No tickets to Paradise

  The sky outside the t windows was lit as if the sun had died just before dawn, but the light had kept flowing out anyway. A dull dead almost blue. Not just cloudless, but uncloudable. Like a gradient backdrop for a film set. A wide ft dry nd stretg beh. Downtown in the distance, bck windowed and dead.

  She turned back to the hall aing area behind her, and found it, ulingly, just as she had expected.

  All the people were gone, and the light had dimmed, as if the clouds had passed over the sun, or it had moved beyond the windows in its arc, the seats and walkway now heavy in sleepy shade. The white noise and occasional engine sound, which her ears had growo though her mind had hardly noticed, were gone.

  The airport had been dropped into still dark silence, and somewhere down the hall, a beed her, sternly. She felt a momentary urge to resist, but shook it off. There was no other pce she’d less like to be, and she felt that if she stood still too long she might sink into all of it and never escape.

  As she walked down the hall between deadfaced restaurants and steel-shuttered agent desks, she felt the pce was expellihat eise of something beginning that had hummed out of the light and floors before he had left, that had beed her to e with him, was gone, repced by something not quite hostile, but definitely unweling. Despite or because of the absence of any mali the sensation, she was vihat he was going to a plike what he had been promised, and more than ever she believed that paradise in this world was nothing more than a lie.

  The fsh of light had been the final clue. She remembered that when they were together, she had gotten the feeling that he had been running from someone, and everyone knew Paradise wipes your ste . Someone had said to her once, “Anyone who tells you they’ve been to paradise is lying.”

  She had asked them how they knew, and they said, “Cause no one ever es back.”

  Sometime during the trip, he had said to her,

  “If I go you won’t see me again. I thought maybe you would want to e with me.”

  But she could never remember where or when he had said it. She could picture him saying it at the train station, irain, the airport, even stopping halfway down the b tunnel, but none of the pces stood out. Maybe he had never said it at all. It had been a year at least now. It was hard to recall.

  Now, sitting at a party, her mind thrown back to that day by an uedly familiar fsh of light, dimmed by its crass duplication and pced oddly amidst the light show at the ter of the stadium-shaped resort club, she could finally accept that she wasn’t having a good time.

  Her friend had invited her. A celebration of the eightieth ht huh piece by some artist well known in the resort industry. It was the kind of thing she would have loved before. Now it seemed petty. Back then, she would have marveled at the brilliant lights, the panoramic effects, the way the ses pyed in 3D to the viewer, and allowed you to cast subtle ges, but now, almost a year after her first trip to the Hardworlds, she saw them for what they were.

  She had dohe same thing herself, in her realm and in the vault before a job. Taken memories and morphed them, but while that had been aimed at a definite purpose, these dispys and by extensiohing else iher seemed like a process severed from meaning. In the light show, she saw the gre of headlights on a rain-slicked road, feel the electrisation of waking up early to a long-awaited day off, even reized muzzle fsh ahe distinct cussion of close gunfire. But they were all softened and stretched, desigo hook the viewer with a filed flechette of reality and drag them into a fantasy that they would pier like an addict for the rest of the night, at least.

  It was the kind of thing she would have loved to get lost in, long ago, when she was infamous among the Other’s most urained party ses. The kind of thing that turned sour in her eyes after the airport, like so much else.

  She couldn’t shake the feeling, afterward, that there was so much more to this ence, and that all the resorts and clubworlds and dreamworld drugs were nothing but a new kind of barrier, a way to bind souls that had found themselves in a world of total freedom.

  She had searched for that something else everywhere she could think of, the cults and temples that preached turning your ba all the excesses of the Otherworld, the bck market sims that promised to turn your own memory i until you could find what really made you tick, what childhood trauma eic quirk made you you, and a million other things that all turned out to be different fvors of the same thing. A flight away from yourself towards something ultimately impossible, a way to pacify the feeling but not resolve it, like taking a ride in one of those dive po simute the feeling of zero g.

  She had given up auro partying when Michael found her.

  He always cimed he didn’t, that she had found him, but if this was a lie, told early on to ease her fear that he was just another creeper, and one he was now uo admit to as her boss, or if he had really vinced himself of it, she couldn’t say. It didn’t matter. She had long since given up the na?ve belief that Michael was some kind of enlightened guide. He didn’t have to be. He had shown her what she had been looking for. Maybe his fws were what allowed him to.

  “Are you here alone?”

  The theme of the party was “repetition, broken”. The upper echelons of Otherworld party life had long since run through all the expected themes, and now often had to resort to those that reminded Celeste of bad alt-rock album titles. The man standing in front of her wore a houndstooth patterned robe, with oooth” popped out and the gap giving a view to a 3D space that made Celeste think of the old desktop music pyer visualizer. The fact that every other dude had also worn some fractal themed get up brought a smile to Celeste’s face as she spoke to him that he clearly mistook for something else.

  The versation took the usual course, which made her ugh again in the text of a party themed arouition. Of course, she would get hit on by the same kind of “wisened” pseudo-intellectual she had met a million times before, who predictably fessed his disdain for “these types of things” and even implied that he had chosen his outfit as a joke, knowing that the lowly masses would of course take the surface level interpretation of the theme, and he would be lost in a sea of fractals.

  She smiled and nodded and feigned fusion, gd finally to have someoting across from her to prevent anyone else from approag the table, a her thoughts float away to the st job, to Cooper and the shootouts, to the razor-sharp pull the memory of lethal fear had on her. Despite being with Michael for almost a year now, the office job had been her first time shooting at anyone. She had goo the twins immediately after and told them straight up that she never wao be brought to tears by gunfire again. They had looked at her like uys might look at her if she offered her body without reservations, and put her through a course that came in handy when she had found herself trapped in the Beetle with PKM rounds testing the windshield.

