Will there be pop culture references in heaven?

  Gradie fell through the dark and nded on what looked like a giant tact lens h over the shifting blurry cloud of Guhe other three were already there, now inside avatars of their own.

  Nova’s skin was like motor oil floating on a puddle in the middle of a bright m, rainbow opalesce over rippling darkness, and his eyes were solid pink pearls. He had on what Gradie instantly reized as a “coat of many colors”, a puffy robe oscilting in rainbows that partially reflected the swirling shapes below.

  Angel looked like a dark elf, pale skin and inkbck hair with a crimson shio it, bck silk robes and eyes of solid emerald.

  The pattern was pleted by Luke, who wore a pair of aviators with blood droplets glinting on their mirror lenses, and a flight suit studded with bullet holes.

  “Oh good, you blocked out your eyes,” Nova said. “Was gonna tell you. It’s good practice to not let enemies know where you’re looking. A lot of times the fightis pretty close.”

  He waved his hand and an s floated out of the lens-floor. Multiple boxes. quest, Assault, Sponsored, Private, and one highlighted. [Cssic]. He navigated the other options too fast fradie to see, and the s ged to a bck box with white letters.

  Joining queue…

  The box shrunk and a soft golden light reflected off the lens floor, outlining each of them as if some unseen user had them selected.

  It added to the fusion he had felt sihey had first arrived at Gunmaze, and boiled it into a question.

  How much were schema and Principalities like software in this pce? Up until now, he had only really ied with forces of the Otherworld that had a clear live sciousness propelling them. The workers at Rays running the “grills” and “fryers”. The DJs at the Allclub operating whatever geed the lights and music. Everything else had just been near inanimate simple objects. A door that responds to you, a craft that takes you pces, but this felt pletely different than all that. Even different than the Vault, where despite the fact that the twins interfaced with ss and keyboards, which he had always assumed was just for venience, a way for them to their minds around the visualization o make such a pce wradie had never felt there was any kind of autonomous maery beyond what was being immediately willed ience.

  Gunmaze, however, felt like a mae. Like a real program, something created the go just like any cluster of code in the Real. Which was terrifying, whehought about it. People who could flick you across dance clubs were ohing, but people who could create something that could trap you, dazzle you with false images, or even torture you, all without being near you or even knowing you existed, were horrifying beyond anything he could imagio what extent would these things hold up without the master them? To what extent could they be maintained?

  Despite the terror these ideas sparked in his mind, none of it was surprising. It all seemed to follow logically from what he already knew about the Otherworld, as if all these facets of its plexity would have been revealed to him if he had only takeime to stop and think it through. Which made it all the more uling, because it made it seem that much more real, that much more certain.

  Aform floated by, this one shaped like a broken off bridge of a very familiar and highly trademarked spaceship right out of a certain film series. Through the wide windows, he saw people ianding in front of their own s, dressed as all kinds of movie and game characters.

  It was the first time he had seen anything like it iher, and it was s he ughed out loud.

  “What the fuck?”

  “God dammit,” Nova said almost under his breath, and started making motions on a summoned s. Their clear ptform floated away from the cluster of fanboys but it was too te.

  “Fug soomers,” Angel snarled, with an iy that surprised Gradie almost as much as the fanboys had.

  “What?”

  Nova sighed and looked away. Angel exhaled through his nostrils and expined in a pained voice dripping with pt.

  “ers. TV heads. Fug ’t exist without their cartoon bullshit.”

  “Angel hates Star Wars,” Luke said, shooting a smile at Gradie behind Angels back.

  “I don’t give a shit about the fug movies!” Angel said, twisting towards Luke. “But they have to shove their pop culture bullshit into everything they do. They’d make Gunmaze look like a god damned shopping mall if they could.”

  “You actually get extra points for killing them,” Nova said, like he was weary of saying it for the huh time. “And Gunmaze herds them into their os when it . Really bro, the makers hate them as much as Angel does.”

