Falling, for you

Hardworlding hadn’t been her idea, really. Poppy had dragged her along the first time. The idea was they would both get enough money to buy a character creation pass to Arthel, which unlike the gun maze wasn’t free unless you signed up to be a “townsperson” or whatever, which is what they had been doing, but at the rate that was going (squirreling away “gold” in a shared player chest hidden under their hut) it would have been months before they were able to play actual characters. So, Poppy came back one day talking about the Hardworlds (which Sam had heard as Hardworld™, and assumed it was a resortworld designed to look like the Real or something) and when Poppy started talking about something in that voice, Sam knew she was about to go along for a ride.

The way Poppy explained it, you went and just watched other people try and kill each other and then came back and let some kind of scraper read your mem of what you saw and they handed you money. Since it sounded too good to be true, Sam was extremely skeptical and asked a lot of questions, which, as always, annoyed the shit out of Poppy.

“Why would they pay us to do that? Can’t they just scrape the mem of the guys actually playing?”

“Sam, oh my god, I told you like three times it’s not a game, ok?”

“Pretty sure this is just a scam to let them scrape our mem and sell it.”

“It’s a legit org, Sam. You’ll see when you get there. They wouldn’t risk their rep to scam us. Our mem isn’t worth anything anyway.”

“But that guy bought all your sex mem—”

“It wasn’t all of it! It was like the two times I hooked up with my roommate! And why do you always bring that shit up?”

“Are you sure they pay this much?”

“Yes.”

“Why would they if it’s so easy? Seems like they are offering so much to draw us in because they know they’ll never actually—”

“Because it’s dangerous! You can actually feel pain and get trapped—”

“But you said it was easy?”

And so on. Eventually Poppy just got all mopey and said the guy at the place would explain it, which he did, but Sam asked him just as many questions if not more, so his like professional demeanor cracked a bit at the end and he asked her if she wanted the job or not, so by the time she went in the box she was half convinced she was finally about to wake up for real.

Which, she realized, walking into that darkened doorway, was all she had been trying to do for the year or so she had been in this “Other World.” As her Spirit faded for the first time since it had been born, taking a backseat to a third Sam she had never imagined possible, she realized that she had assumed this was all one big nightmare. She had never fit in anywhere, the clubs or groups or even orgies, never had any real friends, even Poppy seemed to hate her, somehow. This realization wasn’t exactly surprising, more like she just hadn’t had time to focus on it, like seeing a little light from your monitor blazing in your eye when you turn off your light for bed, unignorable though you had been staring at it all day, or something like that.

Anyway, turns out they were working for a “data company”, which contracted out to Hardworld teams doing bulk scraping using “sleepers”, in this case Sam and Poppy. At the time, none of it had made sense. She had woken up, gone to work, had a normal day, then right when her dreams that night had been about to get interesting, she was dragged away from her new life and back into the Other, where a multi eyed machine head stripped off her memories like a wet t shirt you couldn’t get your elbows through the right way and ended up having to tear out of, and then she was there in some kind of waiting room/recoup area with Poppy, trying and failing to remember that other her.

It felt very wrong. She couldn’t remember doing anything but now she had more money than ever and some HR lady was pushing her out the door with corporate niceties.

She was certain that they had taken advantage of her, but when the money had been spent on Arthel characters and sim passes, and Poppy was dragging her to another “job”, she still didn’t have any concrete reason why she felt that way, and so she didn’t have any objections to bring up other than,

“I really don’t feel like it.”

“Why not? Didn’t you say it turned out fine last time?”

“I said I didn’t remember anything bad happening.”

“Because it didn’t. You just had like a normal ass day and then woke up. And we got to do all that shit in Arthel. Remember all the things you said you wanted to do with—”

“I don’t really want it that bad. I’m fine with just—

“No you’re not! I know how bad you want it! I want it too! Are you afraid that like, once you get it, it will be disappointing? Like you won’t even, really, um,”

Poppy had done one of her fighting against tears things that looking back, Sam couldn’t believe she had ever taken seriously, and that was it.

The next few jobs had been the same. Just a vague feeling of having been somewhere unpleasant and lots of money. Then one time while inside she, or more accurately her self, had seen a cop car flying by and followed it out of a vague impulse and ended up right next to the action. A stray bullet had hit her radiator and she had spent the four minutes of gunfire crouched down below the steering wheel, but that was really the start of it. When, after a long night of police reports and insurance calls and drinking, she had finally passed out and the Sandman came to get her, he told her the company had a promotion in store if she could stay “in it” while observing.

