    Lindsey spilled ice water into her lap.


    ¡°You didn¡¯t drop in clean?¡± she hissed.


    ¡°Oops.¡±


    ¡°Fucking space cadet!¡± Philip laughed in their ears. Gradie couldn¡¯t help but wonder if he would have been laughing if it had been Gradie¡¯s name on the BOL.


    ¡°Probably have your face all over the nine-o clock news,¡± EP said, not sounding nearly as amused as Philip.


    ¡°I guess I wasn¡¯t pretty enough for the six-o¡¯clock,¡± Luke sighed.


    The waitress came over and he tried to hide his face by looking straight down at his phone. She had been giving them knowing looks all night. After one refill, Luke had pointed out that she probably thought they were on a double date, and Lindsey had done absolutely nothing besides precisely forking green beans and make a clinking sound in the little bowl that seemed the perfect pitch to mock Luke. Sam had laughed loudly in a way that made Gradie want to quote Shakespeare, but he had decided to put brisket in his mouth instead of his foot.


    Now, the waitress looked around the table, asking about how the bill would be split, giving out smiles (or in Luke¡¯s case, frowns at the top of his head) and trying to gauge how the two new relationships she seemed to feel she had a hand in fostering were progressing. It looked a lot like someone trying to gather facial features for a future composite sketch, but Lindsey and Sam didn¡¯t seem to mind. They smiled at her, maybe hoping their faces would overwrite Luke¡¯s in her memory.


    When she was gone, Luke stood up.


    ¡°I¡¯m going to take a shit. I hate shooting on a full tank.¡±


    ¡°Shut up!¡± Lindsey hissed. Sam giggled, bouncing, and tipped her glass towards her face. The salt flashed under her eyes like diamonds. Gradie looked at the sweating ice in his glass regretfully. Was it the gins fault she looked even cuter than usual?


    ¡°Time to switch to water, babe,¡± Lindsey said like an older sister. Sam turned her head slightly and raised one eyebrow, still drinking. It proved to be too much multitasking and she spilled margarita down the front of her jacket.


    ¡°Shit!¡± She pulled the damp part of her shirt away from her chest, and Lindsey saw Gradie staring.


    ¡°Hand her a napkin,¡± she snapped. He did, and Sam took it from him with a stare like she had caught him trying to rob her.


    He just smiled at her, then leaned back and got on his phone. EP had sent some info on the DC. He tried to roll his mind over it, like pushing a dog¡¯s face into the carpet, and make it believe that the layouts and notes were more deserving of brainpower then generating a ¡°what if?¡± where Sam spilled a whole pitcher of margaritas on herself. When Luke got back, the Sam in his head was wringing her sweater out and winking at him, while the one across from him sipped ice water like medicine.

 The Bounty | Chapter 49: Road Trip

    Where you go, are you there?


    Out in the lot, where the hum of a Saturday night rushed around like a flash flood, Sam took off her sweater and threw it in the hedges at the curb. Her tank top had a big White Claw logo on the front that made Luke laugh and say something lost in the wind. Gradie watched her pale arms swing in the air, watched them reach back and pull the top down over the small of her back, heard her laugh echo across the cement plain, bounce off the store fronts and windows all around them. God dammit.


    He feared his new crush more than the gunfire. When they left here, the bullet wounds and attackers would evaporate, but the other thing would remain, wouldn¡¯t it? In an existence of near total freedom, it stuck out like the dumb weight and cold metal of a collar and chain. Would he feel its hold if he moved against it? She bounced across the lot and another idea moved in on him. If it was all hallucination and mental breakdown, he¡¯d surely imagine someone like her in it.


    There was a grey Camry waiting for them in the middle of the lot, just at the edge of where the cars started to thin out. Sam tossed her keys under a truck and pulled the new ones out of the wheel well. In the trunk, they found a tool bag filled with pistol mags and a fake id for Luke. There was a short AR in a paper grocery bag on the floorboard of the passenger seat and Mossberg shockwave under a jacket in the back. Lindsey leaned it on her knee and held the handle like a cane. Gradie got behind the driver¡¯s side and stared at the baby hairs on the back of Sam¡¯s neck as she swerved out of the row. Luke cracked his window and lit a cigarette.


    ¡°Can you not?¡± Lindsey said behind him. They got into it. A compromise was made. Lindsey blew smoke out her window. Sam joined in and Gradie declined like the good kid in a shitty after-school ad. His Self had no tolerance for nicotine, and he wanted to watch it all with a clear head.


    Saturday barflies and club hoppers swarmed at the light, bouncing with anticipation. A car inched forward under the red light as if to summon the green with its boldness. A horn was held then tapped repeatedly. Music thumped on windows, rattled frames, fluttered through cracked windows, swam out with clouds of smoke.


    Lights swirled above in the soft warm night, then flowed away in streaks of amber, red and green. A whole realm of brightness and noise, gone, vanished behind the car frame, sinking away below the windows, falling back into some point of blended light far behind them, leaving only the highway, long and singular, everything else just a haze. The dark was no longer playful, but waiting in great sheets like the mouths of caves.


    A truck revved past them, spraying white light everywhere, and Gradie remembered the gunfight. Needles of paranoia prodded him, thrown out by eyes he couldn¡¯t see. Hollow echoes of gunfire bloomed off every sound. He felt his flesh like a new thing. His body weighed by food, now tired, groaning for sleep. The most solid stuff on earth. How could he escape it? How could he believe that what he was had ever been outside of it, that even in that whirling dreamworld, it hadn¡¯t been right there with him?


    A question that had been sleeping in the back of his mind dislodged itself from some upper crevice like a bat and came down, diving, hunting.


    If that bullet had gone into my head, but not killed me, would my Spirit have left, or just stayed around to experience me being a vegetable? Would I have felt all that pain, or would my Spirit have escaped it?


    He tried to picture it, his Spirit separate from his body, from this fleshy version of himself, but it wouldn¡¯t work. Like trying to imagine the sun stripped of its light.This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.


    ¡°Pretty good shooting out there. Especially for your first big one,¡± Luke said, his voice rising over the simmer of talk he had been holding with Lindsey. He raised his eyebrows at Gradie. Lindsey nodded out the window. Sam flicked her ashes.


    ¡°Thanks. Not bad for a desk monkey, huh.¡± He caught Sam¡¯s eyes in the rearview. She gaped at him.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°You called me a desk monkey, remember? Before the¡ª¡±


    ¡°What? Oh my God, that wasn¡¯t an insult, you baby! You were talking about going to Vegas and shit! You always act like everything¡¯s gonna be so easy!¡±


    ¡°Got a little Max in training here,¡± Luke said to Lindsey.


    ¡°God, I hope not.¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t gas him up!¡± Sam said.


    ¡°How is that gassing me up?¡±


    ¡°Saying you¡¯re gonna be like Max?¡±


    ¡°I meant cause he wants to go Hardworlding by himself,¡± Luke said. Lindsey looked at Gradie like he was planning a grave robbery.


    ¡°Do not.¡±


    ¡°Why?¡±


    ¡°Do you know how we get people out of here when they get stuck? When they forget and think this is their real life? We try and make them remember, which almost never works, so usually, we have to kill them.¡±


    Gradie looked at the others then back at Lindsey. ¡°But we die all the¡ª¡±


    ¡°Dying when you know the Otherworld is waiting for you is different. Dying when you¡¯ve been lost in a Hardworld is a terrible experience. And so is having to do it to someone else, so if I have to be a part of that, I¡¯ll never work with you again.¡± She sat back and turned her eyes on Luke.


    ¡°Max goes solo all the time¡ª¡± He started.


    ¡°He¡¯s a moron, and a veteran. When Alan has been doing this ten years, then he can fuck off in the Hardworlds alone all he wants, on someone else¡¯s team.¡±


    Highway sounds flooded into the awkward silence. Gradie listened to himself blink.


    ¡°Some music¡ª¡± Luke reached for the knob.


    ¡°No, Alan, I¡¯m sorry,¡± Lindsey turned to him as an amber sheet passed through the car lighting her up for a moment, her curves all lined in shadow, her eyes like a wolf watching in the grass, her skin soft and glowing like streetlight given texture. Gradie leaned into the door as he looked at her. Could she see him blush in the dark?


    ¡°You are a valued member of the team, but¡ª¡±


    Luke laughed.


    ¡°Ol¡¯ corporate ass.¡±


    ¡°Shut up! Really, Alan, you¡¯ve done a lot more than most beginners do, I mean it,¡± Sam¡¯s grey eyes cut towards him in the rearview mirror, steel jacketed bullets on pillows of soft fondant cheeks. Like an angry baby.


    ¡°¡ªBut you have to remember that this place is dangerous,¡± Lindsey continued. ¡°I¡¯ve seen so many good operators get cocky in the Hardworlds, think they¡¯re untouchable, then something goes wrong and it breaks them. You have to take it slow. You have to respect this place.¡±


    This place. Slices of shadow and light rolled past the window like great swords drawing and sheathing themselves. A memory climbed into the car. Late, still half drunk, the stupidest thing he ever did. Driving home from the conference in Las Colinas, squeezing his eyes closed for half-seconds at a time, trying to fight the tug of sleep, thinking how funny it would be to die on the way home from something he didn¡¯t even care about. Flying from the idea of spending the night in a hotel in a strange place, missing home and all the people, best friend, cousin, that had slipped away from him after high school, somehow, like pool balls playing out the physics of a final contact, stubbornly refusing to just stop still so they could be factored into the next play. That was the night he decided¡ª


    He sat up straight. That wasn¡¯t him. He thought of the Otherworld, the clubhouse, the Real, Lucy, even tried to remember what it had felt like picking the gunk out from the crevices of his mouse in the Real. They all felt like dreams, and the last memory was swapped out for a similar one, with this other closer him.


    ¡°Alan,¡± Lindsey put a hand on his shoulder.


    ¡°Gradie.¡± EP¡¯s voice, a whisper, rang in his ears like a scream. A soft sympathy in his name. Is she real? He saw her in the raft, flying through the air, frowning at him during a break at the clubhouse. The other him shifted, and he flew past it, dodged it, like walking around the side of a cardboard cutout, or a reflection that perfectly mimics a hand wave, revealing its trickery.


    ¡°Yeah, I¡¯m fine. Thanks.¡± He turned and looked out the window.


    ¡°Some tunes¡ª¡± Luke coughed and flipped on the radio. Gradie felt Lindsey¡¯s hand pat his shoulder again, then slip away. He wiped the tears from his eyes as stealthily as he could and sat forward.


    Out the window, amber lights floated in the night, and he tried to believe the darkness was trees and earth, and not an endless empty void.

 The Bounty | Chapter 50: Higher Ups

    Who do you think you¡¯re talking to?


    Michael had the door to the balcony slid open and the noise of downtown droned up twenty stories. He could see the highway through the glass balustrade, a strip of silver concrete winding through a mass of black and scattered streetlight. Celeste was sitting outside curled up under a cardigan in a woven deck chair, hot toddy in hand, the small fire pit crackling with blue fame. They smiled at each other and he went back to work.


    Sitting on the bed with a laptop on his thighs, he was at war. EP had gotten into the distribution center¡¯s systems, and every other network of any importance for miles. He skimmed the layouts, the blueprints, the spreadsheets and tables. Reaching out, he pushed here and there. He guided Philip in his trailer down a route his Self had used to avoid the police, helped EP get access to the more upper echelon systems, sent her leaked software it was a crime to even know about, but most importantly, he looked for the telltale signs of Hardworlders.


    He started on the cops, the ones on leave from the first shooting, who had turned up at the admin building during the second. Phone calls, GPS pings, credit and debit card purchases, all stopped a few hours ago. Taken under the wing of some more experienced operators. From one phone number, he found a whole nest of them. Ex-military, underground connections, protected assets of law enforcement. Their lives the past few days followed a familiar pattern.


    The drop, the sharp shift between the Self¡¯s life, and the life they started to live after a Hardworlder took up residence, was easy to spot, clear as day, three days ago. It was marked by silence. No more phone calls to friends, Instagram stories with their training companies or tactical gear contracts, or replies to tagged posts. The rage-tinged paranoia of their underworld associates, triggered by their sudden absence, came through in frantic texts and calls.


    But the best Hardworlders were near invisible, and Michael had to look for other signs, things too subtle for EP to pick up on, at least not yet, but that for Michael felt like waking up at a friend¡¯s house and sensing them moving around in the next room, comfortable, the way they could only be in their own home.


    The hospitalization of a few pilots had left the local police with only one chopper fielded, and its uptime was cut in half. A warehouse fire, barely reported on, its contents suspiciously absent from the news reports. Ransomware attack at a bank a few weeks ago. And other things that could easily be normal happenstance, but for Michael screamed activity by higher level Hardworlders, which were now surely reinforced with other splinter units.


    With a general idea of the kind of fighters the team would be facing once the location of the Coin reached the buzz, Michael started setting up a plan of action, coordinating with Philip for specific weapons, with EP for more detailed and up-to-date photos of the DC (employee social media posts, camera feeds, etc), ran through it over and over, casting himself as each member of the team, and as the enemy, from door kicker to gun runner, spotting moves and counter moves. It made him want to be there, gun in hand, but he kept himself from reminiscing about his own warehouse shootouts, if only just barely.


    ¡°Hey, have you seen this?¡± EP sent him a screen cap on the messenger. She had multiple monitors pulled up in different windows. Luke¡¯s self¡¯s cell phone home screen, Celeste¡¯s smart TV in her apartment, two of the computer screens at Cooper¡¯s work, the lock screen of a computer in the homicide unit. They all showed the same thing. A message, typed in a blocky sans serif, white on a black background:


    ¡°Call us about the coin: 1-800-376-7688¡±This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.


    ¡°I checked the line. It¡¯s bounced around pretty good. Tried calling it. Lady comes on, asks for a name, clicks off. What do you think?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m calling it now. Try and get a fix on the voice.¡± Michael took out his phone and dialed the number. A woman answered.


    ¡°Dreamland, can I get a name?¡±


    ¡°No.¡± Michael waited. After a moment, the woman chuckled.


    ¡°One second.¡± A few beeps, then a man answered.


    ¡°Well, it¡¯s been quite the cluster fuck, but there¡¯s no accounting for decision making in this business. I must say you¡¯ve handled it quite well.¡±


    ¡°Mhm.¡± Michael pulled a gummy worm out of the bag in his pocket. It was the last one.


    ¡°There were about five other teams on this one, if you can believe it, and yours is the last one standing. You really should be proud.¡±


    Michael popped the worm in his mouth and exhaled into the phone. The man on the other end pretended not to hear.


    ¡°To get right to it, I want to make a deal with you, save us both some trouble.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not in any trouble.¡± Teeth smacked on sugared gelatin.


    ¡°Oh yes you are. Look, I can tell you¡¯re a veteran. What you¡¯ve managed to do with the manpower at your disposal is impressive to say the least.¡±


    God, Michael missed the old days. Back then, if you got the other side''s number, it was nothing but prank calls and ¡°If you can manage to so much as graze one of my guys, I¡¯ll buy you a round in the Allclub.¡±


    Now here he was, listening to the most corporate Hardworlder he had ever heard, if he could even be called that.


    ¡°However,¡± the guy continued as Michael smacked. ¡°This job is beyond you now. It¡¯s nothing against you. To be honest, it¡¯s a shame they drug you into this. The idea, I believe, was to hire a bunch of lower-rung outfits, no offense, and get it back without attracting too much attention from the big players. Have you all eat each other alive and muddle the story at the same time. But word got around, and here I am.¡±


    ¡°Gee. Guess you¡¯re like a big shot, huh?¡±


    There was a pause, then a scoff.


    ¡°Don¡¯t be childish. I might as well tell you, I¡¯m with GSK.¡±


    Michael smiled but quickly wiped it away so it wouldn¡¯t come through in his voice. Instead, he did his best to inject his words with an awed respect.


    ¡°All right. So what¡¯s that deal?¡±


    ¡°Thought that would get your attention. Here it is. You tell us where he stashed the coin, we collect it, and you get half the payout. No more pointless shootouts. No more collateral. You¡¯re a realitist, aren¡¯t you?¡±


    Michael said nothing, but he continued anyway.


    ¡°We can tell from your work. Very clean. I¡¯m sympathetic myself. Unfortunately, my associates don¡¯t feel the same. Solipsists, all of them.¡± He affected a tired tone, as if confiding a secret pain to an ally of the faith. Michael opened his Dr. Pepper with a hiss.


    ¡°Gonna get pretty messy then, if I don¡¯t play ball?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s a fair assumption. On the other hand, being the last team standing is a fine accomplishment. Your reputation will already far exceed your status.¡±


    ¡°Are we the last team standing?¡±


    A pause. Celeste moved inside during the silence and loaded more ice into the shaker.


    ¡°As close as you can be. As close as you¡¯re going to get.¡±


    ¡°So, the deal is, we give up, and as a reward, we get half of what we¡¯ve already got?¡±


    ¡°You¡¯ve gotten nothing. You think you¡¯re getting paid for shooting some methhead with his back to you? Every operator on the job will claim they did it, and who¡¯s to say? As for the coin, you¡¯ll never even see it.¡±


    ¡°Well, everyone¡¯s entitled to their opinion.¡±


    Ice clinked in Celeste¡¯s glass and she shifted her weight spectacularly.


    ¡°Suit yourself. If you change your mind, call us back, but be warned, the offer evaporates the moment the first shot is fired. And after that, your people will die.¡± The call ended. The timer on the screen flashed 02:28.


    ¡°You get any kind of a trace?¡±


    ¡°Nope.¡±


    ¡°All right. Let me know if his voice comes up on the buzz.¡±


    ¡°Ok. Did you see my alert?¡±


    Michael tabbed over to it. Philip''s safehouses and the homes of many of his underground connections had been raided. FBI swarming Coopers POE. Highlighted emails about anonymous tips and informant testimonies.


    Little late in the game boys. It¡¯s getting close to high noon.


    ¡°Cute,¡± he said. EP beeped off.


    He smiled and tried to enjoy it. That greasy sack of shit had no idea who he was talking to, and his men had no idea who they were fucking with.


    But, as his thoughts returned to the team, his team, speeding towards a sheet metal death trap, a voice in the back of his head reminded him,


    Now that was an awfully long time ago, wasn¡¯t it?

 The Bounty | Chapter 51: Arrival

    The magical meets the mundane, explosively


    They had all taken turns choosing music and talking over it. At times, the conversation drifted toward serious matters. Luke gave Gradie reminders on combat; focus one thing at a time, communicate, if the fire stops there¡¯s a problem. Lindsey advised him to keep his thoughts simple and let the Hardworlds figure it out.


    ¡°Subtle, positive thoughts. More like just an attitude at first, till you get the hang of pushing. Most important thing is to not over think it.¡±


    Gradie queued up bodies on bodies by Vio-lence and bit down on the statement ¡°I overthink everything¡± so it didn¡¯t get out.


    The window, cold and clear, held broken glass-shaped pieces of light that slid slowly across the matte blackness then zipped away, only to return, reborn, identical on the other side of the window as another streetlight came on.


    Cars fell behind them, beaten, unable or unwilling to match their pace. No Saturday night excitement here. These were the forgotten people. On their way to weekend jobs, graveyard shifts, parking lot drug deals. The warehouse must be close. Would it feel like this, too real? Grinding across a highway, boxed in between glass and breath and metal, all those cars rubbing by. Inescapable reality.


    He closed his eyes to block it out and saw the daylight shootouts, broken in pieces and lit by something not like sunlight. They all felt like dreams now, and he couldn¡¯t believe he had been there. How had he been so scared? How could he forget none of it could harm him?


    ¡°Don¡¯t fall asleep!¡± Sam swerved.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± He yelled.


    ¡°No naps on this field trip!¡±


    He looked through the windows, but didn¡¯t see the warehouse looming anywhere. He grabbed between his knees and felt nothing. Brief panic. The X95, left behind in the SUV. Cops picking over it now, or had already stuck it in some drawer, useless. He hoped not to end up the same way. His hand moved to his hip and he felt the five-seven. It fired in his mind and Paul dropped dead. The triumph was wilted by his inexplicable distance from the moment, beat away by the conversation, the car noise, the slivers of light again on the glass, obscured it. Like he had dropped the moment on the floor and after clawing it out from under the seat, found it dusty, with hair and scraps stuck to it.


    Somehow, he managed to get hold of the moment again, briefly. But its context was lost. How had he done it? It didn¡¯t even feel like him now. None of them did, those other Gradies. He was the highway. The hum, that was him. The sensation of moving, the direction of motion, unthinking, slipping away, untethered-


    The music exploded as Sam cranked the dial and Gradie shot up again.This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.


    ¡°All right. I¡¯m good!¡± He shook himself. Sam flicked her blinker on and he almost threw up. They lost speed and the cars passed them now, an unsettling reversal. The ramp dropped downward like a rollercoaster, reminding him that this was supposed to be fun. An astral projecting gunfighter, that¡¯s what he had thought he would be. All the missed shots from the past two days rang out in his head. Who misses in a dream?


    ¡°Park in the lot and look over the maps,¡± EP said in their ears.


    Gradie pulled up his phone. The area looked like a motherboard from space, all big rectangles cut up by the grey lines of streets, surrounded by an oval of highways. The distribution center was surrounded by an empty field, the highway, and one massive warehouse. A live drone feed tagged vehicles, including theirs, and a small sedan speeding out of the DC back lot.


    ¡°Cleared out the guard,¡± EP said.


    ¡°He leave the gate up?¡± Philip asked.


    ¡°Yep.¡±


    ¡°All right. I¡¯m coming in. Kate, come in behind me.¡± The drone tagged an eighteen-wheeler as it accelerated down a side road. Sam sped across the lot and around the DC. It was a big block of shadow and amber light that rotated like a thing waking up. headlights on the highway flew by thirty feet up in the air.


    ¡°All right team,¡± Michael said on the line. ¡°Got some good news before we get started. The other warehouse to the west is vacant, and as you can see, the highway is up on an earth berm to the east¡­¡±


    Luke was already smiling when Michael delivered the good news.


    ¡°So, I¡¯m clearing you for all weapons. But watch your angles¡ª¡±


    Luke danced in his seat and Lindsey sighed with relief.


    ¡°¡ªbe prepared for that to change. Good luck.¡±


    ¡°All right, here it is,¡± Philip said. Another map opened on the app. This one was a layout of the DC.


    ¡°The target¡¯s in one of the returns pallets, in this area.¡± He drew a circle in red around the far northwest corner of the building. ¡°They¡¯re shipping it all to a liquidator on Monday, so there could be a good number of them.¡±


    ¡°There¡¯s twelve,¡± EP said.


    ¡°Shit. Anyway, Alan will start searching the pile immediately after getting geared up.¡±


    Gradie looked at Luke, who just nodded. Was he really going to be digging through fucking retail returns while a gunfight broke out?


    ¡°The rest of us will set up around this conveyor mezzanine area.¡±


    Another circle traced around an area that looked like mesh on the layout, just below the returns section.


    ¡°Positioning as such.¡±


    Icons appeared on the map, initials of the team members, in spots around the mesh, and lines radiated out from them denoting fields of fire. Gradie saw his own ¡°AL¡± in the corner, away from the others.


    ¡°Set-ups gonna involve a lot of barrier pallets and explosives at key entry points. As far as the actual fight, it¡¯ll be LMGs and launchers across the board, so make them pay for every second they¡¯re inside. When shit gets ugly, fall back under cover to the mezzanine here.¡± He marked the core of the mesh area.


    ¡°With a building this size, they¡¯re gonna prod until they have an idea where we are, then try and force a single point of failure. We¡¯ve got the defensive edge, but they can maneuver outside through the lot unopposed. Luckily, we don¡¯t have to kill all of them, we just have to run out the clock. Assuming you do your job, Alan.¡±


    ¡°This is gonna be fucked,¡± Luke said excitedly.


    ¡°Well, we already got rule one covered,¡± EP said.


    ¡°What¡¯s rule one?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°Get there first.¡±


    Philip got out of the truck as Sam got the door to the truck office open. He was already wearing strange dark coveralls and a plate carrier, topped off with a helmet and NVGs.


    ¡°If I buzz yall it means I¡¯ve got traffic and you¡¯ve got two minutes to set up, so stay frosty,¡± EP said. Something was beeping behind her voice, and she sounded like she was in the middle of an adrenaline dump.


    The door squeaked open with an ominous echo, and they all slipped inside like a knife.

 The Bounty | Chapter 52: Internment

    In between, forgotten places


    The dark office smelled like microwaved Styrofoam and long-gone fast-food oils. The door slammed closed, leaving them in solid darkness until Sam flicked on the lights. It was half waiting room half break room, with two flimsy tables, a microwave, and a glass pane facing into the security office, in which their reflections loomed darkly.


    Lindsey shoved a table out of her way and threw open the inside door. As they walked out onto the main floor, a motion sensor flipped on the warehouse lights. Philip threw out two small drones the size of coasters and they buzzed up and out across the ceiling, tripping other sensors and lighting the rest of the warehouse. Gradie felt like he was watching it all come into existence.


    It was devoid of all human aesthetics. Wherever he looked, lines of metal, in the form of pillars and beams and shelves, mixed with cardboard and concrete in an even distribution of unevenness. It was like a landscape designed to sicken. Only things without eyes, or those blinded by a kind of selective vision evolved from seeing it daily could handle it. Plastic and cardboard and metal and dust and paper and industrial orange and fluorescence. All the ingredients of the world outside, ground up into pieces, assembled here, wrong.


    Gradie thought of those images meant to simulate what a person sees when having a stroke. This was like that, but all the more unsettling because the mind did, eventually, find a form. The backrooms of America, the unseen ugly thing hidden beneath it all, everywhere, not even a skeleton, more like insulation, itself subject to some other greater overarching structure.


    He didn¡¯t have time to find out why it disturbed him so much.


    The bay door flew up with a musical sound, like as sting in a film score meant to express anticipation. Sam came out of nowhere on a forklift and moved a pallet with a six-foot-tall container on it out onto the staging area. Philip broke off the plastic and opened a door in the front of the strange, unfolding crate.


    ¡°Alan, get the fuck over here.¡±


    He tossed a duffel bag on the ground, with a set of black coveralls hanging out of it. Gradie picked up the coveralls and tried to step into them. Luke was already in his boxers, pulling another kit on. Phillip shook his head at Gradie.


    ¡°God damn, didn¡¯t the twins show you the kit? Strip down and get all that shit on, now!¡±


    By the time Gradie got his shoes off, Luke was finished. Dark coveralls in what could only be described as ¡°warehouse camo print¡±, gloves, boots, plate carrier, helmet with four-tube night vision, and a strange face mask.


    ¡°Are you going to literally let them catch you with your pants down?¡± Philip snapped as Gradie stared at Luke.


    ¡°Why couldn¡¯t I just keep my clothes on if I¡¯m going to be digging through boxes anyway?¡± Gradie had meant it sarcastically, but Philip was in no mood.


    ¡°Because the kit is IR and fire resistant. Because your plastic mall goth boots might melt to the concrete. Because your colors stand out. And because using common sense is my job, apparently, and your job is to do as your told.¡±


    Sam zipped by with another pallet, apparently having changed somewhere out of sight, and Lindsey zoomed out of the trailer on a Honda Grom, also in full kit, with her suppressed Galil slung over her back and a duffle bag over her shoulder.


    Gradie pulled over his coveralls while Luke tore into the rest of the strange container, which unfolded on hinges into four pieces. Guns, magazines, grenades, and brass glittered inside various compartments. Still, silent, but Gradie imagined the noise, the destruction, waiting inside it all, and felt his heart rev up.


    He dug into the rest of his kit, infrared lasers and illuminators, his own helmet and NVGs equipped with thermal overlay, eye protection, plate carriers, and a myriad of other things, and got them on with a little help from Luke. Eventually, he was encased in a shell of battle readiness that belied his own fears. Luke showed him how to adjust straps and position pouches to minimize noise, then asked him, with a meaningful smile,


    ¡°Anybody ever teach you how to move silently?¡±


    Gradie exhaled and cast back with memory. It was rough at first, crunchy, like a dried thing moving for the first time in days, but eventually, the Spirit pushed the Self into a corner and he remembered. Forest walks, thousand-dollar classes, advice from friends of friends, given for free, hunting trips, airsoft excursions, sneaking up on a fuck buddy spotted in a grocery store, her bursting glowing smile.


    ¡°Yep.¡±


    Luke nodded and patted him on the back, but he couldn¡¯t understand why. He was almost certain he hadn¡¯t even done anything.Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    ¡°Got something special cooked up for this,¡± said EP, sounding more like she was talking to herself than anyone else. ¡°I synced some pressure pads with my drones. If you go white, they¡¯ll hit the target with a twenty-thousand-lumen light. Should give you some element of surprise if you need it.¡±


    ¡°I like it,¡± said Philip.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know how much surprise I¡¯ll need with this.¡± Luke smiled and lifted an MG3 out of a case, and Gradie got flashbacks of middle school days playing the second Call of Duty.


    ¡°I¡¯m gonna have these dudes dancing like it''s D-Day.¡±


    ¡°Please don¡¯t,¡± Lindsey sighed. ¡°As I recall the other guys won that one.¡±


    Sam scowled at the MG3.


    ¡°Please tell me you have something else for me Max. If I shoot one of those I¡¯ll go flying across the damn warehouse.¡±


    ¡°Left side. Grey tote.¡± Philip hefted his own LMG, a Knights Armament AMG in 7.62x51 with 150 rounds in its ammo container and a suppressor already attached, out of the crate followed by a canvas bag of ammo. Sam opened the grey tote and found an Ultimax 100 Mk4/5 Para with the 10.5 in barrel, an ultra-light, low-recoil LMG from Singapore. With the 100-round drum mag and angled foregrip, it looked like a modern-day Tommy gun.


    ¡°Cute.¡± She slung it over her shoulder and picked up its ammo bag. ¡°What we got left?¡±


    Philip shouldered his MG and looked at the trailer.


    ¡°Crack open Zoey¡¯s done crate and move that big barrier pallet down to the recycling bay door. There¡¯s a ramp outside of it. Then get to work blocking off doors and setting up MG positions. After that, get to moving as much off the racks as you can to give everyone a good line of sight. Why are you still here?¡±


    Gradie was waiting to dig out a weapon of his own. ¡°Where¡¯s my gun?¡±


    ¡°Oh shit. Here.¡± Luke handed him a backpack that felt like it was full of bricks. Inside was another X95 and a loaded mag pouch, some smoke grenades, and a box cutter.


    Philip pointed in the direction of the returns area.


    ¡°Get that on and start working on those pallets. Now!¡±


    Gradie started putting the mag pouch on.


    ¡°Gear up while you walk!¡± Philip hissed and the echoes backed him up from down the rows. Gradie took off across the staging area as a swarm of drones buzzed out of the trailer.


    It came on like an undertow. Like driving along and suddenly feeling your car die beneath you; thoughtless highway driving turned suddenly into a mindful cataloging of costs and possible outcomes.


    Her Self was weighing on her. Maybe she shouldn¡¯t have picked a grocery store. It brought on memories. Real memories.


    She remembered walking down the aisles. The colored boxes flashing like taunts, the sugar singing out to her in rainbow logos. Her mother somewhere near the produce, the real food, as she called it, surely speaking to the vegetables and herself in Russian, scolding them both for an unknown failing.


    Outside, beyond the bolted doors and camera palisades, just past the dusty employee hallway that lay quiet and ready as a castle¡¯s lists, something pushed into the store.


    It was the world. A great darkness moving across the bare cement, down the empty aisles and freezers, trying to push her out. Push them all out. It knew they should not be there, and it would either push them out or swallow them, dropping them out and trapping them forever.


    Despite this, she was nested into the world. She was in the police systems, the traffic cameras, the company intranet, the satellite feeds, the emergency disaster lines and sensors, left ignored and unused (these gave her the sensation of travelling down old sewer systems, now barely moist, waiting for the rush of water at any moment), in the phones of almost everyone in the district, her botnets sleeping, her eyes expanded. She was like a specimen held between mesh, touching everything, stretching out, defined by what held her.


    It was quiet. The police were in wait mode. They had raided the homes of Philip¡¯s associates, but had gotten no closer to touching ¡®Max¡¯ than if they had clipped his fingernail. Just there, but inert. Cooper was dead, and with their target dead, whatever shadowy criminal syndicate had attacked was now surely on the retreat, wiping down doorknobs, executing the impotent and the unnecessary, right?


    The two cops on leave had disappeared off the face of the earth. Unmarried, their mothers and cousins and co-workers sent texts that went unanswered, their phones turned off, banks untouched.


    Michael had spoken to her of the gut feeling, the smell he had said, of Hardworlders in action, that a good Overlord could spot. It had stung her, though he hadn¡¯t meant it to. Because she had never experienced it. He had pointed out the signs, given her names of men with suspicious backgrounds, but how he picked those out of the thousands with the same kind of backgrounds, she couldn¡¯t tell, and he had no time to tell her. ¡°Watch the highways,¡± he had told her, like a child told to dump potato peels in the trash. Be sure to get them all!


    She had enough things to do, anyway, she told herself. But the drones found their spots on the warehouse roofs and hooked onto the ceiling beams of the DC with ease, her Self having done this countless times, apparently, and Lindsey, when passed control of the bomb drones and other sensors and explosives, had got the perimeter defenses set up, so that now EP could only sit back, while others planted charges and trips she had built, and prepared to take on gunfire she would never even hear, and watch the highways.


    The phone call broke in like a ghost. It came in on the extension for a desk near the returns section. It was a regular cell number, with a name and identity attached to it with its own mundane history. She was sure, somehow, that if she went looking for the person her databanks told her had been using the phone for three years, she would never find them, because they didn¡¯t exist.


    The hairs went up on the back of her neck. She focused on the feeling, tried to memorize it. This is what Hardworlders feel like.


    ¡°Call coming into the DC.¡±


    ¡°Anyone near?¡± Michael said.


    ¡°Alan is.¡±


    A pause. Another ring ruptured the silence. EP breathed as if throwing punches.


    ¡°Have him answer it. See if you can track them.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°They already know it¡¯s here, or they wouldn¡¯t be calling. Trust me.¡±


    EP pressed her lips together and nodded to no one. Wouldn¡¯t it be better to let them wonder if anyone was here? How could they know?


    How she wished for just a fraction of Michael''s senses.


    ¡°Alan. Go answer that phone.¡±

 The Bounty | Chapter 53: Phone Call

    Can I speak to Dedmond Walking?


    The return pallets were stacked in a clearly forgotten section of the warehouse, between rows of cubicles and workstations and the trash compactor. A marked forklift path led directly from the pallets to a bay door which also looked exceptionally mistreated. He had broken open the first pallet, sifted through the boxes looking for the small ¡°something¡± Cooper had slipped into them. Apparently the camera quality had been shitty even for a small time retail outlet, and EP¡¯s best guess was ¡°either like a small envelope, or maybe a box, maybe for some headphones.¡±


    So far, he had only managed to coat himself in a thin layer of cardboard dust, rendering his probably carefully thought-out camo useless. He was considering swiping some of Lindsey¡¯s explosives to make the chore more interesting, when the phone rang. He thought about answering it, but decided that Philip would throw him in the trash compactor if he did, so he went back to cutting open the second pallet.


    ¡°Alan, answer the Phone,¡± EP said. For a second he thought he imagined it.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°Answer the phone.¡±


    ¡°Are you serious?¡±


    ¡°Answer the phone!¡±


    He sat the box cutter on the second pallet and jogged to the desk.


    ¡°What should I¡ª¡±


    ¡°Act like you work here! Receiving desk!¡±If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    He picked up the thirty-year-old flesh colored phone and held it to his ear as his earbud clicked off.


    ¡°Uh, regional Distribution, this is receiving.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s weird, I called the extension for returns.¡± The voice was cold and mocking.


    ¡°Oh, they might have changed the extensions. You wanna call back? I don¡¯t know how to transfer.¡±


    There was a dusty silence.


    ¡°No. Hey, now that I think of it, aren¡¯t yall closed? Why are you still there?¡±


    ¡°Back orders. You know how it is. Gotta go that extra mile, what with Amazon and¡ª"


    ¡°You know, your boss is playing with fire, pissing off GSK like that. Can¡¯t he tell this is an off-the-books union job? Your whole outfit is one bad step from being thrown into Nightmare.¡±


    ¡°Uh, sir, I am but a humble warehouse worker¡ª¡±


    ¡°Are you the new hire? We can tell. Saw you shitting yourself behind that SUV.¡±


    ¡°Well, when you gotta go¡ª¡±


    ¡°You don¡¯t even know what Nightmare is do you?¡±


    Gradie tried to think of another witty retort, but the question bred a curiosity that got in the way.


    ¡°It¡¯s a place for those who don¡¯t play nice, or don¡¯t play by the rules, in your case. Those who become a nuisance to the big shakers. And despite what you may have heard on the ball, it¡¯s not like hell. Oh no, it¡¯s much worse. You know that really bad day you had when you were a kid, maybe six years old, thinking your dad was gonna kill you or something? They¡¯ll trap you in it forever. Fire and brimstone don¡¯t have shit on the misery of a helpless child.¡±


    ¡°Sir, this is a Wendy¡¯s¡­distribution center¡ª¡±


    ¡°Get ready boy. Won¡¯t be any meth heads on go-carts this time. I¡¯ve watched presidents die.¡±


    The line clicked off. The desks and racks watched him through dust that ate up the word ¡°die¡± like they had been waiting on it.


    ¡°So, did you trace the call?¡± he asked, in as much a cadence of a joke as he could manage.


    ¡°Get back to work. Like your life is in those boxes.¡± EP beeped off.


    *****


    Across the city, on a wide empty parking lot next to the rising web of the Mixmaster, a pack of armored vehicles stood waiting. Someone inside a sedan got a call and the engines started up. A few moments later they were tearing up the sword blade curve of an on-ramp. As their engines faded into the night, they spread out and blended among the stream of cars on the highway, but even the trash stuck in the shoulders knew they didn¡¯t belong.

 The Bounty | Chapter 54: Encirclement

    Got them right where we want em


    Gradie stood over the boxes spilling out of the mutilated plastic pallet covering and checked his phone again. EP had gone back in the footage and taken images from when the pallet Cooper had slipped the coin in was assembled in the receiving bay at the POE and Gradie tried to match the blurry pixels to the boxes before him. The fact that he couldn¡¯t see what boxes were in the pallets until he cut the semi-opaque plastic off would have been frustrating if not for the fact that every pallet he had cut open so far had boxes on it that looked very those-pixels-esqe anyway.


    He felt two possibilities open to him, each standing off in the dusty darkness like the monsters of sleep paralysis; either he found the coin before the other side, whoever they were, attacked, and the gunfight burning in the back of his mind never even happened, or he would be digging though pallets in the middle of a gunfight, and it would all come down to him finding the coin before a bullet found him. Even if there was an afterlife, dying in a dusty pile of rejected appliances and other consumer products didn¡¯t seem like the way to go, and a rising voice, screaming at him to drop his guns and run out the side door, was becoming more articulate by the second.


    ¡°How many pallets he got left?¡± Sam whispered, on the line.


    ¡°Eight,¡± EP answered, like announcing a death.


    ¡°Oh lord!¡±


    Gradie didn¡¯t tell them that it was more like nine, or eight and a half. Mostly out of spite. He didn¡¯t know why he was on the main channel anyway. Just so he could hear them gossip about his speed? Why not come help him?


    He kicked the remaining stacked boxes over, hoping they would be easier to dig through in a single layer.


    ¡°Stay quiet,¡± EP said.


    ¡°How am I supposed to do this quietly?¡± he whispered.


    ¡°Figure it out. This is the part where you show you have what it takes to be here. And don¡¯t say another word unless your life is at stake.¡±


    He cut open the next pallet and the sound slid through hundreds of thousands of square feet of dead space. EP¡¯s drone, hovering above him, shone an IR illuminator on the boxes, and he tried to convince himself that this is what he had signed up for.


    EP ran through the defense for the hundredth time. The explosive placements. The barrier pallets set up in front of most of the small entrance doors to funnel the attackers towards the others. The positioning of the team, which EP had dialed in to a degree of centimeters, with direction from Michael and Philip. The team¡¯s targeting lasers had painted her map in various colors, with blind spots revealed in empty grey.


    Her drones filled in the gaps. They were marked on the map like a starfield, programmed with predetermined evasive paths, loaded with explosives or lights, or just sensors and cameras. She did a quick sweep of the ones outside, stationary, hidden. Some parked on the beams at the underside of the nearby overpass. Some atop towering highway lights.


    Her third eye moved out farther still, and detected the ripples of the oncoming attack. Multi-vehicle crashes. Police scanner chatter about sightings of ¡°suspects in the main case¡±, and other signs the attackers were shooing law enforcement away from the area like flies, baiting them across the city. But beyond that, there was no sign of them. No unordinary traffic heading for the DC, no unexplainable sense of Hardworlders at work, not since the phone call. Just rumblings, like a distant thunder.


    She returned her thoughts and scanning to the warehouse, now dark and still.


    Lindsey and Philip were up on the catwalk, silent as the dust, with duffle bags full of sand and barrier pallets placed around them. Luke and Sam down on the floor, surrounded by cover, concealment, and ammo. The escape routes and fall-back positions were all planned out. They had drilled it verbally ten times. Everything that could be done had been done. Now was the time for controlling breathing and planning for the unpredictable.


    But they had been waiting in silence for at least ten minutes and the tension was gone, slowly replaced by annoyance and sleeping limbs.


    ¡°Can you call them and see where they¡¯re at? I¡¯m worried,¡± Luke said, his voice breaking out like a bright screen in a movie theater.If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    ¡°Shut up!¡± Lindsey hissed, but her words were bouncing in laughter.


    ¡°I¡¯m telling you, they only called so we would get spooked and cut our set up short,¡± Philip said. Michael had only given them ten minutes after the call to finish preparing, vetoing Philip''s request to wait until EP spotted something.


    ¡°Which didn¡¯t work,¡± Lindsey hissed. ¡°We got all the gear out.¡± She had spent the full ten minutes driving around the warehouse planting charges.


    ¡°Yeah, but we could have spent more time setting up ped barriers for kill zones,¡± Philip said.


    ¡°With what?¡±


    ¡°What? All these pallets! Did you not notice we¡¯re in a¡ª¡±


    ¡°Vehicles on the access road,¡± EP said.


    The warehouse got dead quiet again beside the shuffling sound of Gradie digging through boxes.


    ¡°A black SUV,¡± EP continued. ¡°Probably armored, judging by the way it¡¯s riding. Followed by a sedan. Got others coming from the west. Work Van, another SUV, two trucks¡­¡± EP bit off her words. It was a caravan, ten vehicles and counting, coalescing out of the mindless hum of the surrounding traffic into something sinister and focused. Once invisible on the three highways that circled the district of warehouses, now in the open, brazen, like fighter planes abandoning the cover of clouds.


    ¡°You sure it¡¯s not the cleaning crew?¡± Luke whispered.


    ¡°Yeah, and you¡¯re the stain,¡± Lindsey whispered. Luke laughed in his throat.


    ¡°They¡¯re going dark,¡± EP said. On her drone feed, the headlights died as the cars approached the DC, as if an invisible force radiated from it and demanded darkness. A moment later the lights in the parking lot went off in dark disks of shadow. A drone on the roof caught the slight slaps of suppressed weapons on its audio feed as they skipped across the lot. EP switched to infrared and watched the vehicles approach in light blue, the cones of their IR illuminator headlights preceding them like sails. Other cars moved into the back lot and darkness conquered it methodically.


    ¡°Vehicles in both lots. No clear attack point yet,¡± EP advised them.


    ¡°Don¡¯t fire until you can get a whole squad, but don¡¯t let two squads link up,¡± Philip said.  EP saw Lindsey shake her head in a section of her screen.


    There were more cracks in the lot. EP saw two of her outside drone feeds go dark. ¡°Shit.¡± She set the high flying one on evasive maneuvers and the feed started to roll around. These first minor moves always quickened her heart rate the worst. A pawn for a pawn. Once you were in it, you hardly noticed.


    She caught movement on the feed of the front lot.


    ¡°Joey, they¡¯re stacking up on the wall south of the main door. Got another squad going in the north office. Just broke the glass.¡±


    ¡°Back lot?¡± Lindsey whispered.


    EP glanced at the west feed. ¡°Just sitting in their cars right now.¡± In her peripherals, Luke made a hand signal in one frame, and the gunmen in the front lot shattered the doors in another.


    ¡°Joe¡¯s got contact.¡±


    Luke was set up on the ground floor, among a serpent coil of conveyor belts, his position reinforced with pallets of sandbags, the MG3 resting on its bipod, pointing towards the front door like a missile already in flight. He had aimed the weapon at the central metal detector with a laser sight when he first set up.


    The men came in the front door over broken glass. Their active IR glowed like Christmas as they scanned corners and cleared the security office from the lobby. He could tell they were fodder. They had all the right moves, but something was lacking. They crossed the lobby in swift practiced steps that cut the distance into bits the way their rifles pie-sliced the room. Point man stepped square in front of the central metal detector, like a target moving into the crosshairs in an old arcade game, and Luke opened fire with a smile.


    The scream of the MG3 bounced off every surface in the warehouse. It made the sheet metal roof sing its song, a solid roar, indivisible, each retort blended into the next. Shell casings and links poured onto the ground as the gun pushed into his shoulder, devoured the ammo belt, and threw fire at the lobby. Even with the flash suppressor, the muzzle flash blinded him during the bursts.


    The rounds rang off the metal skeletons of the turnstiles in flechette sparks and cracked off the floor. Two of the IR lasers jerked down to the ground as the men holding them died. His ammo belts had their tracers replaced with standard rounds, so the bullets struck out unseen. At just under fifty yards, it didn¡¯t matter.


    Rounds zipped in from the parking lot and struck pallets and boxes around him. More like a whimper than a counter-attack. Luke had poured almost a hundred rounds through the lobby in about five seconds, and all he could see were bodies. Vehicles squealed through the lot to get out of his line of sight. He fired shorter bursts after them and rounds sparked off the lot. Someone out of sight was screaming into a radio.


    ¡°Can you tag that guy?¡± he said softly, between bursts. One of EP¡¯s drones lit up a section of wall to the left of the turnstiles with an IR beam and he put a half-second burst into it. The voice stopped.


    ¡°They¡¯re moving in the truck door office,¡± EP said. ¡°Charge going off.¡± An explosion rocked the building, like some giant playing drums on the roof. The roar came through their earbuds as a moment of silence. The office windows shattered out onto the main floor. Sam swore and Luke chuckled as he felt the vibration at his back and in his boots.


    ¡°Got em. Whole squad,¡± EP said.


    On her left monitor, an outside drone feed showed a plume of debris where the trucker entrance had been. The cars in the back lot stopped moving. Men got out next to a few of them and aimed at the building from cover. Weapons came out of trunks and doors.


    Movement in another window drew a portion of her focus, which was fragmented across multiple screens, despite the tunnel-vision-tug of adrenaline.


    A five-man squad had broken into the north-east office and now moved towards the door to the warehouse floor. One of them was listening to intel from a voice channel she hadn¡¯t been able to get into.


    ¡°On your door Max,¡± EP told him.

 The Bounty | Chapter 55: Offering

    Round for Round, tooth for tooth


    Philip was watching through his NVGs up on the third level of a three-level rack mezzanine unit on the north side of the DC. From his position on the northwest corner, he could look down on the return pallets, a section of office cubicles, and the windows and doors to the back offices in the northeast corner. He had concealed his position with boxes and packages taken from the surrounding pallets and had his weapon aimed at the office door through gap in the cardboard.


    EP had stuck a single low light on the wall disguised as part of an ethernet port, and it raised the light level just enough for his night vision to see what the fuck was going on. Which up until about three seconds ago, was absolutely nothing.


    It had been maddening listening to Luke open up just meters away, while he sat there watching dust settle on a bunch of fucking cubicles. But he was a professional. A Hardworlder with over two decades under his belt, even if many of those memories were now under lock and key. Which meant he knew how to wait. Waiting, often, was most of the job.


    So as the attacking squad stepped into the far office and EP talked him through their movements, he stayed just as calm as if he was watching water flow, and reached out for those memories, trying to slide into that middle zone of consciousness, halfway between watching himself and being in the driver¡¯s seat, the convergence of what could be and what he wanted to happen, the unification of his selves, the fusion of Spirit and flesh.


    A man in full fatigues, NODs, and face mask pulled open the office door and stepped through swiftly, covering the right as another one moved in behind him watching the left, and so on until all five were through the door, rifles moving like the batons of a high school color guard. Philip let them come in, get committed to the room, and sweep a few areas, then he got to work killing.


    He had his grenades inside a Kevlar helmet with the pins tied by wire to the mezzanine frame. He took one in his hand, wound his arm back, and pulled the trigger just as point man¡¯s IR beam swept across the mezzanine. The low recoil AMG was a dream, even in 7.62. He felt the gunfire in his chest, and the flash lit up the desks and high wall in sharp shadows.


    He gunned down point-man while overhanding the grenade and dropped another before he had finished bringing his empty hand down to the foregrip in a single fluid motion.


    He kept up the fire as EP¡¯s drone flashed them with fake muzzle flash and IR beams. It was like watching them die on stage. Their only cover was a few fabric cubicles and plywood desks. He counted to four in his head and ducked back behind the barrier. Only in the pause of his own gunfire did he realize one of them had been laying into an M27 with what looked like a 60 round magazine. Luckily, most of its fire had gone after EP¡¯s fake gunner.


    The grenade went off and the roof sounded like it had caved in, and then there was just the screaming. He popped back up and finished off the last gunman with a short burst from the collarbone to the forehead, and it was quiet again. All five men had died within five seconds and Philip had expended almost fifty rounds.


    ¡°Stat,¡± Luke whispered.


    ¡°Got ''em. But I¡¯m sure I was supposed to. They just wanted to know where we are.¡±


    Before he had gotten the words out, an explosion blew in a bay door.


    Lindsey was on the third level of the four-level conveyor mezzanine with her machine gun aimed at the south wall. She had line of sight all the way down the massive staging area in front of the bay doors, 200 yards of bare concrete and sparse pallets. Another hundred yards of bay doors stretched from the central truck office to the right, to the north side of the DC behind her, where Gradie dug through boxes and Philip was set up on the mezzanine adjacent to hers.


    Her position was reinforced with barrier pallets and duffle bags of sand and plates, raised up by Sam¡¯s forklift, and disguised and screened by carefully placed boxes and other warehouse debris. She had two 250-round belts linked together draping from her PKP-SP (an upgraded, lighter PKM with a fluted, and in this case shorter, barrel, and an attached suppressor) to an ammo box strategically placed not to cause her any issues if she had to change positions.


    Which, almost immediately, she did.


    A bay door exploded below, eighty yards away, right next to the north wall. It was the recycling bay door where they had placed the barrier pallet. It was also the one closest to Gradie.


    Metal fragments sparked on the roof and racks around her and the compressed dusty air roared and shook again, like a direct reply to the truck office explosion and Philip¡¯s grenade.


    ¡°Alan stat!¡± Michael said on the line.


    ¡°I¡¯m fine.¡±


    ¡°Make sure!¡±


    ¡°Vehicle moving on that door!¡± EP said.


    A SUV revved up the ramp outside, crashed through the hanging strands of shredded bay door, and slammed right into the anti-vehicle barrier pallet. The crash echoed across the warehouse.This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.


    ¡°Huh,¡± EP said with a smile in her voice. Lindsey bit back her own laugh as she swung the PKP around. They must have thought it was just a normal shipment of retail junk. The big pallet slid about a yard, but the SUV crunched to a halt with its back end stuck outside. The crash must have surely tripped the airbags, but the doors flew open and IR beams shot out anyway, though not as gracefully as they might have otherwise.


    Lindsey, however, was the picture of grace. She brought the gun into the keyhole like a decorator placing a center piece and fanned the belt like it was an all-brass accessory to her evening wear. In under two seconds, she had transitioned from her previous position to the new target, and was still chuckling when the gun roared.


    It felt like a second date. Bullets screamed off the hood and ripped through fragments of bay door. The side windows on the SUV turned white, and one crumbled like disturbed snow. Two men getting out of the passenger side died instantly. The others ducked down out of her sight on the driver¡¯s side, but she kept up the fire, trying to skip rounds under the undercarriage.


    One of the survivors was yelling at the driver to back up when Philip stepped out from somewhere to her right and put a burst through the top of his head. The windshield frosted over as both guns joined together, and the driver was just able to throw it in reverse before the glass gave out into sudden darkness. The SUV rolled slowly back down the ramp at an angle and bumped softly into the railing, completely devoid of life.


    Lindsey breathed, and another bay door exploded to her left.


    Sam had cover pallets and warehouse debris arranged around her in a triangle, less than fifty feet from Luke, in roughly the center of the warehouse, positioned to cover Lindsey¡¯s blind spot, the bay doors closest to the truck office, which screened them from the PKP, or overlap fire with Luke or Lindsey as needed.


    Waiting had been awful. Her own racing thoughts were always a thousand times worse than anything that actually happened, and her body shuddered with relief when the action finally found her, and she slipped into that almost automatic, thoughtless groove that made every other second in the Hardworlds worth it.


    The explosion flashed briefly in her NODs and everything around her made awful sounds as strips of bay door hit metal. A pickup backed up to the jagged glowing hole where the bay door had been and five men in full kit shining IR illuminators stepped onto the dock floor, hugging the wall of the truck office to avoid Lindsey¡¯s line of sight. Sam had the Ultimax resting on a sand filled duffle bag, and point man flashed her position with his IR as she opened fire.


    It was a lazy rhythm compared to the high fire rate of Luke¡¯s MG3, but it was effective, and after the initial kick of the first round, the recoil was non-existent, like using a lethal water hose. Point man fell in a flash of fire that glittered like fairy lights in her goggles and sprayed casings like slot winnings. The rest of the attacking squad dashed to cover under a stream of extra hot 5.56. Bullets sparked off the wall, tore boxes to pieces, and struck the pickup through the open door. Before she could savor the feeling of control, the survivors were behind pallets and pylons returning fire.


    She never let her finger off the trigger. Another one fell, but it felt like years since the last one had died. Their bullets got closer to the mark, striking her cover and zipping past her ears like swearing bees. Second after second dragged on without another one dying, and a subtle fear rose up behind her jaw. It was like a bad dream where her gun fired only blanks.


    The truck office wall next to the gunmen exploded in bursts of drywall and concrete as Lindsey¡¯s PKP tore it to pieces. In a second the last two were dead. Sam only realized she had killed a third after everything was still and her earbuds adjusted to the quiet. She waited for another explosion, another attack.


    Nothing, so she let her attention move to her breath, and her ammo.


    ¡°Reloading!¡± she whispered, and got another drum mag out of the bag. Her voice carried across the concrete floor like a ghost taunting the dead.


    ¡°Kate, fall back to the mezzanine,¡± Michael said, dead calmly, like he was advising of an upcoming turn. She got her ammo bag on her shoulder and made for the more heavily fortified position under the towering levels of metal. It seemed so soon, but as she got her things together, she noticed wide jagged bullet holes in the wood and pouring sand just inches from her, and was glad to be going.


    ¡°Update,¡± Lindsey said softly.


    ¡°They¡¯re moving their vehicles,¡± EP said. ¡°Getting ready for the next move.¡±


    ¡°They know where we are,¡± said Philip, softer than Sam had ever heard him. ¡°Now comes the real fight.¡± He finished loading his AMG and racked the charging handle.


    Gradie had found nothing. The boxes piled around him like gore. Fitness trackers, headphones, pod coffee makers, shoes, phone chargers, all-in-one printers, nameless things in tape covered boxes. The banal and everyday pooled at his feet uselessly while out in the warehouse, astral warriors waged war, their temporary vessels of flesh falling in instants. The gunfire and explosions clapped harshly in his ears while the kitschy boxes remained unmoved, as if the two existed in alternate dimensions, unable to interact.


    EP¡¯s illuminator drone flicked off the moment he heard Luke¡¯s MG scream and he had been digging with only the low-level illuminator attached to his NODs. The team had set up extra pallets between him and the rest of the DC to screen him, but he still felt suffocatingly exposed, and ill prepared.


    Is this my dream? My fantasy? A dead end dreamworld? Searching through retail pallets while things from my nightmares live and move just outside my reach?


    His rifle nudged the pistol at his hip and snagged on plastic wrap strips. He had tried a million times to see the envelope peeking out from the boxes, told himself the next cut would expose it, that this pallet would be the last. Now, dusty and beaten, empty handed, he was sure it was all bullshit.


    The Hardworlds, whatever they were, didn¡¯t give a shit what you visualized, what you wished. Wish in one hand and shit in the other, as Philip might say, and his wishes piled at his feet unanswered. No. If they were so God damn magical, why was he here breaking down pallets? Why hadn¡¯t Michael wished the coin into his hands when they had the son of a bitch in the car with them?


    The world had felt far more malleable last night. He remembered how the building had seemed to morph to his will, allowing him to slip through the ceiling and out to Sam. He tried to recapture the feeling, but suspected he had imagined it. After all, had it ever really felt like he had done anything?


    ¡°Did you find it?¡± EP said in his ears.


    ¡°No,¡±


    ¡°Then why are you fucking stopped? This is all on you!¡±


    Maybe if he acted like this was life or death, he would believe it. Maybe this kind of mundane task could feel like a gunfight if he tried hard enough. He tore into the next pallet like a madman and felt his knife catch on plastic. A rage inside him flared out and he forced it through. A woman smiled over a coffee cup, her mouth bent grotesquely by a crease in the cardboard.


    No coin anywhere.

 The Bounty | Chapter 56: Talking Guns

    7.62 speaks louder than words


    Flashing lights glittered on a slice of highway miles out over the curve of the metroplex, and sirens joined each other slowly. It had only been a few minutes since the first burst of gunfire. In the DC lot, the vehicles whirled around the building like scavengers circling a fresh corpse. They didn¡¯t want their prey to know where they would strike next.


    EP watched them on the screens while trying to break into their voice channels with Michael¡¯s help. A war of movement and information had taken up the space given by the pause in the gun battle.


    The team had changed positions as much as possible to keep the enemy from getting the drop on them. Sam had retreated under the mezzanine below Lindsey, who had shifted positions as much as she could around her defenses, and Philip had moved further east, closer to the office and out of line of sight from the broken ramp bay door. Only Luke stayed where he was. His ammo stash and protective pallets outweighed the benefit of any of the places he could have moved to, and none of them gave the same lines of sight.


    The compromises the team had made in their prep were starting to show, and EP could only hope the enemy would take some time to identify and exploit them.


    Two vehicles broke off the ring in the lot and sped towards the ramp at the south side of the DC.


    ¡°Multiple vehicles moving in on the south side, ramp bay door,¡± EP said.


    A moment later, the bay door exploded in a flash.


    ¡°Got em.¡± Lindsey aimed at the cloud of dust and fluttering metal and cardboard with her finger pinning the trigger, waiting. The sound of the grenade had barely died in the rafters when the armored SUV roared through the bay door and sent a pallet of boxes and a mail cart flying with a soft, muffled boom that was beaten down swiftly by the rattle of the PKP.


    Lindsey fanned her fire to compensate for the absence of tracers and sparks fluttered across the SUV as it crashed into another barrier pallet just inside the door. But this time, they caught it at an angle and started to slowly move it across the floor, even as their windows went white, and the air cracked apart around them.


    Suddenly, like a cool breeze on a hot day, the windows went black and gave out, and the engine roared died to a faint idle.


    It was a short-lived relief. A pickup shot through the bay door and slammed into the SUV. Immediately, its engine roared as it struggled to push the corpse filled SUV and barrier pallet out of the way. If they got clear, it and any vehicles in wait could drive into the forest of pallet racks in the center of the warehouse, where they could prepare their next move under cover.


    So, fighting against an impending infestation, Lindsey locked her finger around the trigger. Shells pooled at her feet as she swept her iron sights over the truck, but despite the unrelenting fire of the PKP, the two vehicles squealed forward on shattered ride-flat tires, pushing the barrier block out of the way, shedding plexiglass and bullet fragments and even fuel and blood across the warehouse floor.


    Suddenly, the truck disappeared behind the SUV, finally clear of the roadblock, and in the next instant, as Lindsey guided her iron sights in front of the SUVs hood, trying to lead the truck, a burst of muzzle flash bloomed over the top of the SUV.


    The rounds fell like hail around Lindsey and cracked just past her in a percussive rhythm. Another light machinegun. Some phantom part of her told her it was probably an M249. The truck had stopped right behind the SUV, and other weapons joined in from behind the doubled cover.


    In the deadly bee-swarm like wave of combined fire, instincts took over, and the gun jumped from target to target on its own, her body a servant to the will of the Spirit. She barely noticed an IR laser shoot out of the truck, prod her for a second, then switch off.


    ¡°Quadrant?¡± Luke hissed on the mic.


    ¡°Eleven,¡± EP told him.


    They had mapped Luke¡¯s fields of fire during the set up, finding paths of low resistance through the racks and moving pallets when needed to give him line of sight on the ramp bay door and other obvious entrances, then marked the targets with IR reflecting stickers.


    ¡°Roger, moving.¡±Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    ¡°Let them get committed,¡± Michael said. He sounded like someone who had never even been shot at. Grooving guitar riffs came in with his voice and Celeste clinked ice in a glass somewhere close before the mic cut off. Lindsey, laying into the PKP the whole time as cracks and buzzes cursed at her head, wanted to scream, but she turned it into another controlled exhale and let the PKM make all the noise instead.


    But, despite her well-placed shots, and the sudden twinkling out of a few of the flashing barrels, the enemy machine gunner held the trigger down like his barrel would last forever, and the double edge of her sound attuning earbuds was that she could hear every round impact the metal mezzanine, crack past her head, and thunk into the barrier pallet. It seemed they would never die. It felt, for a moment, like the PKP was shooting air.


    There was a bright flash in her Nods as something exploded over the vehicles, turning all the windows white and stopping the fire dead. EP¡¯s explosive drone.


    Lindsey exhaled, and her senses caught up with her as the tunnel vision subsided for a moment. She glanced at the empty links hanging off the gun, the 25 round segments at her feet, and realized it had only been about twenty seconds since the SUV came in the bay door.


    ¡°April, that laser tagged you,¡± Michael said. ¡°Probably got you on some kind of overlay map.¡±


    Lindsey stepped to the left and repositioned herself. Not much else she could do.


    EP watched as two more vehicles that had been making a feinting charge at the north ramp made sharp squealing turns and headed for the south ramp, where her drone had just gone off over the two vehicles.


    ¡°Two more on that ramp, April.¡±


    ¡°Alright Joe,¡± Michael said. ¡°Get into it, but hold your fire.¡±


    ¡°Fucking A.¡±


    Luke had barrier pallets arranged around him in a staggered star for multiple positions. EP watched him gather his gun by the belt and bipod, step backwards, take a half-moon Kali-esque sweeping step with his other leg, and pivot into his new position like a dancer with a 80 year old Machine gun platform as a partner. It was, given the surroundings, unexpectedly graceful, and in three seconds he was set up in his new position like he had been there for hours.


    As if on cue, the two vehicles roared in the bay door, bumper to bumper.


    ¡°Now,¡± Michael said, but his words were cut off by the MG3. He could have saved his breath. Luke opened up the moment he heard the engine roar echo off the ceiling.


    The painfully laid plans of the two forces collided with each other in seconds.


    The first vehicle, another truck, stopped dead behind the bombed-out truck and SUV, and another machine gunner opened up from the back window. From of all things, the hacked web cam on the mail desk PC, EP saw that the gunner was prone in the back seat facing the driver¡¯s side, surrounded by plates and sandbags, and had pressed the barrel of his FN MK48 lMG in 7.62 up to the glass and either let the first burst drill a hole in the armored glass, or used a hole that had just been drilled out in the lot. Either way, he doused himself in brass and links and sprayed the general area of Lindsey¡¯s position with red tracers.


    The second vehicle turned hard and drove past the first until it was screened from Lindsey by the massive pallet racks. As it rocked on its brakes, five men, two with LMGs, got out and got into position to engage the PKP. On one of her hidden, micro mic drones, EP could hear someone yelling at the truck gunner, helping him correct his fire.


    It was a strange feeling of pleasure that washed over EP, like landing a combo or something in a game, seeing the second vehicle tagged on her fire-map, right in the center of one of Luke¡¯s quadrants.


    ¡°Joe fire on quad ten now!¡± Her voice broke into a girlish squeal, but she didn¡¯t care. Luke laughed into the mic, pivoted slightly, and poured the most beautiful chainsaw burst she had ever heard into the men positioned behind the second vehicle.


    They had parked at an angle for maximum protection against the PKP, but had wrongly assumed Luke¡¯s MG3 was unable to reach them through all the cover at the center of the warehouse.


    And it cost them dearly. The rounds skipped off the hood, the ground, the side of the vehicle, sparked wildly off the pallet rack frames, lighting up the bullet¡¯s paths in EPs aerial view, and in a second three of the gunmen were just odd-looking piles on the ground, their loads of ammo, guns, and armor nothing more than useless things for bullets to tear to pieces. EP laughed with tears in her eyes.


    But the truck gunner still fired, and the last two men on the vehicle behind the pallet racks figured out where the death was and got to cover, picked up the two belt feds, and laid into it. They knew they couldn¡¯t hit Luke, so Lindsey got the full brunt of it.


    ¡°Mother fuckers!¡±


    EP, her joy soured into panic, queued up one of her last bomb drones. The team¡¯s MGs went off unwaveringly, until Michael¡¯s cool, calm, and strangely murderous voice came over the line.


    ¡°Talk it out guys.¡±


    Luke and Lindsey laughed into the noise, though for Lindsey it was more like a gasp, and then started talking.


    The PKP went wild for two seconds, then died, and the MG3 picked it up without a gap, then two seconds later it was back to the PKP, and soon they had the rhythm.


    EP called out the quadrants most needing a little tlc, or where the enemy was under cover, or where the fire was just short of the mark, and it became like some kind of lethal team exercise.


    After about ten seconds of uninterrupted fire, the momentum shifted, and the fire from the attackers died down.


    Again, comically, the relief was as short lived as its ending was brutal.


    Two heavy-riding Suburbans sped up the ramp and into the warehouse. SAWs and rifles bloomed out of the windows and over the roof, and the survivors around the other vehicles resumed their fire on cue.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Lindsey laid into the trigger as the two vehicles sped by, but half a second later they were behind the forest of pallet racks, and a breath later the truck squealed away after them. She sent rounds down range the whole time, but it hadn¡¯t been enough.


    Now she was going to have to play fucking peek-a-boo.

 The Bounty | Chapter 57: Killboxes

    Stop on the X, please


    ¡°Another squad moving in the lot!¡± EP yelled. ¡°Heading towards the southeast offices!¡±


    The MG3 erupted in metal-tearing roars and Luke yelled between the bursts.


    ¡°They gotta get in line!¡±


    He poured lead at the two SUVs speeding past the center row that bisected the pallet racks. They sparked in the dark and vanished, but he kept firing blindly into the maze of cardboard and metal until he thought better of it and decided to save his ammo.


    ¡°Fuck! You got anything for these pieces of shit?¡± he yelled.


    ¡°Gonna try!¡± EP said.


    EP guided another bomb drone toward the southeast corner of the DC. Some of the gunmen got out of the SUVs and piled into the truck bed while others scanned the air with their rifles. As she dropped the drone down out of the support struts, one gunman caught her drone in a beam of white light. She twisted the controls and slammed the descent, but the feed went dark as a stationary camera drone caught the muzzle flash.


    ¡°Shit!¡±


    She closed the dead drones feed and switched to the stationary one that had caught its death. As the attackers who had broken in through the southeast offices linked up with the two SUVs, the pickup truck coasted along the wall towards the front entrance, gun barrels clawing out of the bed and windows.


    ¡°That truck¡¯s moving down the east wall! Quadrant Five to Four!¡±


    Luke pivoted the MG3 and burned brass and belt firing blindly into the pre-marked zone of cardboard and metal. For the first time in what felt like ages, EP saw something go right. The bullets cracked out of the boxes and splattered the gunman in and around the truck with ripping death. Some fell instantly while others scrambled to cover or shot wildly at nothing.


    Trying to keep the momentum, she prepped another bomb drone and scanned the other feeds. Another vehicle sped out of formation in the back lot, and before she could find the words to call it, two other vehicles made for the south ramp again.


    ¡°Two more heading for the ramp, April!¡±


    Suddenly, one of the Suburbans in the southeast corner squealed across the floor and flipped a bitch, heading back west. It took a hard fast turn down the center path between the towering pallet racks, right at Luke.


    ¡°Bitch really?!¡± He swiveled his gun again and squeezed the trigger like it was a trachea. Rounds sparked in the darkness as he walked the fire from the grill to the right tire.


    There was a flash and a roar as a gunman atop the sunroof laid into an M249 and everything around Luke became cracking air and screaming ricochets and shattered barrier. At just under a hundred yards away, the two belt feds ripped the dead space between them into something heavy and bristling. It seemed to last forever, the muzzle flash of the 249 growing like some widening demonic eye as the SUV barreled towards him.


    A breath later the PKP cracked the air open just over his head and his earbuds muffled everything down to his heartbeat. In almost the same moment, the tire he had been shooting at exploded, and for a measureless drawn out second the SUV sailed forward like a ghost and he thought it would never stop, but in a sudden jump, like time had caught up with itself, the SUV jerked to the right and slammed into a pallet rack with an all-metal crash. The rack collapsed in a heap as Luke broke through the windshield with a sustained burst, and it took a few seconds after that for him to realize a stray PKP round had taken out the M249 gunner long before the wheel went.This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.


    ¡°Joe! Left! Quadrants two-one!¡± EP screamed. It all clicked into place in his head, his situational awareness good enough, in this instance, to tell him he was fucked, but unable to do much else.


    The truck hugging the east wall had accelerated in unison with the SUV and in an instant, it was pulling out from around the racks in front of the turnstiles, bristling with fresh barrels.


    Luke pivoted his gun to his left like a boxer rolling with a punch, but it felt like moving through thick oil. He fought the urge to shoot until he had them in his sights, but right as the front bumper slid into his line of fire, there was a distinctive ¡°chunk¡± and the conveyor belts exploded ten yards ahead of his face.


    ¡°Fuck!¡±


    He went blind in a flash and his swear dissolved into a groan as the sudden sensations of gut punch, eardrum strike, and burning needles rolled over him. If he could feel that much with the adrenaline, he thought, almost detachedly, the real damage was probably far worse.


    He unleashed a wave of fire into the pallet racks, the floor, the wall above the entrance, and, eventually, into the gunman in and around the truck, but the biggest effect of the burst was that the muzzle flash reflected off everything, telling him it wasn¡¯t his real eyes that had been destroyed.


    ¡°My NODs are fucked!¡± he hissed, and with one quick swipe of his forearm, knocked the broken half tubes of plastic and glass up out of his face.


    His bursts turned the truck to scrap, but the gunmen had quickly realized that was about all he was hitting. They started to fan out, moving out of cover, and each step they took without getting cut down made them more bold and more sure; This MG gunner was blind as a bat.


    ¡°Joe!¡± Lindsey shrieked and got halfway through changing positions before the gunman moved in for the kill. They were in a half-moon, with rifles raised when the gunfire clashed with the bursts of the MG3.


    It was the slow steady fire of an Ultimax 100. Sam flicked on her IR beam and opened up from under the mezzanine, catching them completely off guard and dropping two before one had time to return fire with a FN MK46. She lay into the trigger and gave them the rest of the drum as rounds sparked off the mezzanine around her like fireworks hitting a chain link fence.


    ¡°Oh shit, sorry!¡± EP squealed, and one of her micro drones bathed the truck gunmen in white light.


    ¡°About god damned¡ª¡± Luke lay into the gun and three men died instantly, but others opened fire from the deep woods of the pallet racks. The concentrated rifle fire rivaled the MG3 and Luke was once again in a world of splintering air and spitting death.


    ¡°Mother fuckers!


    He returned fire, but this time with more conservative bursts. He could feel the belt getting shorter. Somewhere beyond the circle of white light, another belt fed opened up, this time using his own thinly packed quadrant against him, and one of his barrier pallets broke open in geysers of sand.


    In one peripheral camera feeds, EP saw the other two SUVs from the back lot speed up the South ramp and into the DC.


    ¡°Joe, fall back!¡± she squealed, but Luke just laughed and kept firing. She mashed the mute button and screamed. On her camera feed, gunmen scampered down the rows of pallet racks, crawled through boxes and climbed over the racks like insects, evenly spread apart but advancing as a single force, looking for a line of sight on Luke. When they found one, he¡¯d be in trouble, and she would once again be completely helpless and far away.


    Lindsey was less disheartened.


    ¡°Quadrants four-five!¡± she screamed. ¡°Let em fucking have it!¡± She unloaded into a section of the pallet racks and the PKP sent the gunmen scattering. Luke snapped to her target and the two of them once again caught the enemy in a wall of lead, though this time the devastation was diminished. At the very least, the gunmen slithering through the racks stopped dead still.


    EP saw her chance to move in a bomb drone while the gunmen were suppressed. She flew it out of the top of the rack and hugged the ceiling. She was soaked in sweat, breathing erratically, and purely focused on piloting the drone, so she didn¡¯t see another SUV speed across the lot and pull up to the truck office door.


    Luckily, Michael was more alert.


    ¡°Gunmen in the truck office.¡±

 The Bounty | Chapter 58: Fragmentation

    Becoming lethal at the breaking point


    Luke stepped to the side and glared back over his shoulder past the cover pallet behind him.


    In the flickering ghostly light, the window to the truck office was a solid black box, until something flashed and rounds cracked into his cover.


    ¡°Shit!¡± He stepped back to cover and lifted his MG to bring it around, and as if on cue, the gunmen in front of him opened fire from around the truck and pallet racks, crossfire be damned.


    It was a bad spot. He had positioned the cover pallets to prevent two forces from engaging him from either side at the same time, but if the guys in the truck office moved up, or if they had also brought a grenade launcher¡­


    The PKP and the Ultimax tore open the air around the truck gunmen, ripping cardboard and windshield, and everything else the rounds touched to warped shreds, but the enemy didn¡¯t let up. They had smelled blood, and the hatred of machine gunners was a powerful thing. This could easily be lights out.


    Ok. Time to get creative.


    He held the trigger on the MG3 with one hand and it jumped wildly, firing at nothing but empty air and dark warehouse, but a few of the men dropped their heads. With his other hand, he snatched the GM94 out of his bag and leaned around the cover pallet. Rounds struck inches from his face, spraying him with sand and plastic, as he used the soft muzzle flash as a guide and fired the launcher at the truck office.


    The 43mm thermobaric grenade flashed in the dark and outlined the forms of some very dead men. The sound was like a meteor hitting the roof and he felt the blast in his teeth.


    ¡°Jesus!¡± Lindsey screamed.


    Luke tasted blood in his smile as he dropped the launcher and spun back to the MG3 and lined up his sights on the illuminated gunmen around the truck. One of them fired in the air and EP¡¯s flashlight drone went out and they were covered in darkness again.


    Too little too late boys. He lay into the solid darkness with the MG3, keeping the ghostly memory of their bright forms in his rattling, fragmenting mind.


    ¡°Keep em pinned down!¡± some squeaky little Russian-ish voice said in his ear, but before the bolt had cycled again, he forgot he ever heard it.


    EP had the bomb drone right over the gunmen around the truck and one finger on the switch when it got caught in an IR cone and the feed went dead.


    ¡°God dammit!¡±


    She queued another bomb drone up and scanned the cameras again. The two vehicles in the south had moved into the maze of pallet racks.


    ¡°Call quadrants on those vehicles and link me the bomb drone,¡± Michael said, calm as ever. Some of her feeds went out as the new arrivals located her drones in the top rafters, and she thanked herself from an hour ago for thinking to hide some micro drones in the lights. Still, it felt like being blinded. She took a deep breath and was trying to comfort herself by imagining Michael sitting right behind her on his computer, waging the same war she was, when something exploded over Philip.


    Philip hated the relative quiet in his little slice of the darkness, and the waiting. The rest of the warehouse sounded like it was coming apart at the welds. Gunfire and explosions skipped across the thin ceiling and rained down on him like taunts.This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.


    As if in answer to his silent prayer, just above his sights, a fresh squad melted out of the back offices through the door and broken floor-to-ceiling windows.


    He held his fire. He saw in their movements an easy confidence, a smooth advance of the kind that only came from a familiar unspoken communication. They utilized practiced methods without conforming to them, and stepped together like streams forming into a river, then flowed out again to cover every crevice of their new space.


    These were veterans. And despite all his prep, they were too fast for him.


    Before he could make his move, two IR beams flicked across the mezzanine and converged on him. An instant later, an M203 exploded on the ceiling and sprayed him with fragments.


    ¡°Shit!¡± He rolled back firing, cursing himself the whole way down.


    ¡°Alan get the fuck down!¡± Michael shouted in his ears. He found the button inside his mag pouch and waited. Tragically, his ears were ringing from the blast force to his head, making his high-sensitivity earbuds useless. His only sign that automatic fire was tearing open the dead air above his head was the way it sparked angrily off the metal around him. He had no way of knowing how close they were.


    ¡°Zoey,¡± he whispered,


    ¡°I got it.¡± Michael said, his voice muffled. A moment later Philip felt the explosion shake the mezzanine. He had set a charge next to the staircase, but had planned on being able to see them approaching. Another fuck up.


    He rolled up with his gun ready and let out a burst at the first body he saw. When the reflected muzzle flash faded, nothing else moved. The shaped charge had done its work. They must have assumed him throwing grenades meant there were no other explosive traps in the area. Unfortunately for them, he knew how to shield his shit.


    He exhaled in relief and felt a razor-sharp pain. He took his hand off the foregrip and felt around with his pinky, the only finger removed from his gloves, and felt the wet flowing blood on his shoulder, his stomach, and in two places on his right thigh. He stopped looking for blood and got to work slapping on quickclot.


    The line cracked on, muffling the echoes of gunfire even further, and Michael spoke like he was planning a drive-thru shift.


    ¡°Max, move to April and engage. Kate, empty that mag and move to Alan.¡±


    Philip scoffed then stopped breathing and listened. He was right below the gaping hole in the roof blown open by the M203. He stayed quiet until he was sure of what he was hearing.


    Son of a bitch. Not again.


    ¡°Hey Zoey, you watching the skies?!¡±


    The three machine guns talked steadily as the maze of pallet racks crackled with fire and grenades went off wildly. The attackers had fallen back behind the truck, slinked away into the forest of pallet racks, withering under the team¡¯s fire, but now firing from concealment, drawing out bursts of twenty rounds that often hit nothing but empty warehouse.


    Sam moved from position to position, firing sustained bursts and then disappearing behind the boxes or pillars when she was shot at, taking full advantage of her mobility to offset Luke and Lindsey¡¯s static but more lethal positions.


    EP¡¯s flash drones fanned the area with blazing floodlights while evading fire, trying to distract the gunmen that were slowly picking apart her network of camera drones, blinding her further. A small victory, Michael had already guided the last bomb drone to a cluster of four, and one of them was still screaming.


    It was a battle of light and darkness, fire and smoke, sound and silence. The sprinklers had gone off in places and puddles reflected the chaos in little windows of inverted gunfire. The men moving through the pallet racks towards Luke had paused their push, but EP felt it was in preparation of a charge, and not out of hesitance.


    Luke¡¯s ammo got down to the last ten rounds, and after a final, taunting burst, he made a hand signal and started to reload. Lindsey and Sam opened up with doubled intensity as he set the lead round in a 250-round belt into the tray, and he wished they had just held their fire. The enemy smelled what was up, and bullets fell on him like hail blown sideways.


    ¡°Quadrant nine!¡± EP yelled. Lindsey fired through the racks and Sam emptied a magazine into a slab of cardboard a gunman had dropped behind.


    Sam¡¯s burst cut off suddenly, and she remembered Michael¡¯s command.


    ¡°Cover me!¡± she yelled. Just in time, Luke came up and let the MG3 go wild, and the gunmen went quiet again.


    She sprinted under the mezzanine to the Grom leaned on a pillar. She revved the motorcycle and pealed out through the shelves towards Gradie, the infrared headlight throwing shadows of phantom gunmen on the boxes everywhere she looked.


    Luke couldn¡¯t be sure if he was dead yet, if it all wasn¡¯t just some echo of his Self¡¯s last moments replaying in the ghostworlds. That happened sometimes. The MG3 went off on its own, moved on its own. He felt he was not involved. But was anything but afraid. Some distant part of himself noted a sound at the edge of hearing, in the silence between the MG3 bursts, that made him feel all this would soon be coming to an end.

 The Bounty | Chapter 60: Above as Below

    Repeated, reflected, reversed


    ¡°It¡¯s a fucking S seventy-six,¡± Philip said. He could tell just from the sound. ¡°There¡¯s probably ten shooters on that thing. If they get over the roof, they can shoot through it like tin foil.¡±


    He felt blood running down his body, pooling in one of his boots. He had done the best he could with gauze and quickclot and focused now on controlling his breathing (which was always a little dicey when each breath came like a vortex) and telling his flesh what the Spirit already knew. He wasn¡¯t done. He rolled up into a kneel and leaned against a shelf and started to reload.


    ¡°My last bomb drone just went!¡± EP shrieked, like she would beat the chopper with her bare hands if she was close enough.


    ¡°There¡¯s a rebuilt CG in the trailer,¡± Philip said, like a dying confession. ¡°I forgot about it.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve got it!¡± Sam zoomed below him on the bike Lindsey had brought in earlier. He had thought it was ridiculous watching her zip around on it, setting charges, but now he thanked whatever strange gods worked in these worlds for its existence. From the sound of the chopper, they couldn¡¯t waste a second.


    ¡°God dam please let me hit it!¡± Sam screamed. She was almost sobbing.


    EP was watching the helicopter glide in. Horrifying. It moved through the air like a rock falling sideways. A vision of Sam shooting the rocket through the roof and hitting nothing but empty air played in her head, a vision that even in her mind¡¯s eye was viewed through a drone feed. She really was losing touch.


    An idea broke out of the fear.


    ¡°You will. I¡¯ll make sure of it.¡±


    The engine whine came in through a rare gap in the gunfire, just audible enough to make Luke want to scream, right before the shelves exploded.


    High-powered white lights swept each other through dust and smoke. A grenade went off and something nudged him in the shoulder. The air cracked like invisible metal things were ripping each other to pieces just above his head.


    He poured bullets into everything. The casings and links splashed at his feet when he shifted his fire. The noise stressed his earbuds to their limit and the world was a dull roar over a shrill ring, and the smell was like fermented gunfire blended with the burning plastic smell of explosives and his own blood. Another grenade went off, the flash just a warm sensation in his peripherals. Heat in his hand. A wetness that flowed down his sleeve.


    Then the god damned gun stopped like an execution. He almost threw himself over on his face, his body so used to pushing against the recoil.


    ¡°Cover!¡± he yelled, like a reflex, like he had touched a hot stove and his scream came out word shaped.


    Something slapped his face. An unmeasured time later, he went down behind the cover pallet and it was like he had fallen into a cave. His eyes, adjusted to the bright flashing lights, saw nothing but shadow on the ground. He reached up reflexively for his NVGs and found jagged pieces of plastic and metal attached to the mount.


    Oh, right. He laughed. Lindsey held the trigger down on the PKP and screamed at him to fall back. He fumbled in the pool of brass, links, water, and blood for the box of ammo belts. His hands found something else.


    ¡°Fucking A.¡± He pumped it as he came up and knew, with that dream certainty that comes to an operator only when he¡¯s on the top of his game or close to death, that the round would kill. He pulled the trigger the moment he cleared his cover. The 43mm detonated in the center of the path between the pallet racks, just meters away. The enemy had gotten cocky, pushed up the moment they saw him go down, suppressing Lindsey with overwhelming fire. Three of them died in an instant, and the blast hit him in his smile.


    His world was one of white-hot razors. He turned his head in a slow reflex and saw a blurr of white light and dark silhouettes towards the front entrance. More gunmen moving up from around the truck.


    It took years to pump the gun again, like the action weighed a thousand pounds, and every muscle from one palm to the other screamed in exertion. Something squeezed against his arm, and for a moment, he thought it was Lindsey grabbing him in a ¡°you¡¯ve been a bad boy¡± hold to take him to cover, but he remembered, distantly, that she was far above, saving his ass in another way.


    One of the advancing shadows bent funny and the ground sparked all around him. The pump finished its cycle. He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Ages passed. He gave up on it. Then the grenade exploded inside the truck. One silhouette bent funnier than the other one, but the rest kept coming. Kept firing. Kept killing him.


    He tried to let himself fall behind the cover pallet, now a crumpling mound of sand and plates near collapse, but gravity was taking its time. Their muzzles flashed like red carpet cameras while he was still in the air, and it felt like he was getting jumped by ghosts.


    The ground came up to meet him, along with a pool of casings and links and blood, and he groped for his MG with one hand and another ammo belt with the other. A strange deja vu, duplicated infinitely like he was being crushed between opposing mirrors.


    As sudden as death, the PKP went silent and other weapons erupted to fill in the gap.


    EP watched the helicopter come in low towards the highway less than half a mile from the DC. It was a civilian purchased surplus that was surely fitted with all kinds of illegal shit by now. She had it tagged with an IR beam and overlaid the ping on the warehouse map, then rendered a straight line between the helicopter and Sam, but she had to take a visual guess where the line intersected the roof. She pushed out the idea that she could be wrong and guided the drone into place.Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    Sam was off the bike before it came to a stop and caught the ground in a run, sprinting into the trailer. Gunfire and grenade blasts echoed down the shaft of metal like someone was watching a movie with the sound too high. She opened a container tucked frustratingly in the very back and found it; Beautiful, cartoonish, a tube with a flared end and a big rocket already loaded. The helicopter roared above her, rattling the roof like it was right inside.


    They had moved up like dogs smelling blood.


    Philip made sure the cap was on his white light, then pressed the smaller touchpad on his AMG, and sure enough, one of EP¡¯s drones still loitering on the rafter blazed a cone of fifty thousand lumens in the direction he was aiming, probably using one of his attachments as a guide. Clever.


    The grenade was already flying through the air as he started firing. His aim wasn¡¯t as good as it had been even a minute ago, but the surprise made up for it.


    Two of them fell before the metal mesh walkway exploded up at him in a shout of sparks. The grenade went off, and he was reminded that he had neglected to duck. Fragments caught him full in the arm and chest and he slumped down hard, but the AMG spoke through it all, like a dictator giving a speech. It still had a lot to say, but the enemy wasn¡¯t listening. They were doubling down on their return fire or slipping into cover. Like roaches in the light. He knew he¡¯d see them again.


    A bullet ripped through the canvas ammo box and skipped off his chest plate, cracking his jaw and turning his vision into a shuddering blur. A small consolation was seeing Lindsey in his peripherals, putting the finishing touches on a PKP reload.


    ¡°Zoey, you got it?¡± Sam sprinted out of the trailer while flipping the cap of the scope.


    ¡°Yes! Aim at the roof and wait for my signal!¡±


    Sam slid to a stop just outside the trailer and raised the CG to the roof, now roaring like it was going to fall in on her at any second. Flashlights and reflected gunfire broken by skeleton beams danced on the metal ceiling. She stared at the unnaturally illuminated darkness through her NVGs, and breathed.


    It felt like forever, and just as the roar of the helicopter sounded like it was right over her head, the drone lit up like the Christmas star, a ring of red lights hovering in the dust. Sam felt, suddenly, that the rocket in her hands had a life of its own. She rolled with the idea, imagining that the explosive round wanted to touch the helicopter, that it was born for it, like magnet and iron separated at birth. All she had to do was let it go.


    She pressed the trigger.


    A light went on and someone kicked her. The fire ball shot off towards the roof like a flare strapped to a bullet. She felt the shot in her nose, chest, and back. For an instant, it was like she was held in the air by a great invisible burning hand, squeezing her from all around.


    The roof exploded inward in a shower of sparks while she was still looking through the scope. There was a moment of brilliant, blazing horror as a fireball bloomed into life, outlining the helicopter like a spotlight, the scene made all the more horrifying by the sudden silence as her earbuds went into full dampen mode.


    Then the Helicopter fell.


    It sounded like the entire warehouse was being tossed in the trash. Philip saw the roof shake like liquid metal above him as a massive chunk of burning helicopter crashed through the ceiling. One blazing piece tore through the forest of pallet racks right into the armored SUVs, while the rest of it, a molten orange fireball the size of a house, flew sideways as if still propelled by ghosts of the long-gone engines and propeller, crashed through the far wall like all the concrete and rebar were only suggestions, and exploded into rising angry fire in the front lot, like the sun had risen early beyond the turnstiles.


    In an instant, half of the warehouse seemed made of fire and a thick smoke rolled out across the ceiling.


    Philip laughed and felt every bit of shrapnel, every wound, every broken bone.


    ¡°God damn, girl! I haven¡¯t seen anything like that in years!¡±


    Someone shot at him as he sat there recollecting and Lindsey gunned them down. She crouched next to him and wiped her face. It was covered in blood. She tightened one of his tourniquets above a wound he hadn¡¯t even noticed and glared at him, her dainty frown so out of place under her blood-spattered night vision tubes.


    ¡°Alan! You find it yet?!¡± she yelled like it was him sitting in Philip¡¯s place.


    ¡°Alan?!¡±


    ¡°Where is he going!¡± EP screamed.


    ¡°What? Who?!¡± Sam yelled. Engines roared out in the lot, and more gunfire broke out amidst the groans and cracks of smoldering warehouse.


    ¡°Last two cars. Fucking reserves moving in!¡± EP hissed. Drones zipped over Philip¡¯s head as he finished injecting a shot of Epinephrine and brought up his gun. Part of him hoped the kid had dropped out and run off. At least that way he¡¯d never have to work with him again.


    Is there a flaw in my soul? It had seemed so easy. The clothes in the car. The gentle light of morning. The victory in the last gunfight. Here in this dusty dead darkness, everything seemed frozen still, a rigor mortis of a world that had died when he wasn¡¯t looking. He had three pallets left. Nothing seemed less possible than the coin being in one of them. So then, what?


    The Warehouse had fallen apart while he stood there, doing nothing. His friends, or whatever they were, were dying somewhere out of sight. Explosions shook the walls and turned the air into something that slapped and pushed. A bullet would skip out of the darkness and smack against the wall or plink off some metal. A box of charge cords exploded a foot from his hand and rolled off the stack. He felt he was being mocked.


    ¡°It¡¯s not here.¡± The words settled on the dusty boxes laying corpselike under the ghostly cellophane. The voice was a double. It was his, and not his. In his mind, and from outside. It was the Self he had been ignoring for three days, afraid he would drag the real him down into the abyss of ignorance, into a different kind of slumber where the Hardworlds froze up like a trap.


    ¡°It¡¯s not here.¡± He knew it was the truth. He let it be the truth, and his Self knew, the same way he had made his fortune trading worthless tokens, sensing the unspeakable while others chewed on fundamentals and technicals until they starved. His Self was of this world. His Self knew this world.


    ¡°It¡¯s not here,¡± He spoke. He listened. He believed. He knew.


    The last three pallets stood there in black and white, looking like found pieces of a sunken ship in his white phosphor NVGs. He knew he would never cut them open. He dropped the knife and brought his rifle around off his back. He felt it in his hands and his heart raced. The gunfire grew louder.


    ¡°This is not my body. This is not my life. This is my dreamworld. This is my Spirit.¡± The words came naturally, like breath. The anger that had built up with every cut bit of plastic wrapping, every disassembled box pile, dropped away. There were only two options now. Either he would find the coin his own way, or he would never come back to the Hardworlds again.


    He would challenge the gods of gunmetal with rifle in hand, bending reality to his will, and find victory like a true astral warrior, or he would fade away into that glittery neon dreamworld forever. But he would not spend another moment bent over, digging through boxes, praying to an uncaring fractaled universe, begging like a slave.


    He looked around. There was a small square office built into the corner next to the shredded recycling door.


    Instantly, it all made sense. He saw what had happened as clearly as if he had been there. His Self nodded somewhere behind him. Yes, obviously. It was the only thing worth a fuck in that pile.


    He got into a low crouch with his rifle up and moved towards the office, laughing as quietly as he could.


    The whine of a helicopter engine bounced in from the lot and something flashed next to the gear trailer. A few moments later the warehouse was ripped apart. The crash was so loud it seemed proof his entire reality was collapsing.

 The Bounty | Chapter 61: Cremation

    The flesh is burning, the spirit is ascending


    Sam ran out from around a stack of pallets and waved at Gradie to get down. In the blue light of his NVGs, her soft mouth stuck out of the dark rough texture of her battle gear in a drastic frown. An adorable softness out of place in the apocalypse. He would have kissed it if she had given him time.


    ¡°What the fuck are you doing? Did you find it?¡± She had ditched the Ultimax somewhere and scanned behind him with her SIG Rattler.


    ¡°No,¡± he said softly, not taking his eyes off her. ¡°It¡¯s in that office.¡±


    ¡°What? How do you know?¡±


    Just fifty yards away, Luke¡¯s MG screamed like it would never run empty, and her voice echoed in his ears, the earbuds taking milliseconds to parse through the noise.


    ¡°I just know,¡± he said. Her mouth hung open. She glanced at the unbroken pallets behind him and snarled.


    ¡°You didn¡¯t even finish! God dammit, this place is burning to the¡ª¡±


    He swept his shin hard into the side of her knee and she went down with a squeak. He had his rifle up and firing before she hit the ground. Three taps to one, two to the other, he dropped both as their bullets cracked past him. Like shooting pop-up targets in the clubhouse.  They crumpled just inside the bay door on either side of the barrier pallet as the machine gun fire on the mezzanine reached a crescendo. He scanned the staging area to make sure they were clear, then offered Sam a hand.


    ¡°You¡¯re welcome,¡± he said. She grabbed his hand and pulled herself with a yank meant to pull his arm out of the socket.


    ¡°Good job. Come on!¡± She pushed past him towards the returns pallets. He watched her ass bounce for a bit then slinked away towards the back office.


    Another explosion in the center of the warehouse rattled the ceiling. Out in the lot, police lightbars flashed and spotlights swept the smoky air. He stepped quickly up to the office door and tried the handle. It turned easily, like it didn¡¯t know there was a war on, and he stepped inside.


    The burning jet fuel had nearly engulfed the central maze of pallet racks and the blaze rolled out through the massive tear in the ceiling and lit up the warehouse like hellfire. A police helicopter spotlight shone through bullet holes in the roof and lit up the smoke in glittering beams. One of the police vehicles in the lot aimed a light that glared in the blown open bay doors and peeked in at the edges of the other ones like a UFO mid-abduction.


    Fire sprinklers had soaked everything that wasn¡¯t burning. Water and blood pooled on the floor. Sirens and helicopter noise flowed around the building and bounced under the roof like the trapped sounds were growing louder out of anger. It was all misty, steaming, smoky, hazy as a dream, but one that was melting into a nightmare.


    Luke tried to get up and his hand slipped on the pool of water and blood. Casings clinked in the wake like brass jetsam. He got hold of the MG3 and saw he had somehow loaded a fresh ammo belt before passing out. He tried again and got up on one knee this time, and immediately guns went off all around him. Philip or Lindsey responded with a burst from the mezzanine, or maybe it was just the echoes and he was already alone. He stood up with a strength so foreign and distant it felt like being lifted, and shouldered the MG3.


    Three drone-illuminated men were moving up on the other side of the conveyor belts, hugging the mezzanine, with rifles flashing. He pulled the trigger and two of them died in an instant. The muzzle blast shook the bloody water and smoke in front of him into a blurry cone and the recoil knocked him back slipping on his own blood. He came down hard just as the third gunman finished dying.


    Geysers of water and blood shot up around him as someone somewhere returned fire. He brought the gun around as he bounced up into a crouch and drew a crescent of muzzle flash in the wavering air. He felt two punches to the chest and a few to the gut as he stood up, leaning into the recoil like a crutch, never letting off the trigger. He sprayed the crumpled pile of shelves and boxes and eventually the dark forms strobing under dronelight until the belt was empty, then he gave himself permission to die.


    Lindsey watched him, silhouetted against the fire, the flames reflected mirror-like in the water at his feet and even in the blood down his face and arms, throwing fire at his enemies. He looked like he had been made of fire and death all along, and now it was breaking out through his skin, consuming him into nothing. The belt went empty and he collapsed into the pool of blood, casings, and links at his feet. Everything went quiet, besides the fire¡¯s rushing roar, blending into the noise of her own bloodflow. She sighed and felt the blood fly off her lips.You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.


    She turned to scold Philip for dropping the fucking ball, and found his eyes staring at her, empty. The armored platform under him was dark with blood. For some god damned reason, like a breeze of sweet perfume intruding on an operating room, she remembered his laughter.


    ¡°God damn, I haven¡¯t seen anything like that in years.¡±


    And a part of herself that she didn¡¯t know how to speak to cried and wailed that all her friends were dead.


    ¡°Okay, I must be fucking losing it. I really¡ª"


    ¡°Truck office!¡± EP yelled in her ears. Two muzzles flashed in the square of bomb-blasted office and she felt a round fragment on her chest plate and slice up her face. She whipped the PKP around and fanned the belt, and in the corner of her eye, like razors moving in slowly, she saw two more gunmen moving toward the north side of the DC.


    The office was bizarrely calm and quiet. An L desk against the wall, two stacking office chairs, file cabinets, mail baskets, boxes, all in a still darkness that smelled of paper and old carpet. After the jet fuel and gunsmoke smell of the warehouse, it felt like stepping into another world.


    Sam came in the door behind him and shut it softly.


    ¡°Ok then mother fucker. Go get it.¡± She was crouched down in front of the window. Light glared in the warehouse behind her and twinkled in his NVGs. He nodded at the soft silhouette of her head and looked around the office.


    He knew now that pushing on a Hardworld didn¡¯t feel like asking or praying. It felt like remembering. It felt like waking up. So he listened, he waited, looking for something to jog his memory.


    His gaze stopped on the desk, and a realization seeped in like dream knowledge.


    They had taken it in here. They had tried to think of a way to get it out, past all the metal detectors and security. Maybe they had even succeeded, but they had left something else behind. He opened the top drawer with a certainty he had never felt in his life.


    Just old pencils and post-it notes and plastic utensil packages and salt and ketchup packets. His fear and regret rose up like bile as he rummaged through the drawer, his fingers clawing desperately, until¡ª


    He looked down at the trashcan under the desk. Wal-Mart bag filled with Styrofoam cups and empty energy drink cans. He dumped it out, and there was the plastic clamshell box for a Go-Pro Max and the quick-start guide. He found it taped to the third page of the guide with clear packaging tape.


    There was something nostalgic about it. A dull quarter. Nothing worth killing over for anyone in this world, but for him¡­


    He held it up to let Sam see behind him.


    ¡°Holy fuck.¡±


    He smiled at her then looked back at the quarter, and his smile dissolved as a question crawled across his mind. What if the guy had taken the camera with him case-and-all? Would they have all died for nothing? How could he have been sure that hadn¡¯t happened? How had he known? What if it really had been in the last two pallets?


    His mind was spinning so fast around a central axis of broken causality that he felt on the verge of vomiting. This was not like remembering. No matter how he looked at it, he felt that reality had buckled under the force of his mind, and rather than being a triumphant feeling, he felt disconnected, vulnerable, like the whole world was about to drop out from beneath his feet and leave him floating forever in¡ª


    ¡°Ok get going!¡± Sam hissed.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°Are you serious?¡± EP screamed suddenly in his ears. ¡°Drop out! Did you forget how to take it with you?!¡± She sounded on the edge of tears. Gradie exhaled and reached for the drop-out pouch under his magazines. Then the window exploded.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± Sam shot up and opened fire, spraying shells into the filing cabinet. IR lasers moved through the air and bullets followed their path. One caught her in the neck, and she threw herself backward into the wall. Gradie brought his rifle up with one hand and started firing, but the shooters fell behind cover like phantoms.


    ¡°Get out!¡± Sam hissed at him between clenched teeth as blood pooled in her mouth.


    ¡°Alan! Get the coin out now!¡± EP screamed. Sam¡¯s eyes went wide as she glared at him. He let the rifle drop and rolled away from the window, fighting a nearly crippling urge to run to her. He got the syringe out and fumbled with the cap.


    Sam flicked the selector to full auto. Blood was streaming down her chest and she knew she would be out soon. The world outside the window bloomed in her eyes as one of the police spotlights beamed in through the broken bay door. She saw the gunmen clear as day as two of them advanced from behind cover. Her Rattler took the first one full in the chest and head, then she stepped forward and fired four rounds over the other gunman¡¯s head before she brought her hand off of her neck and down to the fore grip, steadying her fire. It felt like the most natural thing in the world. Somewhere out of sight, she was sure Philip was watching her, and it all felt like the breeziest run of the killhouse.


    Gradie watched her die as he plunged the propofol into his vein. She was an angel. Beautiful, radiant, overflowing with death. Bright blood sprayed out of her neck as the gun rocked her body. Shells glittered in the spotlight like glass tears. She moved the gun from target to target and he knew without even looking outside that they were dying like flies. In a few seconds it was over, her bolt locked open, smoking like cathedral incense. The last thing he saw was a bullet sparking off her gun as she fell to the ground, wingless, her task completed.


    As he slipped into darkness, he squeezed the coin in his hand and knew that he would take it with him.

 The Bounty | Chapter 62: What We owe our Selfs

    You leaving you, for now


    The last two gunmen stepped over the corpses of their teammates towards the broken corner office. One kicked in the door while the other stepped through the window frame. The girl was dead, but the guy was breathing softly, leaned back against a file cabinet. Door-man put three rounds through the guy¡¯s face and the window man reached down and opened the newest corpse¡¯s closed fist. It was empty. He had time to look up at his companion before the PKP flashed on the catwalk and both gunmen fell dead in a storm of drywall and gore.


    ¡°They got him,¡± Lindsey sighed, gasping for air after her short sprint.


    ¡°He¡¯s gone by now.¡± EP already sounded like she was drifting away.


    ¡°I hope so.¡±


    ¡°See you back there.¡± The line clicked off. Lindsey took her earbuds out and dropped them on the catwalk. For the first time in what felt like years, she heard the real raw sound of the world, but now it was a world falling apart. The fire roared and cracked just behind her, and the whole half a mile of warehouse groaned and snapped and even dripped. Outside, sirens and shouts and engines blended into a uniform drone of tragedy that rolled ghostlike through the broken bay doors and drifted down through the broken roof.


    She had taken the pills instead of the injection to give her time.


    Though struggling against the brain-crushing tunnel vision brought on by the last grenade blast, she managed to shed her armor and ammo and weapons into a pool of spent brass at her feet, and stomped towards the stairs, sending more shells and debris clattering down into the falsely illuminated darkness. She had a tourniquet on one leg and quickclot on almost every bit of skin she could reach. It might burn, later, she realized suddenly. That other her. Waking up somewhere, but not here. Would she remember? She had heard they didn¡¯t, from those that believed they continued at all. She hoped it was true, that she would take the memories with her. They were hers, after all.


    As she stepped shakily down the stairs, impatient fire spreading behind her and water dripping down after her, she shook off her NVGs and let her eyes adjust to the dim glowing light, half refracted spotlight glare, half firelight, and saw it all with her real eyes for the first time. They ached, too accustomed to seeing only softly glowing images of distant death.


    When she got to the recycling door, she ripped off her coveralls and gloves and got down to just her underwear, boots, and tourniquets.


    This is all I can give you girl. The boots are a gift. Thank me next time you put on your socks without feeling any scar tissue.


    She limped out the bay door with her hands up, blinded by a spotlight, metal and brass and glass crunching under her boots, the fire roaring behind her, throwing waves of heat on her bare skin.


    The cops were yelling something, but she was already past the point of being able to understand. She slowly let herself down as boots marched towards her, casting long shadows on the cement ramp.


    In her underwear was a note, written on the back of a receipt, stuck in an empty bandage pouch, telling a story of being kidnapped and drugged and wrong pin numbers given. It was all she could do for her, and she passed out hoping it would be enough.


    Then there were two of her, one sinking into liquid thoughtless blackness and another walking down a shifting hallway towards another world.


    ****


    EP killed the last drone feed and exhaled what felt like her last breath. Lindsey always tried to give her Self an out. Funny, considering she claimed to believe the Hardworlds didn¡¯t exist after they left. A blessing and a curse, to see them all like this, from above. Her first mentor had warned her. They will forget you were watching and lie to your face about things you saw with your own eyes.


    She took her ear buds out and set them on the desk, then activated the meltdown on her phone and tossed it on the ground. She started the hard wipe and changed into the clothes she had dropped into almost two days ago. She took another deep breath and took three big swigs of vodka then splashed some all over her clothes. Next to the door, she pressed a circular button until it clicked five times like a gas starter. Four separate unseen fires ignited, and the room began to smell of burning plastic.


    She went out and shut the door behind her. There was an airgap between the office and the rest of the building, and it would burn down to ash and leave nothing but a blackened space in the concrete building around it. Gone, but not missed. If something grew in the space left behind, she was sure it would still smell of burning plastic. But would the walls remember? Would the new thing know?Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.


    Her flashlight swept the barren concrete floor. The few remaining broken shelves watched her leave, impatient. The gaping empty freezers on the wall with their old plastic smell were ready for her absence. She had disturbed them by coming here, kicked up old air and broken rightful silence, like a bomb dropped mistakenly in a forest. It longed to heal what she had wounded. It pressed in around her, expelling her, touching her while it did it. She almost cried. Maybe it was the liquor. Maybe it was all the dead friends.


    The lot was bright and dead. The lights kept on to discourage vandalism and vagrants. Light defending the dark. The humming present guarding unerringly the still past. A young woman walking alone in a bad place at a bad time of night, trying to save what she had borrowed, because it could never be returned.


    She made it to the street just as dawn was starting to break. A soft suburb with basketball goals mounted in the ground and fondant lawns hugging chalk-smooth sidewalks. Pink and yellow breathed over paper roofs, and windows blinked back streetlight reflections sleepily. She lay down in the alley, a streak of mosslike grass between planes of stained wood the color of sandwich bread, and took the pills with the last of the vodka.


    A mourning dove tested the depth of the houses with its voice. The girl in the grass dreamed of birds roosting in a burning building. Though she screamed and ran, waving her arms, she couldn¡¯t get them to fly away, and they all burned together.


    ****


    The office was empty and quiet, but demons of fire and shadow with flashlight eyes pressed in on the window. Metal began to scrape metal outside and Gradie knew the warehouse was folding in on itself, forming a jaw of broken-girder teeth, wet with jet fuel saliva. It would soon eat the office and digest him in a stomach made of cellophane and sloshing with Propofol that stretched out in the parking lot like a trash bag bloated with rancid juices.


    He took a deep breath and squeezed the coin. The metal was soft as silver and hummed like a mild electric current.


    I did it. It¡¯s over.


    He stood up and walked his mind through the steps to get out of the Dreamworlds. Michael had told him he would have to do it himself this time, and he tried like hell to remember every single thing he had learned from EP and Celeste and all the other journeys.


    Make a path. Create distance.


    He turned his back to the window and pulled a filing cabinet off the wall like it was made of Styrofoam and found a door behind it lit up in gentle white light. He pushed past it and shut it behind him. The hallway beyond was made of apartment walls and smelled of pan asian take-out. The blue-grey lights wavered like tear-filled eyes. He knew he was far away from the world he had left and turned around to prove it to himself.


    The hallway stretched back for miles and curved up, disappearing behind its ceiling. The voice that had waited silently under his mind for the past two days, threatening to speak, was gone. It was a brief feeling of loneliness. He thanked that other him, for whatever part he had played in the final victory, but there was no one around to hear. He was the only him in this hallway.


    The sound and smell of rain grew stronger as he walked towards a door at the end of the hall. When he got to it, he heard the storm beating on its other side in heavy drops. It sounded like being inside a car while it went through the wash. Water leaked in under the door and moved past his feet like liquid mirror glass. He knew everything behind him was flooding, sinking, that it would all join the dripping nightmare hallways he had seen with Celeste, and something else he couldn¡¯t remember, in that world beneath the world. Those tunnels and hatches that connected every abandoned building and empty home in every dream he had ever had, and maybe even the dreams of every other him.


    He shoved out into the grey shower and slammed the door behind him. It shattered from the force, leaving him with no way back.


    Good.


    The woods were familiar. At first glance, he had thought he was in a rainforest, but as he stomped ahead, he saw it was the type of raw brush that might be left between two housing divisions back home, or growing unchecked behind an apartment complex. Shouldn¡¯t it be a rainforest if that was what he was expecting? Was his own mind defying him?


    ¡°Welcome back,¡± Klara said in his mind, and he almost sobbed. Her voice felt warm and compared to the cold of the rain, and the sensation of hearing her in his head was completely Otherworld, and he realized how much his Spirit had missed it.


    ¡°I trust you have your mask on,¡± she said gently. He summoned his mirror mask and pulled it over his face.


    ¡°Where am I?¡±


    ¡°You tell me.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s a forest.¡±


    ¡°Then it¡¯s a forest. The Otherworld made it for you. You can decide which forest it is, though.¡±


    ¡°What do you mean?¡±


    ¡°There¡¯s a forest on the Allworld, south of the big suburbs. If you push through those bushes, you should find yourself at the edge of it.¡±


    He moved a wing of greenery out of his way and stepped onto cement. There was a big fountain in front of him, the bottom glittering with bright pennies. There was no rain here, and the copper shined in the sun. On the other end of a big cement court, a mall repeated itself. Like a thousand different malls fused together. People walked in and out, flew up through the skylights, parked crafts on the roof. He had made it.


    ¡°I¡¯ve got the coin.¡± He held it in his hand and let it glare in the sun. For a moment he thought about turning it into a penny and throwing it into the fountain.


    ¡°Good. Meet us at the office.¡± The sensation of her presence left his mind gently.


    He flew up through the blue sky till it turned black and tore around the curve of the massive pulsing planet. The memories of his days in the Hardworld slipped from his mind like raindrops off a windshield. He tried to catch them, but it was hopeless. It was all little more than a fading dream. Lucy would have to make do.

 The Bounty | Chapter 63: A Kiss Goodbye

    Is this flesh I feel?


    Gradie landed inside the office and found Michael already waiting, wearing the same weird white quasi-kimono he had worn to the briefing, and standing next to Lucy, who looked like a snow demon photoshopped into the soft light of the office. She held her hand out, smooth as a glass doll.


    ¡°The coin please.¡±


    Gradie tossed it to her, and it floated through the air like it was moving in zero-g. She caught it, rolled it over with a smooth swipe of her blood-nailed thumb, studied it with her neon eyes, which glowed for an instant, then slipped it into her pocket, or somewhere between her form-fitting silk dress and her marble skin.


    ¡°All right, look at me.¡± Her voice snaked through his mind like he was thinking the words himself. She waved a hand across her face and his eyes sunk into her neon violet gaze.


    ¡°Take off your mask.¡±


    He did.


    ¡°Remember the first thing you saw when you woke up two days ago in your house, just before Sam picked you up.¡±


    And he did, and in an instant it all rushed out of some dark previously hidden part of his memory right before his eyes, the hours, the days, Sam looking at him and everything they had said and the mother fuckers shooting at him and his feeling of victory and the crushing unrelenting weight of failure and uselessness and all the fear and the smells of gunfire and gore and then she was dying again right in front of him as he faded away under the impossible breath-crushing gravity of Propofol.


    For an instant, that other him lingered, just long enough to cry out to him, and he felt, suddenly, that he was on the verge of a revelation, a re-realization of something that had bloomed into being, beautiful and pure, sometime after the drug had put him down.


    Then it passed, and he felt he had missed something that he would be looking for forever.


    ¡°Next time try and come out of the Dreamworlds straight into the office,¡± Lucy said, her voice now just another sound, her eyes now studying again the coin that she had brought out of nowhere. ¡°Your Self¡¯s memory was already half gone.¡±


    And with that, she dropped through the floor. Michael smiled and clapped his hands around Gradie¡¯s still outstretched coin-offering arm and shook it.


    ¡°Congratulations. Job well done.¡±


    ¡°Fuck yes! I was so bad ass!¡± Sam¡¯s voice struck him like another bullet as she walked in, drink in hand the color of molten lead. Luke and Lindsey came in behind her, and they had all shed their mortal skin. The flesh on their faces would never age. It glowed in the light of angels, while their eyes glared like stars, their clothes moved as if in water, their hair fluttered as filaments of distilled color, their movements like those who forgot gravity with every step.


    Sam looked Gradie up and down and smiled at his outfit, which he only now realized was somehow the same kit he had worn to his grave in the warehouse, and bounced up to him waving her drink near his face.


    ¡°Are you gonna go shoot up the Allclub or¡ª¡±


    He grabbed her by the waist and kissed her, like a man desperate to devour the last of a dream before it ends. Echoes of the days before had flared up at her voice, and he reached out for the girl who had saved him in the rain, mocked him over take-out, smiled at him over her coffee.


    When you see a dream come true, right in front of you, can you be sure it¡¯s not a trick of the mind? Like D¨¦j¨¤ vu, a retroactive prediction? Wouldn¡¯t you want to be sure?If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    She shoved him hard with her fists and he let himself float away.


    Her face was twisted into surprise and confusion, and she tried to cover it with an anger that wouldn¡¯t quite respond to her call.


    ¡°What¡ª¡±


    ¡°I saw you die.¡± He felt the tears float away from his eyes. One passed in front of him, and he saw it was blood.


    ¡°Well, deal with it! Dying is our job.¡± Her voice cracked. Fingers of razor-sharp ice moved outward through his chest. Had any of it been real?


    ¡°Gradie, don¡¯t kiss your co-workers,¡± Michael said. Joking. Trying to lighten the mood. Hoping he would just get over it.


    ¡°I know it can be confusing,¡± Lindsey started.


    Gradie threw his mirror mask on over his weeping traitorous eyes and turned his back on them and kicked across the room. He heard it in their tone, saw it in their eyes. This was no big deal, happens all the time. Just another newbie freaking out after a job.


    ¡°Gradie, it''s normal to¡ª¡± Michael called after him, his tone parental, patronizing. Gradie wanted to shoot him, but he was stuck here in a world where guns didn¡¯t kill and you only bled if you wanted to.


    ¡°Fuck! Yourself!¡± he yelled, then went through the wide frosted window and shot out into the Allcity, then flew straight up until he found the silent darkness. He screamed out into the void and the sound died inches from his face. The dots of light flickered at him. The orb of the great planet seethed like an optical illusion.


    Could he imagine all this? Maybe everyone did. A massive dream that felt like it lasted all night, but was really just some trick of the brain, a process that had never been studied or explained because it was never remembered. Other people probably went to some kind of paradise, or an ideal version of their real life, but he dreamed of a shared dreamworld and a team of quantum phantoms with a spot just for him. Typical. He overthought his Dreamworld till his brain rejected it, denying himself happiness even here.


    ¡°Michael¡¯s wrong, you know. It isn¡¯t natural,¡± Klara said. He wanted to deny her existence, but her voice proved her reality. It felt impossible to imagine her, to predict her. They all felt like that, when he thought about it. Was that what scared him? Not thinking it was a dream, but fearing that it might be real? That she might be real?


    ¡°Throwing yourself back into flesh, living as another version of yourself. Seeing your whole life only as a dream. It¡¯s a lot to ask. It¡¯s a lot to take.¡±


    ¡°They all do it.¡±


    ¡°And they all suffer for it, in one way or another. You may not see it, because they¡¯ve faced it and come to terms with it, but it¡¯s there.¡±


    He felt her hand on his shoulder, and when he turned, she was floating there. Smiling.


    ¡°You don¡¯t have to do it. There¡¯s a whole world out there.¡± She glanced out at the black. ¡°More than you could ever see.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not the same. I¡¯d rather be in a Hardworld.¡± She had a way of getting the truth out of him. It would have scared him if she wasn¡¯t so warm.


    ¡°Then don¡¯t let anyone make you feel guilty about the way you do it. If you had listened to everyone else, you never would have found the coin.¡± She winked at him and disappeared.


    ¡°Thank you.¡± He thought.


    ¡°Any time.¡± She said from everywhere, and her presence left his head. She knew just how much to say, just when to leave, and it occurred to him, through a more cynical voice than he wanted to hear, that she probably had a lot of practice dealing with the emotional oscillations of Hardworlders.


    Hardworlders¡­


    That¡¯s what I am now. That¡¯s what I¡¯ll always be. A Hardworlder.


