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—”

“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.

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—”

“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 façade 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!”