A moment is all it takes

  A darkness made of anticipation. A question molded into a physical form. A word oip of your tongue. Something fotten, now ay space, surrounded by remnants of the feelings it had spawned. Happiness, excitement, often relief. What was it? What had I decided? What had she said?

  Then, a flicker, a fsh, a suggestion. The flight was a question. The light was an answer, seen from the wrong angle. From afar, its brilliance blinded. Dead on, you only saw one side of it. You had to get to it, get i, be absorbed by it, to really get it, you just knew.

  So you flew to it. Or fell towards it, or were pulled up by it, or you never moved at all, and it just grew, slowly, stubbornly, fragilely.

  Your life fred behind you. Your memories burned in the bustion chamber. What were they worth, anyway, if they couldn’t get you closer? You started to run out. Your mind searched frantically. Your memories sifted and shredded, searched for any scrap of happiness, that votile propelnt, your only hope, and then,

  It all burned out. You all burned out, burned away. For a moment, you almost didn’t eve. For a moment, there was almost only the light. Then the moment passed, or died, or slipped out of your hands and out of the world and the moment didn’t so much happen as slide into the gap left by its absence, and,

  He fell to the mattress and the sudde of bei him there, immobile, until the attendant informed him his time . If he didn’t get up and leave on his own, the mattress would spring down, loooon-like, and drop him into a bck shaft that echoed his screams, if he made any, and shot him out at the orbiting craft rack like the afterbirth he felt he was.

  Here, the extractor saved some time.

  A myriad of Lukes broke off from the main node and refracted outwards, their simirities enough to disjoint their p linear ology, their differences uo their p time. The many now stood in for the ohat first eje from the Bliss den without her, which even prime Luke had difficulty being sure had actually been the first time and hadn’t gotten mixed up with one of the others in assed for his head in this pce.

  Luckily, the extractor didn’t care. It spread his time out like a used napkin and picked the crumbs. For Luke, the experience was once again like standiween two mirrors, only this time he wasn’t standing, more like he was a vibration passiween the multiple hims, like he was the kiiergy traveling through one of those g ball things CEO’s had on their desks in movies.

  The Extractor tried to capture the sensation, the theme, by creating a kind of mirrored montage of Luke’s big binge, but fell a bit short. Showbiz baby, one of the Lukes thought.

  A multitude of Lukes floated in the bck, then a multitude of Lukes hitched a ride or took a door to Dr. X, then the Lukes sold their mem, then the Lukes did bliss, then the snake found its tail, or the system married ass with mouth, and the Lukes became part of what sociologists and activists on TV might have called “a cycle”. However, Luke preferred the idea of a ping pong ball, smacked bad forth by two experts, while the ball, hopeless romantic that it was, held out hope that it would be flicked into a cup of beer or down some college girl's shirt or something.

  In the osciltion, a sione emerged, like a musical scale, or a narrative thread, or maybe something less romantic, like the digestive process or the nitrogen cycle. It was Luke’s life. His real life. The journeys from Bliss den to Extractor and back again moved forward in time only by the fshes of the Real pyed out in his hocked mem. Proceeding from high school through fifteen or so years, astounding Luke with its nothingness, its just-so-ness, its obviousness, its gaping hole “here, something is missing” ness. It took him a sed, given the circumstao realize what the missing thing was, and the extractor picked it out a moment before he did.

  It was a world of dramatic happenings, near-death decisions, life life-ging breaking points, leading to a rajectory of purpose aainty. A world that had seemed so real and near in the day-by-day living of his life, and that he now found had oed in his mind, like an illusion projected stantly from his forehead, maybe like an infant’s mobile hanging from a stick tied to his back, the little stars and spaceships repced with easy money and a wife and kids, a better metaphor, he felt, than the fabled carrot.

  Still, a few choients, of both lives, separated themselves from the drone and popped out at him.

  In one, he stumbled through the darkness of cordia and broke through onto a se he was never sure afterward had actually been “real”.

  A guy y on a heart-shaped bed, surrounded by mirror walls, his hand falling at his side, having just given himself the crystal hit of Bliss. Then, slowly, he rose off the bed, floated a foot over it, and his eyes glowed, like an unseen light was shining on them, and slowly, he faded away and disappeared. Then, maybe no lohan a sed ter, he reappeared ao the bed.

  Another memory branched off of that one. An old head, who Luke had been trying to squeeze for info, like whether or not he had seen Rory tely or even ever in his life, who he told about the guy on the heart bed, said, “You know how you know if someone makes it to that god damned light? Because you’ll never see them again.”

  The extractor filed that one away and tinued on, and some time towards the end of this particur romp between two mirrors, the seemory popped out at him.

  Real Luke, te night, 2:47, the police report would ter show, which to Luke seemed like the most random time possible, a glowing white bricked venieore, bck bars on the doors and windows like slices of the unnaturally bck sky above, washed out by the LED brilliance beaming off the storefront, whily served, in this instao shine a fug spotlight on his dark purple Challenger.

  The guys melted out of a Kia and fluttered towards Luke in choppy, dancy steps, like ghetto moths to a fme, and the extractor stuttered. Though of course, the thing already had the mem on file, maybe the file itself was unwieldly even for it. It was an untarnished memory, encoded in an adrenal state with terabytes of data, so to speak, and impervious to the extractor’s artistisibilities, or whatever they were.