    He tried to remember what it had felt like, at the end of the job, to give up their ways and jump with his whole weight onto his own, to risk it all, to find the coin right where he had expected, but he could hardly remember where he had found it at all. It had only been minutes ago, theoretically, but seemed so far away, like it had happened to someone else.


    It was the saddest feeling in the world.


    His communicator rang out like an old Nokia phone. God dammit, now?


    ¡°Hello?¡±


    ¡°You done crying?¡± Philip said.


    ¡°Fuck you.¡±


    ¡°Yeah, fuck me. Anyway, the team¡¯s going out for a celebration, something about one of the twins running a party on Planet Sol, whatever the fuck that means. I think they¡¯re about to go looking for you. Probably apologize and tell you its ok that you threw a big tantrum and invite you along.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not going, tell them¡­¡± Gradie was already looking around the black frantically, wishing he had any idea how to get to one of those stars.


    ¡°Yeah, I¡¯ll tell them you need some alone time to figure out all your problems and get a really good cry going.¡±


    ¡°Fuck¡ª¡±


    ¡°Yeah, I know. Anyway, my ships hovering above the Allclub, right over that club with all the waterfalls and whales and shit. You remember how to use the controls?¡±


    ¡°To get to the HQ?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. Lucy already has the mem of the job loaded into the bank. I wanna show you in detail how you fucked up before Michael gives you the kiddie gloved version.¡±


    Gradie was already halfway around the ball, flying faster than he ever had, his tears long forgotten, his thoughts full of highways and gunfire.

 The Bounty | Chapter 64: Mice and Maya

    A lost soul, found


    He saw his brains fly out in front of him and spatter on the curtains. Bright pink and white bone on cobalt blue. The colors smeared together and faded as he dropped into darkness.


    ¡°Cooper. We need to talk,¡± The voice said from everywhere.


    Shit. That fat fucking traitor. He visualized a door and it appeared in front of him. He told himself, in a very stern fatherly tone, that the door would take him to the Allclub, then grabbed the handle and it shattered into pieces.


    ¡°There¡¯s no escaping ones such as us, Cooper.¡±


    The voice was multiple, oppressive. His name echoed in his own head and he couldn¡¯t think about anything else, so he screamed, and the two noises blended together and blinded out his thoughts, catching him in a swirl of light and sound that took hold of his focus and broke his mind free of the causal chain it had been bound to.


    He found himself sitting in a recliner, with a glass of scotch in his hand and a naked woman bouncing on his knee. The sudden relaxation took hold of him like a straight jacket.


    ¡°I¡¯ll be back to check on you later.¡± She kissed him and waddled away. She was a teacher he had been obsessed with in high school, and as he realized this, she turned back to him and winked, then disappeared into the unlit void beyond the circle of soft light.


    There was a man sitting in front of him smiling. Two others, faces hidden under eyeless tengu masks, stood behind the first man, their arms clasped behind their backs oddly.


    Or at least it looked that way. For all he knew there could be a million, or just one. His mind was captured. Everything was suspect. The man sitting in front of him, three-piece suit the same kind the lawyer had worn in his day on court, read his mind.


    ¡°It¡¯s not so bad, is it? Could be worse. You¡¯ve heard about Nightmare, right?¡±


    Cooper nodded. Just get to it. Tell me what I¡¯m in for, you demonic fuck.


    ¡°Here¡¯s something you may not know. Nightmare is, as the old saying goes, other people. By that I mean that in order to keep you in Nightmare, someone has to will it, continuously.¡±


    Cooper nodded, but he didn¡¯t believe. No one knew how Nightmare worked, and if they did, the last mother fucker in the Other they would let in on it was sitting in this fucking chair. The man, of course, read his mind, but just kept on smiling, and talking.


    ¡°No matter how well crafted a box is, eventually the Spirit will escape, unless it¡¯s watched. Now, it¡¯s a lot, of course, for someone to expend all their time keeping someone else locked up, especially when there is so much out there to think and do. They take turns, obviously, but it¡¯s still quite the expense. And so, Nightmare is reserved for those who are truly worth the effort. But, fortunately, one day in nightmare is more than enough to ensure that there are no repeat offenders. It¡¯s a punishment that lasts on its own. You see, it¡¯s very hard to enjoy paradise knowing such a pure and undeniable hell exists as part of it.¡±


    He got quiet. He let him think about it. And Cooper decided that they were probably not going to put him there, otherwise they would have just done it and let him find all this out on his own.


    ¡°So, what do I have to do to keep you from sending me to,¡± He trailed off. Unable to say it.


    The man nodded and smiled. ¡°I want to know where you got it.¡±


    Cooper glanced at the masked men as if the frowning tengus could give him a hint. There had to be a trick in it somewhere. The answer was too easy.


    ¡°The guy gave it to me.¡±


    ¡°What guy?¡±


    ¡°The one we robbed.¡±


    The man frowned for a second, then burst out laughing. The laugh came from everywhere. It came from inside Cooper''s forehead. Cooper laughed too, because it also came from his tongue, from his throat. It leaked out of each of his teeth.


    ¡°Saints on the cross, kid. You are stupid. Not the god damned coin. Where did you get the snare?¡±


    ¡°The what?¡±


    ¡°He means the mouse trap,¡± one of the masked men said. His voice was fragmented and it echoed, but there was something familiar about it.


    ¡°Yes, the mouse trap,¡± lawyer man said.


    ¡°We just found it.¡± Cooper had a twisting feeling that he didn¡¯t know enough about what was going on to get himself out of this one.


    ¡°My fucking dick you found it. No more lies, Cooper.¡± His strange tone and choice of words reminded Cooper of someone, but he wasn¡¯t about to try and remember anything that wasn¡¯t asked of him.


    ¡°We did! It was just fucking sitting there!¡±


    ¡°Try and remember,¡± The man said, like he was daring him to jump off a bridge.


    The room slid away from him and another rolled into its place, like the two were connected end to end, two realities painted on the inside of a rolling orb. Cooper saw Rowland sitting there, his arm around the girl, jumping and pointing.If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.


    ¡°Right there! Right fucking there! Go to it!¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not fucking going anywhere near that thing.¡± JP, their pilot shook his head while squinting out the window.


    ¡°Why not?¡±


    ¡°That shit belongs to someone serious. Look how black it is! That¡¯s blacker than black hole black, man. A big-time maker put that together. I don¡¯t wanna fuck with people like that. They¡¯ll trap you in a box.¡±


    ¡°Bullshit! It¡¯s just sitting there! If it was some big shot¡¯s we¡¯d never even see it!¡± Rowland was jumping hysterically.


    The room and the man and the masked men rolled back into place.


    ¡°I fucking told you.¡±


    ¡°Go back.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°Go back to before he saw it. Walk me up to that moment.¡± The man had death in his voice. Cooper found he couldn¡¯t close his eyes, so he stared up at the circle of darkness over his head, and tried to remember. The memories expanded and strengthened until they filled up the room and it rolled back out of sight.


    Rowland was sitting with the girl, Ooma. They had just left Fuscia, where she had caught their eye dancing under a never-ending fountain of soapy water. Rowland had sworn he never came so hard outside the real. He was even tired afterwards.


    ¡°Can I sleep in this place?¡± He had laughed, then he had looked at her, as if she had the answer to everything.


    ¡°No, not really.¡± She giggled and winked at Cooper. Later she had fucked him on a cloud that felt the way a child imagined clouds did, soft warm ephermal cotton, and he understood what Rowland meant. It was better than having a body again. If this was what those memories were like, the ones that felt ¡°more real than the real¡±, than it was no mystery why people slaved away to buy one.


    ¡°Focus.¡± The man¡¯s voice poked his mind and cleared the haze of lust. ¡°You¡¯re in the ship.¡±


    He was. Rowland was sitting with the girl. She just sat there smiling like a housewife swimming in marital bliss.


    And then he saw it.


    It happened so fast. So natural. At the time he hadn¡¯t even thought of it. Anything she did had sent his mind groping desperately at thoughts that only partially responded. Now, seeing it again, without the haze of her sex, he knew that he was fucked. This was something bigger than him. Bigger that swiping mem and sticking up old resort tramps.


    ¡°What was that?¡± She pointed out the window.


    What was what?¡± Rowland purred without looking away from her face, like humoring a child.


    ¡°No really! Did you see that shit? It was like a solid black spot out there.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s all black,¡± Rowland said. He looked outside, reluctantly at first, then studied the void the same way he had searched her eyes for some sign of her magic.


    ¡°Yeah, but this was like, really black. Like blacker than black, you know?¡± Innocent, stupid, curious. She was none of the things Cooper had been so sure she was. Only now, seeing the memory replayed, refracted, did he see her as she had always been.


    ¡°Hey JP!¡± Rowland yelled to the front. ¡°Back this bitch up!¡±


    The room with the man and the masks slid back into place, but this time the girl stayed. She sat there, frozen, just as Cooper had remembered her. The lawyer man was staring at her like she had pulled the pin out of a grenade and tossed it to him.


    ¡°Take them out,¡± he said to no one, and men appeared from nowhere. Solid black silhouettes. They walked Cooper and the two masked men through a door, and the last thing he saw of the room was the suited man staring at the frozen, smiling, winking girl, as if expecting, hoping, praying, that he would start to see anything else.


    The silhouettes led them into a stone room with a view onto an endless ocean, like a historic castle preserved for tourists. It felt more real than anything he had ever seen in the Otherworld, and its realness pressed down on his mind like physical exhaustion, pushing his memories away. He struggled to remember the Real or even who he had been just moments ago. Eventually, he knew, he would forget even that he had forgotten.


    One of the men took off his mask. It was JP.


    ¡°Dude, what the fuck did you assholes get me caught up in? I had to sit in a Hardworld for days, and these fuckers still got me!¡±


    The other man tossed his mask at JP. It was Zip.


    ¡°I didn¡¯t do shit. My only crime is smashing some choice pussy.¡± He looked at Cooper. ¡°Bro, no lie, that shit was worth Nightmare.¡±


    ¡°How can you be so sure, until you¡¯ve been?¡± a voice said from everywhere. JP. whimpered and Cooper slumped to the floor.


    ****


    He saw his own reflection in the peephole, which if looked into, would show only darkness. Not the darkness of an unlit place on the other side of the door, but the darkness you might expect to see if every scrap of reality beyond the door had been ripped out and whoever had done it had left the peephole just to show you they had. Otherwise, how would you know?


    His reflection was hazy, incomplete. It had only been partially scraped, as if whoever had preserved the mem hadn¡¯t thought the identity of the man important at all, which was strange to the point of being frightening, as it was obvious how important they had thought the memory itself.


    But it was enough to know he was middle aged, average, un-adorned. Dressed in plain clothes, the sweats and shirt of a Sunday off, not the flashy attire of the Otherworld, which was certainly where he was, for behind him, shown in the reflection and in the peripheral memory attached, was a simple room broken cleanly in half. The soft indoor light and carpet stopped five feet behind him and gave way to a dark opal ocean rolling into soft sunless sunset. In the bottom of the deep sea, the memory told her, was everything the man had ever tried to hide from himself, all the truths ready to shatter all of his lies, his real self ready to raise a final objection to the persona¡¯s insistence.


    But all that could wait. He had only one focus now. The doorknob. He watched it. Studied it. Imagined how it would feel in his hand, how it would turn, the sound, the sensation, but he didn¡¯t move. It was important that he didn¡¯t move before it was time. And he would know it was time only when he heard the signal.


    Lucy knew that he had been standing like that for years, and the pure terror of the thought was very difficult to ignore. She wanted to leave. She wanted to stop watching. But it was too late for that. Now she had to know. She had broken a very important law to know. She had risked everything, not just what she had, but what he, what they all had, again, to know, and knowing might be her only defense against the immeasurable consequences of having learned.


    So she watched. And listened. And she heard.


    ¡°Goodbye.¡±


    Oh God damn, how fucking awful. How gut crushingly terrifying, that voice. Just a pure, animal fear at the sound of it, and the feel of it, as it snaked through her mind. She was almost certain it knew she was there, that the speaker could sense her beyond time and infinite distance, and she felt sure for some reason that she had to respond.


    But before she could, the man smiled, a big spreading smile that made a noise in his throat and pulled tight the skin at the back of his neck, and then he turned the knob.


    It sounded just like he had always known it would. The door even creaked a bit, just as he expected it to, and he was free, just as he had always known he would be.


    And the memory ended, and Lucy poured over every schema of defense she had, looking for a sign that someone somewhere had seen.


    But she knew that ultimately, it was a waste of time. If anyone had been watching, she would know soon enough. It would be kind of hard not to notice being thrown into Nightmare.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze - FTO

    Forced Time Off


    Gradie¡¯s last month of training had been a mad dash to put distance between himself and the coin Job.


    After the job was over, when he had calmed down enough to have a debrief, Michael had congratulated him on his successes, while Philip tried to drive home a warning.


    ¡°If that coin had been in one of those last three pallets, we woulda been sunk. Pushing is always a gamble. Never forget that.¡±


    Gradie had tried to protest that he hadn¡¯t actually pushed anything, but they gave him another one of those ¡°how do we explain the sky is blue¡± looks, and he remembered that¡¯s how pushing was supposed to feel.


    The rest of the debrief had been spent going over minutiae about his performance in the various firefights, the discussion enhanced by a live play of mem from his point of view. It was hard enough to focus given his mind¡¯s tendency to fly off on wild what-if scenarios, but the entire time he was terrified they might start playing his memory of Sam¡¯s apartment. Still, he managed to pick up enough details to compile a list of his shortcomings, then it was off to the Vault.


    The training had been oriented around his biggest failing; priming a Self that could survive dropping into a specific Hardworld intact. A lot of his progress during the first round of training had fallen short when it came to preserving a Self¡¯s abilities while also waking up in the target¡¯s world.


    ¡°It¡¯s a push and pull, like everything else.¡± Philip had advised him, and that was essentially the extent of his advice. For weeks, Philip would drop into a Hardworld, Klara would scrape a vision together and feed Gradie the data. Then he would drop in and head to the clubhouse, where Philip would run him through the god damned gauntlet.


    The difficulty was that while priming a Self alone felt like building in the infinite, each additional parameter increased the difficulty exponentially. The twins mentioned some kind of law or equation, but Gradie didn¡¯t need terminology to know what Philip made him live through, painfully.


    ¡°A real Hardworlder can be given an address, occupation, even fucking a phone number from a client and drop into a self that matches no problem,¡± he told Gradie casually one day. Around the same time, probably three weeks into it, he gave Gradie the only other piece of advice he would give on the matter.


    ¡°It helps to work backwards.¡±


    It was another week and a half before Gradie realized what he meant. Rather than priming a self like telling a story, birth to adolescence to the present, the key was to push the final result, visualize the self actually using the skills in the Hardworld he was dropping into, and letting the hardworlds sort out the how and why.


    It was nearly impossible in practice, and the few times he came close to pulling it off only made it worse. At least if he had never done it, he could tell himself it was simply beyond him.


    One day, around the month mark or so, He found the door to the Vault unresponsive, and Michael standing nearby.


    ¡°I had hoped you would have gotten over your fear of the Otherworld on your own by now, but it looks like I¡¯m going to have to throw you out. I feel like a dad dropping his kid in the deep end.¡±


    It took Gradie a moment to realize what he had just said.


    ¡°Why would I be afraid of the Otherworld? I thougt you said nothing out there could hurt me? Or was that another half truth?¡±


    Michael kept on smiling, as If everything Gradie said or could ever say was something he had orchestrated.


    ¡°You are going to go out there, and make a craft. Then you are going to take that craft and fly it away from the ball. To a gameworld, or a resort world or something, I don¡¯t care, but you will not stay here. If I find you still hanging around tomorrow, I¡¯ll drop you out into the black myself.¡±


    ¡°I thought only demons could make people go where they didn¡¯t want to.¡±


    ¡°Maybe I am a demon. I could be, for all you know about any of it. It¡¯s time you stop taking everything I told you the first day for granted. Maybe I should have let you flounder around¡ª¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know how to make a craft, and I don¡¯t know where¡ª¡±


    ¡°Fly up, past the blue, where the Principality of the Allworld lets go, and use your mind. Put this inside your craft,¡± he took a black orb out of his jacket. ¡°And connect it to a screen. Then you can navigate your craft to wherever you want. I loaded a few worlds into it.¡±Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.


    Gradie took the orb and kept his face taught. The idea of flying around a liquid dreamworld in a ship out of his mind sparked a current in his throat. Childhood fantasies jumped back to life, and he realized what Michael meant about his fear. He wasn¡¯t scared of the Otherworld. He was terrified it would disappoint him.


    ¡°After you¡¯ve spent a few days or so outside the ball, get with the Twins and construct your home realm. For the next week, you are not a Hardworlder. You are a new Spirit, looking for a good time. If you need¡ª¡±


    ¡°A week?¡± Gradie was sure a job would get called before then. The twins had mentioned at least three in negotiation. The thought of dropping in on a live run when he had just started ironing out last jobs failures soured his aspirations. He had intended to drop into the next job as a Hardworlder unlike anything the team had ever seen, putting on a show of true lethality, culminating in a daring rescue of Sam and EP, drenched by tripped fire sprinklers, menage trois among the shell casings¡ª


    ¡°Your Spirit needs an anchor,¡± Michael continued. ¡°If the next job lasts more than two days, you¡¯ll understand, but it will be a painful understanding, and this is one lesson I¡¯d prefer you learn the easy way.¡±


    A door slid open in the wall and Michael¡¯s noir-lounge control room twinkled on the other side. He stopped in the frame and looked over his shoulder like Gradie had tried to run off.


    ¡°And don¡¯t bother going to the Vault in your craft. The twins have strict orders not to let you in.¡±


    Gradie nodded, a comforting thought forming in his head, but Michael cut it off.


    ¡°Orders that I have ensured will be followed to the letter.¡± His voice had the shape of threats, and Gradie knew the Vault would be sealed from the jungle planet as well, if he could even find it. The twins had mentioned being able to make the entire world ¡°un-reachable¡± at will.


    ¡°And remember, don¡¯t go to any mem dealers.¡±


    ¡°You already told me that,¡± Gradie snapped. Despite Michaels insistence that he try and sell his mem that first day on the ball, he had been forbidden to sell any after joining the team. Not that it mattered. He had enough MEM to buy whatever he wanted, if he could ever figure out what that was.


    Michael disappeared and Gradie sulked down the hallway towards the door to the atrium, trying to explain to the childish part of him now jumping with excitement that the Otherworld was a disappointing place and he should curb his enthusiasm and replace it with a more adult skepticism or at most a mild hope, like when the movie your friends drag you too isn¡¯t quite as insulting as you expected.


    The office was unusually empty and the lights were somehow dimmed, probably Michaels doing. He tried to remember the ¡°exit procedures¡± (which reminded him, painfully, of springing out of an armored SUV with a rifle raised in some parking lot millions of realities away) and remembered what Philip had told him, one day between training sessions, after Michael had insisted for the thirtieth time that he take some time off.


    ¡°This is the trap door. It¡¯ll kick you out through one of a couple thousand open access doors around the city. Randomized for security. If you don¡¯t have a destination in mind or don¡¯t need the privacy of the hallway.¡±


    Gradie recalled nodding and excusing himself and walking right back to the Hallway and the door to the Vault. Philip had been waiting for him in the Hardworlds like Michael had never said shit and they continued the training as if they had never stopped. It was unspoken, but everytime Gradie returned to the Vault or the Hardworlds after assuring Michael he would take a break, Philip¡¯s words got just a little less harsh, at least until Gradie made some mistake that reset their relationship back to grunt and taskmaster.


    He held the trap door open, and stopped himself. His black sleeve brought out another sluggish half buried memory. He needed a new outfit for ¡°dreamer Gradie¡±, that other persona who knew absolutely nothing about Hardworlding besides some Allclub urban legends, and who loved flying around the Allworld and sinking into harem simulations or whatever. Gradie flinched and decided that Dreamer Gradie had a similar distaste for all that shit, and just wanted to fly. He had learned that a simpler identity, oriented around a single facet, was easier to slip into anyway.


    He banished his mirror mask and long dark jacket and 90¡¯s action movie assassin get-up, stashing it in a compartment he imagined was a few centimeters wide on the left side of his pocket, and looked in the mirror hung above the chute.


    Neutral grey sweats and shirts. The archetype of all ¡°clothes¡±.


    What would Dreamer Gradie wear? He does a lot of flying. Spacesuit? Something with a high collar. Metallic, mildly reflective maybe. With goggles¡ª


    In the mirror, the air around him rippled and an outfit shook out of it. A high collared jacket that the mirror told him through dreamknowledge was a ski jacket


    In the mirror, there was an infinite line of Gradies, as if another mirror had sprung up behind him, but when he glanced back to check, there was nothing but empty office.


    The other Gradie¡¯s were wearing variations on his chosen theme, high collared metallic jumpsuit esque get up, and he knew that the mirror would help him dial in his look with a library of almost every kind of clothes ever worn in the Other.


    Ok. Ski suit. So¡­


    The outfit took shape, with some refinement. He had to stop himself from gravitating towards his Hardworlder aesthetic, the mirrored surface of the goggles and the high collar already reminded him of his mirrormask and trenchrobe. Eventually, he chose a metallic blue-grey ski suit, reflective enough to pick up the hues of the office, and he assumed whatever else he stood next to, mirrored ski goggles hanging around his neck from an invisible strap, and gloves, boots, and belt pouch of a kind of leather the same color as the underside of a raincloud.


    Just enough personality to look like his Otherworld Self gave a shit about putting it together, and just enough anonymity and camouflage if he needed it. Perfect.


    He kicked open the trap door and jumped down into darkness.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze - The Craft

    An unputdownable pulse pounding thrill ride


    The chute was a flashing tunnel with concentric bands of light and dark that reminded Gradie of the casino level in an old Sonic game. He rolled and dropped so many times he couldn¡¯t be sure if he was sliding feet or head first or even in what direction. When the disorientation was complete, it spit him out in the familiar hum.


    He looked back at the building behind him, but saw no evidence of whatever hole he had popped out of, only a solid pane of opalescent marble. He realized the exits could number in the millions and be anywhere in the city, which reminded him he had no idea where he was.


    A scan of the buzz around him gave little indication of his location, until he spotted a familiar tower shimmering up into the sky.


    Gulfstream tower. A pillar of streaming bright water as thick as a city block. Like a morphing serpent of molten glass that stretched from the deep dark undercity all the way up to the black. He had only seen two of them, the other being an orange and peach colored sibling shooting into the sky near the 6¡¯oclock band, turning dark violet at the top.


    Inside Gulfstream tower, Spirits swam with projections of sea life and air-bubble bars the size of neighborhoods. It took you right up to the black but terminated in a spiral eddy that portaled to a resort world called Tidepool or something. He had ridden it once but dropped out halfway up. It had been awkward taking it alone, especially with all the couples. Maybe one day he¡¯d ask Celeste if she¡ª


    ¡°Have you ever wondered what it feels like to be the ultimate killer? An apex predator at the top of your game? And what if the very organization that created you, the country you loved, the nation you swore to protect, took everything you hold dear, in the blink of an eye?¡±


    The voice hit him before he had a chance to put his defenses up. It had a directional quality and he found the source with an irritated flick of his eyes, like locating the side mirror beaming you with reflected sunlight from across a parking lot.


    It was a craft shaped like a black hawk helicopter flying meters above a city street where a bomb had just gone off, the explosion frozen in time. The blades spun dramatically in slow motion, and a masked man hung out the side, holding a pornstar-bodied woman by the hand as she hung down towards the fiery death ball, tears in her eyes, a look of pure desperation and need, back arched in an anatomically improbable way, tits and ass poked out in either direction like there was a second unseen explosion inside her spinal column propelling them away from her.


    ¡°In ¡®Wounded Game¡¯, you are a grieving father, a tortured widow, an enemy of the state, and a Navy Seal, with nothing to lose, and no more red tape to hold you back. Your bloody quest for revenge will take you to¡ª¡±


    Gradie had gotten really good at flying. The few times Philip had put a pause on his training, or the Twins had told him to come back in a few hours, he had taken to the skies, timing his trip around the ball, and looking for any dots or silhouettes that seemed to be moving faster than he was, then trying to catch them.


    So, it took him a little less than a second to leave the Allcity behind and break up out of the blue, and the echo of the movie announcer voice was still buzzing around in his ear canal when the silence of the black embraced him.


    It had been a while since he had been this far up. He remembered how mesmerizing it was just to watch. To be reminded of the scale of this world, at least a part of it. The city sparkled, the suburbs and archetypical zones hummed in their respective frequencies, the mall jittered nervously, the beaches bloomed like a prolonged yawn. He had explored so much of it from a distance, but never landed at anything but Rays. Now, with Michael¡¯s order to fly away from it all, he felt a sudden desire to dive into it, to explore everything and take up every offer. The only thing that stopped him was the people. Every part of it felt full of other Spirits, watching and wanting, and he realized it was this, more than anything else, that had kept him from it.


    A craft flashed through the sky towards the Allworld, blended into the shifting colors of the surface, and was gone. All around him, others shot out to the black at impossible speeds, like beads of light streaming across some invisible glass pane floating in front of his face.


    He looked out to the darkness. Besides the small dots of light, it was the kind of sky that hung over fluorescent lit parking lots in the middle of the night. So black he felt like it was about to drip. Other crafts disappeared into it like they had broken its liquid surface. Where were they going? What was out there? Michael had mentioned gameworlds and resortworlds. Would they be any less anxiety inducing than the ball? What if he found something else? Was there still danger in this place, after the Demons had gone?Stolen novel; please report.


    Scenarios played out in his head. Flying through the black, finding worlds and creations beyond the restrictions of reality, massive fortresses and resorts plucked from Michaels story, where they had been tinged in an elegance absent from the Allworld. He saw himself flying past them, exploring them, and if anyone looked his way or so much as asked his name, getting in his craft and¡ª


    Oh, right.


    The Allworld rolled back into view, as if a gravity was turning him around to face it. The sensation was unsettling, especially given his sudden intention to make a craft, which felt, somehow, like a private thing. Mixing his mind with the material of this place, like speaking of something secret, might expose elements of his mind he had forgot he was hiding. The speaking signs and searching voices had the same kind of irritation. An intrusion he had never gotten used to.


    Floating in front of it all, he felt exposed, a contrast to his fantasies of flying around the worlds untouchable in his craft.


    His Spirit precluded his desire, and the Allworld shrunk to half size as he flew away from it, and he felt something unexpected.


    Weariness. Like a mental fatigue from staring at one word too long. Flying in the black, he realized, was not without effort. Zipping across the Allworld had felt like falling by comparison. Must be another trick of the Principalities and Schema of the place, to make flying around the ball as easy as summoning a door.


    The weariness blended into an anger, a rage at being restricted, trapped.


    All right. I¡¯ll make the fastest fucking craft anyone¡¯s ever seen.


    His anger, unfortunately, failed to find a release. He had no idea how to even begin making one.


    Now what had Michael said when he told him he didn¡¯t know how to make a craft?


    ¡°Fly up, past the blue, where the Prince lets go, and use your mind.¡±


    Awesome, very helpful.


    His frustration with Michael brought on memories of the rooftop and the gun that had come without thinking.


    He closed his eyes and imagined a craft. It was a vague shape at first, like all day dream things. He zeroed in on details, and the craft took them on seamlessly. Black. Polished. All angles like a stealth bomber. It was like he was carving it out of the void. He opened his eyes.


    It was there, just as he had seen it, but now it was almost invisible in the black. When he had imagined it, he hadn¡¯t had to worry about whether or not he could see it. He knew it was there. Now he had to move to position himself with the Allworld behind it so he wouldn¡¯t lose sight of it. As he moved, he noticed something was off. He reached out and put his hand on it.


    It was too small, and it crumbled like tinsel when he touched it. He realized that as he had reached out for it, the thought that it might be the wrong size, or the wrong material, had popped into his head, and he hadnt had time to dispel it.


    So that¡¯s how it was. You had to hold the idea of something in your mind without any doubt or any other ideas about what it might be like. It took focus. Like effecting your dreams, but


    He tried again. Same shape, same color, but this time he kept his eyes open. The fear of it being small and brittle flashed back in his head, and it was small and brittle again, but he kept his focus and it grew until it was the size of a semi. He touched it again and it crumpled where his fingers brushed. He imagined it healing and it did. He thought of marble half a foot thick and touched it again. It was smooth and cold and held its form.


    He took another non breath, backed up and looked at it.


    Now what? He had to get inside it. Right now, he knew, it was a solid piece of marble. He opened it up, slid back one of the planes seamlessly into itself. Darkness. He imagined what the interior should look like, held the visage in his mind, and turned on a light.


    Inside was an oblong room about the size of his bedroom, a large leather bench seat at the front in front of a panel of screens and keypads, more bench seats along the walls, with shelves and cabinets set into the benches.


    He went inside. He told himself that the walls could become transparent at will, and made the ceiling vanish. He looked around and saw that it was far more real and detailed than it had been inside his head, but nothing was out of place, as if his subconscious had filled in the gaps when he wasn¡¯t looking.


    He sat in the captain¡¯s chair and looked out the front, telling the rest of the walls to become opaque again. Taking hold of the single joystick, he tried to turn it out to space.


    It moved like it weighed a thousand pounds and reacted sluggishly to his commands, if at all. Once he finally wheeled it around and had it facing away from the ball, it kept drifting and he struggled to aim it back at the star he had arbitrarily chosen as his destination.


    Finally, he got it aimed, and told it to move. It didn¡¯t.


    ¡°Fuck!¡±


    A loud roar shook his craft and knocked him out of the seat before he had time to register what it was. A foghorn, the kind that would be used by an old steamship in the foggy waters of an old black and white horror movie, but loud enough to shake empty space.


    He looked around and saw nothing but blackness.


    Oh.


    He focused again, and imagined the top of the crystal hull turning transparent, and it did, just in time to see The massive ship began to pass over him.


    The bow looked like a sci fi city in the shape of a conical pyramid. It¡¯s main body was cylindrical and covered in an ocean that gave a hint at its size by the slowness of the white capped waves that rolled around it. There were islands and buildings dotting the surface and it was lit from below, as if the core of the craft was a concentrated rod of summer.


    It stopped suddenly and something shot out of the pyramid and in an instant was floating in front of Gradie. A solid metal cube twice as long as his craft. A door opened up in the face closest to him and three figures were standing there, framed in gentle indoor light that felt like it came from a real world living room and clashed with the darkness of everything else.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze - Invite

    Like a really patient engine


    ¡°You blow a head gasket?¡±


    It was Luke. His clothes were a blend of fantasy ranger, cowboy and 80¡¯s action hero. The twins stood next to him, Nova dressed like a rainbow hued sci-fi wizard, and Angel in dark armor under a green silk cloak.


    ¡°Uh, can¡¯t figure out how to make it go.¡± Gradie looked at the black and clear craft like someone else had wrecked it. ¡°Maybe I need to imagine like an engine, or¡­¡±


    Nova zipped over like a supersonic insect, his shoes sprouting wings that buzzed and glowed.


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about it bro, we¡¯ll help you later. Mike and them always want the newbies to make a craft first. It''s bullshit. Sam spent three days orbiting the big ball in a fucking Astro van.¡±


    Gradie laughed at the image, then felt it pull on his chest, and looked back at his craft like it had made a wrong noise.


    Angel zipped over to the craft in half a second and started looking it over, his dark armor with silver trim reflecting a starry sky that was nowhere around. Gradie noticed the matteness of his own craft reflected dully in it.


    ¡°This is cool,¡± Angel said. ¡°Most people make a car the first time, or some shit that looks like an X wing.¡±


    ¡°Hey we¡¯re gonna hit up Gunmaze,¡± said Nova. ¡°You wanna go?¡±


    ¡°Gunmaze?¡± He remembered the name from somewhere.


    ¡°Yeah, bro. You been yet?¡±


    ¡°No. I think I¡¯ve heard of it.¡±


    Angel snickered. ¡°Yeah, bro he¡¯s heard of Gunmaze. Probably in big guys fucking video or maybe ol¡¯ smokey worked it into an insult.¡±


    ¡°Aight bro,¡± Nova said, smiling and nodding like it was a sure thing. ¡°You¡¯re fucking going. Forget this shit. Making a craft is its own thing. You need to just move around the world for a bit.¡±


    A maze of guns in a dreamworld with some new friends. The old suspicion that this was a hallucination came back to him, but it had lost most of its power now.


    ¡°Sounds good. As long as you don¡¯t mind carrying me.¡±


    Nova nodded thoughtfuly at the immobile craft.


    ¡°Yeah sure bro. No problem. You can ride in our ship and we¡¯ll load yours up.¡±


    ¡°No, I meant in the game.¡±


    ¡°Oh! You never know man. Sometimes people are just naturals at it.¡±


    Angel stuck four baseball sized lights to the side of Gradie¡¯s craft and they flared up and it went flying towards the front of their massive ship. Despite all the frustration trying to get the fucking thing to move, Grade felt a twang of jealous protectiveness watching someone else fly it away.


    Nova and Angel zipped back inside the cube and Luke floated lazily after, sipping something glowing on ice. Gradie followed them all inside the dark doorway stuck on the bottom of one of the square faces like it had just been drawn on.


    The interior was about the last thing he expected to find.


    It looked like any of the suburban houses his friends had growing up, if the living room had eaten every other space. There were couches, chairs, hammocks everywhere. Bottles of liquor floated around in zero g.. Angel was sitting on an oversized beanbag made of tigerskin and making a finger gun at the far wall. A bolt of light shot out and zapped the center of a target. Nova was standing in front of a bay window with the blinds pulled up looking out at the big ship floating in space, which clashed with the mundane window and wall around it in a way that made Gradie even less sure any of this was real.


    The door shut behind them and the whole Cube hummed. Out the window, the ship suddenly filled the black void, the only sign that they had accelerated towards it. The cube sailed over the pyramid and the window was all black void again until the metal horizon of the pyramid rose up from below as they dropped down into it.Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.


    Suddenly, the room fell away into a million pieces, and when those disappeared too, they were all standing on a massive starship deck with towering slanted glass views all around.


    Nova kicked up into the air and flew to a small floating platform surrounded by lights.


    Something flashed behind them. Gradie looked out the back window at the glowing ocean that surrounded the ship, towards a strange horizon that dropped down on the sides. The dark sky glowed and changed colors as if the sun was rising. The other sun, at least the one that permanently lit the day side of the Allworld, was somewhere down out of sight and Gradie knew that the one rising at the other end of the ship had come out of the ship itself. The black void and the Allworld disappeared as the new sun turned the sky a radiant orange-pink. When the sun had settled, Gradie was looking out at a tropical ocean under a vibrant sunset with a curved horizon.


    ¡°Hey Gradie.¡± Angel motioned for him to look to the front massive viewport, and the sky went from pink, to purple above, to solid black as he turned around, and the sky ahead of the ship was the same black void sprinkled with lights that it had been before. The ship made a soft humming sound, like a sibling hum to the drone of the Allworld.


    The lights in the sky moved to the right and the Allworld came into view from the left.


    ¡°All right, see this star?¡± Angel pointed.


    There was a single star dead center of the wide forward view. It was one of the few stars in the Allworld sky that twinkled, a blueish purple four-pointed starburst, like something out of an old fantasy poster.


    ¡°Yeah.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s Gunmaze. We¡¯re going the slow way so you can get a sense of where it is in relation to the Allworld.¡±


    Gradie thought about his own ship, that rough chunk of stone that would barely turn, and wondered at the mental control needed to move a ship like this, much less make it. Suddenly, all the crafts he had seen flying around the Allworld held a deeper gravity, even the floating advertisement he had fled from.


    ¡°All right, we¡¯re going.¡± Nova¡¯s voice came from all around, as if the ship itself was speaking.


    The ship began to shake, which Gradie somehow knew was unrelated to its propulsion, but was simply a convenient way to remind its passengers that it was moving. The Allworld slid out of view and the stars drifted away from the one in the center as it got brighter. Some of the stars zipped past while others barely moved.


    ¡°So, what is it?¡±


    ¡°Like all your favorite games had a baby,¡± Luke said.


    ¡°Fuck that,¡± Angel said. ¡°It¡¯s a video game like the world is the map.¡±


    Luke gave Angel a tired, eyebrow raised grin that told Gradie he had heard this kind of thing before.


    ¡°Oh, I was gonna try and tell him what it is in people terms, but if you wanna geek out and confuse him¡ª¡±


    ¡°It is a Gameworld, Luke¡¯s right there,¡± Angel said. ¡°But the challenges are not limited to the analog difficulties you find in video games. There are mind puzzles, tests of will, things that use your¡ª¡±


    ¡°And lotsa shootin,¡± Luke said, bouncing his eyebrows at Gradie. Angel sighed.


    ¡°Yes Luke, lots of shooting. And a bit of fighting also.¡±


    Luke grinned and raised his drink in a toast.


    ¡°Fucking A.¡±


    Gradie tried to use his apparently limited knowledge of how this world worked to build a picture of Gunmaze in his mind, but there was a big hole in it.


    ¡°But how do you decide who wins?¡±


    Angel frowned at him.


    ¡°What do you mean?¡±


    ¡°If you can just will whatever you want into¡ª¡±


    ¡°You can¡¯t.¡±


    Gradie tried to keep the frustration out of his voice.


    ¡°Yeah I know I can¡¯t, but what if someone else¡ª¡±


    ¡°They can¡¯t. Gunmaze is one of the most complex collections of schema in the Other, and it¡¯s Princes are some of the best.¡±


    ¡°Princes¡­¡± Gradie said, mostly to himself. He remembered Celeste saying something about that, but it felt like ages ago, and he had gone through a thousand other hims in the Hardworlds since then.


    Angel tapped the pommel on his sword and made a face that said he couldn¡¯t believe he had to explain this.


    ¡°Yeah, so when you make something in the Other, you set the rules for it. Not just physical qualities, but laws, you could say. Who can come in, what can be made or unmade inside, things like that. The rules are called Schema, and the totality of the rules, the system of the thing that you¡¯ve made, is called the Principality, or Prince. You might also hear them called Ghosts or Gods. They create the order you see everywhere in the Other. It¡¯s the same thing that makes the money in your wallet¡ª¡±


    Gradie¡¯s mind flew off with the idea of making his own place in the Other, but somewhere along the fantasy got weighed down as he remembered something else Michael had said.


    ¡°They were the first to capture souls, trapping them in places that couldn¡¯t be found.¡±


    ¡°Can you make a place that people can¡¯t leave?¡±


    Angel stopped talking and looked at him like he had mentioned a dead relative.


    ¡°Uh, theoretically yes. That¡¯s why the Saviors exist. You know, the guys in the white ships? Remember, uh, Big guy¡¯s video?¡±


    Gradie hadn¡¯t thought about that in a long time. He had been too preoccupied with the real danger, the violence of the Hardworlds.


    ¡°Does that stuff still happen? People getting kidnapped and locked up in¡­¡± He remembered the square blackness in Michaels video, and wondered if it had just been a convenient visual metaphor or based in reality. The thought of being trapped in endless darkness somewhere in the Other made his skin crawl.


    ¡°Not really,¡± Angel said, wearily. ¡°Most Spirits spend their time on the big worlds or the routes between, where the Prince¡¯s are too strong to do something like that. Even if you go off into the black and stumble on some trap, the Savior¡¯s speakers will find you eventually.¡±


    Eventually.


    The word rolled around in Gradie¡¯s head, and Angel¡¯s assurance of safety sounded like someone who believed that crime never happened in his part of town.


    For the first time since he had found this place, he was afraid of it. It was like the whimsical glow, that euphoric feeling of possibility that was wrapped around everything in the Otherworld, had cracked, and something dark and horrifying was looking through.


    ¡°All right! Check it out!¡± Nova said, suddenly behind them, pointing at the big forward viewport.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze - Gunmaze

    Kill your friends guilt free


    It shifted under the eye like so much else in the Otherworld, but had a definite steady rotation. It was like seeing a city from space, a city not confined to a single hemispherical plane, but spread out across countless separate shapes that didn¡¯t align to a single gravitational direction. Its pulsating colors and textures were strangely familiar; along with the glitter of metal and warmth of cement, there was also the green of forests, the blue of ocean, white of snow or clouds, and even the dark of night in a seemingly random distribution. There was no great artificial sun to be seen. It glowed from within, or maybe from nothing.


    ¡°There it is,¡± said Nova.


    ¡°All right, thanks. I see it.¡± Gradie looked at them then back at Gunmaze. Nova started laughing.


    ¡°Bro we¡¯re not going this slow for your benefit. Gunmaze won¡¯t let us approach faster than this.¡±


    ¡°Why?¡±


    ¡°Some kind of scanning procedure,¡± Angel said. ¡°It may seem like a funhouse to the average visitor, but it¡¯s as locked down as any fortress world.¡±


    ¡°People take the games seriously, huh?¡± Gradie must have let some of his contempt leak out through his voice. Angel glared at him.


    ¡°Gunmaze makes more mem per day than the Allworld. Some people spend every scrap of mem they have here, so yeah, the Makers have to take that seriously.¡±


    ¡°Makes sense,¡± Gradie said flatly looking back at the swirling cloud, wondering if his contempt was a reflex against his fear, and Angel¡¯s words caught up with him.


    ¡°So, how much does it cost to get in?¡± He wasn¡¯t especially attached to his money, but he had always held some sliver of hope that he would find something worth spending it on somewhere in the Other. Though it seemed an ironic tragedy to think he would spend so much money on games in both his lives.


    ¡°Getting in¡¯s free,¡± Nova said. ¡°Playing¡¯s free. You can pay for skins and ports and other convenience shit. When it comes to shit you use to play, you gotta earn in the hard way. Absolutely no pay to win in Gunmaze.¡±


    Gradie had heard about a thousand similar spiels about games in the Real, almost all of which were at least partialy PR bullshit, but he just nodded along. Stuck in the back of his mind like an itch was the constant reminder that the twins were probably only taking him along because Michael or Klara had pressured them to.


    ¡°And you can make some good money if you¡¯re not a nerd about it,¡± Luke said, grinning.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°If you take your winnings and flip em for cash instead of buying outfits and shit, yeah. I usually clean up.¡±


    Gradie couldn¡¯t help himself.


    ¡°They let you do that? Trade the game tokens for real money? Wouldn¡¯t that kinda ruin the spirit of the game?¡± He raised his eyebrows at Angel, who gave back another glare.


    ¡°Gunmaze tokens are real money. They used to be the fucking reserve currency before MEM. They have value everywhere in the Other. You just swap them out for mem for convenience.¡±


    ¡°I thought memory was always the currency here?¡±


    ¡°Yes, but not¡ª¡±


    Nova interrupted Angel loudly.


    ¡°Ok bro, you wanna get into the financial history of the Other, come by the HQ once Boss lifts your ban. Right now let¡¯s go over how this is gonna go down. First of all, stick together. You¡¯re gonna see a lot of cool shit but don¡¯t go running off on your own. Strength in numbers.¡±


    Gradie felt, once again, that he was tagging along like a little brother, but he kept nodding and watching the swirling mass of light and activity grow in the window, trying to temper the excitement growing in his stomach.


    Nova raised a second finger.


    ¡°Second of all, be vocal. Our comms will work inside, so call out what you see, what you think, and especially what you¡¯re about to do. We gotta be on the same page.¡±


    Gradie had to focus pretty hard to use the comms normally, which was usually only when Klara or Michael called him out of the Vault for a briefing, and resulted in him standing perfectly still with his hand to his ear while responding with his mind¡¯s voice.


    ¡°Grandpas on the phone,¡± EP had said once, flying past him into the office, but despite the ribbing he had never gotten the hang of doing anything else while communicating. He doubted trying it while in the middle of a tense session of dreamworld PVP would make it any easier.The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    But again, he just nodded. They could find that out on their own.


    Somewhere during his spaced-out thoughts, Nova had raised a third finger.


    ¡°- so don¡¯t be afraid to dip out. And finally,¡± He raised a fourth finger and smiled at Gradie. ¡°Look for work. You already know that one though.¡±


    If Nova had expected that borrowing one of the Gunmaze commandments from Philips Hardworlding creed would make Gradie feel more comfortable, it had the opposite effect. Suddenly, Gradie wished he was back in the Clubhouse, or flying down the highway, or in Lucy¡¯s lair, ready to drop in.


    Luke raised two fingers.


    ¡°Fifth, have fun. And sixth, be yourself.¡±


    Nova smiled.


    ¡°Five is guaranteed, bro.


    Angel rolled his eyes and groaned.


    The ship came to a sudden stop just as Angel and Nova stood up in a way that told Gradie they had done this a million times. Something zipped up to the window and shined a light inside. An orb made of a thousand camera lens like eyes. The light became a projection and the orb dissapeared behind a widescreen banner.


    ¡®welcome to¡¯


    GUNMAZE


    ¡®please present id¡¯


    The word Gunmaze was made of block metal letters with mazelike tracks inside, floating in front of a shifting background of various moving images depicting destroyed cities, space stations, wide fields strafed by fighter jets, and even a medieval siege.


    ¡°Uh, ID?¡± Gradie asked. The other three were already holding up watches and rings to a beam of light coming from the projection.


    ¡°Your wallet,¡± Nova said. ¡°It¡¯s tied to your Real self with a bit of your Real mem.¡±


    Gradie looked at his digital watch like it had betrayed him. Michael had set it up, but hadn¡¯t mentioned that little fact.


    ¡°How do they, uh,¡±


    ¡°Boss used some of the mem pulled when you first joined,¡± Nova said.


    First joined? He saw Lucy¡¯s glowing eyes. Great. He felt like throwing the watch into the black and flying off for good. Maybe even dropping into the Hardworlds on his own. Up till then, he had enjoyed his relative anonymity. He had gotten used to the idea that no one in this world ever had to know a thing about his Real life. Flying over the Allworld, watching from afar, he had felt like a visitor, an alien. Now that his real life was tied to this place, he felt a nagging urge to run from it, to escape to the only place he could, the Hardworlds. For some reason, the sensation reminded him of Phillip.


    But they were all looking at him and even the repeating animation behind ¡®GUNMAZE¡¯ seemed impatient, so he raised his watch and the light swept it with a ¡®beep¡¯, and a slightly robotic but very sensual female voice oozed out of the screen.


    ¡°New Player, would you like to create an avatar, or observe as a Specter?¡±


    ¡°Uh,¡±


    ¡°Avatar,¡± Nova said. ¡°Specters are for solo noobs and streamer simps. We¡¯ll show you the ropes.¡±


    The screen was now blinking the text of the woman¡¯s question in neon red.


    ¡°Avatar, please,¡± Gradie said.


    ¡°A mirror room has been summoned and will be attached to the team leader¡¯s station. Welcome to the Gunmaze, and pop that cherry with a bang.¡±


    The projection disappeared and something floated in from the swirling haze. A castle melted onto a sci-fi space station. It looked like the Twins from top to bottom and he guessed it was custom made, as out in the black similar rendezvous were happening between ships and stations that looked nothing alike.


    The structure rotated and a crystal orb like a geodome was stuck off the side of it.


    ¡°That¡¯s the mirror room,¡± Angel said. ¡°It¡¯s where you¡¯ll make your avatar.¡±


    ¡°Cant I just go like this? I¡¯m not really into dressing up.¡±


    Nova laughed.


    ¡°An avatar isn¡¯t an outfit. It¡¯s a second body that meshes with the schema of a Gameworld. You¡¯ll see when we get in there.¡±


    The castle door approached a drawbridge extended right through the front viewport, which Gradie realized for the first time didn¡¯t have any kind of glass pane or barrier. Gravity had returned and Nova bounced on the balls of his feet as they walked across and spoke to someone out loud.


    ¡°Yeah, we just pulled up. Gonna be running some small unit shit for today. Oh, fuck I forgot about that. Ok yeah, we¡¯ll probably make an appearance later. All right bye.¡±


    Nova groaned and Angel asked him what was wrong.


    ¡°Fuckin Bartoth¡¯s having that post viewing thing today at the orbital. We¡¯re gonna have to swing by after this.¡±


    ¡°Thought you liked Bart.¡±


    ¡°Yeah, Bart¡¯s fine, but he¡¯s still doing that series for that fucking Bombfaction captain, so I know all his guys are gonna be there.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s our orbital, if they get on your nerves, you can just¡ª¡±


    ¡°No bro, I can¡¯t just, cause like I¡¯ve told you a thousand times, you gotta maintain rapport with those assholes if you wanna get contracts.¡±


    ¡°We don¡¯t need their contracts.¡±


    They were fully inside the castle now, in a wide carpeted circular room, the walls alternating between tall doors and hanging tapestries depicting all kinds of scenes apparently plucked from different parts of Gunmaze. Luke had been eyeing the twins since they stepped inside, and now that it was clear the conversation didn¡¯t have an ending point in sight, he sighed and turned to Gradie.


    ¡°All right, guess I¡¯m gonna have to try and explain. So I think it¡¯s in there,¡± he pointed towards one of the tall doors that looked more like an airlock than a castle portcullis.


    ¡°Yeah, that¡¯s it, sorry,¡± Nova said, while Angel was still in the middle of a sentence. Despite the interruption, Angel didn¡¯t look put off, but instead smiled smugly at the back of Nova¡¯s head as they moved towards the airlock.


    ¡°So the mirror room is pretty user friendly. It¡¯s gonna show you a bunch of options and you can narrow them down. Pretty much just like creating a character in an RPG.¡±


    Angel¡¯s smile vanished, but Nova continued


    ¡°If you have any questions just call em out and the announcer will help you.¡±


    ¡°All right bro, get in there!¡± Luke yelled with mock anguish. ¡°I¡¯m ready to blow shit up!¡±


    Gradie looked at the airlock, and it slid open on its own. A childish excitement fluttered in his stomach. The windows flanking the door showed other crafts and stations rotating around the swirling mass of Gunmaze, and small lights in singles and swarms dropped to the surface. It felt alive, active. Millions of them. A dreamworld MMO. The kind of game he had always dreamed about but had proved to be just beyond possibility.


    The rest of him tried to beat down the feeling, now more convinced than ever that Gunmaze would be a waste of time, made of the same cheesy escapism as that navy seal revenge sim he had seen advertised on the ball. But maybe that¡¯s what he needed. Despite the thousand other hims he had inhabited since the coin job, he still couldn¡¯t shake the feeling that the next time he would wake up in a burning warehouse, Sam¡¯s corpse staring at him with dead weeping eyes.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze - Mirror Room

    Sitting in the mirror room


    The mirror room lived up to its name. There was a polished glass walkway leading to a single wide mirror. The rest was darkness.


    He stepped across the mirrored path and the room lit up, and it was all Gradie all the time.


    Another wide mirror had appeared behind him, creating an infinite stream of Gradies in either direction. Other mirror pairs, above and below and side to side, completed the fractal, and a chill went up his spine.


    He had never seen a better metaphor for dropping into the Hardworlds, and it disturbed him to see it attached to a gameworld.


    ¡°Please banish any facial covering,¡± the same female voice said. He did, and immediately felt like an idiot. The mirrors glowed and rainbow light danced over his reflection as a pop up appeared, a close up of his face in the center of a multi windowed menu. Gunmaze had his face, his real name, and his wallet now. He could only imagine what Philip would have to say about that.


    The menu was right out of a video game character creation, despite Angel¡¯s pretentious insistence that this was nothing like one. Of course, if you were trying to get the most people to play your data mining dream game, you would chose an interface most people were already familiar with.


    It¡¯s responsiveness, however, was straight dreamworld. When he looked at his eyes, a slew of options rolled out, not just across the screen, but across his mind, and a subtle thought was enough to filter the options down to whatever he wanted. He made his eyes solid black, then moved on to his skin, his hair, his face, and finally his clothes. Surprisingly, in an un-video game like twist, he had limited control over the size of the body itself, his height changeable only by selecting some kind of platform shoe. He guessed that it had something to do with the difficulty the mind might have in taking ownership of a body too far removed from the one it inhabited in everyday life.


    It took him less than a minute to create, and when he was done, he had succeeded in creating something that satisfied his only requirement; It looked nothing like him. Gunmaze already knew who he was, but none of it¡¯s players had to. He had been guiding his mind around the idea of a shared dreamworld mmo while tweaking his avatar, and had stumbled upon something that, for some reason, had never occurred to him while flying around the ball or even when creating his Otherworld persona¡¯s ski goggled get up; What if someone from his Real life saw him? They would be here, somewhere, wouldn¡¯t they? If everyone went to the Otherworld? Did everyone get into the Otherworld?


    He was nudged back to the present by a prompt, asking him in the same voice if he was done creating his Avatar, and if so, would he like to select a username?


    The twins hadn¡¯t mentioned that. In a slightly unsettling deja-vu, especially after the symbolic appearance of the refracted mirrors, he was reminded again of the Hardworlds. Philip had been dogging him for months now to select a Hardworlder name, and he hadn¡¯t been able to think of one. Despite Philip¡¯s promise to choose one for him, he never did, and it was now unspoken that he wasn¡¯t going to, which Gradie assumed was due to some Hardworlder superstition, so Gradie was up on the boards as ¡°5Seven¡±, which did have a nice ring to it, but was chosen by Michael, and Gradie had an uneasy feeling about letting yet another aspect of his Hardworlding career be determined by ¡°Boss¡±.This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    Philip reminded him constantly to just pick one on his own, nothing flashy, and that ¡°the name is for fame¡± and would always spit after he said it to drive the point home, at which one time Gradie had reminded him that he had spoken numerous times about the importance of a reputation, which had of course devolved into a shouting rant from Philip on all that, and how only a na?ve idiot couldn¡¯t see the difference.


    So, Gradie was still up on the board as 5Seven, technically fitting into Philips advised word and number convention, and coming dangerously close to the point of no return.


    ¡°You¡¯re up there twice now,¡± Philip had said after the coin job, showing him his place on the boards, under the header with the job number and name;


    ¡°JN:scl195cfm850sa BurningBird and the CoinCollector,¡± (they all had names that sounded like cold war coded radio messages)


    ¡°Winning move made by 5Seven. Located the polytope via last second push.¡±


    ¡°Best Sizzle: MonkeyToo and E.P. : Brought down attack chopper with a drone targeted Carl Gustav.¡±


    One more placement on the boards, Philip advised him, and the name would be permanent. But try as he might, he just couldn¡¯t think of a name and number that expressed how he felt about this new him, despite Philip¡¯s demands that he not try and do so.


    Compared to all that, choosing a username for Gunmaze would be a cake walk.


    ¡°You figure it out bro?¡± Nova¡¯s voice came over on his comms.


    ¡°Yeah. Just choosing a name. Any suggestions?¡±


    ¡°Whatever sounds good. It can¡¯t be taken though. Don¡¯t have to worry about it rolling off the tongue, we won¡¯t be saying it out loud often.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s yours?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m Quasar Cultists. Angel is Emerald Swordsman, Luke¡¯s is NotBannedMan. Sam is Deadriver¡­¡±


    He trailed off at the end of her username.


    ¡°Sam comes here?¡±


    ¡°Uh, yeah, she¡¯s usually with us. But I think she had something to do today.¡±


    Immediately, Gradie knew she had not wanted to go knowing he would be here. He hadn¡¯t seen her in the clubhouse since before the coin job. For the millionth time, he remembered the kiss, the look in her eyes, and the embarrassment washed over him all over again.


    ¡°Anyway man,¡± Nova continued, sounding like he could hear Gradies feelings in the silence. ¡°If you can¡¯t think of one just use a placeholder. You get one free change.¡±


    Gradie, desperate now to distract himself, wracked his head for maze puns, maze mythology, then gave up and skimmed through old usernames for something that meshed with the ones Nova had given him. Finally, he thought of Gunmaze itself, that big swirl of chaos, as he had seen it through the viewport, and his immediate destiny of dying repeatedly. He had learned that the best way to go into a competitive game in the beginning was to accept the fact that you were going to die over and over, and in fact welcome it, as each death was a learning opportunity.


    ¡°OrbitingCorpse,¡± he said.


    The name lit up on the screen, blinked for a second, then chimed and turned green. Available.


    ¡°Uh, all right bro see you down there,¡± Nova said.


    Gradie accepted the name with a thought, and the screen dissolved away, and there was his avatar, looking back at him in the mirror. He had chosen a jump suit that looked like a straitjacket half undone, combat boots, and shemagh draped over his head, all various shades of black and charcoal.


    ¡°Look here, please,¡± the voice said, originating behind him. He turned around, and saw nothing but the same repeating mirror images, only this time the Gradies were his avatar.


    ¡°And now here,¡± above him this time. ¡°And here,¡± below him. Then it clicked.


    ¡°Look behind you,¡± E.P. said in his memory. This was the mirror room convincing him he now looked like his avatar. This was another way to take the Spirit to another world.


    ¡°Please try and catch the lights.¡±


    They came from random directions, soft orbs of yellow light that zig zagged and changed speeds. He reached out for them, and the avatars around him did the same, solidifying the sensation that he was the avatar.


    ¡°Synchronization complete. Have fun out there.¡±


    The mirrors went dark and a spotlight shined down on him. He looked down at his body, glowing in the harsh light, and the sensation of being his avatar was complete.


    Then the floor dropped away.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze - Loading

    Will there be pop culture references in heaven?


    Gradie fell through the dark and landed on what looked like a giant contact lens hovering over the shifting blurry cloud of Gunmaze. The other three were already there, now inside avatars of their own.


    Nova¡¯s skin was like motor oil floating on a puddle in the middle of a bright morning, rainbow opalescence over rippling darkness, and his eyes were solid pink pearls. He had on what Gradie instantly recognized as a ¡°coat of many colors¡±, a puffy robe oscillating in rainbows that partially reflected the swirling shapes below.


    Angel looked like a dark elf, pale skin and inkblack hair with a crimson shine to it, black silk robes and eyes of solid emerald.


    The pattern was completed by Luke, who wore a pair of aviators with blood droplets glinting on their mirror lenses, and a flight suit studded with bullet holes.


    ¡°Oh good, you blocked out your eyes,¡± Nova said. ¡°Was gonna tell you. It¡¯s good practice to not let enemies know where you¡¯re looking. A lot of times the fighting gets pretty close.¡±


    He waved his hand and another big screen floated out of the lens-floor. Multiple boxes. Conquest, Assault, Sponsored, Private, and one highlighted. [Classic]. He navigated the other options too fast for Gradie to see, and the screen changed to a black box with white letters.


    Joining queue¡­


    The box shrunk and a soft golden light reflected off the lens floor, outlining each of them as if some unseen user had them selected.


    It added to the confusion he had felt since they had first arrived at Gunmaze, and boiled it into a question.


    How much were schema and Principalities like software in this place? Up until now, he had only really interacted with forces of the Otherworld that had a clear live consciousness propelling them. The workers at Rays running the ¡°grills¡± and ¡°fryers¡±. The DJs at the Allclub operating whatever generated the lights and music. Everything else had just been near inanimate simple objects. A door that responds to you, a craft that takes you places, but this felt completely different than all that. Even different than the Vault, where despite the fact that the twins interfaced with screens and keyboards, which he had always assumed was just for convenience, a way for them to wrap their minds around the visualization needed to make such a place work, Gradie had never felt there was any kind of autonomous machinery beyond what was being immediately willed into existence.


    Gunmaze, however, felt like a machine. Like a real program, something created then let go just like any cluster of code in the Real. Which was terrifying, when he thought about it. People who could flick you across dance clubs were one thing, but people who could create something that could trap you, dazzle you with false images, or even torture you, all without being near you or even knowing you existed, were horrifying beyond anything he could imagine. To what extent would these things hold up without the master observing them? To what extent could they be maintained?


    Despite the terror these ideas sparked in his mind, none of it was surprising. It all seemed to follow logically from what he already knew about the Otherworld, as if all these facets of its complexity would have been revealed to him if he had only taken the time to stop and think it through. Which made it all the more unsettling, because it made it seem that much more real, that much more certain.


    Another platform floated by, this one shaped like a broken off bridge of a very familiar and highly trademarked spaceship right out of a certain film series. Through the wide windows, he saw people inside standing in front of their own screen, dressed as all kinds of movie and game characters.


    It was the first time he had seen anything like it in the Other, and it was so jarring he laughed out loud.


    ¡°What the fuck?¡±


    ¡°God dammit,¡± Nova said almost under his breath, and started making motions on a summoned screen. Their clear platform floated away from the cluster of fanboys but it was too late.Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    ¡°Fucking soomers,¡± Angel snarled, with an intensity that surprised Gradie almost as much as the fanboys had.


    ¡°What?¡±


    Nova sighed and looked away. Angel exhaled through his nostrils and explained in a pained voice dripping with contempt.


    ¡°Consumers. TV heads. Fucking can¡¯t exist without their cartoon bullshit.¡±


    ¡°Angel hates Star Wars,¡± Luke said, shooting a smile at Gradie behind Angels back.


    ¡°I don¡¯t give a shit about the fucking movies!¡± Angel said, twisting towards Luke. ¡°But they have to shove their pop culture bullshit into everything they do. They¡¯d make Gunmaze look like a god damned shopping mall if they could.¡±


    ¡°You actually get extra points for killing them,¡± Nova said, like he was weary of saying it for the hundredth time. ¡°And Gunmaze herds them into their own maps when it can. Really bro, the makers hate them as much as Angel does.¡±


    Gradie¡¯s initial reaction was to wonder what the big fucking deal was. It was all fake anyway, and if he got into a fake shootout with a guy dressed like Nova or a guy pretending to be a jedi, didn¡¯t really seem like it would change the experience much, but he sensed it was the kind of thing people more attached to Gunmaze or just the Other in general might get more worked up about, so he tried to change the subject.


    ¡°So, what¡¯s the basic, uh, gameplay like?¡± said Gradie.


    Angel was glaring out at the now descending platform of cosplay spirits and Nova was looking at him like his brother was struggling to open a jar by twisting it the wrong way and not for the first time, so Luke stepped in.


    ¡°Fight people. Solve Puzzles. Try and get to the center.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s in the center?¡±


    ¡°Well, at the very center is the original maze,¡± Nova said, pulling his eyes from his scowling sibling. ¡°This place was built around the first arrivals fighting it out for fun and grew from the inside out. The center is where the best players are. But we won¡¯t get there.¡±


    ¡°Why not?¡±


    ¡°Because you have to get a win-streak for days or get a challenge invite. But I think what Luke¡¯s talking about is the main map in Assault mode. It¡¯s kind of like the central hub.¡±


    ¡°Yeah, the big murder island,¡± Luke agreed.


    ¡°It¡¯s not the central hub,¡± Angel said, his anger flaring again. ¡°It¡¯s fucking noob nation,¡± ¡°The higher ups threw it in a few years ago to appease the new blood who are all obsessed with continuity and progression and shit, but don¡¯t have the attention span for Conquest.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s like, a cluster of segments, wrapped around a big land mass, but you keep your gear and shit between zones. It¡¯s like a big battle royale. If you die you just go to one of the peripheral zones until you get a win, then you can come back. The creators made it so that players who weren¡¯t interested in the ladder could have something else to grind for.¡±


    ¡°Sounds kind of fun,¡± Gradie said.


    Angel glared at him.


    Nova laughed.


    ¡°We can give it a shot another time, but for your first time we¡¯re gonna do it old school. A classic run. Randomized segments. You win one, or get enough score if it¡¯s a time battle, and you get moved into the lower rings where the rewards and difficulty increase. You lose, you get knocked back up a rung. Some segments repeat at different levels with the difficulty tweaked, while others you only see at certain levels.¡±


    ¡°What is the combat like?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°Usually depends on the segment. They each have their own rules, setting, objectives. Could be guns, blades, vehicles. Any kind of shit you can think of. Gunmaze is more like a thousand different games sharing a common reward currency.¡±


    A warm, electric sensation had been building on the back of Gradie¡¯s neck since he dropped out of the mirror room, and something in Nova¡¯s description ignited it into a pulsing reaction. A current of childish excitement surged down his spine, over his scalp, across his tongue.


    Here was something out of his dreams, his fantasies. A swarm of players orbited alongside him, ready to play something that hovered out at the edge of his imagination. It was every lobby and start up screen that had ever excited him, all rolled into one, or maybe, it was the thing all those other moments had been born from, breaking off from the mother lode and floating up, distorted and slightly tarnished, into his Real life.


    Below him, through the transparent platform, Gunmaze rolled and flashed. Like soap bubbles that had figured out how to break the sphere-only rule that bound them back in the Real, the multitude of visions refracted through the hazy stormy membrane added a visual to Angel¡¯s words. He saw bubbled, fish eyed views of massive cities, island chains, night drenched forests, rolling lava volcanoes. He wondered if he was really seeing the segments, as the twins had called them, or if this was the Otherworld equivalent of a loading screen, flashes of curated images rather than a live feed of the gameworld.


    A bright chime broke his spaced-out train of thoughts.


    ¡°Damn that was quick,¡± Luke said.


    ¡°It¡¯s cause we¡¯re in an orientation queue,¡± Angel said, standing up and taking a deep breath, which struck Gradie as strange.


    Suddenly, Gradie got a sinking, rollercoaster drop feeling in his stomach, and the clear platform descended towards the haze.


    ¡°Remember, stick together, communicate, every fight a choice, and look for work,¡± Angel counted the rules off on four fingers, but Gradie hardly heard him.


    The jittery excitement that had taken over his body reached a frenzied rhythm, and the lens dropped them all into darkness.

 A Day in the Afterlife | If I go, you wont see me again - Part 1

    Come fly with me


    He had told her he didn¡¯t want to go alone and there was no one else. He wouldn¡¯t say where, just that she wouldn¡¯t hear from him again after. She had suspicions, but no idea, really. Maybe it was the curiosity that made her say yes. Their relationship had ended amicably, the most boring way, the easiest kind to break away from, to forget. So when he contacted her, it had been months since she had even thought of him, maybe years. It was hard to tell here.


    They had taken a train. The first clue. She asked why not a door or a craft and he had told her that was impossible, while smiling at her like he wanted her to guess what he meant, like she would enjoy the answer. She didn¡¯t get it, but it gave her a bad feeling, like a gesture of kindness with a hook inside. She was used to those, especially here.


    The station had been at the end of a long maze of hallways, so disorienting she had expected to end up in a Dreamworld or a Hardworld, but the termination was archetypically Otherworld. A glowing train platform and awning stuck in the void, with strange stars shining that she had never seen from anywhere else in the Other. Spirits stood waiting with overflowing smiles and bouncing anticipation. The train itself appeared as a dot out in the black, and within a few seconds it was rushing in front of them with sounds that echoed in the airless void. A strange steam cloud rolled off of it, though it looked like an archetypical bullet train.


    He had presented two tickets, polished metal pamphlets that radiated opalescence, to the masked station hand, who had returned a single sliver of metal to each of them. It wrapped itself around her wrist, and from then on felt like a small hand pulling her. The second clue.


    The train ride had felt just as she had expected, but faster. Steam rolled across the windows until the black disappeared, and when the steam itself fell away, they were flying across a wide plain under a bright blue sky with clouds the same color as the steam. A downtown skyline glittered in the distance, wavering like it was struggling to exist.


    The track had curved once, for no other reason than to let her see, she felt, the airport spread out in front of her, streaks of concrete and flashes of sunburst metal and glass, with the distinct feel of having been thought into being. It looked like a piece of the Otherworld laid across a flat section of the Real. Another clue.


    They had been alone in their train car and were the only ones to step out onto the platform, and she knew with her dreamsense that all the other spirits that had stepped onboard were long gone and far away, Another clue.


    They walked down an echoing empty hallway towards their departure gate, number seven. The light outside bloomed into a late morning glare. Smells of breakfasts foods and espresso and sugar came from somewhere unseen. The echoing hum rose gently as they approached the gate, a white noise murmuring full of excitement and emotion, a mass of people ready to go, to move on, speaking of the magic of an ultimate destination, though she couldn¡¯t recall the exact moment they had blended into that flow of travelers, or even if she had seen a single face among the crowd.


    She had looked over the railing at the dark empty level below. All shadows and shuttered restaurants and a lone mop bucket. The Arrivals section. Its dead darkness and closed doors had drawn her eye as if trying to tell her something, but his hand on her arm had pulled her further into the stream of light and energy flowing across Departures.


    They stood waiting, time rolling over them and pushing everything before back into some other life, until there was only them, standing in front of the massive windows, sunlight in long bands at their feet like offerings, a stream of people flowing behind them, somewhere, unconnected to them now. It was a place, a moment, between places, between states of existence, between lives, or maybe between a life and something else that wasn¡¯t a life, but could take roughly the same shape, occupy the same space. She couldn¡¯t describe it, so she let him talk.


    ¡°This place must be made for me. Amazing.¡±This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.


    She had asked him why, as he expected her to, and he had told her of his childhood, of things he never would have mentioned when they were together. Things she had spent the entire time, in some way or another, trying to get him to talk about.


    He had grown up in Colorado, in Broomfield, in the nineties, during the city¡¯s tech boom. His father worked in the industry, and they were, as a family, propelled by that current in a way that may have made the marriage ¡°break up in orbit¡±, as he put it.


    After the divorce, his father had moved to Los Colinas, Texas, as if to spite his mother, who hated the heat and would get deeply depressed if the weather ever got up out of the sixties. He had laughed when he first came to Texas, and seen the land, its wide flatness so similar to his hometown, but without the mountains to box it in, as if the earth would just spill out forever. He came to believe it was this quality of apparent endlessness and boundarylessness that made the people there insane, resistant to even the most common sense of restrictions.


    This Airport, he told her, was taken from his dreams. He had spent so many hours in the DFW and Denver airports, that he had often dreamed of them, and in his dreams the two merged into the mega-airport they now saw. Looking back as an adult, the dreams had blended with memory, adding another layer of refraction, and he found that when he visited either airport later in life, he didn¡¯t recognize them.


    There was a pause as he looked around, smiling, taking everything in as if he had just been handed the deed to it all, while she waited for him to let her back in, but at the end of the pause he said something that sickened her.


    ¡°I know that this place will take me back, it will fix everything.¡±


    She was suddenly glad she had decided to not go with him, to brush off his hints at an invitation, and to not ask him to explain where he was going. Whatever kind of place his destination was, it was for him, and she would only be an accessory to it.


    He had seen her face, and that old game had started up again, where she had realized something about him, unintentionally, (how the fuck could she help it anyway?) and he had become embarrassed like he always did, and tried to hide what she had seen.


    ¡°Isn¡¯t that what this world is about? Healing ourselves? Getting to the root of the flaws in our Spirits? What¡¯s deeper than childhood?¡±


    She didn¡¯t have an answer and he was only looking for some sign she didn¡¯t think he was childish, so she watched the people walking down the hall, and noticed something.


    They never got any closer. She would watch them walking towards her from far off, and then they would turn or stop or sit down, but never get close enough to see. When she was looking one direction, some would pass her from behind, but never turn their face to her. After some time watching them, she was convinced they didn¡¯t have any faces. These were specters, fragments of memory, robots with nineties wardrobes and white noise voices.


    A voice, a real voice, had come over the intercom and announced the boarding. Phantoms filed into the doorway and gave illusionary tickets to an agent who had the only other face in the world. Celeste watched her flash smiles and move and was convinced that she was a real Spirit, and something about her seemed completely in control, as if she could snap her fingers and turn the entire airport to rubble.


    ¡°I guess this is your last chance. To come with me.¡±


    He said it without looking at her. Two questions crammed into statement shapes, broken by a sigh and said breathlessly. She was suddenly glad he was leaving. Everything about him made her sad for him.


    ¡°I hope you find what you¡¯re looking for.¡± Such a fucking movie thing to say, said for lack of anything else coming to mind, but he ate it up. He nodded like it was full of meaning, looked into her eyes for once, and even kissed her. Like all his kisses, it felt like he wanted more than anything for her to be dazzled by it, and to tell him she was.


    She patted him on the shoulder and mumbled goodbye and he was gone, walking down a tunnel that glowed with a focused humming beam of the mid-morning light bouncing off everything else, and fading into a blurry square at the end, where he turned and vanished.


    Time rushed out like water over a convex surface, going any which way as long as it was fast, sometimes running over itself out of order, but this is what she remembered.


    He had a window seat, and somehow she could see his face, clear as day. He waved to her, childlike, and soon the plane was taxiing out. She could see his face the whole time, as the plane turned, as it came down the runway, as it lifted off, as if her vision had detached itself from her body and followed him. The plane darkened and flew into the sun. It wavered and shrunk and suddenly the sun wasn¡¯t the sun, but a pure ball of light with something to say, and full of memories of things said to it, and in the brief moment as it was flashing like an explosion, she knew something about it that she could never put into words.


    Then it was gone, and he was gone, and the world around her had become exactly what she had expected since they stepped off the train.

 A Day in the Afterlife | If I go, you wont see me again - Part 2

    No tickets to Paradise


    The sky outside the towering windows was lit as if the sun had died just before dawn, but the light had kept flowing out anyway. A dull dead almost blue. Not just cloudless, but uncloudable. Like a gradient backdrop for a film set. A wide flat dry land stretching beneath. Downtown in the distance, black windowed and dead.


    She turned back to the hall and seating area behind her, and found it, unsettlingly, just as she had expected.


    All the people were gone, and the light had dimmed, as if the clouds had passed over the sun, or it had moved beyond the windows in its arc, the seats and walkway now heavy in sleepy shade. The white noise and occasional engine sound, which her ears had grown used to though her mind had hardly noticed, were gone.


    The airport had been dropped into still dark silence, and somewhere down the hall, an exit beckoned her, sternly. She felt a momentary urge to resist, but shook it off. There was no other place she¡¯d less like to be, and she felt that if she stood still too long she might sink into all of it and never escape.


    As she walked down the hall between deadfaced restaurants and steel-shuttered agent desks, she felt the place was expelling her. That energetic sense of something beginning that had hummed out of the light and floors before he had left, that had beckoned her to come with him, was gone, replaced by something not quite hostile, but definitely unwelcoming. Despite or because of the absence of any malice in the sensation, she was convinced that he was going to a place unlike what he had been promised, and more than ever she believed that paradise in this world was nothing more than a lie.


    The flash of light had been the final clue. She remembered that when they were together, she had gotten the feeling that he had been running from someone, and everyone knew Paradise wipes your slate clean. Someone had said to her once, ¡°Anyone who tells you they¡¯ve been to paradise is lying.¡±


    She had asked them how they knew, and they said, ¡°Cause no one ever comes back.¡±


    Sometime during the trip, he had said to her,


    ¡°If I go you won¡¯t see me again. I thought maybe you would want to come with me.¡±


    But she could never remember where or when he had said it. She could picture him saying it at the train station, in the train, the airport, even stopping halfway down the boarding tunnel, but none of the places stood out. Maybe he had never said it at all. It had been a year at least now. It was hard to recall.


    Now, sitting at a party, her mind thrown back to that day by an unexpectedly familiar flash of light, dimmed by its crass duplication and placed oddly amidst the light show at the center of the stadium-shaped resort club, she could finally accept that she wasn¡¯t having a good time.


    Her friend had invited her. A celebration of the eightieth or eight hundredth piece by some artist well known in the resort industry. It was the kind of thing she would have loved before. Now it seemed petty. Back then, she would have marveled at the brilliant lights, the panoramic effects, the way the scenes played in 3D to the viewer, and allowed you to cast subtle changes, but now, almost a year after her first trip to the Hardworlds, she saw them for what they were.


    She had done the same thing herself, in her realm and in the vault before a job. Taken memories and morphed them, but while that had been aimed at a definite purpose, these displays and by extension everything else in the Other seemed like a process severed from meaning. In the light show, she saw the glare of headlights on a rain-slicked road, feel the electric sensation of waking up early to a long-awaited day off, even recognized muzzle flash and felt the distinct concussion of close gunfire. But they were all softened and stretched, designed to hook the viewer with a filed flechette of reality and drag them into a fantasy that they would pine after like an addict for the rest of the night, at least.


    It was the kind of thing she would have loved to get lost in, long ago, when she was infamous among the Other¡¯s most unrestrained party scenes. The kind of thing that turned sour in her eyes after the airport, like so much else.


    She couldn¡¯t shake the feeling, afterward, that there was so much more to this new existence, and that all the resorts and clubworlds and dreamworld drugs were nothing but a new kind of barrier, a way to bind souls that had found themselves in a world of total freedom.


    She had searched for that something else everywhere she could think of, the cults and temples that preached turning your back on all the excesses of the Otherworld, the black market sims that promised to turn your own memory inside out until you could find what really made you tick, what childhood trauma or genetic quirk made you you, and a million other things that all turned out to be different flavors of the same thing. A flight away from yourself towards something ultimately impossible, a way to pacify the feeling but not resolve it, like taking a ride in one of those dive planes to simulate the feeling of zero g.


    She had given up and returned to partying when Michael found her.


    He always claimed he didn¡¯t, that she had found him, but if this was a lie, told early on to ease her fear that he was just another creeper, and one he was now unable to admit to as her boss, or if he had really convinced himself of it, she couldn¡¯t say. It didn¡¯t matter. She had long since given up the na?ve belief that Michael was some kind of enlightened guide. He didn¡¯t have to be. He had shown her what she had been looking for. Maybe his flaws were what allowed him to.


    ¡°Are you here alone?¡±


    The theme of the party was ¡°repetition, broken¡±. The upper echelons of Otherworld party life had long since run through all the expected themes, and now often had to resort to those that reminded Celeste of bad alt-rock album titles. The man standing in front of her wore a houndstooth patterned robe, with one ¡°tooth¡± popped out and the gap giving a view to a 3D space that made Celeste think of the old desktop music player visualizer. The fact that every other dude had also worn some fractal themed get up brought a smile to Celeste¡¯s face as she spoke to him that he clearly mistook for something else.This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.


    The conversation took the usual course, which made her laugh again in the context of a party themed around repetition. Of course, she would get hit on by the same kind of ¡°wisened¡± pseudo-intellectual she had met a million times before, who predictably confessed his disdain for ¡°these types of things¡± and even implied that he had chosen his outfit as a joke, knowing that the lowly masses would of course take the surface level interpretation of the theme, and he would be lost in a sea of fractals.


    She smiled and nodded and feigned confusion, glad finally to have someone sitting across from her to prevent anyone else from approaching the table, and let her thoughts float away to the last job, to Cooper and the shootouts, to the razor-sharp pull the memory of lethal fear had on her. Despite being with Michael for almost a year now, the office job had been her first time shooting at anyone. She had gone to the twins immediately after and told them straight up that she never wanted to be brought to tears by gunfire again. They had looked at her like other guys might look at her if she offered her body without reservations, and put her through a course that came in handy when she had found herself trapped in the Beetle with PKM rounds testing the windshield.


    ¡°¡ªThe Hardworlds. Repetition in ultimate form. But broken?¡±


    She almost jumped out of her seat before realizing the light show in the center of the room had transitioned to a spoken word and image performance art piece, and not as she had feared, tapped into her thoughts and poured them out onto the stage.


    The half dome pseudo screen showed a lotus opening, the image becoming a reflection upon glass, the reflection itself reflected, then repeated.


    The man across from her took her troubled look as another kind of discomfort and expressed his opinions on the over-hypedness of the Hardworlds.


    ¡°They¡¯re really not as scary as people make them seem. I''ve been in them-¡± (here she struggled not to smile) ¡°-and came to the same conclusion as Astodryphys. They¡¯re made out of our memories of the Real, and really only seem so lifelike to us after we have left them, a kind of retroactive editing of memory common to¡ª¡±


    She would have had to try a lot harder not to laugh, but the presentation on the Hardworlds was unsettling enough to keep her mood less than jovial.


    Fire, ash, burning lotus trampled under tires, all repeated in a half dome of mirrors like a fly¡¯s eye.


    ¡°When the mirror is shattered, the viewer is cut, deeply, but even shattered glass reflects. And the light cannot be destroyed, or escaped.¡±


    The show proceeded to scenes of violence repeated kaleidoscopically, and the point beaten home in a similarly repetitive fashion. The Hardworlds were reflections of the real, and Hardworlders, by bringing violence into them, tarnished a place capable of infinite retrospection and enlightenment.


    ¡°But the violence is not the final desecration. Nor is it the first.¡±


    Endless MEM symbols, reflected endlessly, accompanied by a distorted sound that Celeste recognized as a winning chime from a slot on Roulette. As the art piece turned lecture morphed into a scolding of monetizing the Otherworld, which Celeste found very naked-emperorish given that everyone at the party besides her and maybe some of the girls had enough MEM to rent out half the Allclub for a night, she let her thoughts float away, knocked free by the reminder of the Hardworlds and the visceral physical terror she had felt in the half a second she was sure her cover was blown.


    Michael had once told her of a theory, which felt a lot like a personal confession, that the Hardworlds were as real to the natives inside as our Real is to us.


    ¡°To them, it¡¯s us who aren¡¯t real.¡±


    A nice thought. To be unreal. Sometimes, when the earbuds were silent and there was nothing but time to kill, she would stare at the people in the Hardworlds and when they looked back, tell herself, ¡°I¡¯m not real. They are.¡±


    So when Michael asked her, ¡°What do you want from the Hardworlds?¡±, she had told him, ¡°To be unreal.¡±


    He had smiled at her the way he always did when they talked about things like that. That was another good thing about him. Every time she said something she was sure was weird enough to make him think she was insane or stupid, he just smiled like she had accidentally revealed some truth that most people were too polite to say out loud.


    Thinking about Michael, she became aware again of the man across from her. Thinking about the Hardworlds and the people in them, she became aware of the party and the people around her. They felt unreal, in a different, more boring way. Her friend was floating around, leering from behind her glass as if she had some filthy secret only the lucky chosen man of the night would be able to uncover, and all the men she spoke to smiled and played along like they gave a shit.


    Celeste thought of the last party she had been to. A Hardworlder party. Everyone in masks. It had been the most candid open experience of her life. Never had she seen people reveal so effortlessly who they were and what they felt and lived. This was exactly the opposite. A party of people being masks. The clich¨¦ of the metaphor was only slightly less tedious than the thing itself.


    She got up and walked out without saying anything to anyone. It didn¡¯t matter. After the self-flagellation of the art piece, everyone had given themselves wholly to selfish debauchery and didn¡¯t notice her beyond a few hungry stares and even one or two squeezes.


    The walls of the stadium space now projected a rolling jungle canopy and molten blue sky burning into sunset. The spherical orbital upon which the party was set turned translucent and fish eyed. A single drop of rain, falling to the jungle below. The feeling of falling was well executed, and the sky and jungle rolled around, making her feel every step might be the start of a trip and fall.


    She got over it by focusing on the exit, a frosted glass door that revealed itself reluctantly between the tables and the lounge pool. After a few steps, she had a hold of herself, and the stumbling, staring partygoers with their arms out akimbo for balance took on a comical slant.


    She activated her communicator and found a message from Michael waiting for her.


    ¡°Just got another contract. Should be dropping in within the day.¡±


    The Hardworlds bloomed in her mind with a radiance that pushed her surroundings out into blurry peripherals, those other hers calling out to be set alight by her Spirit¡¯s fire, her Spirit longing to do something that felt like stretching its legs.


    And then, like a light turned on in the early morning, she saw Cooper, sudden and blinding, heard the gunfire and the crinkle of broken armored windows, smelled the blood and acid smoke. In an unexpected burst of vivid memory (Hardworld memory tended to fall from her mind like rain off glass) she could feel the Beetle all around her, crumbling, pressed in vicelike by not just the gunfire, but by all the rest of the world outside. A real world. A dense world.


    Then, as she stepped out the exit, she had a sudden vision, halfway between daydream and memory, perhaps brought on by some unseen hazy person waving goodbye as she left the party and the scene forever.


    She was in the Hardworlds, talking to a native, at the end of a long day, vial of Propofol clinking in her purse. She looked them in the eye, and said with a smile.


    ¡°You know, If I go, you won¡¯t see me again.¡±


    The face watched her with wonder, which filled her with a satisfied, powerful feeling, while it lasted.


    But then the face became Cooper¡¯s, and Cooper replaced the face looking out the window of the plane as it vanished, and she felt suddenly that it was impossible to ever leave anyone in this place, that a soul in the Hardworlds was just as close to her as one locked in the center of Paradise, and that all the distance between them was just a trick of the mind.


    But the feeling passed, and she was alone in the elevator, speeding toward the office.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze - Colors

    I am the rainbow


    The sudden darkness gave way to blinding white light, and a pure humming tone that had the feeling of crystal. Slowly, both faded and Gradie found himself in a hexagonal room with colored mirror walls and a circular table at the center.


    ¡°Oh man, this map!¡± Nova said, enthusiastically. ¡°I haven¡¯t seen this place in years!¡±


    ¡°Probably because we haven¡¯t taken anyone brand new since Marcus,¡± Angel said, in the tone of someone talking in a church.


    ¡°Welcome to Colors,¡± a voice said from everywhere, reverbing off the glass like a tuning fork. It was a different voice then the one at the entrance to Gunmaze, and Gradie assumed it was one of the makers of this place.


    ¡°Use the mirrors to choose a color. Select a weapon at the center table. You may change both color and weapon during the game. Death results in a duel. Victors may select respawn location based on color or prism, if one has been attuned. Have fun.¡±


    Half a second later, the same voice started up again, as if from a different audio file.


    ¡°The game type is deathmatch. The goal is to score the highest Kill to player ratio. Good luck.¡±


    ¡°Kill to player?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°Yeah, so like the average kd ratio of any given party. It¡¯s to balance teams of different sizes,¡± Nova said, already at the table. Like Gradie, he and the other two were solid white, as if some big model maker in the sky had forgotten to paint any of them.


    ¡°So if a team of five gets five kills, that¡¯s one K to P, so a solo player would only have to get one kill to be even with them. Which weapon do you want? We¡¯ll let you have first pick.¡±


    Nova motioned to the hexagonal table, where Gradie found four weapons.


    ¡°Assault rifle, sniper, grenade launcher, shotgun.¡±


    Gradie picked up the assault rifle, a solid white hunk of what felt like an impossible blend of plastic and metal formed into something halfway between an AR and AK platform, with a top-mounted carrying handle and drastic banana clip.


    Angel grabbed the shotgun and tossed Nova the sniper while Luke shouldered the grenade launcher. From the silent and immediate way they distributed the weapons, Gradie detected a synergy he was still uncomfortably outside of.


    Nova waved at the mirror walls.


    ¡°All right bro, now pick a color. Just shoot one.¡±


    The mirrors were red, green, blue, yellow, orange, and purple. Gradie aimed down the iron sights, a three quarters ring with a post in the center, and shot the red mirror. The gun kicked lightly and flashed with a big four-pointed star of muzzle burst. The sound was muffled and he didn¡¯t even feel it in his teeth. Compared to the memory sims of the Vault, it was a plastic sensation. Compared to the gunfire in the Hardworlds, he almost laughed out loud.


    The red mirror vibrated from the bullet impact and when it stopped shaking, the Gradie reflected in it was a much darker red. He looked down at his forearm and found it a deep scarlet. There were more plastic sounds around him as the twins shot other mirrors and Luke punched his.


    ¡°Real quick, let me give you a crash course,¡± Nova said, now a solid orange. ¡°Your color effects a lot of things. Like you do more damage to materials and players of your opposite color, which for red is blue, but also you take more damage from yellow. I¡¯m orange, so I¡¯m weak to purple but strong against green. It¡¯s like two rock paper scissor games, got it?¡±


    ¡°And keep in mind you can change colors while you¡¯re out there if we need a tactical advantage.¡± Angel had picked green.


    ¡°And if you get all the colors in one game, something magical happens,¡± Luke said with mock drama, his smiling face a monochrome blue.


    ¡°Don¡¯t spoil it, bro!¡± Nova said, like witnessing a sacrilege. Given the fact that he and the rest of them looked like freshly minted toys in a crayon box, Gradie found his distress hilarious.


    ¡°Match starts in thirty seconds,¡± the voice said.


    ¡°All right, form up,¡± Luke said, sounding suddenly serious. The twins deferred to his commands, which Gradie found surprising given the obvious gap in experience with Gunmaze, and the formation ended up with Luke in the front, the twins staggered at his flanks, and Gradie in between them, but also staggered so he wouldn¡¯t flag them.


    Suddenly, all the concrete commands Philip had shouted in the clubhouse echoed through the child¡¯s toy box surroundings, clashing strangely. Gradie went from feeling like the brother tagging along to the professional QB asked to play a scrimmage at the local Y.


    ¡°Ten,¡±


    Standing amidst his friends, holding a weapon, about to be dropped into an unfamiliar game where, as far as he knew, anything was possible, connected to an unknown but surely massive number of other players, and finally, at last, confident in his ability to do something other than embarrass himself, Gradie felt that humming, electric, adrenaline-tasting feeling of excitement flow through him.


    Here was something he had dreamed about since he was a child. Here, maybe, at last, was the Otherworld equivalent of what the Hardworlds offered. A freedom to explore. A freedom to test himself.


    ¡°One, Fight!¡±


    There was a flash of bright light, and Gradie knew they had all been turned into a rainbow and beamed down to the map below. Suddenly, they were in a sunken room with multicolored walls, standing on a large flat platform of solid green material that felt like something between plastic and felt beneath his feet. The sky above was a simple light blue gradient, and shapes of rainbow floated under it, like chunks of legos stuck together.


    Angel pointed up at the sky. His voice came over the comms.


    ¡°Our best move would be to get up to one of those orbitals and attune to its crystal. We need to find a reflector.¡±


    ¡°Right here.¡± Nova pointed, and Gradie noticed a faint rainbow beam coming from somewhere on the other side of the far wall up towards a top-shaped chunk of rainbow blocks hanging in the sky.


    Angel nodded.


    ¡°Right. Let¡¯s go for it. Gradie, remember, attack blue, avoid yellow.¡±


    They moved in formation through the tall rectangle cut into the far wall and found themselves in a downward sloping wide hallway that ended in a slice of quasi sunlight illuminating what at this distance Gradie could only guess was some kind of multicolored crater. As they moved forward, Gradie noticed openings to other tunnels and passageways in the sides of the hall, and even pits and shafts. There was very little gradience to anything, every shadow was a solid quadrilateral or rhombus, every surface was one tone. It made the recesses of his weapons and his allies stand out starkly, and he guessed that was the point.


    For the first time, he noticed the weight of his Avatar, like a thin layer of wet cloth spread tightly over him, and he couldn¡¯t shake the feeling that his motions were somewhat delayed, though when he swiped the rifle in front of his face, it seemed to move in real time. With every step, the sensation lessened, and he wasn¡¯t sure if that was due to him getting used to the feeling, or the Avatar ¡°learning¡± how he moved. He hope it was the former. The last thing he wanted was any part of this place learning how he did anything.Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.


    Just before they got to the end of the passage, a solid yellow laser beam bisected the opening from the top right to the bottom left, then vanished as the gunshot echoed down the hall.


    ¡°Shit! Hug the walls,¡± Luke hissed on the communicator and fanned one hand backward.


    They lined up on the right wall with Gradie at the rear and stalked towards the opening. Something exploded and more laser gunfire with a faster cadence echoed from the shaft just outside the opening, which grade could now see was ringed by balconies and platforms and riddled with shadowed openings. Just outside their own hallway, the balcony slanted up to the left and down to the right.


    ¡°All right bros, eyes open. I¡¯m gonna try and get a shot.¡± Nova moved up with his sniper shouldered.


    ¡°Watch the rear.¡± Luke reminded them, while stepping across the hallway to the other wall, where he took aim at the left side of the balcony. Angel aimed at the right side and Gradie aimed back down where they had come from.


    Just dim hallway and the shadows of the various offshoots. Laser sounds and dull explosions and other sounds he didn¡¯t recognize echoed out of some of them. He could hear Nova stepping up to the gap slowly, his footsteps sounding like stock noise that Gradie knew was amplified by the game.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Nova hissed in shock, his voice breaking out into the air and echoing with the communicator. Gradie turned back to the front and saw movement out in the shaft and brought his gun around in an instinct. By the time he realized what it was, Nova and Luke were already laughing.


    ¡°It¡¯s just a block. Relax.¡± Angel¡¯s voice was solely on the comms, but his laugh echoed in the hall. The solid yellow block floated lazily up the shaft and disappeared past the top of the opening.


    Gradie aimed back down the hall, and felt something strange.


    Nostalgia. D¨¦j¨¤ vu. He guessed it was because this all felt like the archetype of an online shooter, and that the map had some resemblance to one he had played long ago when games came on cartridges and dial up still lingered, but the explanation was lacking. There was something else about it. Like he had dreamed it and forgot.


    ¡°All right, we¡¯re clear,¡± Nova said.


    ¡°Ok. Next block that comes up, we should be on it,¡± Angel said.


    ¡°Contact right.¡± Luke¡¯s voice, even echoing dreamily in the comms, was like a live current jumping from Gradie¡¯s ear to his nervous system. His training moved him before his mind could catch up, and he swiveled back to the front in time to see Luke fire a grenade with a cobalt hued flash and puff of smoke. Half a second later, the explosion echoed out in the shaft.


    ¡°Got that mother fucker. Oh shit, hello!¡±


    Luke pivoted in a way that reminded Gradie of his gunfights in the Hardworlds, but the movement was more twitchy here, as if gravity and Luke¡¯s muscle speed were farther out of whack from their Real counterparts.


    Another burst of blue smoke.


    ¡°Contact! Two floors down!¡±


    A rainbow of projectiles soared through the opening, and only about half of them came from below. Luke stepped backward firing and glided over the ground.


    ¡°And every fucking where else too!¡±


    He side-stepped and got ready to charge the opening again, but Nova stopped him.


    ¡°One sec, making some cover.¡± He shot the ground with his sniper and the yellow beam took a man-sized chunk out of the green material in a burst like a monochromed glitter bomb.


    ¡°Hell yeah. Hey, shoot right here!¡± Luke pointed to the ceiling ten yards from the opening.


    ¡°Get me like an angle.¡± He made a motion with his hand and Nova nodded with a smile.


    ¡°I got you bro, I got it.¡± He shot five times in a slow semi auto cadence until a jagged tunnel broke out into the shaft at an angle.


    ¡°Fuck yeah!¡± Luke aimed up into the new hole and stepped back and forth until he had a bead on something and fired.


    ¡°Shit. They scattered. Can you make me one in the floor too?¡±


    ¡°They¡¯re thinning out,¡± Angel said, peeking around the corner. Out in the shaft, the rainbow storm of beams and bombs that had been crosshatching the open space had died down.


    Angel looked up in the air then down as far as he could without sticking his head out.


    ¡°Another block should be coming up. We should go for it.¡±


    Luke abandoned the fresh channel Nova had carved in the floor and crept towards the edge of the hallway.


    ¡°Shit, all right yall, serpentine. Don¡¯t make it easy on em. Gradie, Get up here.¡±


    ¡°Hit it with your bomb when it¡¯s about two levels down,¡± Angel said. ¡°That will be our signal.¡±


    ¡°Ok bros here it comes,¡± Nova said, looking through the hole in the ground.


    Angel and Luke were hugging both walls, peeking into the shaft. Nova slinked up behind his brother with his sniper raised.


    ¡°Here we go,¡± Luke said, and his grenade launcher went off with a ¡®chunk¡¯, and an instant later an explosion flashed in the center of the open space, blue flame sending yellow shards flying off of something out of sight.


    ¡°Cover me!¡± Angel said, at about the same time as a red bomb, responding to Lukes shot, exploded on the wall outside the opening.


    ¡°Bro wait,¡± Nova yelled, but Angel was already sprinting out into the shaft. He shot the ground at his feet with his shotgun, which to Gradie¡¯s surprise, shot him up into a high jump.


    ¡°What the fuck!¡± Luke said, laughing, as he launched grenades at seemingly random places.


    ¡°Cover him! Cover him!¡± Nova screamed, firing his sniper as fast as he could, which was not very fast. Gradie, trigger finger itching from the sounds of shooting echoing down the hall for the past five minutes, sprinted up to the opening and aimed out at the three walls that he could see.


    He was just in time to watch Angel land dead center in the pit Luke¡¯s bomb had carved out of the center of the rising yellow block, fire another round at his feet, and launch himself at a purple chunk of wall directly across from them. He fired again while still in the air, blasting a man-sized pit in the wall, and landed inside it, pressing himself as flat as he could, looking like a green stain on the purple square. Projectiles of all colors followed him the entire way.


    ¡°Go! Go!¡± Nova yelled, still firing, but Luke was already sailing out towards the rising block. He had shot a bomb at his feet, and it had launched him about triple the height that Angel¡¯s shotgun had, and as he arced through the air, he fired another three bombs before he landed on the block, and the rain of colored death lessened significantly.


    But as Luke settled on the rising block, the formerly haphazard sprays of fire converged on him. He glanced up at the opening and caught Gradie¡¯s eye, (or so it seemed in his mirrored shades) just for a moment, and that was all it took.


    Gradie stepped up to the opening and lay into everything with his plastic AR, and immediately felt another gaping difference between Gunmaze and the Hardworlds. The experience was purely analog, hollow, unresponsive somehow. At first, feeling confused him, but as he squeezed the trigger over and over, it clicked. In the Hardworlds, and even in the Vault sims meant to simulate them, there had been a responsiveness in his gunfire beyond the physical interaction between flesh and metal. Though he hadn¡¯t ever noticed it at the time, he was now sure that his Spirit had been subtly pushing on the Hardworlds with every shot, altering reality just slightly. Here in Gunmaze, the game wasn¡¯t up for debate.


    Another more minor difference, was that the sound was anemic, the feeling impotent, compared to the echoes of gunfire and whispers of recoil in his head, and for a moment he was sure the enemies would laugh and gun him down, but instead he got one toy soldier looking mother fucker with a full burst of maroon tracers and his rainbow colored friends disappeared behind the balcony.


    It took a moment, by which time Gradie had already moved on to firing at other barely visible targets, for him to notice that the guy he had shot had turned white and disintegrated in a burst of white light.


    ¡°Jump bro!¡± It was Nova, who at some point had made it onto the rising block, where Luke and Angel squatted and fired as fast as their triggers would let them.


    As colored things of all kinds whizzed by around him and broke aparpt pieces of the hallway like glass, Gradie took a few steps backwards, then stomped forward in a rushed sprint and jumped out the opening, his leap taking him much farther and straighter than any long jump in the real world ever could, as if this places gravity had sensed his intention and suddenly loosened up.


    As he sailed through the air, he realized the battle raging in the shaft was much larger than he had expected. Rather than there being only a few other levels above and below them, each holding about five or so enemies trying to shoot them, as he had imagined, there were at least ten levels in either direction, fading into soft blue light above and dark shadow below, each belching colored beams and bursts and blasts everywhere. He stared at it all, open mouthed, until something whizzed by his head. A burst of orange gunfire.


    Another side effect of the game¡¯s flexible physics was that he could easily turn and fire as he sailed through the air. He held down the trigger and fanned the balcony across from him, where another AR gunner and a sniper were trying to track his flight, but weren¡¯t quite leading him enough. He sprayed their alcove and they dove to cover. A blue bomb sailed past him and exploded two levels up, sending a green body flying that disintegrated midair.


    Holy shit, this is awesome.


    He turned back to platform and landed in a combat roll next to Luke. For a split second, they smiled at each other.


    ¡°This shit is¡­¡± Gradie started, but was cut off by a solid yellow beam that bloomed out of his upper left peripherals and glowed just under his chin.


    The world froze, then turned completely black and white, and he fell right through it at near instantaneous speed. He zipped down through the platform and everything else in a fraction of a second, his body glowing and blinding him, like he had been turned into light and bounced off a mirror.


    Then everything was silent, and he was standing in a solid white room, with just enough shadow over everything to give him a general idea of the forms. His hands still clutched his rifle, though he was now in a standing position, and the rifle and his arms were now the same white as everything else.


    ¡°Fight!¡± a voice said from the ceiling, and something moved on the edge of the room.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze - Duel

    Are you yellow?


    A flurry of photo negative tracers shot by his head and he ducked behind some hexagonal prism of white non matter. He looked around hastily and saw he was surrounded by desaturated shapes, like a child¡¯s block set covered in white out.


    He stepped up to the nearest cover, a knocked over grey cylinder, and put it between him and whoever was shooting at him, then, out of habit, scanned his surroundings. There was an open space behind him where he had spawned in and a spattering of blocks and shapes around that. Off to the side, he glimpsed the alternating light and shadow pattern of a staircase cut into a large block, and he realized that many of the shapes were tall enough and close enough together that if he could get up to one, he could jump across to the others.


    He decided that second to get up to higher ground before engaging whoever was in here with him, but the next second it didn¡¯t matter.


    A solid white figure sailed over him and exploded and the white world washed out completely.


    As he fell into a solid white void, a screen appeared in front of him, similar to the one that had appeared in the twin¡¯s craft before they had entered Gunmaze. It was a bird¡¯s eye view of the room he had just been in. He saw himself outlined in red, and another figure outlined in purple across from him. The purple figure fired, the Gradie ducked down, the purple figure made a b line for a ramped block, like a giant simple triangular prism, leapt off the end of it and sailed through the air and blasted the Gradie with his shotgun midflight.


    Then the screen vanished. It was immediately obvious that the other guy had done that before, and Gradie only had time to wonder if the makers had a way to randomize the blocks each round, before a rainbow light surrounded him and the sensation of falling ended.


    ¡°You have died. Select a respawn,¡± the voice said, and two boxes with text floated in the air in front of him.


    [Random Spawn]


    [Red Room]


    ¡°Uh..¡±


    ¡°You still in the duel chamber?¡± Nova asked on the comms.


    ¡°No. I lost.¡± Gradie fought the urge to hold his hand to his ear, and imagined he was wearing his old PS3 headset. It helped, but he could still see EP laughing in his peripherals.


    ¡°Ah, no big deal bro. I think it should let you respawn into the red room. That¡¯s probably your best bet because we¡¯re not that far from it.¡±


    ¡°Ok, so what¡ª¡±


    ¡°Just be sure to get moving the moment you spawn in so you don¡¯t get spawn camped,¡± Angel said. ¡°Try and get to an opening and shoot up a flare so we can find you.¡±


    ¡°A flare?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s a secondary button on your gun. Should be where your touch pad for a light would be.¡±


    Gradie looked his AR over and found it. He pressed the button and a red hued roman candle shot out of the barrel and vanished in the white distance.


    ¡°Found it.¡±


    ¡°All right bro, we¡¯re gonna make a pit stop but we¡¯ll be there soon. And be careful. Don¡¯t fight unless you have too.¡±


    The connection broke. Gradie shot the box that said [Red Room] and gravity returned with a vengeance, sucking him down into the ball of prismatic light. There was a winding-up sound like a laser gun charging and then a ¡°pew¡± sound as the world faded from white to red, and he was standing in what looked like a jail cell with no door. Muffled videogame-esqe sounds of battle raging somewhere in the distance floated in through the doorway.


    He considered, for a moment, just sitting there and waiting the whole thing out. His earlier momentary feeling of elated excitement as he jumped onto the block had proven to be a temporary height from which to fall into disappointed dissatisfaction, his momentary childlike gullible belief that anything could ever be as fun as he imagined it to be was taken down swiftly by the two successive failures like a hot glass plunged in ice water.


    But a part of him bounced and writhed in anticipation, a stupid senseless desire to get back out there, to chase that temporary high again. Gradie tried to beat it down, to douse it in the cold water of cynicism he had been swimming in since Michael told him to fuck off out into the black, but it didn¡¯t work all the way. It wasn¡¯t, as he had thought, his inner child. At least not all of it. It was a fresher him. It was the Gradie that had gone to sleep last night, the one he had tried to imagine was now completely separate, the one who could never even know this place existed. It was that Gradie that still had some hope in him.Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.


    The revelation shocked present Gradie. He would have thought that the discovery of another world, of shared dream shooters and near endless creation would have enlivened his hope, his mental wanderlust, but here he was standing in a fucking jail cell by choice while his newest friends were out playing a game that Real Gradie would kill to even believe in.


    What happened? When had his seemingly healthy cynicism of the Other translated into a moping defeatism? Was it his training? Had Philips and to some extent Michaels dismissal of the Other been something he had just taken for granted? Or had he just been that offended by his first day, by those people in the Allclub, by the grand promises they had shattered with their low, cheap pleasures.


    Maybe it was the Hardworlds, his obsession with crafting the perfect version of his own life, a life that by necessity, had to be of a real world to be satisfying, to resolve the disappointment of his own real existence. Of course they were never perfect, and standing here, so far away from them, their memory so distant, he wondered if he had not made them out to be more than they were. If they faded, vanished the moment he stepped out of the dreamworlds and left his Self behind forever, if they were just as unreal as anything here, were they really any more special than this place, a place of less realness but more permanence?


    But a deep longing came at the thought of the Hardworlds, one that was exacerbated by his difficulty in remembering them, which was always a struggle outside the vault. He had once confessed this during a grilling Philip was giving him at the HQ, and Philip had laughed at him.


    ¡°You don¡¯t need this fucking machine to remember. You just need to dive deep. Your memories are still in there,¡± (he had pointed a rigid finger at Gradie¡¯s skull) ¡°Every fucking one of them. Don¡¯t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.¡±


    But there was nothing he could do about any of that here, so he let the bouncing inner child or whatever the fuck it was guide him out of the cell and into the cavern outside.


    It was all solid red, its walls lined with other cells rung by catwalks, descending down to a dark point. Gradie saw across the way that the rows of cells were broken intermittently by dark doors leading back into dark hallways, so he moved across his own catwalk until he found one.


    The door led directly into a stairwell. He looked down, and the square spiral spun into dim darkness. He looked up, and the reversed spiral ended just a few floors up, where the ceiling glowed from a neon red something out of sight.


    He bounded up the stairs, learning quickly that he could take each set almost in a single jump, sliding across each landing before taking another leap. It felt like some beaten down sibling to flying, and the excitement in his heart fluttered again. He clutched his rifle tight, and in his mind multicolored adversaries ascended from below and waited on each landing above.


    He got to the top without seeing anyone, and found a single doorway with a glowing exit sign above it. Inside, a small wide room with square chutes recessed into the walls, glowing pads below, like plastic arcade cabinet start buttons, and dark squares above, the shadowed mouths of the chutes. Of course, there was one of each color. It didn¡¯t take any dream knowledge to guess how they worked, but he had no way of telling which one he should take.


    He activated his comms in his head.


    ¡°I¡¯m in a room with a bunch of tubes. Which color should I take?¡±


    ¡°No fucking idea,¡± Noval replied. ¡°Just get somewhere you can see sky and shoot a flare.¡±


    Since it didn¡¯t seem to matter, Gradie took the obvious choice and stepped onto the red square. It was immediately apparent that there was a bit of finesse involved in using the jump pads correctly, unlike in a video game. The moment he stepped down with his right foot, the fucking thing went off like it had C4 under it, launching him up by his right leg, which in a fraction of a second was shooting straight up with the rest of his body lagging behind. He tried to roll right side up but the roll kept going and he shot out of the chute into a red room tumbling in the air like a rag doll.


    He landed hard on his head, feeling nothing at all, and crumbled into an awkward sitting position. He rolled up onto his feet with his rifle raised, as distant echoes of Philips laughter chased him, and found himself alone in a bare cube with one large square opening to a long hallway.


    The hallway ended about fifty feet away, though distance was hard to tell here, in a bright cavern that looked, from what he could tell, like the one he had gotten sniped in. Faint sounds of idealized gunfire echoed down at him. Great.


    He hugged the right wall and moved a bit faster than he knew he should have, but he felt the prickly fear of being seen crawling on the back of his neck, and the hallway was lined with dark parallelograms of shadow that could have led anywhere, and his anxiety of who might be in the cavern was worse than the idea of starting over from the jail again, so he resolved to get there as fast as possible.


    Why are you scared? Its just a game. The bullets don¡¯t even hurt here. This is literal childs play, Hardworlder.


    His inner voice was less inspiring than derisive, and he tried to deflect it.


    I¡¯m having fun. I don¡¯t need to be Hardworlding every moment for the rest of my fucking life.


    Are you having fun?


    Before he could answer himself, two figures shot out of a shadowed sliver fifteen feet down the hall. In a reflex, he stepped forward in two long strides to reach the next recess in the wall and shot himself inside. Luckily, it was one of the faux doorways that ended two feet inside the wall, but he could still see Philip¡¯s eyes flashing at him for stepping into it without clearing it first.


    The two figures hadn¡¯t noticed him. They moved down the hall, bunny hopping and bouncing left to right, then stopped and aimed out into the shaft. One of them shot a flare out of his sniper rifle, and the other talked into a radio pinned to his shoulder.


    ¡°You see it? Here!¡± He shot another tracer out of his shot gun and his voice echoed down the hall. It was like a sudden light in a dark room. Until then, Gradie had felt he was navigating a sterile world made out of a crayon box. Sure, the world had bitten him once, sent him tumbling down into a red inconvenience, but it had felt more like tripping over something on a hike than being attacked.


    Now, hearing the voice, its panicked excited, angry tone, like a scolding whine, Gradie realized these were real people, real spirits just like him, stuck inside these colored suits and shooting at each other.


    Now, finally, it was interesting.


    He braced his rifle against the wall and fired.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze - Dazzle

    Multi-colored sound and fury


    Red sparkling laser bolts cut through the first figure like he had been made of flakes of brittle paint carefully balanced together, and the flash turned purple where it met his blue form. He had time to turn around and face Gradie before the last round of the three round burst caught him in the head and tore him to tiny pieces of pale blue that faded to white in the blast. Gradie had aimed at the chest and let 3 rounds off before releasing the trigger, and the recoil, (which was more severe than he would have expected had the gun been a real AR firing 5.56, and yet less violent, perhaps because of its uniformity) sent the barrel rising into a perfect headshot.


    The other guy saw his friend vanish, had time to scream, ¡°Oh fuck!¡±, and then, for some reason, turn out toward the opening, possibly to scan the chaos out there for some sign of the unseen shooter, before Gradie finished him with a single burst to the head, this time with the recoil handled by and overhand grip on the barrel sheath.


    ¡°Ping, Ping¡±


    Two semitransparent ¡°+25¡±s floated up in his peripheral. When he turned to look at them, they stayed at the edge of his vision, and he realized they were being displayed right onto his eyeballs.


    ¡°Damn bro, you got two more?¡± Nova asked. Gradie assumed he just hadn¡¯t noticed any numbers during the first fight, or maybe they had been lost in the chaos around the block. The hallway was dead quiet now.


    ¡°Yeah,¡± he told Nova. ¡°Two poor blue bastards.¡±


    ¡°Sick. You get half score for them because their weak to you, you get double for yellow, and¡ª¡±


    ¡°How did you see my kills?¡±


    ¡°Oh, I have ally kill feed turned on. It¡¯s in settings.¡±


    ¡°There are settings?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, you gotta¡ª¡±


    ¡°Where are you?¡± Angel interrupted, his voice filled with uncharacteristic urgency.


    ¡°Uh,¡±


    Gradie approached the opening while carefully hugging the wall, and peered out.


    It was another massive cavern, but this one was shaped like an inverse pyramid with a massive dome and a circular skylight at the top, and was at least ten times as big as the one they had ridden up on the block. At first glance, it looked like a chaotic light show, but as the seconds passed, he found some key distinctive features.


    ¡°Big room, there¡¯s like these bounce pads that change colors, people are flying off of them. There¡¯s some floating blocks¡­ and mirrors?¡± He saw a sniper bolt form a letter L and vaporize a flying purple shot-gunner at the tail end of his bouncing parabola.


    ¡°Oh shit, that¡¯s the bounce house,¡± Nova said. ¡°OK, I know where you¡¯re at bro. One sec.¡±


    ¡°Try and find some red and sit tight,¡± Luke advised. ¡°Don¡¯t wanna have to dig you out of jail.¡± There was friendly mockery in his voice.


    ¡°Find some red?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°If you stand next to a wall or something of your color and don¡¯t move, you become invisible,¡± Angel advised.


    Gradie wanted to ask them why the fuck that little tidbit wasn¡¯t part of the orientation, but instead scanned the prismatic chaos playing out across the room for some evidence that they weren¡¯t fucking with him. An orange figure bounced over to an orange-walled platform and swiftly vanished. A few seconds later, a purple bomb sailed through the air and blasted wall and player into whitening fragments. Gradie made a note that the trick only worked if no one saw you do it, and looked around for something red and close to use.


    Down on the next terrace, a red cluster of shapes looked promising, until a yellow figure descended on it, shot out the center and took cover in the resulting hollow form. The next nearest piece of red was a long rectangle that stuck out like a pier some yards above his head. Sniper beams and AR bursts sprayed off it, and he decided just to stay put until he had some back up.


    He watched the drama out in the open space until Nova came back on the comms.


    ¡°God damn, its poppin off. Ok, shoot a flare.¡±


    ¡°Wait,¡± Angel said. ¡°A flare screams ¡®I¡¯m alone¡¯. Fire a one second burst up at the skylight.¡±


    Gradie did as he was told, and noticed the rounds lost their brilliance by the time they got to the opening at the top.


    ¡°Shit. Do it again.¡±


    He fired another burst and wondered if he had infinite ammo.


    ¡°Ok, bro got you,¡± Nova said. ¡°Here.¡±


    An orange sniper beam blazed a few yards to the right of Gradie and crashed in the hallway. He almost jumped out of the opening.


    ¡°You see me?¡±


    Gradie saw a faint Orange speck on the lip of the skylight, which based on the known size of the speck must have been the size of a football field.


    ¡°Yeah. God damn, I gotta get up there?¡±A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    ¡°You¡¯re gonna have to run, bro. Take the bounce pads. You see this reflector up here? Looks like a big cannon?¡±


    High up beneath the dome, a long crystal covered in machinery pointed up at the skylight. The tip of the crystal reflected the dull, even light of the false sky in a scattering of rainbow, but the rest was covered in shadow. As he watched it, the whole thing moved slowly, as the blocky mass it was mounted to rotated, traveling along a circular ring just inside the dome. He hadn¡¯t noticed it before, because up there, there was very little gunfire to draw his attention.


    ¡°Yeah. Do these bounce pads go that high?¡± The flying figures seemed to only ever go about halfway up the dome. As he spoke, another one got disintegrated midflight.


    ¡°Not the ones you can see, you have to take the ones on the edge to the high steps, then those launch you.¡±


    ¡°You gonna be able to cover me?¡±


    ¡°I guess we¡¯ll find out.¡± Nova sounded offended. Partially as an act of repentance, Gradie didn¡¯t waste any more time. He made a note of a staircase running up the slanted stadium sides of the space to his left, and jumped out into it.


    It was like stepping out onto a field at the center of a packed sports dome. The noise ramped up immediately and he noticed for the first time that the unidentifiable roar he had heard bouncing around inside the hallway was actually the blended shouts, weapons, and shit-talking of about fifty people. Not everyone took the ¡°only on internal comms¡± approach to communication the twins did.


    The terrace level he landed on, with a slight bounce that told him the fall would have broken both legs in the real world, was larger than he expected, and was his first clue that things out here were much different than they had appeared from up in his alcove. The terrace was at least as wide as a two-lane highway, shoulders and all, and he felt immediately exposed. A few breaths after this revelation, as he was just getting into his sprinting stride, a green sniper beam came out from some higher part of his peripherals and blasted a hole in the ground a few yards ahead of him.


    ¡°Shit!¡±


    ¡°Got him,¡± Nova said. ¡°But you might want to zig-zag or something.¡±


    Gradie changed up his pace, which till then had been a full-blown sprint down the center of the lane, and cut at an angle towards the nearest cover, a jagged block of purple the size of a Winnebago that had seemingly fallen from the destruction above. He was wondering if falling objects could kill him in this game as he stomped around it, when something strange happened.


    His breathing got heavy. It wasn¡¯t a complete sensation, but more of a subtle nudging from some phantom version of his lungs, much like feeling out of breath in a dream. He reminded himself that he didn¡¯t need to breathe here, and the sensation subsided a bit, but almost immediately the muscles in his legs began to ache. As he turned his scolding focus to reminding his legs that lactic acid didn¡¯t exist in this world either, his feeling of out of breathness returned, this time much less of a subtle nudge than something approaching a physical reality.


    ¡°What, the fuck?¡± He panted mid-sentence, and despite himself, gave up on jumping up to the staircase, now about five feet over his head and right in front of him, as the thought of pulling himself up and over became a visceral idea, and instead ducked down into a crouch behind another fragment of fallen color, this one unfortunately only about the size of a purple mini fridge.


    ¡°Oh shit, he¡¯s feeling the phantom pain,¡± Luke said, much more jovially than Gradie thought called for.


