Your problems are illusions and the solutions are simple

  “They’re anyone’s worlds.”

  It was a lifeging statement. Every other person he had ever heard talk about the Hardworlds had made them sound like some mystical pce that required multiple levels of enlighte just to earn the right to step inside, which made Luke’s box driven excursions feel like a perversion or at least a sacrilege, and everyone else in the biz seemed to feel exactly the same way.

  You would think, looking back, that all pretense of wonder and majesty regarding the Hardworlds would have died away the moment he woke up in his sweaty boxers or felt the headache from ck of caffeine or waited at a light in a fast-food smelling SUV with a bunch of unemployed wastoids carrying hand me down guns, but it hadn’t. Quite the opposite. ing from the Other, where even the piss streams sparkled, all that mundane dimness had felt like getting closer to God. In a world where everything sung with divine energy, the Hardworlds were the ultimate holy pilgrimage.

  But Philip seemed like the type of guy to ask God, if given the ce, why his dumb ass ied heartburn, and though ter Luke would find that he had his own kind ious seriousness regarding the Hardworlds, it wasn’t the same kind as everyone elses, and at the time of their first meeting, just the fact that he cked the protective reverie of every Hardworlder he had ever met was enough to vince Luke he was pletely a-spiritual.

  But despite his reframing of the Hardworlds as open to anyone, he had simultaneously posited that Luke might still be too lost to find them.

  “See you in the Hardworlds, or not at all.”

  His challeo Luke, drop in without a box, seemed to, in some way, the sanctimonious view of the Hardworlds, but his tone and mannerisms said something else. Dropping in without a box was the lowest of tasks, and if Luke couldn’t even do that, then there was no use wasting any time with him.

  Luke got the idea, from all this, that Philip wasn’t so much bringing the Hardworlds down to the level of the unholy as he was looking at their facets from the point of view of the asded. Getting in was the easy part. Anyone could do that. Then what, Luke wondered, did he sider the hard part?

  Luke went to his realm and created a door in the basement, telling himself wheepped through it, he would wake up in some shitty apartment, just like he did every job. He turhe knob, opehe door, and stepped into darkness. After floating for a few seds, his Realm rolled bato view. He had dropped out the bottom of it.

  Immediately, he uood what had gone wrong, an unusual crity of thought. Like a dream, his fai of doubts had soiled his efforts, direg the oute. His realm was in the heart of pure void, where every thought burst into being with a bit of focus, and every fear, if left un squashed, could be realized. Half of his time making the big floating house had bee stabilizing it, as Car-Crash had called it, meaning visualizing that within the walls, ge was a slow process and subjeultiple firmations.

  Here with no box t hand his mind into believing, it would take nothihan pure untainted belief to get him through the door and into the Hardworlds.

  The extractor reduced his struggle to a montage, and for the first time he found it offensive. When dispyed as a few seds of doors opening into the void, or bato his Realm, now with a new bedroom, or onto some random suburban sliver of the Allworld, the hours lost most of their edge, and here, above all other times, he wahe pain to be precisely and fully unicated.

  Dr. X reminded him that with these things you had to strike a bance, and so relutly, and with a creeping doubt about the whole thing rising in the back of his mind, Luke led him to the important part.

  Down there Luke stepped through a final doht into a bliss den.

  Cue the screaming, the g, the swearing, and the feeble attempt at physical destru, throwing the little ottoman or the dle stand into the wall and all that, whi a world of blurred physid a pce where the objects always kept their form, was less than satisfying. Even the bean bag returned swiftly to its sagging shape after he kicked it.

  And there, waiting on the square end table of faux bck marble and bronze, were two hits of Bliss, little shining crystal sticks, either glowing from a light frozen ihem, or refleg an unseen sun, the great debate of all Bliss moths.

  And, a little note.

  “Luke, thanks for your patronage. Please accept—”

  And so on. His long absence before this most ret binge must have spooked them. He wondered, smiling coldly, ertage of their monthly revenue he had been at his height.

  Holding the doses, letting them roll in his hands and k together, he thought of what they had said about it.

  “You’re not addicted! You’re just bored!”

  “It’s not super heroin.”

  Yet here he was, at the end of his effort, at the bottom of his life, holding two dim lights like they were revolver and single bullet, trying to get up the nerve.

  “—the happiest day of my life…”

  He squeezed them both. One vanished and he was ba that void, falling, as the light burst into being just ahead.

  He chased it, it fled, it sang to him about its power to wake him to his real life, where everything made sense and Rory was waiting in bed beside him, m breath and all, to hear him try and describe the dream he had where she was an astral realm artist and he shot people for a living. Maybe she would say something like, “that’s so you,” or something, but they would smile and hold each other, and the flesh would be solid and the gravity certain and everything still and quiet with maybe some traffioise but ne rushing hum of the Allworld and all memory of this fug nightmare would dissolve into dreamscraps and fall out of his mind food.

