How do you hunt a lost soul?

  Cooper dreamed of never-endiail parking lot where cops spawned like video game mobs. He ran from them, hid from them, but whehey found him they never cuffed him, just stared at him with those eyes made of Otherworld. Eventually, just as he had every night since he had dropped in, he found the edges.

  He stepped through one of the closed down strip mall stores, a Gamestop circa 2006 with a full size Kingdom Hearts 2 advertisement and 360 kiosk, and found the hallway that ran along his dreamworlds like a spine, or a pstic vein, dosing them with unease and fetfulness.

  Eg, linoleum floored and fluorest-lit. School hallway during csses meshed with a te night hospital wing. White noise from rooms unseen, like scrambled versations and rushing blood in the ears. The doors on his left were endless, leading to more parking lots and other dreams, some molded from his Self, drug houses and arrests, and others seemed borrowed from the Real Cooper, embarrassing family dihat took up stadiums and porn breaking into the real world aing him fired. The dreams iably swallowed him and split his Spirit from its memory, so he avoided them, or tried to.

  The opposite side of the hall was plete bare painted derblock wall, besides a single door. A metal slim windowed jail or school style door propped open on a rubber wedge, leading to a small room where two suited men with glittering pistols on their hips looked up from neers at him as he passed, their eyes made of something else, not this world or the other, but an energy crafted, he ko keep him from moviweewo, and to keep anyone else from getting here from there.

  However, the seal wasn’t foolproof. In sleep he knew his Spirit, and as he walked the hallways now, a memory returned.

  Memories of the Spirit never felt like those from the Real. The Spirit, he knew, is not bound by the flesh, neurons rey matter. He had been told that the only thing keeping his memories of the Otherworld from staying static, crystalized, objective recs of events as they had happened, was his own minds inability to accept that its limiting an was no longer in trol.

  Regardless, the memory was close enough, and as it swelled in his mind, the hallway disappeared, and he moved through the events at the speed of thought.

  Parium had been one of the firstbor worlds, supposedly. It was a scaled-down recreation of the sor system, with eaet dramatized in some way. Earth was endless beaches, backyards, and os. Mars was an ochre orb covered in biodomes and poputed by blue-green women. Jupiter was a stant cye storm, they eye being the on dance floor, while the limited visibility in the arms made for an endless zone of pockets of privaeptune was an orb of o navigated by carved icebergs. The sun was a crystal mazework of glittering lights that made anyone who e sweat baby oil and lose all of their clothes. In its day it had been infamous.

  Now, it was as close to a ruin as anything could get iherworld. Without aging, wearing down, or actually deg, most pces that fall out of vogue are just abandoned. Many of the first clubs and worlds hung frozen out in the dark, just as they had been the day the were made, but empty and quiet, kept ience by the mythical ghostlike Principalities, or maybe by the memories of those who had seen them in their prime. There was a dignity in that. Parium, however, had just enough visitors to keep it alive. The cheap kinds of people, addicts and broke newborns, were like a life support line keeping a vegetable alive out of some perverse misuanding of theology.

  The room the had spent their st hours in was made of a Saturn su, everything warm vanil gold light and e-tinted vapor. The circur dance floor was clear as gss and a zy lightning sted below. The interior was shaped like the inside of a mpshade, with the wide mouth above open to a sea of stars, through which the other ps could be seen coasting by at times. Many of the visitors had orieheir gravity so that they danced or lounged on the walls, where rows of couches and cushions wound up like ripped wrinkles of a throat. Cooper, however, had been reminded of other body parts.

  Ghostly attendants, colored to be transparent and ignorable, took orders. They were like videos cut and sliced and molded into human form. Cooper had never seen phantoms before that. They were forbidden by the Schema of almost every Principality from the Allworld to Gunmaze.

  The main attra, which he was sure hadn’t been there during Parium’s heyday, was the tangled orb of girls floating at the ter of the room, fug and squealing endlessly. For a price, one (or two) would dislodge herself from the group and float down to you, and for even more money she would hang around. The two girls Rond had enjoyed finished lig all the cum off themselves just before they returo the throng, and a mome was like they had never left. Cooper knew just by the look in their eyes they were all under some illusion. They probably couldn’t evehe ers until they were bought. Maybe floating through forests and gumdrop nds. Real Spirits were alreferred over Phantoms. It seemed even the greatest makers had trouble creating lifelike people.

  They had been on their sed full day in the resort, and were now pletely out of mem. It had all bee freely, knowing from the get-go that the robbery would go dowhey ran out, a predetermined signal left up to just enough variability to keep any of them from pussing out or turning snitch.