    ¡°Really? Bro, my bad, I forgot you were so fresh. It¡¯s not real bro. Just don¡¯t think about it and it will go away. C''mon man get up!¡±


    A bomb of some color Gradie didn¡¯t notice and a flurry of red and green that recalled, oddly at a time like this, Christmas, flew over his head. This time, there was nothing playful about them. Maybe because of the sudden unwelcome return of his physical body, so soon after his avatar had faded away from sensation, but now he had a visceral fear of any of the molten projectiles touching him.


    ¡°Fuck!¡±


    ¡°Move! Just run it off!¡± Angel said, sounding like someone watching his little brother ruin his KD ratio, and his fucking tone offended Gradie more than the phantom weariness bothered him or the possibly painful bullets scared him, so he shot up with a growl and climbed up and over onto the staircase, then started to sprint.


    ¡°Serpentine!¡± Luke yelled with a laugh in his voice that dampened some of the anger brought on by Angel¡¯s scolding.


    Gradie sprinted up the staircase toward the next level. As if to let him focus on his own irrational physical exhaustion, nobody shot at him. By the time he got to the top of the stairs, the physical sensation was near overwhelming, like a dense solid weight on his thoughts that threatened to drag the rest of him down through the soft cotton ball texture of this false gameworld right into something real and painful. The sensation made him nostalgic for the vault and all those other hims he had run into the ground in the clubhouse.


    The stairs led him to a larger terrace, like half a city street wrapped around the edge of the stadium space, complete with buildings and alleys. He looked around him frantically and tried to find the words to ask his other three teammates where to go, but the fear of his words coming out breathless kept them in his throat.


    As if sensing now was the absolute worst time to do so, someone shot at him from somewhere over his head.


    ¡°Shit, I can¡¯t see them!¡± Nova said.


    ¡°Get in that box ahead of you!¡± Angel said. Gradie looked around and saw the ¡°box¡± was a three-story high structure with punched-out shadow squares for doors and windows that looked like something a fireman might train in if drawn by a child who only had three crayons on hand.


    He sprinted for the door, and something magical happened. His exhaustion reached a crescendo, threatening to cut his air off all together, hovered there a moment, then melted away, and by the time he threw himself in the darkened building, he couldn¡¯t imagine he had ever been tired at all. For a few seconds after the exhaustion passed, he felt his Avatar again, chugging along like a mech suit wrapped around him, legs shooting out as if operated remotely, then that sensation vanished too and he was left with something like the tireless running of dreams.


    Inside, there were only bare walls and floors of uniform color and texture, and the light coming in from the unwavering sky far above found no variation beyond itself and the shadow. It felt like being completely inside a created space, like climbing inside a painting or if a VR game could project itself directly onto his eyeballs. It amplified his nervous sensation of being watched, as if the creator was somewhere unseen, as he checked all his corners and followed every commandment Philip had ever given him.


    Going through the motions of room clearing here felt silly. Like performing CPR on a Raggedy Anne doll, until Nova came over the comms again.


    ¡°Bro, two guys just dropped on the roof and went inside.¡±


    Gradie recalled the first rule of room clearing Philip had given him. When at all possible, don¡¯t.


    ¡°Should I leave? Where¡¯s the launch pad?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s like right above you, on the next level, in this little recess thing,¡± Nova said.


    ¡°So I have to go up through this house to get to it.¡±


    ¡°Yep.¡±


    Gradie made a snap decision and stepped into the room to his left and set up in the immediate left corner with his weapon aimed at the hallway.


    ¡°Try and let them pass if you can,¡± Angel said, with nervous excitement in his voice. Gradie had been considering it, but something in Angel¡¯s tone that said ¡®please don¡¯t make us wait for you to run out of red jail again¡¯ stirred up his already agitated frustration, and he decided to open up the moment these two fuck heads came down the hallway.


    Standing there, with his rifle raised at a doorway, awaiting a violent threat, the Hardworlder in him just couldn¡¯t let it slide.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze - Emerald Swordsman

    Ultraviolet Ultraviolence


    Their footsteps were as constant and untextured as the rest of it, increasing in volume like someone was slowly moving a slider on some unseen soundboard. Gradie heard them stop and shuffle then move, stop again and shuffle, then move again, and got the rhythm. They were checking the other rooms, only taking about two seconds to do so. Either they were really good, or¡­


    One stepped in through the doorway with an ultra light hop, twisting in mid air as he did, taking advantage of the worlds light gravity and cartoon physics to get the full scan of the room in one motion. Maybe an eighth of a second after Gradie saw him, the bouncing blue man was aiming right at him.


    Unfortunately for Mr. Blue, the motion had become, probably sometime on the previous floor, just a mindless movement with barely any intention, and he didn¡¯t start shooting until Gradie had shot him three times.


    After about the second shot, Gradie saw why Mr. Blue was so relaxed. He had a shotgun in his hands. He pulled the trigger without even looking up and the blast caught Gradie in his left arm and knocked him back against the wall. Before the blast had registered in Gradie¡¯s head, Mr. Blue had flown backwards out the door, propelled by a single panicked stomp.


    A single shotgun shell floated through the air and bounced on the ground, looking like a stray piece of blue sidewalk chalk. Gradie saw without taking his eyes off his sight that his left arm was completely white, a dappled texture out of place in the uniformity of everything else, and about half a second later, he recalled that Mr.Blue had also turned white on his chest before he had retreated.


    ¡°You good bro?¡± Nova asked on the comms.


    ¡°Yeah. Fucking shotgun guy. He¡¯s still in here.¡± In his panicked adrenal state, Gradie had accidentally said it all out loud. He hoped for a moment that the enemy hadn¡¯t heard, but then a second later,


    ¡°Ha ha, fucking shotgun guy gonna get your ass bitch!¡± from out in the hall.


    The strangeness of hearing another human voice in this inhuman plane of existence rattled Gradie¡¯s mind like a sudden sickness. The guy sounded like something off the TV, and it took Gradie a moment to realize it was because he had a slight northern accent he wasn¡¯t used to hearing. Which meant the Spirit he had just shot was from some far northern state, now transported via a strange astral projection to a dream game Gradie was fearful of losing. The idea that here he could run into anyone from anywhere in the world shot through him like a current, terrifying and enticing, and the slow ice bath realization that every crayon colored humanoid in this place was a living breathing soul washed over him in a strange, indescribable way.


    Then Angel spoke, and added to the weirdness.


    ¡°Sit tight. I¡¯m trying to get to you.¡±


    Gradie¡¯s existentially agitated mind zeroed in on the fact that Angel was also someone very real with a life outside this insane Otherworld, and that if they saw each other there, in the Real, there would be no recognition.


    Before he could think too much more about it, another voice sounded off.


    ¡°Bye bye mother fucker!¡±


    This time it was a gravely smoker¡¯s voice without any accent that he could detect, followed by a chunk sound that took a moment for his ear to identify.


    It was a grenade launcher. The baseball sized yellow orb sailed through the door and bounced off the far wall then rolled into the center of the room. It felt like ages watching it roll, and just about the time Gradie got the idea that he could pick it up and toss it out the door, it went off.


    The blast was a white flash with big blue fan blades at the edges, and even at a distance of five feet with Gradie pressed into the corner of the room, he took damage, the lower part of his legs turning a spackled white.


    ¡°They have grenades,¡± he said, this time only on comms, managing to imagine his headset activating.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Nova said.


    ¡°Throw em back bro!¡± Luke offered. Gradie laughed through his teeth, but then Angel gave him an idea.


    ¡°If the grenade rounds impact a surface after less than a second of flight time, it goes on a timer.¡±


    At about the same time, the second grenade bounced off the far wall and rolled into the room. This time Gradie dove to the center of the room with a low g glide and snatched it in his left hand, a motion that was unnaturally easy, as if his avatar had magnets in its gloves.


    As he wound up to throw it out the door, a question caught up to him and broke out into the comms.


    ¡°How long?¡±


    ¡°Two seconds,¡± Angel said gravely.


    The grenade had just cleared the doorway when it went off.


    ¡°fucking shit!¡±


    It was Mr. Blue. Rather than wait for yellow guy to launch another, Gradie stepped out through the door way in a practiced motion, aiming to the left at first while hugging the right wall, but after seeing nothing but bare hallway, springing out the doorway with his rifle aimed to the right down the hall.


    There was a yellow guy two feet from him. He started firing at his head, and after three clean head shots the guy pulled the trigger on his grenade launcher. Luckily, he had been aiming through the door and his first round went inside and bounced harmlessly. The weapon cycled, and the barrel snapped over towards Gradie¡¯s stomach just before the fourth and last headshot turned yellow man into a white flash.


    It was about that time that Gradie noticed that Mr. Blue was not the only other person in the hallway. An orange guy was squatting down next to him with a shotgun, with two other figures formed up behind him, and a red figure holding something long and thin was halfway down the hall


    ¡°Shit.¡± Gradie dove back into the room, fortunately a sliver of a second after the grenade went off.A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    The hallway behind him erupted with fire, and he got right back into his corner and aimed at the door.


    ¡°There¡¯s like fucking five of em!¡± he thought on the comms. The wall next to his head made a strange sound and started cracking. They were shooting through it.


    Then the shooting let up, slightly, and a strange sound, like a chainsaw roar softened by an old nineties techno dj into something more musical echoed down the hall.


    ¡°Mother fucker!¡± yelled Mr. Blue, and his shotgun boomed.


    There was a sound like the chainsaw was being swung through the air and the noise was terminated in a sound like a hollow pipe hitting concrete but with more reverb, and something shot inside the room, leaving a glowing green trail behind it.


    Angel rolled over in a mid air summersault and landed in the far corner, staring daggers at the wall next to Gradie, a glowing green sword in his hand.


    ¡°Shoot that wall!¡± he said in the comms, as Gradie watched his scowl tighten. Gradie turned his gun on the cracking wall and opened up with his AR.


    ¡°Wide circle!¡± Angel advised, and Gradie made a wide circular motion with his barrel, cracking the entire surface of the blue wall in dark seemingly drawn on cracks.


    Then, suddenly, the shooting stopped. Gradie looked down and realized the bolt was locked open. For a moment, he saw the grey whisp of gunsmoke and the shadowed steel of an AR action, but the vision only lasted until his eyes completed their arc downwards, and then he was looking at a red plastic quasi-firearm with a dark pit of shadow in the top.


    ¡°Uh, what¡ª¡± He thought on the comms.


    ¡°Mag on your chest!¡± Angel replied, then leapt forward and swiped the wall with his sword in a single sudden motion that made Gradie jump back. The blade glowed neon green as it arced and made the same chainsaw roar turned into a techno chord sound Gradie had heard earlier, and the wall exploded outward in a burst of fragments.


    Suddenly, he saw the crayon hued figures waiting out in the hall, and his panic triggered a practiced motion in his mind.


    ¡°Reloading.¡± This time, he said it out loud in a low tone quiet enough to hide under gunfire but loud enough to be picked up by the teams earbuds, had they been in a Hardworld, and snatched a magazine off the magpouch on his chest, which he had not till then noticed, and reloaded, only absently taking note that an identical magazine appeared in the empty slot on his pouch a second later.


    Angel apparently didn¡¯t give a shit to wait for Gradie to reload or even if he was there at all. Before Gradie had gotten the word ¡®reloading¡¯ out, one of the figures exploded into white at the center of a neon green sword swipe. Others fired, and Angel did something that made Gradie¡¯s chest pang with that jealous sensation of watching someone play a game that you havnt had the money to buy yet.


    He swiped into the ground, and the blade made that same electronic metal pipe on concrete noise and launched himself up at the ceiling. He rolled midair in another graceful somersault and paused with his feet on the ceiling as if gravity was now a thing he controlled, and sliced downward and another one turned white and exploded, then he kicked off the ceiling, rolled into a crouch on the ground, and swiped up samurai style and the lone figure left standing near him vanished in a burst of white.


    ¡°Multikill! Holy Shit!¡± Nova yelled on the comms.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± the red guy at the end of the hall yelled, and aimed his sniper. Angel swiped the floor again and launched himself diagonal across the hall and disappeared into another room. The sniper fired and the red beam missed him by a mile but zipped just inches above Gradie¡¯s head.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Gradie opened up with his AR, but the sniper took two hits before stepping into a nearby doorway, becoming just half of a red face and a long barrel peeking out from the frame. Gradie kept firing, but the sniper went off anyway, its red neon beam screaming in the air as he stepped sideways.


    A green blur shot out of the other door and Angel bounced down the hall right towards the sniper. Another red beam blazed through the air and then there was a neon flash as Angel cut him down.


    ¡°That¡¯s gotta get on the reels!¡± Nova laughed on the comms.


    ¡°Any more come in?¡± Angel asked.


    ¡°Nah, that should be it,¡± Nova said. ¡°There¡¯s a big cluster fuck at the other corner so you should be clear up to the pad.¡±


    ¡°Alright. Hey Gradie, come here.¡± Angel motioned him over hastily. Gradie bounced down the hall to where Angel was standing, passing two open doors on the way that he cleared as best he could.


    ¡°There¡¯s no one in there, come on.¡± Angel sounded annoyed, almost panicked, and when Gradie got to him he hurried inside the nearest room and pointed to the nearest wall.


    ¡°Put your hand on that!¡±


    Gradie just looked at it.


    ¡°It¡¯ll heal you, come on put your hand on it!¡±


    Gradie put his hand on the red wall, and after a few seconds his arm up to his elbow seemed completely invisible. Then the color flowed up his arm and spread to the rest of him. It took about five seconds for all the white to turn back to red.


    ¡°Woulda been nice to know that before the game started!¡± he laughed.


    ¡°Sorry. We forgot.¡± Angel said stiffly.


    ¡°No, I meant the game narrator or whatever.¡±


    ¡°Oh. Yeah. Let¡¯s go.¡±


    Gradie followed him down the hall, up the stairs, out onto the roof of the building, which was flush with the next level of the terrace and connected by a short bridge. They took the bridge across and headed for a squat building with a wide opening like a Mexican street shop and a pulsing glow inside. It was a white pad, much like the ones bouncing around other players out in the big area behind them, but with a steady white light and pointed straight up to a skylight. Angel stepped on and shot upward, and Gradie followed.


    They landed softly on the end of one of the long pier like structures Gradie had seen spread around the massive open space. At the other end was a circular platform ringed with machicolations, with an angled color-changing launch pad at the center.


    Out in the main open space, the fight was still raging, but did seem clustered, as Nova had said, in a far distant corner, where colored silhouettes bounced and flew, and suddenly something like a roman candle shot through the air.


    ¡°Oh fuck, they found a rocket launcher. Must be fighting over it.¡± Angel said. That reminded Gradie.


    ¡°Where¡¯d you get the sword?¡±


    ¡°On a pedestal, behind a mirror. You have to shoot your reflection, then its like a mini game where your reflection is shooting at you and you have to take him out.¡±


    There was a pause as Angel looked over at him, but Gradie couldn¡¯t read anything in his monochromatic goggled face.


    ¡°It didn¡¯t take that long,¡± he added.


    ¡°Ok, youre clear, come on!¡± Nova shouted on the line. ¡°Its almost there!¡±


    They sprinted down to the platform and Angel stopped at the pad and sliced into the blocks supporting it. Part of it shattered, and the pad, once angled out towards the open space and another dock about a hundred yards away, was now facing almost vertically, which was apparently what Angel was after. He sliced again and the pad was completely flat on the ground. Angel looked up in the air and pointed.


    ¡°That¡¯s where we¡¯re going.¡±


    The blocks supporting the big crystal cannon thing up on the ring were about fifty feet above them, moving along the circular track.


    ¡°I¡¯ll go first, then you get on and it¡¯ll launch you when it turns red.¡± Angel stepped onto the pad and it turned from orange to yellow. The pause gave Gradie the chance to think about how ridiculous his situation was, not just the standing here waiting for a blinking light to send him flying, but also the fact that he was deep in the guts of some overstructured gameworld when he could be tripping through realities. Was this really the best the Other had to offer?


    ¡°You¡¯re just coping because you got your ass kicked in that white room,¡± his own voice said, snaking out of the silence. Before he could respond, the light changed from yellow to green and Angel went flying. He watched him sail upward, seeming to hover in the air near the black rail, then slowly land on it, and it occurred to Gradie that he might not be able to duplicate the movement.


    He stepped onto the pad, and something bounced on the long pier behind him. Before he could look back, it exploded.


    ¡°Shit, I got him!¡± Nova said. Gradie crouched down and looked around, but there was only still shadowed blocks of color. Nova¡¯s orange sniper beam flashed towards some recess in the tall buildings ringing the top level above him, and the platform at his feet lazily changed from green to blue, then from blue to purple, and Gradie tried to convince himself that this was all pointless and he didn¡¯t care if he died a second time and got sent back to the duel room.


    But by the time the bright pad shifted from purple to red, he had to admit it. He was hooked.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze - Reflection

    Double barrel rainbow


    Gradie¡¯s flight up toward the rail gave him a view of the battle spreading out from the far corner of the bounce house. Multi-colored figures bounced in every direction off the lower ring of bounce pads, which were much closer together due to the spaces step-well like shape. It took some effort and a little bit of fear to claw his focus away from the skirmish and set it towards the black rail above. As he sailed upwards, a rocket shot out of the chaos and exploded with a muffled echoing bang that gave a hair-raising depth to his surroundings.


    The black ring which the crystal cannon structure traveled on was only about a foot and a half wide, and Gradie barely caught onto it with one outstretched flailing hand as he fell out of the end of his flight.


    ¡°All right, were coming down,¡± Nova said on the comms once Gradie had scrambled up onto the rail. Two figures descended from the edge of the skylight, where he now saw a suspended ring of rooms lining the opening like bat houses, and landed gracefully on the blocky structure.


    ¡°Ok, coming up.¡± Angel said, and got up from his sitting position ten yards or so from where Gradie squatted on the rail. Gradie was trying desperately not to look down, surprised that his fear of heights had manifested itself in the game. Luckily, Angel provided a distraction by sprinting down the rail and slashing it with his sword at the last second, launching himself up onto the blocky crystal-cannon housing.


    Gradie tried to stand but his stomach floated out from under him and he ended up in a half crouch.


    ¡°Shit, one sec,¡± he said stupidly.


    ¡°We don¡¯t have one sec bro,¡± Luke said. ¡°They¡¯re figuring it out.¡±


    Gradie saw colored forms bouncing towards one of the higher bounce pads where one figure was shooting the block the pad rested on. Others on the other side moved across the bounce house toward the bounce pad right below him.


    ¡°Shit!¡± He sprinted along the rail without looking down to ensure he wouldn¡¯t have time to worry about his steps slipping, and jumped at the face of the oncoming cannon structure. His foot caught a hold and he scampered up, discovering something amazing.


    Due to the suggestive nature of gravity, he could run up the side like a wushu star without stopping. By the time he cleared the front and flipped over onto the top, he had a big smile on his face.


    ¡°Watch the sides!¡± Angel said to them, motioning at the edges of the craft. He was at some kind of monitor station next to one end of the glowing prism, which looked like the stereotypical ideal of a hippie crystal, a five-sided prism with two pyramidal points.


    Gradie aimed at one section of the blocky half wall that surrounded their platform, and Nova stood in front of him but off to one side and aimed behind him. Luke bounced over to the edge just in Gradie¡¯s peripherals and aimed down.


    ¡°If they get near the platform, I¡¯ll blast em,¡± Luke said.


    The crystal moved in its housing with a whirring sound as Angel worked the controls. Eventually, it stopped moving and its glow intensified with a sound like a weapon charging up in a game. Of course.


    ¡°Ok we have to go now,¡± Angel said.


    ¡°It¡¯s got a reflector, right?¡± Nova said in a reminding tone. Angel responded like he was being nagged.


    ¡°Yes, bro, God damn. Ok yall, watch me real fast.¡±


    He swiveled his head around to make sure Luke and Gradie were watching him, then looked back to the screen and pointed at it.


    ¡°Just pick your color on the orbital using the targeting screen and press this launch button.¡±


    He hovered his hand over a palm sized red button in the dash.


    ¡°So I¡¯m picking a green spot as close to the reflector as I can find. Ok, I¡¯m out. Good luck.¡±


    He plunged the button with his hand and turned a brilliant solid white, then a beam of solid laser light shot through the crystal and out into the black sky, and he was gone.


    ¡°Ok, Gradie you next,¡± Nova waved him over.


    ¡°Get fucked,¡± Luke said, and started launching grenades off the side as fast as his trigger finger and the action would allow.


    ¡°Dammit. Hurry bro!¡± Nova waved some more and Gradie, despite a ghostly Philip toned voice scolding him for leaving Luke to engage by himself even here, bounced over to the control station.


    ¡°All right, I picked you a red spot closest to where Angel dropped on.¡± He pointed to the screen which showed the orbital, a nearly circular floating chunk of blocks, and had a small reticle pointed at a sliver of red. Nova¡¯s finger was pointing at an oval lake of green, about a quarter inch from the reticle on the screen.


    ¡°When you drop in, head for the reflector.¡± Here Nova moved his finger to point at a dark octagon near the ¡°top¡± of the orbital.Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    ¡°Got it?¡±


    Gradie nodded, guessing that asking questions about distance and terrain and anything else was probably a waste of time, not to mention the fact that Luke¡¯s firing and swearing had suddenly increased in intensity.


    ¡°All right, go go!¡± Nova stepped back and pointed at the big red button that said ¡°launch¡± in white letters.


    Gradie pressed it and everything froze in a kind of black and white freeze frame, textured like one of those old eighties music videos where they had tried to make live footage look like animation. Then, with a ¡°Wheeeerrrrroooooo¡± sound straight out of an old cartoon, the image stretched until everything snapped and shattered like glass, and he was standing in the center of a fresh crater on a section of red sand, with nothing but black sky and distant colored blocks in sight.


    There was a moment of stillness, of sudden silence that made him realize just how loud and constantly moving everything had been back in the bounce room. He had no landmarks to go on, no direction to head, besides the vague memory of the map Nova had been pointing at, which made him think the prism, whatever that was, was somewhere beyond the bare, steeply curving horizon ahead of him. But for the first time since the game had started, he had a chance to look around and really see where he was.


    The ¡±orbital¡± was obviously spherical, and he was stuck to it with a gravity even weaker than on the main mass, which floated below him, or more like above him, and which he could now see had a definite structure to it, with pits and shafts cut into it at regular intervals. There were other orbitals floating in the black, their varied shapes obviously a result of their creator trying to ensure variety.


    It all felt like that. The entire place felt like something made, and the thick black surrounding it didn¡¯t feel like the endless void of boundless possibility that enveloped the Allworld, it felt like a blanket, a felt wall, a formed barrier with a definite purpose, solid and close.


    It was like being in someone¡¯s mind, nestled in one of their thoughts, their imagination wrapped around you like a diorama. Though the entire Otherworld was crafted of thoughts, of the vision of its makers, textured by the projections of its thinking spirits, he had never really felt a singular expression of will so clearly. The closest had been Celeste¡¯s beach house, but perhaps because she had had help constructing it, or maybe because he had been kept in the peripheral of her home, the entrance area and hallway designed for guests, he hadn¡¯t felt it as strongly there. This was a new and eye-opening sensation.


    What would my mind look like, projected outward? What would I make?


    The question was intoxicating, but he wasn¡¯t given time to really drink it in.


    ¡°Gradie! Shoot up a flare!¡± Angel hissed in his ears. At about the same time, as if the world had been inhaling while he stood there reflecting, or giving him time to rest before battering him again, a white beam flashed over his head and impacted the orbital somewhere beyond the curve. It sounded, of course, like every other fictional laser weapon blended together.


    ¡°There¡¯s Luke,¡± Nova said. ¡°I¡¯m heading out. Meet yall at the prism. Wish I could blow up this fucking control pad!¡±


    Another flash across the sky, like a spotlight with a high-powered laser at its core, and another thud somewhere out of sight. Gradie found the button on the bottom of his gun and shot a glittering flare out into the black.


    ¡°Ok, I see you,¡± Angel said. ¡°Run towards my flare.¡±


    A green sparkler shot into the sky ahead and to the left over the horizon and Gradie sprinted towards it. The light gravity let him clear about five feet per stride and soon he had a rhythm going. The orbital revealed itself to him by rolling smoothly out from the horizon, like he was running on some kind of inverted hamster wheel the size of a small town.


    A familiar synthesized chainsaw sound bounced over the horizon at him, at a rate of about once every few seconds, and got louder until Angel shot over the curve right at him, clearly at the end of one of his sword jumps.


    ¡°Up here!¡± He swung his sword like a flag and motioned for Gradie to adjust his trajectory a little to the left. Soon Gradie was following him across the rippled rolling landscape as a black structure rose out of the horizon.


    Another white flash cracked across the sky, landing somewhere behind him.


    ¡°Oh shit,¡± Nova said on the comms. ¡°Hurry up!¡±


    The black base of the structure was now in sight, and Luke was already standing atop the high machicolated walls, as Angel moved up the side, stabbing his sword into the wall and throwing himself up ten feet at a time.


    Gradie repeated his maneuver from a few minutes ago and ran up the wall, which felt for a moment like sprinting in liquid darkness, as the sleek black surface gave way to velvet black sky at the top, until another beam flashed across the sky and divided it from the wall in a definite, threatening way.


    ¡°Shit, they¡¯re really dropping in now!¡± Nova said.


    ¡°Get to the prism first!¡± Angel said, and waved them into a doorway. The first level that Gradie had dropped on was a circular path around the central structure, which had tall arched doorways in its face. There were more protruding machicolations atop this structure and something glowed softly just out of sight, its radiance extending across the black sky.


    Gradie followed the three of them into the doorway, and a rush of nostalgic excitement washed over him. His brain rifled through late night game sessions and childhood outdoor bouts of pure imagination, the Texas woodlands becoming Tolkienesque forests or other places scraped from movies and games and smeared across the dry dead grayness for he and his friends to tear across, and the memories glittered anew as if this present experience was lighting them from afar.


    Inside, a giant vertical crystal hung suspended from the conical roof, four ramps projecting out of the high ringing walkway and stopping a yard of dead air away from it, the walls were riddled with balconies and walkways. Angel somehow knew a direct route, through a door to the left, bounding up a steep stairwell, across to a hidden bounce pad, and up through a single stairwell shaft, to the top of the structure. Here the top of the crystal was clamped in a metal housing faced with another control station.


    Angel put his hand on the pad, and the crystal glowed green as his own body glittered for a moment. Then he stepped back and Nova repeated the process, this time with an orange glow and glitter.


    ¡°If you die, you can select it as a respawn,¡± Angel explained. ¡°You¡¯ll pop out of the crystal down there, but you¡¯ll have about five seconds of light aura, which will keep you from taking damage but also makes your attacks do nothing.¡±


    In the sky, another white beam flashed, and muffled laser sounds and grenade booms bounced back at them off the velvet darkness. On the other side of the crystal, on another raised platform, was another crystal person-launcher. The roof was shaped like a big octagon with circular platforms at the corners that were the tops of towers. It was an odd place for a shootout, feeling more like a place to observe a meteor shower or firework show than shoot at anyone.


    Gradie¡¯s turn at the prism came and went and more sounds bounced up at them, this time coming from the stairwells breaking up through the floor.


    ¡°All right,¡± Angel said, bouncing his sword blade on his off hand.


    ¡°Let¡¯s get some fucking kills.¡±

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze - Saturation

    Fade to Black


    Angel set the giant crystal on the center platform to a constant slow rotation and stood next to it, sword at the ready. Luke was up on a tower, and Nova was in another at a right angle to Luke¡¯s. They had picked their towers based on which direction foot traffic would pour out of the four square holes in the floor around the crystal platform. Gradie was on the ground floor, hugging one tower, to get line of sight on any enemies that might try and hide from Luke or Nova, and to cover Angel as he dashed around cutting them down.


    Or at least that was the plan, hammered out by Luke and Angel in a few seconds, adjusted and tweaked a bit as the sounds of gamefight flowed out of the stairwells and more lightbeams flashed in the sky.


    After what felt like forever, after Gradie¡¯s anticipation, which he normally tried to subdue in the Hardworlds but here let go and even egged on into a crescendo of excitement, had reached a frenzied pitch, held itself there for a minute or so, then started the slow descent down to complacency, the fight started with a bang.


    One of the stairwells exploded and two figures shot out of the explosion, launched into the air, and immediately drew fire from Nova, Luke, and Gradie.


    One of the two faded from purple to white and vanished after firing two grenades mid-flight that exploded harmlessly across the polished black ground, while the other landed into an immediate sprint that was cut short when Luke direct-impacted him with a grenade.


    ¡°Good shit yall!¡± Nova yelled, his voice in the comms blooming with warm energy, a strange aspect of the comms direct connection to his Spirit that set Gradie¡¯s trigger finger itching.


    But there was another pause, more cartoon sounds echoing from somewhere, even a soft shuffling of feet in the stairwells, muffled and smoothed out into 64bit ambience.


    Then another explosion, doubled this time, and a handful of enemies threw themselves up and out of the colored flashes and scattered across the sky.


    Nova¡¯s sniper and Luke¡¯s bombs went wild, but before they had gotten more than two of them and just after the explosions had finished echoing off the black velvet sky, another group of enemies leapt out of the far staircase in some kind of practiced formation, and ended up aiming four different directions from a crouched position, looking to Gradie like a coloring book version of an old NAVY ad.


    It was comical, for a second, then they opened up and moved out, and the two sided fight turned into a cluster fuck.


    The survivors of the first wave used the crystal for cover and threw everything they had at Nova, who swore on the comms and ducked back. Luke fired grenades as fast as he could but couldn¡¯t quite get the arcs right, so they skipped across the ground and exploded near the wall somewhere to Gradie¡¯s left. Half of the Navy Seal wannabes fired at Luke while the other half shot at everything else; the first wave, Nova, and finally, Angel, who had dashed out from behind the crystal to cut down the first guys, but upon seeing a tightly formed squad advancing from the stairwell to the crystal platform, laughed like a streetfighter who¡¯s opponent had tripped on a banana peel.


    ¡°Fuck yeah!¡±


    He sliced the ground and dashed towards them, but their goofy stance belied their ability. They scattered like shrapnel before Angel got to them and he only got one of them before his leg and shoulder had turned spackled white. He flicked his sword and dashed back behind the crystal as the other three engaged Luke and the other enemies.


    Gradie had purporsely held his fire, and now opened up on the three, sensing that they were the biggest threat. He was correct. They swiveled on a dime and sent their combined fire right at him so quickly he barely had time to duck back into the wedge between the wall and the outside curve of the tower before the air he had been occupying lit up in rainbow death. He realized, belatedly, that Luke and Nova had been forced back behind cover by exactly the same concentrated fire.


    He took the opportunity to swap out for a fresh mag, and the noise out on the platform tripled in intensity. He peeked out and saw at least four grenades bouncing across the ground, one skipping off the crystal. The explosions were followed by more enemies pouring out of the stairwell, and the cluster fuck was in full swing.


    The nearest group hadn¡¯t noticed him and he gunned down all three of them with a single sustained pull of the trigger.


    ¡°Tripple kill mother fucker!¡± He whooped in the comms, but was cut short by another volley of fire and dove back into the partial safety of the wedge.


    ¡°Saved your fucking life bro!¡± Nova said. Gradie peeked out in time to see the fading white remnants of two enemies that had apparently been coming right for him. A shot gun and a gun he didn¡¯t recognize but looked like someone had redrawn an MP5 from drunken memory fell to the ground.


    ¡°Thanks,¡± Gradie said with a sour taste in his mouth. He looked for target¡¯s but the battlefield had changed drastically in under five seconds. The crystal had rotated and was now showing one side to him, which Angel hugged for dear life. Against the low wall ringing the area, and right under Luke¡¯s tower, five enemies stood formed up, one with a shotgun aimed up at the tower, the rest pelting the crystal and Nova¡¯s tower with grenades and fire.


    ¡°Luke! Shoot me!¡± Angel said, like a realization. From Gradies unique and very convenient vantage point, he saw Luke back up on the tower and fire a single grenade just as Angel backed away from the crystal. Angel blocked it with his sword like a bunt, took two steps back and strode over it like a sprinter just as it went off, and the explosion launched him into the air.Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    ¡°Shoot me! Shoot me!¡± He said again, and for a moment Gradie thought he was talking to the enemies, but Luke fired another grenade that he caught in his non sword hand and threw down at the attackers like a God casting judgment. They scattered, but not in time. It detonated on impact and two of them vanished.


    Angel landed in the middle of the explosion before it had dissolved and darted out, his blade flashing down every half-second, every strike cutting through an enemy and striking the black ground, sending him flying in another dash that ended the same way. Be bounced around the floor like he was really made of light. It was amazing, and Gradie felt suddenly like a kid watching his older brother beat a boss he had been struggling with for hours.


    Luke stepped up to the edge and started firing grenades. Nova¡¯s sniper beam went wild. Gradie emptied his fresh mag. In a few seconds, it was all over.


    ¡°God damn bro, they¡¯re not gonna let you get this shit in rotation for a while,¡± Nova laughed.


    ¡°Whoo! They just stood there for it!¡± Angel whooped.


    ¡°They couldn¡¯t really move much, on account of all the bombs and sniper shots,¡± Luke said dryly.


    ¡°Yeah, thanks yall. God damn.¡±


    ¡°Allright, so do we wanna stay here and wait for another wave, or ¨C¡± Before Nova could finish, a grenade went off feet from Luke, turning his right side white.


    ¡°Shit!¡±


    They all looked around at the stairwells, but those were still as death. It wasn¡¯t till the next grenade landed, this time right where Luke had been before he jumped off the tower, that the rest of them figured out what Luke had clearly guessed.


    ¡°Above us!¡± he hissed as he rolled across the ground. Gradie found it amusing that his Hardworld training was so ingrained that he para-rolled across the ground when in this gameworld landing from even up a few hundred feet felt like a short hop.


    ¡°Shit, the moon!¡± Nova said, aiming his sniper straight up in the air.


    Gradie followed the barrel and saw a circular cluster of color floating in the air, moving slowly across the sky. It was impossible to judge how large or how far away it was, until something moved on one of its small knobs and another grenade flew towards them. Judging from the size of the guy firing it, the moon was about the size of a very large house.


    ¡°Scatter!¡± Nova yelled, firing up at the moon while sprinting backwards. Angel watched the grenade intently without moving and Luke fired a grenade straight up in the air that arced towards the horizon and fell somewhere down on the orbitals surface.


    ¡°Oh,¡± he said flatly.


    The moon borne grenade landed harmlessly on the top of the crystal and went off with a yellow burst that made Gradie far more agitated than the rest of the team.


    ¡°Looks like three of them,¡± Angel said. ¡°Lets go up and fuck them up.¡±


    Another white beam shot through the sky, and Nova pointed at it.


    ¡°Fuck em. Lets camp this shit and kill these dudes. Moon boys will be outta sight in a bit.¡± He drew an arc with his finger leading from the drifting moon down beyond the horizon. Angel shook his head.


    ¡°Then they¡¯ll come back while were in the middle of a fight. We should just deal with them now.¡±


    Another grenade bounced down and went off before Angel finished. Luke swore and ran for the crystal¡¯s command pad.


    ¡°Aight, Im goin up there. These clowns are asking for it.¡±


    Another white beam shot through the sky, but this time landed on the moon with a puff of orange.


    ¡°Wait, let em fight it out,¡± Nova said, watching through his sniper scope. Up on the moon, flashes of color glared out of the dark openings that riddled it like Swiss cheese. They all stood there a moment, watching the light show, and Gradie studied the colors like they held a prophecy, all his other thoughts floating away. The fight had aligned his mind into a single direction. He wanted to get more kills.


    The lights stopped and the moon floated on without a single sign of life on its surface.


    ¡°How many are¡ª¡± Angel asked Nova, but before the rest of the words got out, everything in Gradie¡¯s world went orange, then black and white, then smeared upwards as he fell.


    ¡°Shit! Move! Move!¡± Nova yelled on the comms.


    ¡°What the fuck?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°Headshot,¡± Luke sighed. ¡°Sorry bro, I¡¯m about to fuck em up. How do you aim this thing?¡±


    The world stilled and Gradie found himself in a familiar white space, and it really pissed him off.


    ¡°What the fuck? I thought I was going to respawn at the crystal thing?!¡±


    ¡°Shit, no bro, you gotta win your duel. They had to add that cause¡ª. Fuck!¡± Nova cut off and Angel broke in.


    ¡°No bro, launch me first.¡±


    ¡°I''ll suppress them with my ¡®nades, dude,¡± Luke said real venom in his voice.


    Gradie tried to ignore them as the white room solidified, but another part of him hoped they would keep talking so the dual wouldn¡¯t feel like a one on one.


    ¡°Fight!¡±


    He raised his desaturated AR and aimed around, looking for the staircase he had seen last time. It wasn¡¯t there. The shapes were completely different.


    He heard footsteps and pivoted, quick enough to let off a burst at a white form dashing among the grey. He moved in the direction the guy had been running and tried to hop from cover to cover, but the shapes were odd sizes and some only came up to his hips. A fear rose in his chest. He saw himself being taken by surprise by a shotgun guy again and blasted down into the red jail, where he would have to wait alone or try and find his way all the way back up to the bounce house, then the launcher¡­


    He shook the thoughts out of his head and focused on his monochromatic sight.


    Then he saw him.


    A figure standing straight on, sword in hand, coming down a lane between two long blocks. Gradie opened fire and the sword came down hard on the ground, sending the guy flying off out of sight. Gradie backed up to the nearest block and scanned around. Another chainsaw sound to his left, somewhere behind a cylindrical block. He stood still, waiting for the guy to move, but nothing changed in the gradient landscape. He thought it over. The guy¡¯s weakness was range. He had to get up high.


    He ran and jumped up on to the cylinder and scanned the area, and there he was. A grey figure, stopped dead mid stride, looked up at Gradie, and swung his sword. Gradie smiled as he fired. What did he think that was going to do fifteen feet away? But as the guy ducked and rolled, trying uselessly to dodge Gradie¡¯s bursts, something didn¡¯t feel right. About half a second later, his brain filled him in.


    Why is the sword getting bigger?


    Another half a second later the sword sliced Gradie in half and the world smeared upwards again.


    Another bird¡¯s eye view replay revealed that the guy had thrown the sword the moment he saw Gradie up on the cylinder, and that Gradie had shot him at least twice before dying. Judging by the little health bars in either side of the ¡°screen¡±, had Gradie shot him one more time, that would have been the match.


    ¡°You have died. Select a respawn,¡± the voice said, and two boxes with text floated in the air in front of him.


    [random spawn]


    [Red Room]


    Then he was back in the red jail, which was embarrassingly, mockingly, completely still and silent.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze - Squad

    Is there crossplay with the real world?


    The red cell luckily, had a little bench bed suspended from the wall with two cables, so Gradie sat down and exhaled pointlessly through his nose.


    ¡°Where you at bro?¡± Luke asked, after an embarrassingly long moment of silence.


    ¡®Back in jail. Lost the fucking fight.¡±


    ¡°Shit. Ok sit tight, we¡¯ll come get you.¡±


    ¡°We got another wave coming,¡± Angel said.


    ¡°Bro fuck it,¡± said Nova. ¡°We¡¯ll go get him then come back, probably get some kills on the way. We¡¯re already attuned to the prism so¡ª¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about it,¡± Gradie said, feeling the blood rush to his face, somehow. ¡°I¡¯m heading up there. If I get pinned down, yall can come get me, but I think I can slip by on my own.¡± He leaned his head back against the wall and crossed his legs. Surely this game couldn¡¯t last forever?


    ¡°All right man. Good luck.¡± Angel said.


    ¡°Nah bro, fuck that. We¡¯re on our way,¡± said Luke.


    Gradie thought of other times in his life when he had been the dead weight in a game, and from there his thoughts drifted to the Hardworlds, and like dry kindling that had just been waiting for the passing focused beam of a magnifying glass, an idea flared up that he had been trying to keep from igniting for weeks. He saw himself in the Hardworlds alone, without Philips commands or EP¡¯s watching drones, sailing down a highway, or robbing a bank, or using a million dollars to live a day of unimaginable debauchery¡ª


    ¡°Top team needs twenty points to win,¡± the robotic female voice said from everywhere, as if she couldn¡¯t believe what she was seeing.


    ¡°What the fuck?¡± said Nova. ¡°I thought Colors was on a timer?¡±


    ¡°No, it¡¯s old school,¡± Angel said.


    ¡°Shit no time to waste then,¡± said Luke. ¡°Let¡¯s go pick up Corpse and fuck them up!¡±


    ¡°Bad idea,¡± Angel said, and for a miserable moment Gradie thought he meant the first part of Luke¡¯s statement. ¡°First of all, when a team is close, you want to just avoid them, starve them of points, get your score off easier teams. And second of all we don¡¯t know who they are. There¡¯s no scoreboard on colors.¡±


    ¡°So wait, then it could be us?¡± Luke asked.


    ¡°No.¡± Angel and Nova said at the same time.


    ¡°Top team needs ten points to win!¡± The lady sounded absolutely unhinged.


    ¡°See, that¡¯s what happens when you go after the top team,¡± Angel said.


    ¡°Thought you said you couldn¡¯t know who it was?¡±


    ¡°Well, we can¡¯t, but I¡¯m assuming everyone else is seeing them running train and figured it out. There¡¯s probably a big brawl in the arena. Camping that place was meta when Colors was more heavy in rotation.¡±


    ¡°Sounds dope,¡± Luke said. ¡°Where is it?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s a big crater on the other side of the¡ª¡±


    ¡°Victory! The winning team is¡­ Hyperflex!¡±


    ¡°Who¡¯s Hyperflex?¡± Gradie asked, as the world turned white and foggy and fell away from itself. In an instant, the four of them were standing on the strange contact lens platform again, as a wide screen floating ahead of them displayed a scoreboard. The world around was a indeterminate mist of light clouds and white noise. Ghostly images of six or seven avatars floated momentarily over the scoreboard, posing and dancing, until they faded into the mist. A banner over them had read ¡°Hyperflex¡±.


    ¡°The winning team,¡± Luke said with a smile.


    ¡°Fuck you. I mean do we have a team name?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, its VisionQuest, our guild,¡± Nova said. ¡°We¡¯re playing under their banner for today.¡±


    Gradie found his own name on the scoreboard, highlighted, in red like the other three, but separated from them by a wide field of blue rows. Six kills. Two deaths. Angel was well at the top, twelve and zero, with Luke and Nova not far below him.


    ¡°Not bad for your first time,¡± Luke said with a leering smile.


    Gradie looked out at the swirling clouds, hoping they could take some of the edge off his rage at once again being the new guy on the fucking team, and threw the conversation forward, as if it could take him with it into the future.Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    ¡°So I get the gun part, but why is it called a maze again? Did losing set us backward in the maze, or¡ª¡±


    ¡°We didn¡¯t lose, bro,¡± Nova said, sounding disgusted. ¡°We just didn¡¯t make top slot. And the maze is more a legacy name, from the inner core, the OG maze. It¡¯s not like this there. The segments blend seamlessly into each other, like a series of dreams. This is more for the mass market, get me?¡±


    Gradie studied the clouds again. The inner maze sounded like something that would actually be worth the time. Despite the brief moments of excitement in Colors, they hadn¡¯t been worth the embarrassment. An itch in the back of his head, an unformed desire, took shape out of his reflection. Gunmaze might have been a lot of fun if there was no one with him to disappoint. Once again, like kindling, the idea of going into the Hardworlds, telling no one, ignited in his mind, and whisked his thoughts away.


    ¡°So no maze, but lots of guns, right?¡± Luke asked


    ¡°Yeah bro. I queued us for shooters only today,¡± Nova said. ¡°Good way to get familiar with the experience."


    The screen dinged and a pop up appeared over the scoreboard. Two words stuck out to Gradie.


    ¡°Conquest Invite¡±


    ¡°Oh shit. Goat-Head is pushing that power plant on Sarthor,¡± Nova said.


    ¡°How many slots does he have?¡±


    ¡°Looks like eight open.¡±


    ¡°Fuck yeah, get us in.¡±


    Luke squinted at the screen.


    ¡°What is it?¡±


    ¡°Conquest. Remember that big shared sci-fi thing I was talking about?¡±


    ¡°The one that¡¯s like an MMO?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. Got some openings.¡±


    ¡°An MMO?¡± Gradie couldn¡¯t imagine a game type that would punish him more for his inexperience.


    ¡°Kinda,¡± Angel sighed, the comparison clearly frustrating him. ¡°Its four persistent planets and a bunch of moons. Multiple factions grouped by language. You can make a character and respawn at the cloning station, pay mem to lower the rebirth time, that kind of thing. Or you can get dropped in on a maze run in a temp character. The makers put it out to compete with Arthel. Which is like the fantasy roleplay gameworld that kind of competes with Gunmaze.¡±


    ¡°Yeah, but Arthel is way more stuck up about it. Lots of LARPers who live that shit,¡± Angel said.


    ¡°Maze queue paused. Preparing¡­Soulara.¡±


    ¡°So, is it still part of the maze?¡± Gradie was trying to get a picture of the gameworld in his head, and his original vision of multiple games arranged in a mazelike mesh had collapsed, now apparently reserved for the top players at the inner core.


    ¡°Yeah, you still get tokens,¡± Angel said. ¡°And winning counts towards your streak. Theres a few portions of Gunmaze that are like that. Sometimes if they¡¯re hard up for characters they¡¯ll offer extra for dropping in.¡±


    ¡°Characters?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, there are no NPC¡¯s in Gunmaze. So if you have a game that needs enemies or something, it has to be done by actual people. Some do it professionally.¡±


    ¡°Like, if every goon in a game had to be controlled by a real person?¡±


    ¡°Exactly. It¡¯s why so many of the segments are competitive. It¡¯s usually either that or player versus environment kinda thing.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s the game like?¡± Luke asked.


    ¡°Sci fi, space opera. In the actual Conquest the avatars are pretty fleshed out. You can get genetic¡ª¡±


    ¡°Can I get a lightsaber?¡±


    Nova stopped mid-sentence and shook his head at Luke with a smile. Angel scowled behind.


    ¡°Soulara portal established. Prepare for departure.¡±


    The fuzzy clouded world went dark, and just like before Colors, Gradie suddenly felt like he was falling at an incredible speed. This time, however, after about five seconds of falling, a mirror appeared in the dark, reflecting the four of them in their avatars.


    ¡°Previous loadouts found.¡±


    The twin¡¯s avatar¡¯s picked up new clothing as if they were falling through them on the way down. Angel had a kind of armor plating and monk robe combo, with a helmet that looked like a kendo mask made of metal and colored glass, and Nova got something that reminded Gradie of a formula one Racer who had patterned his suit after a psychedelic experience topped with a space age gas mask and, surprisingly, a fucking cowboy hat.


    ¡°Nice hat bro,¡± Luke laughed.


    ¡°Welcome newcomers.¡±


    Luke and Gradie¡¯s avatars were slowly given space suits and masked helmets that screamed space age grunts, and then two identical rifles and gear pouches. Once the system was convinced they had looked at themselves in the mirrors long enough to make the effect stick, a map appeared in front of them, with a dialogue box.


    ¡°Solara Tutorial. [accept][decline]¡±


    Nova waved his hand and the decline button flashed red then vanished, leaving only the map. The sensation of falling faded and Gradie felt he was floating in zero g.


    ¡°Ok, lemme see.¡± Nova manipulated the map with hand motions and zoomed in on a portion that looked like the center of a spider web.


    ¡°Ok, so this is high roads of Sarthor. Big fuckin sci-fi highways and skyscrapers. Drop ship is somewhere down here,¡± he motioned towards the bottom edge of the screen. ¡°And here¡¯s the fuel plant.¡± He swiped up and the map revealed a beach and ocean rendered in muted colors. A large structure that looked like a cannon-age starfort was stuck on the beach, with five of the spider web lines branching out from it.


    ¡°So here¡¯s Geyser Squad control.¡± He motioned to the red overlaid on half the map. ¡°And this is allied territory.¡± The other, bottom half, overlaid with blue, and turning purple at the edges. ¡°So let me see what¡­¡±


    ¡°Yo Quasar,¡± an unfamiliar voice said on the comms. ¡°You in yet?¡±


    ¡°Nah bro I¡¯m at the map,¡± Nova said. ¡°Where you need us?¡±


    ¡°One sec.¡±


    A box popped up on the map that Nova quickly interacted with, turning it green before it vanished. A new icon, like a circular avatar portrait, appeared on the map, as well as a pink and black cursor.


    ¡°Ok, center road got nuked, we¡¯re trying to build up on left center, but I need some cover so here.¡±


    The cursor marked a dot on the map, just on the red side of the purple belt.


    ¡°Clear this tower out and call a cannon team. If you guys are still around when we storm up, then that would be cool.¡±


    ¡°Alright bro. You got a transport.¡±


    ¡°Yeah, Mav and Robin are already on it. You wanna pilot?¡±


    ¡°Always bro.¡±


    ¡°Ok I¡¯ll drop you in.¡±


    Another box popped up and Nova hit accept and the sensation of falling renewed with a vengeance.


    ¡°All right bros, pretty simple,¡± Nova said. ¡°Shoot em dead and watch your head.¡±


    Gradie landed in a sitting position, and the world tugged away from him, two cross chest straps keeping him in place


    The transition was so seamless, so perfect. That his mind accepted the new world around him wholesale.


    And very quickly, it became apparent that it was a world of violence.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Dr. X

    Don¡¯t feel my Self, Doc


    If you had never been shown it, you never would have seen it. A door-sized hunk of shadow stuck between two half-pillars, gradient curves of beige cement or maybe the kind of skin-toned plastic they used to make PCs out of, like an exhaust port in the tower.


    It was even more unexpected because the tower it was stuck in was one of those big glass office buildings that gave the Allcity just enough realish features to make your mind say ¡°city¡± when your eyeballs gave it the rundown, even though it did usually say it with half a question mark at the end. The tower didn¡¯t even float or rotate or anything, and was topped off by a standard flat roof with a fire escape door. It was unusual only because of its impossible height and the surreal mind-defying things reflected in its sapphire glass. Which made it easy to find. But the port was something else.


    You could always tell the new ones, flying around in circles, too afraid to ask, cursing to themselves. The old heads like Luke found it immediately. The trick was to fly to the base of the tower, come in past the mangled art piece in the courtyard, fly down the hedge bush lined shadowed sidewalk that led to the squat parking garage at the back (which the newbies missed entirely, too busy staring at the mirrored face of the tower, waiting for their fix to float out of their own reflection in some flash of light, maybe with a choir screaming in the background) and then fly up the v-shaped wedge cut into the back side of the glass tower, until you found it, waiting between awning and balcony, where a sliding glass door probably would have been in whatever tower in the Real they had based it on.


    It didn''t look like anything a human being should go into, and that first time, Luke remembered, he had thought she was trying to trap him.


    The memories sparkled in his head and he let them die as he floated in front of the slab of shadow, savoring the moment. When he came back out, he would never see this place again.


    A familiar sensation nudged his ear canal, and he visualized a hand radio in his head and hit the switch.


    ¡°Yeah?¡±


    ¡°Come into the office, please. As soon as possible.¡± It was Klara.


    ¡°Is this a right this second kind of thing?¡±


    ¡°Well, it¡¯s certainly a ¡®within the next ten minutes¡¯ kind of thing.¡±


    ¡°Can you give me fifteen?¡±


    After a pause, she came back with a sigh.


    ¡°I can give you fifteen. Make them count.¡±


    He killed the connection and wondered at her last words. Did she know? Could she know? Nah. It was just like Philip had said. Her being in your head, made you think she was smarter than she was. Start imagining that she¡¯s clairvoyant. Half of what gave Speakers such pull around here.


    He tried to get back to the way he had felt before she had called, that feeling of ¡®my life¡¯s gonna change after this¡¯, but could only manage some half-assed echo, so he dove into the shadow headfirst.


    The sound came first, a rushing white noise roar, like he was in the center of the earth and it was flash flooding all over the surface, then there was the light, floating softly in the endless black, about a quarter of a mile away, streetlight on a sidewalk in front of a strip mall shop face, the two ends of the building disappearing into darkness on either side.


    When he was a few yards from it, gravity took notice of him and pulled him down to the sidewalk. He landed less softly than other places in the Other. The maker wanted you to know who was in charge here, he guessed.


    ¡°Look who¡¯s back.¡±


    Old guy, dressed like a hobo, or the nineties TV interpretation of one, sitting next to the door. Like always. Couldn¡¯t be just some beggar, though he did often ask for spare mem. Luke was damn near certain he was shop security. Maybe he used to be one of those Saviors people went on about. Masters of Otherworld combat and control. But how would anyone hold up one of these places? Did they keep the memories in a safe under the floor tiles?


    The guy watched Luke push through the door with blue eyes like fake ice that clashed with the rest of his costume. Like he could read Luke¡¯s thoughts. Don¡¯t go asking questions like that, boy. Whatever. After he sold this mem, he¡¯d never see the son of a bitch again. Today he was going to cough up something that should wipe his debt clean.


    The door dinged an electronic bell and fluorescents hummed overhead. It was like an old video rental smashed into an arcade and textured like a dreamworld corner store. Spirits stood at shelves and kiosks, their eyes glowing, their ¡°bodies¡± translucent, previewing mem.The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    Mr. O was standing at the counter like he had been expecting Luke, just like he always was, the way every junkie who walked through the door probably saw him, though probably not in the same form, like some kind of personalized illusion, like Mr. O was a projection upon one of infinite facets. A small feat for someone who could get people to sell their lives at a discount and beg for the opportunity to do it.


    Still, somehow, he was an okay dude.


    ¡°Hey Sleepy. How¡¯s it going?¡±


    One day, during the lullaby of small talk that Dr. X wove around the ice bath plunge of the extractor, he had mentioned that everyone in the Other really just wanted one thing. To wake up. Luke had thought about that a second, then said the he really just wanted to go to sleep. Dr. X laughed. The name stuck. Luke was sure everyone had nick names inside Dr.X¡¯s place. Wouldn¡¯t want the outside world to know you were a junkie. Most people even wore a mask, but Luke never had. Hiding seemed like admitting he was doing something wrong. Kind of convenient now. He had just recently found out his junkie spirit persona would become yet another mask, another kind of cover, protecting what he felt in his soul would be his true self.


    But to Mr. O, he just said,


    ¡°It¡¯s going.¡±


    ¡°What can I do you for?¡±


    ¡°Need to make a drop. Put it towards what I owe.¡±


    ¡°Thought you weren¡¯t allowed to sell dailies.¡±


    A daily was a basic strip of everything the Self had seen in the Real that day. Junkies that lived day to day, selling each new day of Real mem the moment it popped into the Spirit, were a special kind of fucked. Luke had been there just a few months before, but this was different.


    ¡°Not a daily. Something bigger. Something with a narrative.¡±


    Mr. O smiled like Luke had just offered to let him hold his baby.


    ¡°That sounds nice, Sleepy. We¡¯ll take good care of it. Go back and see Dr. X.¡±


    There was a buzz as Mr. O mimed pressing a button under the counter, and a door appeared in the wall just past the kiosk. Luke waved to Mr. O and stomped off towards it.


    ¡°All right, have a good one.¡±


    But Mr. O, whoever he really was, had probably already shifted his focus to one of his other facets, maybe the kindly old woman he used to talk to momma¡¯s boys, or the slick-suited man he used on people who needed to think of the whole thing as a business transaction. Luke had done a lot of asking around about Mr. O, but he shook it all out of his head now. It hadn¡¯t gotten him any closer to any kind of freedom.


    The door had a push bar and was heavy and smooth-swinging like a hospital door. The familiarity continued into the hallway. Humming fluorescents and a white noise like the drone of a hospital long past visiting hours, but softened at the edges. Smell of antiseptic something.


    The hallway turned at right angles and proceeded, doorless, for a while, then turned finally onto a hall lined with shut doors with darkened window slits and a single glowing door frame at the end of the hall, its door open a palms width.


    Luke knew by now that the hallway, like the dark cavern void outside the shop and the hospital gown that had replaced his clothes, was there to separate his mind from the ¡°causal chain of memory¡± and make him more receptive to the extractor. He knew this but his knowledge was powerless against the effect. When he tried to think of how he got there, the thin line of events wilted under the humming waves of present experience.


    But the understanding did take some of the fear out of it. A little voice in the back of his head reminded him,


    ¡°Yeah, you¡¯ve seen this before, Hardworlder.¡±


    And so, he stepped into Dr. X¡¯s office with a smile on his face.


    ¡°Ah, Mr. Fisher. How are you feeling today?¡±


    He said it in that ¡°I already know the answer, but I¡¯m being polite to a mere mortal like yourself¡± way that doctors had.


    Dr. X looked like Luke¡¯s ideal of a Dr. which was how he knew it was all bullshit. They could have made it a little less obvious they were drawing from your own Spirit to generate these facades, but Luke suspected that might be intentional. The feeling that you weren¡¯t getting the full story heightened your sense that anything could happen, which once again made the extractor run smoother.


    Luke went along with it. He wanted to be done with it anyway.


    ¡°Got something I want to get off my chest, I guess.¡±


    ¡°A confession, so to speak?¡± Dr. X did his best, whoever and wherever he was, not to let his money-grubbing salivation seep through the layers of illusion, but Luke could still smell it.


    ¡°Just a memory I want to let go of. I think it¡¯ll make a good story.¡±


    Dr. X nodded. ¡°Well, like I always say, handing them over is the best way to get over them.¡±


    He did like to say it. Luke suspected Dr. X had borrowed that phrase from someone who had a much deeper concern for the health of a Spirit than he did, but he could never shake the dead certainty that it was essentially correct, which made his disgust that much worse. Here was a creature that had taken something beautiful, a healing process unique to this world, and given it a bottom line.


    His disgust quickly doubled back to remind him of his own role in this process, so he dropped the thought and got up on the cushioned table.


    ¡°Try and find the singular moment, that focal point of the memory, and¡ª¡±


    Dr. X went through the spiel every time, and it must have been about a thousand by now. After the tenth time, Luke had thought him some kind of phantom, only able to spit out words that had been spoken to him unknown years ago, but by now he had come around to the understanding that after so many times going under, the words themselves became a kind of trigger, opening his Spirit like a scalpel, allowing the memories to flow out, once Luke had found the right origin.


    Conveniently, he was on his back in the memory too. Hard concrete rather than firm medical cushion, bright sky rather than foam tiles. He found it, held it, looped it, till it grew and lived, the process by now like opening a drawer, and he didn¡¯t even have time to be disgusted with how quickly his soul opened itself to this stranger before the ceiling melted away, the ¡°Dr.¡± and his words dissolved, and the sensation of falling took him,


    And he was there again, laying on that rooftop, wondering where in the hell he was, watching the impossible crafts and floating buildings whizz by overhead.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Rooftop Rebirth

    Eyes I dare not meet in dreams


    That first day had always been a blur when he looked back on it, but Dr. X¡¯s extractor peeled it out of him in vivid detail, each second chain-linking to the next. Despite his loathing of the extractor, it was always amazing, what he thought he had forgotten, what was lurking hidden in his mind. The Spirit sees everything, it¡¯s us who are blind, she had said to him once.


    He had been laying there for what felt like days, waiting to wake up, but he had known despite his confusion and the lack of sense in anything else around him, that dreams don¡¯t last days.


    Maybe he was in a coma. Or a car wreck. Maybe an overdose. The Adderall mixing wrong with something else. The fact that he had two perfectly believable explanations for his premature demise must have said something about his life, but he was too distracted to reflect on it. A ship, or plane or boat or whatever it was, shaped like a giant pecan, its shell peeling and revealing a network of ant-farm-like tunnels and rooms with glass faces carved into the seed, was floating by overhead, and he was trying to guess why his brain had spit that out at him.


    ¡°Whatcha doin?¡±


    Her voice had two qualities to it, sweet sugar sing-song on top, and fucking tractor beam underneath. In the brilliant hindsight of extracted memory, these revelations came easy, but at the time, he had barely noticed anything but the warm electric all-over body tingles that always came with meeting your crush in a dream.


    And just like a dream, it was better when you had never seen the girl before in your life.


    Wide open bright green eyes stared out of a heart-shaped face. Her skin was pale and smooth, blushing and freckled. High cheeks, perfect little pointed nose, lips that he could feel just looking at them, jagged flying pixie-cut hair, rainbow iridescence dancing on platinum blonde, and that swoopy eyeliner thing girls used to do that always drove him wild.


    Then he got the rest of her, leaning over him with her hands on her knees. Shortstack, great tits, swelling thighs peeking out the sides of a mini skirt she was pressing down against the wind, which he realized now hadn¡¯t blown once before she got there.


    To his surprise, he ignored her. He just lay there, staring at the sky, saying nothing. It was such a shock to the one Luke to see the other had once been able to ignore her. Even now, he saw her in crowds, hunted her in the Allclub.


    But that other Luke, though already burning for her, his throat and chest smoldering and his spine trying to jump out of his neck, his breath tingling like the air around her was ionized from a fresh lightning strike, just stared at the sky, counted the windows on a psychedelic submarine. He knew then that this was a dream, and if he stopped to talk to every dream girl, no matter how cute, he might never wake up.


    Unfazed, relentlessly smiling, she squatted down next to him. Her weird metallic clothes, like a rave girl who had actually been to space and partied with aliens, ruffled and tinkled like tinsel.


    She cocked her head and spoke to him again, and this time, it was double in a different way. One voice spoke in the smooth lulling way he remembered, vibrating his memory, and another voice was just a series of sounds. The extractor was working in dual feed, one an emotionally hued and tainted record, the other distilling raw sensory data.


    Then the process became too subtle to detect, the extractor faded into the fabric of time and reality, and he glided across the memories like a raindrop on a windshield¡­ no. He was the windshield, and the water. He passed through the memories like a wave, like energy transferred.


    The Luke in the extractor was beyond time now, so the Luke in memory became supreme.


    She spoke.


    ¡°You know, I can read your mind.¡±


    He focused on his bed, on his alarm, told himself¡ª


    ¡°You think I¡¯m a dream girl. Like in your head, right?¡±


    That got to him.


    ¡°Nope. I know you are. You are the part of me that¡¯s afraid of going back to the real world.¡±


    He thought it would banish her. He had read somewhere that dream people hate when you tell them they aren¡¯t real. It didn¡¯t.


    ¡°Exactomundo!¡± she pointed one slender finger at his face and grinned.


    ¡°Fuck off.¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t you want to hear what I have to say? It¡¯s not every day a guy gets to talk to his dream girl.¡±


    ¡°Doesn¡¯t matter. Soon as I wake up, I¡¯m gonna get to work killing you.¡±


    ¡°How do you figure you¡¯re gonna do that?


    ¡°Scorched earth.


    ¡°Ha ha, what?¡±


    ¡°Kill enough brain cells, you¡¯re bound to be in one of them.¡±


    ¡°Oh, that¡¯s a good idea, but I have a better one.¡±


    ¡°Fuck¡ª¡±


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you just apply the alcohol directly? I know a place right below us where we can get¡ª¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not moving and I¡¯m not going along with your bullshit. Since you¡¯re my subconscious, I can finally tell you this to your face. I¡¯m not fucking interested in self-discovery, healing old scars, or any of that shit. I¡¯m interested in waking up and getting paid. Life is shitty, I might as well stay shitty too while I have to deal with it.¡±Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!


    Something flashed across her face like longing, like need, like pain, but in her practiced perfected guise, it manifested only as stillness, as the absence of expression, a temporary freezing of the mask, for only an instant. Of course, the Luke on the rooftop didn¡¯t notice.


    Then she started back in again.


    ¡°So, you¡¯re trying to wake up, right?¡±


    He didn¡¯t respond. Even if he hadn¡¯t just fucking said that, she was in his head anyway.


    She leaned in and smirked like she had caught him in something.


    ¡°Or should I say, you¡¯re trying to wake up, again.¡±


    He stopped noticing anything in the sky or hearing any sound but the soft jingle of her skirt. He noticed, annoyingly and with a jolt of primal anticipation, that she smelled like citrus and alcohol and a fresh clean sweat.


    ¡°But you can¡¯t quite do it, because you¡¯re afraid that it¡¯ll be just like the last time you woke up, right?¡±


    He had never known his peripheral vision was capable of such definition until she had taken up residence within it. She leaned in closer.


    ¡°You¡¯re afraid you won''t remember any of this when you wake up, but you¡¯ll come right back here anyway, so it¡¯ll feel like you never woke up at all, right?¡±


    He let his laser focus forward lapse, and his mind, fresh off the leash, charged backward into memory, until it slammed into that dry mass of time when the world hadn¡¯t been churning with flying things and electrified with emotion like even the roof could talk to him. There he was, at the center of a normal day, completely fucking oblivious to this other him stuck on this rooftop. Abandoned. Helpless. It had ended as quickly as it had come, and he had forgotten it as he watched the insanity float past overhead.


    He let the fragile belief that all of this was part of him slip out of his grasp, momentarily, but that¡¯s all it took.


    He looked her square in the face.


    ¡°How do you fucking know that?¡±


    She smiled and nudged his shoulder with her little ringed hand.


    ¡°I¡¯m in your head, remember?¡±


    He looked her over for the first time. Gorgeous. Sparkling. As vibrantly alive as he was dead and doomed on this fucking rooftop. That was it. He was now like a thing dropped from high up, his destination and destiny a matter of mathematics. Everything that happened between that look and the final dull thud was and would be just window dressing. Far away and far ahead, another him took it all in and measured the arc, searching for signs that what happened after impact had been something more than a dead cat bounce.


    But on the rooftop,


    ¡°Then why aren¡¯t you naked?¡±


    Her smile didn¡¯t falter, didn¡¯t increase. Like he had burped or something. Still, she replied.


    ¡°Maybe you¡¯re more into the tease than you think?¡±


    ¡°Or maybe my subconscious knows once you give it up, I¡¯ll stop listening to you.¡±


    She rolled back on her ass, with her hands flat on the ground behind her, tits pointed up like howitzers, knees bent, legs together, shoes flat on the roof next to his shoulder, so that her entire thigh and full round hip was out in plain view under her skirt, and her soft calf just barely blocked her pussy. Still, it occurred to him he could reach out and touch it, but he didn¡¯t. Maybe he really did like the tease, or maybe he wasn¡¯t entirely certain she was just a thing of his mind.


    ¡°Maybe,¡± she purred. ¡°But do you think¡ª¡±


    ¡°Just fucking say it.¡±


    She flipped her hair out of her face and her tits bounced, then she cocked her head at him.


    ¡°Say what?¡±


    ¡°Whatever it is you want to tell me. Whatever message is so important you¡¯ve taken the form of my ideal fuck doll and strapped me to a roof to tell me. Speak, oh great and powerful subconscious!¡±


    He pointed a finger at her face and the skin of his hand caught fire. He wanted to touch her so fucking bad.


    ¡°Well,¡± she rolled her legs out from under her until she was laying on her side next to him with her head resting in her hand and one knee pointed towards him, like the classic Playboy pose. Like a pillow talk monologue in an old black and white.


    ¡°You¡¯re not exactly strapped down, but ok I¡¯ll tell you.¡±


    She swung her arm up to the sky and followed it with her gaze. Her profile was sickeningly adorable. Still, for some reason, he didn¡¯t touch her.


    ¡°This is not a dream world! All those people¡ª¡±


    He hadn¡¯t taken his eyes off her, so she grabbed him by the jaw, an electrifying contact that he felt all the way to his toes like a fucking teenager, and turned his face towards the sky.


    ¡°All those people are real. Just like you. Just like me. They wake up in their sad little beds and their shitty lives and forget any of this ever existed. But while they¡¯re here, they have a lot of fun.¡±


    She pulled his face back towards her.


    ¡°Do you want to have a lot of fun?¡± It was a soft smoldering whisper, and she left her lips parted at the end.


    ¡°You said it isn¡¯t a dreamworld. Sounds like they dream to get here,¡± he said, defiantly, trying to keep the heat out of his voice.


    She let go of his head with a sigh and rested her face in her hand and frowned at him.


    ¡°Are you really going to make me try and explain how all this works?¡±


    ¡°Should be no problem if you¡¯re real. If you¡¯re made up of some piece of my brain matter, I expect you¡¯ll just say we¡¯re all just brains plugged into a computer or some shit.¡±


    She stared at him a moment, then scoffed and rolled onto her back. She scooted up next to him so they were both laying side by side, staring at the sky. A craft built like a skate park rolled into a tube floated by overhead, and a skater went up a half pipe and came towards them and stopped for a moment, before falling back down into the park''s gravity.


    ¡°Do you remember how you got here? How you first dropped into all this?¡±


    Now, a few things happened to about three different Lukes. The Luke on the rooftop cast his memory backwards, and found a stomach-churning drop. He saw himself running through dream schools and falling out into endless suburbs with strange crafts in the haze overhead. He raced down surrealist highways and flew through portals like things out of a PS1 game and he woke up a hundred times. It was all half there, like dreams within dreams, like it had happened in that foggy period of childhood that was often papered over with dreams and imagination when viewed from the present.


    That Luke on the roof tried to explain, and felt like he was saying nothing, but she had understood completely, and even confirmed things he had forgotten to even mention, which, at the time, only made him more certain she was a reflection of his sleeping brain and that none of this was real.


    Another thing that happened, that could have been said, by certain Lukes, to be happening at the same time, was that the extractor stuttered. Even the best ones had a hard time extracting memories of memories, so to speak. They worked better when starting from a distinct sensation related directly to the memory they were extracting, but since Luke couldn¡¯t have given them such a memory of his slow birth into the Otherworld even if he had wanted to, the extractor made do.


    Also, the Luke lying in the extractor realized two things; Firstly, the uncanny similarity between the girl laying there, so that only her voice was with him, while coaxing out memories he had thought lost forever, and the present, to this Luke at least, feeling of being in the extractor itself. Or more so, the similarity between his first time in an extractor and her method of teasing out his memories. And secondly, he realized that in sharing his memories, the rooftop Luke had taken part in his own ensnarement.


    He consoled himself with the fact that it hadn¡¯t helped anything, but had also been basically unavoidable, like an object picking up speed after being dropped from a height.


    The real tragedy he realized, as the extractor progressed unflinchingly afterward, was that for the rooftop Luke, terminal velocity hadn¡¯t even been reached yet.


    But she was getting to it.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - OneiRory

    Don¡¯t let go


    She had done her best to explain it all to him, but his dream-lust floated over his mind like a cloud, and she would go off on a tangent every other sentence, so by the end of her rambling he had only the vague idea that this was a place beyond his understanding, or at least his attention, and that while the rules of the world made a kind of sense to people like her, his brain might as well have been trying to absorb one of the odd passing crafts through his ear canal.


    Looking back through that fractaled vision, another Luke understood that the specifics and rules hadn¡¯t been the point anyway. The message got through loud and clear.


    Bro, you''re out of your fucking element, and I¡¯m swimming like a fish, so you better hang on tight.


    And he did.


    ¡°If you could do anything, go anywhere, be anyone, for one day, what would you do?¡±


    She asked him, wide-eyed, after a long pause that signified the death of her final attempt to explain it all, and he had sat there and thought about it a moment.


    The answer, he found, was that he didn¡¯t know. He had no goals, no dreams, really, besides a vague hope that one day he would ask himself, ¡°is this all there is?¡± and something would answer, ¡°no.¡±


    So he told her,


    ¡°Ten women at once.¡±


    She blinked at him.


    ¡°Is that it?¡±


    ¡°Maybe not, but lets get it out of the way and see if I still have any aspirations afterwards.¡±


    She sighed and stood up straight, and clicked a keyfob that popped out of thin air.


    ¡°All right, I¡¯m gonna get you your ten women, then I¡¯m going to show you what this world can really do.¡±


    ¡°What, twenty women?¡±


    But she had ignored him, and a second later, he ignored himself, because a ship shaped like a giant teddy bear, its head and torso two felt-covered orbs, had dropped down on the rooftop with a thud and a squeak. It stood over him and she flew up into a tear that opened in its ass, disappearing inside a cloud of white stuffing. Before Luke could figure out if he had what it took to fly, a tractor beam, rings of green neon accompanied by the classic 60s ¡®woo-woo-woo¡¯ sci-fi sound, dropped around him and pulled him inside.


    The stuffing had been soft as a cloud. The interior like a spaceship, one orb the cockpit and lounge, and the larger chest orb a kind of combo dance floor observatory.


    She had made him watch through a window as the Allworld faded away, slowly, and spoke softly in his ear about makers and archetypes and schema and principalities and other things that he would have to hear a hundred times from people he wasn¡¯t hopelessly in love with before they would stick.


    And she had made him promise,


    ¡°Never forget that I¡¯m the one that got you off that rooftop and showed you the world.¡±


    He wouldn¡¯t, he had thought. He hadn¡¯t, he snarled to himself, as the extractor chopped on.


    The promise came back to him, for the first time, after the ten women, and before the rest of it, as he lay there, spent, and she explained to him that this particular refractory period was a facet of the mind, a vestigial barrier that he could, with time and effort, learn to break through, if he wanted. He turned and faced her, and asked her why she had helped him.


    ¡°Because you¡¯re new, fresh,¡± she sighed. ¡°People who have been in this place a while, get tainted by it. Get locked into the same old ideas, the same old wants and fears. I wanted to see what it was like to be new again. To have so much hope.¡±


    He had reminded her that, while laying on the rooftop, he hadn¡¯t had any hope in this place at all, and she had been the one to drag him off into the black with promises of ¡°whatever, whoever, whenever.¡±


    Or at least the far away Luke thought he had, but the extractor peeled off the truth and threw it at him like an old potato skin while it continued to dig into the solid ground of his past, leaving him flailing his arms and falling over and shit topside.This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    The Luke in that big mirror-walled hotel suite, with its hot tub floor of rolling neon foam and floating raft beds and near zero-g, had only asked her why, you poor sweet thing, why did you lose hope? What took it from you?


    But she had¡¯nt answered. Left him dangling by his own pity, ensnared in his masculine desire to comfort and protect, pulled him along with the unspoken promise that he would one day open her up and reveal what had been broken inside, the scar that only he could heal.


    Then there were two kisses, one in glowing softened memory, and one peeled off and dropped wetly at his feet. An old curling potato peel. A warning ignored.


    The extractor sliced through his second session with the ten women and he noticed, numbly that this time there were eleven, only one of whom seemed solid and real when he turned his back.


    When they were done, the ten slithered away like faintly aware steam, and she lay there with him, leg thrown over his, ass moving side to side slowly like a thing counting time, asking him, again,


    ¡°If you could be anyone, do anything, go anywhere,¡±


    And he still hadn¡¯t known, but had said,


    ¡°I¡¯m fine right here. Fuck the rest of it.¡±


    But she had giggled, and pressed on, no really, what do you really want, and he said he wanted to know her name, and her smile had passed away, like he had broken through some barrier and touched her where she was serious and vulnerable, and she had told him,


    ¡°Rory,¡±


    And he had said it again like a spell, and that sealed it. If it even needed sealing at that point.


    Then she asked him again what he really wanted most in the entire world, then giggling, in any world, and he had said again,


    ¡°I have no fucking idea.¡±


    ¡°Well, let''s go find out together, ok?¡±


    They had gone to Gunmaze and failed miserably, their single conquest, a two-on-one gunfight in a broken down church where Rory had hummed here comes the bride as they camped in wait, had been celebrated like V day. They had toured the resort worlds, even Titanova with its neon blue ¡°hydrogen¡± lakes and tropical Genesis with its edible everything and drinkable lazy river. They had been to every corner of the Allclub, from the rolling human waves of the great floor, to the floating secluded velvet rooms. They had sampled every simulated life Rory could find him, from marital bliss to bank heists to indescribable and nearly inhuman experiences.


    Here, the extractor stuttured, skipped, and let go, just a bit. It let the granular details slip through its claws like sand, zoomed out and scanned in the frame of days, not seconds, and relied almost purely on its second tongue, that other orifice made only for the absorption of sticky emotion laded and fallible memory, while the more objective data was left to whither.


    Luke wondered if it was what you might call an artistic choice, but then quickly changed his mind. First, Dr. X had as much artistic sensibilities as a scalpel, and second, the artistic embellishment was usually left up to the sim makers themselves, Dr. X being what you might call a dealer in raw material.


    Nope, it was probably just that some kind of Otherworld copyright law kept him from taking too much mem of what might be considered by his clients, competition, or he didn¡¯t want any memory enticing the future customers to skip out on whatever low-grade Sim Luke¡¯s memories were destined for, and seek out the high-class shit he and Rory had been doing. Better to keep it vague.


    Whatever the reason, after the days had flaked off he saw, from the mathematical viewpoint of the extractor, that it hadn¡¯t even been a month before she took him to do Bliss. Wild. Those first few weeks had the weight of years in his memory, a vast expanse he often wished to go back to, that he now realized, with it packaged neatly for resale, would be like trying to land a plane on a postage stamp.


    Somewhere in that parcel of memory, toward the end, she had asked him,


    ¡°Did you find what you wanted?¡±


    Years later, he had tried to remember what he had told her, but couldn¡¯t. Now, he watched as he said nothing at all to her.


    She hadn¡¯t let the silence stay for long.


    ¡°Well, do you at least know what you don¡¯t want?¡±


    Her teddy bear ship had produced a cup and saucer, and they were lounging in the frothy tea-scented water within, orbiting Crystalia, that old world resort now left nearly abandoned, like a half-opened geode, where the trillion crystal facets reflected every fantasy its patrons had ever had for your choosing. What he had found most amazing about the place was that it was apparently possible to get a headache without a body.


    ¡°To go back in there,¡± he had said. She hadn¡¯t laughed, only smiled, and asked for the last time,


    ¡°What do you want, more than anything? What do you want to get out of boundless paradise?¡±


    He had looked her in the eye, and told her the truth.


    ¡°I want you.¡±


    While one Luke was telling the truth, another was finally figuring it out. That had been a fucking lie, and she knew it.


    She smiled, shyly, and looked down, and the Luke unblinded by lust and longing saw the disappointment at the edges of her face. Had she been hoping he would say something else, or had she hoped she could believe him?


    ¡°If you want me, I have to be sure there¡¯s nothing else in the world you want more than me.¡±


    He had made all kinds of moronic statements and promises, and she had sat there, listening but trying not to hear, smiling with her face and screaming with her eyes, waiting for him to shut the fuck up. Then she said,


    ¡°There¡¯s one last thing we have to try, just to be sure.¡±


    ¡°What?¡± he had said, like a child going along with a bedtime story.


    And she had shown him.


    The Bliss den had been nestled in the husk of a dead gameworld. Some kind of sex game, judging by all the beds. She had talked about the ruins. About how in this world, where nothing degrades, there were abandoned places a thousand times larger than the earth that some mad dreamer had made just for fun.


    ¡°Those are the harmless ones,¡± one of the patrons had said, with a voice like existence had become for him a kind of itch. ¡°It¡¯s the places designed to trap you that you gotta look out for.¡±


    She had nodded like that was a really good point sir, even though now, Luke could see the contempt. From up here, he could see right through her. If he could have moved, really moved, not just lay there and floated through dead memory, he would have screamed at himself to run.


    But he couldn¡¯t, so the Luke from long ago and far away took his first hit of bliss, and that was it.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Bliss

    Jump at the sun and miss


    Here, the extractor jumped the track. Its linear path, which it not so much followed as made up as it went along, finally gave way and left it ping-ponging across a starburst web of memories, the gaps between them sanded and smeared by the jackhammer cravings of addiction.


    Every hit of Bliss Luke had ever taken had apparently linked themselves somewhere under the oblivious chronological slope the rest of his mind aligned to, like a fungus meshing its mycelium under the topsoil. The extractor took a quick survey of the memories, found them identical enough to be interchangeable and completely devoid of even the smallest filament of latent contextual memory, packaged them all together under a single label, and went back to work forming the narrative.


    The high-up watching Luke almost shit bricks. What had seemed at the time to be repeated brushes with enlightenment, each with their own personal message about his present state of existence, proved in the enhanced hindsight of the extractor to have been the same fucking lizard-brained sensation every single time.


    Its like being lifted out of the cold and flying slowly towards a bright warm light. The closer you get, the more the heat and energy seep into your skin, your muscles, your bones, then into your mind. First your present thoughts, then what you were thinking moments before, than every thought you ever had, so that your entire existence has been overwritten by approaching the light.


    You have been flying towards it forever. You began existence when its light struck the void. Should something come between you and the light and cast a shadow over you, you would not exist. The light is the answer that created the question. The light. The light. The light. There!


    And just before you get to it, just as you reach out (with whatever a being made of pure light-wantingness has for hands) and just before you reach the final stage of light meeting not light, of light becoming all, just before the final and pure revelation from which all knowledge and existence sprouts,


    You wake up in a fucking bliss den, staring at the ceiling or something, and your body and Spirit are devoid of even the tiniest microsensation of the light and the warmth, so that your time flying towards it dissolves out of memory and becomes like an impression in your mind, like a fossil after the leaf or animal has eroded away.


    The extractor picked up the trail again, and the down there Luke looked up at Rory like she had just pulled a chair out from under him.


    ¡°That¡¯s it?¡±


    She feigned disappointment, even a little taking offense.


    ¡°You didn¡¯t like it?¡±


    ¡°Fuck no. What¡¯s the point of that shit?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s supposed to give you like, a spiritual experience, like you see yourself¡ª¡±


    ¡°Didn¡¯t I tell you that first day on the rooftop I¡¯m not looking for that shit?¡±The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    ¡°Yes. But I guess I had thought that was just a kind of newbie cynicism.¡±


    ¡°Nah, baby. That¡¯s all me.¡±


    He had stroked her cheek, her thigh, oblivious. The cut was already made. A dead man lumbering forward like an old kung fu movie.


    ¡°I don¡¯t need anything to show me how to look at myself. I just want to look at you.¡±


    She smiled with everything but her eyes. Guess she had got fed up with faking those the moment he took that hit.


    ¡°We¡¯ll I¡¯ve shown you everything in this world,¡±


    ¡°And I could give a fuck less. Like I told you¡ª¡±


    ¡°I know, I believe you.¡±


    Then the sad look down, the fake self-consciousness.


    ¡°But I know you¡¯ll be just as disappointed with me as the rest of it.¡±


    God damn. Girls were the same all over, he thought.


    He lifted her chin. He made sweet promises. He spoke of the day on the rooftop and the unwaveringness of his revelation there. She smiled and pulled back, emotionally, with her words, and he chased her with his. They sat there on that little silk mattress between marble pillars with the sheer curtains waving and the candlelight and the whole place like some middle eastern emperor¡¯s opium den as designed for a music video, and the words played out like taped readings for the extractor to collect.


    And the up there Luke ignored them, watching only her eyes, hearing their story for the first time, and knowing, disgustedly, that the extractor was picking up on that too.


    ¡°I have to go,¡± she said, after the conversation had spun them around a hundred times like two kids holding hands in a montage.


    ¡°Why?¡± he said, like the impact after a thing had been dropped.


    ¡°Well, this wasn¡¯t just a selfless act, showing you all this. I was hoping, I mean I thought, when I saw you, I thought if I found someone knew, I had hoped you would find something worth it all in this place, and that way, I would find it too.¡±


    It was a strange lie, watching Luke thought. She must have known then, as he did now, that she had him dead to rights, and all other words beyond ¡®pay up bitch¡¯ were pointless, but she spun this shit out anyway. Was a part of it true? A way to blame him for his own destruction? If you had only found true happiness, I wouldn¡¯t have had to do this.


    But the next part made sense.


    ¡°I borrowed a lot of money to do it,¡±


    Down there Luke had never thought about money in this world. He had heard it mentioned, even heard her use the word ¡®expensive¡¯ a few times when describing the worlds or sims, but thought it was a kind of metaphor. Now, with his mind freshly branded with the imprint of the common Bliss addict, she explained, in expert detail, watching Luke thought, the economics of the Otherworld, the exchange of memory, the value of experience, even the way the Nine worlds had come together and created a common currency, MEM, after the currency wars and the collapse of a gameworld token.


    He had found her obsessive interest endearing, like a child learning about the workings of government, hoping to find proof that the sharing is caring style ethics they had learned in kindergarten still applied in the imperceptible upper strata of the world.


    Then she explained her debt, and tried to explain the methods loan sharks used to pursue their debtors in this place, using words like seekers, hounds, hardworlders, that he didn¡¯t understand or even fully believe, but the gist of it all shined through.


    ¡°I need help.¡±


    On this second go-round with the raw mem, watching Luke realized that she never actually said it, and while he was sitting there waiting for her to ask down there Luke to sell some of himself to save her, the conversation slipped by, and they were climbing back in her ship. The classic clich¨¦ con artist ability to make the scam seem like the mark¡¯s idea.


    So, as the ship dropped into the Allcity, as he watched her tell another, less broken and less healed Luke all about extractors and selling mem and her gushing gratitude, he found he had only himself to blame.


    Even though, he found some consolation, some absolution, in the fact that if she had never shown him the door, he never would have seen it.


    But, guilt or no guilt, the down there Luke followed her into that little square of shadow just the same.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Dancing Mirrors

    Does the xtractor see the mirror clearly?


    A familiar reflection. A familiar refraction. Like standing between two mirrors. The extractor recorded his suspicions, his anguish, his limerence and lust, and then, when Rory led him, hand in hand, like a couple facing the horror of some terminal illness he had just been diagnosed with, down that hall to Dr. X, Luke wondered if the extractor extracting itself would cause some kind of explosion, but he was disappointed.


    The down-there Luke lay on the table, and became an up-there Luke as Dr. X guided him through the process for the first time. The extractor, most high Luke noticed, focused on peeling off his feelings and fears, and blurred everything else, from the waiting room to even the good Dr.¡¯s voice, so that it became a story of a scared man, with no risk of being anything close to an expose on the predatory inclinations of mem extractors.


    Not that tippy top Luke gave a shit. If he really wanted revenge on Dr. X, he¡¯d just drag him into a Hardworld and burn his face off.


    Suddenly, both higher-up Lukes were watching from the point of view of a third, who¡¯s entire world was warm sunlight glowing through plastic blinds on solid forms of pure color, and a voice that wove through the world and was the foundation of it.


    Both higher Lukes began to sob, one a deep body rocking moaning fit that was twice as devastating because of its unexpectedness, the shock of seeing someone you had forgotten was once your world and who¡¯s absence from the last decades of your existence only intensified their importance, and the other a sob like deep quiet breathing, like accepting the death of someone or something or some time that you had held out hope might maybe possibly would somehow return.


    Supreme Luke noticed, through subdued tears, that the reflected extractor had gotten a little too excited and gone searching associated memory for flashes of a funeral. Sorry bro, no such luck. She¡¯s still alive and well. Talk to her every other week and she never hears a word I say.


    However, down their Luke had been too preoccupied with the crying and shit to notice, so superior extractor trimmed any evidence of its past self overstepping out of the mem, and moved on.


    Afterward, she had held him, whispered that his memories would now be used to help some hypothetical poor orphan feel what it was like to have a mother, and then whisked him off to some caf¨¦ floating above the pastel suburb zone of the Allworld.


    He asked her if that settled it, and she laughed and said almost, but not to worry about it, that it would be enough to keep the creditors off her back, and that money in this world had never really made her happy, and then she kissed him, and they had flown off to Gunmaze, her final barb firmly set.


    As the extractor peeled away the days, Luke saw that his memory was terrible at judging time, but in this case it was like an inverse of the distortion that had surrounded their first period of honeymoon bliss.


    It had been almost an entire month, the extractor tallying his touches with the Real like a cold machine, though in memory it seemed much shorter, the days and conversations squeezed together, ultimately just a bare ragged portion of his Spirits time between two doses of Bliss.


    In another paradox of memory, to down there Luke, the days dragged on like years. They flew around the ball, acted as extras in Sims, spent the cash on drinks in the Allclub that tasted faint as carbonated water to Luke, and tested the limits of sex in a world without flesh.


    But, of course, something was missing. Down there Luke got agitated. Rory tried not to notice, or pretended to try not to notice, then got agitated or pretended to get agitated, then they had their first fight, then they made up like two pendulums pulled apart crashing together again, and then they started it all over again.


    Somewhere in the middle of it, top-shelf Luke had an epiphany. An epiphany that, like all great realizations, it seemed, felt less like a relief or an ah-ha and more like hearing the click of a landmine under your feet.


    He saw the Luke down there trying to find the words to explain to her that something was missing, something he couldn¡¯t name, and no I don¡¯t know what it is or I would tell you, and her saying well then why are you taking it out on me, and him saying he wasn¡¯t, but yelling as he said it, kind of defeating the point, and then another fight, and top shelf Luke realized that, while down there Luke was slowly coming to the realization that what was missing looked like a glowing light in the dark that you flew towards forever, what was really missing was no such thing.


    What was missing was a warm light hiding behind the dark black irises of her eyes. What was missing was her love. What she was hiding from him was herself. And when, as the Luke down there sobbed and screamed and left and came back and apologized and doubled down, she hid further in the deep recesses of her mind, lest her mark accidentally stumble upon it, down there Luke decided to go after the warm light that came from little crystals handed out in twilight colored dens at the edges of the Otherworld.If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    About the thousandth time she asked ¡®what is it?¡¯, which had really been, the extractor told him dryly, only the third time, Luke told her he couldn¡¯t get that Bliss shit out of his head, and she had only said, ¡®well, lets go and make our visit then,¡¯ and made him feel, somehow, on the way there that this was his fault, and she was sacrificing so much for his desires, mostly by sitting still as a corpse on the way there, and not even looking at him as he took the crystal in his hand.


    Or, was it something else, her frowning like a kid lying in bed watching their parent fawn over them just before leaving for work, knowing the cough was fake and they would soon be on the Playstation. Was there a feeling of guilt in it? Any at all?


    Before he could figure it out, she was gone, and after a quick flash of a light, the extractor''s chosen metaphor for Bliss, down there Luke ¡®awoke¡¯, and staring up at the strange projections the proprietors of the Bliss den had thought should play on the roof for some reason, like clips of vacations played with the lens at the wrong angle and covered in dust, he said out loud,


    ¡°You might as well have left me on that fucking roof, all the difference it made,¡±


    But when he lifted his head, he found his corner of the den empty, and in her absence and the coming down feeling of failing again to catch the light, he felt about the worst pain possible in a world made of dreams and wishes.


    Then came the guilt, which was somehow worse.


    While down there Luke anguished and paced, then screamed into a communicator he had never had to do more than whisper in while they were temporarily separated in the Allclub, then got no answer and started to sob, up there Luke let go of his own memory, and the extractor really kicked it into overdrive.


    He had learned, or been told at some point, that the extractor¡¯s first job was to sever the memory from your working, active mind, and then talk only to the subconscious, who had less hangups about spilling your deepest secrets out into the void, and in fact often enjoyed it, which Luke had some sympathy for. An entity that spent its entire existence trying to communicate via symbols and dreams and impulses to some dumb creature comprised mostly of denial that it was doomed to live beneath, could now speak freely of its wants and memories and all that shit to something that listened and even asked questions. Must make the shadow Self feel like a neglected wife getting all the attention online.


    So, as up there Luke looked away in disgust, the extractor slid over the days of agony in record time, till it hit a bump.


    Down there Luke, having gotten it into his head that her reason for abandoning him was the massive debt she was running from, had returned to the little square of shadow, and Dr. X, and the extractor was painstakingly censoring the faces and other particulars.


    This time, Luke had sold some of his exceptionally active teenage years. An entire half-decade of easy sex and drugs and fights and even a brief stint as the school dealer, till all the texts and phone calls made him feel more like a secretary than Scarface.


    Another hiccup, a pause and a refraction, like the extractor had run over a landmine. The memories poured out of somewhere, one of the two Lukes or maybe even a third, and the extractor tried to hack through them like a Vietnam vet in the jungle and get to the relevant facts.


    First, that down there Luke had only sold about a month''s worth of those memories, and second, that he had been advised by the kind Dr. X, that spending too much time at once in the extractor could have disastrous consequences for the Spirit.


    ¡°You spend too much time in dead memories, the mind makes them the world, and you cant get out.¡±


    The voice in the extracted mem was hollow, monotone, compared to the easy cadence echoing in up there Luke¡¯s head, and said more like an absolute warning than the ¡°hey man, it¡¯s your funeral,¡± tone up there Luke actually remembered. Not to mention the fact that he was pretty sure he had actually sold all of freshman year that sitting and spent half the day in some kind of recovery room in the back of Dr. X¡¯s cave, where high school Luke and present-day Luke argued and cried and the Spirit went back and forth between them, unable to settle on a single POV.


    But, up there Luke let the edits pass without a word, and down there the story picked up again, essentially unchanged, with Luke putting the word out to every club, ruin, bliss den, and odd shopkeeper they had visited together during the good times, that he had a lot of money with Rory¡¯s name on it.


    The extractor revealed, like a cold diagnosis, that she had waited exactly three days to come find him, and despite the fact that, in his panicked addict brained frenzy, he had forgotten to leave a location or time for her to meet him, she had picked him out of the pulsing masses of the Allclub and motioned towards an elevator.


    Time slowed, memory bloomed, and Luke could imagine the white noise hum at the bottom of it all rising into the roar of an engine pushed to its limits as the extractor kicked into high gear.


    She stood in the softened light of her craft, this time furnished like an art deco office building, arms crossed, cold eyes watching, waiting, as he tried to explain what he had done and how it had all been for her.


    It took him a moment to notice the change, which seemed like magic to Luke and Luke. Her eyes were black. Her cheeks less rosy, less pronounced, lips not as full, her hair a soft brown pulled back in a bun. Even her tits were smaller.


    And when she spoke, finally, there was a rough gravellyness to it that threw out the clear sing-songy bell toned voice that shined laser-like in his memory, and from then on, when he fantasized about her, ran her through all those scenarios that he used to paper over the wounds, it was the only voice he could ever hear, the first one lost like a dream to an alarm.


    It was obvious, later, that she really had no choice. Her pixie dreamgirl schtick could work while Luke was unsure of the reality of it all, but after Bliss, even the most rational Spirits find it near impossible to believe the Other is a dream they could ever wake up from. Her old visage would have stuck out, been ridiculous, maybe even loosened her hold on him.


    So there she was, somewhat closer to the Real her, maybe, telling him,


    ¡°I don¡¯t want it.¡±

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Once, An Addict

    Got you where I want you


    He had gotten mad, let his anger at everything flow out through this lone escape valve that she had carved into his life. He yelled, screamed, about a lot of things he didn¡¯t really care about, like a man swinging in the dark, hoping to feel the impact of hitting something solid, so he can finally fucking give it a rest.


    She had left him. She had vanished. She had been the one to complain about her debt, and now that he had¡ª


    But she hadn¡¯t asked him to do that, and in fact, had left so he wouldn¡¯t, and could handle herself thanks, like she had done before they met. Like she would do forever.


    So, deflected, he tried to be honest.


    ¡°I love you. There¡¯s no fucking strings on this shit, I just want to help you. You said they would hunt you. Was that a fucking lie too?¡±


    More screaming. More of her just standing there with her arms crossed like he was knocking shit over in the checkout line, but she only had like three things anyway. Finally, she spoke.


    ¡°You want to do something for me? Take all that money, and go find some newborn, some fresh, uncorrupted soul, and do what I did to you,¡±


    Luke had made a noise like someone throwing a punch mid-vomit.


    ¡°Everything but the Bliss, ask them what they really want, take them somewhere, show them something, that makes them really happy, it¡¯ll probably be something in their memory¡ª¡±


    ¡°I tried all that shit, and couldn¡¯t find a single god damned¡ª¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t find someone like you! Find someone better!¡±


    As down there Luke reeled and gasped, supreme, floating Luke studied her movements, her eyes, tried to peel apart her voice and find the thin silver wire of honesty beneath it, because for the first time, he felt she might be getting close to it.


    ¡°I was fucking fine when you found me, and now I can¡¯t get this shit out of my¡ª¡±


    ¡°You were already corrupted. I just didn¡¯t see it. You never enjoyed anything but Bliss¡ª¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re the one who showed me that shit!¡±


    ¡°After you hated everything else, after it was the only thing left, I thought maybe you could be the one to catch it¡ª¡±


    ¡°I didn¡¯t hate everything else! I wanted you! I love you!¡±


    ¡°You don¡¯t even know me. I¡¯m not even here,¡± she said with a strange waver, then vanished.


    And Luke spent a long time screaming, until the craft broke apart, like a ship in zero-g that had suddenly lost all its rivets and seams, spilling art deco fixtures and dusty hotel furniture into the black, and then, at that moment, like a joke, his Spirit blinked and touched the Real.


    His day flew by like it always did, like a memory suddenly inserted into his brain, but rendered by the extractor in perfect detail. Of course it did. The son of a bitch already had that file on hand, and supreme Luke couldn¡¯t help but notice it had made some artistic edits. The way-down there Luke, the one in the Real, stared out at the city longingly as he took a break on the job site, though the real Luke remembered spending his break on his phone, swapping memes and lying to three or four girls.


    Either way, the edited, man lost adrift in the modern capitalist wasteland of America version of Luke¡¯s day in the Real seemed to have a severe effect on down there Luke, and he remembered why.


    In the Real, he hadn¡¯t thought of Bliss or her a single fucking time. Suddenly, and for the first time since the rooftop, he was completely taken over by a longing to wake up. It was like the return of an old ailment that, since you had written it off as cured, catches you off guard and unprepared, and knocks you on your ass.


    The desire became a weight somewhere in his head. A dense gravity well pulling all of his thoughts into a useless loop around it, a flight path that ultimately resembled circling the drain, with the same end result.Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    With no other recourse, he flew off into the black, aiming at the widest space between two still, un-twinkling false stars. Within a few minutes, the stars passed by his ears and he was flying through solid emptiness.


    ¡°I¡¯m going to wake up.¡±


    Nothing happened, so he closed his eyes, which changed absolutely nothing, but made him feel better.


    ¡°I¡¯m going to wake up, I¡¯m going to wake up, I¡¯m going to¡ª¡±


    He flew through solid darkness. His eyes were closed. His eyes were open. He saw empty darkness. He saw his own eyelids. With nothing around to tell him he was moving, he remained still. He went nowhere. He floated in darkness. He saw and did not see. The only things were his words. His commands. His prayers.


    ¡°I am going to wake up,¡± he said, he thought, as if it had been the conjunction keeping the spell from working.


    More darkness. More nothing. More motion indistinguishable from stillness, like he was vibrating in one place.


    Ok. He tried something else. He remembered a portal, a big metal O with pulsing multi-color rings of energy, that he had dreamed of once as a kid, after spending a solid 28 hours or so playing Crash Bandicoot, that had woken him up the moment he touched it. He had told everyone about that dream. No one seemed half as excited as him. But he had never forgotten it.


    The portal expanded from a single point of light straight ahead, like he had been flying right towards it the entire time.


    ¡°Thank God. I¡¯m finally getting out of this fucking place.¡±


    His words died inches from his face, like the black void was a dense carpet. A fear that had been licking up his spine, burst into invisible flame around his head. He tried to focus on the portal. He tried to think of nothing else but his waking life. But it had finally caught him.


    That glowing orb of light floating in the darkness. This time, he had been flying away from it, but it didn¡¯t matter. Flying away from it, flying towards it, were so similar as to be interchangeable, polar opposite forces that equaled out to the same outcome. Two motions that ultimately resulted in no motion at all. It felt like that game, the one where the only way to win was not to think about it, and you always lost eventually.


    He touched the portal and got yanked down into swirling energy that turned the darkness solid white, and for a moment his heart jumped and he believed he did it.


    He fell softly onto the wide red carpet, having apparently dropped out of the gradient skylight above. Out past the lobby, beyond the dramatic arches and red carpet steps, the void twinkled darkly with crafts and Spirits coming and going.


    It had once been called Concordia, and had lasted all of six months, he was told. But the Bliss den had been here as long as anyone could remember.


    As the tuxedoed, pomade-headed mother fucker led him to a back alcove, (the entire place was somehow crafted of only back alcoves and tucked away booths), he thought about Bliss with a fresh vigor, this time the pent-up momentum throwing him past the typical thoughts, towards a wider reflection.


    There was absolutely no physical component to the addiction. Of course, there was technically no physical component to anything here, but you would think whatever god like maker had decided one day to make the ultimate dreamworld drug would have added in some shakes or itching or something to the withdrawal period. Even the burgers in the Allcity made your mouth water.


    But with Bliss, the real draw was just the memory of that warm feeling, that pure excitement, of flying towards a ball of pure glowing love, like every hug and fuck and victory of your life squeezed into one, or like the thing that gave all those things their goodness, the pure font of distilled happiness, was right in front of you, and you were going to touch it.


    Of course, you never do. Of course, its just a trick, using your own memories as barbs, your own desire as an impression with which to cast a mold, a mold that breaks just as you get yourself wedged into it. Of course, he told himself this every time.


    It''s not worth it. You won¡¯t feel any better afterward. It''s nothing you haven¡¯t seen or felt before, in fact it''s only things you¡¯ve seen and felt before, it''s you repackaged into a thing you try to enter, to take, that dissolves back into your own shadow and reflection before you can touch it. It¡¯s not even as good as you remember it, because your own memory of it is censored, rose-tinted, fake and delusional. If you just stop doing it, if you just never touch it again, you¡¯ll forget about it, you¡¯ll move on, you¡¯ll survive. You¡¯ll be whole again. All it takes to stop is to do nothing!


    And of course, he went down the list and back up again a million fucking times, but his legs or whatever they were kept right on following that ask Jeeves looking mother fucker, as his skin began to warm, as if the light was already glowing on him from some unknown place.


    And another Luke watched, and realized that he had never had a chance in hell, because the words of warning he spoke to himself before every dose might as well have been a commercial jingle. Useless without the meaning, the knowledge, the certainty that came, he now knew, paradoxically, only after the habit had been kicked.


    It was the hope that was the true snare. Bliss had been ingeniously, insidiously designed, by a maker that was probably closer to God than anyone else kicking around the Other, and its twofold mechanism, of condensing and reflecting one¡¯s own memories and ideals of happiness back at them but just out of reach, and of storing an altered memory of its own use that was far more satisfying than the actual event had been, was effective only because of a single facet of the Spirit. Hope.


    It was Luke¡¯s hope that kept him coming back, ultimately. Hope that real pure happiness could be grabbed, held in the hand, measured, bought, or even stolen.


    A hope that was the pure defining feature of the Otherworld. A hope that only the Hardworlds could shatter.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - A Perfect Memory

    A moment is all it takes


    A darkness made of anticipation. A question molded into a physical form. A word on the tip of your tongue. Something forgotten, now an empty space, surrounded by remnants of the feelings it had spawned. Happiness, excitement, often relief. What was it? What had I decided? What had she said?


    Then, a flicker, a flash, a suggestion. The flight was a question. The light was an answer, seen from the wrong angle. From afar, its brilliance blinded. Dead on, you only saw one side of it. You had to get to it, get inside it, be absorbed by it, to really get it, you just knew.


    So you flew to it. Or fell towards it, or were pulled up by it, or you never moved at all, and it just grew, slowly, stubbornly, fragilely.


    Your life flared behind you. Your memories burned in the combustion chamber. What were they worth, anyway, if they couldn¡¯t get you closer? You started to run out. Your mind searched frantically. Your memories sifted and shredded, searched for any scrap of happiness, that volatile propellant, your only hope, and then,


    It all burned out. You all burned out, burned away. For a moment, you almost didn¡¯t even exist. For a moment, there was almost only the light. Then the moment passed, or died, or slipped out of your hands and out of the world and the next moment didn¡¯t so much happen as slide into the gap left by its absence, and,


    He fell to the mattress and the sudden weight of being kept him there, immobile, until the attendant informed him his time was up. If he didn¡¯t get up and leave on his own, the mattress would spring down, looney toon-like, and drop him into a black shaft that echoed his screams, if he made any, and shot him out at the orbiting craft rack like the afterbirth he felt he was.


    Here, the extractor saved some time.


    A myriad of Lukes broke off from the main node and refracted outwards, their similarities enough to disjoint their place in linear chronology, their differences unrelated to their place in time. The many now stood in for the one, that first ejection from the Bliss den without her, which even prime Luke had difficulty being sure had actually been the first time and hadn¡¯t gotten mixed up with one of the others in what passed for his head in this place.


    Luckily, the extractor didn¡¯t care. It spread his time out like a used napkin and picked the crumbs. For Luke, the experience was once again like standing between two mirrors, only this time he wasn¡¯t standing, more like he was a vibration passing between the multiple hims, like he was the kinetic energy traveling through one of those clacking ball things CEO¡¯s had on their desks in movies.


    The Extractor tried to capture the sensation, the theme, by creating a kind of mirrored montage of Luke¡¯s big binge, but fell a bit short. Showbiz baby, one of the Lukes thought.


    A multitude of Lukes floated in the black, then a multitude of Lukes hitched a ride or took a door to Dr. X, then the Lukes sold their mem, then the Lukes did bliss, then the snake found its tail, or the system married ass with mouth, and the Lukes became part of what sociologists and activists on TV might have called ¡°a cycle¡±. However, Luke preferred the idea of a ping pong ball, smacked back and forth by two experts, while the ball, hopeless romantic that it was, held out hope that it would be flicked into a cup of beer or down some college girl''s shirt or something.


    In the oscillation, a single tone emerged, like a musical scale, or a narrative thread, or maybe something less romantic, like the digestive process or the nitrogen cycle. It was Luke¡¯s life. His real life. The journeys from Bliss den to Extractor and back again moved forward in time only by the flashes of the Real played out in his hocked mem. Proceeding from high school through fifteen or so years, astounding Luke with its nothingness, its just-so-ness, its obviousness, its gaping hole ¡°here, something is missing¡± ness. It took him a second, given the circumstances, to realize what the missing thing was, and the extractor picked it out a moment before he did.


    It was a world of dramatic happenings, near-death decisions, life life-changing breaking points, leading to a new trajectory of purpose and certainty. A world that had seemed so real and near in the day-by-day living of his life, and that he now found had only existed in his mind, like an illusion projected constantly from his forehead, maybe like an infant¡¯s mobile hanging from a stick tied to his back, the little stars and spaceships replaced with easy money and a wife and kids, a better metaphor, he felt, than the fabled carrot.


    Still, a few choice moments, of both lives, separated themselves from the drone and popped out at him.


    In one, he stumbled through the darkness of Concordia and broke through onto a scene he was never sure afterward had actually been ¡°real¡±.


    A guy lay on a heart-shaped bed, surrounded by mirror walls, his hand falling at his side, having just given himself the crystal hit of Bliss. Then, slowly, he rose off the bed, floated a foot over it, and his eyes glowed, like an unseen light was shining on them, and slowly, he faded away and disappeared. Then, maybe no longer than a second later, he reappeared and fell to the bed.


    Another memory branched off of that one. An old head, who Luke had been trying to squeeze for info, like whether or not he had seen Rory lately or even ever in his life, who he told about the guy on the heart bed, said, ¡°You know how you know if someone makes it to that god damned light? Because you¡¯ll never see them again.¡±


    The extractor filed that one away and continued on, and some time towards the end of this particular romp between two mirrors, the second memory popped out at him.Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    Real Luke, late night, 2:47, the police report would later show, which to Luke seemed like the most random time possible, a glowing white bricked convenience store, black bars on the doors and windows like slices of the unnaturally black sky above, washed out by the LED brilliance beaming off the storefront, which only served, in this instance, to shine a fucking spotlight on his dark purple Challenger.


    The guys melted out of a Kia and fluttered towards Luke in choppy, dancy steps, like ghetto moths to a flame, and the extractor stuttered. Though of course, the thing already had the mem on file, maybe the file itself was unwieldly even for it. It was an untarnished memory, encoded in an adrenal state with terabytes of data, so to speak, and impervious to the extractor¡¯s artistic sensibilities, or whatever they were.


    Luke remembered the mole, black and bulbous like a raisin, on the first gunman¡¯s wrist, and the way the sleeve of his hoodie had bunched up around the forearm. The way his eyes glared, like a kid trying to imitate a rapper in a music video, from above his wrap-around skeleton-mandible styled face mask. The way the other gunman, wearing for some reason an identical hoodie and a bright orange bandana like something out of a cartoon, had bounced around the rear bumper, while flicking his hammerless revolver around in his hand like it was the master key to the universe, and the way he had banged his hip on the gas pump and stumbled sideways.


    The first gunman had pointed his Glock 17 in Luke''s general direction and jerked it around like a bottle of spray paint and barked,


    ¡°Keys, motherfucker, keys! Gimme them keys! I¡¯m not playing! Where¡¯re the fucking¡ª¡±


    Luke had motioned inside the driver¡¯s seat, and the gunman had hissed at bandana man,


    ¡°Get em, get em!¡±


    The smooth feel of the hood as he grazed his fingers over it, stepping back, the smell of gasoline and weed and dense body odor, the way one of the lights had flickered, drawing Luke''s laser attention for a quarter of a second, the bandana man shoving his pistol back into his hoodie pocket and climbing into the drivers seat, the way he had bounced around inside, just a shadow on the tinted windshield, looking for them, and the exact moment the idea came into Luke¡¯s head and became a reflex.


    Glock boy looked down at the driver''s seat and his scrambling companion, and barked,


    ¡°You get em?¡±


    Luke thanked God, really prayed and pleaded and begged so hard the smell of incense from a thousand Sundays at St. Patrick¡¯s flooded back and became lodged in the memory itself, that he had moved from an empty-chamber appendix-carry to a round-in-the chamber hip-holster.


    He lifted his shirt with his thumb and drew his pistol just like he had practiced in the mirror and on the range a million times, and grabbed the Glock, now aiming just past his ear, with the other hand. It felt like it took an hour, like he was standing there, fingers wrapped around the Glock, other hand aiming his M&P Shield at the gunman¡¯s chest, waiting for him to turn his head and see how the situation had changed.


    He finally did, and the Glock exploded. Luke felt the slide kick in his hand and pulled the trigger halfway down on his pistol with the other as he raised it to the gunman¡¯s chest. It had felt like it took him ages to level it, but in the removed vantage point of the extractor, he realized he had done it as fast as his muscles would allow.


    The gunman¡¯s eyes ping-ponged in his sockets, from the Glock with its slide halfway back, shell casing sticking out of the side, to Luke, who stared back like they were passing each other on the street, back to the Glock, and his own finger jerking uselessly at the trigger, then back to Luke, and down to the pistol moving up to his face.


    It was like an electric shock hit him. He let go of his Glock and melted into the ground. For a moment, Luke thought he had accidentally shot him, until the guy scampered off towards the back of the Challenger, tripping over his friend¡¯s leg sticking out of the driver¡¯s seat but losing absolutely zero forward momentum, and sprinted across the concrete towards the shadows beyond the other pumps.


    Luke stood there, with a gun in each hand, the whole world ringing, as bandana man popped out of the car like something inside had launched him. The guy came out and stopped with his head level with Luke''s pistol, his eyes darted from one gun to the other, his hand reached reflexively for his own hoodie pocket and Luke almost blew his brains out, but he only slapped the outside of the pocket before dissolving backwards and following his friend into the night.


    What felt like another hour passed with Luke just standing there. He had finally gotten his brain to consider that they had left their car there, right behind his, doors open and everything, when another car pealed out behind him. He turned and saw taillights melt onto the street. The car passed under a streetlight, and he saw it was a gold late aughts Camry, with a dummy tire on the back driver''s side, bubble tint, and a basketball-sized dent on the back bumper. The license plate flashed for an instant, and Luke had it committed to memory for the rest of his life.


    He turned back to his car. Another eternity alone, then the darkness flashed out beyond the pumps and a window in the convenience store exploded behind him. He raised both pistols, though one was pointed the wrong way, and the darkness flashed two more times, then went still, and what was left of his hearing picked up someone yelling,


    ¡°Come on, come the fuck on!¡±


    Or something like that, chopped to pieces by the ringing in his ears.


    Retroactively, he could confirm what his memory had told him in the Real. He was calm the entire time. The adrenaline had felt like background music, and while he had felt the fear, it was more like it had just been sitting in the back seat mumbling at him, than fighting him for the steering wheel as it had so many other times in his life.


    As the cops explained to him that the other car was carrying five people all armed, and that the cameras had confirmed his license plate recollection, and that one round had skipped off the roof of his Challenger a foot from his head, and hey man just some advice, you might want to duck next time, he had actually yawned multiple times and asked if they really had to take his gun to evidence if he hadn¡¯t even fired it.


    That night, he slept like a baby, twelve hours, the orange sunlight greeting him through the blinds in the morning. He had told himself, lying there, that this was it. Life was precious, and he had been wasting it doing things he hated. This, he told himself, was the push he had been waiting for.


    But of course, whatever he had hoped that flash of life versus death would push him towards, never materialized. It had revealed to him what he didn¡¯t want in life, but none of what he did.


    A part of Luke realized, sluggishly, that it might not have been him picking out those choice memories, but the extractor, which may now only feel indistinguishable from his conscious direction of the searchlight of memory, maybe even having now replaced it. It would have been a scary thought, had he had more sentiment for his own mental processes.


    Another Luke, floating high above the hall of mirrors, decided that the hyper-focus on the gas station memory was no accident, and that ultimately, he really did owe Dr. X quite a lot of gratitude.


    Second only, of course, to the Hardworlds.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Cold Call

    Soul satellites and strange sanctuaries


    The montage ended abruptly, with down there Luke standing at the counter, and Dr. O staring at Luke like he had tracked mud all over the recently mopped floor.


    ¡°All right, go on back,¡± Dr. O said, defeatedly, like it was his memories getting sold for scrap.


    Luke walked down the hall with an odd feeling that something had changed, and his suspicions were confirmed when he found Dr. X standing outside the door of his office, hands in the pockets of his white coat, waiting to say something.


    ¡°Sleepy, I¡¯m afraid there¡¯s nothing I can do for you right now.¡±


    ¡°The fuck do you mean? Had enough of my life? Too bad. I got a good one for you this time. I almost fell off¡ª¡±


    ¡°I know,¡± Dr. X sighed. ¡°Almost fell to your death building that complex out in Hutchins. Tripped on the tarp dumb ass Steven didn¡¯t have secured.¡±


    Luke froze, his mind racing back in memory and getting stuck in the fractures, bounced around by the doubled experiences. Dr. X helped him.


    ¡°Luke, you already sold your mem from the Real for today. It¡¯s been less than six hours world time. I¡¯m assuming you¡¯ve been in a Bliss den since then.¡±


    Luke looked at Dr. X¡¯s fake fucking stethoscope for a second, then turned on his heels and stamped out the hallway. This time, the door kicked him out right into the Allcity. He floated and swore and cried. Then he went back to the god damned rooftop he had come from, and laid down.


    But this time, the extractor was there. Down there Luke thought about Rory, the way she had been, bright face smiling at him over an impossible sky, and the extractor was there. He thought about their first time in the resort, and the extractor was there. And, he thought about Bliss, or, his brain searched for Bliss, but could only find the memory of it, and so cried out like some wounded animal, begging him to get off the rooftop and go get it, and, of course, the extractor was there, supplementing the hazy flashbacks with its pristine extractions of them, enhancing and editing them in ways no Luke could ever be sure of.


    The Luke that lay on the rooftop this time wasn¡¯t the same Luke that had lay there those eons ago. That Luke had been made of the Real, his only thoughts and concerns born from that place, but this Luke was something entirely new, so different that when Luke awoke into the Real, and spent a day without the memory of Bliss, or of her, it didn¡¯t soothe rooftop Luke at all. It only widened the divide between them, and created a new longing.


    He wanted to wake up. Really wake up, which meant remembering all this for what it was, a bad dream.


    He remembered that someone, somewhere in the Other, had mentioned a group, maybe a club or even a cult, that was obsessed with waking up for good. The discussion, wherever it had been, had devolved into an argument over whether any of them had managed to do it, with Rory taking a typical disinterested neutral position. He tried to remember if anything had been said, by those now obvious dream characters, that would help him get the fuck out of here.


    But, like half-finished coffee poured down the sink that, eventually, inescapably, meets with the soiled water in the sewer line, his thoughts returned to Bliss.


    That must be what it is. That¡¯s what¡¯ll happen when I finally touch the light. I¡¯ll wake up.


    The thought was like an electric current, and he jolted upright. Then, in one of those strange story-like coincidences that seemed to happen in the Other just often enough to make you doubt it all, his phone rang.


    He clawed for it, and remembered he didn¡¯t have a phone here. It rang again anyway. After a moment of confusion that blended into a euphoric hope that this really was just a dream and his phone ringing on his dresser in the Real was about to wake him up, he realized it was his communicator.