Poppy filled her in on what that meant. Directed her to some (now, laughable) pieces of advice and instruction on the freed about “keeping your Spirit prime in a Hardworld”, but in the end the company just gave her a call every job to tell her how not real her life was, which the first twenty times or something her Self just brushed off, but eventually, one day.,

It had been horrifying at first. All the warnings of pain and entrapment (delivered at her corporate orientation and mostly ignored then) now blaring in her face, but after a moment, she didn’t give a shit.

The sky was brighter, the wind sweeter, each breath tasted of morning weekend coffee and open possibility. The world, which had always seemed so subtly menacing and had always oozed mockery and doubt the way the inside of a car radiated dull dumb heat in the Texas summer, now was silent, listening, saying “huh?” instead of the annoyed, threatening “What??!” it spoke like a constant tone in the Real. Everything was broke open and welcoming, like the heat had finally cooked it, like the humming tone of anxiety had finally reached the crescendo it had always promised.

Maybe it was because she knew it would all be gone in an instant. A practice world. A disposable life, able to be lived in true freedom because all the pressures and expectations were now thrown around backwards into jokes of themselves.

She cried that first time, the first time she really knew where she was, just got in her car and blared music and screamed and bought the biggest stupidest coffee and told the barista how beautiful she was and—

Then the phone call and the where the fuck are you get your head in the game, and the anxiety came back with the job and the desire to do a good one and with the first flash of gunfire that other her, the one that really did live here thank you bitch, reminded her how important a throwaway world could be.

But anyway, it was addicting, and almost immediately Arthel and the sex sims lost their appeal. She went in every other day, though she wasn’t always lucid. It was like chasing the greatest high of her life. And the money was great. She was showering Poppy in gifts, taking them on all kinds of journey’s (though often her mind wandered) and it felt like she had finally figured out how to exist in this nightmarish inescapable other world.

Then the company had offered her a temp contract for “direct work,” and what had felt like a path to some kind of mild contentment broke in half like a mine cart track in an old game and down she went.

“You would be working directly for the team,” the icy HR-ish lady who handled all her checks and stuff said to her, just before laying out the risks, and baiting the hook with something Sam had never been good at resisting. Praise.

“Your observations are very detailed. And you have a knack for being at the right place at the right time. That’s not really something that can be taught.”

So Sam had started nodding and didn’t stop until her name was on the line and all that. Poppy had already offered her enthusiastic approval. More money. A path to advancement and maybe one day, a year pass to Arthel Royalty level. Maybe even some left over to buy some less fortunate RPers into their dream avatars. Sounded good, but,

“Wont it be more dangerous? I thought they couldn’t shoot at me the other times because I’m like a third party.”

“Your still an observer! You wouldn’t be communicating any intel to the team until after the job is over, so technically you’re not a live scout so you’re still outside the ROE boundaries. This just means your mem is owned directly by the team you’re assigned to.

Poppy was always very good at repeating community consensus and rationale she found on the freed as her own reasoning, but in the end it didn’t matter anyway. Back then, Sam would have done anything to buy Poppy whatever shit she felt she needed, no matter how severe the cost or frivolous the reward. That was, she guessed, just how she was in relationships.

But there was also something else.

The idea of being closer to the action she had till then only watched from a distance, the gunfire and crashes and explosions that had sent her Selfs into an electric state of awareness that had felt like the opposite of, or more likely the final long-awaited purpose of, her constant anxiety, was too much to pass up.

The job itself had started out different immediately. She had woken up with her Self firmly in the driver’s seat, made coffee, stressed about her day, ranted to her cat about texts from her ex, but not even an hour into what had promised to be a normal Saturday, her phone had rang, and a voice on the other end had broken everything apart.

She had described Sam, Poppy, the company’s office in the Allworld, (an office tower that seemed to be made entirely of ground floor lobbies stacked on top of each other) and a few other things, and although she had used carefully vague wording at times (which Sam later found was an attempt to avoid audio scanners that looked for things like “Allworld” or “Hardworlder” to locate combatants), she got the point across and by the time the line went dead, it was the real Sam standing in that kitchen.

Which was strange. Every other time she had gone lucid on a job, (which, now that she thought of it, had only about five or six times, though it had felt like a lot more) it had been in response to a news bulletin or police sirens or something, and it had been fleeting and groggy. But this time, it was like someone had jostled her out of a sleep and there was no fucking way she was going back no matter how much she burrowed under the blanket.

The lady had given her, somewhere in the purring, brain tickling torrent of words, instructions. She was to go to a certain zip code and drive. Hit up drive thrus, park and watch the birds, whatever, but stay in the area and keep moving, and keep her phone on her.

