You look like ants from up here
The orbital looked like a handful of multi-million dollar mansions plucked out of the Hollywood hills and woven together. Wide sweeps of wood plank and glass and metal wrapped around geodesic domes and hovering pools and wide marble balconies cradling seating and strange glittering displays that might have been screens or holograms or something else entirely. The soft antlike movement of the party goers gave it scale, and Gradie guessed it was about the size of Cowboys Stadium.
“God damn it's already bumping,” Nova said.
“Is it gonna be a bunch of Gunmaze dudes like yall or,” Luke asked.
“No, actually,” Angel said. “Barth always makes sure there’s a slight female majority.” He sounded annoyed, and Luke slapped him on the back.
“It’s ok bro. Girls may seem scary, but—”
“I mean because he’s always obsessing over the fucking guest list!” Angel snarled over Nova's laughter. “It’s fucking annoying, which is why we let him plan this shit.”
“Barth wants us coming in the front.” Nova waved his hand at some invisible screen and rolled what Gradie had thought was an early 00’s decorative glass orb on the back-of-the-couch buffet in its mount, and the house spun slightly and floated toward the orbital.
“Can we please not land in this thing?” Angel said.
“We’ll make an entrance early and get all the introductions out of the way at once, then—”
Angel cut Nova off.
“Let Barth introduce us if he gives a fuck! Seriously bro, please. I didn’t even want to go—”
“All right, fine god damn!”
The House stopped still and Nova pointed a tv remote at the orbital. A beacon on the top flashed like a mirror signaling a lost hiker, and he pointed again at what would have been the door to the garage from the kitchen. It beeped like someone had deactivated the security system.
“Think I wanna go to this fucking thing? We’re doing this shit for Barth.”
“Back door?” Angel asked softly.
“Front coat closet, so I can tell him we technically came in the front. Ok? So please don’t fucking sulk down there for me bro. Seriously.”
“Yall hate this guy, or—” Luke asked.
“No,” Angel sighed. “Barths fine. I just hate these parties. Bunch of dick riders.”
Nova shot him a glare then cracked open the door.
They stepped out into a marble hallway, and at first, Gradie thought it was just another recreation of a “normal” house. The glossy hall stretched under recessed lighting, a slight smell of cigar smoke floated over a carefully applied floral scent, and the closet door creaked closed with a mundane snap behind them, but the longer he looked, the farther from real it felt, like the whole place was slowly sliding away from its origin point somewhere in the Real toward a nonsensical center of the Other.
The marble floor reflected, subtly, not only their wavering reflections, but bright sky and clouds and even the shadowy outline of an olive tree, as if the house was sinking halfway into a vacant section of ancient Greek ruins. Ambient music, a lo-fi white noise, didn’t just echo off the floor and walls as it had seemed at first, but bled from them. And while the gravity was firm and commanding, the longer they stood still, the more he noticed a slight wavering in its direction, just enough to communicate that they were in fact still in orbit. And most subtle of all, the radiating presence of the place seemed as if it was, somehow, asking them to move along.
“Welcome, wonder twins and guests,” a crisp female voice said from the ceiling. “Barth requests your presence in his study. Your friends can make themselves at home.”
“What the fuck did she just say?” Luke turned on them slowly with a wild look in his eyes, like a man who had found a machine gun in the break room during a particularly bad day at work.
“Dude, please, I’m begging you,” Nova said. “Do not fucking mention that shit to the team. Barth got it in his head we should use it as a gimmick—”
“And the fucked up thing is it actually works,” Angel sighed. “Our last client asked if our “telepathic connection”—” (Here, Angel actually did air quotes) “– is what helped us work together so well.”
“Like everyone doesn’t have a tele connection in the fucking Other,” Nova groaned.
For some reason, Gradie had never really thought about the fact that the twins were actually twins in the Real. He had never heard anyone mention their family members in the Other, and had assumed that everyone he met was kind of born into the Other alone and isolated, but thinking about the twins…
“So do people usually avoid their family in the Other? I’ve never seen—”
“Oh fuck yeah dude,” Nova said. “Especially like parents and spouses and shit. Most people view this place as imaginary debauchery land. They don’t want their family seeing that shit.”
“What, you afraid yo mamma gonna crash the party?” Luke nudged him. Gradie realized that he had just naturally assumed his family was incapable of existing in this world, which he now understood was a remnant of his original belief that this world was all in his head, and if it wasn’t…
The twins led the group down the main entryway and through an archway formed by a sweeping double staircase. Streamer like iridescent silks draped down and brushed them as they stepped into the central Hall, which to Gradie felt like a nightclub, parlor, fine dining restaurant, and opera intermission area all rolled into one.