    Somehow, it had the same ring as his cell in the Real. He put two fingers under his right ear and pushed up.Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    ¡°Hello?¡±


    ¡°Hey Luke, good morning. This is Bob Beefeater.¡±


    Gravelly voice like an unabashed pack-a-dayer. Smooth cadence like a career cold caller, or a seasoned collector. A smile under it all, like ¡°these funny formalities, am I right?¡±.


    ¡°Who?¡±


    ¡°Bob Beefeater. Call me Bobby. Listen,¡±


    ¡°How¡¯d you get this number?¡± Luke said before he had thought about it. Were there communicator numbers? He had only ever talked to Rory on it. Mr. Beefeater laughed in a way just under mocking, like they were both sharing a chuckle about a fuck up in Luke''s past that had long since lost its sting.


    ¡°Well Luke, to be honest you could say I got your number from Dr. X. See, when you got enough deets on a guy in this world, you can call him up pretty easy.¡±


    It was right then that Luke realized Bobby fucking Beefeater was after his soul. Probably visualizing it sizzling on a plate that very instant. The only people who had ever taken the time to calmly explain the mechanics of this world to him had been Rory and Dr. X, and after their ravagings, there wasn¡¯t much left for this new guy. Still, he was curious if not flattered, and there wasn¡¯t anyone else to talk to, so,


    ¡°Why would you want to?¡±


    Another deep ¡°that¡¯s the Luke I know¡± laugh, then,


    ¡°You sell yourself short, bud. I had this roll of mem come across my desk today that tells me you¡¯re just what I need. A guy who can keep cool with a gun in his face.¡±


    It was one of those moments in life where you knew there was suddenly a big wall behind you, because you had just dropped off of it, down onto, a new path, inescapable, like a marble in a groove. Maybe the subconscious really was more alive and aware in the Other, but somehow Luke knew that instant what he was about to be offered, and a deeper part of him, undetectable even by the extractor, saw what it would do to him.


    He asked anyway.


    ¡°What line of business are you in, Mr. Beefeater? I¡¯m not big on playing in sims, and my Gunmaze clan wouldn¡¯t appreciate¡ª¡±


    ¡°Fuck all that, Mr. Fischer. I¡¯m in the business of Hardworlding.¡±


    They were all insane. They went into sims that looked and felt like the Real, created by some unknown long-gone maker and killed people who tried to hide in them, so that the victims popped out into the black and got scooped up by dreamworld cops. They had defeated the Demons. They were the Demons. There had never really been any Demons, that¡¯s just how they made money. They had to be insane to go in. They went in just like you and me, and came out insane. They were sadists. They were masochists. They were liars.


    That was about the extent of Luke¡¯s knowledge of Hardworlders at that time, mostly gleaned from melodramatic references in sims and long-winded rants and arguments with the other dregs of Otherworld society.


    Oh, and they always had a shit ton of money and couldn¡¯t spend it fast enough.


    ¡°If this is a scam, I should help a brother out and let you know, I¡¯m tapped out. So¡ª¡±


    ¡°Heh heh, yeah buddy I know. If they start charging rent on that rooftop you¡¯ll have to sulk in the black.¡±


    Luke spun around in ways that would have snapped his spine in the Real, and tried to find Mr. Beefeater lurking in some sniper''s nest or something.


    ¡°Listen, I¡¯m gonna send some guys by. You can¡¯t miss em. If you¡¯re interested, get in the craft. If not, flip em the bird and we¡¯ll strike your name off the list. I got a lot of candidates to reach out to. Have a good one.¡±


    And with that, Mr. Bobby Beefeater hung up with an old world style receiver click that rang in Luke''s ears and clashed with the operatic echoes of the Allcity.


    He sat there, watching the crafts and spirits flutter around, and noticed they now had the feel of children who thought their parents could never possibly come home. Something in Mr. Beefeater''s voice, even as slimy as it was, as obviously designed to snare and set at ease as it was, had changed him.


    A dark form excused itself from the pulsing swarm and grew in his direction. Bulbous and insectlike, his Allcity-primed mind tried to identify what it was going for. A dragonfly? No. A fish, maybe. No. Some kind of sci-fi ship, maybe from Halo¡­


    It stopped at the edge of the roof. A black hawk helicopter with no rotors. Black glossy coat of paint, road sign yellow logo of five arrows stuck in the center of a bullseye, forming a kind of five-pointed star with a circle at the center. The doors slid open and two men swung out onto the rails. They stood there, next to the open door, which framed a beckoningly empty bench seat, and stared at him.


    At least he assumed they were staring at him. In addition to their slate grey suits and thin black and yellow striped ties, which slithered in the backdraft from the invisible rotors, they also wore full face masks, more like helmets, one of which looked like shell casings welded together over a skull, and the other which looked like a welders mask with a jack-o-lantern smile cut into it with a plasma torch. They stood as confidently still as anyone he had ever seen in this god damned place. Not an ounce of float between the two of them. Like they were hoarding every bit of gravity for themselves.


    Luke started to laugh, but the laugh stopped at the smile stage and stayed there as something slithered up his spine and whispered indecipherable things in his ear. Mr. Beefeater¡¯s voice had incubated in his stomach and was now nourished enough to strike.


    And so, recalling Mr. Beefeater''s words, Luke raised both middle fingers, high and proud, and fanned them at the Allcity skyline.


    Then he hopped into the helicopter and let the sound of the doors slamming shut echo in every chamber of his mind.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - The Hardworlders

    The faces you meet


    ¡°Got a lot of friends on the ball?¡± one of the masked men asked. The other chuckled.


    Luke watched the fluttering extravagance of the Allcity shrink out the window.


    ¡°No. I¡¯ve decided not to come back to this shitstorm, so if ya¡¯ll are planning to drag me out into the black and rob me, just leave me out there once you realize I don¡¯t have¡ª¡±


    ¡°We know you¡¯re broker than the ten commandments, dude,¡± shell-casings mask guy said. ¡°You talked to Beefeater, he told you the score I¡¯m sure, so just save your sass for the Boss.¡±


    ¡°Beefeater¡¯s not the boss?¡± Luke said, letting his gaze drift from his own distorted reflection in the melted brass face, to the cigar sticking out of it, somehow being puffed on. The casings rolled around it as the man under the mask shifted it in his mouth.


    ¡°Nah, he¡¯s more like HR,¡± casings-mask said, and welder-mask got a rumbling laugh going. ¡°Our boss¡¯ll be the one to pick you over, see if you¡¯re worth throwing a bone.¡±


    ¡°How bout throwing me a cigar?¡± Luke had noticed by this point that the smoke was completely free of scents of night club ambiance or summer bonfire youthfulness or any of those bullshit memory-scraped flavors that makers loved to shove into their crafted cigars, and he found it refreshing.


    Welder mask smiled, his jack-o-lantern mouth actually spreading across the metal, and tossed Luke a cigar that floated in the sudden zero-g.


    ¡°Lighters under the window,¡± said casingsface. Luke found it, like a dashboard lighter from an old Buick, and got to smoking. It was an absolutely normal cigar, just on the edge of fine, and his Spirit responded to the familiar flavor by providing the expected bump of nicotine, or so he guessed. Really, he had no idea how any of this shit worked.


    The rest of the ride was silent. Later, when Luke had put names to the masks, and casingsface was known to him as Sammy Stovepipe, they let him in on the meaning behind their brief exchanged glance during the silence.


    ¡°Most recruits talk our fucking ears off, about what they know about Hardworlding, and how much of a fucking natural they think they¡¯ll be. So thanks for shutting the fuck up, at least that one time.¡±


    The extractor plucked that bit of associated memory out of the back of Luke¡¯s mind, and filed it away. Down in the helicopter, other Luke leaned forward in his seat suddenly and gawked at the windshield.


    It was a rough sphere of flat light and dull darkness. A cluster of suburban houses, glass and cement office buildings, mobile homes, sheet metal topped warehouses, strip malls and hotels, all crammed together and drained of color, with street lights stuck here and there, lighting up the doors. It took him a second to notice that all the buildings were only half there; namely, the back halves. There was an alley lined with back doors to a strip mall, but no storefronts. The houses and mobile homes were half buried in the sphere, their front doors hidden somewhere in the maze. There were maintenance entrances and smoking areas at the bases of the office buildings, but the front lobbies were nowhere to be seen.


    The helicopter floated past a hotel with its first floor sunk into the mesh of buildings, and hovered over the roof of a towering office building, the tallest feature on the orb.


    The craft bounced as it landed, and Luke felt real gravity for the first time, not the variable suggestion of Gunmaze, or the just in the knees-down suction to the floor gravity used in the Bliss den, but a real all-over undeniable gravity that made the steps out onto the pad feel like the first thing he had done in ages.


    The rotor cut off, and their footsteps, Italian loafers and boots on concrete from his companions and barefoot patter in Luke¡¯s case, rang flatly in the air, as if they were on a soundstage or a parking lot during a dense soft snow.


    A push door opened onto an echoing stairwell, and the hinge-squeaks skipped ahead of them. Boots and shoes rang off the thin concrete stairs, followed by the hiss of hands on handrails, beginning the familiar song of descending a concrete staircase. The door slammed shut and the noise bounced down in a predictable and undeniably correct way, like a ball bouncing to a stop or dominoes falling in a line. This was a place with firm rules, and Luke wasn¡¯t sure if he was more relieved or terrified.


    Eventually, the two masked men stopped at a door, and Luke glanced down the shaft. They were less than a tenth of the way down, and the railings spiraled towards a point of flat light far below. A barely-there white noise floated up, as if unseen office workers were stealing a few minutes of personal calls on the landings.


    The door clanged open, half the sound echoing behind him and the other half smothered softly ahead of him. They led him down a carpeted hallway flanked by frosted glass and shuttered executive offices towards a corner office at the back. It felt like walking through the heart of an empty massive glass downtown tower in the middle of the night, though he couldn¡¯t see the sky anywhere, as if the structure was subtly broadcasting its own time of day.This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    Welding-mask looked back over his shoulder.


    ¡°Better put that out. Boss hates it. Even the fake stuff.¡±


    Luke had forgotten about the cigar, and seeing nowhere else put it out in the palm of his hand, and instantly regretted it.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± The circle of freshly burned flesh smiled at him as it flaked off wetly.


    ¡°No dampeners here,¡± Sammy said. ¡°Spirits primed from all the ultra real sensations.¡±


    ¡°Makes for good training,¡± Welding-mask said, the jagged smile expanding again.


    Luke scratched at the burn and it flaked away like a Halloween costume scar, leaving his palm just as it had been before. He put the cigar in his pocket as Sammy knocked on the door.


    ¡°Come in,¡± a voice already on the edge of annoyance said. Sammy and Welding-mask pushed in the door and spread out instantly as if they were pie-slicing the room in a kill house. Luke stepped in and the door shut on its own.


    ¡°Glad you could make it. Have a seat.¡± The man behind the desk was all eyes. Grey ones, like two specks of concrete glowing under an overcast sky at high noon. The rest of his face wavered like smoke, and even in Luke¡¯s dissected memory, there wasn¡¯t a scrap of his features to be found.


    However, this time around, higher up in the bleachers Luke did notice one thing. He seemed a lot more filled out, and his hands were thicker in the knuckles and looked strong as pipefitters. Luke couldn¡¯t remember any of that, so it must have been the extractor gussying things up for the future viewer. Even in pure extracted memory, Dr. X couldn¡¯t capture the gravity of those eyes.


    Though far away, another Luke reflected that they weren¡¯t quite the most terrifying pair he had ever seen.


    Down in the office, Luke took a seat without looking at the chair. His gaze was locked ahead.


    ¡°I¡¯m Mr. Filepress. If you end up joining, you¡¯ll report to your captains who will report to me.¡±


    Luke nodded as much as he could given the circumstances. Mr. Filepress didn¡¯t seem to care anyway.


    ¡°You are here to work in the Hardworlds, correct?¡±


    Again, Luke nodded, but he felt he could have burped or yodeled for the same effect.


    ¡°First off, I will be taking a tour of your memory. Consider this a background check before a highly sensitive employment. Do you consent?¡±


    Now here, Luke laughed out loud.


    ¡°Bro, uh, Mr. Stockfile sir. If you want my memories, I should tell you they¡¯re available wholesale at firesale prices down at Dr. X¡¯s magical mystery emporium.¡±


    Sammy and Welding-mask laughed offscreen. The eyes didn¡¯t move, but something in them caught fire.


    ¡°I¡¯m aware. This will be a more exact process. Do you consent?¡±


    This time, the pause was still as death, and up there Luke mulled over the fact that even out there, on their own mini planet and an infinity away from the Allworld, they still feared the wrath of the High Principalities.


    ¡°Uh yeah, sure, it''s not like¡ª¡±


    ¡°I want you to think back to that day at the gas station. When those hoodlums tried to carjack you.¡±


    Down there Luke didn¡¯t have the courage to laugh at the completely serious use of the word ¡®hoodlum¡¯, but up there Luke got a good chuckle. ¡°Mr. Filepress¡± had been and always would be a grade-A fucking dweeb.


    However, as far as down there Luke was concerned, Mr. Filepress was the god damned alpha and omega, so he did what he was told, thought about the bright lights under inkblack sky and the feel of a Glock going off with his hand wrapped around the slide, and felt the chair slide out beneath him and the office give way to a sudden sensation of falling.


    And then he was there, his hand wrapped around the gun. While the extractor was slow, deliberate, savoring and studying the emotional nuances of the memory, whatever the fuck Mr.Filepress was doing was more akin to having your past shot through a laser scanner. Submerged Luke shot forward into the next day without missing a single bump of memory, then was flung backward to the start of it all, pulling up to the gas station, the gas light a desperate pleading orange, and scraped across the 24-hour period in an instant, then back and forth a few more times for good measure.


    Then Luke was back in the office, freed of the vice gripped throttling so abruptly that the stillness of his surroundings and the sudden snail¡¯s-pace of his unpressurized thoughts had a whiplash effect, as the eyes looked down at the desk as Mr. Filepress made a motion with his hands that might have been something close to writing, and the legal pad responded to his touch with liquid movements and faint fluttering lights.


    Luke waited there, like a kid with his test being looked over, and glanced at the masked men for some kind of signal, or maybe even a fragment of conversation. Fresh from the Filepress-Mindpress, he was feeling very exposed, like he had just undressed in front of everyone.


    But the masks were pointed decisively at the ceiling or out the wide window behind Filepress, where solid black void was broken in exactly two places by one immobile and one rapidly departing light, and Luke got the feeling they just didn¡¯t want to look at him.


    So he glanced across Filepress¡¯s desk. There was a nameplate, a bonsai tree growing out of a platter of live rounds, 9mm, a clacking ball set with the spheres painted like mini earths, and a small silver or chrome statue of a hunter holding a bow, various points on his body glowing like stars and a robed figure with torn angel wings at his feet, stuck full of arrows. Just as Luke noticed the angel had horns on its head, Filepress started up again.


    ¡°Well Luke, it seems we can definitely use you. As courtesy dictates, Ill give you a day to think it over and send you home with a file that covers all the final details.¡±


    ¡°You mean like pay?¡± Luke said, staring at a cigarette Filepress was trying to hand him.


    ¡°Among other things. Company policy, all the fun stuff. Here.¡±


    ¡°I thought you didn¡¯t like smoking in here. I have a cigar¡ª¡±


    ¡°This is the file. Smoke it at your leisure and it will run a projection explaining our organization. Think of it as a training video, of sorts.¡±


    A brief shaking of hands and thanks for stopping by and all that, then Welding-mask and Sammy stovepipe shuffled him out of the office and back down the hallway.


    ¡°Hey, a word of advice,¡± Welding-mask said as they all stopped in front of a door labeled ¡°utility¡±.


    ¡°Try and kick the Bliss habit, if you can.¡±


    Luke just stared at him, and Sammy Stovepipe chortled under the brass. Welding-mask shrugged and Luke stepped into the freight elevator alone and that was it. After a few rumbling seconds, the floor opened up and he slid down a chute that spat him out in to the bustle of the Allcity. Guess they hadn¡¯t been listening when he told them he was never coming back.


    The extractor fast forwarded over his aimless flight around the ball and even his frustrated dancing in the Allclub, blinked over his day in the Real, gave a ten-times speed summary of his daily visit to Dr. X, and lingered, artistically, he guessed, on Luke''s next visit to the bliss den, where Welding-mask¡¯s last words echoed in his head, and his own resulting laughter that brought him to tears.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - So you wanna be a Hardworlder?

    Dis-orientation


    After the Bliss, in the dim light of his alcove, Luke pulled back the shades and blinds and stared out the window, if you could call it that, at the void. He preferred having a room near the edge of the undead resort. Something about being on the inside reminded him of old horror movies, like the art deco crypt could devour him any time he closed his eyes.


    Out in the black, frozen white points stood in for stars, adjacent worlds that had once been part of a network of similar resorts, now all dead ruins. A sparse cloud of closer lights, all different colors and sizes, danced in the sky, some breaking away and shooting off into the dark while others vanished suddenly. It wasn¡¯t the romantic movement of spaceships you might see in movies or games, but more like the flight of a scrap of reflected sunlight when you move your watch, or the path of a red dot from a laser pointer right after you¡¯re done messing with the cat.


    He thought about the crafts, each with their own pilots and crew, playing out their own tale of bliss addiction, and wondered if she was out there.


    The extractor pulled her face from the thick muck of memory, cleaned it off, and overlayed it on the feed, and high up in the bleachers Luke almost threw up.


    Down there Luke, however, sighed and took out the cigarette. It looked normal, felt normal, and as he bent it in his hand the paper tore at the bend, exposing the musty- gold shreddings of tobacco. He wondered what would happen If he tore it up. Would he be able to wish it back together? Some objects in the Other were like that. Or would he have to call up Beefeater or Mr. Filepress and ask for another one?


    He decided he wasn¡¯t interested enough in any of it to try. The mysteries and paradoxes and just plain old nonsense of the Otherworld were so vast and numerous that you tripped over three of them going out any of the fucking doors, and right now the only question he had was, ¡°Why do I get the feeling that these wannabe dream gangsters have something I want?¡±


    He pulled a lighter, the archetypical silver Zippo, like the one he had been so proud of as a teen, out of his pocket and got the cig going. It tasted like a regular cigarette. In the Real, he had switched to menthols right before switching to a vape for the convenience, but this was a classic red 100 if ever there was one. He inhaled and felt the old familiar chill down his throat and in his lungs, then exhaled and the smoke clouded the window and stuck there.


    A sound like a projector starting up before an old film, or the sound as it was depicted in sit coms and cartoons he had seen half a century after the sound itself had ceased to really exist, played from inside his ears and he knew the smoke had gotten inside them. A light beamed out from the burning end of the cigarette like the projector was hidden within and lit up the smoke like a screen.


    It was an old-timey radar circle countdown. 3, 2, 1¡­


    ¡°Welcome to the orientation. You will need roughly ten minutes of uninterrupted viewing, so if you are not prepared, please pause the film by extinguishing the cigarette and re-ignite it once you are ready. Please note, you may only do so three times before the file disintegrates.¡±


    It sounded like someone doing an impersonation of a 50¡¯s propaganda narrator or something. Luke found that no matter where he held the cigarette, the light beamed out of it straight to the smokescreen and the feed wasn¡¯t affected, so he leaned back on the matt and got ready for some bullshit.


    A musical sting played, like an old alt-rock riff, and big bold text appeared on the screen and slowly came closer.


    ¡°ACE TACTICAL¡±


    Luke laughed and rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. Up there Luke laughed too. Hell even Dr. X snickered somewhere unseen.


    In small letters below, in a much more professional and less spikey font,


    ¡°A Constellation Franchisee¡±


    Some half-saved memory floated out of down there Luke, of another smokey evening in the Bliss den, and someone saying, as they waited for their accounts to clear and delivery to be made,


    ¡°Those motherfuckers at Constellation¡­¡±


    Down there Luke made a mental note, and the video progressed to a title card.


    ¡°Orientation 1:A ¨C For New Hardworlders¡±


    An animated orb, like a soap bubble floating in a black void, filled with fluttering lights, some revealing themselves in flashes to be recordings of spirits and places in the Otherworld, appeared on the screen.


    ¡°This is the Otherworld,¡± said the Narrator. ¡°The encapsulation of your present existence. All the worlds and all the Sims and everything your Spirit knows is contained in this illustrious sphere.¡±


    The sphere moved up to the top of the screen, so that half of it was out of frame, and another sphere, or at least the edge of it, moved into frame like a glowing horizon.


    ¡°This is the Real. Though you have memory of it, you have never been there. You are wholly a facet of the Otherworld, now and forever.¡±


    The Otherworld exited stage-top and the Real shrunk down a bit.


    ¡°You may have often wished, as many do, to return to the Real, to bring your newfound enlightenment back to the place you feel is your home. Of course, this is impossible. But with Hardworlding, you can do something better.¡±Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    The Real shrunk down and became a half orb floating at the bottom of the screen, and beams of color shot out from it, projecting other spheres into the black, like a biology textbook displays a zoom-in on a cell wall.


    ¡°Much like the Real you is projected onto the soul of your Spirit every day, the Real is constantly projecting itself. Though we can never touch the Real that we know and love, or hate, we can interact with its projections.¡±


    The Otherworld reappeared on the screen.


    ¡°The Otherworld lives, as the saying goes, and thus is a home for living things. Even its objects are alive, speaking, and constantly active. But, should a thing become too rigid, too definite, too real, if a thing should die, one could say, the thing vanishes from the Other completely. But where does it go? Such questions had long confounded the greatest makers, until the solution revealed itself.¡±


    The Otherworld shrunk, and another larger circle came into frame around it. Tiny objects drifted off of the soap bubble and disappeared into the ring with little sparkler effects.


    ¡°The Hardworlds exist below the Otherworld in all directions. They are alternate worlds, infinite in number, that at first glance, seem identical to the Real.¡±


    The camera zoomed into the ring at light speed and after a wipe, a hotel room appeared on screen.


    ¡°Of course, it''s not as if these too-real objects were popping into the Hardworlds. It is more accurate to say that the Hardworlds appeared around the object.¡±


    A cartoon man appeared in the chair, like something out of an old Ovaltine commercial, or, once again, like something out of a parody of those commercials Luke had seen somewhere decades after they had last been aired. The man shrugged his shoulders.


    ¡°You may be saying right about now, ¡°Well, that¡¯s all well and good, but I signed up to shoot to kill and pay my bills!¡±


    Here the cartoon man took out an AK and let loose on the hotel room.


    ¡°And you¡¯re right! But before you start a war, it¡¯s important to understand your battlefield. And buddy, the Hardworlds are one hell of a battlefield!¡±


    The cartoon man stood up out of his chair with a big, excited smile.


    ¡°So how do we get there? Well, the specifics will come later, should you be selected for employment, but for now we¡¯ll stick to the basics.¡±


    The video returned to the Otherworld with the ring of Hardworlds still in frame.


    ¡°Remember those too-real objects we talked about? Well, what if I told you that you too could become too heavy to stick around?¡±


    Another wipe, and the cartoon man was now standing on a cloud, a Hanna-Barbera version of the Allcity skyline behind him, attaching 45-pound plates to his feet with ropes.


    ¡°That¡¯s right, just a simple technique is all you need to say goodbye to make believe¡ª¡±


    The cartoon man dropped out through the clouds, and the camera panned out to track his descent to the Hardworld ring. He struck it with a pop and vanished.


    ¡°And say hello to mayhem!¡±


    To the director¡¯s credit, Luke jumped up off the mat. The video was suddenly a very real Go-Pro feed of a gunman kicking in the door of an apartment and letting loose with his AR. Someone responded with full auto fire that flashed and sparked and the noise rattled Luke¡¯s ears. The footage became a montage of gunfights, chases, even parachute jumps, and boat rides, all set to an early 00s nu metal instrumental.


    Up there Luke yelled ¡°Bullshit¡±, but no one was listening. The narrator continued, now with a more serious tone.


    ¡°But before you start your new life as one of the rough riders of the Otherworld, let me tell you about the dangers of Hardworlding, which highlight reels and Sims often overlook.¡±


    There had been something like humanity in his voice, just for a moment, that got Luke¡¯s attention and set his mind on edge.


    ¡°Firstly, in the Hardworlds, pain is very real.¡±


    Another montage, without the post-hardcore soundtrack, of guys sobbing over gunshot wounds and being dragged out of car crashes.


    ¡°You may think you¡¯ve felt pain as a Spirit, but the muffled dream pain of Gunmaze is nothing compared to the cold hard firings of real nerve endings in a real body. And unlike here in the Other, there¡¯s no easy way out of it.¡±


    On the screen, a man with his leg mangled got sick of waiting for a make-do medic to stick him with morphine, so he drew his pistol and shot himself through the temple.


    ¡°Well, besides that. Which brings me to the next warning. In the Hardworlds, you can get stuck for good.¡±


    A CC-TV, streaming from some retail chain, focused on a line of registers.


    ¡°In the Otherworld, you can escape just about anything. Simply summon a door or will yourself away, and even the most powerful principalities have trouble keeping you there. But in the Hardworlds, there¡¯s no easy escape, outside of a bullet, and if you¡¯re not careful, this¡ª¡±


    The video feed paused and a red circle appeared around one of the cashiers. The camera zoomed in on his face, and even with the drop in quality, Luke could see the ¡°is this my life?¡±-ness pouring out of his eyes.


    ¡°¡ª could be you. Because if you lose yourself in the Hardworlds, the Hardworlds will find a replacement, and it may not be the yourself that you would prefer to be.¡±


    The cashier, now on some kind of handheld private investigator video recorded from a car parked across the street, shuffled towards an apartment complex. His phone rang, and as he tried to juggle his jacket, keys, (already in his hand, clutched tight like a rosary) and thermos, he dropped the latter and sent cold heavily-creamered coffee flying across the sidewalk and all over his pants and shoes. The thermos made a hollow thunk noise that echoed across the street like a musical sting, cutting off half of his swear.


    ¡°And there''s only one way to bring someone back once they¡¯ve ¡°dropped out¡± as the operators call it.¡±


    A guy pulled out a gun right behind him and Luke sat up straight. He hadn¡¯t even noticed the guy walk up, either because he had been too focused on the comedic tragedy playing out on the sidewalk or because everything about the gunman, from his clothes, athletic wear in muted colors, to his walk, a similar ¡°this is really my life, huh?¡± march as his soon to be victim, had made him blend into the setting like an empty tall boy stuck in the grass.


    Now, the low-income-housing-grey-man fired three shots from ten feet away, all of them headshots, which was impressive because the last two were made while the body was mid-fall.


    ¡°And it¡¯s never a very pleasant experience, dying when you don¡¯t know what¡¯s on the other side.¡±


    The gunman skipped towards the car as the camera zoomed in on the body, the pants now changing color from more than just coffee.


    ¡°And that¡¯s if they can even find you. The Hardworlds, you will learn in the course of your work, have a way of concealing their occupants. They do not want you to leave. They do not want you to be found.¡±


    Suddenly, the narrator appeared onscreen. A tall man in a navy suit with wide shoulders and that World War 2 vet straight off the plane look about him, wearing a featureless mask of smooth matte skin-toned metal like someone had smudged his face off. If an insurance mega-corp had needed a masked man for their commercials, this might have been it.


    ¡°To reiterate, should you choose employment as a Hardworlder, you can expect physical and mental anguish beyond anything remotely possible in the Otherworld. But, the danger is not limited to pain, as being trapped forever in these hostile realities is a constant possibility. And, of course, we must consider the time. You can expect to spend hours, days, all together years, if you stay in, waiting in hot cars, attics, trying to stay awake in some god-forsaken sewer, while other spirits are dancing in the Allclub, killing their enemies, and fucking their crushes in Sims.¡±


    He stopped walking through the grey gradient and nodded towards the camera.


    ¡°In short, is it really worth it?¡±

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Dead Stars

    Connect the dots


    ¡°That¡¯s not exactly the greatest pitch,¡± down there Luke thought, but even then, the memory of the apartment complex hitman firing those shots, unexpected, invisible, deadly, was catching fire in his head. How would it feel to walk the streets like that? A ghost, part of reality but also above it, ascended in a world where pain still had its power. To do fantastic things in a fantastic world was one thing, but to do them in the world of highways and fast food, where he had only ever felt as low as the rest of it, if not more so¡­


    After a dramatic pause, the narrator leaned back into a more relaxed posture, and continued.


    ¡°Well, that¡¯s it for this video. Give it some thought, and if you decide Hardworlding is right for you, simply light that cigarette butt, take a deep breath and press it into your skin until you hear a beep. Till next time.¡±


    The screen went black and some words appeared in white plain font, which a separate narrator read quickly with a tone of lethal warning.


    ¡°Licensed under the Constellation essentials franchise ?2020.¡±


    ¡°The use of the constellation logo and name in this recording does not guarantee current licensing. To verify current standing of this organization within the Constellation franchise program, contact the Constellation registrar at 7000 Constellation drive, Brasston, Allcity, or call your preferred operator and ask for our office.¡±


    ¡°For information on the Hardworlds, instruction, history and more, visit the Hardworlders Union outreach office at¡ª¡±


    Luke¡¯s mind wandered as the ending text vanished and the glowing screen disintegrated in the smoke. The corporate feel of the video reminded him of something. A feeling, often just out of reach of any real introspective investigation, that this world contained vast chasms of power invisible to him, effecting him in ways he could never know.


    The feeling had come often when he was alone, or when Rory had been busy with something else, not there to fill his ears with ready explanations and bouncy flirtatious ramblings. It was like walking down a hall and passing a door left ajar, and getting a glimpse, through just a few inches between the jam and the door, of a vast network of pipes and wires that you always knew had to be there but had never really thought about.


    Once, as a kid, his truck driver uncle had told him, or more like told his dad and the other adults while he listened out the second-story window of his bedroom, about an underground city he had dropped off at.


    ¡°They had everything. Even a fucking Wal-Mart,¡± he had sworn. In the morning, Luke had asked his dad about it, and after grilling Luke over staying up past midnight on a Sunday, had told him about Cheyenne mountain, and when young Luke had asked ¡°What do they do there?¡± his dad had said ¡°No one knows¡± and made vague references to apocalyptic warfare and digging into solid granite.


    Of course, fucking Dr. X had the memory brought up in living color, and blended it with the Luke sitting there watching the last of the static melt out of the window frame. And as young Luke sat frozen, filled with terror at the idea there was something out there his dad didn¡¯t have ass whooping knowledge about, coming to terms with a wide world that would be forever beyond his understanding, bliss-den Luke reflected on his own ignorance.


    He had always thought of this new world as a kind of projection, just lights and colors reflected on a wall, but now he wasn¡¯t so sure. Now there was a chance it had the same kind of depth as the other one, and the last time he had found the texture of the Otherworld without being prepared for it, he picked up a bliss habit and a broken heart.


    Now, he decided he had to know what he was dealing with. Not to mention the fact that if this deep hidden thing took all his money, he wouldn¡¯t be able to buy any bliss.


    Or maybe, up there Luke reflected, down there Luke was hoping the hidden thing would have the power to free him.


    Reflexively, down there Luke thought of Rory, that font of lore and dreamworld street smarts, and tried to remember if she had said anything about Hardworlding. There was only vague conversation about their sanity, and one scrap of psychoanalysis.


    ¡°They feel powerless here, so they run to a world they can push people around in.¡±


    Ironic. Another irony jumped after the first, and he remembered the day, or night, though they had been in the lazy afternoon band of the Allworld, when she had showed him ¡°the feed¡±, a kind of Otherworld version of the internet. Specifically, she had shown him the Freed, which was the free areas of the feed produced by the Allworld princes for new spirits to learn about the basics of the world, history, and various organizations, in order to help them not get taken advantage of, supposedly.


    A final irony. He had skimmed it and got bored quickly. It was partially set up like a web browser, for familiarity¡¯s sake, but you could also make queries by thought alone. He had asked it about Rory, and it gave him some boilerplate about privacy, so he had asked it about waking up, and it had given an overview of belief systems, the only one of which he could remember held that the Real had already happened and all the Spirits of the Other were simply re-living it over one day at a time.


    So he had closed the viewport of the pod, which apparently you could climb into for a more immersive surfing experience, and went off to fuck Rory in the underside of some dweebs anime starship reproduction.


    Later, Rory had handed him a small ring with two metallic stones set in the band.


    ¡°Here, you forgot this.¡±


    Apparently, the feed kiosks on the ball spit out little rings that let you access the feed anywhere. Something about making it easier for newbs to use it on a device that wasn¡¯t just feeding their ¡®browsing history¡¯ to a scammer. Even then, as wet behind the ears as he was, his first thought had been,


    ¡°Or more like the big boys don¡¯t like competition.¡±


    He had often seen spirits floating around looking at their hands with their eyes lit up, and even Rory had consulted it once or twice, usually to check messages or something, but Luke had shoved the ring in his pocket and forgotten about it, never seeing the need to do deep research about a world that seemed as shallow as shadows on a screen, and never wanting to communicate with anyone besides Rory and the bliss dealer.


    Now, he took it out of his right-side pocket, where everything else he ever stashed manifested when he went looking for it, and got ¡°online¡± by beaming the light right into his eyes.This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    It was set up like a nerd from the nineties might imagine a VR internet to be in thirty years. Everything was 3D, and you moved the camera around with a thought. For Luke, the view was like a screen projected a few feet in front of him, the same distance he would sit from the TV while melting his eyes and attention span with Syphon Filter as a kid. Though he felt on the edge of his awareness that he had the option to make it fully subversive, he made it very clear to the feed that he had no interest in any of that and the sensation faded. He had seen people access the Feed and fade out of existence and had no intention of dropping down into an even more convoluted and removed plane of reality, even for a moment.


    He started his journey in his ¡°home¡±, a kind of central hub where you could save portals to your favorite ¡°sites¡±. His was barren. He was sure there was unnecessarily obtuse terminology for all of it, but he didn¡¯t know any of it and didn¡¯t care to. He was here, begrudgingly, only to learn about two things; Hardworlding and whatever the fuck Constellation was.


    He navigated to his Search portal, which for him was the default glowing white circle, and thought ¡°Hardworlders¡±.


    Here, the extractor sped things up, though it didn¡¯t have much of a choice. Even with its ability to coax the brittlest breath of memory from the mind, Luke didn¡¯t have much to say about that metaphysical browser session.


    He was presented with videos, speeches, more animated diagrams (the map of the Hardworlds as a dense ring floating around the more gaseous Otherworld popped up a lot, but it wasn¡¯t the only theory), and a bit of history.


    There had been a war, somehow, in this hollow-gram world, and people called ¡°demons¡± or ¡°rebels¡± or ¡°separatists¡± did some damage, and others called ¡°saviors¡± or ¡°the militia¡± emerged to fight them, bravely, and found that their magic save-a-ho powers worked best when used on a world with a strong ¡°Principality¡± which Luke found out, finally, was not a guy, but a kind of magic spell the maker of a thing cast into it, and which was constantly active for all time afterward. However, in classically confusing Otherworld fashion, the guy who made it was often called a Prince, but only when discussing the spell or whatever.


    Eventually, the bad guys fled to the Hardworlds, which, they discovered, the ¡°Saviors¡± were powerless to reach, as apparently their big mirror-hulled spaceships didn¡¯t fly to Dallas, and then the Hardworlders came to save the day, and the war, if you could call it that, was ended.


    That is, until about ten years later when the ¡°demons¡± broke out of their ¡°cage¡±. Here the extractor''s montage slowed a bit to focus on Luke¡¯s extreme emotional distress at this discovery.


    The idea of a place, somewhere in the black, that you couldn¡¯t get out of, had such a deep effect on Luke, like a barbed seed stuck between brainfolds suddenly calling the shots, that his memory of learning that particular piece of info was a hundred times more vivid than the other memories. He had frantically searched for any info he could on ¡°Nightmare¡± and ¡°Boxes¡± and didn¡¯t find anything concrete besides a constant mention of people going into Hardworlds to escape a sentence in them.


    Another reason to give Mr. Beefeater a call. If there was anything like a prison in this place, Luke was almost certain to end up at least spending the night in it at some point, and the story of the Saviors and the Demons had a very ¡°winner gets to write the screenplay¡± feel to it, which had him doubting the supposedly infallible justice of the Otherworld.


    Fortunately, for Luke¡¯s agitated attention span and for the future viewers of his Sim or Story or whatever his extracted mem was destined to be, during his panicked research into Nightmare and the so called ¡°Second Demon War¡± where Hardworlders that went rogue and joined the recently freed demons in doing¡­something, were rounded up and shut into Nightmare, he found a familiar named mentioned at last.


    ¡°Constellation has its roots in the second age of Hardworlding, having been found shortly after the first Demon wars by veterans of that conflict. During the second Demon war, they were instrumental in locating rogue Hardworlders, mustering forces to combat the demons, and of course, bringing the Angels to justice.¡±


    Luke let his mind linger just long enough on that to wonder why some people called the Angels were on the same side as people called the Demons, before following the ¡°link¡± attached to the word Constellation to a new space filled with information, arranged like, of course, a 3d starfield with some of the stars linked by straight lines of faint light.


    The extractor really kicked the montaging into high gear as Luke dug through the files, looking for any sign that Constellation was an Otherworld MLM or something, until he got to the mention of Constellation as ¡°a founding member of the Hardworlders Union.¡±


    They have a Union? Am I going to have to pay dues? Are they going to keep Filepress from making me work weekends?


    It turned out the Hardworlders Union wasn¡¯t that kind of a Union.


    ¡°While less than 10 percent of all Hardworlding teams are part of the Hardworlders Union, the Union is an important part of the Hardworlder ecosystem, being the exclusive executor of jobs billed by the nine worlds, so called capital jobs¡ª¡±


    From there, the article jumped into a description of the Nine Worlds, and delved into the mechanics of currency exchange and shit so he closed it, satisfied that Constellation was legit, but now worried that they might be too legit. The masked guys had said Filepress was like the company¡¯s HR, and Luke wondered how similar this was going to be to other jobs he had held in the real, write-ups and all, as he jumped back to the search portal and thought ¡°Ace Tactical Hardworlder team.¡±


    For all its power, the Freed seemed to have finally found something it couldn¡¯t ramble on. After searching for a link that didn¡¯t just lead back to the Constellation hub, Luke was rewarded for his effort with one snippet:


    ¡°Constellation franchisee Hardworlder team. Low barrier to entry.¡±


    And unlike Constellation, which had a million fucking reviews on various hubs, ranging from suspicious praise to accusations of being ¡°traitors¡± and ¡°the worst thing to ever happen to the Hardworlds¡±, Ace Tactical only had one, a five out of five stars with no written review attached.


    At the end of it all, as the montage rapped up for higher Luke and lower Luke tossed the ring across the ground, disgusted, the situation was about where it had started, so lower Luke summoned a flame from the end of his finger and lit the butt end of the cigarette.


    It glowed red hot, as if some unseen set of lungs was puffing on it steadily, and Luke felt his face break out in sweat. Interesting.


    He pressed it to his palm and threw his arms apart like the cigarette had exploded.


    ¡°Shit!¡±


    The butt went flying across the room and landed, still glowing, on the carpet a few feet away. Luke looked at his palm. It was just as undamaged as it had been after he had put the one in Filepress¡¯s hallway out on it, but the pain had been even more realistic.


    So that¡¯s the trick.


    He rolled onto his side and reached his hand across the carpet until he had the glowing cylinder between his fingers, then sat back up and plunged it into his palm.


    It hurt. A lot. He buckled over and his entire body broke out in a surprisingly real sweat, but he didn¡¯t let up. He counted to three in his head and reminded himself that there was absolutely no way this thing should be able to hurt him. Strangely, after the first second, his body started to listen. The pain lessened, and by the time the butt end chimed, he felt nothing but the dim idea of burning.


    ¡°Have you completed the video?¡± It was Beefeater again, his voice now coming out of the smoking hole in Luke''s palm. He held the hole up to his ear like a phone, and wondered what kind of contortion he would have had to do if he had put it out on his knee or something.


    ¡°Uh, yeah. Pretty cool.¡±


    ¡°You still interested?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. Definitely.¡±


    ¡°All right. I''ll send the boys around for you in a day or two. Get the paperwork started. You get cold feet, just call our¡ª¡±


    ¡°How much does it pay?¡±


    There was a pause. Luke thought he could hear his skin ashing over in his ear.


    ¡°Depends on the job. Should be enough for you to take a run at that glowing Charlie Brown football once a day or so, if that¡¯s what you¡¯re asking. Or maybe you¡¯ll get some sense in your head and save up for a good scraper.¡±


    ¡°Scraper?¡±


    ¡°Hardworlder term. Ask around. I¡¯d bet good money there¡¯s some old heads hanging around one of those dives you like to sulk in who would love to dissuade you from throwing your life away.¡±


    The line went dead, and Luke sat studying his fully healed palm, wondering if a steady stream of income was worth what the Hardworlds had to offer, whatever that was.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Contract

    The insanity clause is moot


    Luke sat in the Bliss den, surfing the Freed, waiting.


    Then, in an instant so brief it could have been said not to happen at all, Luke in the Real awoke and drug himself from bed to car to road to work, like a miniature entity with bills to pay operating a flesh-mecha weighed down by the lingering effects of alcohol and the damages of a lifelong shitty sleep schedule. Sometime later, the sun rose, lunch was had, stupidity witnessed, frustration balled into fists and released as swears and focused into floor tiles, then just when the body and soul had hit a groove, resigned to their fate, it was time to leave.


    Then, of course, a sweaty car ride, a quick shower, a ride to the gym spent trying to locate and rehydrate the anger from earlier in the day, which had now seemingly slipped into a cranial seat cushion or something, and a back and shoulder assault powered by spite against his own exhaustion as much as the pre-workout. Then, home, beer, texts, swipes, girls, porn, and finally, games and the headphone-stereoed voices of friends.


    Sometime around one, some part of Luke slipped from the grip of the Real world, just for an instant, or maybe even less than that¡­


    The extractor breezed over the next half day in the Other, Luke''s trip to Dr.X and subsequent run at the glowing hole in his Spirit¡¯s life, and stopped at the point where Luke, good and sick of it all, was floating in the craft ring around Concordia, hoping someone would take pity and spot him some Bliss, but forbidden to ask for any lest he get kicked out for good this time.


    ¡°God damn, they haven¡¯t demolished this place yet?¡± A mildly distorted voice prodded him from above and slightly behind. He craned his neck to look.


    A guy in biker get-up and a mask crafted from fully fractured tinted windshield glass with blood in the crevices reflecting unseen headlights floated above him. Luke noticed a few shell casings wedged in the tread at the bottom of his black leather boots.


    ¡°You uh¡ª¡±


    The guy flicked a card at him before he could finish. Luke caught it as it sailed through the black and looked it over.


    ¡°Car-Crash¡±


    Team Lead


    Ace Tactical


    A Constellation Franchisee


    There was a little logo of an A over a diamond, bordered by two knives and two fifty-cal rounds.


    ¡°You guys still use business cards?¡± was all Luke could think of to say.


    ¡°Barely three-dimensional object, easily recalled by the minds eye, and easily filed away as the mind can conceptualize a thin stack of cards containing an infinite number.¡±


    After this much more salient explanation than Luke had been expecting, Car-Crash waved his hand toward the black van floating next to him.


    ¡°Get the fuck in. Got some paperwork with your name on it back at the shop, then its D-Day for your ass.¡±


    Luke filed the card away in his pocket and jumped in the van. Gravity quickly reasserted itself and he spent the brief trip bouncing around on the top of the wheel well. When the doors slid open again, Car-Crash and Shell casing mask from his first visit were standing inside a garage.


    ¡°Sup bro. I¡¯m Sammy Stovepipe,¡± Sammy Stovepipe said.


    ¡°Guess this means I got the job,¡± Luke said as he stepped out.


    Sammy scoffed in the back of his throat.


    ¡°This is gonna be more like a temp with a chance at permanent hire situation. Sit down.¡±


    He pulled a beat-up office chair away from an old pressed-wood desk facing the wall and rotated it towards Luke. It was covered in a thin layer of dust and bounced with a squeak as Luke sat in it.


    Sammy took out a glass ball that looked like it had trapped a miniature dust storm inside and squeezed it between his thumb and forefinger. It flashed like bottled lightning and he pressed it into the shell casings on his forehead, which shifted with tiny clinks.


    ¡°Look here.¡± Sammy tapped it and the flashes coalesced into a point of light as Luke stared.


    ¡°State your full name, please.¡±


    ¡°Uh, Luke Robert Fischer¡±The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    ¡°What was the date when you last woke in the Real?¡±


    ¡°Uh, Wednesday.¡±


    ¡°The full, date.¡± Sammy stopped himself from swearing.


    ¡°August, uh, seventeenth? 2017.¡±


    The light brightened, and there was only darkness around it. Sammy¡¯s voice continued, now from all around.


    ¡°Please recall a moment from today in the Real in which the date was proved in some way. Please note that any memory will be kept in the archive, and may be seen by the public."


    Luke had to smile. Every memory of him jacking off was up for sale down at Dr. X''s. He raked over his day and found a moment, a little before 3, when he checked his phone to see if his couple thousand-dollar portfolio had done anything.


    The light prodded him, and he went over it again, the memory this time blazing out in every minute detail. He even felt the Texas sun kicking up sweat on his neck and the subtle, rising, is that chicken sandwich really gonna kill me sensation in his stomach.


    Then the garage came back, and Sammy nodded at him, making the little dim light in his forehead bob up and down.


    ¡°All right. Now I¡¯ve got some questions. Answer truthfully. Your responses will not affect your employment status in any way.¡±


    Luke got that feeling again, that something beyond his understanding or knowledge was moving unseen deep within the world, and that Sammy¡¯s corporate reading was some latent side effect of machinations he could never imagine.


    ¡°Do you feel that you have had ample time to consider your decision?¡±


    ¡°Uh, yes.¡±


    ¡°Please be advised if you need more time to consider, additional time will be granted. This will not affect your employment. Do you understand?¡±


    ¡°Yeah.¡±


    ¡°Do you need additional¡ª¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°Please let me finish!¡± Something like human emotion jumped into Sammy¡¯s voice.


    ¡°Do you need additional time to consider your decision to seek employment as a Hardworlder?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°Please state what materials or services aided you in your decision. A, company-provided training materials, B, third-party information such as the Feed, C, counseling from an approved Union liaison, or D, other sources, please specify.¡±


    ¡°A. and B. I mean.. can I¡ª¡±


    ¡°Multiple answers are allowed. Next question. Do you feel that you have a good understanding of the job of a Hardworlder? Please note additional orientation is available upon request.¡±


    ¡°Yeah, I think I got it. Go down there and kill people right?¡±


    There was a pause, and Sammy made motions with his hand like he was swiping through pages Luke couldn¡¯t see.


    ¡°Tasks required of you in the Hardworlds may include, but are not limited to, engaging, incapacitating, or eliminating the target or designated individuals, observation, surveillance, theft, breaking and entering, and operating a wide variety of vehicles.¡±


    ¡°Cool.¡± Luke said. Car-Crash lit a thin plastic-tipped cigar and watched Luke like he was agreeing to jump in a furnace. Whatever. Nothing in there could be worse than what had found him here.


    Sammy continued.


    ¡°Do you understand that your time in the Hardworlds will be spent in a real body? Please note that the term Real here does not imply preference of any particular belief system.


    ¡°Uh, yeah.¡±


    ¡°Keeping in mind that you will be occupying a real body, do you understand that while in the Hardworlds you may be subject to real pain?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°Do you understand that this pain can be up to and exceeding the limits of human sensation?¡±


    ¡°Uh, yes.¡±


    ¡°Do you understand that there is a risk your Spirit may become trapped in the Hardworld indefinitely?¡±


    ¡°Yesssss...¡± He lingered on that last consonant until Car-Crash cocked his head. Better not to know anyway, most likely.


    ¡°Do you understand that your work in the Hardworlds may incur emotional and mental harm, including but not limited to Spiritual depression and disassociation?¡±


    ¡°Yes!¡± This time he said it with a big, closed-mouth smile that made Car-Crash bend over in stifled laughter.


    ¡°And finally,¡± Sammy sighed, wearily. ¡°In accordance with Hardworlding Union guidelines, Ace Tactical is required to provide you with a summarized mem of your work time. Keep in mind that it will be of limited detail to preserve objectivity, and will also be heavily redacted, within industry standards and Constellation guidelines. Do you accept?¡±


    This time, he couldn¡¯t help himself.


    ¡°What?¡±


    Before Sammy could explain, which judging by how much his shoulders rose and fell with the preparatory breath beforehand, was going to be a mammoth task for him, Car-Crash piped up.


    ¡°It means you get a nice little photo reel of what you do on the job, but the names and faces and all those sticky feelings and particulars will be plucked out before it¡¯s handed over to you. We have to give you evidence of your work hours, but it won¡¯t be breaking records as a drama sim any time soon.¡±


    Sammy sighed again.


    ¡°It says I gotta read the god damned script if he says anything but yes, so hold on while¡ª¡±


    ¡°Just fucking ask him the first part again so we¡ª¡±


    ¡°You know I can¡¯t do that god dammit! I gotta read the script!¡±


    ¡°Jesus fucking!¡± Car-Crash stood up and shook his mask at the far wall while Sammy exhaled sharply and then continued.


    ¡°We will be providing you with a mem recording of your time spent in the Hardworlds on company business, but¡ª¡±


    It took him about two minutes of corporatese to say what Car-Crash already had and Luke tried not to laugh the whole time.


    ¡°Yes, I accept.¡±


    ¡°Good!¡± Sammy stood up sharply and stuck his hand out.


    ¡°Then as of this moment, by the authority of Ace Tactical, its employees, and stakeholders, and under the observation of a licensed witness of Constellation Enterprises, I am pleased to offer you the position of Hardworld Operator, effective immediately. Do you accept?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡± Luke shook his hand.


    ¡°Congratulations and welcome aboard we look forward to working with you. Car Crash here will be your direct superior until you are assigned to your team but please come to me with anything my door is always open.¡± Sammy was halfway across the garage and fully out of breath by the time he finished this particular formality.


    Car-Crash smacked Luke on the back and beckoned him to follow.


    ¡°Oh!¡± Sammy stopped and turned around. ¡°Shit! Give him a copy of the mem!¡±


    ¡°I got it,¡± Car-Crash said. ¡°Here.¡± He picked up the orb, which Luke hadn¡¯t even seen Sammy toss on the desk, and clicked it. Something like a ball bearing popped out and Car-Crash pressed it onto another business card. Luke took it and the liquid blob of metal formed into the team logo.


    ¡°Now don¡¯t go trying to sell this one kid,¡± Car-Crash chuckled. ¡°It ain''t worth much.¡±


    Luke would have been offended, but he realized he had never possessed a single bit of memory that hadn¡¯t ended up property of Dr. X


    Far and away, another Luke realized, with an acid bitterness, that he still never had.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - The Box

    Brute force evacuate soul


    Car-Crash pushed open one of the myriad of doors built into the walls of the garage, this one a metal fire-escape push-door that squeaked on its hinges and slammed closed in its frame, and led Luke down an office hallway.


    It took Luke a moment to realize it was the same office, though maybe another floor, that he had met Filepress in, because while at that time the office had a distinct middle of the night feel, this time soft sunlight bloomed on the frosted glass office windows from slits in the blinds within, and the entire atmosphere was screaming that it was just before dawn on a Thursday morning.


    They took a turn and followed another hallway, with almost no doors besides one propped open on a humming half-lit breakroom and another closed door labeled riser room, to a set of double doors that opened on a thin carpeted space, with restrooms and a fire escape on either side and another set of double doors at the far end.


    Luke, who had never had to take more than a single door or craft jump to get anywhere in the Other, was on the verge of cracking a joke about the trip, but got caught by his own intellect working through his gut feelings towards a realization.


    The office was making him travel just as he would in the Real, preparing his mind to travel to a place that was very similar to it. How similar? He was suddenly, annoyingly, afraid. As much as he had tried to convince himself he hated the Other with a fanatic passion, the idea of leaving it and falling into the Real, with his Spirit alive and conscious, was terrifying. All the talk of pain and torture and getting trapped that he had laughed off just minutes before was now smoldering in his ears.


    And despite his best efforts, as if sensing he was close to breaking, his mind decided to pile another red-hot weight on top of him, and he remembered something Rory had told him.


    ¡°They make you walk, or drive, or fall, some kind of terrestrial travel, something like you would do on earth, that tells your mind ¡°Hey, we have traveled a distance¡±, to separate you from everything, and so you have to travel the same distance to come back. That¡¯s how they trap you.¡±


    She had been talking about Demons. Luke had to laugh, as he followed Car Crash through the double doors. No one would go through all this trouble for him. His soul wasn¡¯t worth a damn.


    He glanced back over his shoulder, saw the closed doors staring at him with darkened glass, and remembered something else. Something that one of the other faceless Spirits who had been with them on and off that night had said, after Rory¡¯s talk of the Demon trap.


    ¡°Yes, but the trick is not to try and go back the same way you came. You¡¯ll never escape them that way. You have to go through.¡± He had made a motion with his hand, fingers pressed together like a karate chop, of gliding forward, and had hunkered down and followed the movement with his eyes so full of seriousness and determination, that Rory had rolled hers and Luke had smirked into his drink.


    But now, the memory made his hair stand on end and his breath flutter in his chest, despite the fact that his real body was safely tucked away on the other side of existence.


    The double doors slammed shut and Luke found himself in a wide lobby. A white noise hummed at the edges, possibly traffic or voices or footsteps on other floors, and all around seating areas of various shapes led to doors of every kind. Medical check-ins with hospital double doors. Hotel front desks and darkened dining areas. Call center break rooms. Elevator lobbies. Glass and concrete waiting areas borrowed from some financial office towers. Even apartment complex gyms and college admin desks.


    Nowhere, Luke noticed, did the lobby lead to any kind of front exit. It was like a front desk that had been severed from the front of whatever it had been built for and become entombed in the peripheral portions of a hundred other places.


    There was a round reception desk at the center, with a woman seated, staring at the desktop as Car-Crash sauntered over to her.


    ¡°Mornin¡¯ Lina. Got a new body for the bricks. Let¡¯s put him on Nugget¡¯s job. I think B.P. has a slot¡ª¡±


    ¡°Nugget¡¯s job has already gone hot,¡± Lina said in a voice that nearly threw Luke back out the doors. It was a smooth voice, like an attorney-politician Luke had seen on TV once, and it bounced off everything harmonically, like the whole space was connected to her vocal cords.


    ¡°Shit,¡± Car-Crash said, his voice a dusty chair-squeak by comparison. ¡°I need something in DFW. What about, uh,¡±


    She looked up for the first time and Luke got caught up in the beam. Her face was perfectly sculpted and made up, like a supermodel playing a CEO in a movie, and her gold-grey eyes blazed like concrete under a midday sun.


    ¡°Tenpound is still collecting for street cleaners.¡±If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    Car-Crash drummed his fingers on the counter as if he was thinking, but Luke got the feeling from the rigidity of his mask that he was just getting an eyeful of Lina¡¯s chest.


    ¡°Uh, yeah. Sounds good. Who¡ª¡±


    ¡°The street clean squad seniors are Tommy Twelve and Backdraft.¡± The light in her eyes fluttered as she spoke, as if she was reading something unseen.


    ¡°Fucking Tommy will roll him,¡± Car-Crash scoffed.


    ¡°Backdraft it is then,¡± Lina said wearily. ¡°I¡¯ll send the word out now. Here.¡± She handed Car-Crash a door key, along with a smile that said ¡°I know exactly what you want. Why don¡¯t you do something to make me give a shit?¡±


    Car-Crash took it with a nod and turned on his heel.


    ¡°All right. Have a good one, Lina. Let¡¯s go man.¡±


    ¡°Good Luck,¡± Lina said to Luke, her eyes offering something like condolences. Luke nodded and hoped her vision wasn¡¯t as penetrating as Filepress¡¯s.


    He turned to follow Car-Crash and stumbled in his step. The Lobby had shifted, somehow, as he was staring at Lina, and the various waiting rooms seemed different than they had been just moments ago, re-ordered, and he couldn¡¯t find the double doors and brown carpet break room Car-Crash had led him through when they came in.


    Car-Crash also seemed a bit disoriented. He stopped suddenly and spun on his heel a few times, even glanced back at Lina as if considering asking her, then finally stopped and looked at the key.


    ¡°Oh, shit. Here we go,¡± he said mostly to himself and pointed at a linoleum and white paint region of the surrounding circle, which Luke identified as they got closer as an apartment complex laundry room, complete with masking tape and sharpie ¡®out-of-order¡¯ labels on the machines and loose articles of children¡¯s clothing on the ground. The room screamed ¡®middle of the night¡¯ which Luke found hard to believe, until Car-Crash shoved the door open, and Luke found himself walking down a strip of concrete lot fractured and pot-holed in every way imaginable, shimmering like a crushed slab of black glass under glaring white lights and a steady, misty drizzle.


    The cold sensation of night rain on his skin was about the last thing he had expected to find on the other side of that door, and he looked around for signs of the unreality of it all, like looking for the zipper on a chuck-e-cheese suit, but found only a perfectly natural apartment complex back alley.


    A Brick wall mouthed with glowing broken blinds and protruding rust-grilled window units, a tall splintered and stained wood fence, and the muffled echoes of their own footsteps. The most out of place thing he could find was Car-Crash himself, and even he seemed trimmed to fit, his broken tempered glass mask now looking more like a very well sculpted piece of cosplay than a morphed memory.


    Car-Crash stopped at a door seemingly at random, put the key in, and turned the bolt. He stepped back without taking the key out and waved towards the door.


    ¡°Ok welcome home. Get the fuck in.¡±


    Luke stared at the door, then looked back at Car-Crash, who seemed to be waiting on something.


    ¡°Uh, ok. What¡ª¡±


    ¡°You will notice that I¡¯m not attempting to explain any of this to you,¡± Car-Crash said with an acidic irritation. ¡°That¡¯s because it¡¯s a waste of time. Just go through the god damned door and the box will do the rest.¡±


    ¡°The box?¡±


    But Car-Crash was already walking back down the alley, and in just a few steps he disappeared into the darkness beyond the cone of white light and glowing misty rain.


    Luke turned the nob and pushed the door inward, and something about the sound of the door made him stop dead still.


    He recognized it. It was the same sound it had made a thousand times. It was the door to his apartment.


    No. It wasn¡¯t. He remembered his apartment, on the third floor of a three-story five-year-old complex, everything smooth, new concrete and orange stucco. Not even any rust on the gate hinges yet. Looking out over unused shrubland down to a two-lane road in one direction, and the most baren stretch of interstate between two metro centers in the other.


    But that door was distant, hazy, fading. This door was right here in his hand. The feeling was ensnaring, like sensing the edge of waking in a dream. He couldn¡¯t help but move towards it. He had to remember who he really was.


    He stepped inside and the apartment came back to him. It was like that other apartment, in a way. The clutter and furniture were nearly identical, and even the smells were the same, but once again, this one was near and close and real, while the other was becoming more distant with every heartbeat.


    Though he hadn¡¯t noticed it at the time, time inside the apartment was warped, pinched at the ends. Far away and higher up, with the benefit of distance, another Luke could see the warp, like a cough drop between two twists, and the way time squeezed him over half an hour in a heartbeat, formed the seconds directly into memory, and pushed him towards the bed.


    He skipped the shower. Skipped the beer, even. He was so god damned tired. A double shift, surely. He stripped down to his underwear and barely got under the sheets.


    As he lay, staring at the ceiling, the world pressed out at the seams, growing moment by moment, as he inflated it with each breath.


    The sensation of being stuck on a precipice of recollection reached a crescendo, and he floated up off the bed.


    ¡°Oh fuck, I¡¯m dreaming.¡±


    He rarely ever realized he was dreaming before he woke up, but he must have fallen asleep so fast his mind didn¡¯t have a chance to trick him.


    Up, up, into the darkness of the ceiling. The shadows of the popcorn texturing melted and broke and he floated into a white noise void.


    ¡°What was I gonna do tomorrow?¡±


    But the question was deeper than that. He didn¡¯t even know who he had been today. He had to wake up. He had to remember who he was and what he was going to do and what day it was. And he had to do it quick. He might be late for work. He might have forgotten something important. He might even have someone waiting on him. He needed to, absolutely had to wake up.


    It flared out above him. A bright light. Like a little warm sun. A pin prick in the darkness letting in some of the summer heat on the other side. There. That was his real life. Not fantastic. Not wonderful. Not even pleasant. But real, solid, steady, indestructible, secure. Like a uniform concrete slab. He was tired of floating around on clouds, dancing in nebulae, swimming in imagination. It spoke to him, told him about yesterday¡¯s traffic, gas prices, news stories, even strange text messages from unknown numbers. It told him of the real world, and it promised to take him there.


    He reached out his hand for the light, and this time, he caught it.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Door Kickers

    Full-auto wake up call


    They called it being shaded, or sketched out, or if they were really old-school they might call it being cloned. Or drained. When a Spirit has enough of his mem floating out in the mesh that anyone can get a measure of his soul, so to speak, for a price. It meant you ain¡¯t running far. It meant the Hunters could sniff you out of a Hardworld like that. It meant the greenest speaker on the ball could, if given access to the mem and a little guidance, pick you out of the swarm, no problem.


    It also meant Constellation and its subsidiaries would label you a very safe hire. And that even the most uninspired escort could craft a box to drop you into the Hardworlds with very little thought required.


    Which is why, just a few moments after Luke believed he had walked into his apartment, he was waking up in a Hardworld for the first time in his life.


    But it wasn¡¯t any fucking bird noise or phone alarms that brought his Self out of a deep Thursday day-off sleep at 11 in the morning. It was the sound of his apartment door getting kicked in and some pack-a-day-throated piece of shit yelling,


    ¡°Rise and shine mother fucker! Training day!¡±


    Then some other guy cackled and a third muttered something. The combination of multiple unfamiliar and adrenaline or drug tremoloed voices breaking into the sanctity of his black out curtain bedroom, and the fact that he had been dreaming about signing up for a murder squad with a guy who¡¯s mask looked like a head-on collision wrapped around his face, made this version of Luke bolt up and reach for his bedside pistol.


    Before he could get a good grip on it, the bedroom door flew open and a blast of white light caught him in the face.


    ¡°Sup Luke. I¡¯m Backdraft. Today you are¡ª¡±


    Luke got his hand around the pistol and swung it into position.


    ¡°Hey!¡± Backdraft yelled and the light danced. A hand the size of a fucking catchers mitt grabbed Luke¡¯s hand, the gun, and half of his forearm for good measure. Amidst the sudden crushing, just under bone-breaking pressure and the sheer weight of the hand, Luke felt the man''s thumb deftly find and reengage the safety.


    Despite the disorientation and depersonalization and the shock of everything else, Luke made a mental note to keep a Glock with a loaded chamber next to his bed next time. He had always felt trigger safeties were kinda goofy, but as he felt his Beretta float away from him, he saw the appeal.


    ¡°All right, hit the lights,¡± Backdraft said.


    ¡°Where the fuck¡ª¡± someone else said. There was no overhead light in Luke¡¯s bedroom, but rather than give the B&E guys any tips, he stayed quiet.


    ¡°Where¡¯s your light switch bro?¡± The tone surprised Luke. Friendly. Like they were all in this break-in together.


    ¡°Right next to the safe, bro. Meaning non fucking existent.¡± Luke said as acidly as he could muster considering his morning cotton mouth and still-sleeping throat.


    ¡°Fuck it bro!¡± another, less friendly voice said. The next instant everything was blaring white and it took Luke''s mind a bit to realize the guy had ripped the blackout curtains off the wall, rod and all.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± Luke put his hands up to his face.


    ¡°All right Luke,¡± Backdraft¡¯s voice boomed as Luke squeezed his eyes closed. ¡°We¡¯re on a tight fucking schedule, so you¡¯re gonna have to get through a bunch of philosophical paradoxes and crisis of identity and shit really fast.¡±


    ¡°Damn dude, I remember my first day!¡± the less friendly voice said.


    ¡°No one gives a shit! Shut the fuck up!¡± Backdraft boomed. Luke got the courage to open his eyes enough to blink at the sheets.


    ¡°Hey!¡± Backdraft tapped him on the top of the head with one finger. Reluctantly, he looked up.


    Up there Luke had to laugh at the effect. At first, Backdraft¡¯s face was completely unseeable. Not that it wasn¡¯t there, but more that the features refused to be absorbed into memory, like water into oil. Then, after the extractor had caught up, a pixelated effect, like someone who hadn¡¯t signed the form on Cops, popped up over backdrafts face, and then over the faces of his two operators. A few moments later, their faces appeared, though they weren¡¯t really their faces. The extractor had supplied generic features from either Luke''s memory or its own pool to protect the Hardworlder''s identity. Though the expressions were the same, the faces didn¡¯t match, even against his flimsy memory of that first day.


    Memory of the Hardworlds, Luke had learned, was fragile. Like the memory of a dream. If you wrote down your dreams the moment you woke up, you could look back on them, kind of, but if you waited and got up and went about your day, the dream would be gone for good, leaving only a kind of greasy remnant of its emotion behind, staining your day.


    The effect was less total with Hardworld mem. You could still remember bits and pieces, the gist you could say, days or even months later. ¡°Yeah, we won that one. No I got dropped out pretty early, I think.¡± But the only way to truly remember all the details, the kind that you could actually learn from, was to see a Scraper the moment you got back to the Other. But Scrapers were expensive. During his time at Ace Tactical, after every job, Luke had to go see Drudge, a short, fat little guy in a reflective latex lab coat and gloves, whose welder goggles glowed like his eyeballs had been replaced with white-hot ball bearings. Sometimes there was a line, and his memory of the job was so hazy by the time Drudge asked ¡°where did you wake up this morning?¡± that he was amazed the guy was able to scrape as much detail out as he was.The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.


    The memory of his first day, however, had been one of the first things he had purchased from the Ace Tactical archivists, paid against his future earnings of course, which in his bliss-deprived state had taken an act of unnatural defiance. But after his drop in the Hardworlds, such acts became more familiar to him.


    And so, though the faces were changed, and certain identifying remarks were let pass by the extractor, the mem was all there for higher Luke to witness again for the thousandth time.


    Somehow, it never really lost its appeal.


    ¡°What did you do yesterday?¡± Backdraft demanded, his brand new Mossberg shockwave prodding Luke¡¯s chin.


    ¡°Uh, work.¡± and it all spilled out in his head. The shitty AC in the van. The dude''s house that had smelled like a certain brand of detergent that Luke had, until then, thought had only ever been used by his grandmother. The strange feeling of trying to install door sensors while overcome with nostalgia. Lunch had been shit. The driest fucking chicken sandwich¡ª


    ¡°Did you? Or did you fly around some dead husk of a resort world, waiting for some good Samaritan to bum you a Bliss fix?¡±


    The memories clashed. The Lukes wrestled. It wasn¡¯t a fair fight. One was beaten down by years of go-nowhere jobs and a temper that seemed ill-suited to modern living, while the other, weightless and fresh, was in ecstasy, finally free of an addiction to something that couldn¡¯t even exist here, ready to live out his wildest and most childish dreams.


    But the other one wasn¡¯t out of the fight yet, and he had a very convincing argument.


    ¡°You fucking delirious moron! This shit is gonna get you killed!¡±


    Still, Backdraft was waiting for an answer.


    ¡°I flew around the less than well-preserved remnant of a classy establishment, inexplicably bereft of customers, waiting for a gesture of¡ª¡±


    ¡°All right, let''s go.¡± Backdraft disappeared his short shotgun in his jacket like a sleight of hand and shoved Luke into his closet.


    ¡°Get fucking dressed and meet us in the living room. And bring this.¡±


    Backdraft slammed Lukes Beretta 92fs on top of the leaning dresser and stomped out of the bedroom, absently finishing what he had started just moments before by yanking the door off the last fragment of hinges and letting it clatter into the hallway wall. The other two followed behind him, tucking their weapons under their jackets, and Luke was left alone, with a choice to make.


    His window, now curtainless, opened out onto the street, reminding him that this version of Luke lived on the ground floor. The squeal of bad breaks came in as someone backed out of a spot. He saw sunlight shining on asphalt through the gap between the blinds and the wall. It would be easy to slide open the window, kick out the screen, and run to safety, flag someone down, call the cops, be done with this nightmare.


    But, there was no point in doing it naked, he told himself.


    He pulled on some jeans, then a white shirt, then a plaid flannel button-up. His pistol winked at him out of the edge of his vision the entire time, saying,


    ¡°You could always pick me up and take matters into your own hands! All those drills, all those range days, and now you got three angry fellas in your living room ready to tango! Whadya say? Lets dance!¡±


    In his head, the gun spoke in a high-pitched voice like something out of a forties cartoon, and he imagined it with big black and white eyes on its textured grip and gloved hands sticking out like something from Hanna Barbara.


    ¡°I¡¯m fucking losing it,¡± some Luke thought.


    Another Luke thought it over.


    They left me in here. They left my gun. They know I can jump out the window. They know I could go in shooting. They know I could call the police.


    They¡¯re testing me.


    They¡¯re fucking with me.


    They¡¯re gonna kill me anyway.


    His mind reeled and his two selves screamed at each other, but somehow he was still able to button his shirt and place his Berretta in his hip holster.


    He stood there for a moment, hand on his pistol grip, looking across his room at the window. The bed with no frame. The ceiling stained from the smoke. The treaded carpet. Memories oozed out of it, completing the feeling that this was a special kind of prison cell.


    He walked down the hall and the other Luke died screaming. It lost its identity. It was suddenly no longer a person, becoming instead a seething churn of emotions at the bottom of his mind.


    ¡°About God damned time dude. I was wondering if Car-Crash gave me a paraplegic or some shit,¡± Backdraft said, smiling. Hearing the name of his dream character out loud banished the last of Luke¡¯s hesitation, at least for the moment and the boiling fear at the bottom of his stomach died to a whisper.


    ¡°So what are we¡ª¡±


    ¡°No fucking questions. When you need to know, you will be told. Where¡¯s your phone?¡±


    ¡°Right here.¡± Luke barely had it out of his pocket before Backdraft snatched it and threw it down the hall. Luke watched it bounce like the last lifeboat passing over the horizon. Backdraft sensed his turmoil.


    ¡°Look at me mother fucker.¡±


    Luke did. Backdraft scowled.


    ¡°You ready or what?¡±


    Luke got ready to lie, but in an instant realized he didn¡¯t have to. Something whispered to him that this shit was exactly what he had been waiting for his entire life, at the very least since he woke up on that fucking rooftop.


    ¡°I was born ready.¡±


    ¡°Fucking a. Lets go.¡±


    Backdraft swung open the front door and pieces of the frame broke off on the carpet. He stepped out into the courtyard with his hand under his jacket and his head and shoulders swiveling like he could launch rockets from his chest if anything tried to step up. One of the other guys followed him out and the last one nudged Luke in the back. They all proceeded in a kind of staggered triangle formation out and under the stairs and back around the unit. On the street, just out of sight of Luke''s back window, a Toyota 4Runner idled on the fire lane.


    Luke learned later, after being on the other side of an onboarding, that it was standard procedure with a new guy to have his phone tapped, his exits watched, and a guy ready to plug him with a suppressed subsonic shot in the back of the head the moment he went out the window.


    Which explained the movement the driver made as they walked up, like leaning over to stash something in the glove box. He caught Luke¡¯s eye, and smiled, and a part of Luke screamed and begged the other to start shooting, but it was too late.


    The Spirit was firmly in the driver¡¯s seat.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Ride Along

    The only way out is through


    Backdraft got in the passenger seat and put his shotgun between his knees. Luke got in the center seat with the short dude who had been the calmer of the two voices in the apartment, and who now took his APC9k, a small submachinegun, out of his jacket and started screwing on a suppressor like he was clipping his nails. The other guy, a heavy-set dude with a wiry rodent-like energy and a Glock 17 in his waistband, climbed in the back seat and glued his eyes to the back window. The way everyone kept looking around was infectious, so Luke did his best to see if there were any barrels peeking out of the bent-up blinds behind the apartment windows, until Backdraft turned around in his seat and got his attention.


    ¡°All right, listen up mother fucker. As of this moment, your name is Bottle.¡±


    That was about the last thing Luke had expected him to say, but after giving it some thought, recalled how Backdraft had sneered at all the empty beer bottles crowding the faux granite laminate counter top in his apartment just moments ago.


    ¡°Oh, cause of the¡ª¡±


    ¡°And this is Daytona,¡± Backdraft pointed his thumb at the driver, who raised a hand briefly before continuing the rapid U-turn out of Luke''s lot. While Luke went sideways in his seat, Backdraft stayed as vertical as if he was outside on the street, and pointed at the guy with the APC9k.


    ¡°That¡¯s Whisper, and the guy in the back is Hamstar. Today our job is to draw the fuzz off the peach when the boys start making cobbler.¡±


    ¡°Uh,¡± Luke muttered. Backdraft smiled, enjoying his confusion.


    ¡°Meaning, for the uninitiated, we are to attract the attention and energy of law enforcement when the main attack crew is ready to make a move on the target. Understand?¡±


    ¡°Oh. Yeah sounds¡ª¡±


    ¡°Gotta pick up Kibbles,¡± Daytona said suddenly.


    ¡°God damn, it really is fucking training day huh?¡± Backdraft laughed.


    ¡°I thought he was out?¡± Hamstar said, sounding disappointed.


    ¡°I¡¯ll make something useful out of him yet,¡± Backdraft said, defiant.


    ¡°Like an ammo bitch,¡± Daytona suggested. Hamstar cackled.


    ¡°He aint touchin my shit!¡±


    ¡°Shut the fuck up!¡± Backdraft yelled at the rear view. ¡°You all started out same as him, like gum stuck to my fucking shoe, and now¡ª¡±


    ¡°I did not start out like that,¡± Whisper said, true to his name, quietly.


    ¡°Is this gonna be his third strike or what?¡± Hamstar groaned.


    With the attention off of him, Luke shifted his own to his surroundings and watched the non-world flow by.


    To a lower, physical part of him, it was nothing special. The same shit he¡¯d seen forever. But when he flicked on the focus of his Spirit, and allowed the flow of awareness to move from his life in the Real, to his existence in the Other, and then down into the vessel of the Self, and from there look out on the parking lots and window barred convenience stores and shirtless marching meth heads, the knowledge of where he really was filled him with an electric excitement, a real feeling of anything¡¯s possible that he hadn¡¯t felt since he was a kid.


    This was the real world. But not his real world, with its plethora of responsibilities and requirements, littered with the husks of his failures, this one was expendable. Fleeting. Impermanent. Like a dream given substance. A video game with a quantum processor. Here, he could do whatever he wanted, and it would all fade like vapor when he¡ª


    He glanced back at his companions, still deep in discussion on the pros and cons of giving a guy named Kibbles access to firearms, and decided not to ask. How the fuck was he going to get out of here? Did you have to die to leave this place? He woke up to get in, would he just go to sleep to get out?


    The pressure building in his mind broke the damn with that one. The thought of being a Hardworlder, the question of what he would do in a world where he could do anything he wanted, and his reflection on his distance from not only his Real self but also the Other, had all been leading his mind toward the one thing he had instructed it to avoid.


    Rory.


    And the fact that his mind or Spirit or whatever it was, was finally free of the insipid tug of Bliss, allowed it to pursue the subject with agonizing vigor.


    He remembered that first day, the non-sun reflecting off her rave girl visage as she lay on her side rambling sweetly about his new existence, in particular, why his first memories of being in the Other, racing down highways and running through schools and all that shit, were so hazy.


    ¡°Your Spirit was kinda in a larval stage at that point. Just barely there, a sketch of your real Self you could say, like a photograph of a real thing. But the more photos you take, you can make a video, right? And then you record sound, and maybe like brainwaves, get it? Until eventually you have a real copy of yourself.¡±


    ¡°So I¡¯m a copy?¡±


    ¡°Maybe. Or maybe this is the real you. But the important thing to remember is that you were being born, right? And being born all at once, as an adult, would have been terrifying. Might have made you go crazy, made the new you break apart before it had formed. So this world did it gradually. Because this world knows how to treat us.¡±If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    He wondered if she believed it. Probably not. He couldn¡¯t imagine the Other had treated her any better than him, given the way she spent her time in it. Just more bullshit to convince him the rules of predator and prey didn¡¯t apply to this new dream world.


    It put a brake on his newfound excitement. The last time he had felt something similar, he had his memories scanned and his life turned into one big Bliss hunt.


    But, he realized as he shifted in his seat and fought back a yawn, she had been wrong. Being born suddenly, here in this Hardworld, hadn¡¯t driven him insane. The new him, the old him, the Real him, were different, but shared a common center, like petals on a flower. Experiencing this, suddenly, gave him a way to compare his selves. It was a cathartic, relieving experience, to know he was something more than just the things that had happened to him. It answered a question he hadn¡¯t realized he had even been asking.


    ¡°Call him,¡± Backdraft said, like a man giving a surgeon the go-ahead to amputate. Daytona flipped open a corner store burner phone and punched in some numbers, then held the phone to his ear and scowled out the window.


    They were parked at the side of an apartment complex, on a wide double-sided street with a big grass median in the center. An iron bar fence surrounded the complex, and they had parked across from a keypad gate with a well-worn path in the grass between it and the sidewalk. Luke noticed the balconies held planters and exercise balls and full sets of furniture, as opposed to the wind chimes and picnic chairs and grills zip-tied to the railings found at his own complex. There wasn¡¯t even a window-unit in sight.


    ¡°Hey. Side gate,¡± Daytona huffed. There was a pause and he glanced at Backdraft, and they exchanged a ¡°sick of this shit¡± glance as someone on the other side of the line rambled.


    ¡°No, you will be riding with us. Yes. Why would you need a gun?¡± Daytona tried to put as much wink-wink nudge-nudge in his question as he could without crushing the phone. Hamstar started laughing until Backdraft shot him a murder stare.


    ¡°Ok. Yes. Side gate. And leave your phone!¡± Daytona closed the phone with an angry clack and tossed it in the center console.


    ¡°If we don¡¯t burn him in the first¡ª¡±


    ¡°How did he sound?¡± Backdraft interrupted. Daytona snickered.


    ¡°Like someone was standing there with a fucking gun to his head. I¡¯m texting CiCi.¡± Daytona took out a thick-cased phone and tapped on the screen.


    ¡°I yanked the cables on his car last night,¡± Backdraft said, in an odd tone, like he was just now remembering, or casting a spell.


    ¡°He¡¯s been pacing for half an hour,¡± Daytona read. ¡°Out the door. Took a right. Goin for his Car.¡± He said the last words with a tone of relieved finality. Backdraft sighed and opened the glove box. Down there Luke saw, for the first time, the compact .45 with the big silencer on it, sitting on top of the registration, and put two and two together. Some part of him raged and screamed, but Spirit Luke was impressed.


    ¡°Wait. He went back. Laughing. Headed for the gate.¡± Daytona read, sounding disappointed, and Backdraft slammed the glove box shut.


    ¡°Scoot over,¡± Whisper muttered to Luke, in a very ¡°go on without me¡± tone. Luke moved to the far driver''s side of the center seat and Whisper scooted into the middle seat and stared out the windshield like a doomed man.


    A few seconds later, a lanky buzz-cut guy in a hoodie and knee-torn jeans stomped out from around the back of a unit. He trudged across the sidewalk toward the gate, glancing up at the 4Runner every other step like it was going to leap over the curb and tackle him. His mouth was half open and his eyes peeled so severely that Luke could see the tell-tale bloodshotness from his seat.


    ¡°Mother fucking little¡ª¡± Backdraft broke the rest of the words into a growl then a deep exhale. Whisper opened the door as Kibbles came through the gate, and before he had even got next to the car, Luke could smell the weed.


    The door shut and Backdraft glared at him. He squirmed in his seat and looked around.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°Fucking what me bitch,¡± Backdraft said, twisting in his seat. ¡°This ain''t a god damned munchie run. I told you this job is straight edge.¡±


    ¡°Uh, sorry bro, my Self,¡±


    ¡°Fuck your sorry and fuck your Self.¡± He took a breath and leaned in even further, putting the seatbelt and the seat itself in an awkward contortion.


    ¡°Mem stop. You are in violation. Pay will be docked for this job. Report to your super for training immediately after scrape. Mem go.¡±


    Luke would later learn that this was a technique to get the memory scraper to pull a specific statement from the job for record keeping. In this case, kibbles would have a few weeks of shit eating in the killhouse before he was let back on a job. But, to down there Luke in the passenger seat, it seemed like Backdraft was losing his shit.


    Backdraft spun back around and shook his head.


    ¡°Drive.¡±


    Daytona pulled off the curb and the apartments melted away out the window. They got to the end of the street and halfway on to the access road running alongside the highway before Kibbles opened his mouth.


    ¡°So, uh, is this thing armored?¡±


    ¡°Jesus,¡± Whisper whispered. Hamstar cackled something that might have been ¡°what?¡± and Daytona got a big smile on his face. Backdraft seemed less than amused.


    ¡°No mother fucker. You won¡¯t see the inside of a war wagon for a decade if ever. Those things are reserved for the big boys. Not kids who cant get their pants on without smoking a bowl.¡±


    ¡°Who are the big boys?¡± Luke asked, the image of the grey-man killer from the hype video still nagging his thoughts. Backdraft glanced at him, and must have seen in his eyes a legitimate curiosity born from a desire to move up in the job, because his glare softened and he nodded ahead at the dashboard.


    ¡°Not us, for starters. Sometimes the Point Operators will roll in a wagon, but it depends. There¡¯s generally only a few of them to go around, and the spear guys like more flexibility than sticking to one vehicle allows. Generally, your higher-ups on an Op will use them if they have to move.¡±


    ¡°You mean like, uh supervisors? Like Car¡ª¡±


    ¡°No names, god dammit!¡± Backdraft snapped and Luke just nodded back at him, bored-faced. With dudes like Backdraft, you had to let them know you wouldn¡¯t bitch out over getting chewed out, and eventually they¡¯d talk to you like an equal.


    ¡°But, no. Team leads like the individual you mentioned, when on a job, take point with the Operators, or one of the other teams, like this little gang of shit stirrers. By Higher-ups, I mean the Boss and other VIPs. Overlords, Wizards,¡±


    ¡°Wizards?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, Wizards. Sometimes called a Keyman, Safelord or Sage.¡±


    One look told Backdraft Luke was lost at sea.


    ¡°Ok, a wizard is a guy who can manifest things here in the bricks. Weapons, cars, electronics. A good one can walk into a gas station and pull an m60 out of the bathroom stall, or get a laptop loaded with NSA spy tools. Shit like that.¡±


    After Luke recovered from the shock of hearing a guy like Backdraft use the term ¡°manifest¡±, which he associated with middle-class housewives trying to boost sales in their Etsy shop, he asked a question that would, ultimately, prove to be quite prophetic.


    ¡°Is that something I can learn to do, or is it like an innate talent?¡±


    Hamstar laughed. ¡°Shit, I wish. Man.¡± Whisper looked at Luke sadly, and Backdraft gave him a ¡°What the fuck is this guy¡¯s game?¡± stare.


    ¡°I¡¯ve heard strong opinions both ways, Bottle. But my advice to you is to take this shit one step at a time. Stay focused on not shitting the bed on this little job here, before you start fantasizing about being some big-shot magic man.¡±


    ¡°Shit, let the little birdy fly B.D.,¡± Hamstar chuckled. ¡°Hey bro try and pull me out an RPG when we stop¡ª¡±


    Daytona¡¯s phone went off with a harsh siren chime and Backdraft snatched it out of the console and read the screen.


    ¡°All right. Flip a bitch. Get us on the other side of the loop.¡±


    Daytona took the U-turn lane under the bridge at 50 mph and Backdraft smiled back at the crew.


    ¡°Time to make some noise, y''all.¡±

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Ride or Die

    ours is not to ask why, yours is to shoot and die


    Kibbles looked like the car ride might kill him. Luke considered asking him what else he was on besides the weed, and if he had eaten anything with it, in order to gauge his own chances of getting puked on in the next five minutes, but decided against it. Backdraft was smiling at the blurring highway and flat cement landscape like it was all dancing for him, and Luke didn¡¯t want to put Kibbles in his crosshairs pointlessly.


    Despite his best efforts, Luke felt sorry for Kibbles. Didn¡¯t help that the little scraggly-bearded pot head kept looking over Whisper¡¯s shoulder at Luke with a strange pleading look, like only Luke had the answer to whatever illness was bugging him.


    That should have given Luke a clue what was going to happen next, but it took him completely by surprise. Probably because he was too busy looking for any indicator that Kibbles was about to hurl.


    They exited onto the access road and stopped at an intersection between the bridge and a gas station, and Kibbles got very still.


    ¡°Shit, here it comes,¡± thought Luke. But a few moments later, they got moving again, and Kibbles swore under his breath. Whisper looked at him, then looked at Luke, with a kind of ¡°you seeing this shit?¡± glance. Luke still didn¡¯t get it. At that moment, he was convinced that Kibbles was about to shit himself.


    Whisper leaned towards the front seat and cleared his throat.


    ¡°Hey Backdraft.¡±


    That did it. Kibbles threw open the door and tried to launch himself at the street, which was going by at 40 mph. He didn¡¯t get far. Whisper shot off the seat and got him by the jeans with one hand and the back of his hoodie with the other.


    ¡°Get the fuck¡ª¡± Backdraft started. Daytona slammed on the breaks. A car behind them honked, and Kibbles lifted up one foot and Mule-kicked backward right into Whisper¡¯s face. The kick slipped across his chin and slammed into his shoulder, sending him backward into Luke. Suddenly, Whisper was very loud.


    ¡°Fucking bitch ass¡ª¡±


    Kibbles shot out of the car and crashed over the hood of a sedan that had squealed to a stop in the next lane. Impressively, he didn¡¯t even lose that much speed. He just rolled and slammed and bounced off the bumper then off the street, and was up running again, flailing his arms like he was being chased by bees or something.


    Whisper had some fucking bees for his ass. He raised his APC9K towards the street without getting up off Luke¡¯s lap.


    ¡°No! Shut the god damned door!¡± Backdraft boomed with fire in his eyes. Whisper sighed and grumbled as he got up, but lowered his gun and slammed the door shut anyway.


    ¡°Man, do not put me on a job with that mother fucker again. If he¡ª¡±


    ¡°Shut up!¡± yelled Backdraft. ¡°Tona, tell dispatch we got a fucking code blue.¡± He took the suppressed G30s out of the glove box and wagged it like a finger out the window.


    ¡°And ask if I need to drop him out.¡±


    Daytona shook his head in a kind of ¡°why the fuck can¡¯t you do it?¡± way, and tapped on a flip phone with one hand while the other steered them through traffic at fifty miles an hour. They turned right on the main road that came out from under the bridge, and Kibbles was already sprinting through a Mcdonalds parking lot fifty yards from the intersection.


    ¡°The rest of you watch for cops!¡± Backdraft said, like they had all conspired to make this happen.


    ¡°Why?¡± Hamstar asked. ¡°I thought our job was to make¡ª¡±


    ¡°Not halfway across the state from the fucking target!¡± Backdraft spat at the dash.


    Kibbles had gotten some brain cells activated and took a sharp right turn towards the back of the Mcdonalds and disappeared behind a dumpster. Daytona sighed and sped ahead, then turned right just past the end of the parking lot. It was a dingy part of town, nothing but massive chain hotels clinging to the highway for dear life. Unfortunately for Kibbles, the one spot of bare land was the massive empty field just behind the Mcdonalds, which he was now running into. He looked to his left, ready to sprint across the road, and saw the squad coming up behind him. He made a weird kind of half jump, like something had shocked him, and then sprinted across the field in the general direction of the highway.Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.


    ¡°You think he¡¯s going for the Cracker Barrel?¡± Hamstar said with a smile in his voice. Luke had to admit, the sight of Kibbles running and tripping across an empty grass field, in the direction of a Cracker Barrel sign floating above the highway a quarter of a mile away like a beacon of safety, was pretty fucking ridiculous.


    Backdraft squeezed the pistol in his right hand and rested his wrist on his left forearm.


    ¡°Get past the curve and stop.¡±


    The road they were on curved to the right back towards the highway, giving Kibble¡¯s chosen field the shape of a headsail with the wind in it. Luke was just thinking that Backdraft''s master plan would only work if Kibbles kept running forward in a straight line like a zombie, when Daytona¡¯s phone went off with an alarm chime, and he glanced at the screen.


    ¡°Negative. Get to marker ASAP,¡± he read to Backdraft. He put the pedal down and followed the curve back towards the access road. Out on the field, Kibbles rotated at the center of their trajectory like a frontman in a 90¡¯s music video, and Hamstar snickered into his hand.


    ¡°Shit, might as well pop him first,¡± Whisper said, again in his usual low-volume purr.


    ¡°Fuck him,¡± Backdraft said, putting the pistol back in the glovebox. ¡°Dropping outs too good for him. Let him bake in that fucking field till the Spiritwalkers come for him. Maybe then he¡¯ll quit for good.¡±


    They got back onto the access road and sped onto the highway, and Whisper kept his eyes on Kibbles until he disappeared behind the barrier wall.


    As they got on the highway, Backdraft lit up a plastic-tipped cigar and cracked the window. After a few minutes of scowling at the highway, he picked up the flip phone and started texting. Luke watched him, wondering if it would be worth it to ask where they were going, until he slapped the flip phone shut and barked at the roof.


    ¡°Hamstar, hand Bottle the 5K!¡±


    There was some rummaging in the back, and then a tap on the side of his seat. Luke looked down to his left and saw Hamstar¡¯s big hand offering him an MP5K between the seat and the door. He grabbed it and held it between his knees. It looked well-worn, to say the least. Tape on the foregrip, tape on the sling. Hamstar tapped again on the seat and handed him a tool pouch of some kind with three extra mags in it, none of which looked the same.


    ¡°Boss wants a big to-do on the mixmaster at a quarter till,¡± Backdraft announced. ¡°Ham, I¡¯ll drop you there and we¡¯ll split. Take a hostage if you can. Shit starts to look final, surrender and start telling tales about all the bombs you stashed. Got it?¡±


    ¡°Yeah bro, all right.¡± Hamstar nodded to himself out the window, clearly trying to psych himself up. Luke realized, for the first time, that even the professionals might have trouble believing a parallel life was waiting for them on the other side of death.


    ¡°The rest of us will stay mobile. Whisper, you and Bottle will be team two. We¡¯ll be following chase at that point, if it comes to that, so no telling where you¡¯ll get dropped.¡±


    ¡°Unless they move us to kill team,¡± Whisper said hopefully. Backdraft smiled back at him and talked like a dad whose kid had mentioned going to six flags on a school day.


    ¡°Now don¡¯t go getting your hopes up for that. Murder squad already popped lucky guy number one last night, no issue. Probably wrap this one up pretty quick.¡±


    ¡°But the defense will be looking out now,¡± Whisper said mostly to himself.


    ¡°You might be right, Whisper,¡± Backdraft said like the kid was now talking about Santa Claus. ¡°Keep the dream alive and your chambers loaded, as they say.¡±


    After that, the ride got quiet again. Luke squeezed the MP5 and watched the same metroplex he¡¯d spent his entire life in float by, but now under a different sun. In the silence and the white noise scenery, his mind wandered. He wondered if all his jobs would be here, and thought that it would be darkly funny if even when projected through dimensions and beyond his own flesh, he still couldn¡¯t move out of the fucking area.


    As his thoughts wandered to Kibbles and attempts to theorize his fate, that old train of thought sounded its horn and he could only watch it smash through.


    Rory had been right about people like Kibbles. This place really did drive them insane. Hell, she might have been right about half the people in the car with them. Maybe they just had gotten to the point where experience masked insanity. He saw that a lot in the construction biz.


    He was thinking about her dancing, and wondering who with, when another alarm tone screamed from Daytona¡¯s phone. This time, it kept screaming.


    ¡°Oh shit.¡± He flipped it open and held it to his ear. ¡°Hello?¡±


    Backdraft was still as death and watched Daytona with wide evil eyes. The car got breathlessly quiet, and Luke could hear someone half yelling on the other side of the call, dishing out their words like measured punches.


    ¡°Ok. Yeah. West? Ok.¡± Daytona sounded like the guy was telling him how to defuse a bomb. Backdraft leaned in hungrily, but kept quiet.


    ¡°Ok. Understood. And¡ª Hello?. Shit.¡± Daytona slapped the phone closed and got into the fast lane.


    ¡°What¡ª¡± was all Backdraft got out.


    ¡°Shit went south!¡± Daytona squealed. ¡°Point squad knocked out. Targets coming down 183. Gold Camry. Oh Seven. Wants us to park at some bank and wait. Call the moment we see them and follow behind. Far behind.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯re gonna fucking hit them,¡± Backdraft said like revealing a secret.


    ¡°No, they said just to follow. Other teams dropping in¡ª¡±


    ¡°Fuck that! TP is being a bitch cause I called him out at the Quarterly!¡±


    ¡°Look man,¡± Daytona said in a suddenly measured tone. ¡°I''m just following him. Ok? You know the fucking game by now.¡±


    Backdraft didn¡¯t even look over, and not a single hair on him moved for a good five seconds, until,


    ¡°We¡¯ll see.¡±

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Crash Dummies

    Disposable fiends


    The ride got dead silent again. They flew down the highway, then they exited and flew down the access road. Whisper got out a pair of ballistic sunglasses and put them on. Daytona shot him a look, which he ignored and handed Luke a pair. Backdraft unloaded the tube on his shockwave and loaded it with something else. Hamstar made a lot of noise in the backseat, and when Luke looked back, he had his Glock strapped down to the seat next to him with the seat belt and was doing a brass check on a Mini UZI.


    Luke checked the chamber on his MP5K, and brass winked back at him. A few seconds later, they were pulling into the right turn yield lane at the end of an overpass. There was a wide grass lot between them and the bank to their right, and ahead of them, far out beyond the flat highway-sliced landscape, downtown loomed on the horizon.


    Daytona brought the SUV to a stop.


    ¡°It¡¯s fucking yield. You¡¯re clear,¡± Backdraft said while looking to the left past Daytona.


    ¡°Holy shit, Dead ahead,¡± Daytona said at almost a whisper. Backdraft cocked his head and froze. Luke followed their gaze, and felt his stomach turn.


    There in the far right lane of the intersecting street, dead across from them, waiting in the turn lane onto the access road, was a gold Camry.


    ¡°Get him! He¡¯s boxed in!¡± Backdraft hissed.


    Daytona looked up and down the street.


    ¡°Where¡¯s his¡ª¡±


    The Camry whipped around the truck in front of it, drove up on to the triangle-shaped median, and floored it onto the access road.


    ¡°Fucking go!¡± Backdraft yelled, and Daytona did. Luke grabbed onto the overhead handle with both hands as they flew over two medians to the sounds of horns and squealing brakes and their own roaring motor and followed the Camry down the access road towards the highway.


    The access road stretched for half a mile before blending into the highway. It dipped down to eject some side street into a warehouse district then rose up again to meet the highway atop its 40ft elevation, which in this landscape might as well have been a mountain. The Camry matched every bit of speed they gained, and it felt like they weren¡¯t as much heading for something with intent and purpose as completing an arc of kinetic energy, like a thing thrown, rising and falling without control.


    Backdraft yelled at Daytona the entire time, cursing him, the vehicle, the road, and everything else for their apparent inability to gain on the fucking target. Luke¡¯s adrenaline had skyrocketed, but wavered at the top of its own arc, and he felt that if they kept fifty feet away from the car for much longer, he would crash and fall asleep.


    He never got the chance. As the Camry merged onto the highway, Hamstar started screaming.


    "Hey! Hey! God dammit, they¡¯re right¡ª¡±


    Luke turned around, and it felt like it took ages. First, the highway traffic, then the backseat, and Hamstar raising his Uzi at the driver¡¯s side window, still screaming. Luke even had time to notice that the barrell wasn¡¯t quite pointing at the window, but, for some reason, wasn¡¯t able to get the words out. He just stared as Hamstar unloaded half the mag into the fiberglass cupholders before the vertical recoil brought his barrel up to the glass.


    Luke''s right ear stopped working instantly and a ringing dominated the other. Shell casings struck the back of his seat, then, as the gun came up, flew past his face and bounced off his sunglasses. As Hamstar fired the last rounds through the dissolving, whitening window, one lone casing caught Luke right in the forehead and left a tiny burn that he only felt in a distant, intangible way.


    It took about one second for Hamstar to empty his mag, and as he sat there, shaking the empty gun with its open smoking bolt out the window, Luke finally saw what he had been shooting at.


    It was a white sedan. Chevy Impala. Cowcatcher on the front. Like an auctioned police surplus. Black tint. And Luke realized, at the last moment, that the front bumper was lined up just behind their rear tire.


    The words pit maneuver formed in his mind, but never found air. The next instant, the world was spinning like an old metal merry-go-round that his cousin had deviously spun as fast as he could.Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    ¡°Relax!¡± Daytona shouted, muffled, as they were airborne, sunlight zipping across the car like someone was moving a flashlight. Down there Luke assumed Daytona was in shock or something, but higher-up Luke knew it was standard procedure. Going limp in a crash was the best way to avoid injury. Not that it would matter much this time.


    The crash was the loudest thing Luke had ever heard, even given the battered state of his ear drums after Hamstar¡¯s mag dump. Glass flew everywhere like some truckload of it had dropped from the sky. The way Daytona and Backdraft flopped around, dead weight, twisted Luke¡¯s stomach worse than the crash, which in his adrenaline gorged state, felt like a distant event with no connection to him at all, like watching a bag blown in the wind.


    Whisper, however, had apparently taken his seat belt off at some point, and while they had been spinning before the crash, had thumped around in the cabin with sounds that no human body should be able to generate by impact alone, until the barrier wall stopped them and he slammed so fast into the door that he seemed to teleport, one moment floating behind the passenger seat, the next just a crumpled quasi human thing melded into the door, hanging halfway out the shattered angled window, calm blue sky behind him.


    In the stillness after the crash, the sudden ungodly silence, after somehow reflecting on his luck at having a mother who drilled seatbelt etiquette into his head at a young age, Luke tried to get a handle on their situation.


    The 4Runner had spun twice across the ramp then slid through a metal guardrail until a single section of cement barrier had stopped it cold. The front of the car came to a stop facing the highway, which merged with their lane just a few yards away, and the rear wheels had dropped off the road and down the grass slope, slanting the cabin upwards.


    Daytona and Backdraft stirred and fought with the airbags. Cars whooshed on the highway, a very suburban sound that reminded Luke of being stuck on the side of the road with a flat, and he suddenly panicked about being late to or completely absent from work. Out the broken windshield, a thin cloud rolled by across the blue. Hamstar was completely silent for the first time in the entire fucking ride, no shifting in his seat or humming or ice rattling in his drink, and it was all very peaceful.


    Until Luke looked out his window, and saw the car that had pit maneuvered them rocking to a stop just ten yards down the ramp. Despite Hamstar''s burst, there wasn¡¯t a scratch on it.


    ¡°Fucking¡ª¡± was all Backdraft got out. He had managed to get his shotgun up out of his lap, but the airbag was still draped over it. Daytona made a noise that might have been ¡°shit¡± and Luke had time to squeeze his fists in a reflex, and thus be reminded he still had the MP5 in his hands, before something flashed over the roof of the other car.


    The rounds went through Daytona and Backdraft first. Something wet struck Luke''s face and they flinched and jumped in his peripherals, then something made a sound like a drink spilling, but he kept his eyes on the flash, two Lukes now screaming internally in unison, as he raised the MP5 and pulled the trigger.


    The crash must have rocked him more than he realized. What had felt like a swift strong movement of his arms to bring the MP5 up to the window, had really only been a soft clenching of his shoulders, so his first ten rounds went out from between his knees, shredded the door, and sparked off the cement a few yards ahead of him. He never found out where the rest of the rounds went. The next moment, he was floating out in the black.


    It was a strange sensation. For a brief moment, up there Luke was alone, as if the extractor had slipped its grasp of him, and then there was that other him again, but his thoughts were frayed at the edges, missing their continuity, and he realized that the entire time before, even when the extractor had sped over parts, he had been able to follow the stream of thoughts in unbroken procession, where as now, suddenly, an entire cluster of memory was missing completely. His death, and whatever secrets the experience may have held, were untouchable by extractor, scraper, or Spirit.


    ¡°Imagine a door,¡± a harsh voice said to him, from inside his head. Down there Luke looked around.


    ¡°Stop looking around and do as I tell you. Imagine a door.¡±


    Down there Luke tried to push the question of where this voice was watching from out of his head, and do what he was told, but it took him a minute. Later he would find, to his frustration at the obviousness of it, that the voice had been watching him from inside his own mind, or at least from the filmy barely there surface layer of it, the same thin quasi-material membrane that allowed his Spirit to interface with the vibration of the Other.


    The door was simple, like the one that had brought him to his not-apartment hours before. He reached for the knob.


    ¡°Stop. You must understand that on the other side of this door, you will find the hallway in which you entered the apartment complex which led you to the box a little while ago. Do you understand?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°Go inside.¡±


    Inside, he found the hallway, and the memories of his last time their clashed with others, still clinging to him, of a time when this had all seemed a dream.


    ¡°Come here.¡± The voice was no longer in his head, but down the hall, and a bright green light dinged on above a door.


    Drudge was waiting for him at his desk, in an office that looked like a repurposed boiler room, pipes and exposed beams and all. He looked him in the eyes, with his forge glowing goggles, looking like something out of a Halloween store or cybergoth music video.


    ¡°Where did you wake up this morning?¡±


    And at that, the memory poured out, and a few moments later he was leaving again, with more mem than he had ever had in the Other, trying and failing to remember what the hell had happened in there beyond a few hazy images and the rough summary provided in the bead of mem Drudge had handed him.


    Eventually, as he flew toward the ball, he gave up.


    He had more pressing matters, namely, a bright ball of light with his name hidden somewhere inside it.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Debt and Balance

    Five and dime, freedom and servitude


    Time is the enemy of memory, Drudge would say, and Luke found painful evidence of that as he tried to recall that first day in the Hardworlds after it had been scraped from his mind. As his day in the Other progressed, the memories dissolved by the second, and after a while, he wasn¡¯t even sure he had ever been to the Hardworlds at all.


    Further proof; every time he dropped out of a bliss trip, he immediately resolved to never go for that fucking light again, but as time marched on, the memory of his disappointment decayed, and his hope for release grew, and there he was again.


    After the memories of that first job faded and he had spent half a day in the bliss den, his money was gone, so he floated back to Dr. X. There, however, he got some bad news.


    ¡°You already sold me today¡¯s Real.¡±


    He just stared at Dr. X, unable to believe all the contract signing and Hardworlding and Bliss trips had happened in under 24 hours, but the good doctor dutifully showed him a clip of the mem, his real Self hanging drywall and texting, and that was that.


    Then more bad news.


    ¡°I can¡¯t extract mem of your jobs in the Hardworlds. It¡¯s under contract. I¡¯d lose my lease.¡±


    Then, unexpectedly, a piece of advice.


    ¡°Kick the Bliss habit. Go to your boss and ask for help. He can keep you dropped into the Hardworlds for a few days and that should do it. Seen it happen before. Your problem is you need a few cycles to get the craving out of your system. Let your Spirit wake up for real a few times. That¡¯s what it really wants.¡±


    Luke nodded. Luke looked thoughtful. Luke left in a hurry.


    But before he could get out the door, Mr. O called him over.


    ¡°Hey Sleepy, come here for a second.¡±


    The extractor got all flaky, tried to jump over this little tidbit, but higher up Luke snapped at Dr. X.


    ¡°No. This is important. It¡¯s the main crux of the fucking ending. You want a story or not?¡±


    Reluctantly, the extractor slowed down. Mr. O stood before Luke at the counter, the peripherals clouded and hazy, other customers moving like ghostly shadows at the edges, maybe not even representing real Spirits at all. Mr. O leaned in and sighed.


    ¡°Sleepy, I know you got a new job, and to be honest, I hate to tell you this because I¡¯ve grown to like you, but the higher-ups have OK¡¯d you for a line of credit.¡±


    Luke stood there, trying to find the bad news.


    ¡°So, uh,¡±


    ¡°So, I know you¡¯re first instinct is gonna be to fly down to a bliss den and burn through it all, but let me give you a little advice, a better way forward.¡±


    ¡°Wait, so by line of credit you mean, like,¡±


    ¡°Go to your boss. Tell him you wanna buy the raw mem of your jobs. It should be fairly cheap for just the one. And ask him about buying a scraper license. That one¡¯s more expensive, and the rate might have jumped so your credit might not cover it, but that¡¯s really the one to get. You get one of those, you get to keep your whole unedited mem after each job. Of course, the faces will still be distorted but,¡±


    ¡°And then I can sell it to you right? You can¡¯t extract it directly, but you can buy the director¡¯s cut shit, right?¡±


    Mr. O looked uncomfortable.


    ¡°No, we can¡¯t take unedited mem of Hardworld Jobs. The Faces blurred aren¡¯t enough. If you wanted to sell us your Hardworld mem, the only way to do that is to sign over royalty rights to us and have your employer send them over, but that¡¯s¡ª¡±


    ¡°And I get a cut of that?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, but I¡¯m talking about the raw mem, so you can live through it again, get me?¡±


    But the Luke standing at the counter had no attachment to whatever Hardworld Luke had gotten up to on the job. His thoughts at that point had long since shifted to a glowing ball of light, floating in the black, promising the chance to wake up into a Luke greater than he could ever imagine.


    So, after a few nods, he asked,


    ¡°So, how much credit are we talking here?¡±


    Mr. O sighed, and broke it down for him.


    The extractor got flying again, and this time Luke let it go.


    Luke signed another contract, recorded, for the credit. Luke flew off to the Bliss den. Luke tried his very best to spend it all, but before he had maxed out, Car-Crash rang him on the communicator.


    ¡°Get to the ball and meet your ride over the Luminance tower.¡±


    Luke, more than a little bit frustrated that they still hadn¡¯t given him door or navigator access to the base, promised he would head right there, then went to buy more bliss, and found his pusher, Lounging Lizard, sitting in the mirror-backed dead-empty art-deco bar at the center of the swirling maze of ballrooms and dens and hotel pools, same place he always was, feedlights on his eyes and an infinity platter of food and drink on the rotating circular table in front of him, only this time, he refused to sell to Luke.


    ¡°No can do. You got a job on.¡±


    That same feeling of something massive and hidden, cities underground, seats of power floating in the black. It seemed that everyone had some kind of contract or agreement with everyone else, and the connections formed a web of clasped hands, keeping him boxed into a select few pathways.


    So, he floated to the ball, as angry as a Spirit could be, feeling like a failure. Somehow, though the memory of that first day in the Hardworlds had faded, something had remained, and a part of him had felt that he had been so close to waking up, to finding something real, to touching that light or something like it, that the fact that he now had to endure the next ridiculous phase of the dream was almost too much to handle.


    Here, Dr. X had to earn his pay. Luke had offered up only a select few jobs to the extractor, the ones he felt were needed to make the story, the ones he felt really had an effect on him, or at least the him that acted upon the limited stage he was willing to sell, and the rest he left Dr.X to weave around.


    Luckily, Dr. X was pretty good at it, for a snake.Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.


    The montage proceeded through scenes of Car-Crash summons and dropping in, visits to Drudge, visits to Dr. X, days in the bliss den, and all the days of the Real in between, perfectly preserved like high-definition diamonds in a churn of broken dusty plexiglass, and paused at a few choice turning points.


    The first, a chance meeting at the Bliss den, or so he had thought then. Though not so much a meeting as an observance, a stolen look. She had been whispering to some woman, or maybe talking to her at full volume but obscured by a privacy schema. Her appearance and style had been like a smart corporate woman from a nineties Jaguar commercial, but her eyes were there. Her face, though carved slightly, still vaguely catlike. Her smile, less devious raver girl, more upper management type who knows how to steal simple pleasures from the few and far between vacation days.


    For a moment, it seemed she saw him. But even through the infallible sight of the extractor, he couldn¡¯t be sure.


    In hindsight, he felt it was this significant moment that had caused the next. The extractor grazed over his bliss trips and Hardworld entry and exit and zeroed in on a conversation he had with Car-Crash immediately after leaving Drudge, in a strange moment of strength, when the Bliss cravings had not seeped in through the crumbling shell of his discarded Hardworld self, but the memory of Rory dispensing Bliss to that woman with a smile had.


    ¡°Hey, I think I¡¯m starting to get a feel for this. Can you drop me in again? I don¡¯t really do anything out there anymore, and I¡¯d really¡ª¡±


    ¡°No can do. Company policy. Can¡¯t have you in if you¡¯re not on a job. Besides, it may feel like you just walk through a door, but a lot of work goes into getting you in. Primers won¡¯t work overtime just cause you¡¯re bored.¡±


    And that was that. The extractor rambled over more bliss trips, more crash dummy drop-ins, dreamlike fragments of Luke loading a gun or running through a Wal mart or ramming his car into a parked cruiser, loose pieces of Hardworld mem, either too small to be under contract or possibly fabricated completely by Dr. X, and stopped again at another choice conversation, this one between him and Sammy Stovepipe after his first quarterly check in.


    ¡°She¡¯s fucking brutal man. I tagged along with M.B. when he went down to your buddy Dr. X to work out the finder¡¯s fee, and that bitch was there trying to get half. Don¡¯t even know how the fuck she got in. Dr. X sounded like he was ready to kill her.¡±


    Despite all the fantasies of putting Rory in a chokehold and dragging her into a Hardworld or slipping Bliss into her drink at the Allclub, Luke had a rough time keeping his temper locked down when Sammy called her a bitch. He looked out the window of the Ace tactical Allcity office and shook his head. Sammy missed his anger but picked up on his embarrassment.


    ¡°Hey, fuck it, man. I¡¯ve asked around, and that bitch got her claws in so many newborns it makes me sick. From the horror stories I¡¯ve heard, you¡¯re doing a hell of a lot better than most of them.¡±


    They spoke of the job, of the commonalities between their first days, the growing pains. Most of it was censored by the extractor, and their identities were distorted, but Luke hoped the main crux of it, for him, would shine through. For the first time since he woke up on that rooftop, he had a friend in the Otherworld.


    The extractor, however, seemed to have a different narrative in mind. It wove through time and plucked out the moment he bought his first Hardworld mem, clearly trying to make a link between the discussion of Rory and the next big step in his Hardworld career. Luke almost stormed out right there, but Dr. X toned down the jump a bit, and Luke hoped that future viewers would see through the charade anyway, so he let it play on.


    He had been standing in front of Drudge, still mostly free of the Bliss cravings, with the mem of his most recent drop still fresh in his mind, and his paycheck in hand.


    ¡°How much for the mem of my first day?¡±


    ¡°Already wired it to the good doctor,¡± Drudge said, his words dripping with contempt. Luke had signed that contract with Drudge to have the TV-safe versions of his Hardworld mem sent directly to Dr. X. After all the fees, it came out to a little more per day than selling his mem from the Real.


    ¡°Yeah, but I wanted a copy for myself. To look over.¡±


    ¡°You can get it from him.¡±


    Luke knew damn well that by the time he stepped foot inside Dr. X¡¯s, he would have no interest in doing anything but chasing that light. It was another manifestation of his imprisonment, his restraints, his servitude. Not only was he a slave to Bliss, a debtor to Dr. X, a wage slave to Ace, he was now shackled to other versions of himself. Step out, and the Bliss hound Luke blows any chance of studying the Hardworld mem, of getting better. Take a wrong step in the Hardworlds, and some other Luke runs off with his soul, until the spirit walkers come with their suppressed rifles and bills for their services balanced against his future pay. And he was sure there were some other Lukes he was forgetting about. Typical.


    But he wasn¡¯t about to say that shit. He refused to give Drudge the satisfaction.


    ¡°I want the raw mem, please.¡±


    Drudge said something into his hand and a woman with bright red hair and dressed like a fairy queen ready to give a Powerpoint presentation came in and escorted him to another room.


    ¡°Hi Bottle, I¡¯m Firefly. I understand you would like to purchase the raw mem of your first day?¡±


    He had expected her to give him some excuse, but she only laid out the rates, a flat price per hour with a modifier based on the security level of his role in the job. To his shock, he had more than enough to buy his first day outright. It was dispensed, at his request, as a CD in a special case, with a paper insert that said ¡°Bottle¡¯s first day¡± in black marker. He was given some other options, VHS, prism crystal, bead, custom object, and for a hefty fee they could make it a ¡°digital file¡± uploaded onto his personal Feed station or iPod or whatever else he had. Apparently doing so was high-level makery, but he had no intention of keeping his mem in another state of intangibility, even if he could afford the jaw-dropping price of Otherworld Hardware.


    As he stood there relishing the feeling of holding a piece of his best life in his hand, a feeling that was, for the moment, keeping the Bliss urges at bay, he remembered something else.


    ¡°How much is a scraper license?¡±


    She did her best not to laugh, but still let her smile take on an ¡°oh you poor thing¡± curve at the edges and around her eyes. When she told him the price, he asked about a payment plan and her laugh broke out.


    ¡°Oh, sorry. I thought you were joking.¡±


    He stormed out of the office and through himself down the chute that spat him out in the Allcity.


    For a moment, things stilled, the extractor slowed its pace, and Luke watched everything roll and bounce, and wondered for the first time in a while what the fuck he was doing.


    This is a world of whatever you want, right? So why am I letting some phantom named Car-Crash tell me what I can¡¯t do? Why does some HR bitch get to laugh at me? Fuck this dreamworld. I could probably get to the Hardworlds right now, if I just found the right door¡­


    But the desire to break into a more real world morphed into the same old desire to wake up, and in this place, at that time, that desire had a physical manifestation; a ball of bright warm light just out of reach.


    He found his way back to the Bliss den via a door in the base of Carnelian tower (he had been told that being on ¡°back door status¡± with the den was a sign of a true junkie by another denizen who had smiled like it was something to be proud of) and very quickly forgot all about his cd, until his funds ran dry and he was rummaging his pockets for something to offer up.


    ¡°I got this.¡±


    Lounging Lizard gawked at him.


    ¡°You give me that and we¡¯ll both be doing time, and I damn sure got more to lose than your junkie ass. Not that I could read it anyway. They lock that shit down for just this kind of jack-assery.¡±


    Lounging Lizard had dropped the fa?ade of respect at about the same time Luke started taking the back door to the place. He waved Luke off and the carpet drug Luke away from the corner booth like gravity had changed directions until Lizard was a distant spec and the curtain of an alcove fluttered into place.


    He sat down hard on a bean bag and looked up through the skylight at three non-stars frozen in the black, until his hand, almost on its own, reached into his pocket and pulled out the cd.


    He looked at the case and realized it was his only possession in this entire world. A world of boundless whatever, where people owned entire planets, so he had heard, and here he was in the archetypical form of a trap house holding a burned cd. It reminded him of something his mom always said, like a bad Disney character. It¡¯s whats inside that counts. Well, here he was, about as inside as you could get, burned out on drugs, with nothing to show for all his pain and gunplay.


    He opened the case and half expected it to be one of those effects where the inside was like a window to some other place, and you could move it around to see different parts of some other landscape, usually a fantasy forest or starfield or something, like the other location was transposed on this one, but invisible. Tacky mother fuckers in the Other loved that effect.


    Instead, inside was a regular burnable CD with a date scribbled on it in marker. The date of the job. A revelation jumped out of the handwriting. It was his own. That sent a shiver down his back. He took the CD out with the standard sensation of popping it off the center spoke, and for some reason turned it around to look at the readable side.


    Same old rays of rainbow on a mirror surface. Until, suddenly, it caught the light, and in an instinct, he turned it in his hand until the light flashed in his eyes.


    ¡°Rise and shine mother fucker! Training day!¡±

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - A Place for my Spirit

    Where am I myself


    Luke dreamed of the robbery a thousand times, and it was never the same. Sometimes he shot all three of the mother fuckers and the cops immediately threw him in prison for life. Sometimes his mom or his sister showed up and the robbers laughed and shot at them, and Luke would either shield them with his body or pick them up and try and escape, sometimes by flying. Other times he just got shot and died right there.


    Reviewing the memory of his first job, however, was completely unlike dreaming. Though, in a way, you could compare it to a lucid dream, (not that he had much experience with those at the time); He was transported to another place, had some control over that place, and the place seemed real beyond all possibility, despite the fact that he knew his ¡°real body¡± was somewhere else, and could even at times sense it. Not unlike having to take a piss in a dream, he felt the carpet of the Bliss den on his crossed legs if he focused enough to think about it. But like many things in the Other, the comparisons to a dream were more out of the thing being less unlike a dream than it was unlike the real world.