  The light got closer, and he could just about see that other him in bed with her, and he felt the pull, that final gravity that always came with waking up, like the dream was leaning to one side then turning upside down, trying to dump him out like the st fke into the waking world below.

  But at the st sed his mind stopped dead still, momentarily immuo the tug, and spoke to him with memories.

  Another Luke drove down the highway, sirens wailing all arouy beretta in his hand, fresh from his first kill, feeling at the ter of a liquid reality, feeling that whatever he willed, could be.

  That Luke wouldn’t mesh with the waking sleeper who spoke of dreams to an altered Rory, and instead stood in front of that vision of waking like a guy getting up in the middle of a movie and blog the s. He looked at Luke and smiled, and somewhere in Luke’s mind a door opened and all the other memories swirled inside.

  “They’re anyone’s worlds.”

  “And buddy, the Hardworlds are one hell of a battlefield!”

  “If you could do anything, go anywhere, be anyone, for one day, what would you do?”

  He smiled. He ughed. He reached out and touched the light.

  It felt like a hot bulb that had bee on all night. He crushed it in his hand ahe gss and fiment crumble, and woke up.

  The extractor jumped the tracks and sailed through the darkness. The mem of the Hardworld meeting with Philip was unavaible to the searchlight spirit of Dr. X, though it did twinkle in the back of Lukes mind, unily clear, as Philip’s own personal Scraper had done excellent work, her his first nor st gift to Luke.

  While the extractor tried to pick up the thread, Luke guided it to his owion on bliss, the main scrap of mana around which the story was ed, like pastry dough around a pill.

  Iherworld, the on addict always an addict rule didn’t apply. Bliss, it seemed, had primarily been a trick of his mind, ving him the light lead somewhere aing him fill in the bnks, and once he showed himself where it could really lead, lihat formless burning desire to something real and current, the trick was foiled. He could never again believe the light would wake him up to some perfect life.

  Against the shotgun bst of his escape from Bliss and subsequeion, the st events iory felt like things leaking out of something torn, dead dumb moments succumbing to gravity.

  Upon his tending resignation with AT, a representative from the steltion franchise outreach office had tacted him and presented what amouo a fairly generous offer desigo keep him in the fold. He would be given a position in the main assault squad on a eam prised mostly of his co-spirators from the A.T. coup. It would be lower run jobs at first, and they would be responsible for drumming up most of the busihemselves, but it was a dder rung to a legitimate adva in the anization.

  His only real temptation was brief, and came in the form of a daydream that he would one day find himself flush with steltion porestige, and thus able to track down Rory and end her campaign of destru food, maybe even by putting his own tra her head once she slipped away to the Hardworlds trying to evade Savior inquisition.

  It was a short-lived fantasy. He had no idea what it took to get the Saviors to go after someone, and he doubted he would have the stomach to see it to the end anyway, and most importantly, he had another future ahead of him. Another brighter star to follow.

  At the end of the exit interview, he was informed that his line of credit had been terminated. Almost immediately after he left the office for the st time, Dr. O called him up.

  “Hey Sleepy, I’m sure you heard, but you’re credits been revoked. e see me when you and we talk about your bance.”

  Bance utting it lightly. The hole was so God damned big, he spent his eime with ST56 paying it down. When Philip called him into his vat strip mall offi the Hardworlds and told him that the team litting up, with Philip and Sam joining some mysterious veteran’s eam and Domino and Cat going their own way elsewhere, and that Luke had an open invitation to follow Philip on his new endeavor, Luke still had half of the bao pay off. And there was a new hitch.

  They new boss had a strio extra” rule. Luke wouldn’t be able to go under with Dr. X even to sell his Real mem. The guy didn’t trust them. Said you could never really give access to a piece of your mem without giving up all of it. Luke would have to pay the bance off with straight cash.

  Sht before he signed oted line and became an official member of Liquid Light, he paid Dr. X a final visit, and sold him something he was sure would wipe the ste . A story of loss and redemption, of addi and sobriety, of love arayal.

  When it was all said and done, and he was sitting once again in that archetypical Dr.’s office, he expected that it was all ly resolved, that the value of his fession would dissolve ly into his debt, destroying both and leaving him a free man, o see that god damned pce again, a perfedcap to the story.

  But when Dr. X showed him the valuation from Reminisce (the third party pricer) he was stuck between ughing and screaming.

  The book value of his extracted mem only covered half of his outstanding bance.

  There was shouting. There was threatening to take it elsewhere, then there acifying and reminding of the deposit and the first optioion of his debt tract, and finally there was a handshake and a into the swirling chaos of the Allworld.

  The rest of his fug bance was now payable only in cash. It would be a while before he was really, finally free.

  But luckily, the new job paid suspiciously well. Michael was nothing if not generous.

  Has Luke repced one addi with another? ime, Luke's tale es to an end, for now. episode, A Light that never Darkens.