The vaulted ceiling held half globes of glass that amplified starlight or opened, in classic Otherworld style, onto skies that were an infinite distance away. The wrap around second level catwalk was packed with recessed nooks, and the third level was all glass and pillars opening onto what must have been the rooftop decks. There were circular lounge couches in sunken slots all across the floor, which was surrounded by walls of shelves and displays and booth seating. At the far wall, the space opened onto a bar/restaurant/dance hall in one corner, a sunroom-like patio in the other (where dappled water reflected light flashed on the ceiling, bouncing off some pool out of sight), and a warm orange and gold carpeted hallway in the center that looked like it led to some candlelit memory.
Of all the people peppering the open spaces and alcoves and even some sitting on what looked like a chandelier, no one even glanced at the four of them as they walked across the floor.
“Well this was pointless,” Angel said as they approached the central hallway, where a doorman Gradie hadn’t noticed (like he had blended into the warm light in his velvet uniform and polished wood stare) nodded to the twins.
“We gotta go talk to Barth,” Nova said on the comms. “Yall two hang out. It’s free game on everything.”
Luke smiled at Gradie.
“Sick. Lets hit the bar.”
Gradie glanced at the curved L stretching out towards a distant windowed wall where rave lights and some kind of mist rolled over gyrating silhouettes, and got a pang of annoyance remembering his first time in the Allclub.
“Uh, I’ll uh meet you there. Im gonna like, look around for a bit. See if…” He trailed off as Luke stared at him.
“Shit, I see how it is. Think Ill scare off all the bitches. Well go get 'em killer.”
Luke had on aviator shades and a mouth tattoo that muddled his smile, and Gradie couldn’t be sure if he was hurt, but he turned and bounced toward the bar in typical Luke “nothing in this world can hurt me” fashion, and Gradie reminded himself that Michael had probably commanded the three of them to cart him around anyway, so there was a good chance Luke was glad to be rid of him.
Now that he was alone at the center of the swirling festivities, Gradie felt eyes on him for the first time. He stomped off in no direction in particular, besides towards the silent edges of the party which he hoped would close behind him like a screen, but he found every alcove occupied, every shadowed nook rustling with muddled conversation, like the house was constantly shredding the voices into white noise for all but their intended audience.
Eventually, he found his way into an external hallway that wrapped around the central atrium, where soft false birdsong and echoed streamsound floated across the marble. A floor to ceiling window in the wall revealed a forest courtyard where more people huddled and laughed while fireflies the size of baseballs bobbed up and down.
Finally alone, he let the thoughts that had been pressing under his mind flow out and consume him.
The Dragon segment, the eclipse orbs forming in his hand, the bright orb forming in his hand on the rooftop that first day with Michael, his fear, his wonder, his flights around the ball, the twins finding him next to an immobile craft, the sound of Nuke’s voice and the two of them hiding under machinegun fire, a warehouse shaking to bits by machinegun fire, Sam…
“Have you ever actually felt what another human being feels?”
Were her memories out there somewhere? Could he buy them, touch them, see her from the inside? A new desire pulled at him at the thought, and a memory,
“This world gets its claws in you just like the other one.”
Would it be like that, seeing her from the inside? Just another frantic desire met disappointingly? Another failed promise in a world that seemed to be made of promise and nothing else?
Two people, walking with purpose, as if to malign the enforced gravity with each step, turned into the hallway and moved towards him. He turned on his heel and kicked off across the marble.
The hallway broke open into other peripheral zones that zipped past him; an indoor outdoor library, like the roof had caved in and the books had sprouted page-leafed vines, lit by torchlight, a Roman-style outdoor theater made of color-changing fabric seats oriented around a dozen screens floating in the sky, showing various feeds from what must have been Gunmaze.
By the time he took the next turn in the square pathed hall, his steps had become automatic, and his thoughts had returned to Sam.
The rain pouring, the takeout steaming, her eyes shining, her voice bouncing, fragments of hazy Hardworld memory that he tried to grab and hold as he walked, like trying to grab reflected mirror light on a wall. His mind flew after them with such painful purpose that he was sure all his efforts in Gunmaze and the clubhouse had been to distract himself, like a chained dog pushing harder on the choke, and now, in a flash, he got to the meat of it.
The kiss in the office, the memory in parts as distant as Hardworld mem, blending into those other Sams and Gradies, perhaps because so much of it was comprised of pure feeling; bitter loss and panicked fear and then hot melting desire and finally cold chest puncturing longing plunged into warm faced shame, feelings that, besides the dulled embarrassment and numb longing, now existed only as faded ghosts at the edge of memory.
But the distance was partially his own doing. How much of his anguished obsessive time in the clubhouse afterward had been a weak attempt to purge himself of the fear that had spawned that embarrassing moment? To prove to himself that nothing in the Hardworlds, not even death, was permanent? To reclaim that electric sensation that in the Hardworlds, nothing could touch him?
Would he ever get that feeling back? Was it the fear of loss that had taken it from him, or the ego wound of the embarrassment? And was it worth it, ultimately, to feel invincible, if even a kiss could kill?
