Press 1 to replay this memory, 2 to save, 7 to delete
Michael stood on a shimmering floor, a facet of a chunk of black glass the size of a small town, its bladed, pointed end stretching down and away into cloudy darkness. The rest of his vision was clogged with things he couldn’t immediately identify and was in no rush to. His thoughts were still snagged on the ringing voice in his head. Echoes of a message that must have come in the snap-second of emptiness now drifting behind him. A voice not unfamiliar, though unrecognized. Words that he had taken, at first echo, for a found memory, but the more they rang in his head, the more certain he was that they had been spoken just moments ago.
“They are listening. He is lying.”
He reached out in memory for the fleeting familiarity of that voice, pressed his mind out into the open air until the almost-there sensation reached a torturous peak, then his effort collapsed like a half-exhale sputtered out after a stretch of breath holding, a rushed clearing of the lungs just before the desperate gasping inhale.
There was only the memory of the voice and the words. He had to remind himself to be grateful for even that, but,
It’s not a memory, is it? Someone spoke to me. Someone used my spiritual near-suicide to tell me… what? That someone is listening? That someone is a liar? Why not tell me the void is black while they’re at it?
Frustrated, annoyed, and drenched in the unique violated feeling of having survived near death from his own hands, he looked around, and what he had taken for another obscure or forgotten dance club, became something more.
What he had thought extended for yards stretched for miles. Things that seemed close enough to touch were immeasurably distant. Objects he had waved off as décor were massive and dense, and terrifyingly so. This was not, as he had assumed upon a cursory glance, a so called “picnic zone”, a wasted refuse area where some Spirit had tried his hand at making deep in the unprinced void of the Otherworld then moved on once tired of dreamworld pastiche. There was malice in its making.
The lights were stars and spotlights and the warm glow of reflected sun severed from its source, and not a single glimmer was unscathed by darkness. Distance had been fucked with. Lenses of warped space. Holes that floated in midair, their open gateways to some space a thousand miles away passing paradoxically in front of everything in between. A quarter dome of darkness was broken open, revealing its shimmering mirror interior like a geode, its fragments frozen around it in various stages of turning from glass to, inexplicably, swarms of dead butterflies. Great stretched sheaths of land, urban plains and grass fields and oceans, frozen in the blurred smear they had been created in, as if viewed while passing with incredible speed. Those who had made it all came alive in his mind. He could see them lifting a foot and side stepping across lightyears in an instant. He could see them, throwing continents at each other, dodging them, slicing them into these blurred shards, a hundred others lost flying out into the black.
He was standing at the edge of a battlefield, his glass platform slowly orbiting around its circumference, light and shadow sliding off a million mirror surfaces, thousands of portals and tears and voids. Here great Spirits, true Dreamlords, had fought each other with the Otherfabric itself, woven into barriers, pathways, deceptions, and revelations. Wrapped it around themselves like armor and pierced it with unimaginable focus and belief.
But the most terrible weapon they had forged here could never be seen. It was the dreamknowledge that spoke directly to the enemy’s Spirit, whispering that the flesh was real and burning, lacerated, peeled, that the bones were shattering to dust, that death was just beyond the passing moment. The blades that sliced the mind. The dark powers of the Otherworld, now so hidden, now so unspoken, and so forgotten.
It must have been the First Demon War. During the Second, as he knew, painfully, the Demons made almost immediately for the Hardworlds, and there were no great Spirit duels in the dark. This was a remnant decades old. But the glass was still razor-sharp, the light still blinding, the fires in the distant still sure to burn his flesh forever. Though all was still and silent. His pedestal set in its rotation as some kind of sentinel. Someone had wanted this place preserved, observed, remembered.
And there it was. A sudden light at the edge. A star hammered into shape. Its rays frozen, stabbing out into the dark. It’s twinkle slowed and steadied into a heartbeat pulse. Then it turned, slightly, and he saw it was a double, like a cell halfway through mitosis. A cruiser. Its soft light, like the blue glow of an underwater reactor but oscillating through every hue, reflected off the battlefield, bringing it all, briefly, back to life.
“For those who never returned.”
They had said, once, during a memorial festival. Someone had scoffed, near him.
“They’re so full of shit. The only ones that didn’t come back got tired of playing fucking space priest. Pure propaganda. Only the Saviors have tasted death in this world, plebs! Better hand over your tithes!”
Michael wasn’t sure. About any of it. He couldn’t even remember who it was who had spoken so familiarly to him then. But they must have been close. He couldn’t even begin to see their face.
Who’s to say, in a world where memories can be cut out like dead flesh, if some really did never return? Maybe they were still out there now, in some Demon box, their minds even more confused than his.
