Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
The first things to fall away were the sensations, sight, sound, ghostly itches, the unnamable feeling of skin, the rigid silence of bone, the slight tug of hair and dry tensity of the eyes. He imagined the fabric of the Other as a syrupy liquid into which his flesh would be not only submerged but also dissolved as it was finally convinced that it and the Otherfabric were the same substance, indivisible, water into the pond, his mind suspended above, relieved, lotuslike.
Then the present thoughts swirled into a cocoon occupying the same space and role as the body that had fallen away. A restraint. A distraction. A tomb. The thoughts were numerous, varied, swarming. His Real mem, that other him and the day he had generated like a wake behind a boat, joys and pains and dull sucking wants, server rooms and tickets, rushed meals and unsent texts. His Other mem, contracts and bargaining and the team and the constant aching guilt.
They were dispersed by his focus upon a single image, a bird in flight, shadows of branches and the dull haze of an overcast morning rushing below it like rocket exhaust, combusting into the dull groan of the Other, echoing as Ohm in his Spirit. Some days it was a sparrow, others a heron, today it was a finch, small and swift, and like always, it caught fire and burned into nothing as it flew, and its sideways trajectory, which spun Michael like a merry-go-round, became a fall, a decent, its withering form became a diminishing falling stone, then only the fall itself, the feeling, leaving the vision clean, empty.
But the deeper memories were a harder fight. Who he was. Who he had been. That he was at all. And the dull thoughtless guilt, undiminished by the loss of its origin, a wound frozen and uncompressed. It would have been easy, relatively, to look away from these, to let them fall away from awareness. That kind of meditation he had conquered quickly. But it was not enough. Not why he was here. Would never bring him to truth. He needed to sever his awareness from them not by ignoring, but through focus, burning them to nothing with the force of his gaze. Coming out through the ashes of their destruction into the lush growth of his true memories.
But the incision through which they had removed his memories had not been a simple wound. There had been graft work, his own mind sliced and spun and sutured into place around the void, trained with his own natural mental process to resist re-opening. Like a specialized knot of un-memory, the more he pushed his awareness into it, probing and prodding, the more densely it constricted into a Gordian imperviability. He had realized the nature of their work too late. Had been too young and angry and stupid. His blind frustrated struggling had served only to train their schema on how best to deflect his inquiries.
“Mem is copied or lost, but never stolen.” He had said it before, heard it a million times, in the context of intellectual property, a declaration of rebellion against the system of copyrights and fines and hidden watermarks and tags that the powers of the Other tried to use to prove and preserve ownership of mem. The same powers that would, as punishment, as a rightful and just sentence, declare the memory in his head too dangerous for public good. The irony.
He hoped, miserably at times, that the one projection of power would ultimately prove just as impotent as the other.
But his own early fumbling had set him back, and when after years of failing to undo what, in part, he himself had done, a bolt from the black, that unexpected message, had found him still picking at the broken pieces of who he was, he had gotten desperate, and unable to confide his task or its struggles to even Lucy, had gone searching for any kind of advantage, a crowbar of the mind, a brute force access method, or even, at this point, a fucking wad of C4 to shove in the keyhole.
Then he found the Oblivion Machine.
His early fumblings had not been entirely fruitless. He had learned what not to do. The way forward, this time, was not through. It was almost certainly up and out. Removing himself from himself, like amputating a trapped limb, severing himself from everything, stepping back so far he came back around like God damned Pac Man through a door, was the only thing it could be. The only method he had not tried, because such a method was, ironically, a very tricky thing for someone who discarded selfs like spent shell casings and put on another like changing clothes. A Hardworlder’s paradox. A fitting sentence. A perfect lock to a custom made manacle.
But if he could only replace one Self not with another, but with the Other itself, he was sure the shackles would shatter. To submerge his Spirit completely into the liquid mesh of the Otherworld and use its infinite power to remember what his mind believed he had never even forgotten as it had never known, that was his last Hail Mary.
