Were you there when the spiritual war went hot?
Gradie brought his feet together on the carpet and let the sharp new edges of the surroundings break through the swirling cloud of his thoughts. In order to avoid a large group of people, he had taken a flight of stairs up a level, and having moved through another kind of parlor space where couches and a self-serve bar promised long waits for the opening of a dark wood double door which looked professionally closed, he now found himself in a sort of art gallery occupying the entire length of a long hallway. Muffled sounds of the party murmured in through a curtained double doorway which led out to the catwalk ringing the main hall.
The first display, just to his left, caught his eye and spoke to him, in a literal sense. It had been made with an effect that Gradie had seen often in the Other, usually in Allworld advertisements. The object was silent and still while ignored, but the moment his (usually absent minded) attention found it, it moved and spoke and slid little bits of dreamknowledge to him like a kid passing notes in class, his higher cognition like a distracted teacher taking in the spectacle. The display spoke to him in the format of an awards plaque, providing the words before he had noticed the square of text.
Polyclitus Award – Best amateur contribution June, 1999
Waterglass hall, The Lost Dancer
Bartoth the Chronomancer
It was a flowing hallway with walls of molten mirror. A half-naked woman with cropped hair and an ass that just barely fit her frame bounced and pirouetted and disappeared and reappeared, reflections and distortions of her tanned form scattering across the wavy surfaces, some of which moved in slow motion while others zipped off at double speed. The gist of it, which Gradie absorbed in about two seconds thanks to the easy contextual communication of the display, was that the user chases the dancer through a massive palace, trying to catch them before the emperor’s guards do, with a choice to run off with the dancer or turn them over to the emperor, each ending almost certainly resulting in some kind of dreamworld fuckfest.
The display half submerged Gradie within the scenario, the hallway jumping off the pedestal and flowing past him, and he knew instantly that if he wanted, he could sink inside and chase the dancer to his heart’s, or something else’s, content.
When he ignored that, the display settled into something more like stillness, and reminded him that he could follow a link to learn more via the Feed, (or the freed as Michael had called it when, shortly after the coin job, he had tried to force Gradie to access it and go through the orientation. Of course, Gradie had scrolled and skimmed and skipped off to the clubhouse, gaining nothing from the experience beyond a mild surprise that the Other needed something as mundane as an internet analog)
Ignoring the link, he moved on to the next piece.
The displays seemed to catalogue Barth’s rise through some kind of Otherworld art scene. His contributions became larger, the award names sounding more and more prestigious, the displays themselves more in depth and the creations more expansive, but none of that interested Gradie as much as what they implied, an entire community of artists, out there in the black, shaping the Other, with enough pull that one of their members employed the twins, who though they had access to the team’s massive vault of memory, seemed firmly under his authority. It felt like walking in someone else’s dream, ironically, and he absolutely hated it.
His steps quickened and he turned a corner, preparing to let his thoughts drift back to Sam or join Luke at the bar, when another display caught his eye.
2018 Flytrap Award Nominee, Best Progressive Segment
Sisyphus’ Solution
Bartoth, Lead Designer
Angel Tchaicovsky, Assistant Designer
Nova Mahadeva, Assistant Maker
It was a Gunmaze segment, apparently made for the “Hero’s Chambers”, some kind of single player option/community forge. In the game, the player plays as Sammy Sisyphus, which is just the player with a grey suit and tie hung baggily over their normal Sprit attire, and progresses by moving a stone, about the size of a marble, through various quasi-mundane scenarios, (the stone was left somewhere at the grocery store, or is heard clattering inside Sammy’s sedan engine, even stuck in the third round of a cop’s magazine) and though the player always possesses the stone in the middle of the segments (which seemed to be randomized somehow out of pre-built components) each segment begins and ends with the stone out of your possession, in such a way that it chained into the next iteration, no matter the order. The player racks up a score based on time and ingenuity (which awards solutions based on how many times the sim has seen other users do the same thing).
The twins’ names, blazoned so boldly on the plaque, seemed to be silently scolding him. He had always thought of the twins as kind of peripheral support staff, like a nascar pit crew or the guys who hand jousters a new lance, but out here they were minor celebrities, and now that he thought about it, even in the Hardworlds, what had he done? Clinched two jobs, barely, after days of fuck ups? The twins might have been involved with every job Liquid Light had taken on, so even in the Hardworlds they were bigger players than Gradie, technically.
“What am I doing here? Could I ever do something that anyone gave a shit about? Or will I end up in whatever the Otherworld equivalent of a call center is?
“He saw potential in you,”
he heard Philip say, but somehow, the idea that someone thought he could be good at anything here, made it even worse. It seemed not only was he destined to be nothing, but his nothingness would now be a disappointment to more than just himself.
Trying to shake his own bullshit off, he skipped to the next display, and choked on his own laugh.
2019 X Award Winner - Best Erotic Solo Sim
The Commandant’s Cuckhold
Bartoth, Lead Designer
The twins’ names were thankfully absent from the credits, and Gradie hurried past before the display could reveal the more intimate details.
But the next display stopped him dead, and like a sudden gunshot, threw off his moping thoughts by activating some kind of primal awareness.
