Beh the musi a farther room
As the elevator moved at some unknowable speed in an uerminable dire, Gradie was only half there, the rest of him still watg Lucy turn over his childhood bedroom, looking for something they were both afraid to find. Michael had been talking, but most of his words slipped by Gradie unnoticed.
“Now that you're oeam, we o cover some basics. Under no circumstances will you let anyone iherworld know that you are a Hardworlder. Do you uand?”
“Why?”
“Because petitioween Hardworlding teams is fierce, and anonymity is our most prized asset. Its the same reason EP was wearing a mask when I picked you up. It’s difficult to ge your appearance much when you drop into a Hardworld, and the st thing you want is the other side knowing who to look for.”
Even if Gradie’s head wasn't spinning from being sliced open like a bag of receipts by some interdimensional spiritual skip tracer, he wouldn’t have followed what Michael meant, but he nodded anyway.
“Good,” Michael said. The elevator stopped moving, as if it had been waiting for him to finish speaking, and they stepped out into a hallway.
If Gradie had to guess, they were somewhere behind a mall, or deep in the back hallways of a stadium. Rain fell outside the walls, beat on the doors, and struck chimes on somethial above the ceiling. Thunder rumbled, soft and even as the carpet.
“EP, have the team head to the clubhouse,” Michael said. EP nodded like she had been assigned a killing and marched out a door.
“See you around,” Gradie called after her, but his words snagged on the carpet and got spped around by the rain. She didn’t even look back. The muted roar of the Allcity spilled out the door and snapped off as it closed.
“What’s the Clubhouse?” Gradie said.
“It’s in the Hardworlds.” Michael moved down the hall.
“We’re going back there?”
“Yes. But not we. Yonna go on your own and I’ll meet you there.” Michael went through a door and Gradie followed.
It was just a normal hotel room, but it felt like so much more. For a moment, Gradie felt there might not be any of that quality that made the Allworld feel so ethereal. But as his mind adjusted, he felt on the edges some of that softness, like the instability in a dream, and like that feeling wheopped looking it, his mind fot it and everything seemed perfectly real.
“What is this?”
“A Fragment.”
“What?”
“A piece of the Otherworld so well crafted that it's almost indistinguishable from the Real.”
“Is that what Lucy uses?” Gradie froze, afraid his past would start spilling out again.
“No. That pce uses your own mind, like a parabolic mirror for your memory.”
“So why are we here? I thought the Hardworlds were outside the Otherworld.”
“It’s easier to visualize the Hardworlds in a pce like this, and in order to get to the Hardworlds, you have to know what they are.”
Gradie dragged his mind back before his time with Lucy, and tried to remember what Michael had told him iory. It felt like ages ago.
“You said they’re like an alternate reality.”
“Right. So how would you get there?” A crystal deter and cup set, plete with an old-fashioned seltzer bottle, stood out of p the minate desk, o a flesh-toned cord phone. Michael poured a drink like he expected this to take a while. Gradie, still shaken from what Lucy had done, wao get on with it, to jump headfirst into whatever terror came . It was the iweehat he couldn’t stand. He felt they could trap him forever.
“A dradie said. It was how they got everywhere else.
Michael pulled the bck-out curtains aside and the rain got louder. The daylight was a soft grey, like glowing crete.
“You have to stop thinking of moving from one pce to another as a physical event. Travel iherworld, even to the Hardworlds, is a journey of the mind.” Michael sat down and got fortable, the son of a bitch.
“So how do I move my mind?” Gradie shifted his weight to ohe gravity here was stant. Dead. The gravity of the Allworld seemed alive, even mischievous, in his memory. Michael shifted in his seat.
“I’m going to be ho, Gradie. This is my first time w with someone who didn’t already know how to get in. I’m trying to think of the best way to expin it.”
Gradie sat down on the bed. For a moment, the bounce of the mattress, the shadows of the furniture, the aseptic smell of the room, so like every other hotel room he had ever been in, jumped out of pd became part of a wider world of highways and people and paychecks. Then it was all alone again, encased by the sound of the rain, floating in a universe of nothing else.
“How did it feel to be in a Hardworld?” Michael asked suddenly. Gradie saw the gas station. It was hard to believe it had been a Hardworld. All the times Michael or Lucy had mentiohem, they sounded like some mythical pot a dingy ter and flickering fluoresce. The feeling of being there returo him.
“Like dreaming I’m someone else.”
“Right. When you ehe Hardworlds, you enter an alternate version of yourself. To do that, for the first time, you have to believe that what you are entering is real, and if it’s real, then all of this—” Michael spread his arms “—is just a dream.”
“So, what? I have to vince myself I’m dreaming?”
“Yes. And then you have to wake up.”
Gradie waited for Michael to smugly expin why it wasn’t that simple. He didn’t.
“Are you ready to try?”
“What’s the catch?”
Michael smiled.
“You think waking yourself up will be easy?”
“I’ve woken up from this pce before.”
“Yes, but not by choice, right? Why do you wake up?”
“I get tired.” It was the best way to describe that pulling feeling that had brought him amically back to his real life.
“Why? You think you have a body to get tired?”
“Then what would you call it?”
Michael shrugged. “Maybe your spirit here is a kind of rea, like a fme or a current, and it o return to the real to recharge.”
“ you just tell me what I o know?” Gradie was siichael's vagaries. At least with Lucy, things were absolute. ‘Either do this or fuck off.’ Her eyes floated up in his memory, and he found himself missing her.
“You should relish this, Gradie. After a while, you’ll have your own theories about this pce, and you’ll be stuck with them forever.”
Gradie had nothing to say to that. Michael sighed and tinued.
“Let me ask you this, does your life in the Real feel more real, from where your standing now, than anything else?”
“Yes.”
“Does it? Really?”
Gradie thought about his apartment, his job, and it all blended with the life in the gas station.
“No. What the fuck? It’s just like the other one.” He felt his real life slip away a into the other one, and he grabbed on to it in panic, ran his memory over every part of it, resg it.
“What did you just do?”
“What?”
“You g to it, your real life, didn’t you?”
“What, are you in my head?”
“No, I’ve seen it happen before, a lot. I did it when I first started. Everyone does.” Michael took a drink and swirled it in the gss, watg it like was telling him something. Gradie recovered himself, and thought of something.
“Wait, then how did Lucy dig through my real life? I never even thought of that other me in there.” Despite the agony of having someone else dig through his soul, he had never had this crisis of identity when Lucy had her eyes fixed on him. Again, he missed them.
“She’s an expert at drawing out the real you. But, the magic of the Otherworld is that here, you get to decide who the real you is. You made a choice, just now, to g to that version of yourself.”
Gradie was silent as Michael's words settled in his mind. Wasn’t this what he had always wished for? A way to get away from himself?
A gehunder rolled outside. Michael spoke in the silehat followed.
“Do you uand what you have to do?”
“I have to let it go.”
“Yes. Here iherworld, you are equidistant from all the lives you could ever live. Once you accept that what you know as the Real is just another dream, your mind will seek out something real. You must open your mind and wake up into that other life. That’s how you get to the Hardworlds.”
He stood up. “Aher you do it, or you ’t.”
Beh your memories, beyond all that you could be, and could have been, who are you? Episode: The Door