Five and dime, freedom aude

  Time is the enemy of memory, Drudge would say, and Luke found painful evidence of that as he tried to recall that first day in the Hardworlds after it had been scraped from his mind. As his day iher progressed, the memories dissolved by the sed, and after a while, he wasn’t even sure he had ever been to the Hardworlds at all.

  Further proof; every time he dropped out of a bliss trip, he immediately resolved to never go for that fug light again, but as time marched on, the memory of his disappoi decayed, and his hope for release grew, and there he was again.

  After the memories of that first job faded and he had spent half a day in the bliss den, his money was gone, so he floated back to Dr. X. There, however, he got some bad news.

  “You already sold me today’s Real.”

  He just stared at Dr. X, uo believe all the tract signing and Hardworlding and Bliss trips had happened in under 24 hours, but the good doctor dutifully showed him a clip of the mem, his real Self hanging drywall aing, and that was that.

  Then more bad news.

  “I ’t extract mem of your jobs in the Hardworlds. It’s under tract. I’d lose my lease.”

  Then, uedly, a piece of advice.

  “Kick the Bliss habit. Go to your boss and ask for help. He keep you dropped into the Hardworlds for a few days and that should do it. Seen it happen before. Your problem is you need a few cycles to get the craving out of your system. Let your Spirit wake up for real a few times. That’s what it really wants.”

  Luke nodded. Luke looked thoughtful. Luke left in a hurry.

  But before he could get out the door, Mr. O called him over.

  “Hey Sleepy, e here for a sed.”

  The extractot all fky, tried to jump over this little tidbit, but higher up Luke s Dr. X.

  “No. This is important. It’s the main crux of the fug ending. You want a story or not?”

  Relutly, the extractor slowed down. Mr. O stood before Luke at the ter, the peripherals clouded and hazy, other ers moving like ghostly shadows at the edges, maybe not even representing real Spirits at all. Mr. O leaned in and sighed.

  “Sleepy, I know you got a new job, and to be ho, I hate to tell you this because I’ve grown to like you, but the higher-ups have OK’d you for a line of credit.”

  Luke stood there, trying to find the bad news.

  “So, uh,”

  “So, I know you’re first instinct is gono fly down to a bliss den and burn through it all, but let me give you a little advice, a better way forward.”

  “Wait, so by line of credit you mean, like,”

  “Go to your boss. Tell him you wanna buy the raw mem of your jobs. It should be fairly cheap for just the one. And ask him about buying a scraper lise. That one’s more expensive, and the rate might have jumped so your credit might not cover it, but that’s really the oo get. You get one of those, you get to keep your whole ued mem after each job. Of course, the faces will still be distorted but,”

  “And then I sell it to yht? You ’t extract it directly, but you buy the director’s cut shit, right?”

  Mr. O looked unfortable.

  “No, we ’t take ued mem of Hardworld Jobs. The Faces blurred aren’t enough. If you wao sell us your Hardworld mem, the only way to do that is to sign over royalty rights to us and have your employer send them over, but that’s—”

  “And I get a cut of that?”

  “Yeah, but I’m talking about the raw mem, so you live through it agai me?”

  But the Luke standing at the ter had no attat to whatever Hardworld Luke had gotten up to on the job. His thoughts at that point had long since shifted to a glowing ball of light, floating in the bck, promising the ce to wake up into a Luke greater than he could ever imagine.

  So, after a few nods, he asked,

  “So, how much credit are we talking here?”

  Mr. O sighed, and broke it down for him.

  The extractot flying again, and this time Luke let it go.

  Luke signed another tract, recorded, for the credit. Luke flew off to the Bliss den. Luke tried his very best to spend it all, but before he had maxed out, Car-Crash rang him on the unicator.

  “Get to the ball a your ride over the Lumiower.”

  Luke, more than a little bit frustrated that they still hadn’t given him door or navigator access to the base, promised he would head right there, theo buy more bliss, and found his pusher, Lounging Lizard, sitting in the mirror-backed dead-empty art-deco bar at the ter of the swirling maze of ballrooms and dens and hotel pools, same pce he always was, feedlights on his eyes and an infinity ptter of food and drink oating circur table in front of him, only this time, he refused to sell to Luke.

  “No do. You got a job on.”

  That same feeling of something massive and hidden, cities underground, seats of power floating in the bck. It seemed that everyone had some kind of tract reement with everyone else, and the es formed a web of csped hands, keeping him boxed into a select few pathways.

