90’s industrial metal training montage
Every day in the Hardworlds felt like starting over, until he got the hang of priming memories that withstood the sudden ice-bath shock of dropping in. The trick was to let the self have a hand in its own creation. Lindsey’s advice to build off of an “anchor” was deeper than he had realized. Once the genesis of an identity emerged, it grew on its own, and he learned to simply guide this process, rather than force it towards focal points of memory as he had done his first time in the Vault.
Of course if he was too hands off, the self would ignore the Spirit altogether and develop into a dead-end office worker with only a cursory knowledge of any kind of violence. Philip had warned him,
“In the Hardworlds, the self tends towards the mundane, the expected.”
It was a tug of war, but if he struck the right balance, the self grew around whatever abilities he fed it (SERE, shooting, a general situational awareness sharpened by decades in a bad neighborhood), in a way that made them less likely to come out half-baked.
He also learned to preserve his memories from the day’s training, in a rough, blurry, shredded-daydream kind of form, in his memory room, by tying them to objects pinned to a calendar. The bottle of pills from the first day, car keys for the sedan he had crashed, a broken piece of a drone, and so on. Nova popped in once to remind him that Lucy could preserve the memories in near perfection, but Gradie, of course, declined.
Eventually, his Selfs woke up better trained, better experienced, and better formed. Of course, the progress was incremental, and painfully slow compared to the balls-wallsing pace Philip set with his Hardworlder boot camp.
Back in the clubhouse, Gradie cleared rooms till his brain melted down to pure reflex, practiced identifying hiding spaces, bombs, stashes, and signs that someone had been home and how recently, prepared mcmansions for an assault (EP’s drones and Luke standing in for a full attack team), and hid from EP’s infrared, thermal, night-vision drones, or at least learned how not to hide from them.
Sam gave him a live lesson in offensive and defensive driving by pit maneuvering his speeding sedan off the road, t-boning him as he came down the clubhouse main street, losing him in a dense neighborhood with leaning front yards the size of area rugs and streets like slightly bloated sidewalks. Finally, in a grand finale, he chased her across town in a pursuit that ended with all available units and two police choppers. He found her truck in a parking garage, empty besides a smiley-faced sticky note stuck to the driver's side headrest, just as the state troopers stormed up the stairs.
That was another thing. Every training session was capped off by a run from the cops. Sometimes multiple times a day. At least twice he ended the night in a cell with officer Luke watching him over a whiskey and coffee. It was really the only constant of the training.
Philip’s metric of success, Gradie realized, wasn’t how well he overcame any particular task thrown at him, but how solidly he had primed his Self. Just when he had gotten the hang of priming good twitch accuracy or physical stamina or something, Philip would whip the game around and strike at another aspect of the job Gradie had forgotten about. It was truly a test of spirit.
Hardworlding seemed to be a constant wrestling with the Spirit, a struggle to get it to give up its knowledge in a world it ultimately didn’t trust. Often the self got in the way, and he spent too much time wrestling an opponent he should really just ignore, while the other, the almighty Spirit, stood forgotten, tapping its foot or something.
While the training was grueling on its own, the ever devious Hardworlders-of-old had also found a way to make it never-ending.
In the Hardworlds, time marched at a merciless rhythm completely opposed to the fluttering frolic of the Otherworld, where “hours” could sneak by as unnoticed as neutrinos. Gradie’s training stressed each second to its limit, but one particular trick revealed another aspect of the strange duality of worlds that he either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t thought about; The unified passage of time.
Though in the Otherworld time was essentially irrelevant, especially on the Allworld with its frozen sun and landmark time-zones, it was not outside of it. The Vault contained a clock, which the Twins revealed to him with deep reverence, despite its simple form of a red digital face in a black plastic orb that made Gradie think of a giant magic-8-ball. He didn’t understand the significance, until he dropped in and found that it had been telling the exact time of the Hardworlds.
If he dropped out of the Vault at noon Hardworld time, (central, in the case of the clubhouse) his Self would jolt awake sometime after 12. The real trick, however, was that if he dropped in at night, into a self that had not spent the day running from attackers and cops in a disused housing development, but had instead rolled out of bed around five pm or something, he could essentially spend 24 hours of every day in the Hardworlds training, rotating out one beaten and broken vessel for a fresh one.
Which he did, because many of the lessons had trouble sticking. Just when he least expected, his gun training, or escape processes or even his fucking ability to work a manual transmission, failed him. Philip had some unhelpful, though probably accurate, observations.
“You're trying too hard.”
“Stop overthinking. Jesus, I can see your little brain getting all bound up. It’s exhausting to watch.”
“Stop trying to be smart. Let the self be smart. The Spirit is supposed to be dumb and wise.”
One lesson, however, was shockingly simple to grasp, but impossible to come to terms with. Every time he looked death in the face, (real death, not chalk rounds and firework bombs), he was sure it was real. When the cops drew on him as he came out of the Clubhouse with his gun still in hand. When Sam swiped his car into the oncoming lane just as a semi barrelled off the exit. When he lost his footing on the third-story roof trying to get a shot. Each time he was sure that everything beyond the self was a daydream gone rogue, and his death would be the end of existence.
“It gets easier after you get killed a few times,” Luke told him once, while pulling into the back of the jail. How he knew Gradie had been thinking about it was beyond him, but the words were less than comforting. Despite the close calls, Gradie hadn’t even died once, and while a part of his mind was eager to learn what dying in a Hardworld felt like, it was a small and powerless part. The rest of him learned to just not think about it.
