Don’t let go

  She had done her best to expin it all to him, but his dream-lust floated over his mind like a cloud, and she would go off on a ta every other sentence, so by the end of her rambling he had only the vague idea that this ce beyond his uanding, or at least his attention, and that while the rules of the world made a kind of seo people like her, his brain might as well have been trying to absorb one of the odd passing crafts through his ear al.

  Looking back through that fractaled vision, another Luke uood that the specifid rules hadn’t been the point anyway. The message got through loud and clear.

  Bro, you're out of your fug element, and I’m swimming like a fish, so you better hang on tight.

  And he did.

  “If you could do anything, go anywhere, be anyone, for one day, what would you do?”

  She asked him, wide-eyed, after a long pause that sighe death of her final attempt to expin it all, and he had sat there and thought about it a moment.

  The answer, he found, was that he didn’t know. He had no goals, no dreams, really, besides a vague hope that one day he would ask himself, “is this all there is?” and something would answer, “no.”

  So he told her,

  “Ten women at once.”

  She bli him.

  “Is that it?”

  “Maybe not, but lets get it out of the way and see if I still have any aspirations afterwards.”

  She sighed and stood up straight, and clicked a keyfob that popped out of thin air.

  “All right, I’m gon you your ten women, then I’m going to show you what this world really do.”

  “What, twenty women?”

  But she had ignored him, and a sed ter, he ignored himself, because a ship shaped like a giant teddy bear, its head and torso two felt-covered orbs, had dropped down on the rooftop with a thud and a squeak. It stood over him and she flew up into a tear that opened in its ass, disappearing inside a cloud of white stuffing. Before Luke could figure out if he had what it took to fly, a tractor beam, rings of green neon apanied by the cssic 60s ‘oo’ sci-fi sound, dropped around him and pulled him inside.

  The stuffing had been soft as a cloud. The interior like a spaceship, one orb the cockpit and lounge, and the rger chest orb a kind of bo dance floor observatory.

  She had made him watch through a window as the Allworld faded away, slowly, and spoke softly in his ear about makers and archetypes and schema and principalities and other things that he would have to hear a huimes from people he wasn’t hopelessly in love with before they would stick.

  And she had made him promise,

  “Never fet that I’m the ohat got you off that rooftop and showed you the world.”

  He wouldn’t, he had thought. He hadn’t, he so himself, as the extractor chopped on.

  The promise came ba, for the first time, after the ten women, and before the rest of it, as he y there, spent, and she expio him that this particur refractory period was a facet of the mind, a vestigial barrier that he could, with time and effort, learn to break through, if he wanted. He turned and faced her, and asked her why she had helped him.

  “Because you’re new, fresh,” she sighed. “People who have been in this pce a while, get tainted by it. Get locked into the same old ideas, the same old wants and fears. I wao see what it was like to be new again. To have so much hope.”

  He had reminded her that, while ying on the rooftop, he hadn’t had any hope in this pce at all, and she had been the o him off into the bck with promises of “whatever, whoever, whenever.”

  Or at least the far away Luke thought he had, but the extractor peeled off the truth and threw it at him like an old potato skin while it tio dig into the solid ground of his past, leaving him filing his arms and falling over and shit topside.

  The Luke in that big mirror-walled hotel suite, with its hot tub floor of rolling neon foam and floating raft beds and near zero-g, had only asked her why, you poor sweet thing, why did you lose hope? What took it from you?

  But she had’nt answered. Left him dangling by his own pity, ensnared in his mase desire to fort and protect, pulled him along with the unspoken promise that he would one day open her up and reveal what had been broken ihe scar that only he could heal.

  Then there were two kisses, one in glowing softened memory, and one peeled off and dropped wetly at his feet. An old curling potato peel. A warning ignored.

  The extractor sliced through his sed session with the ten women aiced, numbly that this time there were eleven, only one of whom seemed solid and real wheurned his back.

  When they were dohe ten slithered away like faintly aware steam, and she y there with him, leg thrown over his, ass moving side to side slowly like a thing ting time, asking him, again,

  “If you could be anyone, do anything, go anywhere,”

  Aill hadn’t known, but had said,

  “I’m fine right here. Fuck the rest of it.”

  But she had giggled, and pressed on, no really, what do you really want, and he said he wao know her name, and her smile had passed away, like he had broken through some barrier and touched her where she was serious and vulnerable, and she had told him,

  “Rory,”

  And he had said it again like a spell, and that sealed it. If it even needed sealing at that point.

