A gentle giant and a date with destiny
Later, she had received an apology in “writing” (a “physical” transcript accompanying mem of his verbal apology as recorded by the team’s third party mediator, which she had tried to let float off into the black, but due to the sensitive nature of it vis-à-vis the team, it had blinked red and vanished, leaving a little slip that advised her it was now on file at the mediation company’s HQ and she could pick up a copy whenever she needed.
Despite the corporate wet-noodleness of the official apology, Philip’s response was a little more heavy-handed.
“You’ll never see that fucker again, but Dom won’t let the son of a bitch go. Wants to put him on a final or some shit.”
Philip threatened to leave and take his people (Luke and her, which gave her a warm fuzzy feeling to be honest) with him, so the new agreement was that Cat was on a separate flank team with some other new hire, and he was not to communicate with Sam in anyway, his team’s only contact with Philip’s people being through Dom.
She had always wondered how much her thing with Catrino had to do with the eventual dissolution of the team, and as that and other still unresolved questions swirled in her head like, had Catrino actually liked her or even wanted to fuck her, or had he just done it all as a way to get back at Philip and Luke, knowing how pissed they would be if Sam actually started dating him, she let her thoughts settle on something more concrete.
And there was nothing more concrete than Luke, who as she recalled had a less severe reaction to the events.
“I thought you were gay!”
“What?”
“I mean, cause of the hair,” he had said in a softened tone, as if assuming she would be offended by being called gay, which maybe should have pissed her off, but the actual concern indicated by his attempted justification was just too genuine to allow her to stay mad at him, though she did pretend.
“Fuck you!”
“My bad girl! Shit, to be honest, I didn’t think Philip would bring a straight girl into the mix with me and Kitty boy running around.”
“Oh, so bisexuals don’t exist?”
“Hell yeah they do! They’re my favorite!”
“Will you shut the fuck up?” Philip had snapped.
It had been a few awkward weeks, maybe even a month, of ST67 operating as a bisected unit, until someone, Philip or Domi, pulled the plug.
“Team’s splitting up,” Philip told them like he was letting them know about a low tire.
“Damn, we really gonna be lightweight now,” Luke said.
“Plan was to shop us out to some other teams, but—”
“Us?” Sam had asked, nervous.
“The three musketeers, right?” Luke asked.
“You see anybody else?” Philp had looked around the Waffle House, dead as 2am could be.
“Anyway, yall obviously can go your separate ways if you would prefer, but—”
“Yeah, maybe I’ll go work for Catrino,” Luke said dryly.
“I can go if you want,” Sam said.
“Do you want?” Philip had snapped.
“No. But it’s my fault we’re getting kicked out right? So—”
“We’re not getting kicked out. Don’t say that shit again. It’s a mutual parting of the ways, and anyway it ain’t about you. I got an offer from another team.”
“Big corp?” Luke asked, and Sam still wasn’t sure all this time later if he had been excited or disappointed at the prospect.
“Fuck you, No. It’s a guy who used to run some serious jobs back in my day. Been out for a while, and now he’s back trying to do the whole soldier to CEO thing.”
“What’s he like?” Sam asked.
“What’s he pay?” smiled Luke.
“He’s as good of a Hardworlder as you’ll ever likely to meet, or at least he was. Yall are too fresh to know it, but this is a skill that goes dry real fast if it’s not used.”
“Uh huh,” Luke said slowly. “So how much—”
“I meant like, leadership style, personality wise,” Sam said.
“You mean is he an asshole?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s a big fucking teddy bear, which is half his problem. He knows just about everything there is to know about the game, but he’s never been in charge before. This is our golden opportunity to get paid by someone we can easily manipulate.” Philip smiled.
“Golden opportunity,” Luke repeated. “So we talking like—”
“I thought he was your friend?” Sam scowled.
“Fuck no, I said I remember him from way back. And don’t look at me like that! He knows I’m gonna put him through the fucking paces, but he knows I’m, we’re, worth it. It’ll be good for him anyway. His current team kinda has him by the balls.”
“What are they like?” Sam had felt the prickly fear of new people rising up her back, and so fresh from Catrino it had extra bite.
“There’s three of them. All girls.” He glared at Luke, but it didn’t matter.
“Interesting!” Luke grinned and leaned back. “So, he’s got himself like a harem.
“Shut the fuck up!” Philip and Sam said together.
“The only way they’re fucking him is on payroll,” Philip hissed. “And you know my rule on that shit. Save it for the sluts in the—”
“Hey!” Sam had shrieked.
“Sorry! God dammit!” Philip had winced and rolled his head in his hand, while Luke crossed his arms and mocked offense.
“I can’t believe you would say such a thing. Those girls are—”
“Shut the fuck up!” again, together.
“And anyway, I did some digging on his girls, uh, his team, and one of them is a fucking ringer of an Overlord, and the other one cut her teeth crashing for Failure Cascade’s black unit, and it was only up from there, so—”
“And what about the third one?”
“She’s off limits,” Philip Glared.
“Ok. So he’s like a nice guy who loves strong women, right?” Sam asked.
“Don’t get any ideas,” Philip smiled.
“I’m not!”
“How. Much. Does. He. Pay.?” Luke said, leaning across the table.
Philip could hardly contain his grin.
“A lot.”
Luke had whooped, they had celebrated, and Sam had been a nervous wreck until a few hours later when Michael met her in the office, the Allcity glittering below in what she had to admit was one of the best views of it she had ever seen, and dissolved her worry like sugar in warm, sunbrewed tea.
