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—”
“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.
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—”
“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—”
“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.
