Jump at the sun and miss

  Here, the extractor jumped the track. Its linear path, which it not so much followed as made up as it went along, finally gave way a it ping-ponging across a starburst web of memories, the gaps between them sanded and smeared by the jackhammer cravings of addi.

  Every hit of Bliss Luke had ever taken had apparently lihemselves somewhere uhe oblivious ological slope the rest of his mind aligo, like a fungus meshing its mycelium uhe topsoil. The extractor took a quick survey of the memories, found them identical enough to be intergeable and pletely devoid of even the smallest fiment of tent textual memory, packaged them all together under a single bel, a back to work f the narrative.

  The high-up watg Luke almost shit bricks. What had seemed at the time to be repeated brushes with enlighte, each with their own personal message about his present state of existence, proved in the enhanced hindsight of the extractor to have been the same fug lizard-brained sensation every siime.

  Its like being lifted out of the cold and flying slowly towards a bright warm light. The closer you get, the more the heat and energy seep into your skin, your muscles, your bohen into your mind. First your present thoughts, then what you were thinking moments before, thahought you ever had, so that your entire existence has been overwritten by approag the light.

  You have been flying towards it forever. You begaence when its light struck the void. Should something e between you and the light and cast a shadow over you, you would . The light is the ahat created the question. The light. The light. The light. There!

  And just before you get to it, just as you reach out (with whatever a being made of pure light-wantingness has for hands) and just before you reach the final stage of light meeting not light, of light being all, just before the final and pure revetion from which all knowledge aence sprouts,

  You wake up in a fug bliss den, staring at the ceiling or something, and your body and Spirit are devoid of evei microsensation of the light and the warmth, so that your time flying towards it dissolves out of memory and bees like an impression in your mind, like a fossil after the leaf or animal has eroded away.

  The extractor picked up the trail again, and the down there Luke looked up at Rory like she had just pulled a chair out from under him.

  “That’s it?”

  She feigned disappoi, even a little taking offense.

  “You didn’t like it?”

  “Fuo. What’s the point of that shit?”

  “It’s supposed to give you like, a spiritual experience, like you see yourself—”

  “Didn’t I tell you that first day on the rooftop I’m not looking for that shit?”

  “Yes. But I guess I had thought that was just a kind of newbie icism.”

  “Nah, baby. That’s all me.”

  He had stroked her cheek, her thigh, oblivious. The cut was already made. A dead man lumbering forward like an old kung fu movie.

  “I don’t need anything to show me how to look at myself. I just want to look at you.”

  She smiled with everything but her eyes. Guess she had got fed up with faking those the momeook that hit.

  “We’ll I’ve shown you everything in this world,”

  “And I could give a fuck less. Like I told you—”

  “I know, I believe you.”

  Then the sad look down, the fake self-sciousness.

  “But I know you’ll be just as disappointed with me as the rest of it.”

  God damn. Girls were the same all over, he thought.

  He lifted her . He made sweet promises. He spoke of the day on the rooftop and the unwaveringness of his revetion there. She smiled and pulled back, emotionally, with her words, and he chased her with his. They sat there on that little silk mattress between marble pilrs with the sheer curtains waving and the dlelight and the whole pce like some middle eastern emperor’s opium den as designed for a music video, and the words pyed out like taped readings for the extractor to collect.

  And the up there Luke ighem, watg only her eyes, hearing their story for the first time, and knowing, disgustedly, that the extractor ig up on that too.

  “I have to go,” she said, after the versation had spun them around a huimes like two kids holding hands in a montage.

  “Why?” he said, like the impact after a thing had been dropped.

  “Well, this wasn’t just a selfless act, showing you all this. I was hoping, I mean I thought, when I saw you, I thought if I found someone knew, I had hoped you would find something worth it all in this pce, and that way, I would find it too.”

  It was a strange lie, watg Luke thought. She must have known then, as he did now, that she had him dead thts, and all other words beyond ‘pay up bitch’ were pointless, but she spun this shit out anyway. art of it true? A way to bme him for his owru? If you had only found true happiness, I wouldn’t have had to do this.

  But the part made sense.

  “I borrowed a lot of moo do it,”

  Down there Luke had hought about money in this world. He had heard it mentioned, even heard her use the word ‘expensive’ a few times when describing the worlds or sims, but thought it was a kind of metaphor. Now, with his mind freshly branded with the imprint of the on Bliss addict, she expined, in expert detail, watg Luke thought, the eics of the Otherworld, the exge of memory, the value of experience, even the way the Nine worlds had e together and created a on currency, MEM, after the currency wars and the colpse of a gameworld token.

  He had found her obsessive i endearing, like a child learning about the ws of gover, hoping to find proof that the sharing is g style ethics they had learned in kindergarten still applied in the imperceptible upper strata of the world.

  Then she expined her debt, and tried to expihods loan sharks used to pursue their debtors in this pce, using words like seekers, hounds, hardworlders, that he didn’t uand or even fully believe, but the gist of it all shihrough.

  “I need help.”

  On this sed go-round with the raw mem, watg Luke realized that she never actually said it, and while he was sitting there waiting for her to ask down there Luke to sell some of himself to save her, the versation slipped by, and they were climbing ba her ship. The cssic cliché artist ability to make the scam seem like the mark’s idea.

  So, as the ship dropped into the Allcity, as he watched her tell another, less broken and less healed Luke all about extractors and selling mem and her gushing gratitude, he found he had only himself to bme.

  Even though, he found some sotion, some absolution, in the fact that if she had never shown him the door, he never would have seen it.

  But, guilt or no guilt, the down there Luke followed her into that little square of shadow just the same.

  What would a dreamworld drug feel like to you? ime, A familiar name, a familiar pce, as Luke's story folds in on itself. episode, Dang Mirrors.