    But, the real glaring difference between the Hardworld mem and a dream, and even between it and the other sims and trips of the Otherworld, was that he had absolutely no power to change it.


    He could alter his awareness, control the flow of time, even step out of his body and fly around the room or SUV to get a different view, up to a certain point, but everything happened the exact same way every time.


    He learned later that the art of preserving mem, meaning not just storing it on a ¡°physical¡± object, but freezing it in a state that was immune to the natural human process of altering memory as its remembered, was a hefty feat that had changed the nature of the Otherworld. They called it one of the prime discoveries, or some shit. And the art of preserving mem of a Hardworld was not far behind.


    But, however unlike a dream it was, it had the same dreamlike ability to absorb him completely, and the extractor had to montage his obsessive exploration down to about a fifteen-second sequence, when in reality, he had been inside for hours.


    Until a voice broke through and brought him back to Other-reality.


    ¡°You¡¯re not keeping that mem in your fucking Bliss-Den cubby-hole are you?¡±


    It was Car-Crash, apparently broadcasting from his craft orbiting the Den. Luke, who had been analyzing why his arms had been so slow to raise his weapon at the pivotal moment, stopped still and tried to think of how to get out of his memory and back into his body. The CD hadn¡¯t even come with a leaflet!


    But, just the act of thinking about it was enough to drop him back into his non-body, lying there in his alcove.


    ¡°Where else would I keep it? It won¡¯t fit in my pocket.¡± Luke pondered this oversight for the first time. Shouldn¡¯t every object be pocket-sized? Was there a limit to how many hallucinated objects he could fit in there?


    ¡°In your personal realm.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m coming in.¡±


    ¡°Uh. Ok.¡±


    Car-Crash threw open the Curtain and stepped in. He held a martini glass and scowled at Luke with his posture.


    ¡°You been born six God damned months and you never made your own space? No wonder you¡¯re a fucking wastoid.¡±


    Luke just stared at him, so he shook his head and brought the glass up to his mask with a clink and drank. The ghostly images behind his fractured windshield face took up an absinthe hue.


    ¡°Hm. Damn, haven¡¯t had one of these in ages.¡± It was Concordia¡¯s signature drink.


    ¡°What do you mean my own space?¡± Luke was suddenly eager to get him the fuck out of here. It was like having a friend digging through your room, and you weren¡¯t sure how you were going to explain all the soiled bedsheets, and now that he was out of the Hardworld mem, he could smell the Bliss in the air.


    Car-Crash leaned against the wall and sipped some more.


    ¡°Most of the Otherworld is invisible. Hidden. Private, I mean. hidden in places you can¡¯t see. Little pockets. Not so big pockets. Goings on you could never even imagine. And some you wouldn¡¯t want to. All the shared places, the Ball and all the worlds attached to it, like this place for example, are really only a fraction of the Other. Tip of the iceberg. Feet under the curtains. Know why that is?¡±


    Luke stared.


    ¡°Cause when you make a place in this dimension, you get to make the rules. You become the prince of the pocket. Following me so far?¡±


    Luke looked around the room. Car-Crash nodded.


    ¡°Yeah, so the guys that made this dump thirty fucking years ago got to design all the rooms, but they also got to tell it that gravity here is non-negotiable and that you can¡¯t enter someone¡¯s little cubby unless they let you. They also have the standard boilerplate ban on physical pain. Principalities and Schema. They¡¯re what make the places and things in this place more than just ideas.¡±


    Luke was only half listening, and the extractor recreated the effect by muffling Car-Crashes words. He was mulling over the idea that if the rules of this place meant you could only enter an alcove with permission, like he had given Car-Crash moments before, then when he had seen Rory laying down that woman, it was because she had wanted him to.If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    ¡°But, this place is linked, or on the map, tagged or whatever they call it now. Meaning you can fly out that window and get to the Ball and a hundred other places. If you can see it in the sky, you can get to it, which means it¡¯s in the same space, which means the Maker that put it there allowed it to be linked. Understand?¡±


    Luke nodded, and thought about Rory watching him fly into this place every single fucking time he had ever done it.


    ¡°So what you want to do, is make a place that¡¯s not linked to anything else. A place that you can only get to with your thoughts. Got it?¡±


    Luke¡¯s thoughts and Car-Crashes words met up for the first time. A place where she couldn¡¯t see him. A place she could never find.


    ¡°How the fuck do I do that?¡± Luke said.


    ¡°Don¡¯t they give you newborns info on that from the feed now? Thought that was law.¡±


    Luke vaguely recalled his first encounter with the feed, while Rory watched over his shoulder, and dismissing something about realms and rights of the spirit and safety practices, so he just stared at Car-Crash, who shook his head into his drink again.


    ¡°Jesus. Look, go out into the black. Fly into it as far as you can go, and imagine it squeezing shut behind you. Imagine you are cut off from everything in all directions. You¡¯ll know when you got it. It¡¯ll feel right. Like you really are alone in this fucking world for the first time in your life. Hard to explain, but you¡¯ll see. Then, and only then, start making. Oh, and when you make the door, visualize that it¡¯s a door only you can create. That only you can open. Just be smart about the whole thing. There are guys out there that make fortunes finding technicalities in that shit. Not that you¡¯ll have much worth all that trouble.¡±


    Luke nodded. Luke listened. Luke focused on the idea of a place of his own, and tried to use it to sweep out thoughts of Rory. Somehow, in the fantasy of himself standing in a mansion floating in the black, she swung open the door and walked in, rainbow clothes and all.


    ¡°Oh, one last thing.¡± Car-Crash had been heading for the door. ¡°You¡¯ll probably find out that you can hire people to make your realm for you, and even to secure it, but don¡¯t go for that shit. The best security is when only one guy has the key.¡±


    By then, Luke¡¯s fantasy of a place of his own had already been soiled. He saw her climbing through windows and rappelling down through the skylight.


    ¡°All right come on. You¡¯re already fucking late,¡± Car-Crash barked, his helpful, strangely soft tone gone in a flash.


    The Extractor sped up again as Luke followed him out to his craft and back to the floating office. It breezed through the next job, a ten-hour long stakeout at a rundown apartment complex capped off with Luke leading two cruisers and a helicopter on a chase in a stolen cable van, and lingered on his walk down the Hall after seeing Drudge. He stood in front of Firefly¡¯s office and rolled the situation around in his head.


    Here, momentarily beyond the pull of that Bliss light, he could remember clearly the sensation of power he had felt while moving through the Hardworld mem before Car-Crash came and got him. In a world where memory was just as hazy and impermanent as the foundations, it had been an addicting experience of control. He could easily max out his credit and burn through his paycheck buying more.


    But, he could also remember the distinct pain of laying in the Bliss den, writhing in one of those booths, with not a single cent to spare, trying to summon the light by will, but only managing to manifest some little candle flame or something.


    Defiantly, office Luke decided that it was a fitting fate for Junkie Luke, and tracked down Firefly and bought as much mem as he could, which unfortunately, didn¡¯t actually max him out.


    ¡°It takes a bit to secure the mem. This is all we have ready. Unfortunately, they won¡¯t let you put in orders anymore. Come back in a few hours and the queue should have thinned out a bit.¡±


    He nodded at Firefly, exchanged smiles, and got the fuck out. He knew he wouldn¡¯t be coming back until he was dead broke in the Bliss den and Car-Crash was collecting him for his next job, and he realized, just before junkie Luke took the reins, that the latter always conveniently happened after the former.


    The extractor picked up the rhythm again, and days flew by like drumbeats in the background music. Luke bounced between office, Hardworlds, and bliss den, stockpiling mem but never touching it. Most days, the Bliss cravings hit him the moment he hit the black, and the CDs stayed in their case, untouched.


    Until, one day, he stood there in line for Drudge, trying to keep the Hardworld mem aloft by his own will, like a kid bouncing one of those dollar store silicone balls in the air, who stumbles into an overgrown part of the park and knows it¡¯s just a matter of time.


    It had been a fun job. He had been sent on his own to draw the cops on the east side, and he remembered the feeling of flying down the expressway, thinking to himself that if he wanted to, he could just keep driving forever and squeeze everything he¡¯d ever wanted out of this world, and if that failed, he could slip out of that Luke and try on another and another till he got it right.


    He wanted that feeling again so fucking bad, but he knew that the moment he stepped out of that office, that other Luke would drag his ass to the Bliss den, and it would be lost forever. He hated that motherfucker. He hated the guys standing in his way in line. He hated Drudge. He hated the whole goddamned swarm of chuckle fucks flying over the ball like ants on a dropped jawbreaker. He wanted so badly to get somewhere¡­


    The extractor was absolutely forbidden from extracting any mem related to his realm, so just for good measure it cut off a little early. It got the gist of Luke¡¯s interaction with Drudge, his defiant maxing out his line of credit on every piece of mem they would sell him, even paying the extra fees to jump ahead in the processing queue, until his CD case was stuffed with them, and he took off into the black, and the extractor shuddered.


    But two details about his first trip to his realm were so important to the story, that Luke let Dr. X include them indirectly.


    One, after he had found that true isolation and broken down in tears at the overwhelming experience of being alone in a world that responded to his thought, of the total absence of any barrier between mind and reality, and when he had the form of his realm down and was testing his power over it, he placed a schema in it, a powerful iron rule, attempted as a joke at first, that changed the course of his spiritual existence.


    While in his realm, he would be free of his desire for Bliss. While in his realm, he could think of the light, of the flying, of the den, without anything but a neutral reflection, and he was free to dive into his Hardworld mem undisturbed. Dr. X tactically included this detail via a wholly constructed scene of Luke standing on a balcony that didn¡¯t exist anywhere in his real Realm and smiling smugly at a glowing blisslight floating a few yards before his face.


    The second detail came before the first, and he almost didn¡¯t let Dr.X see it, but decided that on the off chance it could help some other junkie get free, he should give it up.


    As he had been flying into the black, seeking out that sensation of isolation Car-Crash had told him to look for, he felt the blisslight floating in the black, somewhere out of sight. But this time, he was sure that it was chasing him.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Pieces of Me

    Which me are you again?


    ¡°Where the fuck have you been?¡± Car-Crash¡¯s voice boomed in his ears.


    ¡°In my, uh, zone thing. Why¡ª¡±


    ¡°Dumb ass, we can¡¯t reach you in there unless you set up a communicator link.¡±


    ¡°What? I didn¡¯t take the thing out!¡±


    How the fuck would he take the comms out? Go digging in his head for the little liquid mercury bead? He had bigger fish to fry at the time. Like spending days diving through every molecule of mem from the Hardworlds and trying to forget all about Bliss and a bitch.


    ¡°Doesn¡¯t matter. Next time you go in, give me a call out. That¡¯ll set up the link.¡± Car-Crash¡¯s voice softened. ¡°Your loss anyway. Had some choice jobs up for grabs. Now it¡¯s back to siren slutting. You¡¯re on in five.¡±


    It was enough to make Luke want to fly off to the Bliss den that instant. He had been waiting ages for a slot on a guard or assault team, and now he had missed it digging through memories of lesser jobs. The fucking irony!


    ¡°Alright. I¡¯ll see you there.¡±


    He hitched a ride with some new hire in the back of Spoke¡¯s craft. The dude gawked out the window and asked Spoke moronic questions the whole god damned way. Luke wondered how long it had been since Sammy had picked him up off that rooftop, and what the fuck did he have to show for it?


    As he got ready to jump in the box, he dug through the hardworld mem, or at least the stains and negatives it had left in his mind, and tried to find something to use, something that would help him rock this job like a fucking superstar, but it was like shoveling sand with a pitchfork. It had all seemed so simple when he was digging through it in his Realm. How to shoot, how to drive, how he could have capped the target at least five times before, even on the jobs when he never saw him. But now, standing at the cliff¡¯s edge, all he could do was hope that other Luke on the other side would get something out of it.


    In a way, he did. As Hardworld Luke was laying on the ground, cops over him screaming for medical, he saw the extent to which he had missed the mark, could actually feel the vast abysm between him and the level of skill the other side had displayed in slipping the tail and drawing him and the other crash dummies into the police, before the black took everything and he was back in the office.


    But to the Luke dropping into the office, it seemed the revelations in his Realm had been simple delusions, that for all his pain and effort, he hadn¡¯t really gotten anywhere, like a cartoon character running in place, bunching up the carpet behind him or some shit. He had momentarily slipped the binds and clinging fabric of his new existence and leaped into some bright high morning sunlight, full of promise and possibility, like a freshly awoken alcoholic who hasn¡¯t gotten around to drinking yet, but he could no more stay up there than a fish could stop and take a nap on a cloud after breaking out of the ocean. The gravity of it all was too much, and it pulled him right back down.


    The extractor played out the physics of it again in montage. Luke resumed his three-pronged route, from office, to Dr.X, to bliss den, and back again, the Hardworlds becoming something less than a place he went than a thing he was made vaguely aware of for a few minutes a day, as he was unable to break out of the route, fly to his realm, and take any time remembering what he did there.


    Every time he got ready to fly out into the black, or summon the door to his realm, he found himself flying right back to the door that led to his alcove. Some part of his mind, apparently, didn¡¯t want him to kick the habit.


    It was enough to make him want to join that cult that handed out little mem packets around the Ball. The one that promised they could help converts find a way to die for good in the Otherworld.


    But something had changed. The realm was not completely forgotten. It showed itself in the form of the Luke who inhabited it, that Spirit who didn¡¯t give a shit about Bliss, or Rory, and held encyclopedic knowledge of the operations of a Hardworlder (up to a point), and who made himself known at times when Luke prime found himself anguished over the choice to return to the Bliss den or fly off into the black and try and escape that fucking light for good. Realm-Luke now added his voice to the chorus sounding off in Luke¡¯s head, and though Luke always chose the song of the Bliss-light, which took the form of his Self from the Real, promising it was the only way to wake up for good, Realm Luke did not go completely unheard.


    Now that there were so many god damned Lukes, (even the Luke in the office who only existed between the Hardworlds and Drudge saying ¡°All right, see you next time¡±) that he wondered if he could ever get them all together. Even if he did, they would probably kill each other. Maybe that was the solution. Some of the Lukes had to kill the others for any of them to make it.


    Here, Dr. X butted in, and Luke could feel his discomfort, though couldn¡¯t identify the cause of it, through the strange mind to mind connection of the extracting process.


    ¡°Might it be more streamlined, better for the narrative overall, if we cut out this period of anguish, and instead move your advancement to the ranks of skilled operator up to immediately after creating your realm? Possibly, include a training montage and a have you emerge determined, and show you landing your first kill immediately after? Of course, we would have to create a stand-in for the realm, but that wouldn¡¯t¡ª"


    ¡°You done?¡± Luke thought. There was a silence, and the extractor started up again, speeding through the days and weeks, looking for the turning point Luke was trying to guide it towards.Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.


    It came in the form of Car-Crash, which looking back from this strange vantage point, upper-Luke realized had more significance than he had then understood. God damn. The guy really had saved his life.


    ¡°This is for you. A token of appreciation from Ace Tactical, care of Constellation and its thorough research on asset retention,¡± Car-Crash said, dryly, as he caught Luke in the Hall between Drudge and the door.


    ¡°A fucking bonus, I hope,¡± Luke said, taking the envelope from Car-Crash. It was a postcard-sized manilla envelope with a bump in the middle. Car-Crash let out a fake sigh.


    ¡°Hope springs eternal. Of course, they probably have it bottled, capped off, and sold under a brand name by now.¡± He clapped Luke on the back in a strange show of affection that reminded Luke he hadn¡¯t had any physical contact outside of getting tackled in the Hardworlds since Rory had disappeared.


    ¡°Hang it on your mantle in your Realm,¡± Car-Crash said over his shoulder as he turned a corner.


    Then he was gone, leaving Luke¡¯s section of the hallway dead silent, somehow broken off from the white noise of the rest of the office.


    He opened the envelope and dumped it into his hand. A thick cigar labeled ¡°Orion Robusto¡± rolled into his palm. The inside of the opened manilla flap said ¡°hold cigar here to light¡± in bright red sharpie. He considered dumping the whole thing in the fucking trash, but another Luke reminded him there might be a check or something inside, so he looked in the envelope first.


    Nothing but a strange mesh of bubble wrap. He couldn''t even get his hand in it.


    Oh. Cheesy mother fuckers.


    He held the cigar in his mouth and touched the manilla flap to the end, and sure enough both burst into flame. Luke puffed on it until a cherry glow reflected off the dark glass office faces and unlit fluorescents around him. The envelope burned to ash and left something else behind in his hand.


    A tiny metal pin, about the size of a mini post-it note, shaped and styled like a playing card, specifically a six of aces, pinned to a piece of cardstock, which in black, slightly ornate font, said,


    In recognition of six months of service with Hardworlder Operations.


    BOTTLE


    Play the cards you''re dealt. Shake the hand of Fate.


    Ace Tactical¡¯s motto had never sounded more like bad thrash metal lyrics out of context than they did at that moment. Other words bounced around in his head.


    ¡°Put it on your mantle in your realm.¡±


    Yeah. He would do that. If he could ever get there. Maybe he¡¯d put it in his alcove instead. On the windowsill. A constant reminder of everything he had thrown away. Six months¡ª


    Jesus fucking Christ. Six fucking months? How?


    His most recent drop in the Hardworlds, he had nearly evaded the cops in a stolen Mazda. Zipped towards a parking garage and taken a sharp turn at the alley behind it, flown over a curb and down a sloping grass lot towards another street. The cops had lost him and immediately swarmed the parking garage trying to close it off. He had felt so proud, so powerful, knowing that evading the fuzz was one of the required move sets for a front-line operator, until he heard the chopper in the sky and knew he was fucked.


    All that time, all those months, and he couldn¡¯t even lose the cops. The memory faded. He wouldn¡¯t be able to return to it for God knows how long. His last purchased mem was from a job¡­ he didn¡¯t even know how far back. He didn¡¯t know how many Hardworld hours he had in between, what multipliers they would use to rate them, how much his pay would be in that time, or even how long he had been inside.


    ¡°That¡¯s cause it¡¯s a dream, dumb ass.¡±


    He tried to believe it, reached out for that other him, hazily outlined in memory of the ¡°Real¡±, but felt nothing, no connection, no recognition. What did that other him know about bliss? About selling your memories and still coming out in debt?


    ¡°I know all about that, mother fucker.¡±


    The extractor had trouble with this kind of inner dialogue, or maybe Dr.X just didn¡¯t see any value in it, so the extraction focused on the mem of Luke swearing at the 6 on the pin, pulled it crystal clear, and drifted by the rest of his thoughts, doing little more than watching them lead down-there Luke back to the Bliss den, rendered his arrival there and the Bliss light in HD, and wiped to the next ¡°scene¡±, Luke floating around the Craft rack, staring out at the lights, trying desperately to wake himself up, sobbing.


    Then, for one beautiful moment, Dr. X and Luke got on the same page. As down-there Luke fell to pieces trying to find the common thread in all the hims and all the lives and all the days that he could grab onto and weave into some kind of lifeline, some way to move forward out of this intricately woven trap he had found himself in, the extractor rendered a montage that, for the first time, Luke thought was perfectly suited for the story.


    It was a collage of Lukes, locked in their respective paths, destroying each other¡¯s future. Hardworld Luke couldn¡¯t bear to think of the Otherworld, where addict Luke fiended and seethed, so he couldn¡¯t keep a lock on his Spirit enough to really excel on the job. After the job, office-Luke knew he should go straight to his realm before the Bliss cravings woke up, but he couldn¡¯t shake the fear that he didn¡¯t have enough Hardworld mem stashed away, that he would gather all his experiences and leap and still fail, which for him was worse than anything, so he got snagged up by Bliss addict luke, who dragged him out into the black until he dissolved completely, and then of course, as every other Luke could agree, destroyed everything with his god damned addiction, which for him wasn¡¯t an addiction but just the sensible desire to wake up into the Real world, which was probably similar but not identical to the one inhabited by so-called Real-Luke, and which he would be able to do if all the other Lukes weren¡¯t so obsessed with being a big shot in the Hardworlds or getting enough success to flaunt it in front of Rory, who didn¡¯t even god damned exist, you idiots.


    So as all the Lukes pushed and pulled against each other like gears faced the wrong way, down-there Luke sobbed into the black, and absentmindedly reached into his pocket.


    He felt the square form of the cardstock, and the words flashed up in memory. Six months of service.


    His snarling groan died inches from his face in the pseudo vacuum, but the extractor captured it for eternity. He threw the fucking card overhand toward some black space between a pair of un-stars and watched it fly, spinning, like one of those bullet-discs fired in animes he had watched as a kid.


    The shape was what tipped him off. He reached back in his pocket, and felt the cardstock with the metal pin stuck to it. As the spinning thing caught some stray beam of light, it flashed in rainbow. He had thrown one of his god damned CDs.


    As down-there Luke took off after it, higher up Luke reflected that the contents of his pockets were intention-activated like everything else in the Other, which meant some part of him had meant to throw the CD. He smiled. He laughed. Down-there Luke cursed and flew, but the CD seemed to accelerate. He was suddenly overcome with the idea that the only way to catch it was to summon something in front of it. The next moment, it all became obvious.


    He watched the stars melt away into darkness, waited for that distinctive sensation of absolute isolation to wash over him like cold carbonated water, then brought his realm into view, right in the path of the disc.


    The extractor panned away before it did, sweeping towards the black, panning some more, and capturing the disappearing stars, one of which twinkled suspiciously like a Bliss light.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Job Security

    Justified termination


    In a way, Bliss had been a double-edged sword, financially speaking. On the one end, it had been a monetary black whole as long as he was using it. But in those moments when he was free of the urge, he had absolutely nothing else to spend his mem on. Other Hardworlders, he learned, lived very lavish lifestyles, usually involving sex or over-the-top surrealist sims, things as alien to the Hardworlds as possible.


    Luke could only think of one thing to buy besides Bliss. His own Hardworld mem. So, he had amassed a large archive of it when he visited his realm for the second time. And this time, he was determined to commit it to memory, Car-Crash and missed calls be damned.


    The thing about Hardworld mem, is that while you¡¯re in the memory of one self, it¡¯s nearly impossible to remember the other ones, unless you¡¯ve ¡°experienced¡± them in the Other. Like writing down or acting out your dreams might make them easier to recall the next time you have one. But while in the Other, it was near impossible to tell how much your memory would carry over to that other you, that Hardworld Self, and all Luke had to go on was the fact that he had spent a week inside last time, replaying the same single mem of his first job, which had been just enough to let his next Hardworld Self remember it as some kind of reoccurring dream. So just to be sure, Luke didn¡¯t leave his realm for nearly a month.


    It felt idiotic to break the sanctity of this fragile magical place by summoning a land line to Car-Crash in it, so he didn¡¯t make the call until he was back on the Ball, floating over the sprawling gardens and orb-pools of some Barron¡¯s estate.


    ¡°You dumb son of a bitch. They were about to put out a missing persons to the fucking Saviors, but I told them you were in your Realm having a moment because of some family death in the Real. I assume you were in your Realm?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. I still got a job?¡±


    ¡°Yeah mother fucker, you still got a job. You¡¯re on a first and final, but you still got a job. I was able to convince them to use your sick days and leave time, but that ran out last Tuesday.¡±


    ¡°Damn that¡¯s crazy. I didn¡¯t even know they gave sick days.¡±


    ¡°You didn¡¯t read the fucking pamphlet HR sent you home with?¡± Car-Crash¡¯s voice was back to its playful ribbing.


    ¡°Nah, I got distracted staring at Stephanie¡¯s tits, so I ate it by accident.¡±


    Car-Crash cackled. Stephanie was the busty blonde HR manager who asked Luke once a month if his work environment was ¡°non-inclusive, clique-ish, or making him feel other-personed¡±. He was ninety-percent sure she made her tits unnaturally large via some Otherworld magic as a private joke. He could swear he had seen them change sizes mid-meeting once.


    ¡°Well, long story short, you¡¯ve been moved to floater status. Pun intended.¡±


    ¡°Sounds like the shit. When¡¯s my next drop?¡±


    ¡°Lucky for you, right now,¡± Car-Crash laughed. ¡°Be sure to make a splash.¡±


    It was a run-out-the-clock job. Target was in open negotiations with the guys paying Hardworlders to have him killed. He had absconded from a Simmaker farm with a vital piece of mem after royalty payouts proved less than fair, from his point of view. He had funds for his defense, but the majority of the bill was footed by an interested third party, another Sim manufacturer who wanted him to have some room at the bargaining table so he could exit his employment with some IP rights, which of course they would buy from him cheap while at the same time putting him to work in a content mill.


    His previous employers, part of a conglomerate themselves, had a set budget to spend trying to extract him from the Hardworld. After that ran out, which it would if Ace tactical failed to drop him out but kept their deposit, they would have to attempt negotiations before any more funds were approved. Car-Crash explained it all to him on the ride over, pleasantly surprised as always that Luke showed actual interest in the dryer aspects of the game.


    ¡°So, what about when he drops out, won''t they both try and get their hands on him?¡±


    ¡°Fuck I forgot how green you were. You don¡¯t know about the Sect?¡±


    ¡°Oh.¡± Luke had almost forgotten about the shadowy organization that he knew only as ¡°the guys who catch Spirits when they fall out of the Hardworlds.¡±


    ¡°So the Sect will side with his employer?¡±


    ¡°They won¡¯t side with shit. They¡¯ll hand him over to the Saviors who will have their own trial to see if he really stole anything or was just getting what he was owed.¡±


    ¡°Are the trials fair?¡±


    ¡°Nothings fair in this world, but the Saviors don¡¯t give a shit about either party. They only care about punishing the crime enough to dissuade anyone who¡¯s thinking about doing some serious damage, and not throwing their weight around so much it tarnishes their image. Trials rarely happen in shit like this anyway. Odds are they¡¯ll settle out of court. Sim makers like that got to have skeletons in their closet, and the last thing they want is the Saviors poking around in their vaults for evidence.¡±


    Luke asked about ten more questions, and by the time they parted ways at the box, he still didn¡¯t have a good grasp of the machinations of it all, but the conversation had served its purpose. He hadn¡¯t thought of Bliss once, and the Otherworld once again felt like a sprawling living thing, driving away his desire to wake up from it, or his belief that he even could.You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.


    He paused, in the darkened alley in front of his apartment door, and summoned every bit of Hardworld mem he could think of. All those other Lukes, so close and real and easily manipulated in his Realm, now fled the beam of his perception like bugs scurrying away from a flashlight.


    But he caught some of them by the ankle, dragged them into view, dissected them for their better parts, and moved on to the next.


    The extractor represented the process as flashes of his other Selfs. A Luke taking an offensive driving course as part of a failed attempt at joining law enforcement. Another obsessively studying gunsmithing, another rock climbing or running wind sprints. Little pieces of his other hims that had seemed conveniently matched to his Spirits occupation, as if the blind unreal Lukes knew more than they let on, and had birthed themselves with abilities meant just for him.


    He gathered them up, sifted them from the pile of other qualities, alcoholism, 60-hour work weeks and 20 hour a week gaming sessions, all the long gaps between gym visits filled with beer and fast food. Like a puzzle, angling the reflections of countless hims until he had a picture of one that he wanted. The idea that you could choose what kind of ¡®you¡¯ you dropped into had never seemed so tangible or real before that moment, fresh from his first real study of the variety of his Hardworld mem.


    He prayed to something that this new him, which felt worryingly popsicle-stick-and-glue-like at the moment, would hold together, then pushed open the door.


    The room took him, the time lapsed in that familiar way, and he dropped pieces of this idealized Luke as he stumbled through it all, the pieces falling into the misty flowing quicksand carpet at his feet, whisked away to some other reality, maybe back to the Lukes he had borrowed them from, until at last he lay down to sleep, clutching memories of shooting ranges and obstacle course gym sessions.


    This time, his phone alarm awoke him well before his supervisor pulled up out front. He had a long, hard talk with his Self, asked him ¡°What did you do yesterday?¡± and once the Self had poured out its heart and soul, not just the events but where they stood in a long line of seemingly unending going-nowhereness, Spirit Luke responded, calmly and slowly,


    ¡°Ok, here¡¯s, what I did yesterday.¡±


    By the time his front door sang with the impact of a work boot kicking it halfway off the frame, Spirit Luke was firmly in the driver¡¯s seat.


    ¡°I¡¯m coming.¡±


    He opened the door and found some frowning kid in full denim and a crisp t-shirt for some revival thrash band Luke didn¡¯t recognize.


    He didn¡¯t move.


    ¡°You gonna show me to the wagon, or?¡±


    Eventually, the kid fucked off and pretended to lead Luke to a Chevy Blazer waiting on the curb, which Luke had spotted from across the lot as the obvious dummy wagon.


    ¡°How¡¯s he feeling?¡± the driver asked the kid, pointlessly, as Luke got in.


    ¡°I¡¯m doing fucking fine. Ready to troll some cops till they blast me back to the ball,¡± Luke said. The driver eyed him suspiciously then nodded and they were on their way. Luke was given a phone and 40 caliber Glock 22. He didn¡¯t bother to tell them he already had a Beretta 92x with a custom trigger and 18 rounds on his hip that had been having a love affair with his hand for ten years.


    The Driver went by Pit Viper, or just Viper. The denim-drenched wannabe thrasher who had met Luke at the door told Luke his name was Deimize, but Viper reminded him that since he hadn¡¯t made a kill yet, his handle was Spatula. The lanky guy in the passenger seat who looked like stretched-out Lemmy Kilmister went by Gutterslug and the razorburn faced dude in the back in the Verizon store uniform was G-fool. It was immediately obvious that only Viper and Gutterslug had ever made a kill, even without knowing Hardworlder naming conventions, and from the looks of it that might have been years ago. (Luke felt the name ¡°Bottle¡± hung upon him like an old shirt that tugged under the armpits.)


    Not that he had to deal with them for much longer after that. They were barely two hours into the job when Luke found himself the last living person in a car full of corpses.


    The order had come through on the radio, which this squad played through the car speakers so Gutterslug wouldn¡¯t have to waste his breath telling the team what command told him.


    ¡°Black Mercedes. Dark tint. Follow and observe. You will be relieved when they hit 20.¡±


    It had been a failed swipe. Defense was defaulting to the tried and true method of moving to a safe house out in the sticks. Probably in the middle of a field with a long driveway coming off some forgotten farm road, with every millimeter of Horizon unobscured in all directions.


    ¡°Well, they ain''t going for nonchalant, that¡¯s for dam sure,¡± Gutterslug muttered when the black mirror-polished sedan slid into the passing lane far ahead of them with its blinker going.


    ¡°Yep. That things gotta be armored,¡± Viper said sadly.


    Nonchalant or not, the black sedan suddenly vanished. In a panic, Viper swerved through traffic at thirty above the speed limit, while the rest of the team swiveled their heads around like squirrels. Luke tried to stifle a laugh as Viper put the pedal down. If they didn¡¯t see the tail before, they sure as shit did now.


    ¡°There!¡± Gutterslug actually pointed.


    ¡°Ok! Put your fucking finger down!¡± Viper snarled.


    Luke pressed his lips together hard and exhaled a fragment of the laugh out his nostrils. The sedan was cruising through a turn at the intersection right in front of them. The fact that Gutterslug had thought his observation was needed added another layer of hilarity to the whole thing. Luke looked around the car and tried to gauge if he was really the only one that could tell the mother fuckers wanted to be followed.


    ¡°All right. All right,¡± Viper said in a relieved voice, like someone who had found a dog they had been told to watch, a dog who up until that point could have likely been flattened under a front tire somewhere, and it all clicked. Luke was riding around with a bunch of probation cases. While he had simply not shown up, he had a slithering suspicion that his teammates actions while actually on the job had been what put them in the shit house.


    He decided, suddenly, to stoke the flames.


    ¡°Is he gonna turn up there? Take the back way to 20?¡±


    ¡°What fucking back way?¡± Gutterslug muttered without looking back.


    ¡°Shit!¡±


    Viper accelerated roughly. His fear of losing the target had jumped the shark and outpaced the part of his brain trying to remember if there really was a back way to 20.


    The sedan appeared suddenly, not even 50 yards ahead, coming out from behind a pickup truck, speeding over the turn lane and sliding into the parking lot of a gas station at the edge of an industrial zone of sheet metal warehouses and chain link yards.


    ¡°Shit!¡±


    Viper turned out and floored it across the street. A horn rang out that made Spatula jump half out of his seat. Some hatchback in the oncoming lane.


    ¡°Fuck you bitch! Stupid fucking¡ª¡± Viper said, ducking down at the wheel, as if hiding his body from the sedan would somehow salvage the OP falling to pieces around him.


    The sedan disappeared again, this time down the alley behind the gas station. Viper weaved through the pumps and cars, swearing the whole time. They turned behind the store and the sedan was nowhere in sight, and he swore some more.


    Half a second later, everything got loud.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - A Quick Death in Texas

    It can happen like that


    The sedan must have taken a right turn behind the gas station and made a quick u turn in the small lot between the station and the little self-serve automatic car wash in the back. They had their rear bumper backed up to the dumpster, so any would be good Samaritans couldn¡¯t read the plate from the street, and everyone but the driver was standing with their door ajar, aiming between the jam and the frame, when Viper pulled around into the alley.


    The sound of the glass breaking, of the rounds cracking through the air and ringing on the frame, Spatula screaming a guttural animal noise, Gutterslug¡¯s groan that became agonal breathing in an instant, and finally the crashing crushing noise of the vehicle swerving into the wooden fence and crashing halfway into someone¡¯s backyard before slamming to a crunching stop into a thick oak that had grown up the fence, all these noises were far louder than the gunfire.


    The guard team had short-barreled rifles with thick suppressors on the end. Half of them probably firing subs. The noise was thus dampened and bounced around by the walls and alley, ending up nearly unidentifiable as gunfire. Probably buy them a few minutes before the cops got called. Huh. Defense don¡¯t want to deal with the law either.


    Luke thought all this as he dropped down to the floorboard, which he started to do the moment the front bumper of the sedan peeked out around the wall as they came down the alley. The memory of that first job gave him no illusions about his chances at returning fire. Still, it felt like it took ages for him to hit the floor, and most of the team was dead by the time he did.


    There was a still moment of silence. Then, he heard the voice clear as day.


    ¡°Check them.¡±


    Luke looked around frantically, then spotted Spatulas head hanging above him. The guy had actually been wearing his seat belt. Luke reached up, got a good handful of brain matter and other gore off the seat, and splattered it on the side of his head then closed his eyes three quarters of the way.


    He heard footsteps on the concrete and remembered something else. A fragment of training. He took his phone out of his pocket and slid it across the carpet.


    Just in time. The passenger side center door opened at his feet. Dimly, through hazy lashes, he saw a Carhart jacket and jeans, face mask and ballistic glasses, ball cap, suppressed MCX with nothing but irons. He also saw his Glock, bounced out of the seat pouch, inches from his hand in a pool of gore. Somehow, he stopped himself from reaching for it right there, and played the corpse real well.


    ¡°Shit. Toss me a faraday bag!¡±


    Luke ventured to open his eyes a milimeter more. The SUV had crashed at an angle, and he couldn¡¯t quite see the Mercedes, but he had line of sight on two gunmen, probably each standing next to a door. One tossed something overhand as he stepped up, then checked both ways down the alley. Carhart guy caught it and flicked it open. A thick bag just big enough for a laptop. He stuffed Luke¡¯s phone in it and snapped it closed, all with one hand without taking his other finger off the trigger, then shoved it inside his jacket and got both hands on his rifle again.


    ¡°Snagged a phone. Let¡¯s go!¡± He aimed both ways down the alley, then booked it back towards the car. The other two gunmen covered him, then disappeared from Luke¡¯s view and he heard car doors slam.


    That was his cue.


    He reached up and grabbed the door handle behind him, eased it open, and slinked out, planting his feet behind the tire. He heard the Mercedes roll over gravel or glass, and knew the driver and copilot would be checking down the alley one last time before they pulled out. In their mind, the SUV was already cleared.


    He accepted that he was probably about to get gunned down for no good reason, and sprinted out around the back end of the SUV.


    The car had moved about four feet and straightened up a bit. Sure enough, the driver and passenger had their heads swiveled either direction down the alley. It seemed like it took them years to notice him, and in that time he realized he had absolutely no plan of action. He was running at an armored car with a pistol, and all of his enemies were inside.


    ¡°Fuck it. Nothing to lose. Let¡¯s just play it by ear.¡±


    Time slowed, and all Lukes smiled. The adrenaline had made it feel slow motion at the time, the repeated replays in his realm had committed it all to deeply textured memory, and the extractor rendered it slowly, savoring and studying every detail.


    The driver saw him first. Hands went down to his lap. Yelled something. Copilot looked over, put one hand up on the driver¡¯s chest without looking away from Luke, their eyes locked, Luke smiled, and felt a bit of brain matter bounce off his face from the impact of his sprinting stride. He was already clear of the SUV, almost to the front of the sedan. He considered running to the driver¡¯s side, an instinct caused by the driver¡¯s scared expression, screaming vulnerability, until he heard the passenger door crack open.This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.


    A slight pivot in his stride. The Berretta gliding up through the air. The copilot, to his credit, sliding up out of the seat and behind the door as fast as pressurized steam, and the suppressor moving between the door and frame just as fast.


    Luke fired off one round at it, and the flash and the noise made him realize just how quiet the other gunfire had been. 9mm Gold Dot casing flying through the air, catching the sun. Sudden white-grey smear on the suppressor, a hole in the center, sparks on the door, the copilot flinching, just a millisecond, before shouldering back into his stance and bringing the rifle into position, aimed right at Luke, head height.


    But Luke hadn¡¯t been head height for over a quarter of a second. He had already started his next move, dropped down, half sliding half bear crawling over the last yard of concrete to bring himself around the front of the car, and there was his target, plain as day, close enough to see how he had tied his laces.


    Luke put a round through the top of his foot, one through the ankle, one through the shin, then bounced up and commenced move two.


    He swung around the passenger door and started firing. His first round caught the falling copilot in the neck. The second got him in the head. The third almost blew the drivers forearm apart, leaving blood and gore and a clenched fist on the steering wheel. The fourth smacked into the window behind him, but the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth all met flesh; shoulder, neck, jaw, and brain.


    Something shifted in his peripherals, that foggy area outside his tunnelvision. The three passengers in the backseat. The far passenger threw the center rider down in the seat and put himself between Luke and the VIP. Two things happened simultaneously, forcing Luke¡¯s hand, and ultimately, doomed them.


    The far passenger opened up with his short AR, and the guy in the near, passenger side back seat opened the door and began to get out.


    Luke grabbed the inside passenger door frame with his left hand and swung his entire body weight into the back door as it opened. Not only did he get clear of the doorway as a burst of fire cracked out through the passenger seat, ripping the headrest to shreds and ricocheting off the passenger door window, but Luke also shattered the escaping gunmans arm with the door, slammed his head in the frame, and felt the crunch of bone vibrate through the door right into his shoulder. His smile widened.


    Using the sudden impact as a bounce, he swung himself back into the passenger door frame as the back door he had just used as a human mouse trap went white from the desperate fire of the guard inside. The moment his berretta cleared the t-post, he opened fire. The first round went wide, bouncing off the inside of the back windshield, but Luke easily corrected his fire. From his position, he was able to use the swinging back door as a kind of transparent bullet resistant shield, and despite the white circles, he could see clear enough to line up his next shots.


    Luke¡¯s Beretta, which was pushed so far into the car that the shell casings bounced off the closed sunroof, was under half a foot away from backseat-guard¡¯s head. The guard took two through the face before door guy was finished crumpling.


    But crumpling aint dying. Before Luke could even think about aiming at the target, door guy shot up to his feet and brough his rifle around.


    With a thunk that, give then status of his eardrums, Luke may have imagined, the suppressor struck the top of the car door. Lukes arms went to work like pistons. His left hand shot out and grabbed the suppressor in a vice grip, while the other pumped the Beretta back up to his chest, so that the last two rounds in his 92x were fired from right under door guy¡¯s chin. The bullets caught door guy in the front teeth and eyeball, and the rounds expanded somewhere in his brain and blasted out the back of his head. He hit his chin on the door frame on the way down, and the slide on Luke¡¯s Beretta locked back, smoking.


    Silence. Ringing. Wet dripping noises. Gunsmoke and iron mixed with dumpster fumes. He stood there, his grin trying to rip his mouth off his face, until he saw something move in the back seat.


    The target, struggling to push the dead weight of 250 pounds of guard, plates, and gear off of him. Luke reached under his holster, pulled his spare mag out and reloaded his pistol. As the guy struggled, he reached in the passenger side and dropped the seat forward.


    ¡°I got it,¡± Luke said, and pulled the dead man by the belt down off of the target and to the floorboards.


    The target was a twenty something guy with a weird little twirly moustache and eyes like a shocked rabbit. The extractor blurred his face, but up there Luke would never forget it. Down there Luke laughed at him, and the poor bastard tried to work some words out.


    ¡°Wait. So what¡ª¡±


    That was it. Luke put five rounds through his face and emptied the rest into his torso for good measure. Some of the rounds zipped off into the seats and he realized the guy had been wearing a chest plate under his soft armor.


    More silence. More ringing.


    Luke stood up and looked around. It felt like no one even knew he existed. Cars kept going by on the road. There were no sirens, and he wondered for a moment why the cops hadn¡¯t showed up yet, till he realized it had only been about twenty seconds since he started shooting.


    Slowly, methodically, he got to work. He dropped his pistol on the seat. He closed the doors. He dragged the driver out of the seat and left two on the concrete outside and didn¡¯t even look at the other two corpses in the back seat as he put it in drive, and left the lot at 15mph.


    It was the greatest drive of his life. Not even the adrenal dump could bring him down. In half an hour, he was flying down the George Bush turnpike, a swarm of glittering lights behind him, helicopter overhead, screaming at the top of his lungs with all the windows down and the big blue Texas sky flying by, like an endless plasma ocean full of white cotton clouds for icebergs. He let them catch him on a mixmaster, a hundred feet up in the air, a single concrete branch ready to break off into the sky. He shot one of the short-barreled Ars at a cloud, and the cops cut him down in an instant. He died looking at that big magical sky, so that when he dropped back into the Allcity, he was falling backwards towards the ground, with big cloudcrafts and cloud towers floating by overhead.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Mr. M.O.A.

    Shot placement is king


    His reception after the job, initially, was less than congratulatory.


    ¡°Where the fuck are you?¡± Car-Crash said on the comm line as Luke floated down toward the Allworld Superhighway, like a great band around the equator where massive rolling crafts meshed and broke apart in impromptu parties, tournaments, and orgies.


    ¡°Above the big highway. Why¡¯d yall cut me lose?¡± He noticed that this was the only time he had dropped out of a job into anywhere else but the office.


    ¡°No one cut you lose. The screamers lost track of you. Looks like you skipped the box, somehow.¡±


    ¡°I what?¡±


    ¡°Hold up. I see you.¡±


    On the car ride over, Car-Crash took the scenic route, explaining to Luke that he had, somehow, probably by holding so tightly to his previous Hardworld mem before stepping into the box, partially primed a Self, and after explaining to Luke what that meant, explained why it was a problem.


    ¡°The box drops you into a premade Self that the Spiritualists prepare for you and the Speakers have a line on. When you fuck with the Self by making edits the way you did, sometimes they lose track of it. Which is embarrassing for them. They ain¡¯t exactly the Sect.¡±


    Car-Crash¡¯s voice had a smile in it by the end, and it was at that point that Luke realized that Car-Crash hadn¡¯t found out how the job had ended yet, probably because the scribes were still inside trying to confirm one of the bodies being carted off that highway ramp was the target. He relished dropping the bomb.


    ¡°Wait till they find out who killed the target.¡±


    Car-Crash wheeled on him, and for an instant two human eyes broke the surface of the murky blood-glass mask and stared at Luke with ecstatic surprise.


    ¡°You are full of fucking shit!¡±


    But soon Luke was in front of Drudge again, this time with Car-crash standing by, having pushed him to the front of the line, and his Hardworlding star began its meteoric rise, though down there Luke didn¡¯t know it.


    Drudge handed Luke a card, an Ace of spades of course, with the spade in the center made of half a centimeter thick dull metal.


    ¡°Take this down the hall to Bleedsire.¡±


    Car-Crash cackled and the other guys in the line whistled and clapped and offered congratulations as Luke walked out of the office.


    ¡°Hasn¡¯t been a kill card handed out in that office in years,¡± Car-Crash said. ¡°Do you mind?¡± He reached out a gloved hand, the leather sliced and bleeding and glittering with tempered glass, and Luke handed him the card.


    Car-Crash pressed his thumb to the spade, which fluoresced like molten lead caught in sunlight, or motor oil in a puddle, and a few seconds later he handed it back to Luke.


    ¡°Jesus. With a pistol. Ran empty too. It¡¯s a good omen, you know. Especially for your first kill.¡±


    Car-Crash leaned in when he said it and put a hand on his back, as if reminding him of a religious mystery they had both been initiated into. It was Luke¡¯s first brush with the unexpectedly superstitious mythology of Hardworlders. Once again, he sensed something massive underneath it all, and the fear mixed with awe and surprise left him silent.


    Luke handed the Card to Bleedsire, who barely brushed his finger over the ace, then nodded and touched it to the desktop, on which a light blinked from red to green.


    ¡°You may keep that.¡± He handed Luke back the card and waved his hand over his desk. A large book, like the kind used to sign into a hotel in an old noir movie or keep track of decades worth of horse bets appeared, open, on the desktop.


    ¡°Are you ready to choose a name?¡±


    Luke was stunned. Why hadn¡¯t he thought of this?


    ¡°Uh,¡±


    Bleedsire waved again and the book vanished.


    ¡°No rush. Come see me when you¡¯ve made up your mind. Keep in mind the boards don¡¯t allow duplicates unless a name has been retired. Nowadays it''s common to use a number, or combine two¡ª¡±


    ¡°Wait.¡± Luke held his hand in the air, still high off the rush of victory. Drudge had grumbled and complained about Luke¡¯s ¡°running off¡± before the mem could be scraped, and the already deteriorated quality of the mem, but for Luke, the mem of that job was fresher than any he had stored in his realm, which now seemed like cobbled together story-in-pictures slideshows compared to the vivid living dream of the kill.


    He felt he could do anything, and if the job had proved one thing to him, it was that sometimes it¡¯s better to just go for something than walking around it trying to plan it out.This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    He started speaking before he had the name in mind, but he knew it would come to him.


    ¡°Mr.,¡±


    A pause. Car-Crash snorted. Bleedsire stared like Luke was some vagrant he was paid too little to deal with. Then it hit him.


    ¡°M.O.A.¡±


    Car-Crash stopped chuckling. Another pause, and then he jerked his head towards Bleedsire and put both hands on the desk.


    ¡°No way that¡¯s not fucking taken.¡±


    Bleedsire had already brought back the book and fanned his hand over the pages, which shifted in the light without the pages turning.


    ¡°No. It¡¯s not.¡±


    Car-Crash cackled. ¡°Another good Omen! First fucking try. You got no idea how lucky you are. Took me ages to get Car-Crash, and I only got it cause the last guy got retired by force in the big one.¡±


    The extractor went back over it, replacing the name with five different alternates, then let the mem roll.


    Car-Crash had taken Luke out for a celebratory drink, and it was the first time Luke had seen him without his mask. The face was so ill-suited to the personality he had suspected it was another mask itself. The bar was all marble and mother of pearl and shaped like a big Oyster mushroom jutting off the side of a water and coral tower facing the permanent sunset to the west. Every bit of dishware and chrome-rimmed decoration reflected the orange, and Luke felt like he was in some nineties perfume ad that had gone heavy on the CG and avant-garde-ness.


    It was about the last place he expected Car-Crash to take him, but the drinks and food were beyond reproach. Luke had never experienced this kind of subtle hunger before. Not the pseudo stomach rumbling brought on by the floating clouds of burger smoke that wafted off Rays or something, but like a flower that opened up just for a moment, just long enough for each bite and sip to register with something physical, then closed again, allowing him to savor the sunset on a spiritual level.


    Somewhere, beyond the sun, hidden under the cocktail glasses, humming under Car-Crash¡¯s words and ringing in Luke¡¯s ears when he tried to follow the conversation, was Bliss. This is my world, it told him, all of these things you see are crafted from my essence, like wooden houses and paper doors and crisp checks all spawn from the pure seed. Arent you tired of reflections? Don¡¯t you want to touch something pure?


    But there was a greater magnet now, a stronger pull, another way to wake up. He had no desire to wake into the ¡°real him¡±, whatever that was, some predestined version of himself, sliding into it like a marble into a groove, he wanted to fly, he wanted to drop into the Hardworlds in a Luke with no past and no future, and the possibilities drug his mind down into distracted fantasy.


    In short, he was beginning to forget about bliss, which would have been astonishing to Otherworld Luke, if he had ever taken any time to really think about it.


    Car-Crash pulled him aside as they left, waving him into his craft, which this time was a matte orange craft like a stretched-out Rolls Royce Phantom, as opposed to the crumpled collage of wrecked cars he flew around in while in his Hardworlder mask.


    ¡°I can see you¡¯re distracted, but let me give you the run down before you fuck off back to that light,¡± he said, sadly.


    The run down was that Luke was now a fully vested employee of Ace Tactical, and as such some policy changes were in order. From now on, he would have to wear a mask when going to and from the HQ. He would need to buy or make his own craft and fly into work himself, and as of the next job, he would be placed in charge of his own street cleaner squad, attached to another bled Operator who would act as his driver and contact. In short, he would be the Backdraft/Viper of his own team.


    ¡°And here. Got you a gift.¡±


    It was a CD, marked in black marker ¡°Mr. MOA¡¯s first kill¡±.


    ¡°That¡¯s the unedited full mem, not the sparkled up highlight they give in those cards.¡±


    ¡°Thanks. Guess I owe you some overtime.¡±


    ¡°You don¡¯t owe me shit. I¡¯m the auxiliary Supervisor. Means I handle the new hires and the floaters. Your new supervisor is probably gonna be either Tenpound or Diesel Drip. Which reminds me. Just so you know, you¡¯re not supposed to prime a Self without the O.K. from your Sup, and they usually don¡¯t like letting the peons fuck with the mechanics like that, but try and press them to let you do it. Just don¡¯t go overboard with it, and let me know so I can put in a good word.¡±


    ¡°I honestly have no idea how I did it. I was just thinking about the other jobs when I got in the box, and¡ª¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s the gist of it yeah. You remember things about your Self and the Hardworlds make the memories real. The real trick is picturing things that never happened to any of your Selfs and getting the Hardworlds to turn those memories into reality.¡±


    Luke stared at the side of Car-Crashes head while his mind went wild. Create a custom me. Like making a new character in an RPG. Is that how the pros did it?


    ¡°But anyway, if they say no, I say fuck them and do it anyway. Just use the box and be subtle about it, and make sure you drop out into the office when you¡¯re done so they don¡¯t catch on. Might want to practice using the Dreamworlds to come back, instead of dropping out with a bullet every time.¡±


    ¡°The what?¡±


    Car-Crash chuckled.


    ¡°There¡¯s a lot Ace Tactical won''t tell you till you¡¯ve kissed enough ass to rise in the ranks. Dreamworlds are like the Realm of the Self. Any state of unconsciousness, the Spirit defaults to like a Lucid dream. Like a slice of the Other in the Hardworlds. You can use it to train, run through scenarios, and most importantly, leave the Hardworlds. Just make sure you prime your Self as an experienced Lucid dreamer. You can drop out in the dreamworlds if you¡¯re not careful.¡±


    Luke became immediately obsessed. A new facet of the Hardworld/Otherworld dynamic he had thought he had a handle on. It itched in his mind, deeply.


    ¡°So, it¡¯s just like dreaming? How do I use a dream to get back?¡±


    ¡°You go in by waking up right? Just leave by going out. You walk through the dreamworlds till you forget all about your Self, then just walk out into the Other.¡±


    ¡°That works?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, it¡¯s how most real operators do it. But don¡¯t imagine it¡¯s as easy to do as it is to describe. But practice enough, and you¡¯ll get it. The real trick is walking into the Hardworlds the other way.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°One thing at a time. Just look into it.¡±


    They had reached the edge of the black without Luke noticing.


    ¡°Where¡ª¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re going into your fucking Realm immediately. Got it?¡±


    Luke nodded. A warm sensation lay over his chest, while a cold one fluttered under his brain. On the one hand, Car-Crash cared enough to try and help him, but on the other, he was terrified he wasn¡¯t worth the trouble.


    ¡°Thanks. I¡¯ll,¡±


    He got quiet. Words dissolved in his head before they had a chance to form sentences. He felt the two sensations merge and bubble like rolling warm water behind his throat, and just below his tear ducts.


    ¡°Don¡¯t mention it. I¡¯ve seen too many good Hardworlders get fucked by the Other. If you ever think about running at that Bliss light again, give me a ring.¡±


    Luke nodded, and tried to work up the courage to face Car-Crash, who saved him the hassle by doing the second nicest thing anyone had ever done for him.


    ¡°All right, fuck off.¡±


    He kicked Luke in the back and sent him flying into the void. In a few heartbeats, Luke felt alone again.


    A breath later, he was back in his Realm, his new CD clutched like the keys to the kingdom.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Dreamfable

    Do your dreams follow you?


    Luke had been told, by addicts, by the twins, and even by Rory, once, in that warm melted period of time which in memory was like a mushed misshapen cartoon-character ice cream pop, having all the right features but with the borders between them ruined and useless, a period which the extractor had, using the power of narrative and bullshitting, crafted into a distinct chain of events, that memory did not work exactly the same for any two people.


    Some had perfect memory, which you would think was an extractor''s dream, but really they liked some wiggle room. To bullshit. Others remembered in black and white, or naturally lost all the faces, which made them ideal Hardworld reporters, or remembered only in an informational way, unable to render their memories as images without extreme work from an extractor.


    Which also meant that the experience of being extracted was not the same for any two people. Many relived the memories and forgot they were memories at all, experiencing them as vivid present reality. These poor bastards were fodder for the extractor, probably ideal candidates for Nightmare or Paradise, but also had to be watched carefuly by the good Dr. so that they didn¡¯t distort the memory by playing through it differently the second time around.


    For Luke, it was third person. He could sit, perched above, and watch himself run through the memories below, which had a few interesting consequences. First, he could, like a director, yell cut and stop the extractor dead in its tracks. He could also communicate with Dr. X while the mem was playing, giving hard lines on what to pull and what to leave the hell alone. And, of course, it meant he could see himself, which for Luke was excruciating. All throughout the extraction he tried to avoid it. Theres nothing so painful as watching yourself suffer for your own stupidity.


    The experience reminded him of something he had heard, something Rory or an addict or one of the twins had said while discussing a brutal session with an extractor, a fragment of a song lyric.


    ¡°When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how should I begin, to spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?¡±


    There was a story around it, he remembered. A Spirit, seated in the extractor, selling his last mem for a hit of Bliss, had said it to the Operator of the extractor, and like a magic spell it had reversed the process, and the addict was able to draw out all the memories of the good Dr., and thus not only became wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, but also took the place of the Dr, so that now the real one was bopping around some Bliss den, telling his story to anyone who could catch him between hits.


    Yeah, it was definitely an addict that had told him that shit. Still, it stuck with him, and now as the extractor turned into the final lap, up there Luke wondered how his story would be received. Would they get it? Would they take it and run? Would it help them burn the whole fucking shit show down? And how should he presume?


    Up there Luke snapped back to it, knowing that they were getting to the heart of it all, the final turning point, and he wanted that lab coat wearing son of a bitch to get it right.


    Down there Luke dropped into the Feed and searched ¡°dreamworlds¡± and found an unexpectedly straightforward answer. Most info on Hardworlding, especially the play-by-play speeches narrating a job after the fact, smacked of embellished bullshit or misrepresentations of third-hand hearsay. But the Dreamworlds were basically concrete knowledge, their definition simple and succinct.


    ¡°The dreams of the self, entered in a Lucid state. When the Hardworlder puts enough mental space between the waking world that came before, and the current location in the dreamworlds, return to the Otherworld is possible.¡±


    Of course there were a ton of theories and arguments over what you could do in the dreamworlds, what ¡°mental distance¡± meant, what the ramifications of a world gestated form a separate identity were, but for Luke, the info was straightforward. Like an engineer solving an equation while others argued over whether or not gravity was magic, he studied just enough for it to click in his mind, then he left the land of layman, and got to work.


    The first step was priming his Self as a lucid dreamer, which took some finagling. Since anything spiritual or even the least bit introspective was naturally foreign and incompatible with the Lukes in the Real and the Hardworlds, he had to get creative.


    Up there Luke observed, with a warm feeling of accomplishment, that the process of priming a Self, which now felt as natural as loading a gun, had at first felt like trying to pull one end of the bedsheet around while lying on the other. The Self was malleable up to a point, but once it got to doing things that Real Luke had never even thought to experience, it moved like something fossilized, cracking and groaning as Luke twisted it beyond its form.


    Most of the time, it was a girlfriend who got him into it. Handing him a copy of Stephen Laberge¡¯s book, texting him links to Reddit posts and old internet forums. And usually, post break up, the Self had been determined to master it just to spite her, but compelled to push forward out of amazement at what he had found.The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    The first time he tried to sleep himself back to the Other, he never gained lucidity, and the dreams throttled him around for an hour, nearly dropping him out completely, until a bright alarm tone rang through the dream and a voice commanded him to wake up and eat a bullet. This had the opposite effect, as it immediately made him lucid. His excitement would have woken him up, had he not taken a near-lethal dose of Propofol on top of a brutal adrenal dump. He moved through the dreamworlds, through fragmented pieces of the days driving routes and brightened versions of childhood video games, and got nowhere.


    In the end, Flashlight had to come get him. A big guy in a fantasy-style hooded cloak, face hidden, holding a blazing candle in one of those glass and metal boxes. Luke had half expected him to say ¡°who goes there?¡±, but he had only said ¡°All right man, stay on my ass. Lets go,¡± in a midwestern drone. And then, as they were halfway into their journey, ¡°Look at that shit,¡± pointing backward. Luke had turned back to see the subway tunnels they had come through had disappeared and they were now in some kind of catacomb. Finally, Flashlight pulled an old looney toon lever in the ground and Luke shot down through a trap door and out into the office.


    ¡°You wanna take the dreamworlds out, there¡¯s some training material at the kiosks,¡± Car-Crash had said harshly, sitting on Tenpound¡¯s desk, while the big guy looked on, uninterested posture under a mutilated gas mask.


    ¡°But next time Flashlight has to come drag you out, his rate is coming out of your check. I vouched for your promotion. Don¡¯t fuck me.¡±


    He had stomped out of the office, leaving Tenpound to grumble about Luke¡¯s decision on the job to take a hostage so soon. Halfway through the grilling, Car-Crash came on the communicator, all the acid gone from his voice.


    ¡°Just a heads up, that material at the kiosks should be avoided like the plague, unless you want your Dreamworlds to have an Ace Tactical flair for the rest of your life.¡±


    And that¡¯s how it was the rest of the time Luke spent at Ace. Car-Crash became his secret confidant, his guide through the corporate quagmire, his teacher. A role that suited him a million times better than supervisor ever did.


    The next time Luke slipped into the dreamworlds, which wasn¡¯t for a few jobs as he had a bad habit of ignoring police orders to drop weapons and show hands, he took his time exploring them, shaping them, studying them, before ever trying to find the way out. Finally, he dropped out through a ventilation shaft right into the office.


    It had seemed like an unimportant, almost arbitrary ability, and he realized after he did it that half the reason he had been so hell-bent on figuring it out was that Ace Tactical seemed to want to discourage him from trying, but when he got back to his realm and reviewed the freshly scraped mem, he saw there was a greater purpose to utilizing the dreamworlds.


    The memory was far more vivid, far more detailed, than it had been when he dropped out with a bullet. There were even little contextual details he had never thought to look for, like what the Self had been thinking, or more importantly, what the Spirit had been thinking. For the first time, he could actually get into his headspace while Hardworlding, find the flaws in his thinking, see the snares and blocks thrown up by the Self, and his training theories came that much closer to actual practice.


    Higher up Luke stressed to Dr. X, that this was the crux of his story, the importance of memory, the value of one¡¯s own experiences, that self-reflection, which was so alien to Luke anyway, was unfortunately the only path out of spiritual enslavement.


    Dr. X kinda sighed, kinda rolled his eyes, in tone, and warned Luke against laying it on too thick, and asked Luke, politelyish, if they were coming near the end any time soon.


    Luke indicated, with a flash of memory, the kind the brain does a million times a day, linking events separated by years, instantly, where the final pit stops and the ultimate destination of the story lay in relation to current down there Luke happenings. It was too quick for the extractor, but Dr. X got the ball rolling again, in the form of montage. This time Luke had to hand it to him. It was quite inspiring.


    Luke was given the greenest new hires in the game. His first job played out by the extractor as a compilation of apartment doors kicked in or unlocked with rakes or pry bars, bedrooms entered with guns drawn, panic and pleading, and even a few scared shitless room-mates, and finally, a question.


    ¡°What did you do yesterday?¡±


    When he had his four-headed-knot of scared, staring, stammering newbies loaded up in the 2004 Chevy Suburban, the first thing Luke did was take the head rest off his seat and lean it back. His driver was a guy named Slipdisk, or Slip, with three kills in his five-year career, but Luke rarely saw him. Luke spent the entire ride twisted around in the passenger seat, speaking to the troops.


    He told them things he had wished someone had told him his first day. He grilled them until they admitted all the new blood assumptions Luke knew they had stuck in their heads because he had had the same assumptions himself, then shook them until they had all fallen out, then he slowly, deliberately, repeatedly, placed the proper viewpoints in their head. He knew they would fall out at the first shot, but it didn¡¯t matter. He¡¯d put them right back in the next job until they fused to the brain matter.


    And he gave them challenges.


    ¡°If you can evade the cops, on foot, for ten minutes, Ill give you a quarter of my pay.¡±


    ¡°Get a headshot and Ill buy you a day pass to Silktopia¡±


    He found what they were good at and made them do something else. He even made them take turns driving, to Slip¡¯s very vocal disapproval. He studied their every move in his Realm, even bought their first days and showed them how to watch it.


    He poured every scrap of brain power or Spirit power or whatever it was into molding them into an independent strike team. And every day the order was the same.


    ¡°Stir some shit up on the east side.¡±


    ¡°We need the birds distracted. Get north of the belt and make some noise.¡±


    And then, another collage, this time of the gory ends of police chases and shootouts, his hard work blasted with 9mm on some street, in some lot, dying covered in tempered auto glass or bleeding out next to a day-old crumpled McDonalds cup.


    Until one day, when his team lay dying in four separate places, and Slip had already shed his mortal coil with an overdose of Fet, Luke slipped the cops with a radio in ear and set out to watch the real professionals work.


    It was an eye-opener, in the most gut-wrenching way.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Ace Tactical

    Fighting for bits of colored ribbon


    He had the operations radio in one ear and police scanner in the other. Even together, their was a big fucking puzzle piece missing. He was restricted from the Assault team comms, whatever they were, so he had to find the place where the cops and dispatch were indirectly pointing to.


    ¡°Stay clear of the rave factory.¡±


    ¡°Say again? Confirm? We¡¯re scraping downtown.¡±


    It was the other crash team, audibly angry that dispatch was telling them to stay away from the rave factory, whatever the fuck that was.


    ¡°Then get loud south of the belt.¡±


    ¡°Roger, god dammit.¡±


    The belt was code for I-30, which was to the south of downtown, which meant the rave factory wasn¡¯t. He checked google maps, and his memory, for something that looked like the cheesy fucks at dispatch might call it the rave factory.


    He found it. North side of the river, across from downtown, the old abandoned electric plant. Red brick and busted out windows. He could hear the 90s techno just looking at it.


    He took an indirect route but couldn¡¯t stop himself from speeding. He made rough plans on the way and chose the simplest of them. He stopped at the emptiest drive thru in a cluster of fast food restaurants, ordered a number one without looking at anything, ditched his Ace Tactical issued phone in the trash and dropped his Team-Lead-only radio in a faraday bag.


    Ten bubbling, melting minutes later, he was parked next to overgrown bushes covering the curb alongside a concrete building the color of soiled sand, a solar warehouse. A vent sticking out of the side reminded him of the entrance to Dr.X¡¯s shop. Across the street was a line of red brick and plywood windowed buildings he would have thought abandoned if not for all the cars parked around.


    Down the street, past a half-built parking garage and its surrounding sandlot with chainlink fences and dumpsters and work trucks, the old electric building glowered, looking like a dead animal that had got caught in a terrarium formed by a revitalization initiative. He sat and took sips of the drink, ignoring the burger, and waited for something to happen.


    After a while, he was sure he¡¯d fucked up. He shrugged, sighed, set down his drink and got out his drop out bag.


    Then something happened. A subtle movement, up on top of the electric building. Someone crawling, then coming down the side on a repel line. An instant later, an engine revved behind him. The noise bounced off the brick walls and sliced through the fenced in lots and sheet metal sheds. A V8 SUV. In his rear view it turned onto the street and sped away from him, then took the first turn. He didn¡¯t move, didn¡¯t breath, until it was out of sight, then threw the drink on the passenger seat and flipped the fastest bitch of his life.


    He followed the SUV without any plan, beyond not to be seen. It winded down streets, and for a moment he was sure he had lost it, until another engine roared from up on the raised bridge that brought the wide avenue from downtown onto the peninsula. Another car, speeding away from something. The SUV revved again, just on the other side of a building, and he turned into an alley.


    Guided by the engines, he found himself coming out from behind a white brick warehouse onto the widest expanse of bare cement this side of the AT&T stadium. Two massive dead empty parkinglots where some ancient dance halls or something had been demolished four decades ago, and only scattered shrubtrees stood to break up the roar of motors that shot over the landscape, like the chase was a show put on just for him.


    The SUV cut across one of the parking lots and bounced over the curb onto the clean empty lanes of 287. Luke followed on the streets, then pulled behind them. It was 2 pm on a Wednesday, and there wasn¡¯t a single car in the half-mile between him and the shrinking SUV.


    He let go of any thoughts of not being seen, and floored it. He took his radio out of the bag and switched it on.


    ¡°- route. Verify path.¡±


    ¡°Elis. Repeat, Ellis.¡±


    ¡°Confirm Ellis.¡±


    ¡°Ping defence.¡±


    ¡°Mercedes, sedan, Grey, 100 meters ahead. Confirmed lead. Jeep, forest green, alongside, suspect. Camry, white, alongside, suspect. Four Runner SUV, black, fifty meters behind team, suspect tail."


    It took Luke a second to realize the last vehicle was his own, which meant they thought he might be part of the defense team. Didn¡¯t they recognize their own vehicles? Wasn¡¯t there a GPS tracker in the car itself? It dawned on him that throwing the phone out but driving around in his Ace issued vehicle would have been a stupid move, if they had been more thorough.


    He thought about telling dispatch who he was, but decided against it. Fuck em. He was gonna see how the hit went down, and that was worth taking a bullet, fuck a reprimand.


    And the way it went down, was fucked. Once the target hit Northside, the main assault team went all out, but even going over 100 mph, they didn¡¯t catch them until the bridge. Luke watched from a quarter-mile away, downtown rising in flashing orange over the river on the horizon like a reclining priestly king observing a sacrificial dance, waiting for the obsidian and the beating heart.This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    Guns flashed and glass and crumpled car bodies caught the sunlight and the adrenaline spiking sounds skipping down the bridge and bouncing up from the river, changed on their way to his ears, like a story of murder given magical elements in the retelling.


    The vehicle¡¯s speeds dropped by half after the first impact, and Luke gained on them until he was close enough to see the SUV darting, expertly, between the cars and trucks that fell at it like meteors magnetized to its frame, bristling with guns firing as fast as they fucking could. A stray bullet skipped off and struck Luke¡¯s windshield. Others cracked next to him. Something thumped on the seat behind him, and the wind was suddenly inside at his side, but he hardly noticed.


    They made it, somehow, half a mile past the bridge, where the evening light cast long shadows on an intersection between brick industrial buildings, before the SUV made contact at last with the target sedan. Luke breathed a sigh of relief like he was right there in the seats with them. A heartbeat later the defense vehicles joined in the clusterfuck, and a machine gun opened up from the back of a box truck that had swerved into a lot ahead of them. Luke had no idea if they were with the defense or Ace Tactical, but they seemed to rain death indiscriminately.


    He pulled over next to a telephone pole to watch and the gunfire reached a peak, like it was all just one big fireworks show, then went silent. two other cars had swooped in without Luke noticing and gunned down the SUV crew and tossed a few grenades under the box truck, which had been with Ace after all.


    After a moment of silence and a reshuffling of the gunmen into the two fresh cars, the target sedan took off, its armored windows white as snow, with a car full of killers on either side.


    Luke put it in drive and rolled back onto the street like he had pulled over to have a smoke. He was watching the three-car caravan merge onto 35 just ahead of him when a voice came over his radio.


    ¡°Shows over crash cuck. Fuck off.¡±


    Luke tossed the radio back into the faraday bag and turned under the bridge toward the highway.


    The car radio clicked on and the voice came out of the speakers.


    ¡°Listen here you fucking Ass Tactical crash cart retard, back the fuck off or your boss is gonna have you sucking ass at the hiring kiosk seven days a week.¡±


    Luke had thought, briefly, that this was some kind of ploy by the defense team to get him to back off, but then rationality caught up with him. Why would they do that instead of just shoot him? Why would they have access to his supposedly encrypted radio channel and his cars system? Why would they threaten him with his boss¡ª


    Two cars appeared seemingly from nowhere and shot by him up the ramp. A sedan and a small rounded SUV. The vehicles screamed housewife grocery trip, but the driving said seasoned street racers.


    ¡°Goodbye,¡± the voice said. While Luke was gawking at the other cars, a third came along side his rear bumper and executed the cleanest pit maneuver he had ever seen.


    His 4 Runner rolled sideways, tumbled through the air, and the burning gold skyline whipped over itself in the windshield like some hidden god was throwing planet earth in a perfect spiral pass toward some unimaginable end zone with whatever team Luke had found himself opposite¡¯s name emblazoned on the astroturf.


    As he floated in the air, Luke sensed something amiss, and it wasn¡¯t just the shift in gravity.


    The SUV came to a crunching stop half hanging over the barrier. Luke shook off the airbag facepunch, undid the seatbelt, and crawled around in the glass drenched sideways cab until he found the drop out kit. Somewhere along the way, his hand radio slipped out of the faraday bag and started screaming at him.


    ¡°Get the fuck out now! Report immediately to your super¡ª¡±


    I¡¯m on it bro, he thought.


    He fell away into the black as the sounds of rushing cars blended into that distinctive Dreamworld hum, and a few minutes later Drudge was scowling at him.


    After the yelling, and the slow, measured explanation of his write up, with Car-Crash standing by, shaking his head, and holding his elbow with one hand in a way that Luke had come to know meant he was holding back a laugh, Luke asked to purchase the mem of the job, which started the yelling up again with gusto.


    But, in the end, probably due to some Union or corporate or unwritten rule or some shit, he was able to purchase the mem, though they promised it would be heavily edited.


    But it wasn¡¯t. At least not any more edited than any of his other Hardworld mem. And Luke had gotten the hang of spotting the Ace Tactical director¡¯s cuts and replacing them with his own mem the moment he got back to his realm, since his return trips through the Dreamworlds had preserved his Hardworld mem in a slightly more stable form, at least long enough for him to patch the holes.


    It was during this process of reviewing the mem that he realized the ramifications of what had happened on the inside.


    There had been two attack teams on the job. Ace tactical, and whoever had tried to roll him off the overpass. It would have been no big deal, sometimes teams went halfsies on a job, especially franchisees of Constellation, but their aggressive reaction to his presence, Tenpound¡¯s excessively violent grilling, even for him, and the way Drudge had paused his scrape to make a call the moment he realized what Luke had been up to after his team had dropped out, told him there was something else going on.


    The second playthrough of the mem got him the rest of the way, and a quick chat with Car-Crash confirmed it.


    ¡°Yep. You cracked the code. Ace Tactical is a certified dyed in the wool runner up. A crash team on steroids. But to be fair, that¡¯s by design.¡±


    They were in Car-Crash¡¯s realm, or at least a wing of it, like a giant had gotten a handful of Indonesian resort jungle and slapped it on the side of a gothic revival mansion. It was the first time Luke had ever been in someone else¡¯s Realm, and he could feel that someone near him, looking out from every object, talking in every sound, and he realized that someone was the real Car-Crash.


    It should have been flattering, but all he could think about was that not once had Rory ever even mentioned her realm. He tried to distract himself.


    ¡°But why?¡±


    ¡°Fodder makes a job easier, if you can afford it. And the other teams are usually Constellation¡¯s rising stars, so everyone walks away happy.¡±


    ¡°Besides the working stiffs at A.T..¡±


    ¡°Oh, they make out ok. Usually rejects who couldn¡¯t get a job with an actual team.¡±


    Car-Crash winked at Luke and passed him a drink.


    Luke looked out at the jungle mist dissolving into the black, and his mind wandered back to Rory.


    ¡°So, then, how does anyone get blooded?¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°If they never hit targets,--¡±


    ¡°Oh shit,¡± Car-Crash laughed and shook his head, swirling candy flavored Hookah smoke everywhere.


    ¡°You don¡¯t have to kill the target to get a name. They just kill someone who¡¯s blooded. Usually by ramming a car into them.¡± He chuckled.


    So, all the named guys Luke had rode with, all the ones he had looked up to and envied at the start, had probably never killed an actual target. Which meant,


    ¡°So is everyone pissed at me for killing a live mark?¡±


    ¡°You could say that.¡±


    ¡°But they gave me a fucking promotion the first time!¡±


    ¡°Yeah, because that was unexpected, and they figured that was the best way to lock you down. Figured you were just an addict gunning for a bigger payout. But if you make a habit of it, you¡¯ll get a target on your back.¡±


    ¡°I guess I should stop then huh?¡±


    They looked at each other for a full second before both broke out into laughter.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - The Boards

    Write my name in bullet holes


    While Ace Tactical¡¯s position as contracted professional pawn sacrificers explained a lot of weirdness at the office, there was one thing that itched at the back of Luke¡¯s mind, unresolved.


    ¡°Why not let A.T. get a kill once in a while? Throw a dog a bone? Probably wouldn¡¯t even have to pay them extra, the way these fucking contracts¡ª¡±


    ¡°No, trigger man always gets top payout, but that¡¯s not the issue,¡± Car-Crash said. ¡°They¡¯re worried about the boards.¡±


    After Luke had first gotten his name, Car-Crash had mentioned that Luke had earned his ¡°first slot on the boards¡± and encouraged him to go look it up. Luke had assumed they were some kind of Ace Tactical morale boosting tactic and quickly changed the subject.


    He had been very wrong.


    ¡°Jesus, no,¡± Car-Crash said, solemnly, after Luke admitted his misunderstanding. ¡°The Boards are one of the great traditions. Every job is posted, in some fashion, on the boards.¡±


    ¡°Posted how?¡±


    ¡°Well, you got the team names, the name of the Hardworlder that made the kill, and a second slot for honorable mention, or best sizzle.¡±


    ¡°Sizzle?¡±


    ¡°Uh, like a sizzle reel, I think is the origin. Best move basically. Like one time I was on there for hotwiring a Police Bearcat. Something extraordinary usually besides the kill.¡±


    ¡°So, Constellation wants their guys on the boards. Why? Isn¡¯t it just Hardworlders who care about it?¡±


    At that, Car-Crash got all solemn again, and spoke in that tone of someone who had seen something beautiful tarnished.


    ¡°Wish that it were, be better that way. But at the end of the day, the boards are data, and all data will be assigned a price, eventually.¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    Car-Crash sighed and rolled into a position that let him talk at the hazy void-horizon while dipping one hand in the flowing crystal stream that ran among the rocks and soft grass and lilies.


    ¡°The boards are a live log of all the jobs going at any given time. I mean, of course there are some black jobs not posted, I¡¯m sure, but a good analysis of the boards can tell you who¡¯s getting jobs, who¡¯s winning them, and who¡¯s not. Long story short, they¡¯re used to determine prices.¡±


    ¡°So, Constellation gets their dudes on the boards, and they can charge a higher fee, but what about A.T.?¡±


    But Luke knew the answer before he even got the words out. No wonder he could barely afford his own mem while other Hardworlders were driving luxury crafts and tearing up the resort worlds.


    ¡°A.T. gets the jobs and pay Constellation assigns them. Crash teams are a necessity, but you want to keep them compartmentalized from your main squad for opsec. They¡¯re a shell team. Staffed by rejects and addicts who won¡¯t be believed if they go running their mouths, and won¡¯t make it on another team if they jump ship anyway.¡±


    Car-Crashed raised one dripping hand, letting the water catch the dreamy sunlight in micro starbursts of rainbow, and then, for some reason, crossed himself.The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.


    Then he turned on Luke.


    ¡°Which is why you gotta get the fuck away from Ace Tactical.¡±


    Luke¡¯s first question was going to be, how, but another one jumped in front.


    ¡°What about you?¡±


    Car-Crash smiled, and there was pain and laughter in it.


    ¡°Oh, I¡¯m a special case. Wanted to be a Hardworlder ever since I knew what it was. But every gunfight I¡¯ve ever been in has gone completely tits up. So, at the moment, having fallen through various filters into the silt bed that is Ace Tactical, I¡¯ve had a sort of personal come to Jesus moment. Realized my skills lie elsewhere. Now I¡¯m just trying to figure out how best to use them before I give A.T. the finger.¡±


    Luke rolled that around, imagined Car-Crash dropping his pistol or missing. Something clicked, and he smiled.


    ¡°Is that why you chose car crash? Did you get your first kill in a, uh, vehicular fashion?¡±


    ¡°We can fawn over that story another time. Right now, let¡¯s discuss how you¡¯re going to get out of dodge.¡±


    ¡°Ok. How?¡±


    ¡°By getting your name on those boards as much as possible.¡±


    It was Luke¡¯s turn to look out at the horizon.


    ¡°Oh, bro, easy.¡±


    Car-Crash cackled, and the extractor shot off like the sound was a gunshot. Had this been a movie, here would have been a good spot to queue up whatever song the montage would be playing against, and Luke sensed that Dr. X had something equally cheesy in mind for the final product. But he didn¡¯t care. This was one of his favorite parts. He tried to lean back and enjoy it, at least until that black storm in the distance made landfall.


    With Car-Crash¡¯s help, he smoothed things over with A.T. management, assuring them it had only been eager curiosity and not any kind of hey-wait-a-minute sense of injustice that had spurred him to look inside the big sausage making machine. They grumbled, they yelled, they had him sign a warning, and then he was back on the job.


    The plan was to play it safe. Be the best crash team lead he could be, get moved up to that team 1 slot, right under the operators, then rack up a few spectacular kills before they could make the necessary personnel moves to run jobs without him, then when he was finally delegated to whatever the Hardworlder equivalent of the mail room was, he would start shopping for a new team. Car-Crash said he knew a few who hated Constellation enough just to take him out of spite, and maybe hire Car-Crash along with him.


    But, something came up. Looking back, it was an unavoidable stroke of luck.


    It was a late job. Orange evening dying under purple clouds, out over the power lines and oak leaves floating above an indistinguishable north Texas suburb. Target was in a safe house, snug as a bug in a rug according to dispatch, with a rolling gate and retractable spike strips on the driveway. It was a two-story new build, a brick box with black window screens that promised machine gun placements. Luke¡¯s team had already wasted themselves in car crashes and police shootouts, so the assault team asked him if he wanted to come with.


    Sure. Of course, ten seconds into the radio chatter he knew the score. There was no bag in their future. They would fall on the safe house with a bunch of noise like a bad Halloween decoration, the target would take to the road, and then Constellation¡¯s chosen would make the kill. He let them give him his job, breaking into the neighboring house and shooting from the upstairs bedroom, and then he muted his radio.


    He slinked into the backyard of the neighboring house, then got real close to the fence, moving his face back and forth in front of the cracks until he had the entire back yard mentally mapped. Once the gunfire broke out, big belches of automatic sprays that surely hit nothing but bricks and air, he went up and over and came down in a dead still crouch in the middle of a cluster of wild privet.


    And there it was. On a concrete slab of covered parking under a sheet metal roof, next to old propane grills and half pallets of roofing supplies. A dusty early oughts Honda civic with extra dark tint with an old mud stained tarp half over it and, Luke noticed, not a spec of dirt on the glass. The tires had tread as deep as a floor models. The route from the back door to the sedan was covered, obscured from both sides, and cleared out methodically through the junk piles.


    The play revealed itself in his head. His team had spent the half an hour before go time talking about the big, armored SUV that had rolled into the garage. It would break out A team style and barrel down the street, while this little armored nondescript wagon rolled smoothly out into the alley and off into the night. It was a risky play, one that relied on the attackers over zealousness and poor surveillance. Which made it perfect against Ace Tactical.


    But, they hadn¡¯t counted on Luke.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Reaper

    Oh ye wandering souls


    Luke belly crawled and slithered over to the sedan, keeping something between him and the house windows and cameras at all times (one up on a power pole at the far end of the yard gave him the most difficulty) picked the lock, got the trunk open and slinked inside.


    The gunfire outside reached a frenzied level, like a fireworks show coming to an end, then died to a scattering of pops and cracks. An engine roared out on the front street, and others responded, then silence. Luke got his pistol in hand and quieted his breathing. It was a cold day in the middle of a Texas winter, thank God, otherwise he might have died in that trunk before the shooting stopped.


    The doors opened suddenly. Absolutely no voices. Professionals. The doors were pulled shut rather than slammed. The engine started and it was shifted into drive an instant later. Almost immediately they were turning and Luke steadied himself against the wheel well.


    A voice groaned, probably from the front seat, then silence, then the voice again. Talking on a radio. Probably on an earpiece. Luke rolled silently and pressed his ear to the flat back of the rear seat, and waited.


    Silence. Then the driver talking, still indecipherable. Then more silence. For a moment, he saw his plan collapsing, saw the trunk open, guards with guns at the ready, and a quick death in a flash of fire that would surely become the running gag of the Ace Tactical offices.


    Then, the sweetest sound, like a breeze of fresh air in the stale trunk. A whining, bitter voice, as full of emotion as the others had been robotic and cold. Coming from the center seat. Still, Luke waited to be sure. The seconds dragged on, but looking back there had barely been three of them before another voice answered, patronizingly, gently, but firmly.


    Bingo.


    Luke rolled back, planted his feet firmly on either side of the back panel, aimed right where the pelvis should be, and opened fire.


    Light broke in through the bullet holes like a movie, in big beams of twinkling dust. The casings glittered briefly in the light, like things summoned into existence in the void. The car braked suddenly, and Luke flexed his legs and bounced into the impact, and kept firing. Halfway through his mag, bullets streamed in the other way.


    Something punched him in the knee. Light broke through in big patches. Smoke whispered through the beams. His vision was cut in half as something flowed, warm and dark, into his left eye. Something tapped him on the elbow and his left hand fell off the gun. No big deal, the right kept squeezing the trigger, and a breath later the Beretta locked open, smoking in the half darkness.


    ¡°Shit! Son of a bitch!¡±


    The voices came in from the car clear as crystal, minus one. The whiney, slightly questioning even when it was a statement voice Luke had become so intimately familiar with just seconds ago, was absent.


    He laughed silently, rolled back, pulled the emergency trunk open, and stumbled into the light.


    The orange evening glow swirled and sunk into darkness at the edges. They were pulled over on the side of the road, and a cluster of onlookers watched from a nearby CVS.


    ¡°All right, mother fucker. I¡¯ll admit, that was pretty fucking good.¡± The guard stretched near the passenger door and smiled. Luke was getting ready to make some remark about the seats being armored next time, when the son of a bitch on the other side of the car putt a bullet in his head.


    The world broke open into strange things that the Extractor let slip, as it always did after a death in the Hardworlds, the only time its all-seeing eye seemed to falter.If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    Afterwards, Car-Crash had grumbled about it being bad etiquette to drop a guy out after the job was done, but Luke was more pissed off about its effects on the quality of his mem than of any perceived disrespect. Still, the scrape came out ok. Before he could fuck off to his Realm to enjoy it, however, Tenpound pulled him into his office.


    ¡°Any reason you weren¡¯t with your team?¡±


    ¡°Uh, they were disposed of at the time sir. So I went looking for work.¡±


    Tenpound had just nodded. A.T. had taken the old Hardworlder slogan of ¡°look for work¡± and turned it into one of ten bullet points under some acronym Luke had forgotten. Or maybe Constellation had done it and just handed the shit down. Either way, Tenpound excused him and that was the end of it.


    Or so he thought. The next time he dropped in, something seemed off, and it didn¡¯t take long to figure out what.


    ¡°They¡¯re not here. Just you and me today,¡± dispatch told him when he called in, asking about his team.


    ¡°And you¡¯re in your own car this time.¡±


    His Self¡¯s car was a geeked-out Civic. Everything but the underglow, with a thick coat of dust all over the paint. He got the idea. Look inconspicuous and pack some muscle. He got it gassed up while the lone dispatch agent gave him the scoop.


    ¡°You¡¯re on Spiritwalker duty today. Crash dummy didn¡¯t drop out. Op happened two days ago.¡±


    That explained the push notification news articles and internet memes he had been seeing about a wild shootout. Luke found it unexpectedly unsettling to be in a Hardworld after an Op like this. Like being in a store after closing or staying up so late the commercials started getting nonsensical. While on a job, it was easy to believe the whole world existed only for him to make the kill, that it dissolved like a bad dream the moment he stepped out, but now, reading and hearing about how a bunch of ¡°seemingly normal, unrelated people¡± had gotten together to shoot each other over an ¡°unemployed help desk worker¡±, seeing all the theories, the memes, the weeping families and solemn press releases, it felt impossible that this world was anything other than solid matter populated by real live people.


    He wanted, desperately, for the first time in his career, to get back to the Other. Luckily the target wasn¡¯t hard to find.


    He had, apparently, jumped ship before his crash team got active, leapt from a truck going 40 mph down Meacham and rolled through Texas thistle into a sprint behind some hotel dumpster. The crash team had been advised to forget him.


    It was an eerily familiar story, down to the hotel, and as down there Luke wondered if he would see Kibbles looking up at him when he made the kill, up there supreme Luke wondered, not for the first or last time, just how accurate the scraped mem A.T. gave him actually was.


    Down there Luke found his target sitting outside a corner store, drinking a Yoohoo of all things, with a half empty family size bag of Hot Cheetos sagging next to him on the curb. From the expression on the guy¡¯s face, Luke would have thought he was nursing combat trauma with whiskey and heroin.


    Luke walked up and the guy locked eyes with him immediately. It was not Kibbles, but something about him was very Kibbles-esqe. He stood up, wide-eyed, and dropped the glass bottle to the ground.


    ¡°No man! Please, it¡¯s not fucking real!¡±


    Luke never got a good answer on how exactly the guy knew who Luke was and what he was there for, but he tried, after that, to practice moving like any other person and not like a Hardworlder, in case he had to make another close kill, which seemed a certainty if his advancement took the path he had planned out.


    A separate scrap of memory floated in by association. Another Hardworlder, face hidden and voice scrambled from the recording needle of the extractor, telling Luke ¡°Some of em can see it in your eyes. Like weird lights. It''s why you¡¯ll see a lot of sunglasses.¡±


    Maybe it was Luke¡¯s brain trying to draw the extractor away from that moment, but it didn¡¯t work. The guy kept on begging, each word like a dick kick, as Luke raised his Beretta, which took forever. At last, as he got the barrel up, the guy emptied the hot Cheetos in his face and Luke shot him through the empty bag and didn¡¯t stop till the slide locked open.


    People screamed. Luke ran, trying not to notice the oppressive reality of it all, the absolutely not-dreamlikeness, and squatted down behind the store''s dumpsters and got out the drop-out kit with uncharacteristically shaky hands.


    As he went through the Dreamworlds, he felt a presence chasing him. His training told him it was his Self, desperate to be saved, but Luke couldn¡¯t shake the feeling that it was the man, the real man, he had just killed, now an untethered wraith bent on revenge.


    After the scrape, Luke bought the mem almost reluctantly, and was called into Tenpound¡¯s office for a debrief.


    ¡°Good work. You might have a future with the reapers.¡± His smile was so sticky sweet, his tone and posture laying on the sarcasm so thick, that Luke really considered going right there, but decided against it at the last second.


    He decided to make the son of a bitch pay in another way. He would climb that fucking board and shit on Tenpound and the rest of A.T. from the top of it.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Rising Star

    Blood runs downhill


    He tried to go it alone, in ways the scrape might not notice. Engineering situations that required him to have direct radio contact with the assault team or that put him, miraculously, near their probable location, but now that management was on to him, it was slow going.


    But after one close call, in which he raided a police cruiser from the wreckage of his crash team¡¯s rampage and tracked the assault team to an abandoned grass-poked warehouse off the highway, until dispatch reminded him of the cruisers GPS which was drawing every cop, trooper, and deputy in this half of the state right to him and he bailed it into a ditch and dropped out, someone reached out to him.


    ¡°You ain''t gonna quit huh?¡±


    It was a voice on his comm, sounding more impressed than scolding. Still, Luke had a thing about being spoken too when he wasn¡¯t expecting or inviting it. He had heard somewhere that the first wars in this place had been waged between ¡°silence and noise¡±, and every time some speaker found him uninvited, he understood what they meant. Rory had shown him how to set up the comm pieces so that any Speaker that tried to talk to him would have their voice routed through the little bead instead of booming inside his mind, but he had gotten distracted before she finished explaining how to set up the answering machine function, and they had moved on to other, less mechanical activities.


    He tried to shake off the memories and not let them steal his cool.


    It didn¡¯t work.


    ¡°Who the fuck is this?¡±


    Who it was, was one of the AT lead operators, who refused to give his name, but offered a proof.


    ¡°Next job you¡¯ll get is gonna be for a chick charged with robbery. Role play addict. Swipped a shit ton of mem so she could by her Arthelian avatar a fucking eye color change, if you can believe it. I¡¯ll be in touch.¡±


    Sure enough, when he dropped in a few hours later, dispatch let slip that they were after a female this time.


    ¡°Just in case any of you got a problem with that. Management thinks its best we give you a heads up.¡±


    And then, after his dummies had burned themselves out bank robbing and hostage-taking and highway self-smearing, Luke got a phone call.


    ¡°Figured you didn¡¯t burn up with your boys. Want some action?¡± It was, though less echoey, the voice he had heard in his comms earlier.


    ¡°Sure.¡±


    They told him a make and model of a car, and advised that a certain Burger King was the ¡°good one¡±.


    ¡°They really load up on the bacon.¡±


    So there Luke was, smoke broiled scent wafting over him, his stomach growling from two different types of hunger, as the prophesized car sped by.


    And that was all the help they gave him, other than dying in an assault on the defense team that left the target''s vehicle with only one tail.


    He followed the two vehicles as unsuspiciously as he could, until they turned off onto a thin road rising between two fields, and he kept going down the main road. A quick review of the maps and a lot of head swiveling as he came around the back way through an old neighborhood brought him towards a sheet metal machine shop. From across the vacant fields and behind a chemical storage, he watched them load up in a single, surely armored, car.


    He followed them enough to see them get on the highway, then doubled back to a sedan he had noted on the ride over. It was, in a forced coincidence, the same make and model his Self had learned to hotwire years ago, as his life briefly arced through drug dealing and boosting before a family emergency had shaken him out of it. It was his first real act of pushed memory, and for all the frantic studying and preparations in his mem-painted realm, in practice the act moved by so swiftly and silently that he didn¡¯t realise he had even done it until he reviewed the mem weeks later. At the time, it had seemed like simple dumb luck.


    A few minutes later, he was speeding down the highway in the opposite direction he had seen the target get on, and sure enough another ten minutes later there they were.


    He ran his mind over every job he had studied and recalled something in the murky edges. A job where, after a near totally mortal shootout, the defense team had scrambled to get to someplace secure enough to let one of their team members drop out into the Dreamworlds and make contact with the higher-ups to request back up.


    After racking his brain for his own role in that job, he realized he had never been part of it. It was a story found during his research into the Dreamworlds on the freed. He made a mental note to try and get his hands on Hardworld mem beyond his own experience, and pulled up the map.


    A few miles ahead, a massive hotel cluster waited just off the highway. He picked the biggest one and got into the passing lane. He had been behind the target for five minutes now and knew if he was in their shoes they¡¯d be running the plates if they could. He passed them with his best, these motherfuckers wasting my time face and sped off down the highway.If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    He stashed the car in a non-functioning car wash kiosk next to a gas station, took some glasses, a beanie and a hoodie out of his bag and swapped clothes, then sauntered across the street to the hotel.


    It played out like something slipping out of your hands and falling to the ground. Car keys on the concrete maybe, or like when you hand someone something and they drop it, and you both kind of watch it happen and wonder later why you didn¡¯t reach out faster, why it seemed, at the moment, so inevitable.


    The target car parked in the back. Luke had broken into a chrome-rimmed sedan with the tintedest windows he could find and sat there waiting as the one guy got out and walked around to the front to get a room. He was doing his best to act normal, which was always easy to pick up on. Luke wondered, as he got out, if it would have been better for them just to pull up under the awning next to the front door, if maybe the best defense was to act like you had nothing to defend. If he was on the defense, how would he have prevented this?


    He walked over to the picnic tables and grill next to the back door and sat down. He got out his vape and phone and sat there scrolling. It was so obvious, so blatant, they must not have expected it. When the guy came back around with the key cards Luke made sure to look him in the eye. The guy studied him, maybe trying to see if he could remember the face, but who would be so stupid to sit here like this if they had seen him earlier in the day?


    As they got out of the car, in a nice little diamond formation, Luke noticed, he set off an alarm on his phone. Luckily, it was about five minutes till the hour. He sighed and groaned and stretched and got in line behind them to go through the door as lead guy used his keycard. Two of them looked back.


    ¡°Hey, how yall doin'' today? Enjoy your stay?¡±


    It wasn¡¯t even a question, just the weary automatic ramblings of a wageslave obeying some memo from the distant past. The fact that they had obviously not even started their stay yet only added to it. One guy nodded and the others kind of smiled. Guy in the center looked scared, but the guard right behind him put a hand on his back and pushed him down the hallway. Ironic. The only guy who actually saw it coming was the guy who didn¡¯t know the rules, so he didn¡¯t know, as the other guys did, that everything Luke was doing made for a terrible attempt at a hit.


    Luke reached in his jacket with the most obvious ¡°I¡¯m getting something out of my jacket¡± motion he could muster, so obvious that one guard saw him do it and still looked away down the hall. Halfway through the motion, Luke''s entire body changed. His slow, reluctant steps, his drooping movements, vanished, and he pulled the Beretta out the rest of the way in a swift snap like a hammer coming down.


    He shot the target three times in the head and the guards yelped and one put two in his chest immediately afterward. The rounds bounced off the plate and they all looked at each other, none of them more surprised than Luke.


    The closest guard yelled at the dead body.


    ¡°Mother fucker!¡±


    One of the other guards started laughing.


    ¡°I cant believe that shits going on the boards! I¡¯m gonna get so fucking hosed! You son of a bitch!¡±


    Luke smiled at him and struggled to get his drop-out kit out of its pouch. Something warm ran down his leg. One of the other guards had got him in the side. He leaned against the wall as the adrenal dump and blood loss took turns wailing on him. The guards kept talking.


    ¡°I fucking knew¡ª¡±


    ¡°Then why¡¯d he get away with it?¡±


    ¡°Fuck you, I had the lobby¡ª¡±


    ¡°Fuck are you laughing at? You were right next to him!¡±


    And so forth. Laughing guy helped Luke get the needle plunged and asked if he could use it after. Luke just kept on smiling and faded away.


    The mystery man who had given him the heads-up contacted him later, using Car-Crash as an intermediary, who explained the situation to Luke over dreamsmoke in Luke¡¯s realm.


    ¡°Couple of guys sympathetic to your efforts. Wanted me to talk to you about them setting you up with some kills.¡±


    ¡°Fuck I need them to set me up¡ª¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s exactly what the fuck I told them. And I¡¯m telling you right now if you wanna tell them to go fuck themselves then I greatly approve. This smells of politics. They don¡¯t want A.T. stuck as a crash team because it means they¡¯re stuck as dummies, but they don¡¯t wanna risk too much to get out of it. They let you do the kills and take the heat while riding your coattails to the big times.¡±


    Luke thought about it for a second, and his mind gave up. It just wouldn¡¯t budge toward any kind of political imaginings. He ultimately didn¡¯t give a shit. He wanted two things in all the god damn other. And one was to keep bagging kills.


    ¡°Fuck it. Let em ride. Tell them to hit me up.¡±


    They did. It turned out to be a smooth-moving conspiracy, which made Luke wonder if they had tried something like this with some other na?ve try hard. They even had Drudge paid off so he wouldn¡¯t kick up the mem of the phone calls to management. Even dispatch started slipping him help. Luke got the feeling that they had all been waiting for someone good enough to snag kills yet dumb enough to try and defy Constellation.


    That day, he was brought into Tenpounds office and grilled for every little mistake made while on crash duty, but let go without his kill even getting a mention.


    There was a simple explanation. The conspirators needed Luke on the crash team so if shit came downhill it would smear the expendables, and because they didn¡¯t want to risk having him moved up to the assault team and shining a light on them. Tenpound was getting a big payout to keep Luke where he was, and for someone who had managed to get nothing higher than a shift supervisor position on a dummy squad in ten years of Hardworlding, that was enough.


    And so, after so much uncertainty, Luke found a groove, and so did the Extractor. The montage practically made itself.


    Job after job of kills or near kills, a series of Tenpound pseudo meetings, memos, and whispers of the higher up''s concern, of Constellation headed ¡°client meetings¡±, revealing that the conspiracy had reached the highest level, with half the owners trying to keep the trees from shaking, while the other half looked to take Ace Tactical private.


    Right in the middle of it all, Luke¡¯s star shot up the boards like the drama was nothing but rocket fuel, and more importantly to him, he learned a lot about being on the trigger. He took out targets with bombs, ten-shot handguns, cars, hunting rifles, and even a few knives.


    It got to the point that he could knock off an A.T. target like tying his shoe, and he could see the next level so close he barely even had to raise his foot to step over it. Job offers, rumors, frantic talks with the conspirators. In a few months, he had gone from a caged dog to having so many open doors his only issue was figuring out which one to take.


    And the cherry on top, which, ironically, he didn¡¯t even realize at first, was that with all the excitement and all the advancement and learning, he had forgotten to even think about bliss.


    Then it all hit a snag.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Falling Star

    Star crossed double cross


    She was dancing as if underwater. Her sheer mutli-layered skirt bloomed out and whipped back and forth with each thrust of her hips, shook and vibrated like colored liquid as she belly danced, flew up off her ass as she got down on her heels and bounced. Her hair, waist length and deep gold, flowed around her and water dappled light moved in lines across her skin, like lightning that had been caught and sedated.


    The guy she was dancing with was as green as they come. Smiling at her like no one would ever find out about any of this when he woke up, wearing a tuxedo top and boxer shorts. How did they allow this? Where was the god damned Principality for this shit? Shouldn¡¯t all newborns have to get funneled into some kind of orientation? He thought about going over and yelling at them, maybe telling the guy to try and wake up right now, something, but before he could do anything, she looked at him.


    Her eyes were black this time, reminding him, with the rest of her get-up, of some celebrity he couldn¡¯t put a name to. But they were still Rory. He tried to place the woman in front of him over his image of the bouncing girl that had found him on the rooftop and the dark, solemn creature she had been the last time they spoke, and find the overlap, or the fusion, like glass disks laid on top of each other revealing another color.


    Then she was gone. Like an idiot, he got up and flew toward the last place he had seen her. Nothing. He stopped and scanned around. He knew it was useless. One of the many subtle enchantments of the Allclub was that you could somewhat control who saw you. As he scanned the crowd of almost faceless silhouettes, he realized she could be any of them.


    But he tried anyway, for a while. Long enough for his anger to get up over his longing and look down on it. Then he summoned a door out, but another one got in its way.


    It was all white Lowes paint and bronze colored knob, like every door in his new built house growing up. There were faded and peeling sea flower stickers on it, and a do not disturb sign hanging off the knob was flipped around to say ¡°Come on in!¡±


    It felt like her in a way none of the other hers had. Before he could think of anything else he was already through it.


    It was a teen girl¡¯s bedroom circa 2004. His heart jumped, thinking he might have finally found his way into her realm, until the faux sun of the Allworld rolled by outside, and a handful of crafts flew over it.


    She was sitting on the bed, one arm crossed over her stomach, cradling her tits on her forearm, the other folded away from her, wrist thrown back, holding a cigarette. Her thin skirt was rolled up on her waist and her crossed legs threw her hips out at either side of her like smooth half-moons. He tried to think of something to say, and discarded the first things that came to mind, not wanting to give her the fucking satisfaction.


    ¡°So, this is what your happy place looks like?¡±


    She smiled at him, even chuckled, as if they were old friends.


    ¡°He¡¯s big into aughts nostalgia. It¡¯s retarded. He was born in fucking ninety-nine.¡±


    Luke was immediately confused, and his face showed it. She was confiding in him, sharing a moment, like they were both in on the game.


    ¡°What?¡± She blinked at him.


    ¡°Nothing. Just wondering how you can insult your food like that.¡± His words came out acid, though he had tried to color them like a joke.


    She glared at him.


    ¡°Are you fucking serious with this judgmental bullshit right now? You shoot guys like him in the fucking head all day. At least with me they get to cum.¡±


    Despite himself, he flinched, the jealousy squeezing whatever stood in for his heart in this place like a slipknot. She sensed it, and joined in.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t you be honest. Why are you here? What do you want from me?¡±


    His mind went in two directions. On the one hand, a part of it was reacting explosively to her insinuation that the guys he killed were anything like the wet behind the ears wide eyed poor bastards she got in her web, and after the initial revulsion and dismissal of that possibility, he came to the sickening realization that for all he knew, they could be the exact same mother fuckers.


    But the rest of his mind was consumed with her; memories, a burning longing, and trying to snare an answer to her question. Why had he come here? Why go through that door?


    He had to admit, finally, to himself, that it hadn¡¯t felt like a choice. But he had no intention of admitting that to her.If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    ¡°Guess I just wanted to see if you at least got anything out of ruining my life. But it looks like you¡¯re about where¡ª"


    ¡°Ruin your life? I couldn¡¯t ruin your life if I tried. No one can, not in this place. Don¡¯t you get it yet? This place is fucking empty. It¡¯s nothing.¡±


    ¡°You sure go through a lot of leg work just to steal a piece of nothing.¡±


    He felt a moment of pride at his wit, in refreshing contrast to the massive embarrassment over his childish groan about her ruining his life, but she just laughed, shaking her head and looking up to the textured ceiling.


    ¡°Steal! Oh my god grow up. What did I take from you? Your memories? You still remember them don¡¯t you? It¡¯s not like some bullshit doctors office dream machine can make you forget. Or, what, you want mem, is that it? What would you even buy?¡±


    ¡°More Bliss, probably,¡± he snarled at her, getting close. She just kept laughing, though her smile swelled with pity.


    ¡°Is that so bad? You really think it¡¯s like some hard drug, just cause they sell it in those cheesy Disney world opium dens? They do that on purpose! You¡¯re not addicted, you¡¯re just bored!¡±


    It was a hot kind of anger, the kind with embarrassment and inadequacy in the face of a former lover as fuel, and he reached out and grabbed her despite himself.


    He shook her, and she just kept smiling.


    ¡°You. Can¡¯t. Hurt. Me. Here. This place isn¡¯t real, isn¡¯t touchable. Nothing can hurt you. Don¡¯t you fucking get it?¡±


    ¡°No, I don¡¯t get that, bitch! I¡¯ve felt bullets in my lungs! I¡¯ve seen heaven dangled in front of me! I loved you and watched you fly away and whore out with a smile on your stupid fucking face! This place does fucking hurt! And if you were really so God damn above it, you wouldn¡¯t be trying so hard to leave it!¡±


    He had been told, in one of his frantic searches for her, that what she really wanted, what she was saving all that money for, was a ticket to so-called Paradise. Though up there Luke was sure it had actually been Dr. O who had told him that, the extractor left it open-ended.


    He hadn¡¯t believed it, not completely, until that moment, when he saw the hurt on her face as she realized he knew.


    ¡°You know about that, and you still hate me? God damn dude, wouldn¡¯t you do everything to get there. Fuck yes you would! You already shoot anyone they tell you to just for a chance to run at that light again! You think it''s gonna wake you up don¡¯t you!¡±


    ¡°I fucking hope so!¡±


    ¡°So do I! So does everyone here! That¡¯s all anyone wants! A fucking fantasy land and we¡¯d all kill each other to get back to something real!¡±


    I wouldn¡¯t kill you, Luke thought, but only said,


    ¡°Then why doesn¡¯t everyone buy a ticket? Why isn¡¯t paradise full and this place empty? You think you¡¯re the richest bitch in here?¡±


    ¡°Because they still have hope. They still think there¡¯s something under some rock or through some fucking door that¡¯s gonna make them happy. Or they found a way to have power over someone. That¡¯s really it. In the other place, in the real heaven, no one has power over anyone.¡±


    ¡°If it¡¯s the real heaven, why do you have to pay to get in? Isn¡¯t that¡ª¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s a symbol of your sacrifice! To have enough money to buy anything here, and throw it away! You gotta prove that you give up this place completely! That you know it¡¯s not real!¡±


    He just stared at her, and it was better than anything he could have said. She heard her own words bounce back at her, and hated them. They didn¡¯t have the power or the sense they held in her head, and she couldn¡¯t bring herself to believe them.


    She groaned and growled and clenched her fists and sat down hard on the bed. When she looked back up at him she had tears in her eyes.


    ¡°Ok, so now you¡¯ve proved to yourself that I¡¯m just as miserable as you! Now go back to your phony-ass hitman game and gloat!¡±


    Looking at her scowl, her anger burning eyes, a question Luke had held in his heart since she left him broke out like an air bubble rising to the surface. It breached his lips before he realized what was happening, and after he had said it, he knew it was what had driven him through her door.


    ¡°How did you smile at me like that, that first day? And the rest of them. How did you seem so happy?¡±


    It was his turn to get all teary-eyed, and it softened her a bit. She sighed and spoke to the carpet, half smiling.


    ¡°Same way I always do. I thought about the best day of my life, and how if I keep moving forward, if I make it through those gates, I get to live it all over again. That¡¯s what keeps me going.¡±


    For the first time, Luke thought about her other life, her real life, which he could never be a part of no matter how high he climbed up those fucking boards, and felt his chest caving in. He thought about every smile she had ever given him, and wondered what she had really been smiling at. He wanted to ask her more than he wanted anything. He wanted to know what she loved or who she loved and what about it all he didn¡¯t have. He wanted to wake up, for real, and find her next to him, and the vision of that moment bloomed in his mind like a second Sun and he couldn¡¯t even breathe.


    ¡°You think I¡¯m a piece of shit, don¡¯t you?¡± she said, softly, wetly, still to the floor.


    He opened his mouth to say, no, but, really, he had to admit he did, but he admitted it only through silence. He could give her that much.


    He wanted to tell her that he was a piece of shit too, that her awfulness was only a welcome outline to the swelling form of her goodness, of everything he loved about her, but when he reached out for what her goodness was, he found only memories of a smile not meant for him.


    Looking back, down there Luke knew, through his own painful extraction, that he had known she was faking it the whole time, but convinced himself it was the world that felt false, out of longing to stay with her just a bit longer, in the hope that he would one day wake up out of the dream into a world where the truth was reversed, and she really was smiling for him.


    He had accepted the Otherworld for what it was almost instantly, because he truly didn¡¯t care. It was just another world, just another screen covering something deeper that he could never understand. He had fallen in love with what he had hoped was beneath her fa?ade, or with what he had imagined might lie there. He had loved, he realized, only his own mind. A phantasm, with about as much relation to the sad girl in front of him as his dreams had to the real world.


    He left her there, staring at the ground, and went out the door. Just before he shut it behind him, the desire became too much, and he looked back, hoping to see her looking up at him with longing.


    But the door was gone, and his hand held nothing but air.


    A few moments later, he was back in the Bliss den.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Friends in Low Places

    Kind of help you can¡¯t buy


    During his meteoric rise, meteoric in the sense that it ended with a big fucking crash, Luke had amassed a pretty decent chunk of change. His bonus for the kills, paid out reluctantly per contract by AT, and his higher team-lead wage had been more than he could spend on his mem, and since it was such a fucking hassle to find a mem dealer with any Hardworld mem worth buying, his savings grew, despite his best efforts, and when he dropped into the Bliss den after his talk with Rory, he had enough mem to run at that light for weeks.


    Which is exactly what he did. Turns out, the void inhabited by that floating fleeing light, whatever it was, was just as cut off from everything as his personal realm, so AT was completely unable to contact him until he ran out of funds, maxed out his credit, and was spit out, miserably, in the high-roller¡¯s suite of the bliss den.


    ¡°Where the fuck have you been?¡±


    Down there Luke, up there Luke, and the extractor all had a feeling of d¨¦j¨¤ vu at hearing Car-Crash say those magical words for the unknowneth time. Only down there Luke had anything to say about it.


    ¡°Bliss den.¡± He said the words like delivering a death sentence to himself. Car-Crash groaned.


    ¡°Jesus! Well, I hope you weren¡¯t too attached to your little coup. Whole things gone tits up.¡±


    His coconspirators, if you could call them that, had gotten spooked by his unreachability, and assumed the higher ups at Constellation had solved their problem in a direct fashion by locking Luke in a shadow cell somewhere, maybe even had him shipped off to Nightmare. AT management had done nothing to dissuade this belief, quite the opposite, and after summoning all available parties back to the negotiating table, had come to an agreement. Luke would be ignored. The hits would be left to Constellation¡¯s chosen, and as a consolation to the rebels, the top guns at A.T. would be guaranteed a B.S. slot on the boards whenever possible.


    Hands shook, smiles were forced, asses were kissed, and that was it. A week and a half later, Luke rolled into the office and felt the change in atmosphere. His team had been reassigned to a new lead, and he was back to square one. There was still a slot on the team under the new Lead, if he was interested, but if not, good luck getting any work with anyone else.


    But he was. He smiled at everyone, even Tenpound, like he was too stupid to know what ¡°final-verbal¡± meant, and skipped off to the box.


    The crash team swung by his apartment, and he was nowhere to be found. His empty bedroom was blackout-curtained and lit only by the menu screen of a flight simulator. Manuals and print outs of pirated PDFs and unframed flight hours certificates covered the three desks arranged around the frameless mattress and box spring. Dispatch called in a shaky voice on every line they had for him, trying to sternly warn him not to do what they were pretty sure he was about to.


    Sure enough, half an hour later, Luke was sailing the skies in a hijacked police helicopter with a box of frag grenades in the copilot seat, and the city was breaking apart at the seams.


    His suspicions that they would immediately put him on the lowest scale job they had were confirmed when he got a call on his personal cell.


    ¡°Hello?¡±


    ¡°Hey bro. This is Hamstar. Can you pick me up? I know who the target is.¡±


    Luke had landed on top of a parking garage as sirens and cruisers swirled below like a liquid rave and Hamstar climbed in. They had about an hour of fuel left as they rose into the sky.


    The target was in a caravan of seven cars, every member of the defense, heading out of the city. They didn¡¯t know what to make of the attacker¡¯s unusual strategy, but they had a safe house out in the sticks with belt feds and drones and 50 cal rifles. Luke¡¯s only hope was to catch them before they got to it.


    And he did. With Hamstar leaning out the side, grenades in hand, Luke came down for a pass at the caravan.


    They made it on the boards all right, but not the main rung. Below the names of the five teams involved in the op, the killbox read ¡°Null ¨C negotiated¡±, meaning the target plead out of his bounty, but below that, the sizzle slot said:


    Hamstar: Fell out of a downed helicopter with a live grenade in each hand. Killed two. Disabled one vehicle.


    When Luke had been coming in for the kill, the defense had opened up with every gun they had, and Luke learned, or was reminded in the case of his Self, that police helicopters are not armored.


    When he got back, Tenpound called him into an office, one in the back corner that Luke had never seen and which Tenpound seemed uncomfortable with, trying to decide whether he should sit in one of the chairs rung around the big desk, or stand off to the side of it. Finally, he decided on leaning against a file cabinet that extended, strangely, from the floor to ceiling like a pipe.Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.


    ¡°Hey, good morning. I¡¯m Johnny Aceflush,¡± said the guy sitting behind the desk. He had a mask of polished chrome in the shape of a skull, with two red ruby spades glowing on his black marble eyeballs.


    ¡°Say, what if I told you that your days of running around in the Hardworlds were over, cause I got a management position with your name on it?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯d tell you to go fuck yourself, sir.¡±


    Johnny Aceflush laughed, and told everyone else, Tenpound and a few reps, to get out. Then he laid it out.


    ¡°Mr. MOA,¡± (he pronounced it mo-ah) ¡°That¡¯s just what I wanted to hear. Now, I know you wanna run with the big guns, and since this is off the record, we both know that closing deals is a no-go here at Ace Tactical. Strictly a blue balls outfit.¡±


    The skull''s teethy grin seemed to widen.


    ¡°And we both also know that you got a bad habit and a ton of debt. But, you¡¯ve also got a lot of talent. A lot of promise. And though I run AT right now, that doesn¡¯t mean I don¡¯t have use for real killers in my other ventures. Here¡¯s the deal.¡±


    The deal was that Luke sit back, shut the fuck up, and not make any god damned waves for six months, and most importantly, respond to every call promptly, no excuses (Johnny had assured him he didn¡¯t care what his vices were, as long as they didn¡¯t interfere with the bottom line) then when his yearly review came up, Johnny could confidently move him to another Constellation venture, of which he was a partner, where Luke could intern with an actual team, prove his drive, and most importantly, his willingness to listen and take orders, and then he would be on his way to a ¡°beautiful career¡±.


    ¡°But you gotta be a team player. You gotta show that you can put your ego behind you and put the job first. Its arguably a more important skill than just getting the bullets where you want them. Got me?¡±


    Luke had him the moment he opened his mouth, but he just nodded, and assured, and falsely apologized, and then that was it.


    Oh, and then the bombshell.


    ¡°For the near future, you¡¯re gonna be driving only. You drop off your guys, you come back, you don¡¯t shoot a damn thing. Show me you got restraint.¡±


    Luke nodded and assured and all that, and stepped out of the office into the same hall he had dropped out of his dreamworlds into minutes before, and knew with that whispering knowledge that he wouldn¡¯t be able to find the office again if he tried.


    He was floating in the black, trying to decide between his Realm and the Bliss den, stuck between the pull of two worlds, when Car-Crash called him.


    ¡°Where are you?¡±


    ¡°Just floating.¡±


    ¡°Bliss?¡±


    ¡°Not yet.¡±


    There was a silence. In that moment, up there Luke realized, everything after hung in the balance, just kinda sitting there in Car-Crash¡¯s hands, something fragile and wobbling.


    In the end, he had closed his metaphorical gloved hands around it, and offered it up to Luke, putting him forever in his debt.


    ¡°Well, I¡¯m not sure I should be telling you this then. But before your little bender, I was talking to someone about you. He saw you on the boards and started asking.¡±


    ¡°Asking what?¡±


    ¡°About your employment situation, you know. About your professional mobility.¡±


    ¡°Oh gee let me guess. He wants to hire me.¡± Luke said, all the suspicion and contempt of his current employers coming out in the words.


    ¡°Mother fucker, if you knew who this guy was you¡¯d already be in my face.¡±


    ¡°So, who is he?¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s my mentor, you could say. I knew him before I gave up trying to be a trigger man.¡±


    ¡°Ok, but who is he?¡± Luke was wondering why the fuck he hadn¡¯t heard of Car-Crash¡¯s ¡°mentor¡± till now, and why he seemed so uncomfortable talking about him, like he might say too much.


    Car-Crash scoffed.


    ¡°What, you want a name? Goes by Outlaw Eleven now. I could tell you his old name, but I know that wouldn¡¯t mean anything to you. I could tell you some of the teams he was on, but those wouldn¡¯t mean anything to you either, even if I wasn¡¯t sworn to secrecy.¡±


    ¡°Ok, so he¡¯s a big shot. And he wants to hire me. Is that it?¡± Luke was feeling about as bitter as he ever had about this place, and the idea that Car-Crash had some upper-crust patron ready to save his ass at the most opportune time sounded like dreamworld bullshit.