The Oblivion Machine had revealed itself to him suddenly, unexpectedly, in his quest to turn off his mind completely, to reset. He had found a mention, not even an advertisement, of a sim called simply “oblivion”, stylized on the sign with a curving underline drawing from the center of one o to the other. The user had complained that he had sat in the ‘tank’ and nothing had happened, and that when he emerged fully pissed off and demanded a refund, the owner had handed him his money back with interest “for his time” with a smile. Other commenters had expressed desire to find the place and thus make some easy cash by sitting in a tank, but no one could locate it, and the ultimate conclusion was that the OP was full of shit.
Michael had found the place rather easily. One of his legitimate data feeds pulled from the registrar of businesses on the ball. A simple search, and there it was.
“-oblivion: Registrar number 00199803161018 (Which indicated a pre Demon registration. Amazing.) Type: Simulation. Subtype: Existential, Therapeutic, Religious(other). Founder: Karl Lingpa. Owner: Karl Lingpa. Ownership type: Private. Funding/Operation type: Charity.”
There was no address. Oldschool to the bone.
So finding it was a simple task. Too simple for the aforementioned commenters or OP. Too time-consuming for the modern speed of the ball, with its teleporters and custom doors. But Michael was getting old. He flew out into the swarm, without his craft, and thought,
“Oblivion.”
After about ten minutes of flight, a light flashed off a doorknob, and he descended to a fire escape jutting out of a fractal tower that was at least twenty buildings in one, appearing and vanishing by the second.
It was nostalgic. So much of the ball had locked up over the past few decades, and he spent so much time moving from one fixed location to another for business, that it was easy to forget that most of the Allworld was in flux, as they say, shifting and rolling with the combined shockwaves and ripples of billions of intentions, and that fixed addresses, coded into the prince for a price, were actually in a minority.
In through the simple push door and down an echoing hallway that reminded him of a North East housing project. Echoes of shouts and coughs from people who may have only existed in the sourced mem used to build the place. A doorway. Bead curtain. New age tapestries and carpet (draped across the linoleum floor). Double wooden door thrown open, red drying-blood-colored carved wood. Smoky incensed room, walls lined with mummies with sunken grey faces and dusty robes sitting cross-legged in clay-packed recesses, cord-wrapped pillars stretching to a square skylight in the stone terraced roof, blue sky that promised carrion birds to eat your corpse, red silk hanging and mandala tapestries and the jingle of windchimes. At the end of it all, a smiling man behind a cashier’s desk.
Michael had played the part of a skeptical, irreverent shit who was only there to mock.
“So what are you selling? Shaolin monk sim? Semen retention for years until the Mormon missionary comes along?”
The faux monk behind the counter only smiled further, and rattled off a spiel that made Michael suspect he was talking to a phantom.
“We are selling the one and only death, and here is the only place in the Other where you can find it.”
“So, what, you shut me away in a box somewhere and tell all my friends I died for realsies?”
“No. After death, you may return to your previously scheduled programming.”
Of course. The whole place had a Timothy Leary brand of spirituality vibe to it.
“How much to kill me?”
“No killing. Only death.”
“How fucking much?”
A price, an exorbitant amount. Michael respected the balls, real sim or not. He took the guy’s card and left.
By that time, Liquid Light had already been registered, Klara was mulling over his offer, and a promising young lookout named Polena had caught Lucy’s eye. Going in the sim himself was a no-go. He had a myriad of defensive enchantments on his Spirit, eyes and contacts in every data broker of black white or grey variety, and enough money to drop the fucking hammer on anyone who scraped him, and not to mention the fact that Oblivion was a card carrying member of the Allworld premier business bureau, which meant auditors up the fucking ass, but should anyone get their hands on even the most mundane scrap of Michaels mem and put 2 and two together, all the penalties in the world wouldn’t make a fuck.
So he hired a sim surfer behind about five intermediaries, had him jack into Oblivion and scraped the resulting mem down to the bone and went to work on it in his Realm.