2021 Tinitus Award winner – Best Historic Sim
Battle of Texas Stadium
Qualifying Contribution – Assault of the Budget Inn
Angel Tchaicovsky, Lead Mem Assembler
Nova Mahadeva, Senior Mem Assembler
The liquid screen floating over the podium displayed a bullet scarred and fire kissed clay colored motel with muzzle flash blazing in the windows and semis and box trucks parked in front of the downstairs doors and windows. In the distance, on a smoky blue horizon like a mountain sculpted by a mad god, the white roof of Texas Stadium glared over the highway, black smoke from multiple parking lot fires streaming by.
A few paragraphs of blurb etched into the plaque, which Gradie knew he could play in his head if he wanted, detailed the history of the event, which in the sim was seen through the eyes of a select group of the battle’s participants. Though the faces and voices were obscured, the Hardworlder names were emblazoned on the plaque. Gammaneed…Slabmonster…Kriss Kold…
The screen shifted as he read the blurb.
The Assault of Budget Inn was a peripheral battle to the larger conflict at Texas stadium, where the coalition forces headed by Constellation engaged the last remnants of Sigma Squadron, themselves the last remaining members of the Luminary Legion, a major Demon band founded allegedly by Agony-Piper.
Gradie paused, his mind reeling. His perception of Demons shifted from shadowy dark figures, incorporeal and drifting through the black sky like ghosts, to those of flesh and blood. No shit. Of course, in the Hardworlds, the Demons were just Hardworlders, which meant in the Other…
Somehow, the way Michael and the rest had spoken of them, Gradie had just assumed there was something innately different about the Demons, whatever quality allowed them to disrupt the stable order of the Otherworld, but now Gradie came to the slow realization that the Demons were just people. So then was every criminal a Demon? No. The people they went after certainly weren’t Demons. In fact, everyone spoke like it was a plain fact that the Demons were long gone. So what were they? How do you get rid of an entire kind of person?
The questions faded and withered in their own directionlessness, and his mind was drawn to the next line of substance.
The defeat of Sigma marked the first real victory of the fledgling Union since Angelfall and was a major turning point of the Second Hardworld War.
He read the sentence again, until he realized what about it disturbed him.
I don’t know what the Hardworlders Union really is. I know fuck all about Constellation. I don’t know what the fuck the second Hardworld war was, and I barely know shit about the first one beyond what Michael told me when I first got here. There is an entire world of Hardworlding out there and I don’t know the first thing about it.
His eyes lingered on the scrolling list of “licensed dealers”, Simstore chains where he could gain access to the Sim; Mindflash, Blazing Sims, Doorways, SHS (Second Hand Selves)…
Names he had seen flashing over the haze of the Allworld, names that had even been spoken into his mind by speaking signs or overheard in conversations as he landed on some surreal observation deck or sat pondering multi-dimensional hunger in Ray’s.
The Allworld exploded in his thoughts, seen from above, as he burned hours and days flying and watching and never quite taking the plunge into actually doing.
Why?
If asked, I might say, I am disgusted with the fakeness, with the commodification of dreams, the squandering of possibility for “profit”, but would I really feel that if I said it? There is some disgust, there is some disdain, but not really of any moral kind, right? No. I honestly, secretly, don’t give a fuck about the greed or the corruption or any of that shit. Then what?
The answer came instantly, the kind of thought that seems to come from outside, as if being spoken by another occupant of the mind.
I’m fucking afraid of it. The Allworld, the Other, the hidden places, the reality behind the promises of the words. I’ve been flying around it all like someone studying a danger from all angles before approaching. Coward. The Hardworlds became a salvation. After them, I can just say “oh, the Other is fake, it's inferior to the Hardworlds, I don’t need it,” but how the fuck would I know? Why is it so terrifying? A world of dreams, of possibility…
The same fear as the first day, the fear that it’s real, the fear that it’s not. I’ve been frozen, waiting for a sign one way or the other, afraid to be certain, afraid to know.
Could it be real? Could it be fake? Are all these other people really… other?
Yes. A dream could contain the Allworld. I could dream a city, even one so impossible, but could I dream…
She laughed and ran the red light. She squealed as he swept her leg in the warehouse. She kept firing as she died. She looked at him with pure confusion that he still couldn’t distinguish between pleasant surprise and horrified shock or something in between because all he could see were those big round blue gray eyes shining out of her pale soft face and those glittering fucking cinnamon freckles and lips he could still feel parted like an offering end every shocking frustrating confusing word she had ever spoken from them lit up in his head like pieces of filament caught in a cloud of high voltage current.
No. I couldn’t dream her. I couldn’t create her.
Then if this place is not in my head, I should embrace it, explore it, right? Or can it now safely be disregarded? If it’s not part of me, what else could I possibly hope to get from it?
He had been wandering as he thought, his steps quickened with his heartbeat, and he stopped in front of a window… or a mirror. Its glass only partially reflected his goggled face, and the blurred dark void it seemed to show could have been some part of the Other outside or just a darkened reflection of the room behind him.
As he squinted and tried to guess what he was looking at, the glass warmed, his eyes found the outlines of familiar features, and as if in response to his expectations, the portal filled in the scenery and glowed in his face.
A highway, the yellowish off white of desert sand, Texas sun and blue sky that seemed to be doing its best to pull everything on the spreading landscape up into the air. Office towers and parking lots, seen from something like the thirtieth floor of a glass tower, as if the mirror portal was the window itself.
“Got a road trip on the brain?” a voice bounced behind him, and a breath of ice rolled down his neck as the edges of a figure moved in the glass.