The dual-star ship flared into a blinding flash and his glass platform lit up in a spotlight. There was no beam. Nothing between them glared. As if the photons teleported straight to him. The ship itself constantly morphing now, reminding him of a deep-sea comb jellyfish, changing shape and brightness so that it was impossible to identify its distance or size. A flare the size of an apple right in front of his face. A real star lightyears away. And everything in between.
Shit.
There was probably nothing “illegal” about being here, but just in case.
He closed his eyes and tried to summon the inside of his craft. Recalled its wood and tobacco and slight floral scent. Its lush carpet. The soft ambient hum he had fine-tuned for deep relaxation.
But the battlefield was either too distracting or some ancient anti-teleport enchantment had subtly stretched across the entire space.
The Savior craft still watched him. It hadn’t moved, but he knew that when it did, it would be instant.
Have to try something else.
He kicked open a trap door in the glass at his feet. Lucky. His dreamsense told him nearly everything else in the space was non-morphable, covered in layers of enchantments dense enough to keep the Saviors themselves at bay. The observation platform must have been added later.
Through the trapdoor, he fell into a dark chute, then got rocked around as the slide went every direction at nearly the speed of sound, before finally spitting him out in the Allcity, nightside.
He flicked on his nightvision sunglasses just in time to see the chute opening, a public randomizer, disappear off the face of the tower. Jesus. They had been right behind him and patched a command into the Allworld Prince as fast as he could look at it. God damned council cops.
He flipped again and it hit him like a wave. The Allcity spoke and breathed and whispered, but did so respectfully, at a distance, allowing him his boundaries. It made him realize just how lethal and unsheathed and close that battlefield had been. The shimmering surfaces had been silent, but every neuron of his dreamsense knew their stares held pain.
With a cold shiver down his spine, he closed his eyes, imagined his craft, and felt the warm cozy air of its interior. When he opened his eyes, he was there.
Just how and where he had left it. Out the nearest window, the twilight line of the Allworld sparkled. A pleasure craft of some kind, shaped like a giant beehived Cream Saver and dripping rainbow hued water that stood in bubble pools across its surface, passed in orbit, its textured surface dotted with antlike flecks of naked skin. Something about it struck him as dangerous, probably because he had just left a space where, once, even exposing your general location could mean an eternity of torment.
He preemptively waved the nav system to take his craft to the team’s office tower, and stepped over to the comm station where his answering machine, a black plastic model circa about 2002, blinked a depressingly double-digit number in red LCD. He had been unable to resist the temptation to check his messages when in his realm or anywhere else, so had surgically confined that mechanism of his comms to this isolated nook in his craft.
The oval shaped interior held a conversation pit and bar in front of one massive viewport on one pointed end, and his office and memstation at the other. There was an L shaped desk next to the entrance door, which stood alongside a stone mulched rectangle of reeds shading a slab of frosted glass, which let him see the silhouettes of any visitors waiting in the foyer. No one had been in that way in over a year. The Desk was a remnant of his time as a consultant, and he recalled Lucy sitting there, cigarette smoke pooling under her fedora, waiting for a client, shooting him a look that said, “Am I playing this part correctly, you cheesy motherfucker?”. Time really did march on.
The rest of the interior matched the weeb-noir-detective vibe, as Lucy put it. Paper screens went up at will for privacy or just to hide portions from the sight of clients. Banzai trees, lacquer fixtures, mid-century “oriental” style horizontal wood beams and rock gardens and even a small koi pond. Now they met all their clients at the office or in that drafty tower on the HQ.
“People associate private eyes with mishaps and sexism,” Klara had said bluntly. Still, maybe one day…
He sat in the high-backed chair, summoned a bottle of Mexican Coke, straight from some deep chest freezer, and got to work on the messages. There were the spam messages, fake offers and missed Allclub connections scams. Then the advertisements, which he actually let play a bit, just to get a feel for the current zeitgeist of the Other, what kind of sims and services the new generation was drawn to, or at least being sold.
Then once he had cleaned the inbox up a bit, he went back and listened fully to the ones set aside. Mem auction notices. Lots he had won and others lost. He marked them down and shot pick up instructions to the twins, along with a third reminder to be available tomorrow for a meeting. They would have to be dropping in more. Their contract stipulated no engagement, but with the way Angel had been poring over the old Hardworlder archives, Michael was sure he could get them to alter their terms.
The contract messages came next. Some declined. Some interested parties looking for a meeting (they were told to call Klara, but some never did. As if talking to the “actual Hardworlder” of the team would get them a fucking discount or something) others from obvious competition looking to data mine for pricing info. He routed some to Klara for follow up and deleted the others.
The last two messages stood blinking, and he decided to get the one out of the way to savor the other.