    Unfortunately, no matter how hard he tried to crush it, there was a little part of him that knew Car-Crash was a friend, and that he was trying to help him out. This little guy, however, had not made his existence known in Luke¡¯s words.


    ¡°Yeah, that¡¯s it, you fucking asshole! Hey, you know how much I¡¯ve had to risk my ass nurturing your rising fucking star?¡±


    ¡°Didn¡¯t ask you to do that. I¡¯m sure you saw a ticket to a higher paycheck through me, right? This big-shot guy isn¡¯t trying to hire you, is he?¡±


    There was a painful, silent pause.


    ¡°You know what, I¡¯ve been nothing but honest with you. I told you I¡¯m not a shooter. I told you the plan was to tag along when you moved on to bigger and better things. And you were a-ok with it then. Let me guess, you saw some fucking flower or some shit that made you think of that bitch, and now you¡¯re acting like one? You think you¡¯re the first asshole to get stomped by a succubus in this place? But whatever, fuck me, Poor you, everyone¡¯s out to get you! But you know what? Fuck it! I¡¯m not gonna be an asshole just cause you¡¯re a little baby brat bitch! He wants to meet you at the Space Station, and I¡¯m gonna tell him you¡¯re good for six o¡¯ clock! If you can hold out on dropping into Bliss for that long, you¡¯ll have the meeting of a lifetime, courtesy of me, and then you better be kissing my ass, and if not, then fuck off to your crack den and your boo-hoo broken hearted bullshit!¡±


    Car-Crash¡¯s shouting cut off suddenly, like he had figured out how to slam the phone on a telepathic call.


    Luke tried very hard to keep his anger up, to take every one of Car-Crash¡¯s harsh words and rub them in his still open wounds, to kick up a pain that would drive him straight into the bliss den.


    But the anger dissolved in the radiation of something else, a knot of pure guilt, a deep childish sadness, and it took him a moment to realize it was a response to the hurt in Car-Crash¡¯s voice.


    His introspection reversed, and he saw in his mind¡¯s eye all the times he had spent with the guy, all the things he had done, and tried to see himself from Car Crash¡¯s point of view. A sad bliss addict. A thorn in the side of A.T.. A rising star. But he couldn¡¯t see a friend. God that hurt. Luke had really taken the son of a bitch for granted. For all the help and hand holding and neck sticking out that the guy had done for him, he¡¯d never been more than not an asshole to him, at best, and at worst¡­


    Luke checked his watch, a little glowing set of digital numbers that appeared on his wrist at will, and saw it was 4 AWT. He pointed his face at the horizon and took off for the space station, his tears falling in a twinkling trail behind him.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Outlaw 11

    You haven¡¯t seen him work


    The Space-Station was eternally frozen above the center of the Allworld¡¯s night side. Luke floated towards it and watched the Allclub shimmer at the center of a hemisphere made of every nighttime setting and scenario anyone could ever imagine, and thought of something Rory had said.


    ¡°They made it to trap the new souls. Like a magnet. They get born, dreaming about something, and it¡¯s already right here on the ball, so that¡¯s where they end up. I bet we used to all start out in the black, in our own realms. Then when we met each other on the paths, we met each other with power. They couldn¡¯t have that.¡±


    Looking at it now, he doubted it was that simple, but realized that, ultimately, he didn¡¯t care. If this was a well-crafted hell or an accidental heaven, he still had to find his way in it, and it would never again include her.


    He floated down towards the Space-Station and was immediately reminded of the old pipes screensaver. Solar panels and module tubes and even some geodomes meshed together into something that had roughly the same outline as a snowflake no matter how it turned.


    The eponymous restaurant bar was perched at the top of the rotational axis. It looked like every rotating restaurant on earth blended together and hit with a dash of early 00s Sci-Fi channel. Luke gave his name and was escorted past the pulsing crowds to a dim upper level, where most of the tables sat in dusty shadow and the few customers were shrouded in a cloud of haze, like a digital blur effect that flowed out of the hanging table lights.


    They gave him a seat at the rim and he watched the crafts fly in and drank a coffee that somehow burst with the real pop of caffeine, trying to forget about her.


    About an hour or so later, as he sat there beating back bliss cravings with reminders of Car-Crash¡¯s loyalty, Philip sat down across from him.


    The extractor was very careful. Luke knew Dr. X would go back over it at the end, changing names and identifying features and warping info into unrecognizable vagaries, but the best way to protect intel was to never collect it. Philip¡¯s face was shrouded in blur. His real name never even came to Luke¡¯s mind while he was in the seat. It felt like Luke was casting a play based roughly on the meeting, and the guy at the table was just some actor. Only the dialogue was essentially unchanged.


    ¡°So you¡¯re looking to ditch Ace Tactical and work some real jobs. I got a spot on my squad, and from what I¡¯ve seen you could fit right in. But first I need three things. One, kick the fucking Bliss habit, and I mean really kick it, because I¡¯m gonna have you look a friend of mine in the eyes and tell him you kicked it, and if you¡¯re lying he¡¯ll know it. Two, get your mind right with being on the bottom, because you might be hot shit with A.T., but on my team you¡¯re gonna start out eating shit and liking it. Three, the next time we meet will be in the Hardworlds, and if you drop in through some fucking A.T. box or anything like that, you won¡¯t see me then or ever again. Got it?


    Luke had been waiting for a pause to say something like ¡°Oh, who says I want to join your team? What¡¯s so great about it? Sell me on it.¡±, but from the guy¡¯s tone and posture and everything else, he knew that would probably only get him laughed at.


    And besides, the last part had sent his mind working in overdrive.


    ¡°How do I get in without a box? You mean with one of those, uh, segments?¡±


    ¡°You mean fragments, and no. Those are for dropping into a Hardworld without waking up in your jammies. That¡¯s beyond you and probably will be for years. I mean get in the Hardworlds on your own.¡±Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.


    Lightbulbs went off. Strange phrases and conversations remembered from the Freed and overheard all over the Other rolled over and showed themselves anew.


    ¡°I can get in the Hardworlds on my own? How?¡±


    Philip had laughed, smiled, and got comfortable with his cigar and container of sour Altoids, having seen in Luke¡¯s reaction a genuine curiosity and desire he must have been looking for.


    ¡°You just wish it real hard. Imagine a door. Or a pill, or something that will wake you up, so to speak. Just convince yourself whatever it is will wake you up in the Hardworlds, and there you go. I guess our glass-faced friend forgot to mention it to you.¡±


    ¡°And that will work?¡± Luke couldn¡¯t believe it wasn¡¯t some kind of prank. Everything he had read and heard told him the Hardworlds had been inaccessible for years, and that getting to them was still a specialty skill. How could it be that easy?


    ¡°That¡¯s the big secret. They¡¯re anyone¡¯s worlds.¡± Philip smiled one last time, then got serious.


    ¡°But don¡¯t think just cause its simple that it¡¯s gonna be easy. It still takes an act of willpower. Your advantage is you¡¯ve already been inside.¡±


    Luke nodded repeatedly, already trying to get his mind around how he would do it. Philip blew smoke at the table in a final way and started to rock to his feet.


    Luke heard his mention of Car-Crash as a kind of echo, the way words often hit with a delay due to his attention deficit, and let out a nagging question.


    ¡°So, is he getting like a finder¡¯s fee?¡±


    Philip stopped, taking a moment to figure out what the fuck he meant, then laughed again.


    ¡°Fuck no. He owes me more than he could ever pay back.¡±


    ¡°He gonna be on your team?¡±


    Philip paused, got settled again, and leaned forward.


    ¡°I can¡¯t tell you who is or isn¡¯t on it till you do those three things. Got it? Now any other questions I can answer before I fuck off? Any last little nagging doubts? Cause I don¡¯t want to hear shit besides yes sir and gunfire once we get started.¡±


    Luke almost let him go, and then for some reason,


    ¡°Does it ever stop being fun.¡±


    ¡°Fun?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, you know, not like the waiting around and all that, but like, I guess not fun, but does it ever stop, uh,¡±


    Lucky for him, Philip knew exactly what he was trying to say.


    ¡°You mean do you ever stop needing it?¡±


    ¡°Yeah.¡±


    ¡°No. And any smug asshole you meet who tells you otherwise, that they¡¯ve moved on or prefer management or some shit, is lying through their teeth.¡±


    ¡°I wonder if it¡¯s the being someone else.¡± Luke had half said it to himself, and was afraid for a moment Philip would laugh at him.


    But instead, Philip had looked at him like it was the most serious topic in the world.


    ¡°Is that how you feel, really, when you¡¯re in there? Do you really feel like someone else?¡±


    Luke thought about that for a second, and then let it out.


    ¡°No. I feel like I¡¯m more me than me.¡±


    ¡°Bingo. That¡¯s the real you. Not this shit out here. Not this sad sap addicted to a drug that doesn¡¯t even exist.¡±


    Luke froze and gathered his words without breathing.


    ¡°You ever see anyone get off of it? Bliss?¡±


    Philip surprised him by laughing softly.


    ¡°Yeah. Despite what they tell you, it ain¡¯t super heroin. Everyone talks it up cause their selling it or they just can¡¯t be bothered to not do it.¡±


    Luke felt so much shame at hearing his mind vice addiction reduced to an act of carelessness that he just stared at the table.


    ¡°Let me ask you this,¡± Philip continued. ¡°What do you expect to happen when you touch that light?¡±


    Luke couldn¡¯t think it was possible to be more embarrassed in front of the guy, so he answered honestly.


    ¡°Wake up.¡±


    ¡°You wake up every fucking day!¡± Another laugh.


    ¡°But I don¡¯t remember any of this, so,¡± Luke felt awkward explaining something so obvious to what he had immediately sensed was one of the most worldly people he had ever met.


    Philip saved him with another cackle.


    ¡°You wanna remember this shit?! What, you think that would make real life easier? Fuck, I don¡¯t. Spend all day wondering if I was the real me or some Self stuck in a Hardworld. The worst thing you could do to the Real you is tell him about this shit.¡±


    Luke was shocked by this. Every word from the guy seemed like a revelation. Like he had looked under every cranny in the Other and just said ¡°Ok, yeah, so? Who gives a shit?¡± and fucked off to the Hardworlds.


    And that¡¯s exactly what he had done.


    ¡°Well, I¡¯ll leave you to think about that one. Here¡¯s my card. See you in the Hardworlds or not at all.¡±


    And like that, he was gone, and Luke was left watching the Allworld drift out of frame through the window, suddenly looking smaller than it ever had.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - Wake Up Call

    Your problems are illusions and the solutions are simple


    ¡°They¡¯re anyone¡¯s worlds.¡±


    It was a lifechanging statement. Every other person he had ever heard talk about the Hardworlds had made them sound like some mystical place that required multiple levels of enlightenment just to earn the right to step inside, which made Luke¡¯s box driven excursions feel like a perversion or at least a sacrilege, and everyone else in the biz seemed to feel exactly the same way.


    You would think, looking back, that all pretense of wonder and majesty regarding the Hardworlds would have died away the moment he woke up in his sweaty boxers or felt the headache from lack of caffeine or waited at a light in a fast-food smelling SUV with a bunch of unemployed wastoids carrying hand me down guns, but it hadn¡¯t. Quite the opposite. Coming from the Other, where even the piss streams sparkled, all that mundane dimness had felt like getting closer to God. In a world where everything sung with divine energy, the Hardworlds were the ultimate holy pilgrimage.


    But Philip seemed like the type of guy to ask God, if given the chance, why his dumb ass invented heartburn, and though later Luke would find that he had his own kind of religious seriousness regarding the Hardworlds, it wasn¡¯t the same kind as everyone elses, and at the time of their first meeting, just the fact that he lacked the protective reverie of every Hardworlder he had ever met was enough to convince Luke he was completely a-spiritual.


    But despite his reframing of the Hardworlds as open to anyone, he had simultaneously posited that Luke might still be too lost to find them.


    ¡°See you in the Hardworlds, or not at all.¡±


    His challenge to Luke, drop in without a box, seemed to, in some way, conform the sanctimonious view of the Hardworlds, but his tone and mannerisms said something else. Dropping in without a box was the lowest of tasks, and if Luke couldn¡¯t even do that, then there was no use wasting any time with him.


    Luke got the idea, from all this, that Philip wasn¡¯t so much bringing the Hardworlds down to the level of the unholy as he was looking at their facets from the point of view of the ascended. Getting in was the easy part. Anyone could do that. Then what, Luke wondered, did he consider the hard part?


    Luke went to his realm and created a door in the basement, telling himself when he stepped through it, he would wake up in some shitty apartment, just like he did every job. He turned the knob, opened the door, and stepped into darkness. After floating for a few seconds, his Realm rolled back into view. He had dropped out the bottom of it.


    Immediately, he understood what had gone wrong, an unusual clarity of thought. Like a dream, his faintest of doubts had soiled his efforts, directing the outcome. His realm was in the heart of pure void, where every thought burst into being with a bit of focus, and every fear, if left un squashed, could be realized. Half of his time making the big floating house had been spent stabilizing it, as Car-Crash had called it, meaning visualizing that within the walls, change was a slow process and subject to multiple confirmations.


    Here with no box to strong hand his mind into believing, it would take nothing less than pure untainted belief to get him through the door and into the Hardworlds.


    The extractor reduced his struggle to a montage, and for the first time he found it offensive. When displayed as a few seconds of doors opening into the void, or back into his Realm, now with a new bedroom, or onto some random suburban sliver of the Allworld, the hours lost most of their edge, and here, above all other times, he wanted the pain to be precisely and fully communicated.


    Dr. X reminded him that with these things you had to strike a balance, and so reluctantly, and with a creeping doubt about the whole thing rising in the back of his mind, Luke led him to the important part.


    Down there Luke stepped through a final door, right into a bliss den.


    Cue the screaming, the crying, the swearing, and the feeble attempt at physical destruction, throwing the little ottoman or the candle stand into the wall and all that, which in a world of blurred physics and a place where the objects always kept their form, was less than satisfying. Even the bean bag returned swiftly to its sagging shape after he kicked it.


    And there, waiting on the square end table of faux black marble and bronze, were two hits of Bliss, little shining crystal sticks, either glowing from a light frozen inside them, or reflecting an unseen sun, the great debate of all Bliss moths.


    And, a little note.


    ¡°Luke, thanks for your patronage. Please accept¡ª¡±


    And so on. His long absence before this most recent binge must have spooked them. He wondered, smiling coldly, what percentage of their monthly revenue he had been at his height.


    Holding the doses, letting them roll in his hands and clink together, he thought of what they had said about it.You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.


    ¡°You¡¯re not addicted! You¡¯re just bored!¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not super heroin.¡±


    Yet here he was, at the end of his effort, at the bottom of his life, holding two dim lights like they were revolver and single bullet, trying to get up the nerve.


    ¡°¡ªthe happiest day of my life¡­¡±


    He squeezed them both. One vanished and he was back in that void, falling, as the light burst into being just ahead.


    He chased it, it fled, it sang to him about its power to wake him to his real life, where everything made sense and Rory was waiting in bed beside him, morning breath and all, to hear him try and describe the dream he had where she was an astral realm con artist and he shot people for a living. Maybe she would say something like, ¡°that¡¯s so you,¡± or something, but they would smile and hold each other, and the flesh would be solid and the gravity certain and everything still and quiet with maybe some traffic noise but no strange rushing hum of the Allworld and all memory of this fucking nightmare would dissolve into dreamscraps and fall out of his mind for good.


    The light got closer, and he could just about see that other him in bed with her, and he felt the pull, that final gravity that always came with waking up, like the dream was leaning to one side then turning upside down, trying to dump him out like the last corn flake into the waking world below.


    But at the last second his mind stopped dead still, momentarily immune to the tug, and spoke to him with memories.


    Another Luke drove down the highway, sirens wailing all around, empty beretta in his hand, fresh from his first kill, feeling at the center of a liquid reality, feeling that whatever he willed, could be.


    That Luke wouldn¡¯t mesh with the waking sleeper who spoke of dreams to an altered Rory, and instead stood in front of that vision of waking like a guy getting up in the middle of a movie and blocking the screen. He looked at Luke and smiled, and somewhere in Luke¡¯s mind a door opened and all the other memories swirled inside.


    ¡°They¡¯re anyone¡¯s worlds.¡±


    ¡°And buddy, the Hardworlds are one hell of a battlefield!¡±


    ¡°If you could do anything, go anywhere, be anyone, for one day, what would you do?¡±


    He smiled. He laughed. He reached out and touched the light.


    It felt like a hot bulb that had been left on all night. He crushed it in his hand and felt the glass and filament crumble, and woke up.


    The extractor jumped the tracks and sailed through the darkness. The mem of the Hardworld meeting with Philip was unavailable to the searchlight spirit of Dr. X, though it did twinkle in the back of Lukes mind, uncannily clear, as Philip¡¯s own personal Scraper had done excellent work, neither his first nor last gift to Luke.


    While the extractor tried to pick up the thread, Luke guided it to his own revelation on bliss, the main scrap of mana around which the story was wrapped, like pastry dough around a pill.


    In the Otherworld, the once an addict always an addict rule didn¡¯t apply. Bliss, it seemed, had primarily been a trick of his mind, convincing him the light lead somewhere and letting him fill in the blanks, and once he showed himself where it could really lead, linked that formless burning desire to something real and current, the trick was foiled. He could never again believe the light would wake him up to some perfect life.


    Against the shotgun blast of his escape from Bliss and subsequent revelation, the last events in the story felt like things leaking out of something torn, dead dumb moments succumbing to gravity.


    Upon his tending resignation with AT, a representative from the Constellation franchise outreach office had contacted him and presented what amounted to a fairly generous offer designed to keep him in the fold. He would be given a position in the main assault squad on a new team comprised mostly of his co-conspirators from the A.T. coup. It would be lower run jobs at first, and they would be responsible for drumming up most of the business themselves, but it was a ladder rung to a legitimate advancement in the organization.


    His only real temptation was brief, and came in the form of a daydream that he would one day find himself flush with Constellation power and prestige, and thus able to track down Rory and end her campaign of destruction for good, maybe even by putting his own contract on her head once she slipped away to the Hardworlds trying to evade Savior inquisition.


    It was a short-lived fantasy. He had no idea what it took to get the Saviors to go after someone, and he doubted he would have the stomach to see it to the end anyway, and most importantly, he had another future ahead of him. Another brighter star to follow.


    At the end of the exit interview, he was informed that his line of credit had been terminated. Almost immediately after he left the office for the last time, Dr. O called him up.


    ¡°Hey Sleepy, I¡¯m sure you heard, but you¡¯re credits been revoked. Come see me when you can and we can talk about your balance.¡±


    Balance was putting it lightly. The hole was so God damned big, he spent his entire time with ST56 paying it down. When Philip called him into his vacant strip mall office in the Hardworlds and told him that the team was splitting up, with Philip and Sam joining some mysterious veteran¡¯s new team and Domino and Cat going their own way elsewhere, and that Luke had an open invitation to follow Philip on his new endeavor, Luke still had half of the balance to pay off. And there was a new hitch.


    They new boss had a strict ¡°no extraction¡± rule. Luke wouldn¡¯t be able to go under with Dr. X even to sell his Real mem. The guy didn¡¯t trust them. Said you could never really give access to a piece of your mem without giving up all of it. Luke would have to pay the balance off with straight cash.


    So, right before he signed on the dotted line and became an official member of Liquid Light, he paid Dr. X a final visit, and sold him something he was sure would wipe the slate clean. A story of loss and redemption, of addiction and sobriety, of love and betrayal.


    When it was all said and done, and he was sitting once again in that archetypical Dr.¡¯s office, he expected that it was all neatly resolved, that the value of his confession would dissolve neatly into his debt, destroying both and leaving him a free man, never to see that god damned place again, a perfect endcap to the story.


    But when Dr. X showed him the valuation from Reminiscence (the third party pricer) he was stuck between laughing and screaming.


    The book value of his extracted mem only covered half of his outstanding balance.


    There was shouting. There was threatening to take it elsewhere, then there was pacifying and reminding of the deposit and the first option section of his debt contract, and finally there was a handshake and an exit into the swirling chaos of the Allworld.


    The rest of his fucking balance was now payable only in cash. It would be a while before he was really, finally free.


    But luckily, the new job paid suspiciously well. Michael was nothing if not generous.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Lukes Ladder - A Light that Never Darkens

    How high to touch the light?


    Time is the enemy of memory. Time is the lover of memory. Mixing with it, dissolving it, blending it into something else. Understanding. Luke¡¯s memories, sold to Dr. X, sliced and diced by the extractor, were less than what they became, in time. In his mind, in his Spirit, the memories dissolved, were digested, processed, and became understanding. The knowledge of those other hims, of what they shared, and what they lacked. And the understanding of the nature of Bliss, of desire, and even, finally, the answer to the first questions asked of him in the Otherworld, ¡°If you could do anything, ¡­¡±


    The answer, in time, had become clear. He would be a Hardworlder.


    But the memories sold to Dr. X had been unstuck from time. Stripped of their context, and in that sense, it was Dr.X and all the future buyers of the mem who were getting ripped off. He hoped, faintly, as weakly as he could bring himself to hope for such a thing in this place, that the value of the story would hold, that some Bliss addict would see the tale or some recycled fragment of it and come to one of his hard-earned realizations, but with less struggle. And maybe one of them would find her. Maybe someone would stop her.


    He knew it was a long shot, knew they would chop it up, edit it, use it to make themselves look better, draw more moths to the flame, but he knew it had to be them. Memory rots, as they said on the street, and for good or bad, Dr.X was the only one who had the raw, undissolved mem of each day in the real and the freshest scrapes of the rest of it. It had to be him. It was right, or if not right at least poetic, that it was him.


    In the time that had passed since he gave up the story, he had given up hope that it could continue, that maybe some epilogue or happy ending was still waiting somewhere ahead of him. He had never seen her again. Not even a brief glimpse in the Allclub. None of their common acquaintances had seen or heard from her, and he had stopped asking. The world of bliss dens and dead resorts and dive bars that had encompassed their brief life together, and around which he had hovered like a moth waiting to be let back in, fell away from him once the habit was kicked, and now only floated out somewhere in the black, a forgotten dream, a dead wreck, and every second of his new bright life took him further from it forever.


    ¡°I can give you fifteen. Make them count,¡± Klara said.


    After the drop into darkness, after the rushing white noise roar had surrounded him, he saw the light, and in this excited move of finality, saw the irony in it. A dim streetlight floating softly in the endless black, about a quarter of a mile away, about as similar to a Blisslight as a cardboard tree in a school play was to a towering oak, but the comparison was inescapable.


    He landed on the stripmall sidewalk, its two ends and the building disappearing into shadow in his peripherals, and the sudden gravity took him by surprise. He really was up in his head.


    For the first time in ages, he looked around inside the store. Addicts. Not just bliss but lovebugs too, desperate to take their phantom lovers on more vivid vacations or flesh out their false jobs and personalities with purchased mem. Then he saw the back of a mask. A Hardworlder, browsing the shelves, looking for anything to give an edge. A nagging, annoying, clich¨¦ thought echoed in his mind for neither the first nor last time.


    What if you¡¯ve only replaced one addiction for another? What are you chasing in the Hardworlds? What light are you trying to touch there, huh?


    Despite himself, he thought it in her voice. Running from it, trying not to let it sour this glorious final moment before freedom, he jogged to the counter and tapped the bell.


    The world went all frosted glass around him, and Mr. O appeared.


    ¡°Hey, Sleepy. What can I do for you?¡±


    ¡°Same old shit. What¡¯s the remainder?¡±


    Mr. O told him, and Luke stopped himself from screaming and dancing. He had more than enough to cover it. In fact, it was such a small, unspectacular number, that it was a wonder he had to come in at all. Most merchants would let such a small transaction go remotely, but not Dr.X. Everything had to be face to face mem transfer. Better to snag you with the bright packaging.


    ¡°I¡¯ll pay it now,¡± Luke said, like he was buying gum. Mr. O connected their wallets and smiled.Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    ¡°Well, I guess that¡¯s it.¡±


    ¡°Yep.¡± Luke stood there, awkwardly, feeling, for some reason, that the occasion called for something else. Mr. O must have felt the same way.


    ¡°Sleepy, we¡¯ve known each other a long time,¡±


    Luke couldn¡¯t help but smile, in a ¡°yeah right motherfucker, you don¡¯t know me¡± way, but the smile soon faded as he thought about it some more. The guy had probably seen every memory Luke had for the last four years and then some. From Mr. O¡¯s point of view, he might feel like he¡¯d known Luke forever.


    ¡°And as this is the last time you¡¯ll have any reason to step in here, I just wanted to say good luck and God bless. I always figured you would join up with a decent outfit.¡±


    The visage changed, and the kindly old gas station cashier dissolved, and a mid-thirties guy in pajama pants and One Piece t-shirt held out his hand.


    ¡°It¡¯s been cool knowing you.¡±


    Luke reached out his hand and shook it, not buying any of it for a single second. Sure mother fucker, put on another disguise, maybe I¡¯ll think kindly on this place if I ever hit rock bottom again and look for someone to "help me out."


    ¡°Thanks bro. Have a good one, and don¡¯t work too hard.¡±


    He turned to leave, and Mr. O called out in his new young millennial voice.


    ¡°Oh, Sleepy,¡± the nickname sounded extra awkward coming from him and Luke turned back around and gave the guy a look. He just kept smiling, and pointed a finger at Luke.


    ¡°You hear what happened to Rory?¡±


    The name struck out like lightning, a blade dipped in aced coming from the smug assholes face, tinged with something. She fuck you too?


    ¡°No,¡± was all Luke could muster.


    ¡°Oh,¡± the guy recoiled a bit from Luke¡¯s smoldering anger, and a bolt of guilt went up his gut, despite himself. What if this really was him? What if he was paying something off too?


    ¡°Well, she finally got that ticket.¡±


    Luke just stared at him, letting the ramifications build and rattle in his head.


    ¡°Uh, just thought I¡¯d let you know. So you wouldn¡¯t be looking for her, you know.¡±


    Luke looked him in the eye, and some rabid part of him screamed that the dude was lying, just trying to keep Luke from finding her, paid off by her even. She was scared he would come find her and drag her into a Hardworld. She knew her day was fucking due!


    But, that guttural, childish screaming only confirmed what he saw in the guy¡¯s eyes. He was telling the truth. She really was gone.


    ¡°Thanks for the heads up.¡± He tried to make it sound authentic, to soften some of the previous anger, but his pain slipped out in it, and it sounded like a whine.


    Dr.O, or whoever he was, nodded with sad puppy dog eyes like ¡°oh you poor boy¡± that made Luke want to strangle him, and spoke with a gentleness that seemed beyond his age.


    ¡°If it makes you feel better, you¡¯re not the only one who wanted revenge on her. Sorry to be the one to tell you she got away with it.¡±


    Got away with it, Luke thought, and smiled. Whoever¡¯s running Paradise, they¡¯re probably bigger parasites than she could ever imagine. Right about now, she had probably finally met her match.


    He smiled and reached into his pocket.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know about that.¡± He held the vial of bliss up to the light. Dr.O watched it like it was C4, but Luke just continued.


    ¡°They say this stuff comes from there. I can¡¯t imagine being inside the mother lode is any better for the human condition.¡±


    Dr. O looked from the vial to Luke, and let his jaw droop in a scowl that said, ¡°bro, are you stupid?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, well you know it¡¯s the not having it that causes all the issues.¡±


    Luke¡¯s smile widened. ¡°You sure about that?¡±


    There was nothing to say to that but goodbye. He let the store rush by him, dropped off the concrete outside, and sailed out the chute at the bottom of the void, right into the churning hum of the Allcity.


    According to his clock, it had only been a little over five minutes. On his way to the office, he made a pit stop.


    The roof was just as he had left it. Like it had been plucked from some city in the Real, cigarette butts and all, and placed in the middle of the dreamscape like a joke. He stood there, where she had found him, looking over the railing, and took out the vial. He had kept it with him the whole time to prove he had really beaten it. To know for sure that it was over.


    Watching it glitter, a false light reflecting a false sun, he let himself think about her, really remember her, not with a forced hate but with his natural, reflexive longing. Was she really in Paradise? Could anyone ever even get there? Maybe the scam was just to get them to walk through a door, then lights-out forever, trapped in some box, drip feeding your Real mem to harvesters who sold it to people like Dr.X and Mr. O. Or maybe she had died, in the Real. He had heard that when you die for real, you stop coming to the Otherworld. But, strangely, he had never known anyone to die, and had never known anyone who could reliably tell him that they knew of anyone either.


    So, she was out there, in heaven or hell, far away from him, and he would never see her again, just as sure as she would never think of him, and that was that. An ending of the real kind. Not a resolution, just the sudden severance of what had come before.


    He smiled at the vial of bliss, and let it fall away, down into the dark haze between the floating plates of the Allcity, trying to believe that when the light vanished, so would his longing, that any pain in any world was ever really gone for good.


    ¡°It¡¯s been fifteen minutes,¡± Klara said, with suspicious acid in her voice.


    ¡°It sure has. I¡¯m almost there.¡±


    ¡°Almost doesn¡¯t count, baby.¡±


    ¡°No. It sure don¡¯t.¡±


    She must have heard something in his thoughts, or looked a little deeper than she should have, because her voice softened.


    ¡°Ok. See you soon.¡± Then she was gone.


    He looked back one last time at the roof, and promised himself something silent, then kicked off into the sky, becoming just another spirit, leaving the bare concrete behind, like an altar waiting for its next sacrament.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze: Soulara

    Sing it to the stars


    Soulara was as far away from the cartoon feel of Colors as anything Gradie could imagine. The textures, sounds, even sensations, were all multifaceted and multi layered.


    They were in some kind of transport ship. Two rows of seats facing each other with a thin window glowing in a door on one end, and the dark angle of a closed ramp on the other. The floor between the seats was textured for grip (and maybe to drain blood or oil) and pocked with dings and scars. The suits (seven in total not counting Gradie) of the passengers were varied, flashing in mirror polish in places and sinking in dark matte in others. Some had full face helmets, some only goggles or masks. The weapons ranged from long, tightly held rifles with floating barrels like a fifty cal, to dual-wielded crescents that may have been pistols.


    The noise was just as textured as the rest of it. A deep roar punctuated by whooshes and clangs rose out of the rubber floor, the engine whined at the front near the cockpit and a turbine growled at the rear. Explosions echoed. Gunfire came in as hollowed out whispers, like sounds with the shape of shell casings.


    Gradie turned his rifle over in his hands. A good bit longer than the short barreled ARs the team preferred in the Hardworlds, something in his head, like the Otherworld¡¯s favored dream knowledge communication system (now announcing itself as a computer), told him all about it. How many rounds, how to reload the small canisters in his armored pack, different firing modes and attachments, ranges and deficiencies. He glanced over at the suits on the benches next to him. He spotted Angel¡¯s Kendo mask, a helmet that resembled a welding mask with a circular glass pane, and the standard sci-fi shock troop helmet he had seen himself and Luke put into just minutes before, though the idea that it had only been that long felt strange to him. Surely he had been in this new world for hours.


    One thing he did not see was Nova¡¯s cowboy hat, and he quickly found out why.


    The whole ship swayed in a sudden but decidedly un-jerky motion that rocked the helmeted heads to one side in unison.


    ¡°You dodging rockets bro?¡± Luke said on the comms.


    ¡°No we¡¯re taking the low route,¡± Nova said. ¡°Undercity. Less anti air, but it takes more finesse to get around these pipes and shit. Oh, and talk on the group comms.¡±


    ¡°Sup yall,¡± Luke said, his voice suddenly just as textured as the rest of the world. Gradie only then realized how pure the thought voices on their private comms were. Angels voice now reverbed in the helmets, and the game¡¯s tutorial dream knowledge told Gradie how his would respond automatically to his speech.


    The voice chat erupted in ¡®hey¡¯s and ¡®whatsup¡¯s and the system, whatever it was, displayed everyone¡¯s usernames in glowing letters above their head, and Gradie found his computer (whatever it actually was) had the option to display the status of his group in a HUD. His team members, Luke and the twins, were edged in neon green, while the rest of the group was more of an aqua. There were also options to open private one-on-one coms with individual members, inspect their gear and recent kill/death history, their public profile, even request to join their clan.


    Like all Otherworldly ¡°software¡± that he had encountered, from beverage kiosks to his wallet watch to the quasi computers of the twins HQ, it was infinitely more fluid than a real-world program, responding and adapting to his thoughts and expectations in real time, and the machine-feel of Gunmaze he had encountered at first had essentially disappeared.


    Once, when he had been trying to wrap his head around how some function of the Vault was possible in a world of dreamforms, Angel had told him that creating ¡°schema¡± in the Other was like working with something liquid and alive.


    ¡°The Other is smart. It thinks. It remembers. If you try and make something on your own, it falls apart like paper mache with no glue. The Other is the grand materia, we¡¯re just weaving our requests into it.¡±


    Now, sitting in something so clearly suspended by a myriad of laws and principles, interacting with software created by someone far away and far gone, Gradie knew what he meant. Flying around the other and seeing buildings and structures sitting dead still, inert remnants of a past thought, or seeing a landscape responding in real time to present intentions, was one thing, but the complexity of what was wrapped around him here, a secondary world comprised entirely of its own logic separate from the texture of the Other and interactable only with his mirror-made avatar, made something in his mind click, and the dramatic and partially terrifying possibility of the Other opened once again in his thoughts like a map unfurling.


    His reverie was broken by a sudden lurch that sent the front of the ship rising steeply.


    ¡°All right, we¡¯re breaking up to the surface,¡± Nova said. ¡°Get ready to jump. I¡¯m gonna back us up into the drop site then land down in the base.¡±


    The guy at the ramp end of the row across from Gradie, who¡¯s nameplate said Maverick, started barking in a gruff, middle-aged voice.


    ¡°Ok, new guys! Just in case you don¡¯t know, no disrespect, but call out what you see, what you shoot, what shoots you, where you are and where you¡¯re going. No solo flanking, no bombs without comms. Got it?¡±


    ¡°Yes Sir!¡± Luke said in an exaggeratedly nasal voice, while sitting overly erect and saluting with a knife-hand to his forehead. Gradie¡¯s ¡°Aight¡± broke into a laugh halfway through, though Angel¡¯s ¡°right¡± had an unwavering seriousness that somehow sounded less respectful than Lukes outright mocking.Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    ¡°They¡¯re Quasar¡¯s boys, Maverick. Let him handle them,¡± the guy with the dual pistol things said, who¡¯s nameplate said ¡°Mr. Mackintosh¡±.


    ¡°And just cause you fuckin going out first to draw sniper fire, don¡¯t mean you¡¯re captain sergeant.¡±


    ¡°Snipers live in your head rent free, ay Mack?¡± Maverick said in a smooth tone far removed from his earlier barking, and the rest of the group laughed. One nudged Mack with an elbow, and he got as animated as he could while strapped into the bench.


    ¡°Man that bitch got lucky! She was aiming for Sully!¡± he motioned at the big guy next to him ¡°And I got in the way.¡±


    ¡°Well don¡¯t get in the way,¡± a female voice said, from the trooper holding what looked like either a grenade launcher or some kind of machine gun, and who¡¯s nameplate said ¡°BledRobbn¡±.


    Mack bounced in his seat and shook his helmet.


    ¡°Oh ok then, bet. I¡¯ll be far away from yall motherfuckers. Don¡¯t start crying when there¡¯s no one there to soak up all the bullets.¡±


    The others laughed, and the trooper next to Mack, a small, densely armored figure that reminded Gradie of a W40k mini, and who¡¯s nameplate said ¡°ChknMiniNuke¡± patted his back in a mock gesture of concern.


    The ship swung around in a stomach-churning jerk and came to a sudden stop.


    ¡°Backing up! On your marks!¡± Nova said over the speakers. The mood in the ship instantly changed, and everyone else snapped up, picking up every bit of slack in the strange harnesses, held their weapons at the ready, and faced the ramp.


    Gradie followed suit and held his rifle at low ready. There was a brief moment of stillness, when even the noise outside seemed to hold its breath, and then the lights over the ramp turned green, an alarm chimed with a single ¡®annnngggghhh¡¯, and the ramp door exploded open like it was on dynamite hydraulics.


    ¡°Moving!¡± the guy at the end of Gradie¡¯s row yelled, (Who¡¯s nameplate read ¡°Sulphyr¡±) as the straps on his chest and on Maverick across from him snapped open at the same time as the door. The two of them shot down the ramp with Sulphyr keeping his weapon aimed dead ahead while Maverick swung his around, checking the glass wall of the tower looming ahead of them.


    Like a synchronized dance, the straps on Mack and Angel burst open a second later, and they bolted down the ramp after the first two.


    Then Gradie¡¯s straps exploded off his chest, and he fell forward right into Chkn MiniNuke.


    ¡°Wahh!¡± she yelled, in a very un shock-trooper way, as they both crumpled halfway to the ground.


    ¡°Shit, sorry,¡± Gradie said, as laughter erupted behind him.


    ¡°Got you bro,¡± Luke lifted him up off the ground by a drag strap on the back of his armor, and Gradie had flashbacks of casualty training in the Clubhouse. Luke threw him forward and he ran out the ramp with his weapon snapped into place, as if he could both run from and gun down his shame.


    The other four were already across the ramp and set up around an opening in the side of the glass tower. Gradie sprinted across the ramp and a massive sensation of distance pressed in on his peripherals. They were over a mile up in the air, and a forest of towers stretched out towards the horizon under a grey half-storm sky. Things flashed and boomed and smoked at the edge of his vision, but he kept his eyes on the ground at his feet and sprinted past the other players.


    He formed up at the edge of their formation, aiming his rifle at a door in the far wall of the room. Two rows of strange machines sat under diffused window light at one end, and the other end had clusters of circular seating arranged around nothing as far as Gradie could see, and beyond that was a frosted glass wall with a singular door in it.


    ¡°What is this?¡± He said out loud, his voice having the awkward crack it always did when he spoke for the first time around strangers.


    ¡°Think it supposed to be like a rec room,¡± ChknMiniNuke said. ¡°This is like workers quarters I think?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. This is the condos,¡± Maverick said. ¡°We¡¯re headed for the skybridge that links it to the main lab tower. Lab tower¡¯s full of computers and equipment so its structurally hardened. Good place to set up the artillery bay.¡±


    The broken window behind them suddenly let in a wash of sunlight as the ship dropped down silently out of sight, and Gradie brought his gun around in a flash, stepping to the outside of the group and leaning so he didn¡¯t flag them, the words ¡°contact rear¡± already forming on his tongue, before he realized what had happened.


    ¡°Damn, dudes quick!¡± Mack laughed.


    ¡°I¡¯m dropping her off at the base for a spawn point,¡± Nova said on the comms. ¡°Meet me at the elevator lobby before yall cross the bridge.¡±


    ¡°Understood,¡± said Maverick. ¡°All right, form up. Same order as the drop ship.¡±


    ¡°Yes Mam. Saving the best for last,¡± Luke said in a friendly purr to BledRobn, who¡¯s body language as she nodded and turned away said that if helmets could blush hers would have. The formation built up with Gradie and ChkMiniNuke second to rear in front of Luke and BledRobn, then Angel and Mack, with Maverick and Sulphyr staggered at the front.


    Maverick motioned to one of the walls next to the door.


    ¡°Sulphyr, get a beam tapped¡±


    Sulphyr took something out of his pouch, stepped up to the wall, and punched a hole in it. He looked inside, clearly didn¡¯t like what he saw, and punched another one. This time, he ripped at the material, a quasi-drywall that flaked away like tempered glass, until the hole was wide enough for Gradie to see the shining metal of the frame. Sulphyr clipped something to the metal and pressed a button.


    There was a sequence of three tones in Gradies helmet and then a mini map appeared on the HUD, showing their rooms and the rest of the floor.


    ¡°Towers mapped, Quasar. You good?¡±


    ¡°Yeah got it,¡± Nova said on the comms. ¡°Elevators dead center. I¡¯m dropping her in the Garage.¡±


    ¡°Ok, on me,¡± said Maverick. They proceeded out the door, which slid open with a hiss. Gradie¡¯s computer told him how he could toggle between night vision, thermal, and something called ¡°wide band¡± which would let him detect shortrange comms or something, as they moved down the hallway, turned in through a dark kitchen, strange futuristic machines sharing space with gas burners and copper and cast iron pans, and out across a wide empty cafeteria space.


    ¡°This looks like an ambush waiting to happen,¡± Mack said.


    ¡°You¡¯d rather cut through the office floor and check all those cubicles, be my guest,¡± Maverick said softly.


    ¡°Been scanning this tower for hours,¡± BledRobin said. ¡°No signs of life. Biggest concern right now is if we tripped any unseen sensors, in which case move your ass because we damn sure don¡¯t want them catching us here.¡±


    As they passed under a skylight at the center of the space, Gradie saw streaks of fire flying through the darkening sky. Though the glass was tinted, he guessed it was probably either turning evening outside, or the storm he had seen on the ramp had moved in. thinking back, he wasn¡¯t sure if it had really been storm clouds, or a mass of smoke from some unseen part of the city¡¯s decimation.


    They streamed out of the doorway in a tight formation, moving past the fatal funnel quickly and fanning out into the room beyond. Beyond some small differences, it was a move that could have been made in the clubhouse or the Hardworlds. Gradie squeezed the rifle in his hand and felt his boots plant to the ground. This was a game he could have some fun with.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze: The Tower

    Going up sir? In flames sir?


    The elevator lobby looked, despite an odd pattern in the marble and the strange writing in some places, just like any elevator lobby he might have seen in the Real. It seemed this was out of necessity. The numbers were standard Arabic digits so the players could actually use them, the elevators themselves were the right size, the distance between them and their orientation across from each other all matched what he would expect to see in the Real. There was even a soft ding that sounded, with an accompanying light, a few seconds before the doors opened, and Nova stepped out, wielding what looked like a short submachine gun and an armored pouch on his back.


    ¡°Sup yall. HQs got their eye on us and the ground pounders are getting ready to rush the lane. Let¡¯s go get them a cannon.¡±


    There was a chorus of ¡°fuck yeah¡±s and soft whoops. Nova got in line just behind the two point-men.


    They moved out of the lobby, through what looked like a waiting room, complete with reception desk and chairs, though once again twisted into some kind of sci fi reflection of the real thing, and stepped into a wide echoing hallway lined with frosted glass walls and clear doors. It was fifty feet or so of retail space leading to a bright burst of natural light where the hallway turned into a skywalk. The tower across, from what Gradie could see, had taken some fire. The black squares where some of its windows had been blown in or out seemed to look back at him and whisper of gun emplacements.


    Somehow, the skywalk was completely untouched.


    ¡°Damn, can¡¯t believe this thing¡¯s still standing,¡± Maverick said as they formed up in the shadowed carpeted seating area just at the edge of the skywalk.


    ¡°What did the scanners say about this one?¡± Mack said, staring out at the tower.


    ¡°Lots of movement a few hours ago, then nothing,¡± BledRobin said. ¡°My bet is they either left some drones behind before they fell back or they put some special boys on it.¡±


    ¡°Ooh, special ops!¡± Mack said. ¡°Can¡¯t wait to fuck up their space navy seal larp.¡±


    ¡°All right, hang tight,¡± Nova said. He had squatted down with his back to the skywalk and now pressed some buttons in the air. There was a soft sound not unlike a zipper, and something that looked like a family of grasshoppers sprung out of his backpack and flew into the skywalk. They spread out, hugging the corners and areas of shadow, and before they had gotten halfway across Gradie lost sight of them.


    Sulphyr frowned at the skywalk.


    ¡°If they really are special boys, won''t their scanners pick those up?¡±


    ¡°If they do, Ill know it,¡± Nova said. ¡°My drones can detect any sweeps, and if they tap them enough I can triangulate the operators.¡±


    ¡°Right now I¡¯m only concerned with that room,¡± Maverick said, nodding ahead.


    ¡°Well good news,¡± Nova said. ¡°Looks like that floor¡¯s clear.¡±


    ¡°All right,¡± Maverick stood up and faced the team like they had been waiting on him. ¡°We cross in twos, give some distance between groups, so if they¡¯ve got the bridge set up to blow, they won¡¯t get all of us.¡±


    ¡°Or, we could all run across at the same time, really fast,¡± Luke said. Gradie could picture his sneer just from his voice.


    ¡°I don¡¯t show any signs they got eyes on this thing, man,¡± Nova said. ¡°No sensors or nothing. And they can¡¯t see us from above. Not to mention there¡¯re four other walkways. Let¡¯s just hoof it.¡±


    Maverick blew air out of his nose and looked at Nova with a posture that said ¡°really man?¡±. Nova sighed.


    ¡°Ok, right, it¡¯s your rodeo bro. We cross in twos.¡±


    Maverick nodded and smacked Sulphyr on the helmet. They got squared up on the walkway. Maverick looked back.


    ¡°See you on the other side,¡± in a gruff action movie voice that Gradie wasn¡¯t sure was a joke. The two of them skulked down the hallway in low shooting stances, aiming at either side of the tower in front of them. In the soft muffled silence of the entryway they were standing in, and with the flashes of explosions and softened battle noise the filtered out from the wide horizon, Gradie found their movements had a vaudevillian comedy to it.Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    Luke must have felt the same way.


    ¡°Wow, what a card!¡± he said on the internal comms that only the three of them could hear. ¡°Talk about high-speed low drag! Jeepers!¡±


    Angel laughed on the comms, and the sound was half muffled, as if he was stifling it from even his internal monologue. Nova sighed out loud right next to Gradie and spoke on the comms.


    ¡°Maverick takes this really seriously but hes a good guy. Don¡¯t rip on him too hard. Gunmaze is all he does.¡±


    Luke tilted his helmet toward Gradie.


    ¡°Oh, wow bro I couldn¡¯t tell.¡±


    ¡°In position,¡± Maverick said on the group comms, and made a hand motion at the far side of the walkway. Mack and Angel moved across, a good deal faster than Maverick had, and set up in the shadows behind the first two.


    ¡°All right,¡± Maverick started, but before he got anymore out, Gradie was busting ass across the walkway. He glanced out at the city, half expecting the nauseating spread of towers and battlefires he had seen from the ramp be gone, like an illusion looked at from the wrong angle, but there it was, just as detailed and lively as it had been before, only now, after some time in his new skin, it felt less like a spectacle and more like something he could fall into.


    ¡°Is it really a whole planet?¡± he asked on the private comms as he jogged across, his pace slowed by his rubbernecking.


    ¡°Yeah,¡± Nova said. ¡°And every soldier¡¯s a Spirit, if you can believe it. What¡¯ll really blow your mind is this isn¡¯t the only planet in Soulara.¡±


    ChnkMiniNuke bolted past Gradie and shot him a ¡°Don¡¯t wait up or anything!¡± from the side of her helmet, and he had to stifle a laugh as he stomped off after her. He had hardly had time to look at her since the craft, and her girlish voice bouncing with excitement coming out of a bulbous five foot tall spiked suit of armor straight out of a set of tabletop minis was quite the juxtaposition.


    He had barely gotten off the walkway and turned around when Luke sprinted up behind him with Bledrobbin a few leaps behind.


    ¡°I said two at a time!¡± Maverick hissed.


    ¡°My bad sir,¡± Luke said, voice dripping with smile. ¡°I got all scared being back there alone.¡±


    ¡°Oh ok, alone?¡± Robin said with mock offense. ¡°You mean with no dudes?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s spooky without my bros, ma¡¯am.¡±


    Everyone but Maverick laughed. He was studying something projecting unseen out of his left wrist and swiping with his right hand.


    ¡°All right, we¡¯ve got a couple ways up. Stairs. Elevators. Fucking snack chutes.¡±


    ¡°Bunch of fuckin death traps,¡± Mack said. ¡°Why don¡¯t we just call em on the intercom and shit.¡±


    ¡°I know bitch! Let me finish! There¡¯s a big stairwell in a reception hall on the south side. Its four floors of open air. With seating platforms and a dance floor and shit.¡± He tapped something and the map hovering off his wrist became visible for Gradie after he hit ¡®accept¡¯ on a prompt.


    ¡°It ends right up here in a dining hall. There¡¯s a locked staircase and elevator that leads up to the penthouses.¡±


    ¡°Thought this was supposed to be like a research tower or something?¡± ChknMiniNuke said.


    ¡°They gotta wine and dine the donors somewhere.¡±


    ¡°And the penthouses?¡±


    ¡°Embezzling CEOs need helipad access.¡±


    ¡°You said it¡¯s like an open area?¡± Robin asked. ¡°Won''t we be pretty exposed?¡±


    ¡°Exactly. They¡¯ll probably shoot at us the moment we step in there. Which is what we want. There¡¯s probably not too many of them, or they¡¯d had people on this skywalk, so they want us to come through the chokes where they can maximize their effectiveness. This way we can spread out and even the field and get an idea of what we¡¯re dealing with.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve changed my mind,¡± Luke said on the private comms. ¡°I would like to kiss Maverick on the mouth.¡±


    The twins let the echoes of laughter filter in through the mind link.


    ¡°Ready?¡± Maverick said, and the team gave acknowledgment with various levels of enthusiasm.


    ¡°Ok, lets knock them off this fucking tower.¡±


    They formed up and moved through a sliding door that one of Novas little bots got open somehow, and advanced down a hallway that looked like a hospital that had all of its rooms swapped with blast doors. They made it to another door, this one apparently a three-bot job, as Nova''s drones crawled over it like confused metal cats trying to find out how to crack open a kibble bag, then when it finally slid in half and disappeared into the walls, they stepped into a wide, tunnel-like curving hallway that looked more Mall than hospital.


    They proceeded down it, and Gradie followed their path on the mini map. The tower cross section was a circle, and they were moving toward a big open pizza slize, much different from the grid that made up the rest of the floor, and which must be the open area Maverick had mentioned.


    Gradie realized he could navigate the menus with a thought, all while keeping his rifle up and even set up a ¡°script¡± to clear his HUD if it detected any hostile movement. He tabbed through the team, trying to figure out what weapons they were using and how his ¡°Flex Assault Rifle¡± would fit into things. He stopped on Angel.


    ¡°What¡¯s a ¡°Rad Thrower?¡± he said on the team comms.


    ¡°Shh!¡± Maverick hissed.


    ¡°You¡¯ll see,¡± Angel said on the private comms, with irritation in his voice. Gradie was taken aback, until the Ghost of Philip¡¯s voice rolled out of his memory.


    ¡°Keep the lines clean! Essential info, you moron.¡± At the time, he had been on a co-op exercise with Luke in the clubhouse, and, ironically, talking to him about video games. Now, here he was, in the Otherworld¡¯s answer to a gamers wet dream, and found himself breaking Philips rules for operating in the Hardworlds.


    It felt like a sacrilege, to apply those rules here, to take it seriously, to treat it with the same respect as the Hardworlds, but no matter how he rolled it over in his head, he couldn¡¯t find a concrete reason not to, and the feeling remained just a feeling.


    So as they formed up on the wide door leading to the open space, he gripped his rifle like it could kill, controlled his breathing like his body could panic, and decided to treat the world like it could kill him.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze: The Drone

    Fueled up, unmanned, unbothered, thriving


    They fanned out across the wide carpeted space, which curved to the left and gave way to a wide-open drop to the right.


    There was absolutely no good cover that he could see. The crescent of carpet was dotted with dining tables with the chairs balanced on top. The railing at the edge was clear glass, and beyond the drop, down past two more terraced levels where couches and bar kiosks promised some kind of high class interspace shindig, the massive velvet staircase that ran down the center of the slope ended at the bottom floor, which was solid polished marble and extended out into a wide balcony through the massive floor to ceiling window wall, which was a good five stories tall, half a football field wide, and gave an admittedly gorgeous view to the city stretching out toward the horizon, which glittered with the faint motion of seawater, and the hundred lane half-pipe highway which Gradie remembered they were here to shell.


    As the city approached the highway, the buildings got progressively more bombed out, with those nearest to it sticking up jaggedly like the broken off stumps of snapped matches, but here, closer to the tower, the city seemed relatively untouched.


    He counted three towers close enough for sniper fire. Suddenly, something exploded far away behind them, and the blast was reflected sharply on a small section of the nearest tower.


    Immediately, Gradie felt exposed and crossed over to the high wall rising to his left. If the stairs and elevators were death traps, then what the fuck was this?


    ¡°All right you mother fuckers,¡± Maverick whispered out loud. ¡°Come out and say high.¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t forget,¡± Angel said on the group comms. ¡°You have a standing shield in your kit, in case you need some extra cover.¡±


    ¡°Extra?¡± Luke said sarcastically, pointing his helmet around at all the bare ground.


    ¡°Yeah, here.¡± Angel must have pinged it, because Gradies HUD lit up with a notification about something in his inventory. He mentally activated it and something on his belt glowed bright green. He imagined a sniper using it to get a bead and turned to point it at the wall, until he realized the glow was probably only in his HUD.


    He moved one hand down and grabbed the flat case hooked to his belt over his left hip. It had a handle like a clothes iron, and in a flash, as Gunmaze used the dream knowledge burst of mem (which for the game was described on his screen as ¡°uploadable memory¡±) to show him how to deploy it. He half-saw, half-remembered a quick flick of the wrist with the handle in hand, and a strange mesh like a mosquito net reinforced with umbrella wire expanding into a standing half domed shield, like a short podium made of window screen.


    ¡°What will it stop?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°Most rounds, actually,¡± Angel said. ¡°But if it gets too much at once itl snap. And a good explosion will just knock it into you, of course.¡±


    ¡°Moving up,¡± Maverick said on the group comms. ¡°Sulphyr, Nuke, on me. Watch top of stairs.¡± He motioned with his hand, and Nuke, who up till then had been walking with Gradie like they were the only two shooters in the building, waved at him and jogged up to the front, where Maverick was facing up the massive central staircase toward the top level.


    Sulphyr raised his LMG and Nuke raised her grenade launcher (Gradie had figured out how to browse info on the teams gear via his helmet computer) and the rest of them formed into a v formation pointed up the stairs, and started the ascent to the next level.


    It was an amusing sight, the eight armored and armed death machines marching up the blue velvet stairs, pointing their deep-space grimdark weapons at sleeping dining sets and eye-roll-inducing art pieces and shuttered bars. His imagination ran off, and he saw the rolling parties flowing down the stairs like a colored metallic waterfall, all kinds of costumes and people, and aliens, like a fan convention with an endless budget, but then it occured to him that there had probably never actually been any parties here, that this place was made solely to be blown to pieces, but then, why hadn¡¯t that happened yet? The twins spoke of this gameworld as being out a long time, so what? Did they reset the city after a certain level of destruction? Was it a weekly¡ª


    ¡°Shit, got something,¡± Nova said. The party came to a stop and got low. Gradie cussed at himself in his head. About a thousand times in the clubhouse, he had spaced out on some daydream, and Philip or someone had gotten the drop on him, not to mention the close calls in the Hardworlds. Once, he was sure Philip had figured out what was going on, and told him,This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    ¡°Focus on your sensations, the feel of the gun, the ground under your feet, the air on your skin, you know, the skin I''m going to shoot to pieces if you¡ª¡±


    It was often like being pulled in two directions. His imagination had often saved him, and had arguably been the only thing that had helped him find the coin when stoically digging through boxes proved useless, but it could also get him killed, and in the clubhouse, usually got him shot. If he could find a balance, if he could control it¡­


    The team continued and half his mind listened.


    ¡°Ping it,¡± Maverick hissed pointlessly, as Nova was already sharing his feed. Something was flying out of the top penthouse, fast.


    ¡°Gun drone!¡± Maverick said. He turned to Robin. ¡°Tune your laser to¡ª¡±


    The top level exploded, and an instant later, the air was alive in an almost familiar way.


    The last terrace at the top of the central staircase held a double level of elevator bays, the top one opening onto a catwalk that wrapped around and came down as two fan shaped staircases on the side. There was a single marble staircase in the center which bisected the elevator levels and ended in a large double door on a third level that according to the map led to the penthouses. It was this door that had exploded in a burst of thick wood fragments, and now revealed a shielded machine gun placement letting lose like a mother fucker.


    Cover!¡± Nova yelled, and the team scattered in a flash, some moving with mechanically enhanced speed, and the rest bolting at the edge of human ability.


    Luke slapped Gradie on the back as he bolted for the wall perpendicular to the central staircase, and Gradie sprinted after him.


    The machine gun had an electrical tone to it, like a minigun on an A10 mixed with a blown transformer, and the rounds, whatever they were, cracked through the air like bullets, but also hissed like rockets and buzzed like a pair of toy magnets. The staircase and the railing and everything else shattered and puffed and blew apart in such a real and unimaginable way that the idea that everything around him was made of imaginations and wishes evaporated from Gradies mind and he went bolting after Luke.


    ¡°Sulphyr! Supress that piece of shit!¡± Maverick said on the comms, a strange even sound that floated under the deafening gunfire. Sulphyr threw himself prone in the staircase with his LMG aimed up the stairs and a mesh plate expanded around the barrel, leaving him a thin slit for vision, and he slammed on the trigger. It was a similar mechanical sound to its sibling gun, but the rounds didn¡¯t glow and its roar was less chainsaw than helicopter.


    The MG at the top didn¡¯t even flinch, and calmly walked its fire over towards Sulphyr¡¯s position.


    ¡°Explosives out!!¡± Nuke yelled, in a voice that was halfway to a death growl. Her grenade launcher made a rapid-fire pomp-poomp-poomp noise and a trio of explosions blasted the top level into a cloud of marble flechetes. The fire paused temporarily.


    ¡°I¡¯m flanking that mother fucker!¡± Mack said on the comms, and Gradie watched dumfounded as he activated his halfmoon pistol things, which glowed like arc lights, and used them to climb up the wall onto the next level.


    ¡°Get the fuck down!¡± Nova yelled, and for a moment Gradie thought he was talking to Mack, until the five-story high window exploded inward.


    If the top of the stairs MG sounded like a minigun, the guns on the drone sounded like a robot¡¯s scream skipping repeatedly on a CD and blasted over about a hundred concert amps. The sound was so loud, for a moment Gradie thought it was the noise alone that had shattered the window, but then the rounds started chopping up the terrace.


    The drone was about the size of a kayak, with two rotating machine guns on either side of its main fuselage, and a single barrel, which reminded Gradie, for some reason, of a leaf blower, sticking out of the center. It had dual jet engines, currently aiming down, blasting hot plasma and waves of heat that, combined with the muzzle blast of its dual guns, made it look like a hummingbird with wings of molten metal.


    ¡°Get behind me!¡± Nuke yelled, and surprisingly, Maverick and Bled Robin scrambled to do exactly that, while Sulphyr whipped his LMG around and opened fire.


    As the drone got farther across in its deadly arc, and the wave of destruction tearing the terrace level to shreds approached them, Robin slid to a stop behind Nuke, who did something that Gradie at first thought was squatting, until his brain caught up with what his eyes were seeing.


    She had compressed herself into a shorter, even squattier shape, and her thick metal plates melded together, as she froze completely still.


    Gradie laughed out loud, which was unfortunate, because tragedy soon followed.


    Maverick at first tried to squeeze in next to Robin, who was hunched in a ball between Sulphyr¡¯s legs, but seeing that it was hopeless, turned and ran right towards the edge of the terrace, blasting his strange shotgun at the drone, which shook of the explosive slugs and Sulphyr¡¯s LMG fire in sparks off its fuselage, and kept on firing.


    In slow motion, the wave of shredding carpet and metal washed over him and took on a pinkish hue. Then, as the stream of bullets was just about to meet Nuke, the barrel in the center of the drone flashed, and Sulphyr and the two girls disappeared in a massive explosion.


    ¡°Fucking sick,¡± Luke said, in a casual tone that disturbed Gradie just as it had before in the Hardworlds, until he realized none of the death in front of him was even half as real as all that.


    But his apathy at the team¡¯s demise did not quite extend to himself.


    ¡°Shit! Move!¡± Luke grabbed Gradie by the handle again and pulled him up into a sprint. The world exploded behind him as the bullets and grenade storm caught up with them.


    ¡°Fuck it! Jump!¡± Luke yelled and pulled Gradie with him in a sudden left turn right towards the edge of the terrace. Gradie got the idea a moment before the ground ran out, and sprinted off the edge.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze: Birds of Prey

    Nerf UAV plz


    The stream of death sliced over their heads like a blind sprinkler and they landed into hard rolls on the carpet below, or in Lukes case, right through a table.


    The gunfire cut off suddenly and the whine of the drone faded away as it vanished past the window¡¯s edge.


    ¡°Yall good?¡± It was Nova on the comms.


    ¡°Up,¡± Gradie and Luke said in unison, and they both started instinctively checking themselves for wounds then stopped and shared a laugh.


    ¡°The fuck did yall two go?¡± Luke asked.


    On queue, a piece of the wall below the upper level they had leapt from smoked and smoldered and collapsed outward. Angel stepped out with his rad throwers glowing and Nova skipped out behind him, staring at his forearm. Luke busted out laughing.


    ¡°Shit, that¡¯s what you meant by get down? I didn¡¯t think to go through the fucking floor!¡±


    ¡°Robin, you up!¡± Nova said.


    ¡°Fuck yes! Where is it?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s a quarter mile up, scanning. But my birds are jamming it, its gonna have to¡ª¡±


    The machine gun atop the stairs started up again, and everyone scattered. Luke and Gradie aimed up the stairs and stepped up to the wall until their lower halves were obscured by the next level, then started firing.


    The rifle¡¯s rate of fire was somewhere between an M416 and an FN mini-mini, and the recoil was similar to his X95. Some things shot out of the side like shell casings, but they were about a quarter of the size of any rifle casings he knew of and landed soundlessly on the carpet after floating down like leaves.


    Gradie noticed a gauge in the lower part of his screen, indicating that while his gun had a ridiculous ammo count in the hundreds per mag, it would overheat in sustained fire.


    ¡°Talk with me!¡± he told Luke on the comms, and started firing in alternate one second bursts of fire and pause. Luke picked up the gaps and they lay into the general area of the machine gun with a steady stream of fire that was joined by one of Nukes Grenades.


    ¡°Reloading!¡± Sulphyr yelled somewhere.


    ¡°Drone coming around!¡± Nova yelled ¡°Sword, cut them some cover! Robin, tune your¡ª¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m on it!!¡±


    Gradie had paused his fire to take out his and Lukes cover packs, which unfolded with a snap, and noticed Bled Robin doing something with her massive weapon. The metal exterior rearranged like a jigsaw, briefly exposing a bright glowing core inside.


    ¡°Fuck this!¡± Luke said and grabbed his cover mesh and ran in the hole in the wall Angel had just finished cutting. Sulphyr and Nova booked it after him and Gradie scrambled in behind.


    Inside, they fanned out across the concrete and stainless steel storage room, where extra tables and chairs and even what looked like an old popcorn machine lay sleeping in dust.


    ¡°Look out below!¡± Nuke said on the comms, and fell down through the ragged opening in the ceiling cut by the drone. She sat down hard on a kitchen island and rolled sideways onto the ground.


    ¡°Damn she thick!¡± Sulphyr said.


    ¡°Bro, really, again?¡± Angel said.


    Nuke pointed at Sulphyr and jumped around.


    ¡°Pay up! Pay up!¡±


    ¡°Mavericks dead!¡± Sulphyr hissed.


    ¡°Fuck that!¡± Maverick said on the comms. ¡°You know the rules. 50 tokens every time you make that stupid fucking joke!¡±


    Robin landed gracefully in the room and aimed her cannon outside.


    ¡°Nuke! Come here! Emplacement!¡±


    Nuke jogged over to Robin and got into a low crouch in front of her. Robin set her cannon on Nuke¡¯s shoulder and they stepped toward the opening.


    ¡°Yall get to cover!¡± Nova waved his arm at the rest of them without taking his eyes off his forearm. He was crouched down behind his own cover mesh which Gradie couldn¡¯t help but notice was a different color than his and seemed to have extra layers of some kind of clear glass.


    The whine of the drone changed tone and got louder. Having nothing else to do, Gradie crouched down behind his cover mesh and aimed his rifle at the wall.


    ¡°Gradie! Come here!¡± Luke said in a whisper tone on the private comms. Gradie looked back and Luke waved him towards a corner of the room where some kind of chest high freezer was, and got on top of it and put his mesh cover in front of him. Gradie laughed out loud, as the death sound of the drone roared outside and Luke snuggled into place behind the mesh. It was the most video game-esque thing he had seen since they left Colors.If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    But he followed him anyway. As he was climbing up, Nova hissed on the team comms.


    ¡°He¡¯s dropping down! Charge it!¡±


    Robin¡¯s cannon made a sound like a dive bomber and started to glow in places.


    ¡°Tagging him!¡± Nova said, and the drone popped up on the mini map. There was a burst of gunfire outside, and the drone disappeared off the map.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Nova said. ¡°Ok, he should be coming from the ¨C¡±


    ¡°SHHHH!¡± Robin said out loud, and the only noise after was the drone, its engine rising and falling as it zipped around outside like a wasp looking for an opening. Robin tapped Nuke on the head and they both walked carefully toward the opening. There was a brief pause, as Gradie rearranged himself on the freezer, getting his cover flush with Luke¡¯s, and the engine sound normalized and grew at a steady pace, then everything happened at once.


    Robin¡¯s cannon went off with a ¡°tchoooo¡± sound, Nuke snapped into her compressed turtle form, the walls, ceiling and ground around them exploded, and the drone¡¯s engine shifted in pitch and made a strange grinding sound.


    ¡°Got it!¡± Nova said. ¡°Ok, hold on, hold on,¡± He was typing frantically on a keyboard Gradie couldn¡¯t see. The engine noise faded to nothing so suddenly, he thought it might have exploded, but as it persisted in a muted far away tone, he realized the thing had just zipped off at an unimaginable speed.


    Robin slapped Nuke¡¯s back and she popped out of her turtle form and stepped backward at an angle while Robin kept her cannon aimed out the now much wider opening in the wall.


    ¡°Ok, I got in through one of the cameras. Trying to crack the timing software. Shit. One second.¡±


    The drone¡¯s jets screamed like a thing attacked, and Gradie didn¡¯t even have to see it to know it was diving in.


    ¡°Call it!¡± Robin yelled, jerking her cannon back and forth, seeking for the drone outside, and finding nothing.


    ¡°Shit it¡¯s too high,¡± Nova said. ¡°Your gonna have to move¡ª¡±


    The ceiling exploded and the drone shrieked. The room dissolved into bursts of dust and concrete and the last Gradie saw of Sulphyr and the twins, they were running in three opposite directions. Somewhere in the dim haze, something flashed and spit gunfire and for a moment Gradie thought it was the drone¡¯s rounds ricocheting off something, but then Sulphyr started yelling out loud.


    ¡°Mother fucking toy using piece of shit!¡± He lay into his LMG for a good three seconds as the drone¡¯s fire ripped the room around him to dust, and then he exploded, and the drones cannon roar echoed half a second later.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Someone yelled and Gradie felt another body hop onto the freezer next to him.


    In an instant, the world went silent, besides the lazy buzzing of the drone somewhere out the window.


    ¡°It¡¯s hovering,¡± Nova said on the group comms. ¡°Looking for signs of life. Fuck! It cleared my worms out of the fuel system!¡±


    The dust started to clear, and three big blotches of evening sunlight poured in through the broken ceiling.


    ¡°I need someone to draw its attention. Just for a second!¡± Robin said.


    ¡°Shit, I¡¯m not busy,¡± said Luke, and he hopped off the freezer and jogged away with his cover mesh in one hand and his rifle in the other.


    ¡°Just get it to turn and then run!¡± Robin hissed. Luke held his mesh cover up like an old hoplite shield and rested his rifle on it as he dissolved into the dust. A few seconds later, his silhouette appeared, outlined by the light coming through the hole in the far side of the room.


    ¡°There you are. Hey Buddy,¡± he said sofly, and fired. Immediately, the drones engine shifted up in pitch and half a second later the ceiling above Luke exploded down on him in a burst of gunfire.


    At the same time, Robin had stepped out into the soft patch of evening light, and Nuke scrambled to get in front of her. The laser cannon went off and red neon lit up every piece of dust in the room and reflected off mirror metal surfaces that till then had been laying unseen in the murk. The beam shot out into the light and held steady like a spotlight. It was a surreal sight that took the experience suddenly beyond video game or movie, and for a moment the causal link between the Real, the Other, and even the rest of Gunmaze, with this uncanny moment, broke apart, and he felt that what he was seeing was really happening on some other world yet undiscovered.


    ¡°Got it!¡± Nova yelled. ¡°You melted an engine!¡±


    ¡°I can see that!¡± Robin yelled, and began pulsing the laser. The drones engine whine became an oscillating kick drum like noise that could only mean it was spinning uncontrollably.


    ¡°Oh shit. It armed its payload,¡± Nova said.


    ¡°What payload?¡± Robin yelled.


    ¡°Get out!¡± Angel screamed, surprisingly close to Gradie, and his rad thrower¡¯s green glow lit up the wall next to the freezer.


    Then, suddenly, with a noise like the power surges in Gradie¡¯s old apartment whenever someone hit a pole, the drone went silent.


    ¡°Was that it?¡± Luke asked, stepping out of the haze. ¡°Where¡¯s the boom?¡±


    ¡°Pilot killed its kamikaze mode,¡± Nova said. ¡°Guess they thought better about setting a bomb off in a building they¡¯re stuck on since I was knocking on the steering software anyway.¡± He typed frantically on his invisible keyboard, and the wind blew lazily out in the terrace room.


    ¡°Im in position,¡± Mack said on the comms. ¡°When we hittin this pill box bitch?¡±


    ¡°One second!¡± Nova said, annoyed. ¡°I gotta finish breaking into their systems.¡±


    Watching Nova sit and type, while one of his drones flew out the door and another climbed over to a hole in the wall and clamped onto a piece of exposed cable, Gradie was suddenly reminded of EP, and by extension, the Hardworlds. Like someone had flicked on a light, this world grew dim again, and like a junkie trying to distract himself from his craving, he asked out loud,


    ¡°Is it like actual hacking, or like a mini game?¡±


    ¡°Somewhere in between,¡± Robin said on the comms, and the chat window on the HUD lit up in a way that told him she had muted herself to Nova. Gradie quickly did the same thing, as Nova typed away, frowining.


    ¡°Most of the actual programming is done by software in the game,¡± she continued. ¡°Its mostly memorizing what programs trump what and knowing when to cobble something together from the pieces. Some comp sci knowledge can help at times, but I¡¯ve seen a lot of people pick it up who couldn¡¯t even open a command prompt in the Real.¡±


    Who is this person, Gradie asked himself. Who is she in the Real? He studied her face, but got nothing. A frozen projection under a glass visor. Like an itch, he tried to guess what any of them were like in the Real, what they might say to him, how they might act, would Nuke smile at him, would the twins have anything to say to him at all?


    ¡°Fuck, ok.¡± Nova sighed. ¡°I got two in. Gonna leave them dormant for now. Lets deal with the MG and maybe I can get another access point closer to the penthouses.¡±


    He stood up and everyone started swinging weapons around and getting in stances. Robin slapped her cannon and half of it swung open on hinges then broke apart and reformed. An info pop-up in Gradie¡¯s HUD told him she was now in ¡°anti personnel¡± mode, and listed a circle graph of her strengths and weaknesses. He tabbed over to his own, and saw that he, like Luke, was squarely in the middle. Run of the mill grunts. An AR and two grenades.


    So be it. If there was one thing he was sure of, it was that whoever was waiting in the penthouse, he and Luke would outshoot them.


    In the back of his mind, the Hardworlds called, and he prayed the space age MG on the stairs would drown them out soon.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze: Gatecrashers

    Camping piece of shit


    ¡°We¡¯re coming in,¡± Maverick said on the comms, and the mini map pinged him and Sulphyr moving down the same path the team had taken earlier. On their mini stat-graph, the word ¡®clone¡¯ was highlighted.


    ¡°My MG still there?¡± Sulphyr asked. Nuke was over by the charred hole in the floor where the cannon had gotten him, and she kicked around.


    ¡°I don¡¯t see it.¡±


    ¡°I got it,¡± Nova said. One of his drones chirped in the back half of the room and lifted the LMG out of a pile of broken dishware.


    ¡°Fuck yeah. Let¡¯s storm this breach,¡± Maverick said.


    The two of them came in through a door in the back that was untouched by the drone¡¯s assault, and it looked like they were coming on stage, moving from a world of peace and quiet and snack trays onto a set painstakingly decorated like a war zone.


    ¡°So how we doing this?¡± Maverick asked.


    Nova pinged the mini map.


    ¡°There¡¯s a service staircase at the back pantry that leads right up to the next terrace¡¯s kitchen. We¡¯ll take that up and rush him from that level.¡±


    Robin looked at him, her eyes narrowing behind her red plastic face shield.


    ¡°Thought you said staircases were a no go?¡±


    ¡°This one doesn¡¯t go anywhere else. It wouldn¡¯t make sense for them to waste time or resources trapping it when they could just concentrate their defenses on the actual penthouse chokepoints.¡±


    ¡°You willing to bet your ass on that?¡±


    ¡°Yeah bro, that¡¯s why I¡¯m going up the stairs.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯ll I¡¯m not risking all of us at one route,¡± Maverick said. ¡°Nuke, you and Robin get ready to pop a thermal smoke on the staircase and push this mother fucker. Sulphyr and I will leap-frog up the sides.¡± He gestured with his thumb toward something on his back, a kind of braced backpack connected via tubes to elbow and kneepads that he hadn¡¯t been wearing before he dropped into his clone. Whatever it was, Sulphyr was wearing the same thing.


    ¡°Quasar, you and your crew can take the staircase. If you make it, we¡¯ll rush it once you¡¯re in position. Got it?¡±


    ¡°Alright, yeah,¡± Nova said. ¡°Makes sense.¡±


    ¡°All right let¡¯s kill this bitch,¡± Maverick said, and got moving.


    Nova made some keystrokes in the air and Gradie¡¯s team table floating off to the side changed shape. The other five members greyed out and minimized, so only Luke and the twin¡¯s stat bars appeared next to his. A notification alerted him that he had been moved to ¡°stairs team¡±.


    Angel flipped something over on his rad thrower and another message told Gradie it was now in ¡°extreme CQC mode¡±. He took up point with Luke behind him, followed by Nova then Gradie taking up the rear. They advanced in a staggered formation and Gradie batted away more clubhouse flashbacks.


    ¡°They wanna suck down machine gun fire out there, so be it,¡± Angel said as they made their way through a back kitchen area towards the staircase. ¡°Mav always likes to over plan everything.¡±


    ¡°I can kind of see his point, though,¡± Luke said, in a tone that Gradie knew was tense from not wanting to tell Angel how wrong he was. Maverick¡¯s plan was textbook, besides maybe the part with the girls running at MG fire head on, smoke grenade or not. If Nova¡¯s sweeps had missed a bomb in the staircase, it would have been game over for the entire op if they all took the stairs.


    ¡°You mean being better safe than sorry?¡± Angel said, not really asking. ¡°Yeah, but Quasar swept that shit all over, and he¡¯s assuming they don¡¯t have another gun drone just waiting out there. And we could take the stairs one at a time if he¡¯s really worried. And what the fuck are we gonna do if one of us gets dropped if we¡¯re split up? Can¡¯t get to each other for aid if we¡¯re spread out. Isnt that one of the basic rules of combat or something?¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re making a lot of good points,¡± Luke said. ¡°And I could have some answers to them, and you could bat them back at me, and we could sit there talking forever, but I think you¡¯re missing the big picture. There¡¯s no good way to rush a fucking MG.¡±


    ¡°Alright, fair enough,¡± Angel said, sounding more fed up than intellectually satisfied with the response.


    The staircase, despite some attempts by the dev to make the recessed lighting look ultra futuristic, was a basic cement fire escape. Nova¡¯s drones went up first, found nothing, and then the team followed. Absolutely nothing happened inside, but when they stepped out onto the humming service hallway, Gradie felt something had changed.


    While before the Hardworlds had felt separated by a vast distance, and their calls to him had felt like forlorn cries of morning sailing over a deep canyon, the simple act of ascending a baren concrete staircase, rifle raised, had stirred up the pieces of them wedged in Gradie¡¯s soul, and now he felt them around every corner. Maybe they had gotten fed up with his spurning them and taken matters into their own hands. For not the first time, he was struck by the feeling that the Hardworlds had a mind of their own.


    ¡°We¡¯re in position, and all in one piece,¡± Nova said on the comms as they stepped out onto the carpeted terrace. Gradie had d¨¦j¨¤ vu. It looked exactly like the level below now reduced to rubble by the drone, only smaller, as if the world was slowly collapsing in on them. The massive window frame glowed with dying orange sunlight, as if a shadow cast by some cloud or tower had passed away when they were in the stairwell. Without the tinted glass, the flashing, sparkling skyline seemed to point in at them like bared knife blades.This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.


    ¡°Nuke, pop a smoke when youre ready,¡± Maverick said. ¡°Robin, hold your fire till you¡¯re sure you got a bead.¡±


    ¡°So never?¡±


    ¡°Pretty sure then!¡± Maverick said over the stifled laughter.


    ¡°Smoke out!¡± Nuke whispered, and the sound right in his ears sent tingles down Gradie¡¯s back.


    There was a pop up the staircase, and a strange sparkling smoke that flashed in places like shrunken lightning spread across the top landing. Nuke and Robin stepped out onto the staircase and started jogging up the stairs, a jog being about as fast as Nuke could move. Her footsteps fell heavily on the stairs, and Gradie was sure the noise alone would give away her location, smoke grenade be damned.


    ¡°Aight, moving up,¡± Maverick said. A few seconds later, he floated up like peter pan on a stage wire and flipped over the glass railing on the terrace at the other side of the wide staircase. He rose and fell, completely soundless, and aimed his weapon up towards the smoked out MG position at the top of the stairs. A few seconds later, Sulphyr floated up and over and landed behind him.


    ¡°Hold it till he starts firing,¡± Maverick advised.


    ¡°Yeah, I know!¡± Robin hissed.


    Suddenly, a red laser darted out of the smoke, seeking, it fluttered back and forth down the staircase, until it grazed the top of Nuke¡¯s head, then doubled back and settled on her chest.


    ¡°How the fuck is it getting through¡ª¡± Sulphyr started.


    Three things happened at once. Maverick yelled ¡°Turtle!¡±, Robin fired her laser, and the MG went wild.


    Sparks skipped off Nukes armor and she squealed and contracted into a short pillar that made the stairs under her flex into a dip. The soft carpeted stairs around her coughed up fabric and plastic as Robin sent laser beams as thick as telephone poles towards the MG.


    ¡°Engaging!¡± Gradie yelled out loud, unable to fight the habit, and stepped back until he could see the central portion of the electric smoke, where strange muzzle flash glowed dully like lightning behind clouds, and lay into his neo-AR. Luke opened up a second later, and before another second had passed, they were talking their fire again, sending a single sustained stream of whatever the rounds were made of onto the MG position.


    But much like the last time, it didn¡¯t seem to make a lot of difference, though it did seem to piss the guy off.


    The stream of tracers, mixed with the sporadic pulse of his targeting laser, danced away from Nuke and Robin, and headed straight for Gradie and Luke.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Before Gradie had the word out, Luke had grabbed him by his back handle and thrown the two of them to the ground at the base of the wall. The terrace exploded over their heads, and the four of them, almost at the same time, flipped open their cover packs and held them up like the machine gun fire was only so much drizzle.


    With cartoon-like comedic effect, the stream of floor-ripping death stopped just feet from where Gradie and the other three were huddled against the wall, then flew back the way it came like a frustrated phantom made of tracer fire.


    ¡°Wait...¡± Luke said, barely out loud.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± Robin yelled. ¡°He¡¯s got prismatic shielding! I saw it!¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m gonna cover you!¡± Maverick yelled, now up on some higher level. ¡°Get ready to move, Nuke!¡±


    ¡°You can¡¯t cover shit!¡± Robin yelled, flipping something around on her cannon. ¡°He¡¯s dug into a god damned slit!¡±


    Sulphyr¡¯s MG opened up somewhere before she finished talking, and the enemy MG swept back over her towards the other side of the staircase.


    ¡°Pussy mother fucker!¡± she yelled, and her canon fired a single laser-less shot that Graide¡¯s HUD told him was a railgun, of which she only had five rounds per mag.


    ¡°Yo Maverick,¡± Luke said on the comms, calm as a barfly. ¡°I think the MGs locked horizontally. It couldn¡¯t quite make it to us.¡±


    Across the way, the machine gun fire chased Sulphyr and Maverick back towards the far wall, their jump suit assisted leaps looking like circ de solei maneuvers out of place. Just when the fire seemed like it was about to catch them, it stopped.


    ¡°Holy shit! He can¡¯t touch this far!¡± Sulphyr whooped, and lay into his MG as the enemy shredded the floor just feet from him.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± Robin mashed the trigger on an open bolt. All five of her rail gun round had sunk into the black hole of the MG position without effect.


    ¡°Nuke, move the fuck out!¡± Maverick yelled.


    ¡°Got it!¡± She popped out of her turtle form and sprinted up the stairs. Robin fell over onto her face mid reload.


    ¡°What the fuck!¡±


    ¡°Not up!¡± Maverick yelled frantically. ¡°Get out of there!¡±


    ¡°Fuck him!¡± Nuke said, firing her grenade launcher as fast as she could.


    Robin scrambled up behind her, crawling up the stairs.


    ¡°Bitch if you get me killed you¡¯re paying for my clone!¡± There was laughter in her voice.


    The spray of fire darted over like a flood light and Nuke disappeared in a cloud of debris with a squeal.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Robin threw herself as flat as she could and the tracers zipped over her head and one sparked off her armor.


    ¡°I cant move!¡± Nuke yelled. As the dust cleared, Gradie saw she had turtled mid fall and was laying flat on the stairs like a toppled cocoon.


    ¡°Cover me!¡± Angel said suddenly behind Gradie, and moved out with his rad thrower raised. Gradie bolted up and held his cover mesh like a spartan shield and fired blindly at the fading smoke atop the stairs. This time, the MG ignored him and walked its fire from Nuke to Robin.


    Just before the line of fire made it to her, Angel¡¯s gun made a rocketpunk whining sound and shot a burst of green light right at Robin. The staircase beneath her disintegrated and she fell down into darkness as the tracer rounds blazed through the empty air she had just been breathing.


    ¡°Ahhhhh shit!¡± she screamed and landed hard somewhere below. Angel turned to shoot Nuke, but the MG flashed over to them and Luke had to pull him and Gradie back by the handles as the wall next to them exploded.


    ¡°Moving up!¡± Maverick yelled. Gradie saw him and Sulphyr ascending the staircase on his minimap. They were hugging the far wall and were still a good fifty feet from the top level.


    The enemy machine gun changed pitch, to a steady rhythm of one second bursts.


    ¡°He¡¯s drilling my head!¡± Nuke yelled, completely serious. Robin, Sulphyr and Mack all burst out laughing on the comms.


    ¡°Fuck you assholes, do something!¡±


    ¡°Just let him finish,¡± Mack snickered.


    ¡°I¡¯m going to fucking kill you!¡± Nuke squealed.


    ¡°Ok, fuck it girl. I got you,¡± Mack said, and Gradie saw his icon move suddenly from where it had been sitting for the past ten minutes at the top of the stairs, toward the MG position.


    Gradie had gotten to his feet and was stepping back with his rifle raised up toward the elevator platforms when he saw Mack, very small and partially blending into the wall via some kind of active camo but outlined in green by the computer¡¯s HUD, climbing across the walls and ceiling. It took Gradie a few seconds to understand that Mack was using his half moon weapons to grab the surfaces like a sci-fi spider.


    When he got right over the smoke, he paused, hung by one hand, and then swung down and disappeared.


    ¡°Grena¡ª¡±


    The explosion cut him off, and even from behind the smoke the flash was almost blindingly bright. A few seconds later, chunks of debris rained on the stairs.


    There was an unexpected moment of silence, the first real quiet in ages, as the MG died and the team waited breathlessly for it to return.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze: Shoots and Ladders

    My KD is better in the Hardworlds


    ¡°Shit!¡± Mack said suddenly on the comms. Gradie noticed when his name lit up, that a small loading bar appeared next to it with the word ¡°cloning...¡± above it.


    ¡°Did you frag yourself?¡± Maverick scoffed.


    ¡°Fuck no man! That bitch had flechette traps all over him. I still got him though.¡±


    ¡°The fuck was that bomb?¡± Sulphyr asked.


    ¡°That gel pack shit I looted from those jump-jet guys at the booths. Shit vaporized my guy. Oh fuck my half-moons!¡±


    ¡°Any reason you didn¡¯t do that ten fucking minutes ago?¡± Robin said, stomping up the grand staircase from the next level.


    ¡°I was looking for an opening and I thought yall had it.¡±


    ¡°So which one was it?¡±


    ¡°Hey fuck yall, I did it didn¡¯t I? And now my shit is gone.¡±


    ¡°Speaking of which,¡± Maverick said. ¡°Grab a rad thrower when you spawn back. Its bug killing time.¡±


    ¡°And bring me that drone pallet,¡± Nova added.


    ¡°Aight sure, I''ll just lug all this shit over. Hope yall¡ª¡±


    In a flash, the door at the top of the stairs erupted in deep orange sparks, and Nuke, who had been de turtling and standing up, squealed and popped back into her cacoon. Robin almost fell over laughing.


    ¡°God dammit!¡± Nuke squealed and morphed back into her space marine shape.


    ¡°Is that thermite?¡± Luke asked.


    ¡°Yeah, they¡¯re melting down that shit. Have to find another way in. Nova, how¡¯s the scan going?¡±


    Gradie looked around and found Nova sitting cross-legged on the ground, screens seen and unseen wrapped around him, making frantic motions with his fingers and pivoting his head from screen to screen.


    ¡°I¡¯m taking out external cameras right now. They¡¯re hunting my worms. Once their outside eyes are gone, I¡¯m gonna spinal tap their main line.¡±


    ¡°English, bro.¡±


    ¡°Stick a big skimmer on the framework up there,¡± he nodded up the stairs. ¡°And pick up the vibrations coming from the tower and maybe even that big fucking transmitter they got hidden on the roof. Ok, eyes are blinded.¡±


    He rolled onto his feet and swung his SMG around.


    ¡°On me,¡± Maverick said, and marched up the big staircase. The others formed up around him, guns on the elevator lobby around, and Luke nodded his helmet at Gradie.


    ¡°You ready to show these nerf or nothing mother fuckers what real shooting looks like?¡±


    Gradie laughed silently and nodded.


    ¡°We should bring Philip next time.¡±


    At that, Luke missed a step and almost fell to the stairs laughing. The others looked back, but something else drew their attention. A ship that looked like two Chinooks tied together with no propellers zipped by outside.


    ¡°Shit, looks like the dry dome just popped,¡± Maverick said.


    ¡°The what?¡± Luke asked.


    ¡°Dry domes a big area of no fly and no try. Cannons and satellites lock an area down and it¡¯s a who-moves-first situation. That¡¯s why we¡¯re here. To get a gun emplaced before it goes hot.¡±


    ¡°That our shit or theirs?¡± Luke aimed his rifle out the window and Gradie recalled how his own rounds had bounced uselessly off the gun drone.


    ¡°Ours. We¡¯re at the edge of the dome, and Mercat¡¯s been¡ª¡±


    An explosion echoed through the window, as distant and muffled as thunder.


    ¡°Shit we gotta move,¡± Robin said. More booms and engine roars floated in the high empty window frame, and Gradie realized just how quiet the sky had been until now. He had assumed it was a failure of the gameworlds detail, but now the sounds were just as textured and real as the skyline.


    ¡°Goat-Head to Maverick,¡± a strange voice said on the group comms.


    ¡°Go for Maverick.¡±


    ¡°Status on the tower.¡±


    ¡°Cleared up to the penthouse. About to¡ª¡±


    ¡°It was cleared up to the fucking penthouse yesterday. What¡¯ve you been doing?¡±


    ¡°Uh, we engaged a gun drone, and a machinegun emplacement, and now¡ª¡±


    ¡°Ok, ok. I need, the cannon, up, in one hour. Do you copy?¡±


    ¡°Yes sir it will be done in 30.¡± (At this Robin cocked her helmet in the universal code for ¡°really dude?¡±)


    ¡°It has to be. And clear out some of the anti-air on that thing if you want any support. That fucking towers rigged to shit.¡±


    ¡°Yes sir, understood.¡± Maverick¡¯s tone was completely respectful, but his stiff body posture said about the same thing as Robin¡¯s head tilt.


    ¡°Goat-Head out.¡±


    There was a pause, punctuated by more distant explosions out the window, until Luke said out loud,


    ¡°Well fuck that guy.¡±


    Nuke and Robin laughed. Maverick shook his head.


    ¡°He¡¯s a good dude. Got a lot of pressure coming down on him from the top. This Ops been in the works for months.¡±


    ¡°What no pussy does to a motherfucker,¡± Luke said on the private comms, but out loud he said,


    ¡°Sure bro. But if he talks to me like that, I¡¯m switching sides.¡±


    A piece of the wall next to the elevators shot out sparks and everyone besides Nova got about two feet closer to the ground. He just kept tapping on his unseen keyboard.


    ¡°Calm down. I¡¯m just getting a tap.¡±


    One of his spider drones, the kind with legs that became propeller blades when they flew, was slicing into something in the wall.


    ¡°What are our entry points?¡± Maverick asked.


    ¡°There¡¯s an external staircase here,¡± Nova pinged it on the min-map. ¡°And some kind of laundry service chute here. Any other entry points we¡¯ll have to make ourselves.¡±This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author''s work.


    ¡°If we take the external staircase, they gonna open up on us from the greenhouse?¡± Maverick asked, and manipulated the map.


    Gradie saw for the first time that the circular cross section of the tower got smaller on the next level above them. The ceiling over the terrace room sloped towards a ring labeled ¡°gardens¡± that was about half the diameter of the tower below. Satellite shots supplemented the map, showing a lush green ring of trees, landscaped gardens, pools, decks, and balconies, like a ring of island resort set atop an office tower.


    At the center, the penthouses were a square with bulging rounded edges about a quarter of the size of the tower below, rising four stories above the greenery, and set atop a square of elevator lobbies wrapped around the central support shaft.


    ¡°No, I swept it. It¡¯s clear,¡± Nova said, and swapped the satellite maps away. A fuzzier collage of images overlaid into a single map replaced them, snapshots taken by his drones just seconds ago, one still streaming a live feed in the corner, which revealed the greenery and everything else had been burned down to the concrete, leaving only a flat wasteland around the penthouse with dark pools of murk here and there.


    ¡°Keep some eyes on it just in case,¡± Maverick said. ¡°How¡¯s the chute situation?¡±


    ¡°Tight,¡± Nova said, which elicited muffled laughter from the team. ¡°Schematics say there¡¯s a services ladder in it, but they probably stripped it.¡±


    ¡°So it¡¯s all metal?¡± Nuke said. Gradie glanced over and saw her eyes, soft black things, fluttering around in the glow of her screen, and came to the slow to get there but impossible to avoid conclusion that she was cute.


    ¡°Yeah. Oh shit, your magnets,¡± Maverick said.


    ¡°Guess I¡¯m going up the scary chute.¡±


    ¡°God dammit!¡± Mack said on the comms. ¡°I shoulda brought back up moons!¡±


    ¡°Sulphyr and I will give two of you our jump suits and they can go with Nuke,¡± Maverick said. ¡°The rest of us will take the outside staircase and try and link up.


    ¡°Ill go,¡± Robin said.


    ¡°No, I need your cannon outside in case we get air trouble.¡±


    ¡°Shit, give me the jump suit,¡± Mack said. ¡°I know how to bounce around in a fight.¡±


    ¡°Allright. Who else?¡±


    Everyone looked at each other, until Gradie, knocked suddenly out of his Nuke-centered fantasies, said,


    ¡°Ill go.¡±


    Nuke looked straight at the floor and nodded.


    ¡°Shit, I see how it is,¡± Luke said on the twin¡¯s private comms. ¡°Just leave me with these jokers.¡±


    Gradie actually hadn¡¯t thought of that and now regretted speaking up.


    ¡°You know how it is,¡± he said. ¡°I like to go in through the back door.¡±


    Luke chortled out loud into his helmet and Maverick scowled, but before he could say anything Mack burst through the double door on the far end of the landing, pushing a big pallet on some kind of hover lift.


    ¡°I brought yall some more ammo and shit. You¡¯re welcome.¡±


    ¡°Damn bro, getting fragged was the best thing you ever did,¡± Sulphyr said.


    The game¡¯s ¡°computer¡± alerted Gradie to extra mags and grenades on the pallet, which he grabbed and loaded onto his kit.


    A ¡®helpful hint¡¯ pop up told him that he could configure his rifle into ¡°shotgun mode¡±, which combined 5 to ten rounds into a single shot at the cost of reduced accuracy over range and increased recoil.


    ¡°Uh, Not-Banned, you see this?¡± Gradie asked Luke, and showed his gun clicking into a new configuration around the receiver. Another intel pop up told him the swap took a few seconds because the barrel had to transition to smooth.


    Luke had moved his visor back, and Gradie could see his smile.


    ¡°Damn, can it talk to girls for me too?¡±


    ¡°God damn, they were set up,¡± Nova said suddenly.


    ¡°That¡¯s why we called you,¡± Maverick said. ¡°We clear?¡±


    ¡°I mean, I fried most of their sensors, but the ordinance is still there. I would toss a few charges and shit before stepping through any door.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s standard procedure. Anything else I should know?¡±


    ¡°Looks like they got plates on both entrances, so each team¡¯s gonna need a cutter.¡±


    ¡°Cant we just go through the walls?¡±


    ¡°Nah. That parts Gen twelve residential so the walls are full of hardened data lines and element taps for the printers and shit. The plates are ironically the easiest way to get in.¡±


    ¡°God damn,¡± Mack said. ¡°I thought you said these dudes were mostly worried about aerial drops and would have minimal defenses tower-side?¡±


    ¡°This is minimal!¡± Maverick laughed. ¡°Notice how were sitting here talking without getting blown to pieces?¡±


    Another explosion somewhere outside underscored his point.


    ¡°Aight, let¡¯s move out.¡±


    Gradie followed Nuke and Mack to a futuristic laundry room on the other side of the tower column. They let Nova¡¯s drone blast in the door then stepped in and cleared it with Gradie on point. In the smoke and haze, his mind filled in the unseen places with fragments of the clubhouse and the Hardworlds.


    ¡°Damn GI joe, you can clear a room huh?¡± Mack said, after Gradie had spent half a minute stepping and pivoting around the tall washing machines and kicking in doors to the back offices and storage closets.


    ¡°You can just call my drone to check rooms,¡± Nova said on the comms, annoyed.


    Gradie found the command on his HUD and sent a nearby drone after what turned out to be a break room, and the drones feed was displayed in a little window in the top right of his vision. In the midst of his embarrassment, his thoughts wandered to EP.


    Nuke squatted in front of the chute door and got it open with a retractable tool, exposing a shaft of darkness.


    ¡°You guys step back!¡± She hissed. Gradie and Mack took cover behind some washers as two drones flew into the shaft. Gradie¡¯s helmet had some kind of smart nightvision that illuminated the darkness in blue tones as the rest of the room remained rendered in full color. He recalled that Philip had mentioned full color nightvision was probably less than a decade away for the civilian market, and guessed the blue tones were just a way to tell the players what was happening. Still, it let the internal mechanics of the game world peek through its shell just enough to calm him almost to boredom.


    Nuke stepped inside the shaft and started moving up the back wall, her hands and feet making magnetic humming sounds along the way.


    ¡°Were at the staircase,¡± Maverick said on the comms. Gradie could see the other team members through the walls, and had the ability to dial the intensity of their silhouettes up or down. With a thought, he opened up one of the drone feeds observing them from the outside. They were moving up a steel staircase that had once been encased in skyscraper glass and now hung exposed and glittering in the fading sun.


    ¡°Watching you through the drone Banned man,¡± Gradie said on the comms. ¡°So don¡¯t fuck it up.¡±


    ¡°Fucking simp,¡± Luke said. ¡°Be sure to like and subscribe bro!¡±


    The team stopped on the staircase below the top landing and a few seconds later the door on top exploded.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Gradie said.


    ¡°It¡¯s me,¡± Nova said. He handed his cutter off to one of the drones which flew up to the smoking doorway. Sparks bloomed in the darkness and drew a line in molten orange, then stopped dead.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Nova said. ¡°Shortwave jammer. Really fucking strong, fried my shit!¡±


    ¡°Banned, get up there and finish cutting!¡± Maverick said.


    ¡°You sure? What if I lose a finger?¡±


    ¡°Yes! We can¡¯t afford to lose anyone else!¡±


    ¡°Ok big meanie, here I go. Old useless good for nuthin luh, loser.¡± Luke shuffled up to the door with his shoulders hunched over, fake sniffling.


    ¡°Come on!¡± Maverick hissed.


    ¡°Oh my god!¡± Robin cackled.


    ¡°You should cut a dick into it,¡± Gradie said on the private comms.


    ¡°Bro I was fucking about to, but I think Master chief Maverick would tackle me off the tower and I wouldn¡¯t be able to shoot these nerds camping inside.¡±


    The cutter made an orange molten rectangle that fell inwards and smoldered in the dark.


    ¡°Damn. I can¡¯t see shit,¡± Luke said flatly after a dramatic pause. Robin cackled again.


    ¡°It¡¯s nano smoke! Get the fuck down here!¡± Maverick yelled.


    Luke jogged down and took up his position.


    ¡°Looks like y¡¯all¡¯re stuck with me huh?¡±


    ¡°Moving!¡± Maverick yelled and marched up with what looked like a cross between a rocket launcher and a gyroscopic camera rig in his hand.


    ¡°Pulse out!¡±


    It fired once with a soft crack, and the darkened room exploded three times in rapid succession. A wave of sparkling energy spread through the darkness and vanished.


    ¡°Nano smokes done,¡± Nova said.


    ¡°Frag it!¡± Maverick said. Angel and Sulphyr threw grenades into the darkness and they all squatted down on the staircase. The blast threw debris and a burst of strange smoke out the door.


    Maverick manipulated something on his weapon and looked back at the team.


    ¡°All right, move in on me, and blast anything that moves. Nuke, the moment we start taking fire, you start cutting. I want them committed before you start the pincer.¡±


    ¡°Okie dokie.¡±


    Gradie watched her climb up the wall of the chute. In the picture in picture screen, Maverick¡¯s team moved up the staircase.


    Gradie tabbed the feed to Luke¡¯s POV, and watched Maverick and Sulphyr enter the darkened doorway. Luke¡¯s night vision was dim and hazy from the remnants of the nano-smoke still floating through the air, and Gradie had to remind himself that none of this was actually happening, which rather than comfort him, only made it all the more incredible, and he felt the invisible massive presence of the unseen maker floating out somewhere behind the artificial satellites.


    ¡°Oh this is fucked,¡± Maverick said on the comms. They had stepped through a kind of framed foyer which had once been glass walled with a space age parlor of strange chairs and couches beyond. Their frags had torn it all to pieces, and now they faced a long hallway that led out of the parlor and towards a distant elevator lobby.


    ¡°That¡¯s the private elevator,¡± Nova said.


    ¡°Alright Quasar and Robin hang back and the rest of yall on me,¡± Maverick said in a single breath and rushed towards the first door.


    ¡°Wait,¡± Nova said, crouched down behind Robin. ¡°Ther''es supposed to be a big lobby here.¡±


    The grenade blast blew out the door and Maverick and Sulphyr stepped inside.


    ¡°Clear,¡± said Maverick, and they moved on to the next room.


    ¡°These rooms are not on the fucking floorplans,¡± Nova continued. ¡°They set them up!¡±


    ¡°Still gotta clear them!¡± Maverick said.


    ¡°That¡¯s what they want us¡ª¡± Nova was cut off, abruptly, by an explosion at the far end of the hallway. An explosion that persisted, repeated, and morphed into the roar of a massive machine gun.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Queen of Arthel: Battle of Angleis Plain

    Where Dragons rule


    The sun sat smoldering half hidden on the horizon, immovable, impaled there to bleed its liquid fading light across the sky, staining it a burning, bloodied orange. Its amber light smeared on the jagged knife blade mountains, glared off the river and shaking marsh water, glowed in the sails of the riverboats and behind the thousand banners. It was a twilight just dark enough for deep shadows to rule in the shade.


    And where the light failed, fire avenged it. Dragonfire burned in white hot streaks and siegefire rumbled in rolling stoic waves. Everywhere armor and blades flashed the color of flame, and the smoke formed a dense plain in the sky, sister to the scorched silt below, but twisted and chaotic, a nightmare realm unrestrained by gravity, where dragons clashed and flying magi and mounted air Paladins wove lines of smoke and steam that traced their violent deeds, and which at times dropped corpses and bombs on the land below.


    Those who flew up there saw, when unassailed, the battleground laid out in gentle order. A plaything.


    The massive plain was bordered by the hills to the west, dense lake forest to the northeast, the great river to the east, and lesser river to the southwest.


    The Forces of the Cloth, those who would see the Empire reformed, had come from the northwest, where twinkling fires whispered of their hateful march through the lands of the hillfolk, and were now arranged west to east, south facing, on that massive plain, their left flank now pressed between their enemies and a dense pocket of marsh.


    The forces of Wovenleaf, those who would see neither the empire return nor suffer the dull taxes and projections of soft power and proxy wars of the myriad of anti-imperial republics, had come down from the nearby city of Angleis, visible from the battlefield as a mounded mas of darkness whispering with sparse torchlight, where the twin great rivers met. The leafen army was arranged like a slackened sail, and its rear was a curved line pressed against banks and sand bars.


    The battle was fierce, and the dying day, though having shed most of its hours over the struggle, did not diminish the violence by falling into night.


    Wovenleaf marines stormed the beaches of the downstream flanks of the great river while aided by Angleisie siege machines throwing all manner of burning, crushing, smoking, and exploding ordinance at the Cloth¡¯s beach defenders. On the plain, cloth Paladins led crashing charges against the Leaf Lord¡¯s infantry, and Cloth archers and balistamen rained hell from the safety of their northern marsh-ringed hills. The arrows and bolts fell in a myriad of colors tones and sounds.


    Leafen Pikemen turned maneuvers against Flayed Zealots of the Barbed band, And the main masses of infantry bled themselves into the soil at the center, where siege carts and trenches and fallen shardtowers were the only scraps of protection against the death that fell in all kinds and from all places.


    None of which was more feared than dragonfire. Though magi of either side repelled it in brief boiling translucent domes that smeared it into molten puddles, and the Dragons threw it sparingly, being too locked in combat with each other to let their eight eyes linger on the insectoids on the plain, all feared the time when their enemy¡¯s dragons were left unopposed, free to throw flame in equal to their wrath.


    Though the dragonfire may have been the most observed spectacle, it was not the most brilliant. That honor fell, as always, to the heroics of the fighters.


    In a brief gap in the clamor, where a low grass had miraculously survived untrampled, and a single purple Lealilac nodded in the wind, Myrlias dismounted Sarnec with his great hammer, and raised it overhead with a wavering howl mastered by his people. But Eustus, hidden in the surrounding cloud of melee, stretched out a ringed hand and froze the weapon before it could deliver that fatal blow, so that the great Draugh-forged hammer head shattered against Sarnec¡¯s rune-blue plate like glass. Another wavering howl beat back the ring of soldiers, and Myrlias gave battle with his shattered weapon like a spear, killing both of Sarnec and Eustus in rage at the destruction of that weapon.The author''s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    Stormlord Hedwin was cut down by Sylverai Blackblade, dark assassin of the Foghold streets, and the summoned storm of Donnersturm, thus left unopposed, poured helmet sized hail and biting corrosive rain upon the forces of the Cloth.


    Dryadame managed, while riding that moss covered purple eyed mount of hers sidesaddle, to charm the enemy dragon for a moment, causing it to torch a legion of its own calvary.


    And others too put their names in the log for good though glorious deeds.


    But another more subtle struggle was unfolding to the north forest, where forces greatly needed by the Cloth to ford the mile wide river were about to encounter an unspeakable obstacle.


    The great trees of the Xenshua forest have been untouched by blade for all of history. The edges of that dense region are marked by rolled boulders taller than the towers of Pleidon, placed by the ancients to declare the edges of agriculture. Past them, no forestry was permitted by law, and no foraging beyond the annual holy walks by the chosen priest, which lasted only from sunrise to sunrise. It was an untamed and impenetrable forest. Which is why the sappers of the Cloth chose it as their passage, thinking its strength would bow to theirs, and become their shield.


    The sun had not fallen, but was barely a glow through the smoke darkned skies, as they marched, led by nine magi of the Bestuod Sect, who sung a low chant that turned everything above the soil to brittle stone. Great beasts of Donra walked in the front, trampling the fossilized trunks and growth to dust, and three cohorts of sappers marched behind, armored Shodai-Sen shieldmen at the outside, then crossbowmen and grenadiers behind them, and at the heart of the column, their priceless cargo, nine Silthian powder carts, dark wood and iron liters carried by shelled lizards and defended by the Paladins of Scarlet, wielding crystalline maces and halberds.


    In their haste, they had taken no forward scouts besides a low level Hawkhand, whose bird circled high in the air, only descending below the canopy to investigate a suspect clearing or rogue hill. They had calculated that any force not committed to the battle on the plain or the clash at the lake would not be worth worrying about anyway, given their own strength.


    This assumption would be their undoing.


    They lay in wait still as stone, but not uncomfortable. They knew how to sit still in the forest for hours and even days. Each one had about them a tented cloak reinforced with foliage from the immediate area, a defense not only against the dumb eyes of humans, but also against the keener infrared eyes of Quanli, and the thermal sight of dragons.


    If they could have been seen, their formation in waiting would have resembled a V shaped jaw of teeth, with their enemy walking towards the throat. At the tip of one of the formations incisors, halfway down the jaw, she waited.


    Double obscured, not only by her fabric tent of foraged foliage (in which now nested a silver lark and a weaving moonspider, not unaware of but completely unconcerned with her presence), but also by her silken cloak of twilight, one of only three in the entire battle of ten thousand souls, and by far the fairest of the three. It drew colors from around, threw her body heat off at diffused shapes, and buffeted itself against arrows.


    At the tip of her bow, hard drawn, was an arrow of special cunning. Itself camouflaged, tipped with ultradiamond forged by the beaded sweat of a volcano dragon. Hard against armor, shattering like glass under flesh, mixing with blood and dissolving into a potent poison that took effect quicker than a heartbeat. It was aimed, expertly, at the visor of Khianron, head guard of the marching sappers.


    She had watched him for weeks. Stalked him as he rode out from the distant fortress of Lanyor Draugh, seen him dispatch a rebel raiding team with ease, studied how his armor was put on and removed morn and night by his squire, and been lucky enough to witness his fight with Molt-Molt, head guard of Kaldren bridge, just days before High command had sent Khianron on some unmentionable mission. She could have taken him as he marched through the Doldric caverns and took the backpaths to the battlefield, but she knew it was better to take down an enemy¡¯s oak when he sits among the branches, than when it stands alone.


    So here he was, with armor like polished amethyst, atop a reptilian mount with forge glow eyes. His spear blade was long and shined like sleeping metal. Silverfish he called it. Its segmented blade would break apart into twelve razor lashes that moved through the air as if suspended in their own invisible water as he fought. Impossible to predict or parry for all but the most trained fighters. She had seen the silver fingers catch a magi¡¯s fire ball and throw it back at him.


    But, she had also see him do something else. Every time he sensed a threat, he twitched his spear and squared up in exactly the same way. So when Knucklebuster coughed in the tree line, and the Sappers halted in their march, as the bowmen and sheildmen readied arms and the singing magi shifted to verses of anti-personnel destruction, Khianron shifted his shoulders, bared his chest, lowered his silver blade down and to the right, with the shaft along his back behind him, and Lindsey let the arrow fly.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Queen of Arthel: Ambush in Xenshua Forest

    Whispering trees


    The tongues of metal at the end of Khianron¡¯s spear stuck out like shrapnel and the runes in his armor screamed in a pitch soundless to all but the magi, who heard it as a scream and flinched.


    But it was too late. The arrow broke apart in the back of his skull before those magical defenses had sensed a thing. There was a crack and a hiss as the arrow tore itself apart in his head, and he fell with a dull thud to the forest floor, sounding no more majestic than a dead oak.


    His death was the signal. Before the body had settled, the trees and thickets erupted and a flurry of projectiles struck the advancing force like an ocean wave. Arrows, bombs, spears, bolts, orbs of fire and pure concussive force fell upon the armored column with a slap, and the marching formation shuddered and shed fragments of itself in metal and gore.


    To their credit, the enemy let less than a breath pass between the surprise volley and their own return fire. It came as bolts and bombs, harsh but blind, for the only target they had, was everything. Trees splintered into shrapnel. Leaves fluttered in a gust of arrows. Bolts bristled out of limbs and trunks and sunk deep in the soft forest floor. In some places, the blasts peeled back the forest and revealed the attackers hiding beneath. Lightly armored earth-colored assassins, they fell like leaves and shattered into pieces, their only defense, stealth, now lost.


    The attackers let loose from the trees, threw back bombs, and in some places along the procession where terrain permitted, launched brutal charges. Armed with shields covered in bark and moss and hooked short swords and backed by bowmen who found the gaps in armor as easy as they threaded a shot through the trees during a hunt, they struck in and killed where they could, then vanished back behind the foliage, their tall shields blending into the forest.


    The Shodai Sen sheildmen are notorious for their shield wall, moving like a hiveminded band of metal around whatever force they are assigned to guard, and maintaining their seamless barrier no matter the terrain or enemy, besides to let unsuspecting attackers in to surround and destroy, like a dragon absorbing an insect through its skin.


    However, the soft forest floor, the pit traps dug by the attackers, and the speed and skill of the ambush, tested the limits of even the Shodai Sen, and something else broke it.


    Paravel was one of the best druids Lindsey had ever fought with, and she had been giggling silently to herself (her soft leaf tent had shuddered and her white teeth suddenly flashed in Lindsey¡¯s direction) since the Donra beasts had stomped into view. A few moments after the opening attack, Lindsey discovered why.


    A large female Donra with distinctly Paravel colored markings burst through the trees and charged the columns beasts. Male Donra beasts will not stand against a female, and two of them turned around and barreled through their own ranks into the forest, leaving a gaping hole in the Shodai Sen¡¯s carefully woven shield wall, and tens of enemy men dead on the forest floor. A storm of arrows and other implements kicked up like rain caught in a strong wind and sought out the newly exposed wound.


    The Sappers condensed into ranks and the line became a slim serpent of shield faces and seeking spear heads, spitting arrows and bombs. Still, the attackers slipped arrows through the gaps, dropped thorn wrapped branches from above, and pulled the supports from buried pit traps.


    The Magi had enough of it less than a minute in. Their song changed, increasing in tempo and taking on a shrieking quality, and the forest broke out in streaks of white like an unseen flaming sword was cutting it to ash one stroke at a time. The air filled with screams as the spells cut the attackers to pieces along with the trees. Wood and flesh fell with the same white scars, dissolving into the same fine dust.


    The attackers acted immediately, in a way that revealed much foreknowledge of the Cloth magi. They charged in at the ranks and threw bombs of glass dust and smoke. The magi struck out just as violently when blind as when their enemy was right in front of them, and the Sapper infantry suffered the consequences. Now, both sides lost men by the dozen every time the magi screamed their musical spells, until the acting commander, Siegemaster Gharil, safe in his cart, gave orders in the tongue of the Cloth.


    All Magi, compose yourself and clear us a way! Forward march southwest. Reach the clearing and form up. Then we will swat these flies.


    The Magi returned to their deep slow song, though now with a waver at the edges, and the column pressed forward into the dust of falling forest, towards a clearing sighted by the Hawkhand.


    With the column reformed, the Magi stood again at the front, and drew their swords, long blades like swimming snakes. The remaining Donra beasts walked in front, ramming and trampling the petrified foliage as before, but now pausing to throw a wild horn at enemies that materialized out of the forest.


    Still, it was slow going, and they could only move as fast as the slowest element of the column. But when the men in the front ranks saw the orange light of evening glowing in the clearing, order dissolved, and they nearly abandoned the rear portions and the coveted rocket carts. Only the slow march of the Shodai Sen and the barking orders of Khianron¡¯s two lieutenants, Quetzalfire and Doublerum, salvaged the formation.


    Half an hour after Khianron had fallen, the Column came to a stop in the wide clearing and swelled into a dense formation. It was a long abandoned riverbed. Dust floated thick in the air from the last trampled trees, and the last ray of orange sunlight glowed through and set the Sappers shield wall on fire. There was an uneasy peace as the attack against the front of the column abated, but back in the forest, sounds of metal and death echoed without pause.This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    Another order was given. Regroup in the clearing. Form up and get the rocket carts in the center. Break out the Balistae and close bombards. Speed will be sacrificed for a sure delivery to the front lines. A bird was sent requesting a rendezvous party from the front, though it wasn¡¯t to be expected or relied on. They would march slowly, and everything that moved in the forest would be petrified, blasted, and stuck through with arrows and bolts until they were through.


    Suddenly, the forest erupted again.


    Thanks to the high branches of the primeval oaks that stretched over the river from the far bank, and held the tented, waiting fighters fifty paces above the clearing, the V formation remained unbroken, with the sappers now clustered right in the center of the bite.


    Arrows fell among the disorganized mass of sappers, and the singing magi responded with wails that turned the high branches white in streaks. But the attackers had magic of their own.


    A strong wind rushed down the riverbed, kicking up the white dust left from the fallen petrified trees, and cutting visibility down to a matter of inches. The magi took their wavering swords in both hands and the air around them vibrated the dust clear, giving them sight for a few yards, far enough to see the attackers a breath before they hit the shield wall.


    The rear of the column compressed slowly into this new defensive formation, and every second cost them. Equipped with a wyrm¡¯s-eye monocle that granted thermal sight, Lindsey focused her hateful lightning-obsidian arrows on the Shodai Sen, seeking out the gaps at the back of their necks. Her forces had been shown how to quickly extinguish the wicks of the enemie¡¯s grenades with wet sand, and handed them off to the leafmen who walked across branches like solid ground and dropped the bombs, relit from their pipes, onto the retreating forces. The Magi could only scream blindly into the air, rending branches that fell among the retreating forces.


    It was a beautiful chaos.


    ¡°This is some Teutoburg forest shit!¡± Quetzalfire¡¯s voice floated up towards Lindsey as she stepped lightly across the flowing branch of a sycamore for a better shot. He stood next to a rocket cart, his hands radiating magic force, throwing back bombs and sending arrows end over end midflight. She dropped five more Shodai Sen before the Magi¡¯s shouts got too close for comfort, and noted that Quetzalfire would best be dispatched by dagger.


    Eventually, the rear of the column reached the clearing and the Shodai Sen formed up and closed their shields around the compressed column, now half its former size.


    Once in full formation, the shieldmen earned their reputation. Not only did they resist any attack thrown at them, they let weaker thrusts in through the shieldwall, closing around them like quicksand and cutting the overzealous amateurs down. To Lindsey, it was like watching some big metal skinned monster eat people.


    Suddenly, like a switch had been flipped, the attackers lost the momentum, and Commander Dirdon whistled for a halt.


    Lindsey scaled a high oak and braced herself. Time for part two.


    It became deathly quiet in the forest. The magi no longer sang, saving their voices for a final defense. The shields of the Shodai Sen stood quietly, no longer singing from blade and arrow head. Even the wind had stilled, the white dust of the fallen trees hung in the air, and red evening glow broke through at the edges.


    A single horn sounded, wooden toned, and after a pause another answered.


    The Shodai Sen braced for impact. Siegemaster Gharil ordered the flamethrowers and fire bombs brought out. Rolling ballistae were locked into the ground and wound back. Archers nocked and crossbows were shouldered. The column was ready for open combat, face to face, man to man.


    But that¡¯s not what they got.


    It sounded like the wind, at first, but grew to a roar, and by the time every man in the column realized what was coming, knew there was nothing they could do to stop it.


    A rolling wall of white water, bristling with shattered logs as thick as a man, tossing river boulders like bath bubbles, came galloping down the riverbed.