The only interruptions came from Michael. Every so often, he would stop Gradie in the office and tell him to take a break and go explore the Otherworld. He even offered to let him borrow one of his crafts. Gradie assured him he would take him up on that offer just as soon as this lesson was done, and said the same thing or some variation of it every time Michael told him to go “recharge” or “relax” in the Other.
It wasn’t happening. Gradie dropped out of the Dreamworlds (usually Luke’s, but one time he had gone with EP, although on his own raft that got blasted by her bass boat wake if he got too close) and headed straight for the Vault to iron out whatever deficiency had caused him the most trouble.
It was all a shaky form of progress, but day by day, his Spirit grew into its role as his new dominant identity, and he felt a rising confidence sprouting out of every failure.
One day, around the end of the second week, he had barely gotten his earbuds in and stepped out the door of his apartment when a call came in. It was Philip.
“Meet me at that yuppie-ass coffee place down the street.”
“Which one?”
“Jesus fuck. Why do you always drop into the most obnoxious areas?”
They got it straightened out, and Gradie pulled into the lot of a sloping high-end strip mall under manicured oaks and towering condos. Philip came out of the yuppie-ass coffee place with a drink carrier and a paper bag in hand and walked up to Gradie’s window. He set the drinks on the roof of the car and tapped on the glass. Gradie rolled the window down and smelled bacon-croissant.
“Did you get me any—”
Philip pointed two fingers at Gradie’s face and dropped his thumb like a hammer.
“Bang. You’re dead.”
“What?”
“You got a weapon on you?”
“No. I haven’t been to the clubhouse yet.”
“Oh, so the only guns in this state are at the clubhouse?”
“Uh,”
“Unlock the doors. I wanna see how you drive.”
Philip got in the passenger seat and Gradie put it in reverse. Philip stopped him.
“Wait.” He motioned towards the back window. Gradie barely had time to turn around before Lindsey got in the back seat.
“Bang,” she said, unenthusiastically.
“All this training and you still can't see the pale punisher coming at you from a block away,” Philip sighed. He handed Lindsey a croissant and a coffee and tore into a kolache. Gradie saw something still pouring oil into the bag, turning it translucent.
“Yes, I got you something,” Philip said. “The faster you get to the clubhouse the faster you get to eat.”
Gradie sped towards the highway and Philips Kolache evaporated.
“Lesson number one,” he continued. “And a golden rule, since the dawn of time. Get a weapon as soon as possible, and keep one on you at all times.”
“Always prime your self as a gun owner,” Lindsey added. “It’s so obvious we forgot to tell you, I guess.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Philip chuckled. “I don’t know if you’ve realized, kid, but this job entails a bit of violence from time to time.”
“It’s also good to have a quick way back, if things get grim.” Lindsey said. “Nothing like being trapped in a burning car—”
“Or getting tortured—” Gradie gripped the wheel as scenarios exploded in his head.
“What?” Philip snapped, and Gradie sensed his reaction wasn’t caused by general hungry annoyance. He tried to explain.
“Like If another Hardworlder catches me, and wants to—”
“If they do, they’ll be hiding in a Hardworld themselves pretty fucking soon. Its as close to an iron code as we’ve got. Hardworlders don’t fucking torture, don’t take hostages. None of that shit.”
“Michael told me to be ready to get tortured—” Gradie said, but he had already guessed the truth by the look on Philip's face.
“—But I guess he lied.” He was getting sick of stumbling over some truth Michael had bent or shattered.
“I wouldn’t say that,” said Lindsey. “He needed to know that you went into this with no illusions. And he’s right. There is every chance that one day you find yourself on the bad side of a sick Spirit.”
“Get around this guy,” Philip said. “What is this speed limit shit?”
“Are we doing a police chase already?” Gradie snapped.
“You should see the cops long before they see you,” Philip said. “If you don’t know how to speed, you can’t even be called a Texan. Fuck a Hardworlder.”
“Speaking of speeding,” Lindsey said. “At some point today, I’m going to go away, and you're going to have to find me.”
Gradie let his brain go wild thinking about what that might mean for a bit, then decided to just ask.
“How?”
Philip laughed. “That’s what you need to figure out. We’re not gonna be there to tell you ‘how’ when—”
His phone went off.
“Pull over.”
Gradie took the exit and realized he hadn’t heard EP in his ears yet. He wondered if she had the day off, and his mind wandered over guesses at what EP and Sam and Celeste did in a world of dreams when left to their own devices, until Philip brought him out of it.
“Park there.” It was an empty lot for a drive-thru plastered with for-lease signs, just beyond the alluvial zone of the highway. Gradie barely had the car in park before Philip was getting out, a lit cigar suddenly in his mouth.
“Ok, yeah. Be right there.” He hung up. Lindsey sighed and dug through her purse. Philip came around to the driver’s side window and Gradie rolled it down. Philip blew smoke in with a smile.
“A message from another world.” He dropped his phone on the ground and got something out of an inner pocket of his jacket.
“Our next job just got confirmed. Michael wants us all in for a briefing within the hour.”
He handed Gradie a small plastic bag, like the ones you get after a dentist visit, that now felt like an old friend. Knockout kit. Propofol and a syringe ready to rock. Gradie guessed those near-magic pills he had taken at the gas station were outside Philip’s ability. Must be something out of Michael’s bag of tricks.
“Let's see if you can get back on your own this time.” Philip got his own kit out and walked over to a rusted outdoor table next to the barren restaurant. Lindsey was already out, lips parted, dozing in a delicate way that made Gradie sure the Spirit had left the building.
So, he was left alone, wondering if he really had it in him to make the trip by himself.