So she spent most of the day driving up and down Royal lane and MacArthur, but trying not to make it obvious that she was driving up and down Royal lane and MacArthur, or lingering in parking lots of places that felt way too rich for her, or taking turns at random, and sometimes stopping at a park or something to eat a meal that she only half tasted because is it even real, and would it even matter if she didn’t eat anything anyway?

And nothing happened. Not even a phone call. So, out of frustration over an unresolved anxiety and failed promises of excitement, she got on 114, pushed her little hatchback down the Fastlane and far over the speed limit, missed her exit and ended up a few miles from the boundary she had been given that morning, flying over one of the largest mixmasters around, looking down at what had once been the old Cowboys stadium.

She had been battered by flashes of a monster truck rally from nearly twenty years before, (her parents, one or both of them, she couldn’t be sure, egging her on to shout and scream, which had never been her thing) trying to decide if had been her Self or that other, distant Sam who had been there, when a noise bounced out of the sliding flat scenery and skipped across the thin towering ramp like something aimed just at her.

A gunshot. Then more of them. Muffled and unidirectional inside the coffee and fast food smelling cab. She smacked her hand down on the window controls and the driver’s side one slid completely open while the others stopped at just cracked. The gunshots came in stronger, but were now broken by the wind and she wondered how she had heard them at all.

Before she was off the ramp, the police scanner gave her a location she tried to hammer into her phone. She gave that up and used the voice function while swerving off the access road.

“Possible gunfire at the University.”

Her mind went racing. The orientation had included some general “hints” on documenting the “action” and what to look for, categorizing “engagements” into two categories;

“Operational” and “Diversionary”, with diversionary either “involved” or “generated”, which meant either a Hardworlder was on site, or one had just “pushed it remotely”.

A shooting at the University might just be a distraction, the kind of “generated diversionary engagement” that was low down on her priority to document, but as she turned a corner, it became very clear that the gunfire was not coming from the university, as the school shooting minded dispatcher might have assumed, but from a cluster of apartments that from the aerial map looked like a handful of dead-end cul-de-sac parking lots. Good place for an ambush. Good place to lose the cops, granted there were no helicopters in the sky.

Her heart raced. That other her screamed. Run get away from it, idiot! The gunshots got automatic. She circled the block, watching every car she passed with a laser focus hoping it would help commit them to memory.

And she realized, suddenly, she had no idea what it was she was meant to be looking for. On the other jobs, the scrapers had taken her memory, no matter how mundane or tangibly related to the job and paid her about the same for it every time. But now, she was in a more important position, wasn’t she? They would want her to actually witness the shootouts, right? But how close is too close? Besides the boilerplate wavers, they had really only given her one piece of direction.

“You are to take no direct or indirect involvement in the activities. Doing so would be grounds for immediate termination and besides that make future employment extremely difficult.”

She hadn’t known at the time just how prophetic that warning had been.

So, she turned into the parking lot of the leasing office and pulled into a spot with a view on the fountain-splashed pond that was sunk in the center of the complex. Black screened windows and balconies and the edges of two other lots faced down on the sputtering little bog, but the shootout itself was still raging in secret. Every time an echo of gunfire cracked across the air or bounced off the water, which was about every other second, she scanned for some sign of the action, muzzle flash or men moving in a low run or anything, but there was only the mundane stillness of an apartment complex submerged in a late Friday evening.

Just as she was considering driving around to one of the other lots, as the screaming other her was pleading her case, her phone rang, and she jumped so high her head banged on the car roof.

“Hello,” she said out loud to no one before she even had it out of the console. Then everything got eerily quiet again, a rare few seconds break in the gunfire, as she stared at her lock screen where a missed call icon sat at the top. It had only rung once. The number was unfamiliar, indistinct beyond the fact that it looked like someone had found the last remaining never-before-used area code.

She set the phone down and scanned the complex some more. Her dash clock rolled over the first minute since she had parked, which had felt like hours, and the little flick of LCD felt like someone scolding her. She analyzed her situation.

It was a hot Texas evening dying rapidly into a damp night, and she had no idea what the fuck she was doing. Wherever the shootout was, she couldn’t see it. Whatever the cause or purpose of the gunplay, she wasn’t informed on it. And whoever it involved, would soon be slinking away into the dark night, if the sirens on the edge of her hearing were any indication.

Time to go get some answers.

Her hand found the gearshift like scratching an itch, but before she could slide it into reverse, there was a strange scraping noise at her passenger door that sent her spinning in her seat, then a soft bonk on the roof.

The door opened, the guy grabbed his coffee off the top of her car, and got in like she was his fucking Uber driver.

He set the coffee in her cupholder, spun his medical mask off on one ear, and chomped down on a cigar with a smile.

“All right little birdie, let's blow this joint,” said Philip.