The first message was from “Matt”, the hardest to track down, but most suspiciously well informed of Michael’s “deep corps” contacts, people he brokered for information regarding the less widely broadcast aspects of the current Hardworlder economy. Matt, in particular, had a singular line of inquiry, and took a fee which, while ample, had been suspiciously non-negotiated, being Michael’s first counter-offer. Lucy didn’t trust him.
“He knows,” she had said pointedly, brows down. Well, he probably did. But such a thing was unavoidable in certain cases.
“If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be much use,” Michael had said. Lucy had stayed quiet for a bit, then said only,
“You know how I feel about it. You know what I will allow.”
And so he did.
Matt’s message indicated he had returned from a month-long foray into the ‘uncharted’ areas of the Other, in his case, Dreamlord manors and Hardworld “takeovers”, or at least so Michael suspected. A month was on the shorter end as far as Matt’s sojourns went, but he always came back exceedingly well informed.
“I’ve left the instructions as an attachment. Prepare for a few hours at least.”
And that was it. He found the attachment routed to his membox and set it aside in his mapping software, then deleted the message and moved on to the final voicemail, staring out the window, sunk into the chair with a sigh, and the last of the Coke carefully reserved for this occasion.
“This is Darla Dream with the H W U, inviting you to this year’s Hardworlder’s Ball.”
He recalled, vividly, his dad, sitting in his office at home, turned three quarters in his chair to face Michael, who stood in the doorway. He was closer to the seven foot side of six than Michael ever would be, his over 350 pound form spread atop an ancient faded blue office chair with an accordion spine that Michael’s brother always said was built by NASA (a joke that had flown so far over young Mike’s head that it had turned into a source of pride, his dad knowing astronauts and all) with one elbow on his pressed wood desk, making the workstation look like it had been produced by Fisher Price.
Michael had finished pleading for permission to go to A-kon the same weekend as a family trip to Canton.
“You shoulda told me earlier.”
Michael pointed out that he had just learned the thing existed last week, that the family trip to see the grandparents was sprung on them a few days ago, that he had been acing the shit out of his grades (besides Speech, which was bullshit anyway), and then sarcastically mentioned that since the Con happened every year, should he ask to go to next year’s event now or was that not early enough?
His dad had laughed, which pissed Michael off more than the slow repeating himself his dad usually pulled, and then dad had actually apologized.
“I’m sorry Michael. I’m not mocking your plight. At my age, the word “next year” doesn’t have any sting to it. You’ll understand when you get up there.”
The memory stung. In all worlds, his father was dead. And though he could lecture Gradie or Celeste about the “equidistance” of the Spirit from all our potential lives, and the un-supremacy of the Real, well,
But anyway, Dad had been right. Had it really been a fucking year already?
Darla Dream gave the exact date, time, and location, this year an Orbital over the Allclub side. Last year had been one over the burbs and the year before had been the big fake FEMA camp, right? Michael was old enough to remember when they had tried hosting the thing in the Hardworlds themselves, until the violence got too much and they had to move it to a place where you couldn’t just shoot someone out of the party if you didn’t like them. Luckily, the Gods had made the move and billed it as a vacation from the Hardworlds, a chance to reflect on them from a distance with the calm eye of the Spirit.
“It is intentional my man. They paid some retards to shoot up the place, and now they got us all in the Other where every word is recordable. This party is a data miner’s fucking dream.”
Michale paused the message as the memory drifted to stillness in his head. He couldn’t place the voice, but it wasn’t exactly unfamiliar.
“They are watching. He is lying.”
The voices melded in his mind, but he couldn’t be sure, as ever, if it was just a trick of memory or a clue.
After half a minute of silence with the two memories, one distant and hazy and textured in noise, one fresh and in the pure tones of Otherspeech, the words stilled and he accepted that whatever secrets they held, he wasn’t getting any today.
He slapped the play button on the machine and scowled in his chair.
“And a special reminder, this year’s shindig marks the ten-year anniversary of the end of the second war.”
Oh shit. Speaking of time flying. What Darla Dream didn’t mention was that it also marked the ten year anniversary of the founding of the Hardworlder’s Union, or more specifically its transition from a hangout club turned wartime coalition to a permanent institution and member of the Allworld council, which from then on would be known as the Nine Worlds.
No, you wouldn’t mention that Darla. Too much bad blood. There had been a near riot when it came out a few years ago that the HWU was involved in the awards ceremony. Now the Constellation and Obsidian suits sat quietly at the back or sent representatives, and the Big Ball Committee made sure the party was funded mostly by non-Union orgs, with only a randomized drop box to accept outside donations.
This year was going to be fucked.
But the ten-year meant something else. It meant it had now been a year since he founded Liquid Light, and three years since…
And what did he have to show for it?
A wonderful god damned team that you sure as fuck don’t deserve, asshole.
Which reminded him.