  Gradie’s initial rea was to wonder what the big fug deal was. It was all fake anyway, and if he got into a fake shootout with a guy dressed like Nova uy pretending to be a jedi, didn’t really seem like it would ge the experience much, but he se was the kind of thing people more attached to Gunmaze or just the Other in general might get more worked up about, so he tried to ge the subject.

  “So, what’s the basic, uh, gamepy like?” said Gradie.

  Angel was gring out at the now desding ptform of cospy spirits and Nova was looking at him like his brother was struggling to open a jar by twisting it the wrong way and not for the first time, so Luke stepped in.

  “Fight people. Solve Puzzles. Try ao the ter.”

  “What’s in the ter?”

  “Well, at the very ter is the inal maze,” Nova said, pulling his eyes from his scowling sibling. “This pce was built around the first arrivals fighting it out for fun and grew from the i. The ter is where the best pyers are. But we won’t get there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you have to get a win-streak for days et a challenge invite. But I think what Luke’s talking about is the main map in Assault mode. It’s kind of like the tral hub.”

  “Yeah, the big murder isnd,” Luke agreed.

  “It’s not the tral hub,” Angel said, his anger fring again. “It’s fug noob nation,” “The higher ups threw it in a few years ago to appease the new blood who are all obsessed with tinuity and progression and shit, but don’t have the attention span for quest.”

  “It’s like, a cluster of segments, ed around a big nd mass, but you keep year and shit between zones. It’s like a big battle royale. If you die you just go to one of the peripheral zones until you get a win, then you e back. The creators made it so that pyers who weren’t ied in the dder could have something else to grind for.”

  “Sounds kind of fun,” Gradie said.

  Angel gred at him.

  Nova ughed.

  “We give it a shot aime, but for your first time we’re gonna do it old school. A cssi. Randomized segments. You win one, et enough score if it’s a time battle, and you get moved into the lower rings where the rewards and difficulty increase. You lose, you get knocked back up a rung. Some segments repeat at different levels with the difficulty tweaked, while others you only see at certain levels.”

  “What is the bat like?” Gradie asked.

  “Usually depends on the segment. They each have their own rules, setting, objectives. Could be guns, bdes, vehicles. Any kind of shit you think of. Gunmaze is more like a thousand different games sharing a on reward currency.”

  A warm, electrisation had been building on the back of Gradie’s neck since he dropped out of the mirror room, and something in Nova’s description ig into a pulsiion. A current of childish excitement surged down his spine, over his scalp, across his tongue.

  Here was something out of his dreams, his fantasies. A swarm of pyers orbited alongside him, ready to py something that hovered out at the edge of his imagination. It was every lobby and start up s that had ever excited him, all rolled into one, or maybe, it was the thing all those other moments had been born from, breaking off from the mother lode and floating up, distorted and slightly tarnished, into his Real life.

  Below him, through the transparent ptfunmaze rolled and fshed. Like soap bubbles that had figured out how to break the sphere-only rule that bound them ba the Real, the multitude of visions refracted through the hazy stormy membrane added a visual to Angel’s words. He saw bubbled, fish eyed views of massive cities, isnd s, night drenched forests, rolling va voloes. He wondered if he was really seeing the segments, as the twins had called them, or if this was the Otherworld equivalent of a loading s, fshes of curated images rather than a live feed of the gameworld.

  A bright chime broke his spaced-out train of thoughts.

  “Damn that was quick,” Luke said.

  “It’s cause we’re in an orientation queue,” Angel said, standing up and taking a deep breath, which struck Gradie as strange.

  Suddenly, Gradie got a sinking, rollercoaster drop feeling in his stomach, and the clear ptform desded towards the haze.

  “Remember, stick together, unicate, every fight a choice, and look for work,” Angel ted the rules off on four fingers, but Gradie hardly heard him.

  The jittery excitement that had taken over his body reached a frenzied rhythm, and the lens dropped them all into darkness.

  Did you know the Schema of the Allworld limits the sizes of crafts, among other things? We will leave Gunmaze for now, aurn to it from time to time, but first, lets see how Celeste speernity. episode, If I go, you won't see me again.