Full-auto wake up call

  They called it being shaded, or sketched out, or if they were really old-school they might call it being ed. Or drained. When a Spirit has enough of his mem floating out in the mesh that anyone get a measure of his soul, so to speak, for a price. It meant you ain’t running far. It meant the Hunters could sniff you out of a Hardworld like that. It meant the gree speaker on the ball could, if given access to the mem and a little guidance, pick you out of the swarm, no problem.

  It also meant steltion and its subsidiaries would bel you a very safe hire. And that even the most uninspired escort could craft a box to drop you into the Hardworlds with very little thought required.

  Which is why, just a few moments after Luke believed he had walked into his apartment, he was waking up in a Hardworld for the first time in his life.

  But it wasn’t any fug bird noise or phone arms that brought his Self out of a deep Thursday day-off sleep at 11 in the m. It was the sound of his apartment detting kicked in and some pack-a-day-throated piece of shit yelling,

  “Rise and shiher fucker! Training day!”

  Then some uy cackled and a third muttered something. The bination of multiple unfamiliar and adrenaline tremoloed voices breaking into the sanctity of his bck out curtain bedroom, and the fact that he had been dreaming about signing up for a murder squad with a guy who’s mask looked like a head-on collision ed around his face, made this version of Luke bolt up and reach for his bedside pistol.

  Before he could get a good grip on it, the bedroom door flew open and a bst of white light caught him in the face.

  “Sup Luke. I’m Backdraft. Today you are—”

  Luke got his hand around the pistol and swung it into position.

  “Hey!” Backdraft yelled and the light danced. A hand the size of a fug catchers mitt grabbed Luke’s hand, the gun, and half of his forearm food measure. Amidst the sudden crushing, just under bone-breaking pressure and the sheer weight of the hand, Luke felt the man's thumb deftly find and reehe safety.

  Despite the disorientation and depersonalization and the shock of everything else, Luke made a mental o keep a Glock with a loaded chamber o his bed ime. He had always felt trigger safeties were kinda goofy, but as he felt his Beretta float away from him, he saw the appeal.

  “All right, hit the lights,” Backdraft said.

  “Where the fuck—” someone else said. There was no overhead light in Luke’s bedroom, but rather than give the B&E guys any tips, he stayed quiet.

  “Where’s yht switch bro?” The tone surprised Luke. Friendly. Like they were all in this break-in together.

  “Right o the safe, bro. Meaning non fug existent.” Luke said as acidly as he could muster sidering his m outh and still-sleeping throat.

  “Fuck it bro!” another, less friendly voice said. The instant everything was bring white and it took Luke's mind a bit to realize the guy had ripped the bckout curtains off the wall, rod and all.

  “Fuck!” Luke put his hands up to his face.

  “All right Luke,” Backdraft’s voied as Luke squeezed his eyes closed. “We’re on a tight fug schedule, so yonna have to get through a bunch of philosophical paradoxes and crisis of identity and shit really fast.”

  “Damn dude, I remember my first day!” the less friendly voice said.

  “No one gives a shit! Shut the fuck up!” Backdraft boomed. Luke got the ce to open his eyes enough to blink at the sheets.

  “Hey!” Backdraft tapped him oop of the head with one finger. Relutly, he looked up.

  Up there Luke had to ugh at the effect. At first, Backdraft’s face was pletely unseeable. Not that it wasn’t there, but more that the features refused to be absorbed into memory, like water into oil. Then, after the extractor had caught up, a pixeted effect, like someone who hadn’t sighe form on Cops, popped up over backdrafts face, and thehe faces of his two operators. A few moments ter, their faces appeared, though they weren’t really their faces. The extractor had supplied generic features from either Luke's memory or its own pool to protect the Hardworlder's identity. Though the expressiohe same, the faces didn’t match, even against his flimsy memory of that first day.

  Memory of the Hardworlds, Luke had learned, was fragile. Like the memory of a dream. If you wrote down your dreams the moment you woke up, you could look ba them, kind of, but if you waited and got up a about your day, the dream would be gone food, leaving only a kind of greasy remnant of its emotion behind, staining your day.

  The effect was less total with Hardworld mem. You could still remember bits and pieces, the gist you could say, days or even months ter. “Yeah, we won that one. No I got dropped out pretty early, I think.” But the only way to truly remember all the details, the kind that you could actually learn from, was to see a Scraper the moment you got back to the Other. But Scrapers were expensive. During his time at Ace Tactical, after every job, Luke had to go see Drudge, a short, fat little guy in a reflective tex b coat and gloves, whose welder goggles glowed like his eyeballs had been repced with white-hot ball bearings. Sometimes there was a line, and his memory of the job was so hazy by the time Drudge asked “where did you wake up this m?” that he was amazed the guy was able to scrape as much detail out as he was.

  The memory of his first day, however, had been one of the first things he had purchased from the Ace Tactical archivists, paid against his future earnings of course, whi his bliss-deprived state had taken an act of unnatural defiance. But after his drop in the Hardworlds, such acts became more familiar to him.

  And so, though the faces were ged, aaiifying remarks were let pass by the extractor, the mem was all there fher Luke to witness again for the thousandth time.

  Somehow, it never really lost its appeal.