  Luke remembered the mole, bd bulbous like a raisin, on the first gunman’s wrist, and the way the sleeve of his hoodie had bunched up around the forearm. The way his eyes gred, like a kid trying to imitate a rapper in a music video, from above his -around skeleton-mandible styled face mask. The way the unman, wearing for some reason aical hoodie and a bright e bandana like something out of a cartoon, had bounced around the rear bumper, while flig his hammerless revolver around in his hand like it was the master key to the universe, and the way he had banged his hip on the gas pump and stumbled sideways.

  The first gunman had pointed his Glock 17 in Luke's general dire and jerked it around like a bottle of spray paint and barked,

  “Keys, motherfucker, keys! Gimme them keys! I’m not pying! Where’re the fug—”

  Luke had motioned ihe driver’s seat, and the gunman had hissed at bandana man,

  “Get em, get em!”

  The smooth feel of the hood as he grazed his fingers over it, stepping back, the smell of gasoline and weed and dense body odor, the way one of the lights had flickered, drawing Luke's ser attention for a quarter of a sed, the bandana man shoving his pistol bato his hoodie pocket and climbing into the drivers seat, the way he had bounced around inside, just a shadow ointed windshield, looking for them, and the exaent the idea came into Luke’s head and became a reflex.

  Glock boy looked down at the driver's seat and his scrambling panion, and barked,

  “You get em?”

  Luke thanked God, really prayed and pleaded and begged so hard the smell of inse from a thousand Sundays at St. Patrick’s flooded bad became lodged in the memory itself, that he had moved from ay-chamber appendix-carry to a round-in-the chamber hip-holster.

  He lifted his shirt with his thumb and drew his pistol just like he had practiced in the mirror and on the range a million times, and grabbed the Gloow aiming just past his ear, with the other hand. It felt like it took an hour, like he was standing there, fingers ed around the Glock, other hand aiming his M&P Shield at the gunman’s chest, waiting for him to turn his head and see how the situation had ged.

  He finally did, and the Glock exploded. Luke felt the slide ki his hand and pulled the trigger halfway down on his pistol with the other as he raised it to the gunman’s chest. It had felt like it took him ages to level it, but in the removed vantage point of the extractor, he realized he had do as fast as his muscles would allow.

  The gunman’s eyes ping-ponged in his sockets, from the Glock with its slide halfway back, shell g stig out of the side, to Luke, who stared back like they were passing each other oreet, back to the Glock, and his own finger jerking uselessly at the trigger, then back to Luke, and down to the pistol moving up to his face.

  It looked like he had stepped on a live wire. He let go of his Glod melted into the ground. For a moment, Luke thought he had actally shot him, until the guy scampered off towards the back of the Challeripping over his friend’s leg stig out of the driver’s seat but losing absolutely zero forward momentum, and sprinted across the crete towards the shadows beyond the other pumps.

  Luke stood there, with a gun in each hand, the whole world ringing, as bandana man popped out of the car like something inside had unched him. The guy came out and stopped with his head level with Luke's pistol, and his eyes darted from one gun to the other, his hand reached reflexively for his own hoodie pocket and Luke almost blew his brains out, but he only spped the outside of the pocket before dissolving backwards and following his friend into the night.

  What felt like another hour passed with Luke just standing there. He had finally gotten his brain to sider that they had left their car there, right behind his, doors open and everything, when another car pealed out behind him. He turned and saw taillights melt onto the street. The car passed under a streetlight, and he saw it was a gold te aughts Camry, with a dummy tire on the back driver's side, bubble tint, and a basketball-sized dent on the back bumper. The lise pte fshed for an instant, and Luke had it itted to memory for the rest of his life.

  He turned back to his car. Aernity alohen the darkness fshed out beyond the pumps and a window in the venieore exploded behind him. He raised both pistols, though one oihe wrong way, and the darkness fshed two more times, the still, and what was left of his hearing picked up someone yelling,

  “e on, e the fu!”

  Or something like that, chopped to pieces by the ringing in his ears.

  Retroactively, he could firm what his memory had told him in the Real. He was calm the eime. The adrenaline had felt like background musid while he had felt the fear, it was more like it had just been sitting in the back seat mumbling at him, than fighting him for the steering wheel as it had so many other times in his life.

  As the cops expio him that the other car was carrying five people all armed, and that the cameras had firmed his lise pte recolle, and that one round had skipped off the roof of his Challenger a foot from his head, and hey man just some advice, you might want to duext time, he had actually yawned multiple times and asked if they really had to take his gun to evidence if he hadn’t even fired it.

  That night, he slept like a baby, twelve hours, the e sunlight greeting him through the blinds in the m. He had told himself, lying there, that this was it. Life recious, and he had been wasting it doing things he hated. This, he told himself, was the push he had been waiting for.

  But of course, whatever he had hoped that fsh of life versus death would push him towards, never materialized. It had revealed to him what he didn’t want in life, but none of what he did.

  A part of Luke realized, sluggishly, that it might not have been him pig out those choice memories, but the extractor, which may now only feel indistinguishable from his scious dire of the searchlight of memory, maybe even having now repced it. It would have been a scary thought, had he had more se for his owal processes.

  Another Luke, floating high above the hall of mirrors, decided that the hyper-focus on the gas station memory was no act, and that ultimately, he really did owe Dr. X quite a lot of gratitude.

  Sed only, of course, to the Hardworlds.

  Have you ever felt your life was about to ge, just to find yourself going down the same old path? What if the ge you felt, happeo another you? ime, Luke's memory attracts the attention of a different kind of talent scout, and the Hardworlds rumble in the distanext episode, Cold Call.