    They had damned it a week ago, a force of half frogmen and half dire beavers. The resulting lake had grown under the cover of ancient Sobbing Willow and Silver Alder, escaping the sight of the Cloth forces rudimentary survey of the area. (for the most part, their mapmakers had been content to simply note, ¡®forest, dense¡¯). The river itself was only loosely outlined, left as one of countless mysteries of the primeval Xenshua.


    Now the forest would have its revenge. The attacking forces had moved to the trees, where platforms had been prepared and even rafts and flatbottomed boats hung at the ready for this final stage. It was almost perfect, until the magi started screaming.


    It was like a Gregorian chant sung by a volcano. The trees rattled. The river stones jumped up like frogs. The white dust vibrated in the air. Lindsey felt it in her teeth. The Shodai Sen¡¯s shields rattled together with a mechanical machine sound like someone had smuggled an air compressor into this fantasy realm.


    It was a massive sonic force field. The dust formed around it, revealing a solid dome of protection wrapped in front of the formation.


    The wall of water was less than a hundred feet away when Lindsey decided to do something that would make her name and legend live on for years, and something that she immediately regretted.


    She sheathed her bow, latched her quiver, took her two daggers in hand (one long and wide like a shortsword the other short and curved like a fang) sprinted across a high branch and dove down among the singing magi.


    She broke her fall on one of them by burying the long knife up to the hilt, and drew his neck open with the other. The effect was fantastic. His blood sprayed out with arterial force and thrown out as a cone by the force of his song, blinding the three closest magi. Before the enemy knew she was there, she had cut two more magi down, and the dome of protection wavered.


    A shout went up among her forces and many threw everything they had at the remaining magi. Most of the arrows and bombs glanced off the dome of force, but some slipped through the gap left by the dead magi, and the dome wavered violently.


    Lindsey hooked a nearby swordsman in the brainstem with the clawknife and pulled him close to her as countless blades struck out at her. The only saving grace was that the collumn was so densely packed that her enemies got caught up on each other trying to turn around and kill her. She killed three infantry men as they stood there trying to bring their long lances over their heads. It was like fighting in the front row of some pop starlet¡¯s concert.


    One magi got fed up with watching her dance around the blades, and decided to make some room.


    Lindsey dropped to the soft mud just as his scream broke out and cleaved a line in his own forces. They dissolved into dust, and Lindsey was left completely exposed, flat on the ground, with nothing but a gust of corpse dust between her and the mithril ringed maw of the Magi¡¯s mask. Through the eye slits, she saw his eyes smiling.


    She smiled back. Pressed to the ground, she felt like a fly on a paint shaker, and for some reason (perhaps because he was too busy staring at her ass as she lay there sprawled on her stomach with her cloak of twilight tossed sideways off her drake skin laminated form), he held the killing song in his throat for an extra second, which gave her enough time to sheath her daggers, rolled into a tight ball, and speak one of the only words of magic she knew. A spell of feather fall.


    Then the water was everything.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Queen of Arthel: River of Ice

    Putting points into hydrology


    The spell reduced gravity¡¯s grip on her and the wall of water sent her flying downstream. She narrowly avoided getting crushed between a tumbling Shodai Sen and a rolling log and managed to fill her drake skin vest with air before the water sucked her down. She went limp and let her buoyancy drag her to the surface.


    The moment she felt air on her skin, she cast out her silkhook to the darkening sky. A rope of deepspider¡¯s silk attached to a cluster of adamantine barbed hooks, it latched into the high branches flying by overhead, and with a quick tug she zipped up into the trees just before the spell lost its effect.


    With the roar of the river out of her ears, another sound took over. A sound so awful it almost made her scream.


    The magi were still singing. She saw the formation, now over a hundred yards up river, surrounded by a hazy dome, like a thin layer of vibrating water suspended in air, marching up the bank toward dry land and the trail they had left behind.


    However, their salvation hadn¡¯t been perfect. Over half the column had been washed away, including three of the precious powder carts, the shield line was broken, the rocket carts were sinking in the mud and the remaining Shelled Lizards were struggling to move them deeper into the forest, a lone groaning Donra beast lumbered in the reeds, and the song of the magi was wavering.


    All she could do was watch. The song continued. The sappers struggled. Bodies washed in the white rapids, got stuck on branches, banged against logs, as her force dropped flat bottomed boats from the trees. The river flowed against the knees of the Shodai Sen. The magi focused their song on the wall of water ahead. Their voices cracked. Arrows and bombs fell from the trees. More bodies joined the river.


    Lindsey moved to her arrow stash. Horns sounded from the rocket carts up the trail. The detachment led by Pinespine was attacking the column across the river. They had laid in wait since the first of the fighting. Swiftly, boats forded the river and more forces gathered upstream and downstream from the column, and still the Magi sung. But it wouldn¡¯t matter. She could feel it in the air. They were going to crush them.


    Then one of Khianron¡¯s lieutenants climbed atop a rocket cart, and blew the dragon horn.


    It was no louder than a stern word from someone right next to you, but it cut through every other sound the way only dragon sounds could. She knew every living thing for miles heard it at exactly the same volume, and that they had only a matter of minutes to do as much damage to the column as they could, before the entire forest burned around them.


    ¡°When that dragon gets here, there¡¯ll be nothing but trees and corpses!¡± Pinespine yelled, his voice magically amplified. The entire forest roared in agreement, and the final attack began.


    As Pinspine¡¯s forces cleared the river, the magi song died. A few moments later, the instant Pinespine¡¯s forces threw themselves against the shield wall, the shrieks of the magi returned, now desperate. Man and tree fell in long razor sharp streaks of white.


    Lindsey started killing Shodai Sen, alone at first, but after felling three of them, she got some help with it. Frog men struck out of the water, covered in mud, hooked the Shodai Sen¡¯s shields and slashed them in the ankles with their barbed shortspears. The river boats were chained in a line, and bowmen rained hell from them. Paravel and her druid coven led a charge as water buffalo. Mossbeard barbarians lept from rafts and tore into the shieldwall with hooked long axes.


    Lindsey put an arrow through Quetzlefire¡¯s neck as he focused his Psionic waves to throw burning oil at a squad of attacking barbarians. A spellsword Frogman cut glowing arcs through a wall of Shodai Sen, until Doublerum dueled him with his long mace. Bombs were thrown as fast as they could be lit. Flamethrower nozzles melted from overuse. Arrows hummed like insects. Both sides knew the end was close and left nothing in reserve.


    The collum had become a line once again and the attackers, unable to keep up the prodding attacks, due to lack of manpower and a complete absence of surprise, formed into two groups, one infantry clashing at the rear of the column, with the mosshsields in the front, and the other group, archers in the boats and in the trees, raining arrows and bombs.


    ¡°The carts! By gods get the carts!¡± Pinespine screamed. The infantry converged on a single cart, closest to a break in the line, and backed the guards against it. A single magi stood atop it, deflecting arrows and bombs and sending white streaks of death into the already withering group of forest infantry. Another magi led a charge with his singing sword, and cut Pinespine down.If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    Lindsey, as high in the branches as she could get, put an arrow through the magi atop the cart, timing her shot with the cadence of his shriek. She drew another arrow, pointed her bow at the sword slinging magi cutting through her routed forces, and had it half drawn when the sky exploded.


    The dragon was as silent as the dead leaves rotting into the earth, and as dark as the deep evening sky, and faster than anything else in this world. Its breath sounded like a hurricane had been teleported above the forest, and the fire jumped half a mile from his snout down to the treetops in a matter of seconds.


    Lindsey didn¡¯t even breathe, she just fell. The fire drew a line right for her, the dragon flying parallel to the column, and half a second after she had slipped off the branch, the trees where she had been hiding were solid white-hot coals. She wondered halfway down if the river was even under her, but realized as the heat scorched her hair, it didn¡¯t matter.


    The fall wouldn¡¯t kill her either way.


    She plunged into the ice cold rushing river and dragonfire splattered the surface. The dark river was lit from above, as the thick liquid fire floated on the river above, and she saw the bed of white ash fly by beneath her.


    After a frantic swim, she grabbed ahold of a submerged tree, and held on long enough for the dragonfire to float by overhead. Which wasn¡¯t long. The river too was swift and strong.


    She came up and gasped for air as quietly as she could, and it was burning chaos all around.


    A dripping massive oak as thick as a semi cracked down the center and half of it fell on the scrambling Shodai Sen. The river boats were now floating pyres. The trees were lit up like Christmas lights and dripping sticky death on everyone beneath. People were screaming. Players were yelling.


    ¡°Stupid fucking dickhead piece of shit!¡± Double rum shrieked, watching half the Shodai Sen turn to ash. He was less than fifty feet away from Lindsey, screaming into an amulet of ghostspeak. Probably ranting to Quetzalfire.


    ¡°How fucking dumb do you have to be not to have your dragon use his God damn physical attacks when fighting a fucking forest ambush? Does this motherfucker even know what we¡¯re hauling? Did he even look at the battlemap? Bro I am so sick of these rich dudes who brown nose their way into being a fucking rider. Next time I rise I¡¯m rolling with the god damned Deeprock dwarves or something under the fucking ground, holy shit!¡±


    He hefted his two-handed mace like he wished the Dragonrider would walk out of the smoke.


    The surviving Shodai Sen formed up around him and the three carts, now essentially completely unopposed. Lindsey¡¯s forces were either all gone or in full retreat.


    ¡°Is he coming back?¡± One of the guards asked Doublerum while looking at the dark burning forest with concern.


    ¡°Fuck no dude. Every second he¡¯s not on the field that other dragon¡¯s running train. I¡¯m surprised he even showed up. Frockflower must be¡ª¡±


    ¡°Get the carts moving! Now!¡±  Siegemaster Garil¡¯s voice slithered over the smoke.


    ¡°Over what fucking bridge, bro?!¡± Doublerum shrieked. ¡°We gotta wait for the rendezvous team from the hill! Form up on the fucking carts and de fence!¡± he yelled the last part at the scrambling forces around him. The last singing magi was wafting the falling embers away from the carts and across the river. The forest was now fully ablaze, and Lindsey was certain she was all alone.


    She felt heat at her back and turned around. A single dragonfire coated log floated by, roughly the size of a sedan. She sank into the river up to her eyes, hoping the light hadn¡¯t given her away, and wrapped her cloak of twilight around her.


    Suddenly, she had an idea.


    She pulled a single arrow from her quiver and unwrapped it under water. It glowed sofltly like the moon shining through blue glass. A deep crystal arrow. She had been saving it for an impossible armored enemy, but she had learned a long time ago, in another world, not to squander today waiting for tomorrow.


    She reached the arrow out of her cloak just in time to graze the end of thelog andd collect a single pinky sized glob of dragon fire on the arrow head.


    No time to lose. She pulled herself closer to shore with her leg hooked around the tree submerged next to her, and raised her bow.


    ¡°Hey!¡± Doublerum pointed at her, but it was too late. She let the arrow fly and wrapped her cloak around her before it had reached its target. It sailed over Doublerum¡¯s shoulder and disappeared inside the middle cart.


    Lindsey gasped. She had expected it to sink into the hull of the cart and set it ablaze, but half a second after it vanished, she realized things had turned out far better than expected. The crystal arrow had sliced through the wood like paper, taking the smoldering dragonfire directly to the powder kegs inside.


    The explosion was more violent than even the dragonbreath, and a lot more localized. It lit up the forest and cast dark razor-sharp shadows off the trees. The shockwave rattled the water around her and kicked up a wave of white dust and ash. The smoke cloud bloomed towards the canopy with dark orange flames rolling inside it and Shodai Sen and bowmen collapsed like dolls around it. Pieces of flaming wood went flying everywhere and the remaining survivors of the column scrambled to move the last carts away from the fire.


    She watched them scramble, completely vulnerable, wishing she had just ten of her fighters with her. She would have cleaned them up in¡ª


    A light broke across the forest from upriver, blue and bright like a spotlight from another world. A mounted battlemage, with eyes glowing neon blue and a mirror shield reflecting the forest in nebulae hues, shined a beam from his staff, sweeping it across the river. She saw the water between him and the other bank shimmer, and the water flowing around her dropped ten degrees in an instant. He froze a bridge of solid ice and led his line of mounted paladins across it.


    So, they had sent a rescue team.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Queen of Arthel: Eyes of Skye

    My eyes are up here


    Suddenly, the glowing eyes flashed in her direction, and the spotlight lit up the water around her. She knew that though her cloak was good enough to fool the eye in low light, she was now completely exposed. She kicked off the tree and sank beneath the river just as a volley of silver arrows streamed past her and vanished in the deep dark. The surface glowed above her from the light like a full moon as she let the current take her. Giant stars of ice, spiked orbs appearing suddenly and expanding in place, broke out everywhere around her and grenades boomed just above her head.


    She swam until the water warmed and the sounds softened, but just as she was about to come up for air, a massive section of burning oak fell into the river above, its limbs bubbling and burning below the surface. It was fifty feet wide and even with the swift river current it took her half a minute to pass under it. Though pain and suffocation were distant signals in the Otherworld, even when locked into a gameworld avatar, a bolt of dumb fear ran through her.


    The sensation only added to the beauty. The water on her skin, the firelight beaming down to the sand, the shimmering surface of the river, the adrenaline running through her, an experience crafted purely by mind. Even the bodies, floating silently towards the bottom or rushing over her and bursting into flames on contact with the sticky dragonfire, were a marvel. A vessel for souls to commune with an artificially physical world. An echo of the myth of creation.


    Here, alone, undisturbed, protected, she let her Real self, the Lindsey that had read every fantasy book in the library, those glossy covers and raised titles, images sparking fantasies that the books almost always failed to live up to, racing her brother to see who could finish them first. The Lindsey that faded into an ill defined world of dragons and magic whenever daydreaming, but had never found out how to make them any more real, never quite made the jump from scenes to story. And later, the Lindsey that had deleted every paragraph and regretted it after, but never found the time, between the work and travel and everything else, to try again.


    Here, she tried to let that Lindsey see, through the dense veil of the Spirit, a world like those she had spent a lifetime dreaming of.


    But still, even this one came up short.


    ¡°You can make something better. You can do it. Just write it down. Just start now. Write anything.¡± She tried, for the millionth time, to tell herself, hoping against hope that the Real Lindsey would hear her, somehow, and try again. But she had hoped for so long, and every morning that other her got up and blew through another day with nothing spared but daydreams.


    She came up for air and with a kick-propelled leap she trapped a pocket of air in the leather vest worn over her chest mail and sealed the bottom with a tug of strings. She lifted herself up onto the bag and looked around. Nothing but hazy darkness. The air was heavy with smoke and her nightsight monocle couldn¡¯t see through it, one of the glaring quirks of game balance. Her cloak made it worse, so she threw her hood back and lifted herself up on the air bag, and got her bearings.


    Through the soft glow of her monocle, she saw the land rise into a dark hill to her right, towards the south. She recalled that the riverbed met with the greater river after swerving northeast around the cluster of hills. That couldn¡¯t be more than a mile from here. The lower portion of the river would be swarming with Cloth force ships by now, and would take her south, away from her preplanned rendezvous in the north.


    She kicked towards the left bank. The water rushed in her ears. Phantoms of screams and distant explosions reminded her the war was still near. She smelled fire and the beginnings of rain. With her monocle still in one eye, half the river glowed like a full moon had descended right above her head, and the other half was dark everywhere but the pockets of smoldering dragonfire.The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.


    She got halfway to the shore before an alarm went off in her head.


    Her avatar was something like her thirtieth, but by far her most successful. One of its most useful features was the ability to know when she was being watched by anything of humanoid intelligence or above, granted the creature was not under the effects of a deity level spell specifically designed to counter such an ability. It had cost her a lot at creation and limited her playstyle. Knowing that someone was watching you was worthless if you fought out in the open and never did any sneaking, but it had saved her during multiple assassinations and retreats.


    She had trained it at later levels to have a mild directional component. Right now, it was telling her that someone was watching her from directly above.


    She stopped herself from looking up. A few seconds later, she wasn¡¯t burning to ash, so it probably wasn¡¯t a dragon. She sensed the direction shift in a curved route, and wracked her brain.


    A bird wouldn¡¯t set off her sense. Must be someone skinwalking or a flying humanoid. If it¡¯s a bird, or some kind of flying familiar, they must be waiting for her to get to shore to attack. Even if it¡¯s a flying avatar, they must not want to strike in the water. Either way, she was sure they didn¡¯t know that she knew they were watching, which gave her the edge. Now she could¡ª


    ¡°That was quite the daring leap you made earlier! Never would have expected you to take on the magi face to face.¡± The voice tickled her ears and sounded like the speaker had given it some artificial bass. Despite the shock of a sudden voice, and the panic of being seen trained into her by a year and a half in a stealth avatar, the voice was less than menacing.


    It sounded fanboyish, and rushed in places, like he had been holding back speaking for hours.


    She didn¡¯t answer. After assessing distance and her surroundings for a few seconds, she dropped below the water and kicked for the shore, aiming for the roots of a dense willow.


    ¡°Oh, I¡¯m afraid it doesn¡¯t matter what you hide under. My sight is linked to my mount.¡±


    She came up on the trunk of the willow with bow and arrow in hand, and said nothing. She thought of the tincture in her pouch that would, when smeared on her forehead, prevent telepathic speech of all kinds, but something told her it would be better to let him talk.


    There was a long silence. She scanned the surface of the river for any disturbance in the smokey starfield. Some kind of shadow to tell her where the attack would come from. But the longer she watched the more she was sure this wasn¡¯t going to be a normal ambush.


    ¡°Oh, if you¡¯re trying to respond by thought, I can¡¯t hear it. Figured I would give you some privacy, you know? You can just whisper and I¡¯ll pick it up.¡± He was talking to her like he was trying to convince both of them that he had done some great favor for her, but wasn¡¯t arrogant enough to take any pride in it. Something in the back of her mind, her real mind, set off another kind of alarm bell.


    After another pause,


    ¡°There¡¯s really no need to be worried. Like I said, If I wanted you dead, you would¡ª¡±


    She couldn¡¯t stand to hear him anime-monologue anymore, so she whispered,


    ¡°What do you want?¡± It came out as, ¡°Wadooyoowan¡±, forest speak, an avoidance of hard consonants.


    ¡°Oh, how silly of me. I apologize. In my excitement, I forgot to introduce myself. I am Zadorion, Dragonrider mercenary, currently under coin for the Cloth, but tomorrow¡ª¡±


    She waited a few seconds, wondering if the connection had been cut off, before realizing he had probably shrugged, forgetting she couldn¡¯t see him. This confirmed her suspicion that he had rehearsed his lines, as he had answered as if she had asked who he was, and not what he wanted.


    ¡°Hmm,¡± she said, softly, still searching for him. Though she was absolutely positive he was nowhere near a dragon, he surely had nightsight, and was probably on comms with others in the woods to keep up the charade. If she could¡ª


    ¡°Here, lets get a better look at you.¡±


    The tree line across the river exploded into flames as the dragon shot liquid molten fire on a stretch of the river bank a mile long in a few seconds, and everything was lit up like midday. Apparently, whoever had first made the twilight monocle had heard the myth that too much light let into NVGs would blind the wearer, because her right eye stung until she yanked the glass circle off her face.


    ¡°That¡¯s better. Well, now that you know who I am, would you be kind enough to tell me your name?¡±


    She decided instead to show him who she was. She slapped her monocle back on, wrapped the twilight cloak around herself, and took off into the forest.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Queen of Arthel: Wrath of Man

    The higher they fly,


    For a few wonderful minutes, it was just her and the silent forest. The sound of fire rolling across the river faded as she ran, and apparently whatever spell he had used to speak to her couldn¡¯t work unless he had her detected. Damn, she might actually escape.


    She brought up the map in her avatar¡¯s memory. Her avatar had a high recall stat, so it lit up in vivid detail in a kind of overlay. If she moved north, away from the lake, deeper into the forest, he would be unable to find her. It was just too massive. She just had to get around that raised cluster of sheer cliff-faced hills to the northwest and¡ª


    The sound of fire returned with a vengeance and the forest ahead of her broke into a molten glow.


    ¡°I would rather take you alive.¡± His voice boomed from above rising tauntingly at the end.


    ¡°I think you could do great work for the Cloth. But you¡¯re running out of rope¡ª¡±


    He cut off suddenly, as if he was trying to find a better metaphor. She stopped still and waited. Less than a minute later, the forest roared behind her, and the air grew warm and hazy.


    Shit.


    She burst through the foliage into a creek bed, where a thin finger of snowmelt water winded down, oblivious to the doom closing in. She glanced in the air, and her nightsight glared off the smoke.


    Good, so he couldn¡¯t see her either. Truly an amateur Dragonrider if there ever was one.


    She ran up the creek bed, keeping her twilight cloak tight around her and staying under the branches, just in case.


    ¡°So what is your plan?¡± his booming voice broke in again, like a police helicopter loudspeaker, broken and stretched thin over the smoke-clogged air.


    ¡°Wait until the forest burns down and I have to find you standing on a pile of ash? What¡¯s the point?¡± He tried to paper over his frustration with a level of mock concern. Even in the distorted state of his voice, she could sense it.


    This had to be the strangest thing that had ever happened to her in this fucking game. She had never even heard of a Dragonrider singling out a lone avatar outside of some kind of negotiation. She could only think of one explanation for it, and it made her skin crawl.


    ¡°All right, enjoy your run to that mountain,¡± his voice boomed again. ¡°Unfortunately, I¡¯ve got to go burn some things, but I¡¯ll be back.¡±


    She was reminded of a kid she used to play Magic with who always talked like an anime villain. The kind of guy Malthuseus would weed out of their clan in a heartbeat. How did a guy like that get a dragon? Arthel sold avatars and starting items and skins for top MEM, but dragons were supposed to be outside the memstore market. You had to play the avatar from the bottom and work up to it, no shortcuts.


    Someone was getting banned, but it was now a question of how much this guy could fuck up her lifeline before that happened.


    As she ran, the mountain rose up above the trees, glowing like an early dawn as the forest fire grew. Subtle sensations in her legs and chest told her that her avatar was nearing exhaustion. Halfway up the slope, as the trees thinned and the sensations became alarms, she had made up her mind.


    She would scale the sheer cliff face of the peak, find some recess or cave, if possible, wrap her twilight cloak around her, and put her avatar to double sleep, a near vegetative state that replenished exhaustion twice as fast, but left the avatar unable to react or awaken, and set its goal to return to camp.


    Then, Lindsey would log out of Arthel and try not to think about it. Maybe drop into a Hardworld or try that pirate sim Maverick had been raving about, and if she came back in a day or two and her avatar was a black ashen smear on the side of the mountain, she¡¯d make a new one. Maybe something more direct like a battle mage, or a Paragon. Maybe something with dragonslayer as an elite capstone. Give herself something to work towards, at least.


    The slope met the mountain at a right angle of jagged rock fragments and boulders. She started to pick her way up the face in a frustratingly slow meander. From the maps, she knew that somewhere up the sheer face was some kind of staircase or path, and the peak cradled the broken ruin of an open-air temple. The only other note had been a comment left half a decade ago; ¡°No loot :(¡°


    The wind had picked up and the air grew damp, intensifying the scent of wet and burning forest. As she pulled herself up onto a wide stone ledge, the battlefield caught her eye in the distance, and she brought up her farsight cylinder.


    The sun had finally abandoned the plain, but it remained remarkably lit. Fire flickered everywhere. Magic domes glimmered like neon soap bubbles. Spells flashed like sparklers, fireflies, lcd strobes, spotlights and lightning. Infantry struggled to get to the magi. Magi labored to obscure the charge of the calvary. Archers and artillery hoped for a hail Mary by volume, a stray bolt lucky enough to slip through and cut a magi down.


    Above it all, and sometimes down among it, the dragons clashed. Their fire bloomed in the air and fell in torrents. In some places, the convex arrows formed between two barrier domes for instance, the dragonfire pooled and flowed, evidence of an hours-long fight. A dragon in Arthel could keep spitting fire as long as it had fuel, and a few dives in the infantry gave enough sustenance for another half hour of flame. She counted five of them, mostly fighting each other. The trick was to be the only dragon on the field, then¡ª


    ¡°Ah, there you are.¡± His voice was right in her ear now, and she felt her skin vibrate in a way she knew meant a magical lock. How the fuck¡ª


    ¡°Your twilight cloak isn¡¯t so good against the rock I¡¯m afraid. At least not when it comes to dragonsight.¡±


    Lindsey let the anger boil out of her. In her head she said all kinds of shit about him, but her Avatar simply stood and looked to the sky, letting the cloak hang at her back. It was a moonless night, perfect for dragon attacks, but the air above the peak was humming soft orange. She knew he was somewhere far above it. Maybe she could tease him into flying closer, or even landing, with the right words. She flipped open the flap on her bow holster and rested her hand on the wooden tip. If only she had saved that crystal arrow.The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    ¡°I¡¯ve been watching you,¡± he said, apparently hoping that stating the obvious would fall as some kind of dramatic revelation. She wondered what video game character he was dressed up as. Breaking the wall was against the iron rules of the principalities, and punished more harshly than metagaming, but guys like him were always trying to find ways around it, and the fact that he had weaseled his way atop a dragon¡ª


    ¡°You are wasted on the Wovenleaf forces. Leading ambushes on supply trains is beneath you. You should be cutting down Commanders and Guild Lords, even Kings. You should be draped in chameleon cloth and armed with liquid mithril blades. This place hasn¡¯t had a good assassin in years.¡±


    Lindsey would have told him that was because invis assassinations hadn¡¯t been viable in almost ten years, that any officer higher than a vice admiral had some kind of body double, and every guild lord and king up to the three Emperors used a combination of clones, wards, miscommunication and outright lies about who was even really in charge, and that there was a non-zero chance at least one Emperor was actually a level 0 avatar that could be remade and reborn in a heartbeat if someone managed to get the knifework done, because the real power behind the throne was almost certainly about 20 players who had read everything Feist ever wrote, judging from his recent speeches, but, knowing this would be a waste of time, she chose to fuck with him and hope an adamant arrow would be enough to do something about his God damn talking.


    ¡°Gee, you really think I¡¯m that good. Or maybe you want to put another kind of liquid blade in my hand.¡±


    It was silent for a bit. Clearly whatever script he had prepared for this conversation hadn¡¯t included this.


    ¡°I¡¯m sure you''re used to that sort of thing, so I¡¯ll forgive you for thinking so low of me¡ª¡±


    Lindsey scoffed in her throat


    ¡°But I don¡¯t think with my dick. I want to make you a real offer. I would like to be your patron¡ª¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m already sworn to someone though. A Moss Shaman.¡±


    ¡°I respect your honor, but I¡¯m sure I could convince him to relinquish your vow, or even to swear you over to me. You¡¯ll find most men have a price, and my ventures have made me quite wealthy.¡±


    Fucking pay-to-slay confirmed.


    ¡°Well, I don¡¯t know if he¡¯ll go for it. He likes having me around, cause of all the fucking and stuff.¡±


    There was another windblown silence. Now she had really gone off script.


    ¡°You¡¯re joking,¡± he said, a hollowed-out statement with a soggy question stuffed inside. ¡°I¡¯ve given you the chance to save yourself, to achieve something great, and now you are mocking me. If you would rather¡ª¡±


    ¡°So you gonna come down here and pick me up or what?¡±


    Another silence. The wind kicked up around her, but this time it was damp and carried the scent of wet ash and forest.


    ¡°Go to the edge of the cliff, to your east. Cast your bow and weapons off the side. When I land, you will kneel, then your new life will begin.¡±


    ¡°My bow was a gift.¡±


    ¡°I will get you the finest¡ª¡±


    ¡°Yeah, I know you¡¯re rich, but this one is like, sentimental.¡±


    ¡°Well, you have to destroy the old to begin the new.¡±


    In one of those overly dramatic moments that Arthel seemed to breed like they were programed into its makeup, it started to rain, and lightning flashed bright purple behind the clouds, silhouetting his dragon less than a hundred yards above her, diving down to land.


    ¡°Ok then.¡± She gripped the fletching on an adamantine arrow and drew.


    ¡°Go ahead and torch me then, so I can start a new run.¡±


    ¡°You fucking¡ª¡± his voice cut off as the ember started up in the dragons throat. She saw the rider in his half cockpit style saddle, illuminated by the jet of flame shooting towards her. She let the arrow fly without thinking and leapt out of the way as the world got hot.


    A quirk of all avatar games, one never quite extinguished, is that sometimes the pain of dying jumps the gap and infects the Spirit, which recreates the pain almost perfectly. The best explanation she had heard was that it was a kind of defense mechanism to let the Spirit know the body is in danger. A vestigial process left over from the Spirits origins in the Real. A horrifying thought, it was also, ironically, what made the avatar games so attractive to many. A chance to experience real pain and death, or to inflict it on others, risk free.


    As she rolled across the stone and felt her twilight cloak catch fire, she really hoped this time it would spare her.


    ¡°Shit!¡± he said, his voice booming, and she prayed her arrow had found something vital. She whipped off her cloak and let it roll and in the wind as she came to a stop on a shimmering sliver of stone ledge, stuck between a rising wall of fire and a dark void with a flashing horizon of rolling thunderstorm at the edge. The twilight monocle had fallen off her face in the roll, but she saw the tail of the dragon, lit up by the firelight, as it zipped off into the sky.


    The rain picked up. The drops felt as big as golf balls. The clean line of flame hissed and steamed. Stone cracked and popped. Dragonfire floated atop a mudslide that flowed just yards away from her down the mountain and poured off into the dark forest.


    Suddenly, a flutter of lightning danced across the forest like someone was firing it from space. The river lit up beneath it like a snaking neon mirror, and she remembered something from her days of research into the area.


    ¡°You still there?¡± She shouted.


    ¡°Why, changed your mind? I¡¯m afraid it''s too late to¡ª¡±


    ¡°No, I was just wondering why you weren¡¯t down at the battlefield.¡±


    ¡°Worried about your friends? Their left flank collapsed, I heard, but don¡¯t worry. I¡¯ll be there to finish¡ª¡±


    ¡°No, I mean like, are you afraid of fighting other dragons?¡±


    Another, final silence.


    ¡°No,¡± he spat. ¡°Actually, I¡¯ve¡ª¡±


    In another one of those Arthelian dramatic moments, a low groaning, like a whale song with a rougher texture, skipped across the trees and up the mountain side. Lindsey smiled at the sky and hoped he could see it.


    ¡°Good,¡± she said.


    The wind knocked her to the ground and the air was thick with water, as if she had gotten on the wrong end of a diffused fire hose. The dragonfire line rolled white with steam and she heard the mountain make all kinds of sounds as glacier sized pieces of mud and stone sheared off the side. She managed to get her nightsight monacle positioned in time to see it.


    Breaking out of the chopping river, flowing up like a snake in water, with prismatic multi-sectioned wings that looked more insectoid then reptilian and glimmering scales of opalescent aqua green, the river dragon threw a wall of pure thunderstorm, dense and grey as liquid concrete, right into the fleeing dragon, then spit a flurry of ball lightning into the churn.


    ¡°Fucking god damn random encounter bullshit!¡±


    The connection cracked off, and Lindsey laughed. A deafening lightning strike outlined two dark silhouettes for a beautiful second, then there was only the storm and even the dragon roars faded. She breathed in the rain-thick air once, twice, then as she exhaled into the chopping mist, the most beautiful noise burst through the rain, the sound of something massive cannonballing into a body of water half a mile away.


    Then it was just her and the storm.


    The rain flowed in thick streams around her ankles, poured off the cliffside in solid panes, frothed somewhere far below in newborn pools, and soaked her completely. The mudslide took sections of burning cliffside with it and steaming stumps of trees and popping pockets of dragonfire, carrying it all off into the foggy darkness below, baring shining stone around her that reflected the lightning in foggy fractals.


    When the mudslide had died to a trickle, and the dragonfire had all been carried off, a cold wind blew the last bit of steam away, revealing a gaping night-black archway in the cliff face.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Queen of Arthel: The Cave

    Descend to ascend


    Dark rain flowed off the cliff face down the arch, washing the dirt off the stone and revealing designs and ribbons of murals. Lightning flashed, showing them briefly before they faded back into subtle shadows. She got her nightsight monocle on and the etchings glowed with a subtle infrared. A nice touch.


    The designs were mostly of the expected kind, pseudo ancient cave painting styles, pre perspective 2d orientation, depicting the false history of Arthel. Figures casting spells; fireball and teleport other, wielding weapons well known from the Gameworlds cannon; The Double Dragon Zweihander, Juriah¡¯s Halberd of Mercy, Orgead¡¯s Hammer. She had seen murals like these on other ¡°ruins¡±, like the cracked throne room of Gloria. Most were well known, made by the original designers and makers over 20 years ago. Like every player, she had heard rumors of lost ones, hidden ruins that held secret powerful items or gave access to locked spells. Her heartbeat quickened and she tasted adrenaline.


    This was by far the most eventful day she had ever had in Arthel.


    Her eyes wove their way to the edge of the murals, winding like a spiraled banner around the arch, to what she had thought was the edge, a thick border of lines and runes, and started to come back towards the center for another look over, when a big chunk of mud clogged vines dropped down in the flow and revealed more mural beyond the border.


    It took her a few seconds to realize what she was looking at, and when she did, she almost screamed.


    Beyond the thick band, (which was shaped like a half circle with the dark arch in the middle like a slim dragons pupil) the murals depicted space and stars. But not the constellations projected on the high firmament that let the players navigate across the orb and tell the seasons, but other celestial bodies she was far more familiar with.


    The Allworld, obvious from the towers and fake sun. Gunmaze, depicted with oversized figures holding assault rifles and laser cannons inside the orb. Jericho, a cluster of cartoonish doors around a masked Savior holding a staff.


    She looked around to see if anyone was watching, but there was only the storm.


    Holy shit.


    Mentions of anything outside Arthel were against the rules, and the mods were known to be very strict about it. Anyone caught toeing the line, making characters or plot lines or even emblem designs that strayed too close to anything from pop culture, religions, or even the rest of the Otherworld, could expect a suspension and possibly even a total ban. Breaking the fourth wall was something everyone did in one way or another, besides the hardcore role players, but talking about the Allworld or yelling movie lines in battle was one thing, carving those infringements directly into the fabric of Arthel was another.


    And here was a ruin, clearly made by the same hands as all the others she had seen in every major hub or capital on the planet, which directly referenced the wider world.


    And the door was wide open.


    As if on cue, the archway lightened, and a blue glow descended down revealing a stairway.


    She knew she could turn around, activate a report beacon, and continue the rest of the way to the rendezvous point, where she would be greeted not only as one of the masterminds of a successful ambush and a daring mage killer, but also as the survivor of two dragon attacks, one of which had been flown by her own personal pay to slay simp. J-Slash would definitely be able to make her a new name out of that one. They would all have a good laugh, and the mods would probably send her a hefty reward for reporting something that definitely should not be there.


    But every second passed and she stayed where she was. Her feet didn¡¯t move, and she just kept staring at the dark bottom of the staircase where the glow died. Moment by moment the obvious became inescapable. It felt, in a way, like realizing she had been trapped.


    There was not a snowballs chance in hell that she was going to do any of that. She was going to go down this staircase and the only question now was how long she was going to waste sitting here trying to talk herself out of it before she did.


    All right then.


    She stepped down slowly at first, then as thunder cracked behind her pace quickened. The passage hummed gently around her, and the stormsounds melded into white noise.


    The bottom of the stairwell was a square of darkness that ran from her, immune to even her nightsight monacle. After a minute or ten, it was hard to tell, the staircase turned slightly, then the turn tightened and she was stepping down a spiral staircase, the darkness almost close enough to touch.


    For a moment, she thought it would continue like that forever, that it was some kind of trap, until she stepped onto a landing glowing under the blueish light and found herself at the end of a long hallway extending into a tall rectangle of darkness.


    She looked behind her, and of course the staircase disappeared in darkness. Instantly, it reminded her of something. Exiting the dreamworlds. What her old boss had called the chutes and Michael called the hallways. It had the same feeling, of being separated from where you were before, from anywhere you¡¯ve ever been. This place, whatever it was, felt unlike any other part of Arthel, and something about it felt unlike anything else in the Other, but she couldn¡¯t put her finger on what.Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.


    The only way to find out was to go deeper.


    A torch on the wall rolled with blue flame. She took it out of its holder and stepped down the hall. The walls rolled past her and darkness stood before her like an unmoving monolith. She rested her non torched hand on her dagger, but the gesture felt useless. Somehow, she knew there would be no monsters here, at least nothing that could be fought with weapons or magic. Dream knowledge. The place was speaking to her, and not in the ¡°here¡¯s my stats¡± way that weapons or armor spoke to you in Arthel, but subtly, smoother than the most well-crafted sims she had ever experienced. This realization, coupled with the idea that dangers beyond combat waited somewhere in the dark, sparked a real fear in her. Not the worry of losing items or costing her team the battle that she was accustomed to in this world, but a real primal fear usually reserved for the Hardworlds.


    The torch flared up suddenly and a flat wall faced her, with two hallways stretching into darkness on either side of her.


    She faced the one on her left and stared into the darkness. It sat there immobile, like a dark corner of a storage closet. She turned to the path on the right, towards an identical block of darkness and almost dropped the torch.


    The darkness seethed. It breathed and whispered and was a thing crouching to pounce. The light at its edges battled and withered and screamed, dying with every flick of the torch just before another wave of doomed light threw itself against the black.


    The fear was liquid, being fed to her, thrown at her. She turned back to the left passage, and the fear abated. There was only the darkness left when light has gone. A drowsy nonthing.


    It was painfully obvious which way was the right one, just as it was now becoming clear that this place was built during an alien time of Arthel¡¯s history, for a completely different class of player.


    She marched down the righthand path and her torch sputtered and the fear flared up, a primal sense that she could feel on her skin. It reminded her of turning off the lights and running down the hall as a kid, away from that dark room in her grandparents house, but was closer to what it might have felt like to run into the darkness instead.


    She knew many things as she walked through the dark. It screamed them at her.


    The makers and game masters could not hear her here. To even step foot in this place is punishable by a lifetime ban. Anything that happened to her here would be her own fault, and the army of Arthel makers and investors would make sure that no one would see her as a victim, but as someone who had tried to break the game and had it backfire.


    She wondered, briefly, if there were others out there, Spirits who had found the hard edges and dangerous places of the Otherworld, and had their story smothered into silence, lest it keep the general population from spending everything they had to indulge in the gameworlds and the rest of it.


    Another wall jumped in front of her, and she screamed.


    This time there were three paths. Again, the darkness shined like a light. Fear and menace boiled out of the far-right doorway, while the darkness in the door to her left seemed about to break into the soft glow of dawn. Although the correct path was obvious to her mind, it was now a question of convincing the rest of her.


    What if I¡¯m wrong? What if the real test is whether or not I subject myself to pain just because I think there¡¯s a reward in it? Wouldn¡¯t it be best to at least try the easy doors first, just to be sure?


    Under a constant stream of doubts, she shuffled towards the door with the gentlest darkness.


    Immediately, the fear fell away, replaced by a peace, like the first breath after a long swim. A banal subtle comfort. The darkness was like a blacked out bedroom after a long weekend sleep. All she had to do was wish it, and the lights would turn on, and she would find herself on the precipice of the best day of her life, an ultimate Saturday.


    She took another step and lifted her hand. Her fingers found the dappled surface of a wall. Her feet fell on soft carpet. She knew the switch was inches away.


    A single thought, given in dream knowledge, rang out in the back of her mind. Not an emotion, but a simple dead statement of fact, almost lost beneath the electrifying excitement for the oncoming day.


    This was the door she had come from. If she took another step, the place behind her would be lost to her forever.


    She shifted her weight and placed her raised foot behind her. Immediately, fear jolted up her spine, as if a font of it had opened at her back. With a sigh that cracked into a moan, she turned around and faced the room again.


    The doorways shivered. The slab of darkness at the far right felt like an open gateway to a void. Everything screamed that if she went through it, she would be falling forever. The other doors spoke in dream knowledge too, and for a moment, she considered stepping through the slightly less terrifying door, but pushed herself past it at the last second and shuffled into the void door.


    ¡°This isn¡¯t real. Nothing here can really hurt me.¡± The words fell flat in her head. This place was as far from the structured world of Arthel as anything she¡¯d ever seen in the Other, and she was certain there was every chance of real Spiritual danger.


    She came to another room with five doors. Then another with eight, the doors so close that there seemed more darkness than glowing stone. The supreme door of the eight felt like liquid death. Stepping through it felt like suicide. Three times she stepped up to it, heard it laugh and knew it was going to rip her spirit apart, and stepped back.


    She stood there crying for a second, then got ahold of herself. What was she doing this for? Some reward in a game? Some fake fucking swords or imaginary magic scrolls? She didn¡¯t have anything to prove to anyone! This gameworld and everything in it was beneath her, a plaything she used to pass the time between Hardworld missions. She was a fucking Hardworlder! She didn¡¯t owe this place shit!


    One of the eight doors lightened, and she knew it would take her out. Good. She was done being harassed by some nerd¡¯s vision of a fantasy.


    But she didn¡¯t move. Now with the exit there, now that the dark doorway was not the only way out, but only a choice, it felt less hateful. She realized it was the powerlessness that had really gotten to her.


    Whatever this place was, its makers had no idea how strong a Spirit could be. She had thrown herself into alternate lives and destroyed herself in gunfire a hundred times over. This goofy labyrinth was nothing.


    She stepped through the dark door and felt the world collapse.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Queen of Arthel: The Spiral

    Your spirit swirling to meet you


    It was violent and sudden, like missing a step in the dark, but so brief it melted out of memory instantly. Then a great reversal, like the place had been inhaling since she stepped down the staircase, and now exhaled, expelling everything away from itself.


    She could no longer feel her Avatar, and reached out for that dream knowledge that had poured out of the maze, to tell her if she was even still on Arthel, and found nothing but silence. The dreamsense of danger and terror that had guided her through the maze was gone, and the calm, mundane peace waited somewhere in front of her, down a long softly lit hallway that ended in a softly lit wall.


    She turned and looked behind her, and saw the most unsurprising thing she had ever seen in her life. A physical manifestation of the distance she felt. Receding gradient glowing void. The smooth faintly matte floor on which she stood faded seamlessly into the humming endless far-away.


    She reached back in memory for the route that had taken her to this moment, but found a great distance severing her from it, as if every step she had taken was compressed to a distant point, so far away and so small as to be almost without size, the distance un bridgeable even by thought. Like waking up from a violent dream and forgetting it instantly as the unviolence of waking life flooded in. This place was so calm, so still and unreactive, she couldn¡¯t even imagine the world of action. It felt like she had dropped out of time, become severed from cause and effect.


    This all lasted for a few seconds. Maybe it had just been the shock of the sudden shift. When her more perceptive mind caught up with the whiplash, she realized what she was experiencing.


    It was the same kind of liminal space that she and every other Hardworlder might use to sever the spirit from the self. What use could the makers of the gameworld have for such a place?


    Because it looks cool, idiot. This is a maze designed to dazzle the bored, something special for the players that have done everything. I probably just found it early.


    No, this doesn¡¯t feel like a game.


    Of course not that¡¯s the point! Do haunted houses look like trailers full of costumed teenagers? No, they try and convince you the danger is real!


    It doesn¡¯t matter. I can¡¯t go back now anyway.


    Silence, for a moment. She stared out at the void as fear rolled over from that revelation. She could only go forward now. The void was as endless as¡ª


    Wait, what the fuck? This is a god damned Game world Lindsey! I can leave any time I want!


    She held out a hand to summon a door in the air in front of her, but stopped.


    If I leave, I know that I wont ever be able to come back. My avatar might be locked in this mountain forever and Ill have to reroll and¡ªYou could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.


    And more importantly, she had come this far, and despite some impressive fragment making, this place couldn¡¯t hurt her. She let her hand fall to the side and scoffed at the void.


    Almost had me.


    She turned and marched down the hallway at a pace just below a jog, smiling at her own gullibility, trying to forget what had really stopped her from leaving.


    If she had tried to summon an exit, and the door hadn¡¯t come, she would have gone insane.


    The hallway turned to the left at the wall, then curved, then curved again, and she knew for sure that she was walking a spiral.


    This is definitely a Fragment. There shouldn¡¯t be a fragment in a Gameworld.


    Why not? The Spirits that made this place were master makers. They probably stumbled upon the same truths that Hardworlders did, the same techniques for separating the Spirit, but used them for this instead. Some of them might have even been Hardworlders themselves.


    Or Demons.


    She tried to cut the thought off there by studying the hallway. The walls were the same off white as every apartment, trailer and renthouse she had ever lived in, and somehow was the sum and average of their shades. The floor was a soft carpet, somewhere between the pounded thin dirt clogged skin of her first house, and the springy coffee cake colored flooring of her office in the Real.


    Her mind tried to fly, pulled in separate directions by the twin memories, and thrown into a subtle worry by the realization that this spiral seemed to be made of her memory. It had been a year since Lucy had walked Lindsey through her own life, dissecting and categorizing, but that was something she would never forget, and the similarities were undeniable.


    Or,


    She stopped mid step. The life she had unfolded for Lucy floated out beyond her focus, and so did Lucy herself, and all the rest of it. For a moment, she couldn¡¯t tell which way the d¨¦j¨¤ vu flowed. Did she go to Lucy first, and now this spiral kicked up her memory, or was Lucy and her mind stripper just a fantasy spawned from the disoriented nostalgia of this place?


    For a moment, she couldn¡¯t tell, and all her memories floated out of place, not as a line behind her, but as a fog around her.


    Then it passed, and her memories were oriented just as they had always been, but her confidence in them wavered anxiously.


    She rushed forward and took the next curve in a jog. Unfortunately, her mind caught up with her, and it brought a memory with it.


    She had once been told that many of the traps created by the Demons had never been found, and since nothing degrades in the Otherworld, they might still be out there, waiting¡­


    She put her hand on the wall and screamed inside her head.


    DOOR! DOOR!


    Nothing happened. Her blood became ice. Her breath caught in her throat like a vacuum had formed in her lungs.


    She tried again, but realized the fear was getting in the way of her focus.


    That¡¯s how they work. They make you terrified, unable to focus enough to push on the Otherworld, and unable to leave. That¡¯s how the Demons trap you.


    She ran. The fear chased her. The walls blurred past her and the curved smoothed into a steady constant turn, like walking the inside of a ring in zero g.


    She tried to remember. She tried to wake up. She knew that if she simply imagined her realm, and summoned a door, she could leave. She knew that she had forgotten her real life. She knew she was dreaming. She knew she was still inside Arthel. She knew this was a Demon trap. She knew it wasn¡¯t. She knew that she didn¡¯t.


    She remembered her life. She remembered a dream. She remembered a Lindsey. She remembered a thousand.


    She ran. She floated.


    A voice asked, what do you want?


    She screamed. She ran.


    A voice sobbed, I want to go home. It was the same voice. It was her own voice.


    Ok, the voice said.


    She opened the door without stopping and almost shouldered it off the hinges. She skipped to a stop on the grass. The screen door banged closed behind her.


    She stood there dumbfounded, staring at the backyard. Her backyard, trying to remember where she had been.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Queen of Arthel: The Trial

    A desire into devourment


    The cicadas were screaming. A plane grumbled overhead, its enginesound dappled in the texture of the surrounding quasi-rural suburbia. A dog¡¯s bark skipped over the far fence. Wind hissed in the leaves of the high oaks, whispered in the sugar maple, woke up the wind chimes on the deck that sang in pure metal tones while the wooden ones swinging in the pecan tree thunked a softer song. She smelled grill smoke and earth, compost and wildflowers.


    The garden flowed down the hill and nestled against the fence. An herb spiral close by. Tomatoes and beans and corn farther out. Flowers everywhere. Down the slope, a creek trickled, seen more in memory than vision, screened by the trees, the shrubs, the little wooden bench.


    The backyard curved off into a grass slope then disappeared behind the sunroom jutting off the house. She knew there was a pool on the other side, lap length, its concrete deck jutting over the steep grassy hillside below. She could see it glittering in the Texas sun. She could see it glowing from its underwater lights last night. She could feel the drink in her hand, feel him wrapped around her, still smelling of charcoal or fresh grass or motor oil. Felt the sigh in her chest, the stillness in her head, the warmth in her blood.


    She stopped just short of remembering him, like running up to a cliffside and swaying on your toes, arms windmilling, hanging in the balance, poised to fall beyond and leave gravity and anything certain behind for a moment of pure merciless motion, or rock backwards and settle stiffly on the grass. Maybe with a soft half exhale. Thinking, oh, imagine if I had. Imagine what that would have been like. But then even the imagining would die, and you would just be standing there, still. Standing on a cliffside just as you might stand in the kitchen over the sink, or in the cosmetic aisle, or at the gas pump on the way to work. Standing still and waiting to die.


    She hovered there, her soul in two places, each push-pulling her with a violence meant to remind her this state of being could not last forever, must be killed to create something else. She reached out, like an inhale, and saw it all.


    This was a dream. A false awakening. A few nights ago, she had had twenty of them in a row, woken up sobbing, her husband already slipping off to make coffee. But the house was real. The summer air was real. The night at the pool had been real. This life was real. It would be waiting for her when she woke up, and she could wake up at any time.


    All she had to do was fall forward, down the hill, let the impact wake her, and she would be in her bed, him lying there, her life waiting for her, as near to perfect as to be indistinguishable from it, for an imperfect person.


    The other way, was a dream. A Lindsey lost in fantasy, believing herself an assassin, a dream traveler, rejecting a world of endless bliss for one of highways and pain. What did it mean, that dream? What was it trying to tell her? That she secretly sought out misery? That she was afraid to be happy? Or that she wanted a real life, but overflowing with importance and danger?


    She felt that other her step away from herself and face her across the void of the mind. But, like standing between two mirrors, she could also see her staring at herself, see the back of her head, her face, repeated into infinity, and she was suddenly unable to fix herself in one or the other selves, and felt as if floating, falling, again hovering on the edge, needing to make a choice.The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    She leaned forward. The fall quickened. Like rotating a textured map, the surface of which had been parallel to her line of sight, so that she could see its surface head on, her oncoming awakened life revealed itself to her in detail.


    His face, his name, the days of the week before, the routes from home to everywhere else, their triumphs and troubles, her life came up to meet her, to take her, and all else disappeared in a haze.


    Except for a single sensation behind her. A voice, a motion, a feeling.


    ¡°Goodbye,¡± she sighed, she waved, she let herself go.


    And the other mirror-her threw her arms out like wings, and stopped the fall.


    She missed herself. She missed her fear, her desire, her passion. She missed the Lindsey waiting up on that cliff, waiting on the unsolved side of the mirror. Ready to watch life shatter and heal and shatter again all around her. She missed the longing for something, and the hope that could only come from such a longing.


    That Lindsey could not exist in this plane of peace, of easy evenings and pure underived bliss. A world made of an answer forced upon a question.


    She rolled the world around her, and the waking life became the dream, the texture of the land became a gradient noise, the still peace that had beckoned her became what it truly was, the stillness of death.


    The mirror shattered and fell to the stone floor, the fragments reflecting morning sunlight from that other world, now nowhere to be seen.


    The sensation of that other her evaporated from her mind. The knowledge of her Spirit rushed in and bridged the gap between the single kernel of pure light she had preserved throughout her descent and everything else. All of her life, the Real, the Hardworlds, the Other, up to her fall in the labyrinth, aligned itself again in memory, and her mind was still.


    It was a chamber in a deep cave. The floor was roughly smoothed stone, like moonlit slate, covered in places by richly colored carpets, blood red and bright gold, Tyrian purple and molten silver. The ceiling was a high textured stone, disappearing in places into solid darkness. The walls were mirrors and clear glass, staggered and spiraling out from the center room towards a yawning cavern spreading towards the horizon and dropping endlessly below, seen through scattered portals in the stone floor.


    It took a moment to divide the room and its reflections from the cavern beyond, and from the other worlds intruding on the space. Some of the mirrors reflected siblings to the stone room, but lit in daylight, or bright neon, or rolling flame, or gentle ocean evening. Some of the portals led to other caves, their mouths breaking into forest dappled sunlight or shimmering desert mirages.


    When her mind had categorized the near, it took in the far. That vast yawning cavern, with the cave room nestled in its roof, spread out into a strange lattice of glowing glass tubes and beams of light, some pulsing, others vanishing or growing like roots in a time lapse.


    It was the core of Arthel. The great engine used by the makers in ways she was hopeless to decipher. The central processor of one of the greatest gameworlds in the Other, and, she realized with a shock, surely one of the greatest feats of human accomplishment in any world.


    A moment after she had processed where she stood, a few breaths after the mirror had broken, the shattering sound still echoing on the stone and beyond, she realized she was not alone.


    On the far side of what could be called the room, a section of the floor was raised a step, and its deep night-blue carpet glowed softly in the starlight coming through a billboard sized window cut into the stone wall. Outside. The stars were dense as pebbles in an old black topped parking lot, hovering over a dark forest stretching to the horizon.


    A figure stood before the portal, wrapped in a cloak like a piece of the night sky beyond, but with a flow of warm dawn breaking at the edges.


    In the same moment she noticed it, the figure started to turn, and the dawn broke fully across its cloak, until it faced her, a still inhuman face wreathed in daylit metal, floating over fluttering sunrise.


    Its movements were robotic, and it stepped towards her like something out of a stop motion film.


    ¡°Be not afraid.¡±

 A Day in the Afterlife | Queen of Arthel: The Phantom

    Last of a dying breed


    Old memories, of bible school and an adolescent searching of the scripture for some kind of answer to questions of childhood turmoil, woke up and took notice, while the rest of her prayed the makers hadn¡¯t been some strain of fundamentalists.


    ¡°You have preserved through this trial by the strength of your Spirit, and thus you have earned a portion of the lost knowledge.¡±


    It stopped at the edge of the raised floor and spread its hands out, like so many saint cards she had gotten from her grandmother on Christmas, and she was sure he was about to recite the gospel to her. Maybe afterwords, it would give her the grail, which would have some kind of immunity buff or cleanse effect, or maybe even the spear of destiny. Not her style, but it would probably sell for¡ª


    ¡°Behold, a ruin.¡±


    It¡¯s alienesque teardrop-shaped face now drooped in a metallic frown and it¡¯s words were songlike, almost weeping. Garbled though they were, she felt the human anguish in them. All phantoms spoke with recorded words from their human makers. Despite the massive expansion of ability in this world, artificial life beyond rudimentary holograms had proved impossible. Even the animals in the twin¡¯s forest were little more than snippets of looped images.


    But this was more than just dialogue recorded for a gameworld. Whoever spoke these words, felt them.


    ¡°I am a creation failed in its task. Marred by the original sin of the one who created me, now trying to heal the world, to make penance. Hear my story with your Spirit, for in this place your ears have been severed from yourself, just as your eyes have been dashed out, your tongue cast in to the fire, and all the rest of your flesh cut away.¡±


    It bowed its head, lowered its arms halfway, and began to chant.


    ¡°Paradise, formed in the dark,¡±


    ¡°Fell below, fell away,¡±


    ¡°Stolen, just a drop,¡±


    ¡°Enough to entice,¡±


    ¡°Enough to snare,¡±


    ¡°Never enough,¡±


    ¡°To heal.¡±


    Images poured out from the words, communicated via dreamknowledge, and formed in her minds eye. She had seen paradise as a garden, its fall as a literal descent, the drop of paradise like a molten pearl, the thief as her own hand, first palm down to take the drop, then palm up to offer it, then finally clenched in a fist, the drop pouring like tears through her fingers.


    The phantom clasped its hands together. Its liquid metal face shifted from a weeping frown to a stoic brow-lifted stare that gave her the impression of one reserved to their suffering.


    ¡°Those who built this maze borrowed from the greater one, that glowing promise in the dark, but while Paradise is surely snaring to this day, this one has been doomed to languish.¡±


    It stepped down and stood next to Lindsey, gesturing out into the glowing lattice cavern.


    ¡°Those who built this place hoped to wrap a fable in a riddle, to deliver divine knowledge through a game, the only way, they believed, to do so.¡±


    It gestured with its right hand, and a portal opened in the wall at their side. It was the world above, a castle shining in bright sunlight, dragons flying overhead.


    ¡°In Arthel, they saw the chance to create an afterlife for the living, to make the fabled place where souls are judged and rewarded for their goodness a reality. Inspired by the stories of their youth, they crafted challenges that tested not only the mind, but the Spirit, and the heart. Trials of compassion, determination, humility. Those who succeeded were given the greatest magic in the land. But unknown to those first daring heroes, the trials didn¡¯t end there, and they were judged by how they used their power, and those who turned from good to evil were cast back down to start anew.¡±


    It clasped its hands over its chest and faced her, and in the liquid mirror face, she saw the distorted expressions of the Spirit who had recorded the message long ago, and sensed a prideful remorse.


    ¡°But, there was a schism, between those who believed this world should be castrated into a relativistic amusement park, rewarding nothing more than the playing of the game, and those of us who wanted something more.¡±


    It sighed robotically and bowed its head, then spoke like a eulogy.


    ¡°In the end, it was found that running a gameworld was infinitely more profitable than what the makers had envisioned, and they were pushed out. The remnants of what the first makers had made were paved over, sanitized, or destroyed completely. Lost to legends.¡±


    It faced her again, and its facial features were suddenly more detailed. She could make out a close-cut beard, crows feet around the eyes, the widows peak above the forehead. It reminded her, suddenly, of those old juice commercials with the liquid silver people, and she almost laughed out loud.A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    This time, its voice was less robotic, and very nearly human.


    ¡°But one of the makers left his avatar behind, here in this cave, ready to tell the story to any who could brave the maze, so that the world of Arthel, the real Arthel, could live on in memory.¡±


    The sly smile faded, and it frowned again.


    ¡°Maybe, that¡¯s the only place it could ever really exist.¡±


    It stood tall again and clasped its hands at its waist, so that the sleeves of its cloak ran together, and there was only its silver face, without any hints of human origin, hovering above the now fully dawn-broken fabric.


    ¡°You have braved the maze, and shall now be granted a heroes reward, but first you must swear an oath to secrecy, that you will never tell of this place, to the living or the dead.¡±


    Living or the dead was a classic Arthelian euphemism for anyone in the game or out. She had never before been so keen to follow the rules of the game. Even now, the memory of the maze was so personal, she doubted she could tell anyone about it even if she wanted.


    ¡°I swear¡ª¡± she started, but a piece of floor opened beneath her and cut her off. A slab of marble rose out of the ground, with a mummified corpse atop it. The corpse was draped in silks, dressed in full golden armor, complete with a crown molded into the helmet, and its gauntleted hands clutched a bare greatsword, its blade the blueish moonlit silver of Mithril.


    It occurred to her that this cave may have been made when Mithril was still the highest tier of materials, and she noticed that even though she had seen it a thousand times, the glow of the sword had a wavering quality that every other mithril item she had seen had lacked.


    The altar stopped still, and the dead knight rustled slightly, the countless jewels and polished faces of its armor shaking specks of colored light across the walls, reminding her of the spinning disco ball lamp she had as a kid.


    ¡°Place your hand upon the blade.¡±


    She did, and found it cool and numbing. The metal seemed to flow between her palm and fingers.


    ¡°Do you swear to keep this holy place a secret, and to live your life upon this earth in accordance with the love that was spun to make it?¡±


    ¡°I do.¡±


    The blade slipped out of her hand suddenly and she jumped back. The dead knight rose above her, its skin now flush and healed, its black eyes smiling behind its golden visor.


    ¡°Then kneel,¡± said the knight, in the voice of the Phantom, only fully rendered as a sound of flesh and blood.


    She did, and the undead knight brought the flat of its blade down on her right shoulder, then her left. The metal moved through the air with a sweet pure tone that faded to solemn silence.


    ¡°Rise.¡±


    She got up, and found the knight just as it had been, lying flat and very dead. The phantom waved its hand and the altar and the knight sunk back into the floor, its glittering rainbow lights fading into dense darkness, reminding her now of stained glass.


    ¡°You have been granted a spiritual blessing, which will persist no matter the fate of your avatar. This blessing grants you immunity to the dark and evil powers of the Lich Lords.¡±


    The voice said the last two words with great importance, and Lindsey fought back a sad sigh. She didn¡¯t think it would be worth mentioning to this animated voice recording that the Lich Lords had been removed from the game ten years ago, under a storm of player complaints, when they almost conquered Arthel for the second time. She faced him and made a face of serious gratitude.


    ¡°Thank you.¡±


    ¡°But be forewarned, that should you use this blessing for ill, or squander it selfishly, or seek to profit from it, you will look to it in your time of peril, and find it has abandoned you.¡±


    Again, she nodded gravely. The Phantom stepped aside and motioned to the window behind it, and the sunset forest shifted to a dark night, where the stars fluttered under clouds of smoke.


    ¡°Return now to whence you came, and may you find magic in your waking life, and in all lives you pass through, on this grand journey of souls.¡±


    She stopped, having set one foot on the stone windowsill, struck by something in its words, and turned back.


    There was only the rough rock and dirt of a recess in the cliffside. Behind her, the rain rumbled and hissed as if it had never left, and a thin stream of water ran down her back. She turned around again, and found the smoking sky breaking in patches of glittering starlight above the dark forest,. Out at the horizon, a silver dawnglow radiated through whisps of spent storm clouds.


    Her Avatar felt heavy as death, and her thoughts were almost drowned out by the tones and sensations of simulated exhaustion. She longed for silence, or at least for the pure undisturbed sound of the rain, a real rain.


    And she realized, with something like an epiphany, that she could have it in an instant.


    She laid her Avatar down, and reached in her mind for a mental box. She felt the latch unhook, felt the top slide back, and saw the switch. With a minute mental effort, the switch flipped, and her Spirit was separated from her Avatar.


    The world dropped away from her at near light-speed, and she flew out past the moons and other planets of the system, until she floated out beyond the Arthelian field. With another mental exercise, this time a pressing of a mental keyfob, she summoned her craft.


    A few moments later, she was drifting through the textured memories of her personal vault, grabbing only what she needed, the feel of a handlebar, the sensation of a road, a tiredness in her legs and core, and then she was gone.


    Every time a car came down the highway, it was like a brush with death. The headlights would break out over a hill, waver in the air, seemingly frozen in place, sometime for what felt like hours, then grow all at once and zip past her at over ninety miles an hour, leaving only the same expanse of darkness outside the cone of her headlights, waiting to give birth to another.


    Somewhere out beyond the black, beyond the edge of the world, the edge of her mind, beyond the Hardworlds themselves, dreams called to her. Dreams of easy summer evenings and a man with a lost name, whispering words that were like the shadows of ghosts.


    But they were only dreams.


    She ran their fragments over in her mind until they dissolved, like words beaten into unmeaning by their speaking, and tried to remember what she had found in them, what they had meant to her.


    But, like searching the dark texture, there was only what her mind could imagine, nothing more.


    The song on her earbuds changed. The speed metal sounds of Razor broke off, and there was a moment of empty silence as the road hummed beneath her.


    Then the tremolo rhythm of ¡®How soon is now?¡¯ by The Smiths broke into her earbuds, and she began to cry.


    She remembered the lyrics in reverse, and she knew that though she hadn¡¯t found anything real in that phantom place, that crucible of spirit, but she also knew that she hadn¡¯t given up looking for what it had impersonated. Her fall backward, away from that beckoning ever dream, was proof that she hadn¡¯t yet given up looking for her own happiness, hadn¡¯t yet surrendered it to some outside force, hadn¡¯t yet begun to die.


    Lightning flashed on the edge of the dark, great bursts of purple texture brushed by punch hole silhouettes of trees, and she smelled rain through her helmet. She knew it would be on the road soon, and she knew the rest stop three miles ahead would be scarce shelter, but she also knew that she would get what she had been longing for for so, so long.


    She knew that she would hear the true sound of the rain.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze: Killhouse

    Step into the dojo


    On the small window in Gradie¡¯s HUD, Maverick exploded into a million little pieces and the hallway crumbled like a kid¡¯s diorama caught in a pressure wash. The feed went solid grey with dust and the team was invisible until the drone switched to thermal. The steady beam of machine gun laser fire lit up a solid line that strafed back and forth, blindly.


    ¡°Shields!¡¯ Nova shouted, and Luke and the others held up their barrier meshes. A stray burst from the MG caught the top corner of Luke¡¯s and ripped it out of his hands in chunks.


    ¡°Well that didn¡¯t do shit,¡± he said flatly.


    A burst of sparks above Gradie¡¯s head made him jump and almost squeeze off a round, but he realized it was Nuke cutting through the shaft on queue.


    ¡°On me!¡± Angel screamed. A burst of white light on the small screen told Gradie Angel was activating his rad thrower in short-range disintegrate mode. Luke snapped up and bolted to Angel¡¯s side while Robin held Nova VIP style and rushed him to his brother. She had a shield mesh raised in front of her head, and when a burst of MG fire hit it, it fared better than Lukes, absorbing half of the rounds in a series of small flashes before shattering and spraying off them like a bonfire caught in a strong wind.


    Another burst struck Angel dead on but was buffeted against a till then invisible force field that took on the color and glare of the laser fire and warped and wrapped around it in a cone for a brief second before vanishing again. The MG danced across the room in another pass, came back and rippled Angel¡¯s barrier again, and was on its way toward Robin and Nova when Angel and Luke suddenly disappeared.


    ¡°Jump Robin!¡± Nova said, and the two figures leapt forward just as the laser fire sparked off Robins armor. They disappeared into a darkened pit and an alert on Gradie¡¯s feed told him Robin had taken critical damage, but was still alive.


    ¡°Shit!¡± She yelled in the comms, and in some strange defect of the telepathic channel, her voice rang right in Gradie¡¯s skull as if she was trapped inside his thoughts.


    ¡°Jesus!¡± He threw his hands up to his head and Nuke¡¯s cutter went dead above him.


    ¡°Dammit Robin watch that shit!¡± Maverick said.


    ¡°I swear that girl¡¯s a Speaker,¡± Mack said.


    ¡°I am not! I¡¯m just fucking pissed!¡± This time her voice was a normal volume on the comms.


    The MG went quiet suddenly.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Robin said. ¡°They know we¡¯re down here!¡±


    Gradie looked on the mini-map as Nuke started cutting again. Nova, Angel, Luke and Robin were all clustered in a room on the far side of the condos, one floor above Gradie and Mack and one floor below the floor Nuke was cutting into.


    ¡°I¡¯m working on cameras now!¡± Nova hissed. Small dots on the mini-map tracked his drones as they spread like flies throughout the penthouse. Gradie noticed there were quite a bit fewer than there had been just minutes ago.


    Nuke¡¯s cutter went dead.


    ¡°Wait, can they see me cutting!¡±


    ¡°No! My drones wiped everything they found on the other side of that door.¡± Nova pinged the two drones drilled into the top of the shaft on the HUD and a log of everything they had done in the past ten minutes, drilling, tapping fibers, cracking wireless, and even disabling something labeled ¡°LNDRY RAD-T¡±, scrolled by in a small window on the screen.


    ¡°Get inside immediately and look for a fucking opening on that MG!¡± Maverick said. ¡°There can¡¯t be more than five fuckers in there, and I bet they¡¯re all huddled around it like little bitches!¡± A large dot lit up on the mini map in the general area of the back west corner.


    Nuke¡¯s cutter lit up again and an explosion boomed through the walls. Robin shrieked.


    ¡°Nades! Move! Move!¡±


    Gradie watched their icons spread out and move to the north as more explosions shook the ceiling.


    ¡°On me! On me!¡± Robin pinged her location on the mini map repeatedly. The other dots moved through the floorplan map and found their way to her.


    ¡°Damn, how much space moolah you think it costs to get a kitchen like this?¡± Luke said in an easy tone.


    A loud slam echoed down the shaft as the metal rectangle Nuke had cut out of the door plate fell to the floor upstairs.


    ¡°Emp ¡®nade out!¡± She tossed one in and it rattled across the floor upstairs, then went off with a humming pop like a transformer blowing.


    After an unusually silent pause, she said, ¡°Its clear! Get the fuck up here!¡±


    Mack shot up the shaft, propelled by his jumpsuit and made it to the doorway in a single bounce. Gradie followed but almost missed the doorway. The mechanics of the jump suit meant that every slight movement became a directional propulsion, and by kicking his leg slightly to the right, he had thrown himself off course. He grabbed the ladder with one hand and swung himself around, scrambled in the doorway and found Nuke and Mack standing in a small room at the end of a long, strange hallway, and it took him a moment to realize what was strange about it.Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    All the doors had been covered by some kind of bulging material that looked like spray-foam frozen in place, and at the far end, about fifty feet down the hall, a pile of something that might have been patio furniture was stacked clear to the ceiling.


    ¡°Uh,¡± was all Gradie could get out before Nova, watching his feed, put 2 and 2 together.


    ¡°Get the fuck out of there!¡±


    The pile coughed up a stream of laser bullets and the hallway was packed with a wall of sound.


    ¡°Get behind me!¡± Nuke yelled, already turtled. Gradie shot to the left behind her as machinegun fire tore up the air, but Mack flew up to the 12-foot ceiling and grabbed on to a light fixture.


    ¡°I fucking knew it would be there!¡± Angel said. ¡°It¡¯s the only¡ª¡±


    ¡°Start cutting god dammit!¡± Mack yelled out loud, his voice echoing in the telepathic chat.


    ¡°Fuck that!¡± Nuke yelled, then solely on the comms she hissed, ¡°Grab a charge off my belt and throw it over my head. I¡¯ll slap it on the wall.¡±


    It took Gradie a second to realize she was talking to him, even with the blinking ¡°Request from ChknMiniNuke¡± on his HUD, but with the help of some pop ups and AR arrows and instructions, he got a square packet about the size of a pop tart out of an armored box on Nuke¡¯s belt by pulling it out like a napkin, then pressed a button in the center that made it expand to the size of a spiral notebook and threw it over Nukes head, hoping like hell the MG fire didn¡¯t hit it.


    Instead, suddenly, the fire stopped.


    After a few seconds of dead silence, Mack asked, ¡°What the fuck?¡±


    ¡°They can¡¯t see us,¡± Gradie said, just as he realized it. ¡°They heard the blast and knew Nuke threw that grenade, so they know we¡¯re here, but they can¡¯t see us.¡±


    ¡°What do you mean they can¡¯t¡ª¡± Mack started.


    ¡°Holy fuck he¡¯s right!¡± Nuke hissed. ¡°They¡¯re little furniture trick relies on cameras Quasar and I took out.¡±


    ¡°Aw shit, so let¡¯s rush em!¡± Mack said.


    ¡°No!¡± said Nuke. ¡°If I try and break through all that shit,¡± she pointed at the furniture pile at the end of the hall, now spilling out in fragments but having lost none of its height, and which Gradie could tell was at least twenty feet deep. ¡°They¡¯ll hear it and shred us again. Also, they might just be reloading.¡± The fear broke out of her voice with her last words, as if she had just realized it as she spoke.


    ¡°Maybe they can¡¯t see you, but they can sure as shit hear you,¡± Nova said. ¡°I¡¯m picking up a harmonic sensor on the frame. Don¡¯t move a fucking foot. It¡¯s gonna take a while for my drones to isolate it.¡±


    ¡°Great. So what¡¯s the plan?¡± Mack said.


    ¡°Blast our way out. Ok Corpse,¡± Nuke said, and it took Gradie another confused moment to remember his username was OrbitingCorpse. ¡°Very carefully, reach between my legs,¡±


    ¡°Hmmmmmm,¡± Mack said on the ceiling, like a chortle being forced out of a slightly open balloon.


    ¡°Shut up. Corpse, reach between my legs, pick up the charge and press it against the wall, as high up as you can get it.¡±


    ¡°Uh,¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m not about to get out of Turtle mode with a live MG pointed at us, and I don¡¯t want you coming around and getting splattered all over me.¡± (Once again, Mack wrestled with a laugh and got it beat down into a grunt,) ¡°Just hurry up!¡±


    Gradie very slowly and with as light movements as he could manage, got down on his hands and knees and reached between the two solid pillars and tried not to think about what was at the end of them, and grabbed the charge. He grabbed onto one of Nukes armored legs and leaned as far through the gap as he could, then reached up until his shoulder was rubbing against her tank-hulled crotch, and slapped the charge on the wall.


    They were all silent for a second. The slap had echoed down the hall louder than Gradie had expected, but the MG didn¡¯t answer.


    ¡°Ok good job,¡± Nuke said. ¡°Mack. Get the fuck down here.¡±


    One of Nuke¡¯s legs made a soft metallic latching sound as she moved it against the other one. It locked back into turtle mode with a chunk and she was a solid pillar of hopefully very blast resistant armor.


    Mack swung on the light and slow-fell down next to Gradie, but as he did the big tacky chandelier swung backward and squeaked, and then exploded.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Nuke yelled. The MG roared again and poured fire into the ceiling above them, raining down fragments of space age drywall.


    ¡°Charge out!¡±


    The blast rattled Gradie¡¯s skull and a few other bones he tried to convince himself didn¡¯t actually exist here. Nuke yelled ¡®move!¡¯ and disappeared through the still smoking hole in the wall and Gradie scrambled after her. The MG fire darted from ceiling to floor and chased him out. As his left leg followed the rest of him into the next room, a round obliterated his calf and sent fire up his thigh.


    ¡°Fuck!¡± he yelled out loud and fell over onto hard tile.


    It was a bright flash of pain, and from its molten center deep in his calf, reality spread outwards. Like someone had flicked a light switch, the showers around him became every other gym locker room he had ever seen in his life, the HUD just a cheap rendering displayed by his phone slotted into a VR headset, even the armored figures rushing by him were nothing more than cosplay. His body ached, his leg was screaming, his breathing was shortened, and his mind reached out for an answer in memory, an answer to how he got here and what kind of drugs had been involved.


    Then the pain vanished and with it that whole other slice of the real world, and he was back in Gunmaze watching rounds punch through the walls of a space opera gym shower.


    ¡°Holy shit,¡± he said out loud, but barely a whisper, as he looked down at his leg. His calf armor had been blasted off, exposing the shreds of a kind of black rubber undersuit, and a strange beige gel expanding over his wound.


    ¡°Your suit¡¯s got an auto-doc bro, just let it work.¡±


    ¡°I felt it.¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re about to feel something else!¡± Nuke yelled and grabbed him by the handle on the back of his armor. The showers exploded in tile and dust and jets of pipe-free water everywhere and he scrambled up to get behind her just as she squatted down and turtled.


    The MG wasn¡¯t taking any chances this time. Second after second, the bursts continued, and the room became clouded with porcelain dust like the world was ending.


    ¡°Once these mother fuckers run out of ammo¡ª¡± was the last thing Mack got out. He had been hanging on to a vent in the ceiling, but the MG gunner must have caught wise to his previous ceiling trick, and sprayed a burst right through him. His body misted and the remnants fell to a crumpled heap just feet away from Gradie and Nuke, while, oddly, his voice screamed on the chat.


    ¡°God fucking dammit!¡±


    ¡°Every fucking time bro!¡± Maverick laughed. ¡°That¡¯s why you¡¯re Timmy twenty deaths.¡±


    ¡°Bitch you¡¯re dead too!¡±


    ¡°Yeah, for once. Tally it up bitch.¡±


    Suddenly, the gunfire stopped.


    ¡°All right, I found the Harmonizer,¡± Nova said. ¡°Shit its right under them. Im gonna have to choke it off.¡±


    Gradie looked back down at his calf as the dust settled, and was reminded of his previous pain, just as Macks crumpled body caught his eye again.


    ¡°Hey Mack, did you feel it when you died?¡±


    There was a chorus of laughter on the line and Gradie felt his face warm, drawing more attention to the flesh he was desperate to escape.


    ¡°Aw shit, now new guys got fucking jokes!¡±


    ¡°No, I¡¯m serious.¡±


    ¡°Fuck do you mean did I feel it?¡±


    ¡°I got shot in the leg and it sucked.¡±


    ¡°Why wouldn¡¯t it?¡±


    ¡°Cause it¡¯s a game?¡±


    The only one with anything to say to that was Angel.


    ¡°The more realistic the sim, the less your Spirit is removed from its physical memory. You¡¯ll feel what your mind expects unless you learn to expect not to.¡±


    That wasn¡¯t exactly comforting to Gradie, but his time for contemplation had run out.


    ¡°Ok, got the Harmonizer isolated,¡± Nova said. ¡°Now we can move.¡±

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze: Grazing Fire

    A brush with death


    ¡°Nuke, move toward that MG,¡± Mack said on the comms.


    ¡°Great.¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t bellyache. The moment you take fire, hunker down and sit tight. Sulphyr and I will move up to hit itand we can bound off each other until we¡¯ve got the fuckers surrounded.¡±


    On the mini-map, Gradie saw Sulphyr and Maverick¡¯s icons moving toward the laundry room at the bottom of the chute.


    ¡°I think we¡¯re gonna move to the courtyard,¡± Nova pinged the big circle at the center of the penthouse square, where a strange symbol that looked like an octopus or something was surrounded by small paths.


    ¡°There¡¯s a staircase we can use. Plus the tree will screen us from the MGs.¡± Nova drew lines from the top two corners of the map and showed how the big tree in the courtyard would screen the stairs between the back of the lounge/bar and the courtyard.


    ¡°Will it though?¡± Luke sounded skeptical.


    ¡°Yeah bro, it¡¯s like the god damned Deku tree.¡±


    ¡°Oh, well in that case, let¡¯s look out for Skultulas and shit and then move here.¡± Luke drew a line from the bottom side of the courtyard up around to the top of the map, right between the two MGs.


    ¡°Make em think twice before pulling the trigger.¡±


    ¡°Fucking ballsy but it might work,¡± said Maverick. ¡°Fuck it, let¡¯s do it. But we gotta move now.¡±


    Nuke sighed and got to her feet. Gradie moved to get behind her and a prompt reminded him to loot Mack¡¯s body for grenades and extra ammo.


    ¡°Get in tight.¡± She advised him, and he was glad Mack wasn¡¯t around, though something that felt like the telepathic edges of a snicker wafted over the group comms. He pressed in close and tapped her with one hand on one of the few portions of soft armor just above her hip.


    They marched in a half crouch with weapons ready, past crumpled showers and spraying walls towards a door in the back that slid open right as they got within three feet of it. Nuke jumped back hard into Gradie.


    ¡°It¡¯s just me,¡± Nova said on the comms.¡±


    ¡°Jesus,¡± Nuke hissed, and stepped through the door.


    It hit him like being suddenly turned upside down. Nostalgia. Disorientation. Like falling through one part of a dream into another that was trying to pass as waking life.


    The pool stretched out longways from where they stood clear to the far end about fifty meters away, where doorways to locker rooms waited in a white wall between the shadows of diving boards. The diving blocks, rounded planks on wire thin supports in this universe, were arranged in front of him, waiting. The high dive, looking as space age as the blocks with its platforms suspended on near invisibly thin metal, loomed above the center of the mirror still surface where the two movable plexiglass walkways blocked in what he knew was the deepest portion, twenty-five meters down the length. One wall of the natatoriam was a solid glass window, while the other was a terrace of silver bleachers looking down over a glass railing at the ground floor where tile shimmered and folding chairs sat empty. Despite the minor tweaks to the fixtures, the only thing truly Sci-Fi about the entire space was the view out the tall windows, where space-opera towers smoked and laser beams flashed in the sinking twilight distance. He focused on that fantastic scenery until the lap pool from his childhood sunk back down into memory and there was only this copy, placed before him like a hollow easter egg.


    In his shock, the gap between him and Nuke had widened, and he took two quick steps to catch up. She led him to the right towards the bleachers and a mirror world floated across the pool in that way he had always loved.


    ¡°I don¡¯t like this,¡± Nuke said.


    ¡°Can¡¯t swim?¡± Gradie said, hoping to mask whatever the fuck was going on with him.


    ¡°Ha, no, I mean those windows. Quasar, you sure they don¡¯t have eyes¡ª¡±


    In answer, the far wall exploded. The now familiar rapid-fire laser-like tracers ripped through a door and danced around Nuke and Gradie, kicking up so much tile and rubber slip-mat that Gradie thought they were about to get dropped through the floor.


    ¡°Ahh go!¡± Nuke yelled, and for a moment, Gradie stood there, watching everything disintegrate, wondering where the fuck she expected him to go to, while also wondering, in a wordless, guttural way, as if his skin itself was the one having the intellectual crisis, if the pain of being ripped apart by the MG would be like the pain of being shot in the calf multiplied a thousand times, until Nuke reached around and grabbed him by that always convenient handle on the back of his armor, and drug them both into the pool.


    The makers had not taken the time, or had been unable to think of a way, to make the inside of the pool look any different from an Olympic length pool in the Real. The night vision function of his helmet, rather than being a monochrome green or blue, rendered everything in a natural full moon night un-darkness, and the blue tile Ts at the far end, the slope, the mirrored reverse of itself wavering above them, created the sensation, for just a moment, that he had fallen straight through in to the Real, or at least into the Hardworlds.


    Then Nuke¡¯s armored form floated out of the pillar of bubbles caused by her plunge, and the MG raked the surface with a burst that sent glowing sudsy lines of laser bullet-paths slicing through the water. One round struck Nuke¡¯s chest plate with a soft harmless ¡°thunk¡± that echoed in the pool, and Gradie realized the rounds had their speed reduced to that of an energetic overhand throw.Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    Nuke threw her arms up in a stroke and propelled herself down to the bottom of the pool and Gradie followed, the neutral buoyancy of his suit fighting against him. More rounds struck the water and their paths fizzled out into curving chains of circular bubble clusters, not unlike lane ropes, and the sounds of the impacts and the echo of the gun above were softened by the water, so that it felt like he had entered a dimension where nothing harsh or violent could ever persist. A wave of d¨¦j¨¤ vu washed over him from the way the sensation of the water was kept out by the suit, but he had no idea why.


    ¡°Mav, look alive,¡± Nova said. ¡°You got drones coming your way.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t need them.¡±


    ¡°Not mine!¡±


    ¡°What the fuck! Thought you had their tech locked down.¡±


    ¡°Deployed from the roof. Can¡¯t get my tech up there yet. Don¡¯t panic, just sit tight. My flyers are loaded with lightning plus.¡±


    ¡°What the fuck¡ª¡±


    ¡°Dogfighting software! Just give me a second!¡±


    The machine gun fire had stopped. Gradie followed Nuke toward the far side of the pool in a slow, floating march. It was calm and unexpectedly beautiful, as things sometimes were in the diorama worlds of Gunmaze, until something small, dark, and metal dropped into the water on the far side and sunk straight to the bottom as a drone flew by overhead.


    ¡°Quasar,¡± Nuke started, but the strange bass boosted boom cut her off. There was a bright flash that ballooned into a swarm of bubbles rising up in a pillar toward the surface. A few seconds later, the echoes faded and a strange gurgling noise filled in the silence. It grew into the sound of rushing distant water, not unlike a bathtub being drained in the next room.


    Lights flashed above the warbling silver surface of the water and gunshots echoed.


    ¡°Quasar,¡± Nuke said again.


    ¡°One second!¡± Nova hissed. Something else dropped into the pool with a thunk and Nuke squeaked and jumped backward, the water turning her panicked motion into a slow-mo backwards float that her bulbous armor gave a comical slant.


    The thing descended in a chute of bubbles and clunked again on the pool floor. A broken drone.


    ¡°I¡¯m clearing the fucking skies,¡± Nova said.


    ¡°We¡¯re moving on that MG,¡± Maverick said, and Gradie saw three icons, him, Sulphyr, and Mack, moving through an area labeled ¡°DINING¡± on the other side of the kill-hall from the pool.


    ¡°And just a heads up, be extra cautious. HQ commandeered our clone station at the base temporarily¡ª¡±


    ¡°What the fuck!¡± Robin said.


    ¡°They needed bodies for a supply run. We will get it back once¡ª¡±


    ¡°But they can¡¯t give us fucking air support!¡±


    ¡°I told you, this place is stuffed with anti-air.¡±


    ¡°Which Quasar has mostly fried now anyway!¡±


    ¡°Dammit Robin, we have to make do with¡ª¡±


    The MG cut him off. Nuke went turtle mode as a reflex, but the gunfire was distant and muffled, and none of the rounds broke the shimmering surface of the water.


    ¡°Taking fire!¡± Maverick yelled, and Gradie saw the three icons of Maverick''s clone squad spread out perpendicular to the line of fire. For Otherworld gamers, they had decent tactics.


    ¡°Mouseholes go both ways, assholes!¡± Sulphyr yelled, and Gradie saw his icon light up as another, fainter machine gun sound joined in.


    ¡°Nuke! Move up!¡± Maverick said, his adrenaline bleeding through the mental comms, infecting Gradie with an itch to be out of the lowering water. The surface was descending on them like a tin foil ceiling in a slow collapse.


    ¡°I¡¯ll pop nano smoke, one sec,¡± Nova said. A drone moved by over them, a distorted black smear the size of a small bird. The pop of the grenade was the softest sound Gradie had heard yet, like a comforting voice, and the edge of the water darkened like ink spreading across paper.


    ¡°Moving!¡± Nuke said, her voice filled with an excitement that reminded Gradie none of this was real and that fear was foolishness in a shootout where no one died, though the dull twinge in his calf reminded him that it might not all be fun and games if the MG found its mark.


    Nuke stomped over to a ladder in the side wall and pulled herself up with a groan of stressed metal. Gradie waited behind her until she snapped at him.


    ¡°Grab onto me and jump the fuck up there! Your jump suit!¡±


    Gradie let his rifle swing down, which felt like an invitation for some phantom Philip to float out of the air and kick him, and pulled himself up towards Nuke¡¯s shoulders, now clearing the water. However the jump suit worked, it didn¡¯t activate until he was clear of the surface, and the sudden unexpected and still unfamiliar force rocketing him upward sent him flailing up onto the deck, where he landed in a half roll onto his side.


    As Nuke cleared the water, the deck around the ladder posts cracked and groaned, but didn¡¯t give. She stomped up onto the tile, dripping water off her black armor like oil, grenade launcher already aimed at the spreading smoke. Gradie rolled up and got into formation behind her, one hand on her handle, and had to once again respect his new allies'' training. How many Hardworlders were headhunted from Gunmaze junkies, he wondered?


    She took two steps before the MG fire shot out of the smoke.


    ¡°Shit!¡± she squealed, and turtled so fast that her head dropped two feet in an instant, exposing Gradie to the stream of fire.


    ¡°Dammit!¡± He snapped down into a crouch as the deck and water around him came alive.


    ¡°Moving!¡± Maverick said, and the three icons in the dining area wasted no time in taking advantage of the MG switching targets. They moved in what must have been a full sprint into the area labelled GYM.


    ¡°Nuke, move up! He¡¯s firing blind!¡± Nova said. Gradie looked around him and saw what he meant. The fire was raking the entire natatorium, though focusing mostly on the smoke on the far side of the deck, where the exit door lay hidden. After a few seconds, Gradie noticed something else. Though the MG itself was now firing some kind of tracerless, non-infra-red-reflecting rounds invisible to even his space-age nightvision, the impacts of the rounds let him track the field of fire, and there were some gaping holes in it.


    ¡°Nuke, move to that corner!¡± He pointed with his rifle.


    ¡°Fuck you!¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s firing through mouseholes! That¡¯s one of his blind spots!¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s right Nuke!¡± Nova said.


    ¡°Ahhh!¡± Nuke de-turtled with a groan and shot off toward the far corner of the deck, almost leaving Gradie behind. Like a sudden spot of shade on a hot day, the MG fire became a distant suggestion as they stepped onto the oblong shape of deck untouched by impacts.


    ¡°That smoke didn¡¯t do shit!¡± she yelled.


    ¡°You¡¯re alive aren¡¯t you? And he¡¯s got eyes somewhere on the skyline. Wait one sec, gonna smoke the whole room.¡±


    Another drone whizzed by and there was a pop next to the floor to ceiling windows across the pool and more black sparkling smoke spread out in a cloud.


    ¡°How am I supposed to see where I¡¯m going?¡± Nuke said, as the first cloud of smoke flowed over them, and everything disappeared. Gradie held tight to her handle.


    ¡°The HUD, remember?¡± Nova said, and a glowing yellow overlay, like a 3d blueprint, appeared on their HUD. There was even a flashing arrow path on the ground.


    ¡°I mapped his blind-spots. You should be good to push him.¡±


    ¡°Should be,¡± Nuke growled.


    Like a flipped switch, the MG fire stopped and picked up again in the far room.


    ¡°Fuck! I¡¯m Hit!¡± Mack yelled on the comms, and something bled through that told Gradie his fears of real pain in this place were far from unwarranted.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze: The Penthouse

    High rise low life


    ¡°I got you!¡± Sulphyr yelled, Gradie watched his icon move to Mavericks on the mini-map. The MG went wild, and Gradie suspected that Nova hadn¡¯t blinded the gunner as much as he thought. Whatever pity Gradie felt for the tragedy playing out across the hall, it died without even a wimper under the crushing weight of his own panicked desire to take as much advantage of the sudden calm in the pool room as he could.


    He pushed on Nuke as she stomped forward.


    ¡°Would you quit shoving me?¡±


    ¡°We need to move! Before the MG¡ª¡±


    ¡°I am trying! Quasar¡¯s map thing doesn¡¯t show when there¡¯s a fucking chair in the way though, so you¡¯re going to have to wait for me to clear us a path, unless you want to let go of me and go on your own!¡± Her pauses were punctuated by grunts as she kicked fold out chairs and boxes of resistance flippers across the tile, loudly.


    So, in an odd moment of calm, not unlike some of the surreally banal pauses between firefights he had experienced in the Hardworlds, they moved in bursts of rushed jogging broken by frustrated kicks across the deck toward the door outlined in glowing orange on their HUD, as the MG fired in bursts at something a few walls away.


    As they approached the door, the MG fire got louder.


    ¡°Must be close,¡± Gradie said, partially as an apology.


    ¡°Brilliant observation! Now tell me how many bullets they have left.¡±


    ¡°Uh, five.¡±


    Another burst echoed in the walls.


    ¡°Ok, zero.¡±


    Nuke snickered in her mask.


    ¡°Ok good. Than can you run up ahead and drop a grenade¡ª"


    The far wall of the room they had just entered, which was like a reception area mixed with a lounge lit by a thin portion of two story high window, exploded in a burst of wood paneling and drywall. Nuke squealed and turtled again, and Gradie crouched behind her.


    ¡°Moving!¡± Maverick yelled, and Gradie watched their three icons, one of which was marked with a little red cross symbol, dash across the gym. The MG fire was like a hailstorm, and unlike the bursts in the natatorium, this time the rounds fell freely everywhere, and Gradie couldn¡¯t pinpoint a blind spot.


    ¡°Holy shit,¡± Luke said suddenly.


    ¡°What?¡± Gradie said, hoping he had cracked some weakness in the enemy¡¯s position.


    ¡°It really is a big ass tree.¡±


    ¡°Would you quit staring at it and move?¡± Robin said.


    ¡°You gotta learn to appreciate nature.¡±


    Like clockwork, the MG fire got a notch quieter and the rain of future-bullets around Gradie stopped on a dime.


    ¡°Cover!¡± Maverick shouted, and their icons scattered again, this time across a lounge on the other side of the big circular tree atrium from where Luke and his team were maneuvering up the staircase.


    ¡°Throw a smoke so we can move, please!¡± Nuke hissed on Gradie¡¯s direct channel. He grabbed one off his belt, but stopped and looked at the holes in the wall.


    ¡°Wait, how will that help? We¡¯re screened by the wall anyway.¡±


    ¡°Oh my god, they¡¯re not watching us from there!¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    Nuke un-turtled one arm and pointed out the wide window.


    ¡°They have a camera out on some tower. That¡¯s why Quasar couldn¡¯t take it out! Now throw a fucking smoke!¡±


    Gradie pulled the pin, but stopped. He had been looking at the ground for a good place to toss it when somethings stuck out. The last five feet of floor in front of the windows were completely unscathed.


    ¡°What are you waiting for?¡±


    He tossed the grenade in the far corner next to the window and waited for the smoke to spread. Once it did, he slapped Nuke hard on the back and pinged the untouched scrap of carpet next to the window.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°Blind spot.¡±


    That was all it took. She de-turtled and dashed over yanking him along.


    ¡°You¡¯d better be right!¡±


    Gradie switched comm channels.


    ¡°Hey Notbanned, I think these MG¡¯s have locked traversals.¡±


    ¡°You sure?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. They got a big blind spot on the west side wall over here. Probably so they wont shoot out the windows.¡±


    ¡°Why would they give a fuck about that?¡± Robin said.


    ¡°Anti-Air emplacements,¡± Nova said. ¡°They got the sensors stuck to the side of the building. Armored shell on the outside, but any round fired from within would have free reign on the internals. Good eye Corpse. Im gonna map the anti-air and overlay¡ª¡±This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.


    The MG got loud again, which Gradie knew by now was a result of it transitioning mouseholes, and the Lobby next to them erupted. This time, not a single round hit Nukes Turtled armor, and after a few bursts she popped out.


    ¡°Ok, Im gonna blast this wall, then we¡¯re moving in.¡±


    ¡°Wait,¡± Maverick said. ¡°Let us move up and we¡¯ll hit it¡ª¡±


    A distant roar broke out, and Sulphyr¡¯s icon went red on the screen with a sound like a failed buzzer.


    ¡°Shit! Cover! The other MG!¡±


    ¡°I thought you said they couldn¡¯t shoot towards that wall!¡± Mack screamed.


    Gradie looked at the map. The eastern MG was marked as ¡°engaged¡± and its line of fire was drawn as a dotted line, cutting westward in front of the circular tree atrium, and intersecting with the western MG¡¯s line of fire in an ominous X right on Maverick¡¯s position. The dotted line terminated on the western wall Nova had marked the first section of anti-air sensors on.


    ¡°They probably have range limiters,¡± Nova said. ¡°So the rounds dissipate after a set distance.¡±


    ¡°So is this a trap?¡± Nuke said, looking around frantically.


    ¡°No, the west MG probably is probably restricted in that direction because the range limiters won¡¯t work so close. There''s a minimum distance¡ª¡±


    ¡°Nuke! Move on that fucking MG now!¡± Maverick yelled.


    ¡°Quasar,¡± Luke said in a tone of calm reflection. ¡°Could the MG¡¯s fire at each other safely with those range limiters?¡±


    ¡°Uh, I¡¯d have to compare the distance between them against known limiter models, but they might not want to take the chance. Personnel on this kind of defense is way more valuable than even anti-air, so¡ª¡±


    ¡°Can you guys fuck off to your own channel!¡± Nuke yelled.


    ¡°I moved them,¡± Nova said. ¡°Mack and Mav are pinned down. We¡¯re moving to them right now, but I don¡¯t know how long¡ª¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t worry I¡¯m not waiting!¡±


    Nuke walked up to the yellow HUD outline of the north wall and slapped a charge on it. She backed up so fast that Gradie almost fell over getting out of her way, and when he was pressed between her and the south wall, she turtled.


    ¡°Charge out!¡±


    He got down just in time, now convinced she had forgotten he existed. The blast ripped the room apart. Almost immediately, the soft glow of the late twilight sky broke into the interior. The blast had blown out the floor-to-ceiling windows and most of the smoke was gone in a rush of wind almost instantly.


    ¡°Moving!¡± she yelled, before the blast had finished echoing out in the night air, and sprinted forward. Gradie scrambled after her and a drone whizzed by overhead.


    ¡°Wait, wait!¡± Nova said. ¡°Let me¡ª¡±


    Nuke stomped over the smoking ruins of the wall and immediately fired her grenade launcher across the room. Unfortunately for Gradie, the room was less than ten yards across. Large for a bedroom, but still compact enough to funnel the shockwave back at him with painful effect. His bones still shaking from the breaching charge, he tried to believe it was all just make-believe, but in the back of his mind, the burning feeling of the round ripping through his calf reflected his words like armor.


    ¡°Nuke! Let me check¡ª¡±


    Another grenade blast cut Nova off. This time the entire bedroom wall blew apart and revealed a two-store open space, an artsy lounge and living area cut from some high end New York high rise. Strange hanging sculptures swung in the blast, mirrors and framed art reflected subtle evening light filtered in through angled skylights, but after a moment, the penthouse-ness faded, and he noticed qualities that stood out of place; lights and lasers flickered in all spectrums in his goggles. Entire masses of floor and wall had been cut out, while other portions had been formed by the same molded material he had seen in the kill-hall, and dark holes and slits, impenetrable even to his enhanced infared light, watched him from everywhere.


    Nuke had taken one step into this space, and must have realized what was up just before Gradie, because by the time the MG erupted from a dark hole in the far wall, she was already turtled.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Gradie dove behind her as the rounds ripped the tile floor to pieces and cracked behind him into the bedroom.


    ¡°My gun!¡± Nuke yelled.


    Gradie saw a chunk of what used to be her grenade launcher drop to her feet, along with a broken tube of grenades which he hoped the MG fire didn¡¯t set off, just before he rolled his last smoke grenade between Nuke¡¯s legs. It bounced across the floor towards the hole in the wall spitting fire and broke open with a cough.


    ¡°Damn girl, guess you¡¯ll be throwing them,¡± Mack said.


    ¡°Moving!¡± Nuke said as the smoke spread, and Gradie grabbed onto her handle for dear life as they sprinted into a darkened kitchen to the left and back into what was hopefully still the MG¡¯s blind spot. The MG fire, which had been a single focused stream on Nukes torso, now fanned out and raked the living room behind them as Nuke stomped across the kitchen tile towards the long dining area waiting sleepily under more two-story windows.


    Then, suddenly, the MG went silent, Nukes loud stomps echoed in the dead still apartment, and Gradie knew they had fucked up.


    ¡°Shit, the windows,¡± was all he got out before a new, more focused stream of MG fire eruped from some other mousehole, and sprayed right into Nuke.


    ¡°Ahhh!¡± she screamed and turtled, and Gradie, who had been sprinting after her, ran smack into her now support-pillar-solid back and crumpled backwards onto the floor, which was a bit of luck since the stream of lethal rounds danced where he would have been standing and sparked off Nuke.


    ¡°Do something!¡± She yelled, and something in her squeal sparked an epiphany.


    For the last twenty minutes, he had been hiding like a bitch every time the MG sneezed, to the point that he had forgotten he was even armed.


    He activated his jump suit and launched himself up off the ground in a twist and snatched a grenade off his belt. As he landed ten feet away from Nuke, on top of the kitchens stone counter, he threw the grenade at the fire spitting mousehole, then stood there looking at it.


    ¡°Get down you moron!¡± Nuke yelled, but it was too late. Gradie, somehow, had unlearned every grenade lesson Philip had ever given him, and watched as the blast threw hot shrapnel all over him.


    ¡°Fuck!¡±


    He back flipped off the counter and crashed into a kitchen rack.


    ¡°Frag out!¡± Nuke yelled, and for a moment Gradie thought she was talking about the one he had just eaten, until another blast rocked the kitchen.


    ¡°Frag out! Frag out¡± Fuck you!¡± She screamed. Gradie rolled into a crouch and saw over the top of the kitchen counter that while her head was still turtled and immobile, her right arm was pliable and spinning like a windmill, tossing what he guessed were the spare grenades from her launcher.


    The MG fire died again. Nuke gave it two seconds before she de-turtled and bolted to the window.


    The MG started again, this time distant and muffled.


    ¡°God damn how many holes this mother fucker got?¡± Mack said. ¡°Quasar, you can¡¯t fly a bomb drone through not one of these fucking things?¡±


    ¡°They block them up and pump EMP through when they fire,¡± Nova said sadly.


    ¡°I¡¯m hit!¡± Maverick yelled, before the channel went quiet. Nuke had apparently moved her and Gradie to their own line, as he saw the rest of the teams icons light up but didn¡¯t hear them.


    ¡°I am no longer having fun,¡± she said flatly. ¡°I hate this god damned call of duty shit.¡±


    Gradie crept over to her while keeping one eye on the now widened hole in the far wall. She was sitting down with her back to the window like a boxer after a fight, very clearly bored. In the near dead twilight amplified by his goggles, he couldn¡¯t see a scratch on her armor.


    ¡°So how much damage can your suit take?¡±


    ¡°What? Oh, it¡¯s immune to projectiles and any blast up to a tactical Nuke. At least the plates are. Cost me years of saving up and honestly I¡¯m not sure it¡¯s worth it. I¡¯d rather have more mobility. Just staying alive isn¡¯t as fun as you might think.¡±


    The words ¡°any blast¡± had cooked off something in his head, and he was already scanning the mini map, now amplified by Novas latest tonal scans, as a plan grew in his mind.


    ¡°This is going to sound like a stupid idea,¡±


    ¡°Stupid might be fun,¡± Nuke said, sitting up.


    ¡°The MG is in that back bedroom. Looks like the walls are pretty thick, but the space is small. What if you took all of your charges, stuck them to the front of your suit, snuck up to that wall, then turtled and¡ª¡±


    The MG cracked open the air around them and turned the tranquil window and patio into a hellscape of falling glass and breaking everything.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze: Desperation Game

    Clip that shit


    ¡°Shit!¡± Nuke yelled and dove in front of Gradie, turtling as she fell. Her solid pillar body landed on the carpet like a steel beam dropped from a crane and Gradie pressed himself into the floor next to her.


    ¡°I thought you said they wouldn¡¯t shoot the windows!¡± She yelled. Gradie wasn¡¯t sure if she meant him or Nova, but luckily Nova answered.


    ¡°Yall are too close for that now! Sit tight!¡±


    ¡°Fuck that,¡± Nuke said on their private channel. ¡°Hey, I like your plan, but looks like the sneaking is a no go. Wish me luck!¡±


    She de-turtled and started to stand up.


    ¡°Wait!¡± Gradie pushed her down as the MG raked over them. She turtled again and the rounds bounced off her.


    ¡°Sorry! Guess we¡¯re stuck here!¡±


    Gradie¡¯s mind had now completely shaken off the confines of its Hardworld and Philip centric thought process, and a plan emerged that would have offended both of them.


    ¡°I¡¯m gonna draw their fire!¡±


    ¡°What?¡±


    He decided that showing her would be faster than trying to explain, and now that the thought had entered his mind, he had to act on it, before the fear of spiritual pain caught up with him. Somewhere in his thoughts a memory jostled free, of summer mornings standing in front of the lap pool, trying to get the nerve to get in at the start of practice, and the eventual understanding that a straight dive was the best way to do it, the cold grazing his skin and falling away under the onslaught of his first sprint.


    He activated the jump suit and bolted across the kitchen, back towards the living room.


    Immediately, the MG erupted in the walls, but then, strangely, the noise faded behind him and went silent. For a few panicked strides, he feared they hadn¡¯t taken the bait, but then the wall in the living room erupted and rounds danced around him, and he realized his plan had been smarter than he was.


    The MG position had multiple gun slits cut in it to allow it to shoot anyone at any place in the building, but now that he was right in front of them, the MG had to transition from gunslit to gunslit to chase him as he ran perpendicular to their line of fire, and they couldn¡¯t move fast enough. He made it clear across the living space unscathed and started laughing like an idiot at his own cleverness, until the flaw in his plan revealed itself.


    The other MG, positioned exactly to cover such weaknesses in its twin, opened fire as he stepped into the other half of the penthouse, a kind of art gallery space with a skylight in the tall ceiling and a theater sized screen on one wall, which now exploded in a stream of rounds and glass.


    He was, essentially, running headfirst into machinegun fire. Reflexively, he cut to the left, but the stream of laser rounds followed him, pressing him into the wall.


    I am going to experience a brutal death in a stupid fucking video game world. All those fucking warnings from Michael about the Hardworlds and their real pain, and this is where I¡¯m actually going to find out what it feels like to get shredded by machine gun fire.


    But at the last second, just as he ran out of floor, he did something desperate; he ran up the wall sideways, Matrix style.


    It worked so well he laughed out loud, a strange noise under the sci-fi gunfire. With the aid of the jump suit, his feet propelled him up the wall like the world had turned on it¡¯s side, and he moved across it at nearly a full sprint as the floor and wall beneath him shattered into pieces.


    The opposite wall came to meet him, forming a right angle with his current running platform, and in another flash of improvisation, he twisted at the last second and continued his run up the oncoming wall until he reached the corner of the ceiling and pressed himself in snugly with his arms and legs outstretched. The strange fiber optic lights of the jumpsuit pointed downward like mini rocket engines, illuminated in his night vision.


    ¡°Holy shit,¡± he said on the comms. That was¡ª¡±


    The explosion was massive and he felt it through the walls, so much that it almost shook him off his stable position. He had forgotten about Nuke.


    ¡°God damn Nuke!¡± Nova whooped. ¡°You blew them out of the fucking tower!¡±


    ¡°I almost blew myself out!¡± she squealed. ¡°Get over here!¡±


    ¡°Corpse! Go get her!¡± Maverick said. ¡°The rest of you, rendezvous at the offices!¡± He pinged a set of square rooms to the south of the eastern penthouse. Gradie let go of the wall and slow fell to the ground, then took off at a sprint towards Luke. After about five seconds, he wondered out loud,


    ¡°What¡¯s up with the other MG?¡±


    ¡°Probably trying to bait us into a false sense of security,¡± Maverick said. ¡°Stay frosty.¡±


    ¡°Ay, my balls are like two little dip-n-dots, bro,¡± Luke said.


    ¡°Wonderful,¡± said Robin.


    Running back the way he had come, the Penthouse now seemed like an empty shell, silent, still, as if it actually was just someone¡¯s home left empty for a weekend away. Smoke wafted in through the mouseholes like dream mist and as he stepped out of the living area into the kitchen and dining section, wind pushed at his face.Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.


    Nuke was at the edge of the floor, the sprawling sci-fi city skyline behind her, wind howling and muffled sounds of space age war flowing in with smells of burnt chemicals. The walls, floor, and ceiling had been completely severed, ending in frayed and sparking tendrils of molten wires and smoldering everything.


    She scrambled to get up to her feet and Gradie rushed over and pulled her up.


    ¡°Thank you!¡± Holy shit I gotta do that again!¡±


    ¡°I fucking told you girl,¡± Mack said. ¡°Why you think those suits cost so much?¡±


    ¡°She just thought a turtle-suit sounded cute,¡± Robin said.


    ¡°Shut up! I was sick of getting fragged every time Mack blew my stealth!¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know how you ever expected to do anything stealthy with that dump¡ª¡±


    ¡°The MG team are melting their position,¡± Nova said suddenly. ¡°Probably moving to the roof.¡±


    ¡°And I just got chewed out by fucking Goat-head,¡± Maverick said.


    ¡°It¡¯s been fifteen fucking minutes!¡± Robin said.


    ¡°Yeah, well, they¡¯re pushing the lane now and our cloning machines have been returned to us,¡±


    ¡°How nice of them.¡±


    ¡°He wants the tower cleared for drop-off in ten.¡±


    ¡°Let¡¯s do it in five,¡± Mack said. ¡°Then chill for another ten after to make his bitch ass sweat.¡±


    ¡°How the fuck are we getting up there?¡± Robin said.


    ¡°Uh, one sec,¡± Maverick said.


    ¡°Are you serious?¡± Mack laughed. ¡°After all this we can¡¯t even get¡ª¡±


    ¡°You can! And so can Corpse. Put those jumpsuits to work and get up there and pin them down. The rest of y''all, meet me at the tree and we¡¯ll throw up a grapple line.¡±


    ¡°Pin them down?¡± Mack scoffed.


    ¡°Yes, throw some fucking grenades and lay down some fire till we can move up there. Think you can handle that?¡± Maverick spat.


    ¡°Damn, bro, sorry Goatdick has your balls in a vice, but you don¡¯t have to get all pissy. I¡¯m goin.¡±


    Gradie was already halfway up the smoldering cracking wall, trying to ride the wave of adrenaline. The explosion had ripped two stories of corner off the four-story tower, and the third floor drooped down in pieces. He got up onto it and steadied himself. A thin metallic wire ran from his hip back down to Nuke and it billowed in the wind. She had hooked it onto him before his climb, with instructions to attach it to the top, but now he was unsure of his path up.


    ¡°Aight bro, I¡¯m in position up here,¡± Mack said on a private line. ¡°Let me know when you¡¯re ready and we¡¯ll pop up at the same time.¡±


    ¡°Uh, one sec.¡±


    Gradie stepped cautiously to the edge of the drooping floorboards and looked up. There was another balcony stretching out from the tower, its underside riddled with shrapnel marks. He went into a squat, took a breath, realized he wasn¡¯t actually breathing, which meant he wasn¡¯t actually jumping, shook off his thoughts, and shot up at the edge of the balcony.


    The floor below him groaned and gave, and as he grabbed the edge of the balcony under the railing, he heard cracks and crashes below him.


    ¡°Damn don¡¯t drop the building on me!¡± Nuke said.


    He pulled himself up and over in a single movement like a wushu actor on a wire and landed on the balcony. Bare, unscathed wall stretched above the penthouse doorway, and the night sky outlined the harsh line of shadowed tower. Flashes and flurries of projectiles of all kinds streamed through the sky. Wind brought in the sounds of distant cannons and engines and something he couldn¡¯t identify. In a reflex, he looked behind him at the sprawling sci fi city, and his false breath caught in his throat.


    Before, as he had stood in the smoking gap left by Nuke¡¯s explosion, the city had twinkled faintly in his nightvision, but he had barely glanced at it, too focused on his probably perilous ascent, but now, as the smoke had cleared and his view was a full 180-degree panorama, it hit him hard. A thousand towers, glittering with lights or gunfire. A million crafts weaving through the city blocks or rising and falling to larger, floating crafts that shaded the world below like storm clouds. Everywhere, activity, movement that indicated the presence of other people, real people, playing a game as close to a video game as a vivid lucid dream was to a half-formed thought. Again, a realization, too powerful to ever fully be realized, the way a gunshot was only ever heard in part, just before your ears went to ringing; Someone made this with their mind, and it¡¯s solid enough to support a million others.


    That same earlier childlike excitement rolled up his back and vibrated his skull, amplified by his post machine gun run adrenal state. Though his glance only took a second, he knew something had changed forever. He was beginning to understand the mind defying scope of this new reality.


    ¡°I¡¯m up here hangin out,¡± Mack said. ¡°So let me know when you¡¯re ready to jump up and pin them down or whatever.¡±


    Gradie ran up the wall and grabbed on to the edge with one hand and threw Nukes wire line over the top with the other. It hooked on something and made a whirring noise. The flat line of roof edge looked like a horizon right in front of his face, and he felt like he was about to throw himself over into some brand new day.


    ¡°I feel like we need one of those whistles they used in World War one,¡± Gradie said on the line. Mack cackled.


    ¡°Wow bro! That¡¯s not the fucking comparison I want to make.¡±


    A swarm of steel rods, like a disassembled windchime, slid up the wire next to him like something out of an old movie where they played footage backward to make it look like magic was happening on screen, and assemble itself into a ladder that immediately went taught under Nuke¡¯s weight.


    ¡°They¡¯re moving something across the roof!¡± Nova said. ¡°Should be some cover here. Get over and throw some ¡®nades!¡±


    The minimap pinged some squares on the roof, just as Nuke¡¯s icon regained her grenade launcher symbol. Gradie looked below him and saw one of Nova¡¯s drones delivering her a fresh launcher.


    ¡°You got any AP drones in play Quasar?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°AP drones?¡± Mack said, and Gradie realized he had accidentally used a term from the clubhouse.


    ¡°Grenade drones, and no,¡± Nova said. ¡°I can¡¯t get them over the roof. They got a cone of EMP deployed, which is why you need to fucking go now!¡±


    ¡°Moving,¡± Gradie said on the line with Mack and Nuke.


    He threw himself up and over the edge, his movements again feeling like he was suspended on a wire, and brought his rifle up before he hit the roof. He immediately moved up to what Nova had marked as cover, which turned out to be a giant AC unit or something, and scanned the rest of the roof.


    It was completely empty and still. Besides the other ACs, there was only a wide landing pad next to the door to the staircase that ran between the two Penthouses, a handful of objects that looked like geodesic orbs on tripods the size of moving vans, and the edges of what were, according to his mini map, two skylights over the penthouse living areas and the large opening over the central tree.


    ¡°There¡¯s no one up here!¡± Mack said.


    ¡°One sec,¡± Nova said frantically. ¡°Shit, they¡¯re at the main elevator! Fuck! They¡¯re loading something! Get to the skylight and drop some frags on them now!¡±


    Nova pinged the skylight on the mini map and Gradie moved up, feeling that all over his skin chill that came with walking out into an exposed area with his rifle in hand. Memories filtered in from the Clubhouse and fragments of the Hardworlds, and he heard a voice that may have been Philip¡¯s say.


    ¡°There¡¯s no better feeling than something solid and bullet resistant at your shoulder in the middle of a fire fight.¡±


    Mack bounded towards him like a man on the moon and they both made for the skylight.


    ¡°How many frags you got?¡± Mack asked. Before Gradie could answer, something banged like a flash grenade out of sight.


    Mack dropped to the ground and aimed at the edge of the skylight, where the noise had originated.


    ¡°What the fuck was that?¡±


    Then another sound broke in through the muffled white noise of distant battle. A whistle, growing louder.


    ¡°Move! Move!¡± Gradie shouted, and bolted in a direction exactly perpendicular to his previous path.


    Just as he set his foot down for the second time, the roof exploded.

 A Day in the Afterlife | Gunmaze: Self Destructor

    Slow motion explosion


    Mack''s icon immediately went red with an X over it.


    ¡°God fucking dammit! Every single mother fuckin time man!¡±


    ¡°Get off the roof!¡± Nuke yelled, and her icon moved back towards the edge.


    ¡°No! we need those fuckers suppressed till we get there!¡± Maverick yelled.


    Another pop from the mortar tubes. Gradie looked around frantically, as if there would be some clue on the ground to where the mortars would land.


    Then, another epiphany. He had no idea where they would land, but he had a pretty good fucking idea where they wouldn¡¯t. He broke out into a jump suit propelled sprint, right at the penthouse skylight.


    He barely had time to snatch the last two grenades off his pouch and activate them with the heads-up prompt, before the skylight¡¯s jagged glass edge opened up below him, revealing a fully dug-in command center. But, of course, as he had learned the hard way from Philip, every plan is a compromise, every position a gamble of odds. They had never expected this shit.


    It was action movie-esque. Just as his feet left the ground, mortars exploded on the roof behind him. He sailed over the skylight and slammed both grenades down past his feet, which felt like flapping mid-flight, and gunfire cracked and echoed below him. Something hit him in the side and turned his graceful flight path into a chaotic half-spin and he dropped toward the far side of the roof sideways, his feet swinging slowly out from under him.


    ¡°Shit.¡± He hit the ground sideways and half rolled half bounced across the roof as another mortar landed somewhere farther off.


    ¡°What happened?¡± Nova said, and Gradie fumbled for the words to explain. Luckily, Nuke helped him.


    ¡°His dumb ass ran and jumped over the skylight and dropped grenades¡ª¡±


    On cue, the aforementioned grenades went off in the pit, and their double-sixteenth-note sound was followed immediately by a larger explosion that Gradie noticed, as it echoed across the roof, sounded quite familiar.


    ¡°I set off their fucking mortars!¡± He laughed onto the line.


    ¡°How the fuck did they not have a trophy system¡ª¡± Nuke squealed


    ¡°Time to push it!¡± Luke said, and a second later another explosion echoed out of the penthouse skylight.


    ¡°On me!¡± Luke said, and Gradie watched his icon dash into the penthouse below. All the other ones, however, were slow to follow.


    ¡°Bro wait, wait!¡± Nova said.


    ¡°Let the drones¡ª¡± was all Maverick got out before Luke¡¯s gun went off. It was like hearing a friend¡¯s voice, unexpectedly, in a crowded unfamiliar place. The staccato doubles and triplets, fired while moving so swiftly and precisely that it sounded like multiple shooters in multiple positions. Gradie snapped up to his feet and aimed down into the skylight.


    One guy was clawing at an entrenched machinegun that looked like a SAW and a Dyson Hammer vacuum had a baby, and Gradie put a burst through his face just as a flurry of other rounds struck him under the chin. In under a second, his head was clean off.


    ¡°Damn this gun fucks!¡± Luke said.


    ¡°My kill!¡± Gradie snapped.


    ¡°My dick!¡± Luke said and fired again at something Gradie couldn¡¯t see, and stepped out into view in the penthouse, his feet gliding over the broken bodies and hardware of the mortarmen. It was uncanny. Now that he was taking the shooting serious, he moved in a gameworld with the same fluidity and precision he had in the Hardworlds.


    "Shit! Ones in the elevator!¡±


    ¡°I got him,¡± Nova said, and a drone zipped by past Luke.