  So, he floated to the ball, as angry as a Spirit could be, feeling like a failure. Somehow, though the memory of that first day in the Hardworlds had faded, something had remained, and a part of him had felt that he had been so close to waking up, to finding something real, to toug that light or something like it, that the fact that he now had to ehe ridiculous phase of the dream was almost too much to handle.

  Here, Dr. X had to earn his pay. Luke had offered up only a select few jobs to the extractor, the ones he felt were o make the story, the ones he felt really had an effe him, or at least the him that acted upon the limited stage he was willing to sell, and the rest he left Dr.X to weave around.

  Luckily, Dr. X retty good at it, for a snake.

  The montage proceeded through ses of Car-Crash summons and dropping in, visits te, visits to Dr. X, days in the bliss den, and all the days of the Real iween, perfectly preserved like high-definition diamonds in a of broken dusty plexigss, and paused at a few choice turning points.

  The first, a ce meeting at the Bliss den, or so he had thought then. Though not so much a meeting as an observance, a stolen look. She had been whispering to some woman, or maybe talking to her at full volume but obscured by a privacy schema. Her appearand style had been like a smart corporate woman from a ies Jaguar ercial, but her eyes were there. Her face, though carved slightly, still vaguely catlike. Her smile, less devious raver girl, more upper ma type who knows how to steal simple pleasures from the few and far between vacation days.

  For a moment, it seemed she saw him. But even through the infallible sight of the extractor, he couldn’t be sure.

  In hindsight, he felt it was this signifit moment that had caused the . The extractrazed over his bliss trips and Hardworld entry a and zeroed in on a versation he had with Car-Crash immediately after leaving Drudge, in a strange moment of strength, when the Bliss cravings had not seeped in through the crumbling shell of his discarded Hardworld self, but the memory of Rory dispensing Bliss to that woman with a smile had.

  “Hey, I think I’m starting to get a feel for this. you drop me in again? I don’t really do anything out there anymore, and I’d really—”

  “No do. pany policy. ’t have you in if you’re not on a job. Besides, it may feel like you just walk through a door, but a lot of woes into getting you in. Primers won’t work overtime just cause you’re bored.”

  And that was that. The extractor rambled over more bliss trips, more crash dummy drop-ins, dreamlike fragments of Luke loading a gun or running through a Wal mart or ramming his car into a parked cruiser, loose pieces of Hardworld mem, either too small to be under tract or possibly fabricated pletely by Dr. X, and stopped again at another choice versation, this oween him and Sammy Stovepipe after his first quarterly che.

  “She’s fug brutal man. I tagged along with M.B. when he went down to your buddy Dr. X to work out the finder’s fee, and that bitch was there trying to get half. Don’t even know how the fuck she got in. Dr. X sounded like he was ready to kill her.”

  Despite all the fantasies of putting Rory in a chokehold and dragging her into a Hardworld or slipping Bliss into her drink at the Allclub, Luke had a rough time keeping his temper locked down when Sammy called her a bitch. He looked out the window of the Ace tactical Allcity offid shook his head. Sammy missed his anger but picked up on his embarrassment.

  “Hey, fuck it, man. I’ve asked around, and that bitch got her cws in so many newborns it makes me sick. From the horror stories I’ve heard, you’re doing a hell of a lot better than most of them.”

  They spoke of the job, of the onalities between their first days, the growing pains. Most of it was sored by the extractor, and their identities were distorted, but Luke hoped the main crux of it, for him, would shihrough. For the first time since he woke up on that rooftop, he had a friend iherworld.

  The extractor, however, seemed to have a different narrative in mind. It wove through time and plucked out the moment he bought his first Hardworld mem, clearly trying to make a liween the discussion of Rory and the big step in his Hardworld career. Luke almost stormed ht there, but Dr. X toned down the jump a bit, and Luke hoped that future viewers would see through the charade anyway, so he let it py on.

  He had been standing in front e, still mostly free of the Bliss cravings, with the mem of his most ret drop still fresh in his mind, and his payche hand.

  “How much for the mem of my first day?”

  “Already wired it to the good doctor,” Drudge said, his words dripping with pt. Luke had sighat tract with Drudge to have the TV-safe versions of his Hardworld mem sent directly to Dr. X. After all the fees, it came out to a little more per day than selling his mem from the Real.

  “Yeah, but I wanted a copy for myself. To look over.”

  “You get it from him.”

