Mechanics of unbeing beneath the astral realm

His return to the Hardworlds however, had been a trial, a funeral, therapy, self-destruction, humbling, and a million other things, all anything but glorious. While some skills returned from a kind of Hardworlder muscle memory, he was left with the ultimate, inescapable realization that the Michael depicted in his encyclopedic memory would never return, that he was unworthy of the team he had cultivated with money and prestige earned by a person who did not exist.

He tried to stay in the background, console himself with smirks and thoughts of “back in my day…”, but the few times he stepped out into it, his bullets missed, the adrenaline surged, a sniper caught him unawares, but then…

The coin job. The safehouse. His body still electrified with the adrenaline of the PKM shootout. The bullets flying like the word of God. His movement like a dance, or a shiver, precise steps and rounds missing him by millimeters.

He had been ecstatic, elated, considered joining the team in the warehouse, regretted his distance as the helicopter fell into a ball of fire and the enemy died in waves.

But on the way out, when for once in his painful years he wasn’t looking for it, memory found him.

Another Michael, different not just because of his age or the nuances of the primed Self, but by the sprawling memories radiating in his skull, which spoke freely of things now severed into dark shadows and shook present Michael to tears with only their outlines.

That other Michael stood against two squads of shooters, shining pistol in hand, smile bubbling out of him from the confident certainty that he would destroy them without even a bruise, and he did, but there was something else. He felt them. All around him, like magnetized air. They were on his skin. They were wrapping themselves around his gun. Rubbing their flesh across the bullet edges of every cartridge in his possession. Pressing through the drywall and floor tiles and up through the ceiling of the multi-story marble and steel lobby. And he was there too, on all of them, in the primers of their rounds and wormed into the mechanisms of their rifles. He felt them with a dreamsense, an ability he, present Michael, knew was far beyond him now. An ability that, had they possessed it, would have allowed his safehouse shooting victims to deflect and destroy him with ease.

For a moment after, he had tried to tell himself it must have been mem of a sim or the dreamworlds, but he knew, with the certainty of his Spirit, that it had happened in the Hardworlds.

The implications were monstrous. Once he had been a God, and now he was barely a player. Those scheming forces, those betrayers and pillagers who had filled their pockets with the profit of his mutilation, directly or not, still possessed these powers. Still could step among the gunfire and set the hammers of their enemies off center at will, rendering the strikers inert and the bullets redundant. He was barreling toward a conflict with those same forces, and worse, now he would be taking others along with him, sinking them down in his failure, just like…

He took a catalog of all the mem so far returned to him, and though each had felt like having a new earth dropped on his fucking head at the time, they now lay small and inadequate in his hand, like Chuck E Cheese tokens and buttons brought up from a pocket while digging for change. Far too little a hoard for the time spent retrieving them. And the story they told was barely even a narrative. The Other fragments that had come to him, their smiling faces in Heritage park, a gas station run, slinging Sobes and cigarette cartons into the armored car and laughing at the sirens, night vision prowls through unmapped tunnels, all felt like watching a movie when you could only see the bottom quarter of the screen, and someone had punched a speaker. Things moved, blocks of color and flesh tones and voices that danced around saying something without ever, actually…

At this rate, it would be decades before he was close to what he had been. At this rate, he would never heal. He had tried deep meditation in his own realm and chased phantoms in the Dreamworlds and drove around the Hardworlds hoping some landmark would spark his memory like a god damn video game, and he had gotten desperate. Then he had found Oblivion, and ended up poring over the scraped mem of a paid-eye, mem of a smiling faux monk, then just a sudden drop into darkness, then, essentially, nothing.

But once he got up the guts to tap into the sensory side of the mem, he felt something incredible.

There was a fine line between affecting the Spirit and enslaving it. Everyone from simmakers to bartenders to the Gunmaze mods toed it, outlined it, studied it, loved and hated it. The effects of drugs, alcohol, dazzlers, projectors, could all be generally dismissed or escaped with a brief, serious concentration. The “heavier” a drink or drug, the more concentration it required, and a whole system of grades and warning labels had been established to prevent the user from crying “Demon”. If all else failed, should any sensation become “locked in”, an effect similar to the Real phenomena where an abnormal focus on breathing makes each breath seem a voluntary process, the touch of the Real banishes them, unless, of course, the user requests a more potent experience far beyond the aforementioned line...

Which was what Michael expected Oblivion to be. A sim that pushed sensation to the bulging edge of legality and made a little illegal nook for the “trustworthy” to stand on, it’s rule bending cushioned by the place’s age, obscurity, private funding, and specific clientele. The type of people to seek out a “nothingness” sim weren’t usually the kind to run to the council.