  Rond, who had just spent the st of the mem ow girls, y back with a zy look in his eye. One of the tourists they had caught up in their current heckled him to take a nap. Cooper felt the pounding demand from his own groin after watg the twins gyrate for what had felt like hours, another remnant of the flesh, along with the refra period Rond was trying desperately to shake off. For a small fortune, you could buy a drug to remove the mental dam, dusty remnant that it was, ahe asms flow like heartbeats. It sted hours or minutes depending on who you asked, and its meism was a mystery to Cooper. He imagihe pcebo effect took a role, but try as he might to swalloill of his own making, telling himself in deep serioushat post-sex grogginess would be a thing of his past, it never worked. Probably for the best. He knew many Bliss addicts, and suspected one of their new friends, the one hammering away at an anime-eyed struct, might be one of them.

  Then the memot hazy. Someone had suggested they go back to their craft, maybe take a sic path to the Allclub, but he couldn’t remember who it was. JP was their pilot, but he didn’t remember him suggesting anything other than “damn look at that bitch go”. The hole in Cooper’s memory left him grasping for the solid pieces, and he realized a lot of it was hazy.

  He couldn’t remember how the two groups had gotten together, only that Ooma had gotten flirty with one of the guys, and Zip had gotten jealous and pulled her aside. The uys group had approached the two of them, and Cooper, JP, and Rownd had stepped up in case anythi down. Of course, fights on the ball usually sisted of one party bei flying and absolutely no pain to speak of, but these old worlds were rumored to have a more primitive schema to handle fights. The prince would let you throw hands ahe impact, broken noses and all, until a set timer was reached and a light or something would appear. First person to touch it got to stay, while the other Spirit got unched out into the bck.

  Or at least that’s what Rownd had told him. Cooper never got to find out. The two groups meshed together like old friends and for the day and a half they tore up three ps. Fast friends aside, Rowhem all know throughout the night that these were the guys they were gon it out on. Ooma looked devastated, but went along just fine wheime came. It was one of those things where Cooper imagined another version of himself transpo the victim’s side. Like that scam they had run on those Gunmaze noobs. But he did his part at the jump too. Looking back, it had been like someone else miles away and years apart had set it all in motion, and there was nothing he could have doo stop it.

  It had e out of nowhere. A blocky mass of solid darkness. Light died on its surface, unreflected. It was impossible and unnecessary to be sure how big it was. They had found it by act, flying in the void. Rownd had seen an angur shape, "like a bunch of bck regles” slide in front of a cluster of worlds, maybe Cyberia and its orbitals. It took them hours to find it again, and they only did because he got JP to send some lights out. It had been an huing about that. JP was afraid someone else would see the lights and snag whatever it was from them. He had wao sell it. Anything that bck would sell to the makers food price. Rownd had seen it and realized what it was. Said he thought he knew how to use one.

  “Now we’ll find out for sure,” Cooper had thought, watg Rond dazzle one of the tourists with his mini-dancer struct. A few mier they were floating down the exit hallway on Saturn to the ring of craft docks. He remembered trading scared gnces with JP, sinister smiles with Rownd, and feeling Ooma’s hand on his back, turning to see her reassuring smile, like he was a kid about do something he had just retly e of age for.

  For a moment, he had been worried their marks would see it, stuck to the side of their craft, but it had ged color and was pletely invisible, so much that JP looked up for it as they got to the bay, saw it missing and looked around at his friends frantically until someone whispered in his ear and calmed him down.

  They had waited until Parium e the distance before inviting the victims to their “Sim room”

  Afterward, JP called it a mouse trap. Fitting. The way the darkness had snapped over them, one by one, as their squeal-like screams snapped off suddenly. It had eve like watg vermirapped. The thing had dropped them down and away, and given the group an overhead vantage ohing.

  It went so smoothly, Cooper had felt like someone erating it, that maybe Rownd really had known how to use it, but afterward, Rownd fessed he hadn’t dohing. It had seemed to do all the work for them.

  There, he stopped the memory cold. He khe general shape of what had e after, the brief celebration, the slow realization, the feeble attempts to escape, and at the darkest moment, the ued and still unexpined aid.

  They had told him not to think about it, that his existence might depend on his ability tet it, so he yanked his brain away before it had a ce to think about who had told him that.

  Every night he remembered. Every night he was uo stop himself from taking o trip across the memory’s jagged surface, and every night he got a little bit closer to losing his grip at the st sed, and slipping the rest of the way down. But tonight, he remembered that other him sleeping in a cell, and the memories pull lost some of it’s edge. Tonight, he wao see something else besides traps and cells, because there was a good fug ce that’s all the future held for Cooper, Self or Spirit.

  He dropped out of the darkness and bato the humming hallway. Whe to his feet, he shoved open the first door he saw and threw himself into whatever dreams may e.

  Do you believe in ce? You just withe beginning of a war that will span worlds and tear old wounds wide open. Ill keep you posted. ime, Gradie goes out the window. episode, Reality Check.