  Luke knew damhat by the time he stepped foot inside Dr. X’s, he would have no i in doing anything but chasing that light. It was another maion of his impriso, his restraints, his servitude. Not only was he a sve to Bliss, a debtor to Dr. X, a wage sve to Ace, he was now shackled to other versions of himself. Step out, and the Bliss hound Luke blows any ce of studying the Hardworld mem, of gettier. Take a wrong step in the Hardworlds, and some other Luke runs off with his soul, until the spirit walkers e with their suppressed rifles and bills for their services banced against his future pay. And he was sure there were some other Lukes he was fetting about. Typical.

  But he wasn’t about to say that shit. He refused to give Drudge the satisfa.

  “I want the raw mem, please.”

  Drudge said something into his hand and a woman with bright red hair and dressed like a fairy queen ready to give a Powerpoint presentation came in and escorted him to another room.

  “Hi Bottle, I’m Firefly. I uand you would like to purchase the raw mem of your first day?”

  He had expected her to give him some excuse, but she only id out the rates, a ft price per hour with a modifier based on the security level of his role in the job. To his shock, he had more than enough to buy his first day ht. It was dispensed, at his request, as a a special case, with a paper ihat said “Bottle’s first day” in bck marker. He was given some other options, VHS, prism crystal, bead, object, and for a hefty fee they could make it a “digital file” uploaded onto his personal Feed station or iPod or whatever else he had. Apparently doing so was high-level makery, but he had no iion of keeping his mem in aate of intangibility, even if he could afford the jaw-dropping price of Otherworld Hardware.

  As he stood there relishing the feeling of holding a piece of his best life in his hand, a feeling that was, for the moment, keeping the Bliss urges at bay, he remembered something else.

  “How much is a scraper lise?”

  She did her best not to ugh, but still let her smile take on an “oh you poor thing” curve at the edges and around her eyes. Wheold him the price, he asked about a payment pn and her ugh broke out.

  “Oh, sorry. I thought you were joking.”

  He stormed out of the offid through himself down the chute that spat him out in the Allcity.

  For a moment, things stilled, the extractor slowed its pace, and Luke watched everything roll and bounce, and wondered for the first time in a while what the fuck he was doing.

  This is a world of whatever you want, right? So why am I letting some phantom named Car-Crash tell me what I ’t do? Why does some HR bitch get to ugh at me? Fuck this dreamworld. I could probably get to the Hardworlds right now, if I just found the right door…

  But the desire to break into a more real world morphed into the same old desire to wake up, and in this pce, at that time, that desire had a physical maion; a ball ht warm light just out of reach.

  He found his way back to the Bliss den via a door in the base of elian tower (he had been told that being on “back door status” with the den was a sign of a true junkie by another denizen who had smiled like it was something to be proud of) and very quickly fot all about his cd, until his funds ran dry and he was rummaging his pockets for something to offer up.

  “I got this.”

  Lounging Lizard gawked at him.

  “You give me that and we’ll both be doing time, and I damn sure got more to lose than your junkie ass. Not that I could read it anyway. They lock that shit down for just this kind of jack-assery.”

  Lounging Lizard had dropped the fa?ade of respect at about the same time Luke started taking the back door to the pce. He waved Luke off and the carpet drug Luke away from the er booth like gravity had ged dires until Lizard was a distant sped the curtain of an alcove fluttered into pce.

  He sat down hard on a bean bag and looked up through the skylight at three non-stars frozen in the bck, until his hand, almost on its own, reached into his pocket and pulled out the cd.

  He looked at the case and realized it was his only possession in this entire world. A world of boundless whatever, where people owire ps, so he had heard, and here he was in the archetypical form of a trap house holding a burned cd. It reminded him of something his mom always said, like a bad Disney character. It’s whats ihat ts. Well, here he was, about as inside as you could get, burned out s, with nothing to show for all his pain and gunpy.

  He opehe case and half expected it to be one of those effects where the inside was like a window to some other pce, and you could move it around to see different parts of some other ndscape, usually a fantasy forest or starfield or something, like the other location was transposed on this one, but invisible. Tacky mother fuckers iher loved that effect.

  Instead, inside was a regur burnable CD with a date scribbled on it in marker. The date of the job. A revetion jumped out of the handwriting. It was his own. That sent a shiver down his back. He took the CD out with the standard sensation of popping it off the ter spoke, and for some reason tur around to look at the readable side.

  Same old rays of rainbow on a mirror surface. Until, suddenly, it caught the light, and in an instinct, he tur in his hand until the light fshed in his eyes.

  “Rise and shiher fucker! Training day!”

  It's our memories and what we learn from the that make us free. ime, Luke' gets his first taste of real freedom in a world that alromised but never delivered. episode, A py Spirit.