  Then she asked him again what he really wanted most iire world, then giggling, in any world, and he had said again,

  “I have no fug idea.”

  “Well, let's go find out together, ok?”

  They had goo Gunmaze and failed miserably, their single quest, a two-on-one gunfight in a broken down church where Rory had hummed here es the bride as they camped in wait, had been celebrated like V day. They had toured the resort worlds, even Titanova with its neon blue “hydrogen” kes and tropical Genesis with its edible everything and drinkable zy river. They had been to every er of the Allclub, from the rolling human waves of the great floor, to the floating secluded velvet rooms. They had sampled every simuted life Rory could find him, from marital bliss to bas to indescribable and nearly inhuman experiences.

  Here, the extractor stuttured, skipped, a go, just a bit. It let the granur details slip through its cws like sand, zoomed out and sed in the frame of days, not seds, and relied almost purely on its sed tohat other orifice made only for the absorption of sticky emotion ded and fallible memory, while the more objective data was left to whither.

  Luke wondered if it was what you might call an artistic choice, but then quickly ged his mind. First, Dr. X had as much artistisibilities as a scalpel, and sed, the artistic embellishment was usually left up to the sim makers themselves, Dr. X being what you might call a dealer in raw material.

  robably just that some kind of Otherworld cht w kept him from taking too much mem of what might be sidered by his ts, petition, or he didn’t want any memory entig the future ers to skip out on whatever low-grade Sim Luke’s memories were destined for, and seek out the high-css shit he and Rory had been doing. Better to keep it vague.

  Whatever the reason, after the days had fked off he saw, from the mathematical viewpoint of the extractor, that it hadn’t even been a month before she took him to do Bliss. Wild. Those first few weeks had the weight of years in his memory, a vast expanse he often wished to go back to, that he now realized, with it packaged ly for resale, would be like trying to nd a pne on a postage stamp.

  Somewhere in that paremory, toward the end, she had asked him,

  “Did you find what you wanted?”

  Years ter, he had tried to remember what he had told her, but couldn’t. Now, he watched as he said nothing at all to her.

  She hadn’t let the sileay for long.

  “Well, do you at least know what you don’t want?”

  Her teddy bear ship had produced a cup and saucer, and they were lounging in the frothy tea-sted water within, orbiting Crystalia, that old world resort now left nearly abandoned, like a half-opened geode, where the trillion crystal facets reflected every fantasy its patrons had ever had for your choosing. What he had found most amazing about the pce was that it arently possible to get a headache without a body.

  “To go ba there,” he had said. She hadn’t ughed, only smiled, and asked for the st time,

  “What do you want, more than anything? What do you want to get out of boundless paradise?”

  He had looked her in the eye, and told her the truth.

  “I want you.”

  While one Luke was telling the truth, another was finally figuring it out. That had been a fug lie, and she k.

  She smiled, shyly, and looked down, and the Luke unblinded by lust and longing saw the disappoi at the edges of her face. Had she been hoping he would say something else, or had she hoped she could believe him?

  “If you want me, I have to be sure there’s nothing else in the world you want more than me.”

  He had made all kinds of moronic statements and promises, and she had sat there, listening but trying not to hear, smiling with her fad screaming with her eyes, waiting for him to shut the fuck up. Then she said,

  “There’s o thing we have to try, just to be sure.”

  “What?” he had said, like a child going along with a bedtime story.

  And she had shown him.

  The Bliss den had beeled in the husk of a dead gameworld. Some kind of sex game, judging by all the beds. She had talked about the ruins. About how in this world, where nothing degrades, there were abandoned pces a thousand times rger than the earth that some mad dreamer had made just for fun.

  “Those are the harmless ones,” one of the patrons had said, with a voice like existence had bee for him a kind of itch. “It’s the pces desigo trap you that you gotta look out for.”

  She had nodded like that was a really good point sir, even though now, Luke could see the pt. From up here, he could see right through her. If he could have moved, really moved, not just y there and floated through dead memory, he would have screamed at himself to run.

  But he couldn’t, so the Luke from long ago and far away took his first hit of bliss, and that was it.

  Would you have an ao Rory's questioime, Luke es face to face with an adversary that has beaten some of the greatest Hardworlders of all time. episode, Bliss