But that’s not what he found at all.

Oblivion was a very simple thing. Unbelievably simple. Hilariously simple. So simple it didn’t even justify a shop face, much less a price of entry. The fact that for decades people had paid for the experience was mind-boggling. Enough to drive a modern simmaker insane.

Oblivion was a hole in the ground. Oblivion was the feeling of falling. Oblivion was a mine shaft, an oil well, drilled right into the Other.

The smiling monk rolled back a carpet, which kicked up dust in the shafts of sunlight, and revealed a manhole sized disc of pure darkness stuck in striata that changed with the user, but in the case of Michael’s hired man, was white tile like a gym shower. The OP of the post Michael had first stumbled upon described red terra cotta brick, like a “roman street or something”, and when Michael went to look for himself before smiling at the monk and marching back out without so much as dipping a toe in, the hole had been carved into the patched concrete of a Texas highway.

To Michael, the hole looked like the kind Ringo might drop on the ground in the Yellow Submarine. It meshed with the bald headed monk and the incense and bells and steppe wind blowing outside and hushed chanting into a comically stereotypical version of some concept of eastern philosophy as interpreted by a middle schooler. Maybe that was the point. What kind of punch gets a knock out? The one they don’t see coming.

Down into the hole the guy went, bending at the knees and letting gravity do the rest, whereas Michael, when he finally got around to it, did like a little hop. The entry, like the floor around the hole, was probably unique to each visitor.

The darkness took his sight. The whooshing, which Michael was sure replicated the sound of the womb, took his hearing. The feeling of falling, beginning in his gut and exploding into every nerve in his “body”, took his awareness. Then Oblivion got to work.

Yesterday fell off and vanished behind you. Guilt and worry were already gone. The sensation of falling, vibrating in your flesh, became lighter than air and flew off like a cigarette released on a highway, taking the “flesh” with it. You couldn’t say in what order. You couldn’t say when. There was no struggle. Thoughts and feelings and sensations could not survive the fall. Awareness could not survive the fall. It was not a focused ignorance like meditation. It was not “acknowledging the thoughts and letting them pass”.It was obliterating any thoughts with a shotgun. The feeling of falling cranked up to the limits of Spiritual processing. There was no room for thoughts. No room for you. You became the fall. And the fall became the Other.

Then it was over.

“It's like the opposite of touching the Real.” The poster had said. Exactly. Bingo. Oblivion overloaded your awareness with a simple familiar sensation, then dropped you into the fabric of the Other itself, not the black void, not the non-space, but the actually fucking flesh of the Other itself, until you disconnected from yourself, became only the little light upon which all the other shit was stacked onto. It was priceless. Obvious. The mesh of the Other was worth its weight in gold, but was limitless and free. Makers trained their lives just to scape an eyedropper’s worth into their sims, and this one dunked you in the whole god damned sea.

Touching the Real made the Spirit feel recharged, energetic, the closest thing to sleeping you could get here. But if sleep is the brother of death, Oblivion was a lost bastard sibling.

The hired eye immediately demanded his money back. The monk obliged, with fucking interest! The guy reported his findings and mem to Michael's fourth intermediary and then later repeatedly inquired if they had ever “gotten in again”, indicating the interest payment was a dramatic way to ban someone for life. The refund policy probably part of a carefully planned psychological strategy to justify their exorbitant cost.

Ironically, it was what the mem didn’t show that clinched it for Michael. At the “end” of the fall, just before the guy got spat out back into the Oblivion waiting area, the mem was gone, severed cleanly, just straight up not there.

Michael had run the experiment a few more times with other patsies, and it was all the same. He had checked with the scraper, one of the best in the industry, who confirmed if the mem wasn’t on the output, then it wasn’t anywhere in the Spirit to begin with.

Michael had only seen such a clean severance of memory in two instances, one, when viewing the scraped mem of one who had died in the Hardworlds, where there was always a similar but less obvious gap between the death of the Self and the emergence of the Spirit into the Other, and two, in the case of his own surgically removed memories.

But Hardworld death was a disorienting experience, for lack of a better word. The Spirit clamoring all over you like a forgotten dog the moment you snap back into the other, while with Oblivion, the Spirit barely even realized what had happened, and thus was found in a calmer state, perhaps more able to analyze the experience, so he hoped. The few reports he had from other users had not been promising.

And another thing, of course. Killing himself over and over in the Hardworlds was off the table. He had accepted, seriously, that his Hardworld Self would often have to die for their work, justifying it that if anyone could approve the deaths of his selfs, it was him, but to send them to their graves over and over again when a similar option had not been explored, felt like murder.