    ¡°Corpse, get down here. I¡¯m gonna blow those trophy systems on the roof,¡± Nova said. Gradie hopped down into the penthouse, which looked like an art gallery with a space marine infestation, that same extruded plastic spreading weblike across walls and encasing strange hardware and fonts of wires. The drones went off on the roof with sounds like transformers exploding in a backyard.


    ¡°Nuke, you good?¡± Gradie asked, having noticed her icon hadn¡¯t moved since he started his run.


    ¡°Yeah, God dammit. Fucking mortar asshole dropped me into a closet.¡±


    There was a crash down the hall, and Nuke stomped out of what had once been the master bedroom covered in fragments of drywall and cement.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Get clear! Get Clear!¡± Nova jogged in the room waving them all back in no definitive direction while staring at his wrist.


    ¡°What is¡ª¡±


    ¡°I gotta blow the fucking elevator!¡±


    The group scuffled back behind pillars and any hardware stations that looked particularly armored, and Gradie, now guided by habit, stepped behind Nuke, just before Sulphyr got there.


    ¡°Give me some space bro.¡±


    ¡°Get behind me,¡± Gradie said, not about to cede an inch of space to anyone after jumping over a mortar team with hand grenades.


    ¡°Man come on just¡ª¡±


    ¡°Boys stop fighting over me,¡± Nuke said.


    ¡°He just wants you for your armor,¡± Gradie said, and Nuke¡¯s laugh was cut off by a series of explosions at the elevator.This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    ¡°Shit. Shit!¡± Nova sprinted out from behind a pillar and started drilling something into the control panel. Angel followed close behind him, holding a larger, more sturdier looking version of the mesh shield Gradie had been assigned.


    ¡°What¡¯s he doing?¡± Maverick barked.


    ¡°The counterbalance and weight sensor have been fucked with and it looks like he¡¯s got over half a ton of something in there. I think he¡¯s trying to blow the tower!¡±


    ¡°Shit!¡± Nuke turtled suddenly, and Gradie laughed.


    ¡°How does that suit do against fall damage?¡± He whispered at the side of her head and rapped a knuckle on her metal hip, while Sulphyr glared at him.


    ¡°Better than yours!¡± Nuke squeaked from her cocoon.


    ¡°Can you stop him?¡± Maverick said in a slow booming tone like he was talking to someone far away and possibly deaf or ESL.


    ¡°He¡¯s already dead. Popped himself.¡±


    ¡°Well then can you disarm it?¡±


    ¡°Not with my drone! Shit!¡±


    ¡°What is it?¡± Maverick yelled.


    ¡°It¡¯s gotta be a slurry bomb. I can hear it mixing right now.¡±


    ¡°What the fuck¡ª¡±


    ¡°Theres no detonating device. Its purely analog. Liquids and gases and shit. Once the chamber neck bursts it goes off. Maybe thirty seconds.¡±


    ¡°So what¡ª"


    ¡°Get the fuck out! Im bringing it up!¡¯


    ¡°Bro, I¡¯m up here,¡± Luke said flatly.


    ¡°If it blows up here the tower will still be stable! Everyone get the fuck out!¡±


    ¡°To where?¡± Robin yelled, But Nova was already sprinting down the hall.


    ¡°Repel lines!¡± He yelled.


    ¡°Attached to what?¡± Robin groaned, but everyone else scrambled after Nova and Angel.


    ¡°Here!¡± Angel melted something to a metal portion of the gun emplacement sitting where the master bed used to be and tossed the line outside.


    ¡°Ladies first,¡± Luke said, and waved out the window at Robin.


    ¡°Fucking move!¡± Nuke yelled. She sprinted past Gradie and leaped through the window. While the glass was still hovering around her and gravity hadn¡¯t yet noticed her presence, she turtled and dropped like a rock. Gradie and Luke almost fell over laughing while the rest of the squad scrambled after the Twins down the repel lines.


    ¡°Will this suit break my fall?¡± Gradie asked on the group chat.


    There was no response. Robin descended the rope line in front of Luke and Gradie, and blew a strand of hair out of her visor-less face. Luke looked at Gradie and raised an eyebrow.


    ¡°Think I¡¯m gonna catch that little birdie,¡± he said out loud.


    That reminded him.


    ¡°Nuke, you ok?¡± Gradie said on the line.


    ¡°I fell through two floors! It was bad ass! But now Im stuck, ha ha.¡±


    This time, Gradie raised an eyebrow at Luke who smiled and nodded like they were planning a heist.


    ¡°Ay, there¡¯s no fucking in Gunmaze!¡± Angel said on their private comms. To Gradie, it sounded like a slogan.


    ¡°Is that like a saying?¡± he asked.


    ¡°Yeah,¡± Angel sneered, his calm humor contrasted with Novas whispered swears and pleads in the background which bled a subtle anxiety on the line.


    ¡°Arthel players used to use it as a dig. But even there you can only fuck in the home instances¡ª¡±


    Gradie had never thought about being able to restrict Spirits from fucking. He had taken that first declaration in the Allclub, ¡°here we fuck all around¡±, as gospel. But if you could limit everything else, from walking to seeing, why not? And what exactly couldn¡¯t a ¡°Prince¡± stop you from doing?


    Breaking his thoughts, like a storm blown wind chime on a still night, the elevator dinged down the hall.


    ¡°Shit!¡± Luke laughed and leapt out with the repel line. Gradie looked down and watched him drop the four stories in a few seconds, and bounce safely to the garden grounds below. Gradie grabbed the line and glanced out at the skyline. All around the tower, illuminated in his night vision, the war went off like a fireworks show finale, as if in the five minutes since he had climbed to the roof, the firepower engaged had tripled.


    ¡°The stem just¡ª¡± was all Nova got out before the world around Gradie got very bright and very loud, and then very fast. The repel line went limp in his hands as the explosion sent him flying.


    He flew with his back to the ground, looking straight up into the air, where stray lasers and fighter ships and great dark shadows of capital crafts mingled with smoke and flak explosions. After getting used to the man on a wire motions of the jump suit, being propelled like a bullet was a jolting experience, and in the midst of the adrenaline and noise, a part of him forgot the fall couldn¡¯t kill him.


    ¡°Shit!!¡± He tumbled as he fell, his feet pointing toward the tower just often enough for him to see the rolling bright ball of fire turn mushroom shaped on a pillar of smoke rising up from where the penthouses had once been. The air around the explosion sparkled with glass and metal caught in the fire light. It was immensely beautiful, and once again, in the same way the pool had been, unexplainably nostalgic.


    As if to complete the comparison, he landed squarely in the center of one of the overgrown, flame charred pools spread across the garden, and the world became murky water and broken bits of reed plants lit oddly in his NVGs.


    ¡°What is this shit, simple syrup?¡± Luke said on the line, and Gradie noticed his icon was redlined and hollow.


    ¡°Did you die?¡± Gradie asked.


    ¡°Yeah, big support beam flew at me like an old girlfriend and shit. Now Im climbing out of this goo like some fucking Nickelodeon game show. Wait, you survived that shit? What, did you glide down on a piece of drywall?¡±


    ¡°Landed in water.¡±


    ¡°Well bud that don¡¯t make sense. Waters like concrete at that height. Think the physics in this game need some tweaking.¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t be jealous. My jump suit kicked on at the last¡ª¡±


    ¡°Status report, team Maverick,¡± a voice said on the comms.


    ¡°Goathead, this is Maverick. Enemy combatants have been removed from the¡ª¡±


    ¡°Yeah, I can fucking see that! What the fuck happened to the tower! Did you forget the entire purpose of the op was to secure a fucking artillery position for the advance? Did I not tell you six fucking times to be prepared for rigged demolition? You said your guy was a pro at that shit!¡±


    ¡°He is! The bomb would have taken out the entire tower if he hadn¡¯t¡ª¡±


    ¡°You lost a fourth of it! Do you not understand how height applies to distance when throwing shells?¡±


    ¡°Well, the alternative was the entire tower going¡ª¡±


    ¡°No, the alternative was killing the fucking frogmen and defusing any bombs they left behind because that¡¯s what the fuck you told me you could do!¡±


    ¡°Hey Goathead,¡± Nova said. ¡°This is QuasarCultist from MiMsquad. We got the tower secure so you can keep crying about losing fifty feet off of it or you can call in the artillery pieces before the other side makes a move.¡±


    ¡°Don¡¯t fucking tell me¡ª¡±


    ¡°Oh yeah bro, I¡¯m telling you. I¡¯m also telling you to have my fucking payout in my account by end of day or I¡¯m charging interest on my fucking billed hours. Your CO is D.B., right?¡±


    ¡°Yeah, he fucking is--


    ¡°Ok cool cause I¡¯m seeing him tonight at the Clanhouse so I¡¯ll just have him do it. Peace.¡±


    Goathead¡¯s icon was removed from the chat.


    ¡°God dammit bro,¡± Maverick said. ¡°He¡¯s gonna¡ª¡±


    ¡°Hey man fuck him,¡± Angel said. ¡°If he gives you shit about this, just come talk to us and we¡¯ll make sure you keep your rank. I¡¯ve never even heard of this dude.¡±


    ¡°All right man, I appreciate it. You guys staying to escort the cannons?¡±


    ¡°Nah, we gotta go. It¡¯s been fun though. Nice seeing all of you.¡±


    ¡°Bye Quasar!¡± Nuke said. ¡°Bye Corpse!¡±


    The goodbyes overlapped each other and Gradie wasn¡¯t able to ask Nuke how he could get in touch with her again, and before he made it to the top of the pool, they were back on the floating platform.


    ¡°I¡¯ll make sure yall get your tokens,¡± Nova said. ¡°And I¡¯ll have that mother fucker loading trucks on a moon tomorrow.¡±


    ¡°Is that bad?¡± Luke said.


    ¡°We got priority queue now at least,¡± Angel said. ¡°Howd yall like Soulara?¡±


    ¡°Next time I wanna be in a fighter ship,¡± Luke said. ¡°But shooting that machine gunner felt good. Thanks for helping me live the dream, bro.¡±


    He slapped Gradie on the back and sent him floating across the platform.


    ¡°What about you, Gradie?¡± Angel asked.


    ¡°I liked the jump suit. I would also like to fly a ship next time. And do you know if Nuke has a boyfriend?¡±


    ¡°Bro even if she does, fuck that dude,¡± Luke said. ¡°Bet he doesn¡¯t fly with grenades like you do. Oh, shit I didn¡¯t get my little birdies comm line!¡±


    ¡°What?¡± Nova laughed.


    ¡°He means Robin,¡± Angel sighed. Nova cackled and the floating screen chimed.


    ¡°Next segment selected. Loading¡­ Killcity.¡±

 A Day In the Afterlife | See Sam Run: Tail Chasing

    Running on emptiness


    The road curved upward into the loop and  G-forces pressed her hard into the bike seat from her collar bone to her hips. Her knees found their spongy shelves as her feet worked the pedals and her thighs gripped the quasi-liquid space rubber seat for dear life. The material molded to her form and stretched up her sides leaving only a foot and a half wide strip of tight armor exposed down her back. She could feel the road in her teeth and the roar blasted her ears.


    The half-pipe shaped future highway began its loop over itself and the space age city rolled around her, all massive towers and flying everythings. Ahead of her, a handful of racers, the last of a hundred between her and the top slot, dodged around imaginary traffic and space opera police cruisers. Two of them were girls shoved into latex suits with artificially enhanced asses that bounced with every zig and zag and Sam noted not for the first time the tactical advantage of their outfits. They made it very hard to focus.


    A flash of fire drew her attention, finally. The bikes were all equipped with lightsaber like blades on this segment and one of the leaders had swiped an auto-semi which now went sideways and rolled flaming right towards Sam. She leaned to the left and grinded her glowblade on the road in a shower of sparks as the tumbling future truck rolled over her head and threw a windy wave of heat on her back.


    A millisecond later she was up again and passing between two magnetized sedans shaped like an old wireless mouse she had run into the ground years ago. For a moment she could feel it in her hand, rolling across the particle board as a long gone Saturday broke open and bled out all around her, then the track snapped back into focus as she throttled between two lanes and the starship clogged sky rolled alongside the scooped edge of the highway.


    Three of them, above her eyeline because of the loop. Lightbladed bikes glowing like tracer rounds through the vehicles ahead, not so much dodging the traffic as cutting through it, letting the false cars part and clash around them like fucking water while she scraped the side of a van thing and tried to regain her speed.


    More fire at the top of her vision, then floating down slowly like a wide maple leaf or the wispy remnants of burnt paper, sending smoke up to the sky in her backyard, the fire massaging her soul, the cops called. But it was only the smoldering auto-semi completing its fall from the top of the loop. She saw herself crushed by it. Big red X on the map. Back at the stalls. Race playing out on the screen. No. She gave the throttle everything and aimed right for the back of what might have been a limousine. Motion blur all around her. Fire pressing down so close she could see the metal windowframes. The limo moved at the last second, a punchline to the joke she had been unwittingly telling every time she had swerved around a car on this God damned fucking segment, and then the fire was gone and there was a grinding whooshing sound behind her.


    Little lights somewhere ahead. The track heading down into subcity darkness. Cutting sounds as some of the racers behind her sliced through the wreck and crashing snapping sounds as others didn¡¯t quite get the angle or timing right. She saw herself, back there, falling, failing, not so long ago, then threw her focus back towards the smoking darkness just before it covered her.


    It was deep black. Not even the light of her blades. A clue. The roar of the tunnel shifted, transformed, and became engine groan of an older kind. Like a movie. The darkness fluttered and the smoke rolled white and then became clouds just before she broke through.


    Massive dome of dark ocean. Orange horizon with a whisp of sun like a check engine light. The whole world a cunt hair from darkness. Her bike was now a jet fighter as imagined for a Star Wars knock off. They were going in for a dive, though the semitransparent ghost of the track remained, always. Machine gun fire as streams of tracers shot up from the battleships and a flock of missiles sprouted smoke below her.


    This was a new one.


    She felt the buttons under her thumbs and fired her own stream of sparking rounds at a missile that shot up from below the transparent track. It died in a flash that showered her with metal sparks with a sound like a sparkler firework and she fired at the racers ahead of her, uselessly. Another stream of rounds passed by over her head from behind, and she found a switch under the trigger that gave her a HUD of a rear facing camera, ball turret like, that sighted a backup gun apparently now mounted under her bikefighter. She fired a wall of rounds and the pursuing racer, who had gotten way too close too soon, exploded. A jolt of glee shot through her. A good segment for once. The snap decision, figure-it-out-before-you-die-ness reminded her, not for the first time, of the Warioware cartridge she had nearly melted into her DS.


    A release of the switch and she was forward focused again, as a stream of anti-air fire and missiles demanded her attention. She had just enough time to notice the track below curving out of the dive before it vanished and swarm of missiles and flak and even non-racer enemy fighters surrounded her. For a moment, the track was nowhere, and she really was flying in a downward dive. A nice touch. A few breaths of reflexive fire and near misses later, the track had returned, and she was nearing the end of the dive.


    An alarm blared suddenly in the dash, a red plastic square with a cartoonish bomb symbol, teardrop with box fins and everything, silhouetted in scratched black. She almost smacked it in reflex, but held off and waited for just before the clear track curved up ahead of her, then let the bomb drop.Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.


    As she rose out of the dive, machine gun fire and explosions and harsh metal sounds all around, the ship exploded behind her, launching her forward on the track like boost item in an arcade racer, and the noise of war faded. As the black sky lost its stars, some lights remained. The lead racers.


    She pushed the throttle and focused, clearing all thoughts. That was the trick on the straightaways. The less you thought about anything besides the track, the faster you went. Like Buddha on the speedway someone had said to her once. Of course it couldn¡¯t be all like that. Had to give the less focused racers like her a chance, and no one would want to watch¡ª


    Shut Up! The track! The Track!


    --


    Just as the other lights regained their bike silhouettes, the sky exploded in a radial mandala thing.


    Oh right.


    The rough translation of the tracks name, or the name for this type of track, was ¡°bursting flowers¡±. It had been invented by some Korean guy or group like ten years ago. Though randomized tracks were nothing new back then, and even its modularity with the swappable and upgradable segments had been done before, the ¡°flowers¡± that gave it it¡¯s name were bold enough to launch it into a full blown fad.


    Or maybe it just had a cool name. Maybe other tracks had done something similar and even better but had been named like ¡°choices¡± or something and hadn¡¯t been made by some mysterious sounding Asian collective, so they had never caught on. She had never been good at predicting what anyone would like, really.


    Anyway.


    The transparent track broke apart into a radial as the other racers turned solid glowing white and vanished with a sound like the Super Friends blasting off.


    Eight slices of scenery rotated around a central point of light. A dark cityscape. Dripping sewer. Dreamcore plastic tunnels and poolrooms. Stone bridges across jungled granite spires.


    She let them all roll by as the wheel moved with a sound like a giant crystal turnstile and then a dull, warm sand colored slice locked into place before her and her bike entered it on its own. It was like that sometimes and you just had to go with it. She told herself that you wanted to find the slice that felt right that day so it could more easily fade to background noise and anyway the quicker you chose one the quicker you would finish it but if you just chose the first one every time you were fucked because they usually put the more mentally taxing ones at the beginning, but really, it was hard not to try and use flowers like a kind of horoscope.


    So she found herself suddenly alone (putting the racers by themselves for long stretches was another bold move, or maybe the bold move, that had defined Flowers and launched its success. There was some uncertainty about whether or not the fans would care to see the racers racing not against each other but against personalized tracks, but the addition of head hopping pov view had sinched it. She tried not to think about who if anyone was watching her and her alone) flying down a dusty highway that screamed ¡°Texas¡± not just by the purple thistle and distant rising mixmasters, but by the warm way it welcomed her, by the way the feel of the road and flat massiveness of the sky reminded her of the Hardworlds, of the team, and of¡ª


    No. Need to focus.


    The only challenge of this highway segment was weaving around the sedans and semis, and little did the track designer know how practiced she was at that to the point it became automatic and there was nothing to kick her mind away from the thoughts now buzzing just out of sight like bees in a Six Flags trash can. Rather than try and stoically clear her mind she compromised and pointed her thoughts at what was directly around her, just outside the track, beyond the false projections, and ran through it, checklist style.


    Reflections. A backwater resort, barely clinging to it¡¯s RWA license. If it was a hotel in the Real, it would have been a motel, and the pool would have been paved over, and the rooms would have smelled of smoke and body fluid scents that had died not so much from the off brand cleaning supplies as just withering under the multi week spans between bookings, turning tomblike rather than vanishing, but since this was the Other and all, there were no lingering smells or even smudges on the chrome or hamfisted mirror everything that gave the place its name or at least tried to justify it, no flickering in the city sized sign that floated in the black or its refracted sisters branching off from it, the reflecting pool (which its makers had taken literally so that its surface rushed back to stillness after any agitation and any would be ripples turned into slight tremors after a few feet, giving it a plastic feel of the same kind as everything else here which made it all feel like a Chuck-E-Cheese or something) was just as ¡°serene¡± and clean as it had been the day it was made, the carpets were all spotless, the shadows in the alcoves had razor-cut edges, and the masquerade hall and bounce room looked like they had just dropped out of the molds.


    But that¡¯s how it was here. Nothing aged. Nothing got dirty or even kinda faded. The hotel-motel showed its age in other ways. Somewhat in its emptiness, the walls of quiet that would greet you if you turned certain corners, went in the peripheral places, like she often did on her way to get her check from the office or watch replays in the camera room (these mother fuckers wouldn¡¯t send anything but the streams over the speakernet. Like anyone would try and scrape this place).


    But mostly, it showed its age in the people. The way they walked, not like guests exploring or hurrying to take in the sights before their tickets expired (she hadn¡¯t seen anyone ¡°take in¡± anything here ever), but like NPCs on a set path or stuff placed on a check out conveyer belt, like they knew the path and had been on it forever and now the trip from A to B was just a formality. The way they stood around. That guy in the pool today. Not swimming or actually using the pool, but like a bird in an exhibit who had seen its little square of fake terrain so much it refused to even glance at it, just stared out at the guests like one of them was going to hop the barrier and whisk it off to the savannah. (He had looked at her like that for a second but then it had gone away and she was left feeling like she had disappointed him somehow). The way they only really occupied like ten percent of it, the ¡°good parts¡±, like the last bit of bodywash in a bottle that you couldn¡¯t turn the right way to get completely empty.


    And maybe most of all, the way they looked at any new visitor like lions watching a thawed brisket get lowered into their enclosure, and now that they had stopped looking at her like that she wondered how long it would be until she started looking out like that herself.


    But she kinda doubted it. While they stayed in this place because it¡¯s what they knew, because it was the only place they had ever been seen, she was here to be invisible. They were trying to remember, she was trying to forget.


    But it hadn¡¯t worked yet.

 A Day in the Afterlife | See Sam Run: Heart on the Asphalt

    If I put myself out there, I¡¯m roadkill


    She took an exit off the highway. By the time she thought to be surprised that the track let her do that, she was speeding down an old country road, headlights brushing the leaves just a few yards before her on every turn. The shade turned night dark and the dark started to rain. Mud flying everywhere. This was her terrain. There was another Sam now, in the back seat, younger and scared, and she had to get her out of here. Just as the fear of failing fluttered up in her chest, the mud road fell away and sunk her down into a darkened temple.


    Blocks of stone and torches that lit stray patches between overly dark shadows that she knew would grab her if she drove too close. Low hanging jungle foliage that grew explosive fruit and gas grenade berries. The stone road broke out into an open plane of quarry stone and the other racers appeared, the flames of their gocart engines mimicking the torches. The frantic childhood memories released her as suddenly as any other piece of jungle growth. It was just her and the racers on a rising stone ramp, racing up towards a high eclipse, the road pointing to it in in perspective like a long pyramid.


    Up ahead, the last handful of lead racers jostled for the center lane, when suddenly two of them flew in the air and the others rolled and spread apart. One wrong move had overturned what must have been a careful balance. The other racers alongside her peeled off to avoid the carnage, but she drove right into it, which would later seem like some kind of high minded strategy, but had actually been out of a desperate death wish, a tormenting need to get out of this fucking track that had kicked up memories and taunted her with them.


    Instead, she made it right through the bouncing crashing cloud of five carts turning to scrap parts in flashes of fire, and finished first for the first time in her career.


    The attention had been unwelcome. Her status as a female amateur who had gone from 12<sup>th</sup> to first in a ¡°feat of daring¡± was like honey to the various buzzing adjacent personalities, bloggers and commentators and merchandizers. Her masked face up on the jumbotron thing. Her racername announced throughout the night; at the end of the race, at the winners ceremony (lots of standing around and her rep reminding her that now was the time to get a persona, maybe do a lil dance or say something quirky, as if the racing was nothing but a segway to being the Other equivalent of an e-girl, which some called Dreamgirls? but she had never been able to call them that with a straight face), then again when at the afterparty various semi-famous-who?s had tried to get her attention, but only one had finally succeeded.


    A tall, looming, masked man. Dark hair, mysterious.


    But as the conversation progressed and her perception of him filled out the space his mask had left, she found him a hollow animal going through the motions until it could pounce, bouncing nervously the whole time, which did have its charm, but just when she had resigned to let it work, he had gotten frustrated, and now the rest of his words faded in the memory and another one shuffled in, like a guy getting in the back seat of an SUV, glancing at her in the rear view¡ª


    She yanked her mind away before the face could materialize. The freeway segment had turned from urban expressway to prairieland-flanked two-lane highway, where distance was best measured in hours at over 90mph. There was no jungle, no cheesy 90¡¯s temple anywhere now, it had only been a kicked up memory, a mindfuck race that had pulled her memories and thrown them at her like obstacles. She had fucking hated it and almost sworn off racing for good after that but had only made it maybe a few weeks.


    That was when she had tried to kill the boredom between Hardworlds with Gunmaze runs and Arthel role plays and sex sims. They worked a little. The problem was there was always downtime or small talk, some break in the tasks that let her thoughts through, the same thoughts she had found solace from only really in the Hardworlds. The twins trying to get to know her between segments, which had been nice at first until Philip had let her know that Angel might want to be more than friends.


    ¡°The mallgoth one was asking if you had a boyfriend. I know you¡¯re usually oblivious to that kind of thing. Don¡¯t break his heart too bad. We kind of need him.¡±


    So she had gone instead to the roleplay heavy portions of Arthel, played battle witch hack and slash and captured peasant maiden scenarios and everything in between, but the problem was that if you did it for too long they started trying to sell you shit and the other guys would ask to take it ¡°off world.¡± Then she had tried to go back to some of the kinds of dirty sims she used before being a Hardworlder, but the issue there was that once you had actually experienced being someone else, it was hard to really get into pretending to be someone else while all you had to go on was a simulated backdrop and the words of a phantom, and the sims she could run in her realm (the only kind allowed under Michael¡¯s policies) weren¡¯t exactly top notch anyway.


    Then there had been the brief foray into making. Mostly crafts and vehicles and quasi mechanical things, which she had found a knack for immediately. Even made some skins for Gunmaze and Soulara. Eventually she had slipped up and mentioned it to the twins and they had reacted exactly like she had feared, all helpful and shit with Angel offering her free stuff, and that was the end of it.


    So either by isolation or the lack of it, she had run through her options and returned to the race scene, and even though much later she would give Gunmaze another go and come to a kind of truce with Angel, it wasn¡¯t the kind of thing she could do all the time. Too much cooperation. Too much necessary friendliness.


    Often after a job, she just wanted to be alone, not just away from other people but also from her panicked, scolding thoughts that seemed like someone else living in her head. The races, with their constant input and demand on her focus, were the best thing she had found. The twins and Philip had tried to sell her on the magic of a realm, where anything you could imagine could be, and you could tap into your own subconscious, but the problem was that normally, she didn¡¯t have much of an imagination. At least not a positive one. Most of her thoughts were replays of memories or vague sensations. She would sometimes see flashes of imminent tragedy but never great stories.


    Not like¡­


    She saw him suddenly, vividly, in the clubhouse, framed by the rectangle of the open garage door, glaring white drywall and golden wood frames and copper colored dirt and blue sky all bright as hell behind him, speaking excitedly about the detailed backstories and futures he had given his Hardworld selves. She had just stared at him, socket in hand, half bent into the engine bay, feeling his eyes trace her curves in the sudden silence that she couldn¡¯t think of a way to fill.


    This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    Maybe because she couldn¡¯t relate. All her Selfs were just her, maybe living in a different house, better or worse at certain things, but still basically her, the only real change being the isolation. In the Hardworlds, she was always alone, which made it better to focus. That was half the point, to her. Most of the draw. All the anxious fears and regrets that nagged her in the Real were distant and muffled to her Hardworld self who was always insulated by a nice little cloud of self-sufficiency.


    But dropping in the way he was talking about, with a whole other life imagined, sounded insane. Like it would drive her fucking crazy. Two of her crammed into one little brain case. And wouldn¡¯t it make it easier to drop out? Wouldn¡¯t you believe that other you was the real you if you gave it that much life?


    Shit. She had enough issues with dropping out as it was. That first job with¡ª the job in Dallas or whatever where she had gotten domed by that fucking helo sniper that EP had let slip through her little web, she had woken up late, Philip yelling through her phone speaker, patched through by EP, talking about their reputation and the merger and a bunch of other shit. She told him her Self was a party girl. She told him it would help her know her way around the offbeat tracks. She told him to get his cigar out of his ass and take a breath that wasn¡¯t smoking. But she didn¡¯t tell him about the dream. About that other life, where she had been kissed and fucked and had deep rumbling words poured into her ears while he¡­ and she certainly didn¡¯t tell him who had been there. She had thrown herself out of bed and thought dear god don¡¯t let me see him today, and God must have had that sniper on speed dial or something.


    But had it been him? Michael or someone had told her that ¡°memories never stay in the past¡± or something, that remembering something was creating the memory anew each time, so maybe now she was rewriting that dream, since dreams of the Selfs were so fragile and liquid anyway, because now she couldn¡¯t stop thinking about his lips¡ª


    She pushed the bike but it was going as fast as it could already so she white knuckled the throttle and squeezed the seat between her thighs, which stirred up ghosts of the warmth that had bled out of that kiss so she swerved on the road back and forth and screamed and then remembered the god damn cameras but what the fuck ever no one was going to ask if she was having a panic attack and if they did she would just say she had gotten bored or something.


    Suddenly, graciously, the sky snapped to night and she was speeding down the two lane road with only a cone of headlight lit asphalt in front of her that demanded her attention. She waited, heart dancing out of her chest now, for the darkness to mold into the next section of shared track and kept her peripherals on high alert for oncoming fighterbike headlights.


    But after an agonizing half a minute, nothing happened, and she realized it was a fake out. Her mind, unbound suddenly to the track, fell backwards and she tried to guide its bouncing car-falling-into-a-ravine-in-an-action-movie descent away from warm thoughts and whispered words and towards her most recent clubhouse training or something but it got stuck on the memory of waking up late on another job and Philip¡¯s scolding and that kicked up the same old thoughts of ¡°am I actually cut out to be a Hardworlder or does Philip just feel sorry for me?¡±.


    Driver felt like such a bullshit job. Half the time they were all in their own cars anyway. But when she had said something like that to Philip he had freaked out on her and gone down a list of great drivers of Hardworlding history and times his driver had saved his ass and she had ended up feeling like the role was actually too much for her instead of a make work job but now she wasn¡¯t so sure about any of it.


    And then, on command, the memory of one of her biggest fuck ups floated out of the washed out darkness and hung in the headlight beams like a mocking cloud of dust.


    It had been early in her time with Philip and his crew. One of those early jobs where she still felt like it was all a big mistake and they were going to realize it any second. She had woken up in the Hardworld and right into her perfect life.


    Dropping in was often drastic, but this one had felt like being hung. One moment, she was in the briefing, with Philip laying out orders in the floating empty restaurant he used to use for pre job meetings (maybe because, with its empty banalness, the meetings mostly taking place in the stock room or a [conference, meeting] style room with the tables and chairs all stacked to one corner, and its place above clouds that promised, somehow, that a real live earth city rustled under them, made the team feel they were about to ¡°drop in¡± in a literal sense, and so much of this weird shit being about getting your head in the right space) and the next moment, waking up in bed with her husband already wrapped around her and memories coming up like grass and saplings freshly freed from the weight a terra cotta planter, (which in this case was a deep good night¡¯s sleep which should have been her first clue it was all bullshit unrelated to the Real her?), memories that told her she would have a day full of nothing but minor house chores and fresh meals and sex and laughter, her husband in his home office only a few hours and the rest of the day rolling out like the most Friday flavored Wednesday that anyone had ever seen.


    It had been well into twilight, bedroom lights flicked on for the last session of fucking, before the Reapers finally came and got her. The last thing she had seen was the living room window spitting glass then it was lights-out and the next thing she knew she was sliding out of the dumb waiter into Philip¡¯s restaurant kitchen.


    He had been as calm as she had ever seen him, another strangeness, which at first she thought was just his way of being gentle with her knowing that from her perspective she had just been ripped away from the love of her life, and there may have been some of that behind it, but mostly he was gentle with her in the same way a coach or a drill instructor might speak normally to a recruit who was no longer their problem.


    It had embarrassed her immensely and shown her just how controlled and purposeful most of his anger actually was.


    ¡°Look,¡± he had said, his voice matching the frozen shine of the stainless-steel knives and surfaces around them.


    ¡°I think you should consider whether this line of work is really for you.¡±


    She had apologized, jumped to promises and assurances, then gotten angry and told him if he didn¡¯t want her on the team she would just go Hardworld with some other outfit, but he had continued, mercilessly, with his hand on her shoulder even.


    ¡°Look, you can find a team that will put you down there, sure, but I¡¯m not talking about being a crash dummy, Im talking about doing this as your existence. We are a weird people. We reject peace as a rule. A Hardworlder, a real Hardworlder, and I don¡¯t mean that out of vanity, I mean someone made for this, would find themselves dropped into their perfect life and destroy it as fast as possible just to enjoy a police chase. That¡¯s not the kind of outlook you can learn. It can¡¯t be taught.¡±


    But thinking about her ¡°perfect life¡±, she had felt she would have left it eventually anyway, because she had never really trusted it, and had probably been drawn to it only to find the cracks, to poke it before she destroyed it. She had tried her best to explain this to Philip, and he had given her a simple ¡°OK¡± then it had been right back to business, the failure lingering like a cloud for a while but forgotten, mostly, until now.


    Now that the formless faceless figure tagged ¡°husband¡±, normally as unrememberable as the rest of it because of Hardworld mem¡¯s tendency to fade into dreamwhisps, shreds of feelings and vague flashes like photos taken on accident, now looked at her from memory with a suddenly vivid face, dark hair curling over smile smushed eyes the color of sun warmed honey and a voice¡ª


    No, fuck. It¡¯s not him. It hadn¡¯t been him. Remembering creates the memory new each time, remember! It couldn¡¯t be him!


    Then stop fucking thinking about it and watch the track!

 A Day in the Afterlife | See Sam Run: Collision

    Eyes on the road


    And just then, the track jumped out at her.


    The megacity had returned, breaking out of the darkness as a swarm of lights and planes of glowing nanometal under an inkblack sky. The track shot her and a few other racers out of the subterranean darkness and onto an eighth pipe swarming with future cars and a lumbering semi. Immediately, tracer rounds shot across the road.


    She thumbed around the bike handles, but found nothing. A brief moment of panic, until she saw a racer ahead of her gun down a hapless sedan and swerve into the resulting opening, one handing an automatic pistol of some kind. She reached down at her chest and there, like an MP5K on a strap, she found it.


    She throttled forward after him, weaving through cars that looked like pillbugs and earbud cases, until she was just behind him on the left-hand side. He heard her engine and whipped back with his pistol swinging. The moment she saw him move in his seat, she squeezed the break, let the G forces snap her gun arm forward in a flash, and cut right into the lane directly behind him. His burst went wild, but hers found home from the base of his back up to his skull. His frayed leather jacket (he was dressed up like some post apoc raider) exploded in fabric and gore and his bike snapped sideways like he had struck a wire and then spun out across the road spraying fuel then flame and zipped by her exploding somewhere far behind.


    There was definitely some carry over from Gunmaze at times, not to mention her own Hardworld experience. She absentmindedly wondered, not for the first time, how many of the other racers were secret Hardworlders, as she maxed her speed down a magically wide-open lane.


    Gunfire faded behind her, creating a moment of white noise sci-fi ambience that made her feel she had the entire track to herself again, until more automatic bursts echoed towards her from above and either side.


    A quick glance confirmed that her track was heading for a dark rendezvous with seven other eighth-pipes as they all merged into a single tunnel like the plastic casing of a shotgun shell reforming itself. The dark arms closed in on her in her peripherals, flashing gunfire and explosions and shedding fragments of vehicles. In a few short seconds, the transition was complete, and she was flying down a tunnel, lit by rods of neon floating at the center. The roars of the roads merged into a single whirring scream, and all the battle noise became echoed.


    Here she found what Sinthea, her booking agent who was also big into the nuts and bolts of the races, might have called ¡°layered difficulty¡±, or something.  The first layer was, of course, the race, getting ahead of the other racers. The second, which Sam had recently used to her advantage, was the difficulty of aiming a machine pistol one handed while dealing with powerful and sudden g-forces, which often required careful braking to get the gun in position, or acceleration to snap it to a target before they could react. Then there was the problem of dealing with falling vehicles and debris, as anything destroyed on the ¡°ceiling¡± of the tube would fall on those below. And finally (or maybe not) was the variance of speed in the tunnel. Those on the bottom, (maybe to compensate for dealing with falling burning metal, or maybe because it was a real quirk of physics, Sam wasn¡¯t really sure) accelerated quicker than those riding the roof (and those on the sides kind of split the difference she guessed?)


    She could see the game designers laying all this out and having a good chuckle and congratulating themselves and all that shit, but in practice those four or five layers really just ended melding up into two considerations:


    Those who got shit on and those who did the shitting.


    Almost immediately, the other racers (glowing lights in the increasingly smoky darkness, differentiated from the NPC taillights by their brilliance and speed) moved up the sides and towards the ceiling. They shot at each other. They took out semis. They crashed into sedans and towtrucks (or whatever that thing with the crane was) that went skidding then rolling down the sloped sides in an awesome bouncing path of destruction, a car crash given a new dimension, and kicked up more rag-doll Rube Goldberg bullshit that, in one case, was just a quarter of the pipe short of making a full rotation.


    The lights, muzzle blasts and laser tracers squealed over firework explosions and fluttering fuel fires that rolled like waves or sloshed like water thrown up out of a bucket, illuminated some dangers and cast others in dark shadows. The noises, blaring theater speaker sounds of vehicles grinding past or the skip stone echoes of gunfire and glass break car crash pop of collisions and the bass boosted explosions, were all very cool and very distracting, but once you¡¯ve been in real car crashes and seen real things come crashing down into fiery ruin, like a bell helicopter taken out by a CG for instance, all this shit just felt kinda cartoonish.


    So maybe that was why it was so easy to drive straight down the center of the bottom of the pipe. Or maybe she was just stupid. That was always a possibility.


    A section of a future tanker the size of her apartment bounced off the road and she did a kind of sideways slide through the resulting gap under it, aiming her bike for a few seconds right at the scrap-metal occupied impact zone which only opened up into barren shadowed highway about an eight of a second before she got to it. Things dinked off her bike and the wreck groaned and screamed above her then it was just the roar of her engine.


    In her peripherals, laser fire flickered and all that, but the bottom center lane was mostly lonely. Maybe that was another reason she had taken the risk. Racing against people was fun. Beating them was fun. Sometimes even getting beaten by them was fun. But a lot of times she got the feeling there was a whole other level of game going on beneath the track, the kind of game she had never been good at.


    The popularity game.


    She had seen racers pass others who they obviously could have taken out, let others pass just as uneventfully, and seen others chase down racers with a persistence bordering on obsession. Little things that couldn¡¯t be justified by just the game itself. Things that she had heard whispers of from the fans and others, and blunt references to from her agent.


    Something about being alone made her feel watched, and a part of her mind looked for an opening to ride the tube wall up towards the swarmed racers shooting it out up there, where she would be just another middling contender, and so basically invisible.


    But she was gaining too much ground to do that. She had already dodged a handful of dropped burning sedans (one of which had crashed through the floating center tubelight and showered her with sparks) and three massive cargo wrecks, and now hopped the lane and drove up the sloped side of what might have been some kind of future bus, and shot off it like a ramp as the scattered wreckage of something she hadn¡¯t seen fall passed by beneath her. She landed perfectly and the bus spun out behind her, its wheels shredded by the debris.


    And just like that she was in the lead.


    The racers above faded back beyond her line of sight, unable to drop any vehicle down on her now, but off in her peripherals she saw a couple of lights on either side break off and swerve down the sides of the tube.


    She waited. Her mind was a single tone, thoughtless, silent. This was why she raced. This was why she¡­


    Her pursuers opened fire from both sides, and as a reflex she cut the bike towards the shooters on her left-hand side. Just as expected, they had braked to bring their pistols around, limiting his movement and making them seem stationary by comparison to her. She, however, had her gun on her chest mount, and accelerated as she swiveled the barrel around and fired over her left elbow, her bike sliding nearly horizontal in a storm of tracers from her enemy¡¯s missed rounds.


    She dropped her head down to her shoulder and lined up the red dot on her pistol. Half a second later two bikes were spinning out in a froth of sparks and a third was seeking cover behind some semi.


    The fire from her right side had gone quiet. In her peripherals she sensed a massive commuter bus in the center lane. She whipped the bike back to the right, then tapped the brakes a few feet from the bus, snapped her gun hand around, and let the barrel graze the side windows as she passed.


    The instant the bus cleared she saw three other riders coming down the sloping pipe just behind her. She got the first one, just one lane over and a few yards away, before he even realized she was there, and his bike pitched forward in a ragdoll spray of sparks.


    The other two immediately opened up on her, and she instinctively dipped into a sideways slide, her left hip just inches above the street as it ground sparks off her slide posts, and slammed the brakes.


    The rolling wreck of the first rider screened her and their rounds fell around her as they zipped past, just as she let the g-forces glide her gun hand forward. A sustained burst that burned through the rest of her magazine caught them both like a tripwire made of tracer rounds, the drastic spread of the weapon working fully in her favor.


    She accelerated again and bounced her bike up. The machine pistol, its breech now locked open and smoking, (which she thought odd for a laser gun, but the rule of cool was supreme on these kinds of tracks) was attached to its mount by a wire and she found the button that yanked it up to her chest where a new mag slid home out of the satchel.


    She felt pretty bad ass, until she saw four lights speeding ahead of her down the top of the track pipe. Four lights which didn¡¯t seem to be shooting at each other.


    Motherfuckers.


    She pushed the throttle and tried to catch them. One aimed straight down and shot a sedan in its front tires, causing another to rear end it and go sailing up and sideways. She had to slide into the right lane to avoid it and got doused in fuel and glass. No sooner had she righted herself than a big tanker went sideways. In the real world, which to her was the Hardworlds, nine times out of ten a tanker truck was hauling milk or soybean oil or something, but in the action move land of the race track, she knew it had to be fuel.


    She could either try and go around it, hoping no one shot it as she did, or,


    She snapped the gun forward and fired a single burst, which was all it took. The tanker went up in a dome of bright fire that ballooned into a darkening cloud. She slid as far left as she could before smashing through the wall of flame, which because of the tanker¡¯s previous speed was not an isolated point on the track but a deep channel that took her longer than expected to drive through.


    For a moment, everything was fire, and she recalled a nightmare she had of being trapped in a burning warehouse¡­ or had she? No. It was a Selfshadow, as Lindsey had called them. Memories of a past self lingering long after the job was done.


    ¡°Some you¡¯s stick around more than others,¡± she had said, in very Philip-esque brevity. Though Sam had been hesitant to ask him about them, those phantom memories that didn¡¯t quite gel with the rest of hers but seemed to float around outside asking meekly to be let in, reminding her of floaters on her eye or stray cats that looked at you from across the street but never directly approached your front door, she had mentioned them to Lindsey as one drifted into her thoughts during a QA session (where a senior team member, usually Philip, would review the mem of a job with her and provide feedback), in her typical ¡°say whatever inane thought that pops into your head¡± way that Sam hated about herself.


    However, Lindsey must have mentioned it to Philip, because later, in the clubhouse, he pulled her aside.


    ¡°I don¡¯t want to discourage you reaching out to other team members, but I want to get it straight that just because I seem like a meat and potatoes realist, doesn¡¯t mean I¡¯m not acquainted with the more metaphysical aspects of Hardworlding. Basically, don¡¯t be shy about telling me anything. Theres nothing you¡¯re gonna go through that I haven¡¯t already.¡±


    Sam had suspected at the time, and still did, that he was more agitated that she had reached out to Lindsey (who he seemed to have some kind of professional rivalry with) than he let on. But still, it was nice that he cared.


    The dark tunnel returned, but flame still lingered in places. It took her a second to realize her bike was on fire.


    A few seconds later, it didn¡¯t matter anyway. The central streetlights flared and fused and became a glowing familiar sun, and the leading racers froze in place and flared into those familiar starbursts and vanished with the track.


    A radial display of track choices revealed themselves to her fully with dreamsense or Otherspeech or whatever it was called, and she scrolled through them mentally.


    There was a serene beach track, the top of an aqueduct, a tunnel flooded with amber lights¡­


    Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    She knew that this time, the tracks wouldn¡¯t be static. Those only happened once a race, to give a break. These solo segments would have some kind of challenge that she might be able to guess based on the setting.


    But time is money, and she hated trying to strategize a way to game the system anyway, so she just picked one at random.


    The City.


    The other choices vanished, and she found herself flying down an eerily empty city street, presently being drenched in rain, reflecting a shuddering alternate world on the sleek black ground, the fire on her bike vanishing into steam. A nice touch.


    It was a blend of at least three cities, none of them particularly familiar to her outside of movies or architecture magazines. There were brownstones and railway whatever¡¯s, San Fran Victorians, bodegas and financial centers, all shaded under abstractions of the famous skyscrapers of Chicago, New York, even Beijing. There was, however, nowhere the strip malls and mixmasters of Texas, or even any of the iconic towers from either DFW or Houston metros. There never was, in dramatics like this. It made her feel all the more alien, made her memories of the Hardworlds all the more tempting.


    But the streets demanded her attention. Cars slowed or pulled in front of her. Dead traffic had to be penetrated with side mirror smashing precision. The subtle underlaid ghost of the track had to be followed by sharp turns and unexpected detours down subway stairs, over pedestrian bridges, back onto street paths that rose into ramps and dove into underground tunnels in impractical, racing-game-contrived ways.


    For a while, she assumed that this in itself was the challenge of this segment, until a shrill noise bounced off the close pressed concrete and glass, a sound that activated her clubhouse training, particularly the ¡°what to do once you¡¯ve fucked up big time¡± portion of Philip¡¯s instruction.


    Police sirens. Growing closer. Though these were toned and cadenced as movie music, they echoed in her memory as the real thing, and brought those memories screaming back to life.


    It had been a hot Texas evening dying into a damp night, and she had no idea what the fuck she was doing¡­


    And just then, the track jumped out at her.


    The megacity had returned, breaking out of the darkness as a swarm of lights and planes of glowing nanometal under an inkblack sky. The track shot her and a few other racers out of the subterranean darkness and onto an eighth pipe swarming with future cars and a lumbering semi. Immediately, tracer rounds shot across the road.


    She thumbed around the bike handles, but found nothing. A brief moment of panic, until she saw a racer ahead of her gun down a hapless sedan and swerve into the resulting opening, one handing an automatic pistol of some kind. She reached down at her chest and there, like an MP5K on a strap, she found it.


    She throttled forward after him, weaving through cars that looked like pillbugs and earbud cases, until she was just behind him on the left-hand side. He heard her engine and whipped back with his pistol swinging. The moment she saw him move in his seat, she squeezed the break, let the G forces snap her gun arm forward in a flash, and cut right into the lane directly behind him. His burst went wild, but hers found home from the base of his back up to his skull. His frayed leather jacket (he was dressed up like some post apoc raider) exploded in fabric and gore and his bike snapped sideways like he had struck a wire and then spun out across the road spraying fuel then flame and zipped by her exploding somewhere far behind.


    There was definitely some carry over from Gunmaze at times, not to mention her own Hardworld experience. She absentmindedly wondered, not for the first time, how many of the other racers were secret Hardworlders, as she maxed her speed down a magically wide-open lane.


    Gunfire faded behind her, creating a moment of white noise sci-fi ambience that made her feel she had the entire track to herself again, until more automatic bursts echoed towards her from above and either side.


    A quick glance confirmed that her track was heading for a dark rendezvous with seven other eighth-pipes as they all merged into a single tunnel like the plastic casing of a shotgun shell reforming itself. The dark arms closed in on her in her peripherals, flashing gunfire and explosions and shedding fragments of vehicles. In a few short seconds, the transition was complete, and she was flying down a tunnel, lit by rods of neon floating at the center. The roars of the roads merged into a single whirring scream, and all the battle noise became echoed.


    Here she found what Sinthea, her booking agent who was also big into the nuts and bolts of the races, might have called ¡°layered difficulty¡±, or something.  The first layer was, of course, the race, getting ahead of the other racers. The second, which Sam had recently used to her advantage, was the difficulty of aiming a machine pistol one handed while dealing with powerful and sudden g-forces, which often required careful braking to get the gun in position, or acceleration to snap it to a target before they could react. Then there was the problem of dealing with falling vehicles and debris, as anything destroyed on the ¡°ceiling¡± of the tube would fall on those below. And finally (or maybe not) was the variance of speed in the tunnel. Those on the bottom, (maybe to compensate for dealing with falling burning metal, or maybe because it was a real quirk of physics, Sam wasn¡¯t really sure) accelerated quicker than those riding the roof (and those on the sides kind of split the difference she guessed?)


    She could see the game designers laying all this out and having a good chuckle and congratulating themselves and all that shit, but in practice those four or five layers really just ended melding up into two considerations:


    Those who got shit on and those who did the shitting.


    Almost immediately, the other racers (glowing lights in the increasingly smoky darkness, differentiated from the NPC taillights by their brilliance and speed) moved up the sides and towards the ceiling. They shot at each other. They took out semis. They crashed into sedans and towtrucks (or whatever that thing with the crane was) that went skidding then rolling down the sloped sides in an awesome bouncing path of destruction, a car crash given a new dimension, and kicked up more rag-doll Rube Goldberg bullshit that, in one case, was just a quarter of the pipe short of making a full rotation.


    The lights, muzzle blasts and laser tracers squealed over firework explosions and fluttering fuel fires that rolled like waves or sloshed like water thrown up out of a bucket, illuminated some dangers and cast others in dark shadows. The noises, blaring theater speaker sounds of vehicles grinding past or the skip stone echoes of gunfire and glass break car crash pop of collisions and the bass boosted explosions, were all very cool and very distracting, but once you¡¯ve been in real car crashes and seen real things come crashing down into fiery ruin, like a bell helicopter taken out by a CG for instance, all this shit just felt kinda cartoonish.


    So maybe that was why it was so easy to drive straight down the center of the bottom of the pipe. Or maybe she was just stupid. That was always a possibility.


    A section of a future tanker the size of her apartment bounced off the road and she did a kind of sideways slide through the resulting gap under it, aiming her bike for a few seconds right at the scrap-metal occupied impact zone which only opened up into barren shadowed highway about an eight of a second before she got to it. Things dinked off her bike and the wreck groaned and screamed above her then it was just the roar of her engine.


    In her peripherals, laser fire flickered and all that, but the bottom center lane was mostly lonely. Maybe that was another reason she had taken the risk. Racing against people was fun. Beating them was fun. Sometimes even getting beaten by them was fun. But a lot of times she got the feeling there was a whole other level of game going on beneath the track, the kind of game she had never been good at.


    The popularity game.


    She had seen racers pass others who they obviously could have taken out, let others pass just as uneventfully, and seen others chase down racers with a persistence bordering on obsession. Little things that couldn¡¯t be justified by just the game itself. Things that she had heard whispers of from the fans and others, and blunt references to from her agent.


    Something about being alone made her feel watched, and a part of her mind looked for an opening to ride the tube wall up towards the swarmed racers shooting it out up there, where she would be just another middling contender, and so basically invisible.


    But she was gaining too much ground to do that. She had already dodged a handful of dropped burning sedans (one of which had crashed through the floating center tubelight and showered her with sparks) and three massive cargo wrecks, and now hopped the lane and drove up the sloped side of what might have been some kind of future bus, and shot off it like a ramp as the scattered wreckage of something she hadn¡¯t seen fall passed by beneath her. She landed perfectly and the bus spun out behind her, its wheels shredded by the debris.


    And just like that she was in the lead.


    The racers above faded back beyond her line of sight, unable to drop any vehicle down on her now, but off in her peripherals she saw a couple of lights on either side break off and swerve down the sides of the tube.


    She waited. Her mind was a single tone, thoughtless, silent. This was why she raced. This was why she¡­


    Her pursuers opened fire from both sides, and as a reflex she cut the bike towards the shooters on her left-hand side. Just as expected, they had braked to bring their pistols around, limiting his movement and making them seem stationary by comparison to her. She, however, had her gun on her chest mount, and accelerated as she swiveled the barrel around and fired over her left elbow, her bike sliding nearly horizontal in a storm of tracers from her enemy¡¯s missed rounds.


    She dropped her head down to her shoulder and lined up the red dot on her pistol. Half a second later two bikes were spinning out in a froth of sparks and a third was seeking cover behind some semi.


    The fire from her right side had gone quiet. In her peripherals she sensed a massive commuter bus in the center lane. She whipped the bike back to the right, then tapped the brakes a few feet from the bus, snapped her gun hand around, and let the barrel graze the side windows as she passed.


    The instant the bus cleared she saw three other riders coming down the sloping pipe just behind her. She got the first one, just one lane over and a few yards away, before he even realized she was there, and his bike pitched forward in a ragdoll spray of sparks.


    The other two immediately opened up on her, and she instinctively dipped into a sideways slide, her left hip just inches above the street as it ground sparks off her slide posts, and slammed the brakes.


    The rolling wreck of the first rider screened her and their rounds fell around her as they zipped past, just as she let the g-forces glide her gun hand forward. A sustained burst that burned through the rest of her magazine caught them both like a tripwire made of tracer rounds, the drastic spread of the weapon working fully in her favor.


    She accelerated again and bounced her bike up. The machine pistol, its breech now locked open and smoking, (which she thought odd for a laser gun, but the rule of cool was supreme on these kinds of tracks) was attached to its mount by a wire and she found the button that yanked it up to her chest where a new mag slid home out of the satchel.


    She felt pretty bad ass, until she saw four lights speeding ahead of her down the top of the track pipe. Four lights which didn¡¯t seem to be shooting at each other.


    Motherfuckers.


    She pushed the throttle and tried to catch them. One aimed straight down and shot a sedan in its front tires, causing another to rear end it and go sailing up and sideways. She had to slide into the right lane to avoid it and got doused in fuel and glass. No sooner had she righted herself than a big tanker went sideways. In the real world, which to her was the Hardworlds, nine times out of ten a tanker truck was hauling milk or soybean oil or something, but in the action move land of the race track, she knew it had to be fuel.


    She could either try and go around it, hoping no one shot it as she did, or,


    She snapped the gun forward and fired a single burst, which was all it took. The tanker went up in a dome of bright fire that ballooned into a darkening cloud. She slid as far left as she could before smashing through the wall of flame, which because of the tanker¡¯s previous speed was not an isolated point on the track but a deep channel that took her longer than expected to drive through.


    For a moment, everything was fire, and she recalled a nightmare she had of being trapped in a burning warehouse¡­ or had she? No. It was a Selfshadow, as Lindsey had called them. Memories of a past self lingering long after the job was done.


    ¡°Some you¡¯s stick around more than others,¡± she had said, in very Philip-esque brevity. Though Sam had been hesitant to ask him about them, those phantom memories that didn¡¯t quite gel with the rest of hers but seemed to float around outside asking meekly to be let in, reminding her of floaters on her eye or stray cats that looked at you from across the street but never directly approached your front door, she had mentioned them to Lindsey as one drifted into her thoughts during a QA session (where a senior team member, usually Philip, would review the mem of a job with her and provide feedback), in her typical ¡°say whatever inane thought that pops into your head¡± way that Sam hated about herself.


    However, Lindsey must have mentioned it to Philip, because later, in the clubhouse, he pulled her aside.


    ¡°I don¡¯t want to discourage you reaching out to other team members, but I want to get it straight that just because I seem like a meat and potatoes realist, doesn¡¯t mean I¡¯m not acquainted with the more metaphysical aspects of Hardworlding. Basically, don¡¯t be shy about telling me anything. Theres nothing you¡¯re gonna go through that I haven¡¯t already.¡±


    Sam had suspected at the time, and still did, that he was more agitated that she had reached out to Lindsey (who he seemed to have some kind of professional rivalry with) than he let on. But still, it was nice that he cared.


    The dark tunnel returned, but flame still lingered in places. It took her a second to realize her bike was on fire.


    A few seconds later, it didn¡¯t matter anyway. The central streetlights flared and fused and became a glowing familiar sun, and the leading racers froze in place and flared into those familiar starbursts and vanished with the track.


    A radial display of track choices revealed themselves to her fully with dreamsense or Otherspeech or whatever it was called, and she scrolled through them mentally.


    There was a serene beach track, the top of an aqueduct, a tunnel flooded with amber lights¡­


    She knew that this time, the tracks wouldn¡¯t be static. Those only happened once a race, to give a break. These solo segments would have some kind of challenge that she might be able to guess based on the setting.


    But time is money, and she hated trying to strategize a way to game the system anyway, so she just picked one at random.


    The City.


    The other choices vanished, and she found herself flying down an eerily empty city street, presently being drenched in rain, reflecting a shuddering alternate world on the sleek black ground, the fire on her bike vanishing into steam. A nice touch.


    It was a blend of at least three cities, none of them particularly familiar to her outside of movies or architecture magazines. There were brownstones and railway whatever¡¯s, San Fran Victorians, bodegas and financial centers, all shaded under abstractions of the famous skyscrapers of Chicago, New York, even Beijing. There was, however, nowhere the strip malls and mixmasters of Texas, or even any of the iconic towers from either DFW or Houston metros. There never was, in dramatics like this. It made her feel all the more alien, made her memories of the Hardworlds all the more tempting.


    But the streets demanded her attention. Cars slowed or pulled in front of her. Dead traffic had to be penetrated with side mirror smashing precision. The subtle underlaid ghost of the track had to be followed by sharp turns and unexpected detours down subway stairs, over pedestrian bridges, back onto street paths that rose into ramps and dove into underground tunnels in impractical, racing-game-contrived ways.


    For a while, she assumed that this in itself was the challenge of this segment, until a shrill noise bounced off the close pressed concrete and glass, a sound that activated her clubhouse training, particularly the ¡°what to do once you¡¯ve fucked up big time¡± portion of Philip¡¯s instruction.


    Police sirens. Growing closer. Though these were toned and cadenced as movie music, they echoed in her memory as the real thing, and brought those memories screaming back to life.


    It had been a hot Texas evening dying into a damp night, and she had no idea what the fuck she was doing¡­

 A Day in the Afterlife | See Sam Run: Otherlives

    Falling, for you


    Hardworlding hadn¡¯t been her idea, really. Poppy had dragged her along the first time. The idea was they would both get enough money to buy a character creation pass to Arthel, which unlike the gun maze wasn¡¯t free unless you signed up to be a ¡°townsperson¡± or whatever, which is what they had been doing, but at the rate that was going (squirreling away ¡°gold¡± in a shared player chest hidden under their hut) it would have been months before they were able to play actual characters. So, Poppy came back one day talking about the Hardworlds (which Sam had heard as Hardworld?, and assumed it was a resortworld designed to look like the Real or something) and when Poppy started talking about something in that voice, Sam knew she was about to go along for a ride.


    The way Poppy explained it, you went and just watched other people try and kill each other and then came back and let some kind of scraper read your mem of what you saw and they handed you money. Since it sounded too good to be true, Sam was extremely skeptical and asked a lot of questions, which, as always, annoyed the shit out of Poppy.


    ¡°Why would they pay us to do that? Can¡¯t they just scrape the mem of the guys actually playing?¡±


    ¡°Sam, oh my god, I told you like three times it¡¯s not a game, ok?¡±


    ¡°Pretty sure this is just a scam to let them scrape our mem and sell it.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s a legit org, Sam. You¡¯ll see when you get there. They wouldn¡¯t risk their rep to scam us. Our mem isn¡¯t worth anything anyway.¡±


    ¡°But that guy bought all your sex mem¡ª¡±


    ¡°It wasn¡¯t all of it! It was like the two times I hooked up with my roommate! And why do you always bring that shit up?¡±


    ¡°Are you sure they pay this much?¡±


    ¡°Yes.¡±


    ¡°Why would they if it¡¯s so easy? Seems like they are offering so much to draw us in because they know they¡¯ll never actually¡ª¡±


    ¡°Because it¡¯s dangerous! You can actually feel pain and get trapped¡ª¡±


    ¡°But you said it was easy?¡±


    And so on. Eventually Poppy just got all mopey and said the guy at the place would explain it, which he did, but Sam asked him just as many questions if not more, so his like professional demeanor cracked a bit at the end and he asked her if she wanted the job or not, so by the time she went in the box she was half convinced she was finally about to wake up for real.


    Which, she realized, walking into that darkened doorway, was all she had been trying to do for the year or so she had been in this ¡°Other World.¡± As her Spirit faded for the first time since it had been born, taking a backseat to a third Sam she had never imagined possible, she realized that she had assumed this was all one big nightmare. She had never fit in anywhere, the clubs or groups or even orgies, never had any real friends, even Poppy seemed to hate her, somehow. This realization wasn¡¯t exactly surprising, more like she just hadn¡¯t had time to focus on it, like seeing a little light from your monitor blazing in your eye when you turn off your light for bed, unignorable though you had been staring at it all day, or something like that.


    Anyway, turns out they were working for a ¡°data company¡±, which contracted out to Hardworld teams doing bulk scraping using ¡°sleepers¡±, in this case Sam and Poppy. At the time, none of it had made sense. She had woken up, gone to work, had a normal day, then right when her dreams that night had been about to get interesting, she was dragged away from her new life and back into the Other, where a multi eyed machine head stripped off her memories like a wet t shirt you couldn¡¯t get your elbows through the right way and ended up having to tear out of, and then she was there in some kind of waiting room/recoup area with Poppy, trying and failing to remember that other her.


    It felt very wrong. She couldn¡¯t remember doing anything but now she had more money than ever and some HR lady was pushing her out the door with corporate niceties.


    She was certain that they had taken advantage of her, but when the money had been spent on Arthel characters and sim passes, and Poppy was dragging her to another ¡°job¡±, she still didn¡¯t have any concrete reason why she felt that way, and so she didn¡¯t have any objections to bring up other than,


    ¡°I really don¡¯t feel like it.¡±


    ¡°Why not? Didn¡¯t you say it turned out fine last time?¡±


    ¡°I said I didn¡¯t remember anything bad happening.¡±


    ¡°Because it didn¡¯t. You just had like a normal ass day and then woke up. And we got to do all that shit in Arthel. Remember all the things you said you wanted to do with¡ª¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t really want it that bad. I¡¯m fine with just¡ª


    ¡°No you¡¯re not! I know how bad you want it! I want it too! Are you afraid that like, once you get it, it will be disappointing? Like you won¡¯t even, really, um,¡±


    Poppy had done one of her fighting against tears things that looking back, Sam couldn¡¯t believe she had ever taken seriously, and that was it.


    The next few jobs had been the same. Just a vague feeling of having been somewhere unpleasant and lots of money. Then one time while inside she, or more accurately her self, had seen a cop car flying by and followed it out of a vague impulse and ended up right next to the action. A stray bullet had hit her radiator and she had spent the four minutes of gunfire crouched down below the steering wheel, but that was really the start of it. When, after a long night of police reports and insurance calls and drinking, she had finally passed out and the Sandman came to get her, he told her the company had a promotion in store if she could stay ¡°in it¡± while observing.


    Poppy filled her in on what that meant. Directed her to some (now, laughable) pieces of advice and instruction on the freed about ¡°keeping your Spirit prime in a Hardworld¡±, but in the end the company just gave her a call every job to tell her how not real her life was, which the first twenty times or something her Self just brushed off, but eventually, one day.,


    It had been horrifying at first. All the warnings of pain and entrapment (delivered at her corporate orientation and mostly ignored then) now blaring in her face, but after a moment, she didn¡¯t give a shit.


    The sky was brighter, the wind sweeter, each breath tasted of morning weekend coffee and open possibility. The world, which had always seemed so subtly menacing and had always oozed mockery and doubt the way the inside of a car radiated dull dumb heat in the Texas summer, now was silent, listening, saying ¡°huh?¡± instead of the annoyed, threatening ¡°What??!¡± it spoke like a constant tone in the Real. Everything was broke open and welcoming, like the heat had finally cooked it, like the humming tone of anxiety had finally reached the crescendo it had always promised.


    Maybe it was because she knew it would all be gone in an instant. A practice world. A disposable life, able to be lived in true freedom because all the pressures and expectations were now thrown around backwards into jokes of themselves.


    She cried that first time, the first time she really knew where she was, just got in her car and blared music and screamed and bought the biggest stupidest coffee and told the barista how beautiful she was and¡ª


    This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.


    Then the phone call and the where the fuck are you get your head in the game, and the anxiety came back with the job and the desire to do a good one and with the first flash of gunfire that other her, the one that really did live here thank you bitch, reminded her how important a throwaway world could be.


    But anyway, it was addicting, and almost immediately Arthel and the sex sims lost their appeal. She went in every other day, though she wasn¡¯t always lucid. It was like chasing the greatest high of her life. And the money was great. She was showering Poppy in gifts, taking them on all kinds of journey¡¯s (though often her mind wandered) and it felt like she had finally figured out how to exist in this nightmarish inescapable other world.


    Then the company had offered her a temp contract for ¡°direct work,¡± and what had felt like a path to some kind of mild contentment broke in half like a mine cart track in an old game and down she went.


    ¡°You would be working directly for the team,¡± the icy HR-ish lady who handled all her checks and stuff said to her, just before laying out the risks, and baiting the hook with something Sam had never been good at resisting. Praise.


    ¡°Your observations are very detailed. And you have a knack for being at the right place at the right time. That¡¯s not really something that can be taught.¡±


    So Sam had started nodding and didn¡¯t stop until her name was on the line and all that. Poppy had already offered her enthusiastic approval. More money. A path to advancement and maybe one day, a year pass to Arthel Royalty level. Maybe even some left over to buy some less fortunate RPers into their dream avatars. Sounded good, but,


    ¡°Wont it be more dangerous? I thought they couldn¡¯t shoot at me the other times because I¡¯m like a third party.¡±


    ¡°Your still an observer! You wouldn¡¯t be communicating any intel to the team until after the job is over, so technically you¡¯re not a live scout so you¡¯re still outside the ROE boundaries. This just means your mem is owned directly by the team you¡¯re assigned to.


    Poppy was always very good at repeating community consensus and rationale she found on the freed as her own reasoning, but in the end it didn¡¯t matter anyway. Back then, Sam would have done anything to buy Poppy whatever shit she felt she needed, no matter how severe the cost or frivolous the reward. That was, she guessed, just how she was in relationships.


    But there was also something else.


    The idea of being closer to the action she had till then only watched from a distance, the gunfire and crashes and explosions that had sent her Selfs into an electric state of awareness that had felt like the opposite of, or more likely the final long-awaited purpose of, her constant anxiety, was too much to pass up.


    The job itself had started out different immediately. She had woken up with her Self firmly in the driver¡¯s seat, made coffee, stressed about her day, ranted to her cat about texts from her ex, but not even an hour into what had promised to be a normal Saturday, her phone had rang, and a voice on the other end had broken everything apart.


    She had described Sam, Poppy, the company¡¯s office in the Allworld, (an office tower that seemed to be made entirely of ground floor lobbies stacked on top of each other) and a few other things, and although she had used carefully vague wording at times (which Sam later found was an attempt to avoid audio scanners that looked for things like ¡°Allworld¡± or ¡°Hardworlder¡± to locate combatants), she got the point across and by the time the line went dead, it was the real Sam standing in that kitchen.


    Which was strange. Every other time she had gone lucid on a job, (which, now that she thought of it, had only about five or six times, though it had felt like a lot more) it had been in response to a news bulletin or police sirens or something, and it had been fleeting and groggy. But this time, it was like someone had jostled her out of a sleep and there was no fucking way she was going back no matter how much she burrowed under the blanket.


    The lady had given her, somewhere in the purring, brain tickling torrent of words, instructions. She was to go to a certain zip code and drive. Hit up drive thrus, park and watch the birds, whatever, but stay in the area and keep moving, and keep her phone on her.


    So she spent most of the day driving up and down Royal lane and MacArthur, but trying not to make it obvious that she was driving up and down Royal lane and MacArthur, or lingering in parking lots of places that felt way too rich for her, or taking turns at random, and sometimes stopping at a park or something to eat a meal that she only half tasted because is it even real, and would it even matter if she didn¡¯t eat anything anyway?


    And nothing happened. Not even a phone call. So, out of frustration over an unresolved anxiety and failed promises of excitement, she got on 114, pushed her little hatchback down the Fastlane and far over the speed limit, missed her exit and ended up a few miles from the boundary she had been given that morning, flying over one of the largest mixmasters around, looking down at what had once been the old Cowboys stadium.


    She had been battered by flashes of a monster truck rally from nearly twenty years before, (her parents, one or both of them, she couldn¡¯t be sure, egging her on to shout and scream, which had never been her thing) trying to decide if had been her Self or that other, distant Sam who had been there, when a noise bounced out of the sliding flat scenery and skipped across the thin towering ramp like something aimed just at her.


    A gunshot. Then more of them. Muffled and unidirectional inside the coffee and fast food smelling cab. She smacked her hand down on the window controls and the driver¡¯s side one slid completely open while the others stopped at just cracked. The gunshots came in stronger, but were now broken by the wind and she wondered how she had heard them at all.


    Before she was off the ramp, the police scanner gave her a location she tried to hammer into her phone. She gave that up and used the voice function while swerving off the access road.


    ¡°Possible gunfire at the University.¡±


    Her mind went racing. The orientation had included some general ¡°hints¡± on documenting the ¡°action¡± and what to look for, categorizing ¡°engagements¡± into two categories;


    ¡°Operational¡± and ¡°Diversionary¡±, with diversionary either ¡°involved¡± or ¡°generated¡±, which meant either a Hardworlder was on site, or one had just ¡°pushed it remotely¡±.


    A shooting at the University might just be a distraction, the kind of ¡°generated diversionary engagement¡± that was low down on her priority to document, but as she turned a corner, it became very clear that the gunfire was not coming from the university, as the school shooting minded dispatcher might have assumed, but from a cluster of apartments that from the aerial map looked like a handful of dead-end cul-de-sac parking lots. Good place for an ambush. Good place to lose the cops, granted there were no helicopters in the sky.


    Her heart raced. That other her screamed. Run get away from it, idiot! The gunshots got automatic. She circled the block, watching every car she passed with a laser focus hoping it would help commit them to memory.


    And she realized, suddenly, she had no idea what it was she was meant to be looking for. On the other jobs, the scrapers had taken her memory, no matter how mundane or tangibly related to the job and paid her about the same for it every time. But now, she was in a more important position, wasn¡¯t she? They would want her to actually witness the shootouts, right? But how close is too close? Besides the boilerplate wavers, they had really only given her one piece of direction.


    ¡°You are to take no direct or indirect involvement in the activities. Doing so would be grounds for immediate termination and besides that make future employment extremely difficult.¡±


    She hadn¡¯t known at the time just how prophetic that warning had been.


    So, she turned into the parking lot of the leasing office and pulled into a spot with a view on the fountain-splashed pond that was sunk in the center of the complex. Black screened windows and balconies and the edges of two other lots faced down on the sputtering little bog, but the shootout itself was still raging in secret. Every time an echo of gunfire cracked across the air or bounced off the water, which was about every other second, she scanned for some sign of the action, muzzle flash or men moving in a low run or anything, but there was only the mundane stillness of an apartment complex submerged in a late Friday evening.


    Just as she was considering driving around to one of the other lots, as the screaming other her was pleading her case, her phone rang, and she jumped so high her head banged on the car roof.


    ¡°Hello,¡± she said out loud to no one before she even had it out of the console. Then everything got eerily quiet again, a rare few seconds break in the gunfire, as she stared at her lock screen where a missed call icon sat at the top. It had only rung once. The number was unfamiliar, indistinct beyond the fact that it looked like someone had found the last remaining never-before-used area code.


    She set the phone down and scanned the complex some more. Her dash clock rolled over the first minute since she had parked, which had felt like hours, and the little flick of LCD felt like someone scolding her.  She analyzed her situation.


    It was a hot Texas evening dying rapidly into a damp night, and she had no idea what the fuck she was doing. Wherever the shootout was, she couldn¡¯t see it. Whatever the cause or purpose of the gunplay, she wasn¡¯t informed on it. And whoever it involved, would soon be slinking away into the dark night, if the sirens on the edge of her hearing were any indication.


    Time to go get some answers.


    Her hand found the gearshift like scratching an itch, but before she could slide it into reverse, there was a strange scraping noise at her passenger door that sent her spinning in her seat, then a soft bonk on the roof.


    The door opened, the guy grabbed his coffee off the top of her car, and got in like she was his fucking Uber driver.


    He set the coffee in her cupholder, spun his medical mask off on one ear, and chomped down on a cigar with a smile.


    ¡°All right little birdie, let''s blow this joint,¡± said Philip.

 A Day in the Afterlife | See Sam Run: Outlaws and a Way Out

    Second hand kills


    Sirens that had started gently a minute ago now rose into a screaming swirling song that cut through the buildings and ambient drone like bright glass blown out of a shotgun, destroying any directional quality of the rest of the noise, which now included explosions and obvious machinegun fire.


    Whoever this guy was, he had gotten out just in time.


    ¡°Uh, what?¡± Sam said, gawking at him, trying to find some cue in his appearance that would tell her what the fuck was going on, because from the calm way he ordered her, she must have missed the part where he became her boss.


    ¡°Put it in reverse, get us out of the lot, like you¡¯re done with your lunch and you don¡¯t like gunfire¡ª¡± More of it broke through the window he had cracked behind him. ¡°¡ªand I¡¯ll tell you where to turn and when to stop.¡±


    He wasn¡¯t angry. He wasn¡¯t rushing her. He wasn¡¯t even reacting to the battle sounds that made Sam flinch every time and had her Self screaming in whatever back room of her mind she was locked in. His tone was like he was reminding someone they had forgotten to take their card out of the reader after ordering their burgers and shit. A simple nudge, sure to be reacted to with a simple swift hurried motion that benefits everyone involved, especially said card owner.


    But she just sat there and stared at him. His aviator shades that somehow didn¡¯t obscure his smile in the slightest, but became a part of it like cartoon goggles that could blink. His get up, like a mobster was doing his best to go professional, honest, black jeans and vest under a Burberry trench that was a crime in and of itself in the near ninety degree Texas October, and thick combat boots, all of which screamed ¡°up to no good¡± but somehow matched his smile and pose and something unseen so well that it didn¡¯t look out of place and gave her the impression she might not have been able to necessarily recall him from a crowd.


    She tried to remember seeing him walk up, but couldn¡¯t, then tried to think of how she could have missed him what with her nervous-dog scanning of the complex for the past few minutes, and was at a loss again.


    He let her stare for a second or two then tilted his head slightly and she felt, like some magic trick given his shades, his gaze burning a hole into the gear shift.


    ¡°Oh sorry,¡± she said, and the words bounced around in the car like something dropped as she put it in reverse and backed out. In her peripheral vision, she saw him slide something into her phone and toss it out the window.


    It had been right about there that she decided she was not only going to do what he asked, but do it to such an extent that he would be bowled over by her ability to do so.


    And she guessed, looking back, that it had been because for the first time she had found someone who she felt could guide her through the funhouse insanity that was the Hardworlds toward something she couldn¡¯t articulate but that she was fatally drawn to just the same. Some unknown nugget at the core of the kaleidoscope worlds, some piece of purpose that would set her right.


    She pulled up to the street, where across the way two squat office towers slumped atop a section of land raised above a little terraced parking lot and small corner pond, and felt suddenly, what with all the cars waiting patiently at the light and the cotton gold-orange tinged clouds whispering by overhead, that all the violent noise had been a weird dream, and the strange man in her peripherals was simply batshit.


    Till a flock of police cruisers and SUVs, lights and sirens slicing through the felt-textured evening like neon blades, flew through the intersection to her right.


    ¡°Turn left when you can,¡± the guy said, calmly, and she couldn¡¯t help but chuckle, which brought a glance from him that she felt in the side of her face.


    The light changed and the cars cleared, and she crossed over and turned left down the road, which sloped upward with the land before her, as if the world was molding itself to her feeling that she was being lifted out of whatever groove her other-live had been stuck in till now.


    Then the ride got quiet. The complex passing on the left, where leaning power lines and hedge dappled fence zipped by, and the office buildings on her right, screened by dry sloping lawns and soldier like live oaks guarding against maybe something more than just the sun. The guy sipped his coffee and set it down. He got a torch lighter out and rolled the end of his cigar over it, then blew on the cherry red circle. He took a slow drag on it, let the smoke roll off his face in the wind from the few inches of window crack, and looked as relaxed as anything, until an engine revved behind them.


    His face snaped to the rearview mirror and his body froze. She followed his gaze and saw movement far back closer to the complex, a grey blur rising like smoke behind the traffic.


    She glanced back at him and he was twisted in his seat, looking straight back past the headrest like a sniper using it for cover, only a sliver of his right eye exposed to the backseat, and a blued steel pistol in his hand that had looked to Sam like the biggest fucking handgun she had ever seen in her life comfortably aimed at the floorboard.


    He shifted back into his seat like nothing had happened and picked his cigar up from the cupholder where it had been resting, and rolled it in his lefthand thoughtfully.


    ¡°Don¡¯t accelerate until I tell you.¡± Gently again, like he was reminding her it was a Tuesday (though it was Saturday, if he had said it she would have believed him).


    The engine roared then went into a low rumble, then roared again. She glanced up and saw it in the rear view clearly, a big grey chevy truck weaving through the traffic. The sight of it, metal and moving with menace, made the memory of his gun flash in her mind, with a sprinkle of the earlier gunfire thrown in, and she felt a hard world of death and unfeeling physics closing in on her.


    Her Self screamed inside, then made like a determined huff, and spirit Sam squeezed the wheel and narrowed her eyes (which must have looked funny, given her beady eyes and baby face, because he glanced over at her with more concern than he had shown the pursuing murderers) and the adrenaline and determination and sudden focus came together and moved her, directed her actions in the same way he had since he got in her car, but with far more power and authority, she realized with surprise, than even he could ever inflict on her.


    She flicked on her right blinker and pressed the brake.


    ¡°Wha¡ª¡± he started, but cut himself short, and watched her instead. She turned the car slowly, steadily, even hesitantly, like a person finally arriving at work, into the parking lot of a passing warehouse, its five-storey high wall of flat windowless concrete looking like the proverbial kind you could really put your back to.


    The engine rumble rose behind her, paused, then exploded as the truck continued on down the road, leaving her there in the silent evening stillness among all the dusty cars and staked trees, reminding her of a job she had had some other years ago sorting mail for a discount department store¡¯s warehouse office. Once again, the violence had left her in the realm of mundane softness, and while the Self was weepingly grateful, personally, Sam was fucking sick of it.


    ¡°Good job,¡± he said. ¡°But don¡¯t do that shit again. Just cause you¡¯re at the wheel don¡¯t mean you¡¯re the one driving, understand?¡±


    There was a bit more steel in his voice this time. She nodded, but her heart wasn¡¯t in it anymore. As of a few seconds ago, she had found a new master.


    ¡°Pull in that spot.¡± He pointed to one facing another empty spot between two trucks and under a wimpy staked tree. Her adrenal fired mind decided his selection was not random, as the spot had cover on both sides, but could be pulled through in a hurry.


    She used her blinker again and came to a smooth stop. He glanced over at her, and following his gaze she noticed she was white knuckling the wheel and leaning forward in the seat.


    ¡°Close your eyes, lean back, and take slow breaths.¡±


    She did so reluctantly, noting before her lids dropped that he had a phone in his hand in a thick bomb-proof looking case.


    After a few seconds of very unrelaxing darkness, in which giant Sig Sauer handguns and cigars that smoked like car fires floated in her vision, brakes squealed down the street.


    ¡°Not very subtle are they,¡± he said, and she heard him sigh and unbuckle his seat belt.


    She snapped her eyes open and gawked at him again, despite herself.


    He was pushing his index finger into his ears through his beanie (a cris cross patterned designer variety that wouldn¡¯t have been out of place atop a runway junkie and now that she thought of it looked a bit like urban camo) and didn¡¯t even look at her.


    ¡°Keep em closed and get down in the floorboard. Don¡¯t move till I get back.¡±


    He had set his cigar sideways on the console so some ash flaked off and fell to the passenger side floor as he whooshed out of the car like a billow of smoke. The door shut more softly than she had thought possible in the 6 years she had owned the god damned thing, and she pushed the driver¡¯s seat back and put her face to the floorboard and closed her eyes.


    The other car revved and growled some more out beyond the lot, then she heard metal scrape on concrete as it rushed into the lot.


    Then a strange combination of sounds; the scream of brakes and a gunshot braking off the end of it, so that the two sounds blended in the rubber and plastic bucket of the car seat, and then shit got really loud.


    For some reason she couldn¡¯t think of, she counted the gun shots and divided them into two varieties. One which she thought of as ¡°scared/loud/rapid¡± and another ¡°not-quite-as-ear-shatteringly-loud which was also infrequent/single/final¡±. There were twenty seven of the first kind, and six of the second kind, and after the sixth shot of the second kind, the gunfire stopped.


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    Boots crunched on glass, then went quiet. For a few moments, it was just her and her Self, the bitch screaming and telling her dumb ass to run, then the door opened.


    ¡°Get out. Stay low.¡±


    He wasn¡¯t even sweating. His pistol was half stuck in his belt and he put something in the SD drive of a cell phone in his hands, which was half wrapped in electrical tape, covering the camera.


    She crawled out and crouched down at his feet while he finished whatever he was doing, tossed the phone in the car, zipped up the pouch and re holstered his pistol. When he lifted her up off the ground, both pouch and pistol were tucked out of sight.


    ¡°See that blue KIA?¡±


    ¡°Yeah.¡±


    ¡°Walk towards it like you¡¯re going on break and stand by the driver¡¯s side.¡±


    She did, and for a moment thought he had let her go on her own, and her Self renewed her plea to ¡°run the fuck into the street and just start screaming what is he gonna do?¡±, until she reached the car and turned and found him approaching the passenger side, his steps having been just as silent as before.


    He popped the door open, slid into the passenger seat and leaned over toward the steering wheel and started working under it. It felt, for some reason, like watching a shark move in a fish tank. In the strange silence, a voice slipped out of her head.


    There¡¯s an issue with the KIAs lack of immobilizer. You just have to open the steering column¡ª


    It was her Self, but she still looked around like she was going to see some other Sam standing there whispering to her, but instead there was only a very quiet parking lot, and


    Gen 3 Camry, the steering column, that Civic¡­


    Her Self started rambling about relay extenders and wheel locks and half the cars in the lot opened up in her mind like blooming flowers.


    It had been her first brush with that sensation, that fleeting feeling of remembering charged with something else that dissolved just as quickly as it had come, leaving her with no proof that anything had happened beyond some panicked idle thoughts.


    The KIA started up and she jumped. Then the door opened and he was looking up at her from the drivers seat.


    ¡°Come on.¡± Fast, but not hurried. Eager. Like he was leading them both to a late night excursion they had planned for months. Like a friend.


    She climbed in and put the car in reverse, the feeling of being in someone else¡¯s car for the first time in ages bounced up her spine. It smelled like weed and the Glade air freshener clipped into the vent, and the seat and mirrors aimed at someone else¡¯s height.


    ¡°Seat belt.¡±


    She looked at him, but he was scanning the lot. She drew the belt across and had trouble finding the catch.


    ¡°Take the lot around to the access road,¡± he pointed, as a cluster of sirens broke off from the main flock screaming in the distance and got louder on the main road.


    She backed out and got a few yards down the lot before the other car came into view. Its engine was still running and a slight smoke was wafting off the edges of the hood. The driver was slumped dead, most of the doors were opened, and she saw two other corpses next to it as they passed. The sirens seemed to double as she watched it, so her foot sunk into the gas pedal.


    ¡°Slowly,¡± he advised her.


    Maybe to drown out her screaming Self, maybe just to see what he would say, she nodded at a Civic as they passed.


    ¡°I could have stolen that civic for you. Been a little more power than this thing.¡±


    ¡°What?¡± He actually had some emotion in his voice this time.


    ¡°This is a four cylinder¡ª¡±


    ¡°What makes you so sure you could steal it?¡±


    She didn¡¯t have anything to say to that, because only her Self could answer, and Sam was not about to let that crybaby start talking.


    ¡°Alright, how would you have stolen it?¡± His voice was back to the calm narrator sound it had before.


    She told him, and just as she was rambling past the minor accessory details and comparing it to other methods, they were turning around the front of the building, and a bunch of screaming sirens pulled into the lot back where they had first parked.


    She glared at the rear view nervously and he laughed in his throat.


    ¡°Calm down. They don¡¯t know what our car looks like.¡±


    ¡°They do if whoever called it in is still watching.¡±


    He nodded approvingly and looked at the side of her head.


    ¡°Good thinking, but no one called it in, they just heard the shots and drove down here.¡±


    ¡°How do you know that?¡±


    ¡°Another little birdie told me.¡± He smiled.


    He directed her out onto the evening traffic, where just released office workers clogged the lanes around the industrial zone, and she drove under a bridge toward an Oak infested suburb.


    After a few minutes, he slid back the sunroof cover and looked up. It took her a few moments to think of what the hell he might be doing, until the sirens echoed in some lull in the engine noise.


    ¡°Police chopper?¡± she asked. He scoffed out his nose.


    ¡°No, that birds still chasing down a squad of crash dummies around the skirmish.¡±


    She waited for him to explain what that meant or what he was looking for, but he just scowled at the sky, cracked his window and held his phone up to the crack near the dash.


    ¡°Lay off the gas a second,¡± he said. She did and he moved the phone along the crack, then back down towards the dash, then glanced at the screen and put it back in his pocket and gave the sunroof another glare.


    It would be months before she found out that he had been using a custom app to listen for the tell-tale signatures of a drone, and a few months after that before she would experience first hand just how unreliable that iteration of the software could be, but at the time she had just kept quiet, hadn¡¯t asked any questions, but had done a lot of watching and thinking.


    Poppy had been a bit obsessed with Hardworlders, and had told Sam stories of the legendary ones, The Gods, The Angels, Obsidian, the Circle, which had made them sound like superheroes. Even the ¡°normal¡± ones, had in Poppy¡¯s tellings been magical creatures, able to manipulate the hardworlds like a player with cheat codes, dodge bullets, find military grade weaponry anywhere, learn anything instantly just by ¡°fake-remembering¡±, all while fighting other superhumans in clashes that sounded like every 90¡¯s action movie thrown together.


    But this guy didn¡¯t seem like he had any magic powers. He seemed like a guy just trying not to get caught by the cops. And though he had quickly dispatched like four guys with a pistol, it didn¡¯t seem to have given him any special confidence in his situation. He watched everything, suspicious that even the overhanging powerlines could snap and throw themselves at him at any moment.


    His nervousness, or more accurately his alertness, had set her on edge, and at a light she had pulled out a pack of Marlboro red 100s from her hoodie and lit one up.


    ¡°Put that shit out. Those cowboy killers smell like dying old people.¡±


    She had turned to flick it out the window, and stopped herself, then turned and exhaled right at his face.


    ¡°You can get the fuck out then cause I¡¯m smoking this.¡±


    He stared at her for a bit, then smiled, the most genuine smile she had seen in a long time, and, she realized in that instant, not the kind you would ever see in the Other, and he turned back to the windows.


    ¡°Light¡¯s green,¡± he said to the glass with a chuckle in his voice.


    The rest of the evening had flown by in a haze, and even in the meticulously detailed mem of it, which Philip had given her as a gift her first month at ST67, the mind ran across it like a hotwheel down a ramp.


    It had been a madhouse out in the city, even without the swirling police chases and shooting scene media coverage. Covid restrictions had just ended. The radio, which Philip had set to classical 101, opined once that people had finally completely lost it, and tried to soothe the collective psychotic break with Gieseking playing Debussy.


    It all made the evening feel, to her Self and Spirit, like some apocalyptic ending to everything she had known before, which wasn¡¯t that far off, really.


    They had swapped cars in an old neighborhood where each lawn seemed to double as a mini used car lot, and Phillip quizzed her on the various models, pros, cons, and mainly, methods of ¡°recovery¡±. Then they had stopped by a self storage and he had loaded himself and the trunk up with more weaponry than she had ever seen. Driving with a killer and his expansive arsenal at her side, preparing to risk her Self like life was a game she could respawn into, pursuing a definite goal, was a sudden departure from the ¡°purchase an experience, achieve happiness and understanding¡± quest that Poppy had had her on since they first found each other in the Allclub.


    Happiness and fulfillment, she felt, was something Philip absorbed from the rack of a shotgun, the tight turns she took around the back alleys without jostling him, the way the cops flew by them unawares, and, though he tried to act like he was looking for drones, the way the clouds floated by beyond the smooth steady slice of the power lines. As for understanding, she got the feeling that as long as something worked in his favor, he couldn¡¯t give two shits about understanding it.


    In the deep late evening, as they reached their final destination, a boarded up restaurant under the sweeping arm of a Texas-sized mixmaster at the far end of a Motel 6 parking lot, she felt a pang of regret as he said,


    ¡°Well, this is it for me. Tell your bosses and anyone who watches this mem¡¯ I said¡ª¡± and turned and flipped her off with such an overstated movement and laughing eyes that she couldn¡¯t help but cackle.


    He got out and swung his Benelli M4 (with one in the chamber and a ghost load, she recalled) in front of him and unclipped a pouch that hung under his jacket over his hip, which dispensed frag grenades like a coin changer.


    ¡°Oh, one last thing.¡±


    He snatched something out of his inside pocket and pointed it at her through the window.


    ¡°Read this card. You can reach me at that place or that number in the other, any time.¡±


    She stared at it, and a pure shock, of seeing something that seemed to have fallen out of that Otherworld shining in this grimy car interior, ran up her spine and she vibrated in the seat like she was about to teleport.


    The card was black with yellow-orange hand-stenciled text, like an inverted road sign, and read:


    Outlaw Eleven


    C# 688 - 529 - 11


    Lead, Strike Team 67


    Lightweight Hardworlding Solutions


    Raids ¨C Ambush ¨C Surveillance ¨C Escort


    Millennium Tower East, F241 Suite 1601


    1800 x 33, Allcity


    He snatched it back and set it alight with his cigar and she made a confused sound.


    ¡°Tell whoever scrapes your mem to pull the info. They¡¯re required to do that if you ask.¡±


    Her mind rolled around and she blurted out,


    ¡°I have a girlfriend.¡±


    He laughed.


    ¡°It¡¯s a job offer, kid. Jesus. I have a feeling you¡¯ll be needing it after this one.¡±


    He dropped his shades, looked her dead in the eye and winked, then turned and marched off towards the Motel 6, whose L shape hugged the razorwire fenced outline of another self storage complex.


    She watched him until he disappeared into one of the back doors, then sat there in the silence, and realized she had nowhere to go. No contact with her team, no idea if she should stay in the Hardworld or take the ¡°drop out dose¡± and wait for her collector in the ¡°dreamworlds¡±, which were always closer to nightmares and were sure to be extra horrific after all the screaming her Self had done today. She wasn¡¯t even sure if this guy had been on her side or the other. It really smacked her in the face, her helplessness in doing this thing, her dependence on so many people and forces she didn¡¯t understand and some of which she never even saw.


    An explosion snapped her out of it. Then a double boom. Then an eruption of gunfire, like the first boom had set off fireworks. All coming from the Motel.


    She turned off her car, got out, and watched. A window blew out, glass glittering in the evening light. Three gunmen came running around the corner of the building, then disappeared inside a door. Shouts and engine sounds rang out of the self storage and reinforcements bled out of it into the far end of the lot.


    It occurred to her that she was watching something amazing, something close to the tall tale scenes Poppy had been obsessed with. The guy was all alone, but no matter how much gunfire sputtered out of the hotel, the shotgun kept booming, and the grenades kept blowing out windows.


    The air was cool on her face, and the hood of the car warm and dirty under her hands, the ground crunchy and solid at her feet, her joints sore in her flesh and her mouth dry and thirsty. And she felt satisfied, for once. Accomplished. Useful. She had brought him here. She had taken on the city and its roving hunter killers and here she was, at the edge of it all, watching a firework show that seemed less a struggle than something playing out the motions, its ending forgone.


    She looked over at the last smear of daylight off in the distance, just a dull orange glow, then rolled her head over up to the darkening night sky, washed out by the city lights but still twinkling in places. It felt like the Otherworld was right over her head, ready to open up and accept her into it at any moment. She felt, for the first time, like she wasn¡¯t just a spectator, a fresh Spirit watching a world made by other people. She felt part of something, and the feeling was absolutely addicting.

 A Day in the Afterlife | See Sam Run: Drifting

    The pain of blending lanes


    At some point, she sat down and leaned her head back and fell asleep, crashing hard from the adrenal dump. Then a Sandman came and escorted her out of the dreamworlds and back to the office, like leaving a screaming, mentally destroyed version of herself alone in a Motel 6 parking lot to deal with a ruined life this Sam had created was as natural as getting your fucking 15-minute break twice a day.


    But rather than being shuffled to the paydesk and hurried out with her stub like on every other job, this time she had been brought into a side office and briefed on what apparently had been a very serious fuck up.


    The Job had been a standard attack/defense gig. The target was accused of fixing a private game or gambling ring or something using some Roulette-made software, so the Counters had gotten involved and the stakes were Nine World level, with Roulette trying to get him back and a private defense team trying to bleed them dry before everyone got together at the bargaining table.


    And it turned out that while the company that had hired Sam was on the attacking side, Philip hadn¡¯t been, which meant of course that she had helped the wrong side score a goal, embarrassing Roulette and causing much downhill shit-rolling for her ¡°employer¡±.


    ¡°He was on the other team for Christs sake! Didn¡¯t you figure that out?¡± Some guy, apparently the observer supervisor, had yelled at her, before he got a few hushed words thrown on him like ice water by the HR lady, and stormed out of the room.


    The HR lady and her assistant, who either looked like or were disguised to look like the most sympathetic middle-aged women Sam had ever seen, with voices like a miracle-working inner-city teacher reaching out to the gang member student over math problems, had explained her error and advised best practices for avoiding such a thing in the future.


    ¡°When in doubt, stay out. You¡¯re not expected to ever take a direct part in the operations of a job. So if someone asks you to do so much as hold a gun or bring them a coffee, you should direct them to your supervisor. Only your supervisor or dispatch should be giving you orders. Understand?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not your fault, hun. He should not have involved you, period. It¡¯s a bare-faced disregard for engagement etiquette. Observers and support staff like Sandmen and Reapers are protected by established ethics. If everyone acted like him then the Hardworlds would be completely unsafe for people just trying to make a living.


    Looking back, Sam laughed. If only Philip would have been there. She would have paid good money to see him rant and rave about how safe the Hardworlds should be, about how anyone who steps into them should be ready to bite a bullet, about how the HR ladies themselves and their company was doing more to hurt people ¡°just trying to make a living¡± than any one Hardworlder ever could, and on and on.


    But at the time, their words had made a kind of sense, if their tone and vibe (so contrasted to the honest to a fault bare bones declarations Philip had bombarded her with all day) had seemed a little fake, just a little plastic, like talking to someone your pretty sure is trying to hide the fact that they really have to piss.


    So she had kept her job, for a while, played along like she was into it and looking to move up, a fa?ade which was mirrored in her repeated evasions of Poppy¡¯s prodding into her memory of her ¡°day with a real Hardworlder¡±.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know, like, I just drove him around. He was really quiet and I was too scared to think. Then I stopped one time and he was gone and I like passed out.¡±


    At the time, her memory of the job was hazy enough to warrant this summarization, but there was something else. Maybe it had something to do with Poppy¡¯s known jealousy, but mostly it was what the job had shown her. That there was something out there she wanted. Something besides Arthel roleplays and fantasy sims. Something besides Poppy. And Sam knew how she would react to that.


    So the topic had run dry and fell away, and Poppy was too busy spending all the new mem and playing all the new worlds to care, but for Sam the memories nestled and grew, the feelings took root and spread, and the secret of them wedged like a seed stuck between her teeth, splitting the two of them apart.


    Her Hardworlding days continued, now consisting only of observing and talking into a radio and waiting, stupidly, even looking in her mirrors and in the stature and stride of the few combatants she caught glimpses of, for the return of someone she could reach out and call anytime, until one day, she did.


    Her mind snapped back to the present as the track dropped down into a dark tunnel where only well-spaced bursts of amber lit her way and she had to guess the track between them, and the memories left her. She had been dodging the phantom cops without thinking, navigating the city streets without issue, and now even the mini game of connect the dots in the dark was too easy. She needed something more taxing if she was going to keep from thinking about¡­


    Water splashed her windshield from some puddle or maybe from an invisible stream of rainwater pouring down from the city above (if the track was capable of such continuity) and she saw him in the passenger seat with that smile that made his eyes burst out in crows feet and made her feel like he had somehow found out everything there was to know about her.


    The lights melted out in the dark distance, becoming molten amber drips that blended and swirled into a glowing portal, and she was no longer driving, but falling.


    Then her bike landed, hard, and she had to wrench the handles to keep it from spinning out, and the sci-fi city, which had a name that stuck in her head about as well as one of those passwords with all the alternate caps and symbols, exploded all around her as the track returned.


    She immediately checked her position. Sixth. God fucking dammit! What was the point of the private tracks if the same four mother fuckers (though now joined by some fifth asshole) kept the lead the entire god damned time?


    The mega highway had been trimmed down to a five-lane flat track that immediately sparked into gunplay. She saw number five cut towards her. Fuck you bitch. No solidarity, huh?


    She slid her bike sideways under a lumbering maintenance car that looked like a shipping container hovering over the track, and number 5¡¯s rounds cracked somewhere unseen.


    Oh, this place.


    It was a repair depot, supposedly. She had only seen it on rotation once. The fan favorite, the painfully barren Palace Grounds, which had once been an ultra-rare event, now appeared more often than even the fucking space elevator, while Sam¡¯s favorite, the underground test facility where aliens would latch on to the riders granting random power-ups like x-ray vision or acid spit, barely got any play lest the fans bitch about ¡°RNG¡± like a bunch of fucking babies.


    She revved her engine, then pressed the break. Rather than shoot out in front of the box car, the way number 5 probably expected her to, she dropped back behind it the way she had come just moments before, and sure enough number five had his gun arm outstretched, aimed just ahead of the maintenance car.


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    She emptied her mag into him and he fell and rolled in a shower of sparks. With her bolt locked backward, she reached down for a new mag, and found nothing.


    What the fuck?


    It took a few moments. Frantic moments, during which she scanned the depot (which was like a train yard combined with a far future distribution center, reflected against itself and wrapped in a tube) and enjoyed, on some distant level, that her thoughts were finally flushed out of her head.


    She saw the lead racers moving strangely, all zig zags and double fakes, instead of their normal swanlike-sliding into the win like a key into a lock bullshit, but nothing happened for a few confusing seconds, and then,


    Thundering gunfire behind her, low rpm like an automatic grenade launcher or maybe an Ultimax 100. The first bursts must have gone short, but the next one sailed over her shoulder, big chunky glowing bits of whatever they used instead of lead or tungsten in the year 3000, and tore up the road ahead of her in a rough line of fire and dust.


    She glanced at the rearview fast enough to see the muzzle flash on the front of a pursuing bike, then went searching with her hands for her own trigger. There. Two levers, like the breaks on a mountain bike, just far enough ahead of the throttle/break handles that she had to awkwardly reach out an index finger to activate them.


    She barely had time to wonder if big handed racers had the advantage here, or if like the distance was proportional so everyone had to do the same annoying stretch/point thing, before another burst screamed past her, actually bisecting her evasive slide and tearing half of her windshield to pieces.


    Shit!


    She swerved towards a rising conveyor belt and maxed the throttle, knowing her attacker could only track her across a horizontal axis, and the stream of tracers followed her across the plane.


    She made it onto the conveyor and her speed died instantly (the fucking thing was really made of those rolling cylinders) until she got traction again and shot up the belt with a squeal just as the bottom of the belt got torn to bits by her attacker''s cannons. An instant later she was climbing toward some other layer of the honeycombed depot and the pursuing bike grumbled by beneath her, his barrels still smoking.


    Despite the cluttered appearance, the depot wasn¡¯t all that different from other portions of the track. It was a tube that could be traversed across any portion by g-forces, and shit basically rolled downhill. As she sped across a plain covered in rows of stalks that looked like those old speaker arms people would park next to for a drive-in movie, burning debris fell out in the center of the space, where the lead racers dropped wrecks and runner-ups from above.


    To make sure she had the controls down, she fired her cannons at one of the speaker-arms and it went up in a massive fireball that set off flashing alarms everywhere. She drove through the black smoke and it gushed over her broken windshield and packed around her helmet for a few seconds of pure silence and nothingness, and when she came out on the other side she realized something.


    She was sick of this fucking race. The fake danger. The cliquish ¡°pros¡±. The absolute absence of alien powers generated at random. The fucking fans who would be sure to pester and post about every other thing she did today especially if it resulted (in their minds) in the poor or non-first-place performance of their favorite racer. Then the few fans who had decided that she was their favorite, actually, and then spoke to her or wrote to her in gushing tones that somehow always communicated that they were doing some brave unexpected act of charity by rooting for her instead of the real stars, and of course she always felt that their expected reward for doing so was some quality time with her body.


    She had been fine staying in the unpaid casual circuit, the ¡°free swim¡± let loose on the race tracks between major events, but either because she had won too much or because a lot of her tactics (which were really just knee-jerk reactions) differed from the ¡°meta¡±, they kept pestering her to race ¡°comp¡±, and when she had mentioned it offhandedly to the twins, Nova had said that Michael encouraged them to flesh out their ¡°spirit selfs¡±, their Otherworld non-Hardworlder identity, by finding some kind of employment or passion or even faux addiction, either to cement the believability of their alias or just to give them something to counterweight the powerful pull of the Hardworlds.


    So, going comp became like a special assignment from her boss in her mind, and propelled by her desire to not let him down, she fell into this bullshit. Ironically, after she had run her first comp race, all the pressure to advance vanished, and people mostly ignored her. Which was nice. Maybe half the reason she had stayed in was the fear that if she dropped back down into casual play the pestering agents would crawl back out of the woodwork.


    The linear carwash space she had been flying through abruptly ended (soap jet blown off her helmet and everything) and she found herself sliding down a wide conveyer toward the bottom of the track. While the dull white noise of the sprayers and mops had lulled her into a nostalgic flashback, now the noise of the race returned in full.


    The bike-cannons boomed and their echoes were broken by the splayed levels and walls that made the tubular depot look like the inside of a SlapChop? used to destroy a flash drive. Engine roars came back like poorly heard dreamnoise. Some fake machines clanked with a deep underwater rumble that reminded her of her apartment near the trainyard. All the sounds were distant. The fizzling cluster of lead racers had passed her by. A quick check told her she was now 9th.


    Fine. Whatever. Maybe the twins would be done with ¡°Mike¡¯s forced time off¡± as they had called it, and she could go back into the clubhouse. But what if he¡ª


    She squeezed the throttle and nearly spun out of her turn. Down on the bottom of the tube, trailers hauled wrecked future cars and moved at lazy speeds and she guessed the designers wanted you up on the sides and the roof, where any substantial drop in speed could send you falling.


    Her thoughts and an engine hum drew her eyes upward.


    The cluttered depot had cleared out a bit on this portion, and she watched, unobscured, as five bikes drifted around the roof, their cannons going off at gentle intervals if at all. She knew there would be discussion about it, and some would say that they intentionally avoid ¡°wiping out¡± the lead racers until the last lap because the ¡°respawn rubber band¡± or whatever the fuck could help them make up the difference unless you dropped them at the last second, which completely ignored the fact that the fallen racers would have to make it past their competitors in places 15 through 5, which said argument took as a given, which really pissed her off.


    So, without much thought beyond an angry impulse, she popped the clutch.


    Every racer had the option of choosing an automatic transmission, but doing so applied a few minor debuffs to the bike. Despite this, most of the top racers used automatic just to free their hands for weapons/power-up operation, but Sam liked the added layer of intimacy it added, and she had learned to ride mostly in the Hardworlds on Lindsey¡¯s bike, which is also where she learned to wheelie.


    Her front wheel rose up and silhouetted her cannon barrels against the oncoming blur at the center of the tubular space, the portal to the next segment. She fired and everything was muzzle flash without the cover of her windshield frame, then a stream of tracers bisected the dark tunnel and struck the ceiling ten yards from the lead racers.


    Immediately, their relaxed saber smooth curved trajectories got all fucked up and one of them even squealed on the brakes. Sam laughed out loud, the noise just as disjointed from the atmosphere of the track (dramatic crescendo building towards something new as the Depot terrain thinned out and revealed the next portal, with some music to match, cheesy ass fucking devs) as the sight of her tracers clashing with the muted almost candlelit amber in the darkness of the rest of it.


    She walked her fire instinctively. The cannons were probably based on Browning 50 cal mem, one of which Philip had let her run wild with on the clubhouse as a reward, and the memory of which was burned extra vividly in her mind. The Hardworlds are weird like that, selective in what they let you keep.


    A second into her wheelie, her stream of fire caught two of the lead racers right through the center in a single sweep and they dropped from the ceiling in ruffling ribbons of fire and smoke. Beautiful!


    The rest shit themselves and started evasive maneuvers. She chased them with her fire like a kid with a magnifying glass torturing ants, up on one wheel all the way.


    The burning wrecks of the fallen riders struck the road ahead of her, but she kept her wheel up till the last second, and another racer spun out and lost traction on the roof.


    She set the wheel down mere yards before the burning roadblock and swerved around it, again flying through solid smoke.


    When she came out, the track was already melting, and the third falling racer turned swiftly into a dot of light.


    Lucky son of a bitch. Next time, mother fucker.


    The warm glow of the next portion bloomed in the darkness, and she was firmly in 7th place.

 A Day in the Afterlife | See Sam Run: Driving Insane

    Astral Assassin (In training)


    The warm glow became a hot glare and sweat beaded across her face. Impressive, but a little unimmersive for her. If it was really her skin responding to the heat, she would have been flushed long before she broke a sweat.


    The track became a wide orange desert, more Mars than Mad Max, with big metal wrecks stuck in it. No. They weren¡¯t stuck. They were moving. Big metal pirate ships shaped like pipes with shit welded onto them roaming the desert sea. And there would be sand worms, she was sure of that.


    Her bike was now more like a jetski, its front face covered in solar cells, with more next to her knees and probably at her back. There were no weapon controls that she could find, but a big button in the middle of her wheel had a diagram of what looked like a bike underwater. The dreamsense told her she was a scrap harvester trying to scoop up old fuel rods before the bigger, slower scavengers could get to them. Uh, okay? The fucking devs loved to give info through a dump that felt like it was cut out of their own fan fiction or something, which sucked because all the top racers damn sure knew this segment already so it was only newbies like Sam that had to decipher their worldbuilding bullshit.


    Another bike moved across her side mirror, with a drill bit on the front of it just like hers, but open into segments like a squid mouth and glowing with plasma electricity, which seemed to be propelling it forward.


    She swerved like she didn¡¯t know how to steer then slammed the dive button when he was a few feet behind and he went right over her. The sand was dark and whooshing like an enclosed waterslide at night, and a screen she hadn¡¯t really noticed in her dash became the only light, and pinged a cartoonish radar square.


    The guy moving overhead quickly disappeared, and she realized the dots were either other racers who were also submerged or ¡°fuel scraps¡±, which probably could be used to activate the electric-teeth charge-move for a short period of time.


    After about five seconds of watching the screen, an alarm started screaming. Low power. Thus the solar cells. The bike was powered by the sun and could only stay under for a short time, unless she had extra fuel. So the fuel scraps had dual use.


    Okay, the segment was growing on her.


    She surfaced, and sure enough the guy who had tried to bite her with his drill mouth was sailing ahead, his drillbit now back to normal.


    Farther ahead, two electrified bikes clashed with an awful nails-on-chalkboard screech, and somewhere behind her the signature crack of a bike¡¯s fuel tank exploding echoed across the sand.


    Closer to the horizon, a wing of pirate ships cut towards some kind of bourgeois desert cruise ship (white and gold, the colors of wealth in this track¡¯s world) which was fluttering under a blue wavering forcefield that deflected cannon shot of some kind. Across the desert, on her left-hand side, a dark cloud of sandstorm approached, and pirate fleet and storm converged towards the central vanishing point where a dual sun smoldered like melting orange sherbert under the sandy air.


    Bad ass!


    She swerved around wreckage. She dove for fuel scraps. She watched the lead cars drill through what looked like little pirate bass boats and grab one shot rocket tubes out of the air. She picked one up as she passed through. She drove into the thick of the Pirate raid, now joined in by the cruise ship guards.


    But her heart wasn¡¯t in it. She didn¡¯t even fire the rocket. Just snapped at every fuel scrap she could see and watched the carnage. Her apathy must have effected her driving, because she didn¡¯t see another racer within striking range the entire time. As if they mistook her for a piece of scenery or something.


    The track gave the option to drive through either pirate or cruise ship, but she just cut between them, where she dodged falling debris and flaming fuel by swerving instead of diving. A memory hovered out in the air like the molten sun, maybe kicked up again by the smell of smoke and burning metal, and she was sure if she went down into the quiet dark sand, it would break the surface and that would be it.


    So when the battle thinned as the two great ships broke away from each other like two rocks that had struck in slow motion, and the great sandstorm rolled into view, rather than dive into the tunnels and caverns her bikes computer told her were right below the surface, she glanced at her full solar fuel tank and sped into the rolling lightning filled sandstorm, hoping the chaos inside would distract her somewhat.


    It did not.


    Somewhere in the warm darkness, as her solar cell counted down dramatically (though she knew with a full tank she would have just enough time to clear the sandstorm. It always worked like that) her mind floated back to the Hardworlds, but when it tried like a dog on a scent to wriggle her into memories of the last job, she swatted it towards thoughts of training, which usually worked to hold her focus, like a quiet little cave in a whirlwind. Thoughts of what she needed to do, what was expected of her, where she had come up short, always worked to overpower thoughts of what she wanted, what she felt, and who she felt about.


    But something in the race had put her in a nostalgic mood, and her memories of Philip running her through the coin job mem fizzled out and his face dropped like a heavy stone down into the deep memories of their first time together, her training day.


    ¡°When you get in, pick me up here.¡±


    He had an old Mapquest map folded up with a dusty square of the metroplex pointed at her and a bright red dot drawn on an intersection with the word ¡°Mcdonalds¡± next to it. It looked absolutely bizarre next to all the perfectly formed un-blemished creations that made up the other (even the ¡°faux-real¡± style constructs made to look like they had been dropped out of the Real, which had seen a resurgence starting around that time, didn¡¯t come close), and though at the time she had thought it a gimmick, she would come to learn it was just a quirk of Philip¡¯s Spirit, probably caused by spending his time almost exclusively in the Hardworlds.


    You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.


    It had been her first test. To drop in and find him. It had sounded simple, but when she woke up in that Self, she felt a vast chasm around her. There was no job-contact calling her, no assigned phone that pinged alerts to remind her of the Other or her assignment, no pre-prepared Self snugly fit into the job¡¯s Hardworld. She was adrift, with only a vague memory of a mark on a map in a dream.


    But she had done it, and that had been that.


    And that had also been that for Poppy.


    ¡°I know how this goes, pretty soon you¡¯ll be fucking him, thinking he¡¯s going to make your little crash team into the next superteam, and then once he¡¯s done with you, you¡¯ll be just another brickslut!¡±


    Sam couldn¡¯t say anything that made a difference and it became obvious that the only way back into Poppys arms was to turn down Philip¡¯s offer for good.


    So she left, not out of any pride or self-worth, but because she was finally convinced her nagging suspicion that Poppy never really loved her and was in fact eager to get rid of her was correct, which, looking back, she wasn¡¯t so sure of, and though the calls and messages afterwards (ignored, in order to save Poppy from the doom of wasting any more time with her) had become increasingly angry and ranting until finally one day they stopped dead like a street gone quiet after a multi car collision, she was now just as confused about what they fuck Poppy had actually wanted or felt as she ever had been.


    But Philip was about as easy to read as the bold menu signs gathering dust (or looking like it, anyway) in his floating restaurant above the clouds. He barked his feelings and his orders in the same cadence and with the same importance. And he laid out her future as he saw it like it was a simple mechanical process that they were both powerless to change even if they wanted to.


    ¡°You¡¯re gonna be my driver,¡± he told her, when she met him at a table outside the dusty Mcdonalds across from a food bank. He always did that, made her meetings or training in the most unglamorous parts of the city. Even when they had trained to hit that guy who lived out of his Dallas high rise, they had run drills in a recreation of the floorplan made of taped together cubicles in an un-leased floor of a call center.


    ¡°Why can¡¯t we just go to the actual building in a different Hardworld and train?¡± she had asked.


    ¡°I want you focused on the important shit.¡±


    But, anyway, back to that first meeting over McChickens and windblown cigars¡­


    ¡°You¡¯re looking at a month or so of training, till you¡¯ve got the way we operate down, then you¡¯ll drop into live jobs. A few more months or so of training while you shadow me on the job, then you¡¯ll be ready to drive the rest of the team, or just yourself to scout, depending on what the job requires.¡±


    ¡°The team?¡±


    ¡°One thing at a time. First, get me to Keller in one piece.¡±


    Then he had fired his pistol out the window at a police cruiser as they passed through an intersection, with about the same energy as if he was wiping his nose, and it had been a hell of a ride up 820.


    She thought of that time, her solo training with Philip, as she always did, fondly, longingly, wishing she had done some things differently, but mostly just trying to figure out what she had done to deserve it.


    She had tried, at first, to keep from asking him too many questions. Everytime she started to wind one up, she felt like it was Poppy in the passenger seat ready to give one of her rambling speeches about Hardworlding in response, or to get all exasperated that Sam just wasn¡¯t getting it.


    But Philip was different. His answers were energetic barks. He took his time, answered thoughtfully and slowly, often pausing to drag on his cigar after a ¡°hmm¡± that Sam quickly learned meant basically ¡°give me one second to think on that¡±, even if they were in the middle of a chase or doing something completely unrelated to her question. And though he did get tripped up a few times at her overly particular and technical way of thinking, he never got mad or showed his frustration beyond a brief narrowing of the eyes that seemed more like a ¡°how do I get through to her?¡± than a ¡°why is this bitch not getting it?¡±, though it was Sam¡¯s instinct to assume the latter over the former.


    And if there was a long moment of quiet, or if his answer to a question seemed to land with less than understanding, he would often actually bark out loud,


    ¡°Ask me another question.¡±


    So she did.


    ¡°Why don¡¯t they just keep sending attackers in forever?¡±


    ¡°Expensive. Diminishing returns. Not every Hardworlder can get into every Hardworld.¡±


    ¡°How can the target stay in for days but we cant?¡±


    ¡°Who says we cant? And usually the VIP is put under, dropped into his Self, with a dome on his dreamworlds and all that.¡±


    ¡°Why isn¡¯t every hit done with drones?¡±


    ¡°Mechanical shit like that is more susceptible to being pushed on by any Hardworlder worth a shit. I can put a round on a drone first time almost every time if I can see it, but when two Hardworlders get in a gunfight, its different. It¡¯s a clash of wills.¡±


    ¡°Why cant they just like go into their dreamworlds, imagine a different them, then wake up in a completely different Hardworld?¡± (After a discussion on Doors, which Philip spoke of like a cheap exploit in his favorite game)


    ¡°Dreamworlds are the domain of the Self. They¡¯re connected to him, made of him. You wanna swap Selfs, you gotta touch the Other. Even with a Door, you probably touch the Other for an instant.¡±


    ¡°Why did you hire me?¡±


    ¡°Because you did exactly what I told you to.¡±


    Huh. It had seemed like no big deal at the time. What else could she have done? She had been scared out of her mind, but later he told her nine out of any ten Hardworlders wouldn¡¯t have listened as well.


    It was a simple answer. Obvious, and once received, one that left her looking for the secret she had assumed he had waiting for her.


    It was all like that. Besides a few maneuvers and technical details, ¡°wardriving¡± as he called it (in a tongue and cheek way, while Poppy and others had always used the terms with the utmost seriousness) seemed to mostly be about what not to think about while doing it.


    ¡°Like shooting, I want as little bullshit between your thoughts and the wheel as possible. You¡¯ve known how to drive since you were in fucking high school. This is about moving the car like its melded to your fucking spinal column.¡±


    There was a lot of driving the cars until they wouldn¡¯t, seeing how far rims could take you, and which parts could take a bullet without bricking an engine. How much a four-cylinder stock Japanese sedan could actually push or drag, including other cars and even a mobile home. Lots of driving through buildings (she quickly learned just how drive-thru-able most modern American structures actually were), over curbs and even barriers if the vehicle permitted, off elevations and up slopes (driving a Honda Fit up a double escalator was an especially giggle-inducing experience), through mirror-high water, straight across a Wal Mart, produce displays and all, and that was just with personal vehicles. Once they moved on to box trucks, semis, Busses, and construction equipment and even hijacked bearcats and Armored trucks, it turned out there wasn¡¯t a lot of places you couldn¡¯t take a vehicle into if you didn¡¯t give a shit about collateral or jail time or even your own ass.


    All the while, Philip was right there drilling her with phrases like ¡°Why don¡¯t you actually give it a fucking try?¡± and ¡°I can hear you telling yourself it won¡¯t work from here. Give me something more positive to listen to.¡± Along with about a million other pointers and sounds of approval and wise cracks.


    And when she dropped back out of the Hardworlds, for the first time she had real hard copy of the mem from inside to replay in the Other, which was a soul shocking experience at first.


    It was a good time, then her training had come to an end, and she had met the team¡­