“So, what brought you into Hardworlding?”
“Uh,”
She had tried to explain, and realized as she rambled, that she had about as much understanding of what she was trying to say as the person she was speaking to, which happened a lot, but he never interrupted her, only asked her to expand, to squeeze more detail out, or even slowed her thinking with a slow clarification, “so it was like…”, and in the end she found out just as much about the answers to his questions as he did.
If that makes any sense. But that’s what it was like.
“I ask everyone this. It’s my favorite question. I know it sounds cheesy, but really try and answer it. What are you looking for in the Other?” (She had told him she had no idea, and that she thought it didn’t really matter cause it wasn’t like she could leave the fucking place, and he had smiled like she had solved a riddle.)
“What is it about Hardworlding that makes you feel so empowered, you think?”
“So hurting people is what you’re the most scared of, even more than letting people down?”
His questions were given as spontaneous responses to her admissions, with genuine interest. It had seemed natural, but looking back, the discussion had always returned to Hardworlding, which indicated a level of control she hadn’t noticed.
And while Philip spoke of Hardworlding in reverent terms, he had always seemed to describe it as a profession, like just honest work, and while he took it seriously, Sam got the impression he felt that if it was taken too seriously, handled with too much awe and concern, it would lose its meaning altogether, like a tool or weapon kept in a display case, never used and thus disrespected.
Michael, however, spoke of Hardworlding like a Crusade. Something that would grant an unnamable reward, a movement towards some ultimate enlightenment, maybe. A calling that didn’t so much elevate the callee to a higher status (as she had always gotten the impression Philp felt) as demanded something of them, like an off duty nurse on an accident scene, or maybe more like the guy who happened to have the only working cell phone after a plane crash.
She had thought him insane, the idea that dropping into un-real-real-lives and killing some line cook so he could go back and face judgement by a floating holographic committee for the severe crime of conning a dreamworld casino gambling addict (she had still been kind of waffling on the whole “we support a delicate system/someone’s gotta do it” position on Hardworlding that Philip and Domi had presented) could be some kind of humanitarian pursuit was fucking ridiculous, until he hit her with the mantra of his religion.
“Have you ever considered the possibility that the Hardworlds are real?”
Ok. So he was insane.
But a few more Socratic questions in, she had her doubts. Turned out, she had gotten so used to the idea that the Hardworlds seemed real, and that that apparent reality was a lie to be avoided at all cost lest you get sucked into them and trapped like a fly in honey until some cute reaper came and shot you out, that she (and apparently most of the other Hardworlders she had talked to) had never really considered the possibility that the lie was so enticing because it was actually the truth.
“But I remember my Real life.”
“Couldn’t they both be Real?”
“How can I have two real lives?”
“Not two. Infinite. The same way you have an infinite number of selves. Maybe “you” aren’t the you in the Real, or the you in Hardworld X Y Z. What if “you” are just the act of looking through the other “you”s. Like sunlight reflected through fragments of multi-colored glass,” He had moved his hands in the air in a struggling way that mirrored the awkwardness of the metaphor. “The little shape of purple or green light isn’t the sun, right? Or how the TV picture isn’t the transmission, and some sets render it black and white, others in full color or HD.”
“But I go to the Real everyday whether I want to or not.”
“Maybe that’s due to the limitations of human existence. We need an identity to anchor to. But what if the Hardworlds are some other you’s Real.”
“Ok, so if they’re real, so what?”
“Then so are the people in them,” he had said, darkly.
Oh. Shit.
He had gone on to explain how he wanted to take jobs and do them without “collateral” (a word she had never heard applied to the Hardworlds and that Philip repeated with acid mockery), and that he would pay them a higher rate for their “difficulties”.
Luke and Philip had laughed, later, as they all discussed the “weirdo cult briefing”, but Sam had felt something else. She hadn’t believed him, or not believed him, really, the question of Hardworld Reality was so far away from her intellect it might as well be one of those giant chalkboard equations in the movies, but she had believed in his sincerity. Michael thought they were real, and it hurt him, obviously, to think about the innocent very real people getting gunned down in traffic or at the grocery store because some entity broke a rule in a dimension they could never know of or comprehend. And no one else (besides a few members of a religion she found out about later, basically none of whom were actually Hardworlders, much less Hardworlders of Michael’s ability) believed him. He was surrounded by guys like Philip and Luke who would mock him or other guys who would go out of their way to kill bystanders just to fuck with him.
So basically, she felt sorry for him, and more importantly, she felt that she could actually do something to help him.
But maybe it was even more than that. Maybe it was also that he was, as far as she could tell, being completely honest. Everyone in the Other lived behind a screen, even Philip, despite his protests to the contrary, though his mask was more a matter of withholding than faking anything. Michael was the first person to be completely open to her. And not just the kind of “say anything that’s in my head right now because I think I’m dreaming” shit that every denizen of the Other had run into at least once, but actual “here is what I am about down to the nub” honesty.
Though he wasn’t the last open person she would meet. No. But his honesty was different from Michael’s. He would lie. He would play things off. He would fake anger or apathy or even deafness to avoid conflict when he felt like it, but there was something else. While most people’s feelings were hazy to her to the point she often wondered if she was some kind of sociopath, when she looked in his eyes, when he really spoke to her, undistracted (which was rarely, of course), she could feel him in a way that she had never—
NO! WE ARE NOT GOING TO THINK ABOUT THAT!
But the thoughts came anyway.