So, with intense care and a lot of frustration, he had recreated the Oblivion hole in his realm, in a back room of the palace section of the sprawling space station that waited for him like a familiar stranger everytime he returned to his realm, and whose vast layout and secrets he had never really attempted to explore. It had always felt like something made for someone else, because in a way it was, or maybe it felt like some half-finished project he had started as a child that would collapse under any attempt to change or understand now. Another casualty of his lost memory.

Oblivion looked odd, at first, tacked on, like a hanging brick garderobe plucked off a medieval castle and stuck to a spaceship, until it morphed, either by Michael’s subconscious will or by the RealmFortress acting, as he had always suspected it could, on its own, and the little brick room became a metal and glass enclosure, the patched highway ring around the hole now encased in metal like a preserved artifact, all connected to the main drive of the palace, which was somewhere Michael had never explored in memory but hummed constantly and could be felt from wherever.

So oblivion became the Oblivion Machine. A tap straight into the Otherfabric, the star-engine at the core of his realm assured him, a way to finally hit the reset button on his mutilations.

But as he became the fall, as the fall became the settling of his corpse, the whooshing rumbling roar of the Other morphing into the death rattle of every Michael at once, as the dimmest light of his awareness passed into real empty void,

Nothing was there to greet him. No revelation. No previously forgotten smiling faces. The gap in consciousness he hoped would unlock his memories, which he hoped were still, as Lucy thought, locked away in his head rather than being cut out completely and stored on some mem crystal in the Savior's vaults or Union databases, was behind him. He had missed it.

And then a field of sunflowers floated by, sprouting from gathered soil resting in the crooks of a broken white marble Grecian temple the size of a small town. Other white stone islands floated by, holding pool-sized orbs of sunbright water or patches of soft grass and flowers and one little octagon of dense grape vines full of bulging purple bunches wrapped around what looked like a pink marble holy water station but bubbling up with spouts of spiced wine. The sky was a gradient blue with a single dot of sun and when he looked down through the swarm of floating things to the other side, he saw a starry night at his feet.

He tried for a good minute to figure out why or how his Spirit had generated something that looked like a PS1 game overworld lobby, until he realized it hadn’t. He had been spit out in some random section of the Other. His mapping ‘software’ came up with one exit which led to a completely vacant resortworld, Mythos, and he discovered a glaring flaw in his bootleg copy of Oblivion.

Oblivion surely had some schema to ensure the Spirit popped out in the reception area every time, which in Oblivion’s case was a disk of grass inside a short stone wall under a pure blue sky, but Michael hadn’t thought of the possible ramifications of dunking the spirit in the Otherfabric. As far as the Other was concerned, everything was equal distance from everything else. “Distance” and “travel” were just conveniences of the mind.

No big deal, he had thought. Simply set up his own reception area, In his case a mattress of Bermuda grass under the day side of his Realmstation, and tell his Spirit, “this is where you’ll end up.”

But, again, the gap behind him, and before him,

The glass surface of a dancefloor, half built, fully empty, electrified gaseous nebulae floating above, dead still.

A vast space of mirrors and portals which connected twin points all about the room, the jagged scars of some kind of laser gun still smoldering like they had been cut yesterday, but he knew, somehow…

And once, a hushed alcove of the Allclub, the speakers playing One Love by Electric Universe, the glass floor miles above the more active throng, his booth so dark no one would have noticed him appearing there, had anyone been there at all.

And so on.

Whatever. So be it. The god damned thing could spit him out into Hardworld traffic every time if it would only give him back an ounce of his severed memories.

He was certain it would. Every bit of his exhaustive research, his meditation, his fucking common sense, told him that the complete submerging of his awareness in the Otherfabric, the even momentary reset enough to let in memories that were, he hoped, constantly clamoring to get in, but stopped by some block. So what the fuck was happening?

Upon close analysis of his own memory, he felt he had found the issue.

Just before he reached the pivotal moment, an animal fear of death gripped him, a fear that the memories he had would be lost trying to find the ones he had not, that his Spirit would dissolve into the Otherfabric and he would never return. That the fucking thing would really kill him. Even the ghostly little light that he was at the final moments, apparently, really wanted to live.

So today, as he prepared to hop again into that colorless hole, he told himself, almost scoldingly, that he would have to accept death as a possibility, and as a preferable outcome to living as half a person forever.

“My memories are more valuable than my life.”

This paradoxical statement brought on a whimper from that animal part of him which clung to life like a kid to a toy, so he tried again.

“Better to die trying to be free than to live forever in these shackles they have put on my very soul!”

It was more of a threat, a demand, a panicked shriek with a gun to the hostage's head, than the philosophical revelation he had hoped. And still, the thing fucking whimpered.

Fuck it.

He jumped in.