Do I dare, Disturb the Universe?

  Gradie was afraid it would all be for nothing. He saw himself floating around the Allworld, settling for the recycled scraps of other people's lives while the Hardworlds bzed somewhere out of reach.

  The memory of the gas station pulled him out of it. He had do before, somehow. He could do it again. Still, better make sure to squeeze every half answer out of Michael first.

  “So, I just sit here and try to believe that my real life is a dream, until my mind wakes me up?”

  “It’s better if you try and remember your real life and focus on that,” Michael said slowly, as if Gradie something fragile that might slip through his hands.

  “And what’s my real life?”

  “How should I know? I’m a dream, remember?”

  Gradie sat in sileh ched fists until Michael spoke again.

  “This is the final test before you joieam. If you ’t do this, I ’t use you.”

  “I do it.” Gradie snapped.

  “I believe you, but before I leave you to it, a final warning.”

  Michael set his gss down and stepped closer to Gradie.

  “The Hardworlds are a dangerous pce for the unwary. They pull on your spirit, attag it, like an immune system attacks a fn body, because what you are is unnatural to them. If you let them, they will make you believe that the self in the Hardworld is the real you, and you will fet about the Otherworld, about your real life, and you wont be able to escape. We call it dropping out. It gets harder to resist the longer you’re in the Hardworlds, but for a novice like you, even the first hour be perilous. Do you uand what I’m telling you?”

  Gradie felt like Michael had gut-punched him inches from the finish line. He had just gotteo the idea that this wasn’t all a dream, and now some other yer of it had revealed itself, like reality breaking apart twofold.

  “But, I’ll still go to the real world when I wake up, right? Like I did in your craft?”

  “Yes, but the Real will be evehan a dream to your spirit. It only hold one life as real.”

  “So, what? Do I actually bee that other me? Does the Hardworld bey real life?”

  “I 't say. I just o know that you uand the risk. I t let you join if you don’t.”

  Something in Michael's tone or words filled him with a heavy fear. It was the kind of fear he had thought impossible in this pce, the kind Lucy had tried so ily to make him feel.

  It occurred to him that the one pure differeween waking life and a dream was the danger of something you could not recover from.

  A low, crag thunder gave an ued depth to the world outside the window, revealing it in his mind for an instant. Then it was gone, and they were floating in the void, alone.

  “I uand,” said Gradie.

  “Are you sure?” Michael waved behind him. “There’s always the Otherworld. You shoot people and steal cars and all that shit there, risk-free.”

  For a moment, Gradie thought about it. The advertisements iy, sending hints of dreamlives into his brain. Wouldn’t that be easier? Wouldn’t it be the same?

  No. The Hardworlds, the gas station, just that small part of it, had been unlike anything this pce could ever give him. Even this hotel room, as near perfed simple as it was, didn’t e close. He wanted a life, a real life in a real world, without restraint, without limits, where he could find out who he was, and what he could bee.

  “No. I’m ready.”

  Something in his voice must have do. Michael could barely keep the smile off his face as he stood up.

  “Good. Don’t say I never warned you. Take out that card I gave you earlier.”

  Gradie did, w how pockets worked in a world where everything was crafted of thought.

  “Flip it over.”

  There was some text that hadn’t been there before.

  “Memorize everything on that. The phone number is the most important. Call it at nine a.m. o.”

  It was a hundred number with a triplet followed by two doubles. He ran through it a few times.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s how we’ll synize with you.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t know how to drop into specific Hardworlds yet, so we have to e to you. When you call that number, and I visualize you callihe Hardworlds puts us together to make it happen. There are other ways to do it, but this will be the easiest.”

  Wouldn’t that mean that until they synized, Michael would be in a Hardworld with some other version of him? Another question formed from his fusion. Gradie hadn’t thought about it before, but now as he prepared to throw himself across realities, his ignorance fred up in the dark.

  “How many Hardworlds are there?”

  Michael’s answer was surprising and obvious at the same time, a fitting paradox for this pce.

  “An infinite number. It's better to ceptualize the Hardworlds as a field, a meeting of multiple qualities, rather than a series of distines. As Hardworlders, we move between states stantly. Every ge we make is done by entering an alternate reality, you could say.”

  For once, Michael’s words clicked smoothly into p Gradie’s mind, eradig pockets of fusion that had lingered in his uanding, and kickstarting new questions, but Michael interrupted his refle before they could form.

  “O thing. Before you call us, you o do something drastic.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something that makes it impossible to return to your old life. Something you 't e back from. You o put as much distaween your spirit and your self as possible.” Then suddenly, as if remembering, he added “But don’t kill anyone.”

  “Ok, so what should I—”

  “It’s up to you, but whatever it is, do it before you call me. I o know that you believe that the self in the hardworld isn’t the real you.”

  Gradie nodded as if he uood and looked at the card again. Michael cpped him on the back.

  “If I don’t see you in the Hardworlds, stop by the offid maybe we’ll find something else for you to do.”

  “Fuck that.”

  Michael smiled and waved. There was a sound like a trap door opening in ay theater and Gradie dropped through the floor with his arms filing at nothing. The square slice of hotel room shrunk into a sped blinked out above him, and he was left floating in a bck void with only distant faint stars for referehe card floated by him zily in zero-g.

  “All right.” His voice fell ft in the darkness, as if he was tucked away in a carpeted bedroom. Strange. He had expected an echo. Everything Michael had told him rolled around in his head, aried ta into a pn of a, but kept dropping pieces into the void. The only thing that seemed solid was the phone number.

  Suddenly, something blinked out in the darkness. A light, ging color as it hung among other lesser stars. It held his attention for a moment until he shook it off and looked down to try and think again. Down became forward and the light slid out of view.

  “I’m dreaming.”

  He remembered saying the same thing to Michael when they first met, and to himself a million times siheried to believe it.

  He thought of waking up in his own bed ahat life rising up to meet him. In a panic, he pushed it away and tried to think of something else. The first thing that came to mind was the girl in the gas station.

  That first Hardworld, and the him attached to it, bloomed in his mind and his other life fell away. The sensation was familiar to him now, and he pulled his mind back again. Something iars around him birthed a realization. Both lives felt equally far from him.

  Michael's voice drifted through the dark.

  Here iherworld, you are equidistant from all the lives you could ever live.

  They felt like dim stars, distant and faint. He grabbed onto that metaphor a grow, until he remembered the colorful star and rolled it into view.

  It shifted between a bright purple and neon green.

  “That’s my real life, in there, I just don’t remember it.” His voice shook out from his head and boomed in the space around him. He held the thought and focused oar.

  Something fshed across its surface, a line biseg the blinking orb. It dropped down suddenly and a ft pne rose above. The entire shape came right at him.

  A door. Rolling towards him in the dark. Its edges glowed in the same colors as the shifting star, and it hummed with a vibration he could hear, speaking of memories and another life. He willed it to a stht in front of him.

  It was off-white with a beige coat of paint peeking through where the top coat fked away. The knob was a brushed dull copper color and it hung off like the screws ightening. A shard of some other life, a on to shatter illusion.

  “When I open this door, I'll wake up, and remember everything.”

  The idea became more solid aain by the sed. Everything else faded away into a dull hum somewhere behind him, pushing him towards the door. He grabbed the handle and turned. Light poured in from the edges and the sensation of remembering something made him smile.

  “I t believe I fot.”

  He opehe door and stepped through.

  Astral travel starts with one small step. ime, Someone wakes up. Episode: Awake.