  “What did you do yesterday?” Backdraft demanded, his brand new Mossberg shockrodding Luke’s .

  “Uh, work.” and it all spilled out in his head. The shitty A the van. The dude's house that had smelled like a certain brand of detergent that Luke had, until then, thought had only ever been used by his grandmother. The strange feeling to install door sensors while overe with nostalgia. Lunch had been shit. The driest fug chi sandwich—

  “Did you? Or did you fly around some dead husk of a resort world, waiting for some good Samaritan to bum you a Bliss fix?”

  The memories cshed. The Lukes wrestled. It wasn’t a fair fight. One was beaten down by years of go-nowhere jobs and a temper that seemed ill-suited to modern living, while the other, weightless and fresh, was iasy, finally free of an addi to something that couldn’t eve here, ready to live out his wildest and most childish dreams.

  But the other one wasn’t out of the fight yet, and he had a very ving argument.

  “You fug delirious moron! This shit is gon you killed!”

  Still, Backdraft was waiting for an answer.

  “I flew around the less than well-preserved remnant of a cssy establishment, inexplicably bereft of ers, waiting festure of—”

  “All right, let's go.” Backdraft disappeared his short shotgun in his jacket like a sleight of hand and shoved Luke into his closet.

  “Get fug dressed a us in the living room. And bring this.”

  Backdraft smmed Lukes Beretta 92fs on top of the leaning dresser and stomped out of the bedroom, absently finishing what he had started just moments before by yanking the door off the st fragment of hinges aing it ctter into the hallway wall. The other two followed behind him, tug their ons uheir jackets, and Luke was left alone, with a choiake.

  His window, now curtainless, opened out onto the street, reminding him that this version of Luke lived on the ground floor. The squeal of bad breaks came in as someone backed out of a spot. He saw sunlight shining on asphalt through the gap between the blinds and the wall. It would be easy to slide open the window, kick out the s, and run to safety, fg someone down, call the cops, be doh this nightmare.

  But, there was no point in doing it naked, he told himself.

  He pulled on some jeans, then a white shirt, then a pid fnnel button-up. His pistol wi him out of the edge of his visioire time, saying,

  “You could alick me up and take matters into your own hands! All those drills, all the days, and now you got three angry fels in your living room ready to tango! Whadya say? Lets dance!”

  In his head, the gun spoke in a high-pitched voice like something out of a forties cartoon, and he imagi with big bd white eyes on its textured grip and gloved hands stig out like something from Hanna Barbara.

  “I’m fug losing it,” some Luke thought.

  Another Luke thought it over.

  They left me in here. They left my gun. They know I jump out the window. They know I could go in shooting. They know I could call the police.

  They’re testing me.

  They’re fug with me.

  They’re gonna kill me anyway.

  His mind reeled and his two selves screamed at each other, but somehow he was still able to button his shirt and pce his Berretta in his hip holster.

  He stood there for a moment, hand on his pistol grip, looking across his room at the window. The bed with no frame. The ceiling stained from the smoke. The treaded carpet. Memories oozed out of it, pleting the feeling that this ecial kind of prison cell.

  He walked down the hall and the other Luke died screaming. It lost its identity. It was suddenly no longer a person, being instead a seething of emotions at the bottom of his mind.

  “About God damime dude. I was w if Car-Crash gave me a paraplegic or some shit,” Backdraft said, smiling. Hearing the name of his dream character out loud bahe st of Luke’s hesitation, at least for the moment and the boiling fear at the bottom of his stomach died to a whisper.

  “So what are we—”

  “No fug questions. When you o know, you will be told. Where’s your phone?”

  “Right here.” Luke barely had it out of his pocket before Backdraft snatched it and threw it down the hall. Luke watched it bounce like the st lifeboat passing over the horizon. Backdraft sensed his turmoil.

  “Look at me mother fucker.”

  Luke did. Backdraft scowled.

  “You ready or what?”

  Luke got ready to lie, but in an instant realized he didn’t have to. Something whispered to him that this shit was exactly what he had been waiting for his entire life, at the very least since he woke up on that fug rooftop.

  “I was born ready.”

  “Fug a. Lets go.”

  Backdraft swung open the front door and pieces of the frame broke off on the carpet. He stepped out into the courtyard with his hand under his jacket and his head and shoulders swiveling like he could unch rockets from his chest if anything tried to step up. One of the uys followed him out and the st one nudged Luke in the back. They all proceeded in a kind of staggered triangle formation out and uhe stairs and back around the unit. Oreet, just out of sight of Luke's back window, a Toyota 4Runner idled on the fire ne.

  Luke learer, after being oher side of an onb, that it was standard procedure with a new guy to have his phoapped, his exits watched, and a guy ready to plug him with a suppressed subsonic shot in the back of the head the moment he went out the window.

  Which expihe movement the driver made as they walked up, like leaning over to stash something in the glove box. He caught Luke’s eye, and smiled, and a part of Luke screamed and begged the other to start shooting, but it was too te.

  The Spirit was firmly in the driver’s seat.

  Remember in The Bounty when Philip told Gradie he was lucky to start on Liquid Light? Now we get to see just how lucky. ime, trapped in a car with a squad of killers who don't care about death, driving full speed toward another car full of the same. What could g? episode, Ride Along.