You have to be crazy but it won’t fucking help
As her mind skipped off the smooth surface of those early memories, the sandstorm cleared into a blazing sunset/sunrise on the horizon. Her’s was the only bike in sight, but she wasn’t sure if it was another solo segment or if, somehow, she was just so far ahead of the rest of them. It didn’t feel like a solo segment, she hadn’t noticed any blatant (which they always were) transitions, but she also didn’t see how she could be last, the only other option.
A quick mental touch of the scoreboard would tell her, instantly, if she really was in first.
But the sun was blinding, and the notion to do so became just another one of many thoughts among the stream of memories, like fan blown dust illuminated in a light shaft, passing by her as she barreled towards her ultimate, inevitable memory, which she now knew was unavoidable.
But before that, she thought of Strike Team Sixty-Seven™.
It had been the first time she had ever really felt useful since she had first touched the Other. Really needed.
“Get me to the God damned loop without attracting an attention. The D has as many scouts as they can fucking buy.”
And she would do it. And it was simple. And Philip would acknowledge her in his subdued way that despite being much different from Poppy’s torrent of praise, always felt honest. Could always be trusted.
And she had found out things about herself that she probably never would have discovered floating around the God damned Other. Like how she could shoot someone in the face, in the right circumstances, and not even realize it till afterward.
Which was a shock. She always had trouble imagining herself being violent. Never had violent thoughts about anyone. Once, a boyfriend had offhandedly mentioned smashing someone’s face in like it was the most natural thing in the world, and she had called him a psycho, and he had protested that the other guy was a piece of shit, and what was she on his side or something, and that had devolved into a fight in which, like she often did, she tried to find the right combination of words to quench his anger, but in which they also came to an understanding, like a joint discovery in a lab, that most people thought about punching someone at least once a day at work, but Sam’s brain was completely devoid of even mildly violent fantasies.
The thing was, once another person started shooting at her friends, her muscles seemed to react on their own. The first time, some guy had gotten a bead on the car from across the lot, crouched down behind the concrete base of a light pole, aiming his short AK at Philip, who was on the other side of the vehicle dealing with the four members of the guy’s team. Sam had been down in the driver’s seat, and before she realized what was happening, she had the door opened and was letting loose with her MP5K pulled tight on its chest strap, push-pulling against the recoil like it was just another day in training, and the guy dropped dead.
Philip had taken her out to some weird bar that served root beer floats with whiskey shots in them and shaken his head and laughed the whole ride over. In training, she had aced the targets (at least once she had learned to push a self that had gotten used to wearing contacts) but every time Philip charged at her she was slow on the trigger and his chalk rounds hit her in the chest before she had gotten up the gall to fire. They had kind of given up on it by her start date, with Philip saying only “we’ll see how you do when the shit hits”, in a tone more concerned than she was used to hearing, but despite that, on the day of her first kill he had said “I fucking knew it!” about twenty times.
She saw his face in the bar light. She tasted the root beer and vanilla sugar and Makers Mark. She could feel the Hardworlds all around her, preserved in memory, and felt the fake bike race world wrapped around her like a blanket that had gotten under you in the night so that you pull on it and your own weight keeps it from moving. She wanted them so bad, but the throttle wouldn’t go any farther, so she pushed her memories to the next points they always stuck on, Philip’s “addiction” and her breakdown.
“He’s addicted to the Hardworlds. Never comes to the Other unless he has to, bitching the whole time,” Domino had told her one day. She asked Philip the next time she saw him, pretending it had been prompted by a crack he made about her playing princess in Arthel.
“Why do you hate the Other so much?”
“You’re giving that place too much importance. Better question is why do I love the Hardworlds so much. Ask that instead.”
So she did. And he had said about the most philosophical, new age thing she had ever heard come out of his mouth, so unlike him that she thought he was joking at first, and had to stop herself from making a jibe about him sounding like a mindfulness wine mom.
“In the Hardworlds, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, your “Real’ self is muffled. And when you don’t have to worry about being the Real you every god damned moment, you can just be you.”
Now, on a rushing world no more real than a silkscreen scenery flowing behind some Hollywood actor’s immobile car, she thought of the her in the Hardworlds who had asked that question and heard that answer, and of all the other hers who had thought of it, and wondered, once again,
“Ok, but who is me?”
Her thoughts lingered on the Sam with the nervous stomach who had dropped in that first day with ST67.
There were five of them, including her. Philip, Domino, Luke, and Catrino. Fucking Catrino.
Her first team training, in that abandoned housing project, Domino had been sitting there smoking a thin cigar and drinking espresso outside the open door of an apartment furnished like it should be on top of some Manhattan skyrise.
“Morning Flip. And how are you doing mam? Glad to have you on our little team.”
Domino was something Sam had not encountered in a Hardworlder. A gentleman. She couldn’t remember him cussing, cracking a crude joke, or even getting a little angry (outside a few very memorable incidents), and if anyone else did, he would just sit there, calmly, as if he couldn’t hear them, and respond as if they had spoken just as softly as he did.
Once, Philip had mentioned for the hundredth time that Domino would make a better shooter than Overlord, and Dom just stared out at the smeared grey morning and said,
“I’m not trying to be known as a shooter again.”