  “—The Hardworlds. Repetition in ultimate form. But broken?”

  She almost jumped out of her seat before realizing the light show in the ter of the room had transitioo a spoken word and image performa piece, and not as she had feared, tapped into her thoughts and poured them out onto the stage.

  The half dome pseudo s showed a lotus opening, the image being a refle upon gss, the refle itself reflected, theed.

  The man across from her took her troubled look as another kind of disfort and expressed his opinions on the over-hypedness of the Hardworlds.

  “They’re really not as scary as people make them seem. I've been in them-” (here she struggled not to smile) “-and came to the same clusion as Astodryphys. They’re made out of our memories of the Real, and really only seem so lifelike to us after we have left them, a kind of retroactive editing of memory on to—”

  She would have had to try a lot harder not to ugh, but the presentation on the Hardworlds was uling enough to keep her mood less than jovial.

  Fire, ash, burning lotus trampled uires, all repeated in a half dome of mirrors like a fly’s eye.

  “When the mirror is shattered, the viewer is cut, deeply, but even shattered gss reflects. And the light ot be destroyed, or escaped.”

  The show proceeded to ses of violence repeated kaleidoscopically, and the poien home in a simirly repetitive fashion. The Hardworlds were refles of the real, and Hardworlders, by bringing violeo them, tarnished a pce capable of infirospe and enlighte.

  “But the violence is not the final desecration. Nor is it the first.”

  Endless MEM symbols, reflected endlessly, apanied by a distorted sound that Celeste reized as a winning chime from a slot on Roulette. As the art piece turned lecture morphed into a scolding of moizing the Otherworld, which Celeste found very naked-emperorish given that everyo the party besides her and maybe some of the girls had enough MEM to rent out half the Allclub for a night, she let her thoughts float away, knocked free by the reminder of the Hardworlds and the visceral physical terror she had felt in the half a sed she was sure her cover was blown.

  Michael had oold her of a theory, which felt a lot like a personal fession, that the Hardworlds were as real to the natives inside as our Real is to us.

  “To them, it’s us who aren’t real.”

  A hought. To be unreal. Sometimes, when the earbuds were silent and there was nothing but time to kill, she would stare at the people in the Hardworlds and when they looked back, tell herself, “I’m not real. They are.”

  So when Michael asked her, “What do you want from the Hardworlds?”, she had told him, “To be unreal.”

  He had smiled at her the way he always did whealked about things like that. That was anood thing about him. Every time she said something she was sure was weird enough to make him think she was insane or stupid, he just smiled like she had actally revealed some truth that most people were too polite to say out loud.

  Thinking about Michael, she became aware again of the man across from her. Thinking about the Hardworlds and the people in them, she became aware of the party and the people arouhey felt unreal, in a different, more b way. Her friend was floating around, leering from behind her gss as if she had some filthy secret only the lucky chosen man of the night would be able to uncover, and all the men she spoke to smiled and pyed along like they gave a shit.

  Celeste thought of the st party she had been to. A Hardworlder party. Everyone in masks. It had been the most did open experience of her life. Never had she seen people reveal so effortlessly who they were and what they felt and lived. This was exactly the opposite. A party of people being masks. The cliché of the metaphor was only slightly less tedious thahing itself.

  She got up and walked out without saying anything to a didn’t matter. After the self-fgeltion of the art piece, everyone had given themselves wholly to selfish debauchery and didn’t notice her beyond a few hungry stares and even one or two squeezes.

  The walls of the stadium spaow projected a rolling jungle opy and molten blue sky burning into suhe spherical orbital upon which the party was set turranslut and fish eyed. A single drop of rain, falling to the jungle below. The feeling of falling was well executed, and the sky and jungle rolled around, making her feel every step might be the start of a trip and fall.

  She got over it by fog on the exit, a frosted gss door that revealed itself relutly betweeables and the lounge pool. After a few steps, she had a hold of herself, and the stumbling, staring partygoers with their arms out akimbo for baook on a ical snt.

  She activated her unicator and found a message from Michael waiting for her.

  “Just got another tract. Should be dropping in within the day.”

  The Hardworlds bloomed in her mind with a radiahat pushed her surroundings out into blurry peripherals, those other hers calling out to be set alight by her Spirit’s fire, her Spirit longing to do something that felt like stretg its legs.

  And then, like a light turned on in the early m, she saw Cooper, sudden and blinding, heard the gunfire and the kle of broken armored windows, smelled the blood and acid smoke. In an ued burst of vivid memory (Hardworld memory teo fall from her mind like rain off gss) she could feel the Beetle all around her, crumbling, pressed in vicelike by not just the gunfire, but by all the rest of the world outside. A real world. A dense world.

  Then, as she stepped out the exit, she had a sudden vision, halfway between daydream and memory, perhaps brought on by some unseen hazy person waving goodbye as she left the party and the se forever.

  She was in the Hardworlds, talking to a native, at the end of a long day, vial of Propofol king in her purse. She looked them in the eye, and said with a smile.

  “You know, If I go, you won’t see me again.”

  The face watched her with wonder, which filled her with a satisfied, powerful feeling, while it sted.

  But then the face became Cooper’s, and Cooper repced the face looking out the window of the pne as it vanished, and she felt suddenly that it was impossible to ever leave anyone in this pce, that a soul in the Hardworlds was just as close to her as one locked in the ter of Paradise, and that all the distaween them was just a trick of the mind.

  But the feeling passed, and she was alone in the elevator, speeding toward the office.

  They don't know I'm a Hardworlder. Is Celeste full of herself, or are all those people as deluded as she thinks?

  Now back to Gunmaze.