It was a task that Lucy probably could have done in an afternoon, but Lucy was still snuggly under the impression that he had resolved to patiently await the gradual return of his memory, which she believed was inevitable.
“It’ll come back on its own. It’s already started to. The worst thing you can do is rush it. You’ll end up tainting it or putting something else in its place.”
It was quite aggravating, being told exactly what you would have told someone else in your position. But she wasn’t aware, didn’t understand the urgency. He would have been content to wait too, well, almost content, if not for…
And he shouldn’t have told her about the memory flash! Now she had that to throw in his face. Look, see, it’s coming back on its own!
It had hitched a ride with about half a day’s worth of Hardworld mem, like gold in the pan, and as the silt and pebbles of the day drifted away, pushed back by the Spirit, it remained, shining, apart from the shadows of the Self.
“Those maniacs?”
An explosion. A view from the backseat of an armored SUV. A figure strolling out, drenched in ammo and frag grenades.
The faces had been, for the first time, clear and bright, though hazy like a memory long forgotten. It didn’t matter. Even in the dim dust of time and disuse, they glowed like the smooth faces of cement sidewalk squares under the high Texas sun, every dimple and ripple and crease visible in the contrast.
He wept, of course. It had been his first time seeing them in over ten years, but that’s not what it felt like. Without the memory of them, it felt like seeing them for the first time, and paradoxically, seeing them again after a soul rending absence, one that felt more like 100 years than ten. It was the kind of revelation one could only experience in the Other. To feel the years of love vibrating just below the mind at the sight of them, but because of the merciless incision, to also feel like all the times together were not behind, but ahead, waiting, just about to begin…
But they didn’t. The memory stilled, like a corpse jostled in transport, and though he stared and gasped and waited for more, that was it. The faces faded again to hazy imperceptibility, the moment became just another withered stump of time. And he was left just close enough to where he had started to know that a forward motion was possible but totally beyond his grasp.
He had known, of course, the facts. They couldn’t take those out, or more likely, didn’t want to. He had friends, here were their names, here’s what you did together in the format of a short encyclopedic statement, the dates, the job entries on the boards, what happened to cut it all short, and what came after.
But the memory was gone, and the worst part was he hadn’t even realized, fully, what he had been missing, until that moment.
But that’s a lie, wasn’t it? Not the first memory to return, really. No. That had come from an unexpected contact, a short brief message, left on his comm machine, a warning and a plea all in one.
It had started with a clearing of the throat, then a pause as the speaker realized with shame what they had just done, and that the unnecessary sound, which betrayed their own confusion as to the state of their self in this world, would be preserved forever now.
But the words that followed held oceans of confidence and a good deal of familiarity.
“Well, you’ve really let yourself go, huh? Did you really fall for all that bullshit they shoved inside your big fucking melon head? Which, by the way, saw your hair. You’ve finally grown it out. Told you so! But you’ve styled it all wrong, so now you’ve just gone from Curly to Moe, you stooge motherfucker.”
Another pause, another physical breath filled sound Michael couldn’t place, something between a gasp, a sigh, and a choking sob, but the voice that followed was dry as fresh ash, clear as glass rinsed in alcohol, cold as frozen steel.
“You’ve got to sharpen your sword. I’ll be out soon.”
And that was it. The memories that poured out of the voice, bubbled up like a tapped oil well, glittered like freshly broken window glass in the bright sun, though distorted like trying to look through the tunnel vision of a concussion, were full of love and hate and guilt and longing and whatever nameless sour feeling only came from a deep betrayal, like the sibling of shame, remorse, and disgust.
They jostled for dominance, and just before Love and longing had a chance to fully stand on the toppled mound of the others, Michael had plucked anger out of the pile and gave it a crown and a microphone.
He hated being fucking threatened, and that last bit had definitely been a threat.
Sharpen my sword? I’ll blow your fucking head off.