“Afraid you ain’t got it anymore,” Philip said more than asked.
Dom of course had ignored this in his fashion and continued,
“If you want to get good at something you gotta act like you ain’t got anything else going on.”
He was tall, slim, all salt and pepper but creased more than wrinkled and “dark as a tire” (as in, “Now I may be dark as a tire, fellas, but I’m pretty sure I don’t turn invisible in the dark, especially when these goggle wearing larperators (Luke must have taught him that word) come knocking, so if one of yall could swing by the van…”). He always wore suits that looked meant for the south of France, with colorful pocket scarfs and bespoke watches in shades of coral or moss or some other tone Sam never saw outside of like a moodboard, which Philip ribbed him about.
“Got all dressed up just to sit in that van?”
“Just cause I used to work in finance doesn’t mean I gotta dress like it.”
“You step out to take a piss and the whole metroplex will notice.”
“Yeah, I’m that guy Flip. Just be sure to make some hay while all eyes are on me.”
He also had dominoes engraved on his double stack .45’s grip and could shoot groups the size of one from 100 yards away. He carried a Mossberg pump that he fired about as fast as Sam could squeeze off pistol rounds (one day, he showed her how to work the action and pull the trigger at almost the same time), and a weird looking subgun (a Sites Spectre also in .45, with a 50 round mag and a custom suppressor, customized folding stock, and some minor tweaks to the selector and of course custom grips) that he was absolutely lethal with (judging by the aftermath of that one time the other side tapped their net and put a squad on his van) and which Luke called his “Golden Eye gun”.
And it had been him, unexpectedly, that comforted her when the “reality” of what they did smacked her in the face.
“No! No no no no fuckin wait wait—”
Then Luke had got the new mag in and that was it. Sam had thrown up while Luke was still getting his drop kit out. He shook his head at her.
“Girl, I told you that place looked sketch.”
Sam had gotten the crispiest filets she had ever had from Long John Silvers, but Luke had shaken his head the entire time.”
“I didn’t even know these places still existed.”
In the Other, she had asked Philip what the guy did, and he had gotten uncharacteristically annoyed.
“Got his ass put on our god damn contract, that’s what he did, and that should be good enough. We aren’t the god damn justice league. You start picking your jobs based on what the client claims they did, the whole system falls apart.”
“What system?”
“What system? The system you work for. The only real justice in this loony toon land. Hardworlding. If everyone only hits targets that are fucking “evil”” (here he actually used air quotes). “Pretty soon no one has any recourse unless the fucking morality police think somebody committed a sin. And any mother fucker who gets labelled a sinner, maybe just cause he don’t kiss ass or play nice, gets fucked out of his only method of recourse. So we don’t ask what they did. Only where they are.”
“But then don’t we just only go after people who piss of rich people? If someone gets like attacked, but they don’t have any money to hire anybody—”
“That’s a fucking Other problem. Ninety nine point nine nine percent of the “crimes” ” (again, air quotes) “that get committed in the Other never involve the Hardworlders. And we don’t just take a job cause it pays. Lots of jobs we’ve done pro bono just to get our name out there. Happens all the time. It’s a self regulating system, but you start trying to steer it, it gets fucked.”
“If it’s so great of a system, why can’t it handle me only going after guys I think deserve it?”
“Oh it can, and it does. All that will end up happening is you spin out chasing your tail trying to tell good from bad, but the system carries on.”
“Then why do you care—”
“Because I’m not about to let you spin the fuck out and take me with you.”
They conversation had died off either there or sometime later without Sam feeling anything close to satisfied, so she had found Dom, lounging in the offices break room, watching the stream of some Craft forge production line, and asked him what the screaming guy (whose face she couldn’t even remember because this time Philip had only given her a heavily edited version of the job mem) had done.
“Tricked some newborns into spilling their guts about some childhood trauma and shit. Kids still thought they were dreaming so that goes against the stature. Then the mother fucker sold the mem on the dark pools, either cause it was already so fucked up or because he had a weaver craft it into some sick shit, so that’s a double whammy right there.”
Sam had gotten quiet and then Dom had looked over at her and got some kind of realization he didn’t like because he sighed and sat up straight like a dad who had to look away from the game to explain some life lesson to his kid.
“Look, they ain’t always like that, in fact it’s very rare that they are, but we can’t start playing mr. fucking morals cause we might be wrong, and they don’t tell us shit anyway. It’s not all us either, you know. We catch em and they get a trial with the Saviors or a mediator or on a stream or something. And don’t let old boy bullshit you. He won’t take any job defending pedos or catching Gunmaze cheaters or any of that shit. He just don’t want you thinking you can do this shit like superman or Jesus or something.”
Then, after a pause, she had asked (her head still full of Poppy’s lore dumps),
“So, was this guy like a Demon? Since he took mem from—”
“Hell no,” His face had gone dark, and he had looked back at the stream, where a craft that moved like the seething bubbles of a lava lamp mixed with some kind of deep sea octopus was being built.
“That words got a meaning, and a weight. Just so you know. Makes it hard to throw it around once you seen the real thing.”
Then after a pause, shaking his head at the stream.
“This things ugly as fuck.”
Damn. She missed Domi.
But some of the team she didn’t even have a chance to miss.
