The faces you meet

  “Got a lot of friends on the ball?” one of the masked men asked. The other chuckled.

  Luke watched the flutteriravagance of the Allcity shrink out the window.

  “No. I’ve decided not to e back to this shitstorm, so if ya’ll are pnning t me out into the bd rob me, just leave me out there once you realize I don’t have—”

  “We know you’re broker thaen as, dude,” shell-gs mask guy said. “You talked to Beefeater, he told you the score I’m sure, so just save your sass for the Boss.”

  “Beefeater’s not the boss?” Luke said, letting his gaze drift from his own distorted refle in the melted brass face, to the cigar stig out of it, somehow being puffed on. The gs rolled around it as the man uhe mask shifted it in his mouth.

  “Nah, he’s more like HR,” gs-mask said, and welder-mask got a rumbling ugh going. “Our boss’ll be the oo pick you over, see if you’re worth throwing a bone.”

  “How bout throwing me a cigar?” Luke had noticed by this point that the smoke was pletely free of sts of night club ambiance or summer bonfire youthfulness or any of those bullshit memory-scraped fvors that makers loved to shove into their crafted cigars, and he found it refreshing.

  Welder mask smiled, his jack-o-ntern mouth actually spreading across the metal, and tossed Luke a cigar that floated in the sudden zero-g.

  “Lighters uhe window,” said gsface. Luke found it, like a dashboard lighter from an old Buick, and got to smoking. It was an absolutely normal cigar, just on the edge of fine, and his Spirit respoo the familiar fvor by providing the expected bump of nie, or so he guessed. Really, he had no idea how any of this shit worked.

  The rest of the ride was silent. Later, when Luke had put o the masks, and gsface was known to him as Sammy Stovepipe, they let him in on the meaning behind their brief exged gnce during the silence.

  “Most recruits talk our fug ears off, about what they know about Hardworlding, and how much of a fug natural they think they’ll be. So thanks for shutting the fuck up, at least that oime.”

  The extractor plucked that bit of associated memory out of the back of Luke’s mind, and filed it away. Down in the helicopter, other Luke leaned forward in his seat suddenly and gawked at the windshield.

  It was a rough sphere of ft light and dull darkness. A cluster of suburban houses, gss a office buildings, mobile homes, sheet metal topped warehouses, strip malls and hotels, all crammed together and drained of color, with street lights stuck here and there, lighting up the doors. It took him a sed to notice that all the buildings were only half there; namely, the back halves. There was an alley lined with back doors to a strip mall, but no storefronts. The houses and mobile homes were half buried in the sphere, their front doors hidden somewhere in the maze. There were mainterances and smoking areas at the bases of the office buildings, but the front lobbies were o be seen.

  The helicopter floated past a hotel with its first floor sunk into the mesh of buildings, and hovered over the roof of a t office building, the tallest feature on the orb.

  The craft bounced as it nded, and Luke felt real gravity for the first time, not the variable suggestion of Gunmaze, or the just in the knees-down su to the flravity used in the Bliss den, but a real all-over undeniable gravity that made the steps out onto the pad feel like the first thing he had done in ages.

  The rotor cut off, and their footsteps, Italian loafers and boots on crete from his panions and barefoot patter in Luke’s case, rang ftly in the air, as if they were on a soundstage or a parking lot during a dense soft snow.

  A push door opened onto an eg stairwell, and the hinge-squeaks skipped ahead of them. Boots and sh off the thin crete stairs, followed by the hiss of hands on handrails, beginning the familiar song of desding a crete staircase. The door smmed shut and the noise bounced down in a predictable and undeniably correct way, like a ball boung to a stop or dominoes falling in a lihis ce with firm rules, and Luke wasn’t sure if he was more relieved or terrified.

  Eventually, the two masked men stopped at a door, and Luke gnced down the shaft. They were less than a tenth of the way down, and the railings spiraled towards a point of ft light far below. A barely-there white noise floated up, as if unseen office workers were stealing a few minutes of personal calls on the ndings.

  The ded open, half the sound eg behind him and the other half smothered softly ahead of him. They led him down a carpeted hallway fnked by frosted gss and shuttered executive offices towards a er office at the back. It felt like walking through the heart of ay massive gss downtown tower in the middle of the night, though he couldn’t see the sky anywhere, as if the structure was subtly broadcasting its own time of day.

  Welding-mask looked back over his shoulder.

  “Better put that out. Boss hates it. Even the fake stuff.”

  Luke had fotten about the cigar, and seeing nowhere else put it out in the palm of his hand, and instantly regretted it.

  “Fuck!” The circle of freshly burned flesh smiled at him as it fked off wetly.

  “No dampeners here,” Sammy said. “Spirits primed from all the ultra real sensations.”

  “Makes food training,” Welding-mask said, the jagged smile expanding again.

  Luke scratched at the burn and it fked away like a Halloween e scar, leaving his palm just as it had been before. He put the cigar in his pocket as Sammy knocked on the door.

  “e in,” a voice already on the edge of annoyance said. Sammy and Welding-mask pushed in the door and spread out instantly as if they were pie-slig the room in a kill house. Luke stepped in and the door shut on its own.

  “Gd you could make it. Have a seat.” The man behind the desk was all eyes. Grey ones, like two specks of crete glowing under an overcast sky at high noon. The rest of his face wavered like smoke, and even in Luke’s dissected memory, there wasn’t a scrap of his features to be found.

  However, this time around, higher up in the bleachers Luke did notie thing. He seemed a lot more filled out, and his hands were thicker in the knuckles and looked strong as pipefitters. Luke couldn’t remember any of that, so it must have beeractussying things up for the future viewer. Even in pure extracted memory, Dr. X couldn’t capture the gravity of those eyes.

  Though far away, another Luke reflected that they weren’t quite the most terrifying pair he had ever seen.

  Down in the office, Luke took a seat without looking at the chair. His gaze was locked ahead.

  “I’m Mr. Filepress. If you end up joining, you’ll report to your captains who will report to me.”

  Luke nodded as much as he could given the circumstances. Mr. Filepress didn’t seem to care anyway.

  “You are here to work in the Hardworlds, correct?”

  Again, Luke nodded, but he felt he could have burped or yodeled for the same effect.

  “First off, I will be taking a tour of your memory. sider this a background check before a highly sensitive employment. Do you sent?”

  Now here, Luke ughed out loud.

  “Bro, uh, Mr. Stockfile sir. If you want my memories, I should tell you they’re avaible wholesale at firesale prices down at Dr. X’s magical mystery emporium.”

  Sammy and Welding-mask ughed offs. The eyes didn’t move, but something in them caught fire.

  “I’m aware. This will be a more exact process. Do you sent?”

  This time, the pause was still as death, and up there Luke mulled over the fact that even out there, on their own mini p and an infinity away from the Allworld, they still feared the wrath of the High Principalities.

  “Uh yeah, sure, it's not like—”

  “I want you to think back to that day at the gas station. When those hoodlums tried to carjack you.”

  Down there Luke didn’t have the ce to ugh at the pletely serious use of the word ‘hoodlum’, but up there Luke got a good chuckle. “Mr. Filepress” had been and always would be a grade-A fug dweeb.

  However, as far as down there Luke was ed, Mr. Filepress was the god damned alpha and omega, so he did what he was told, thought about the bright lights under inkbck sky and the feel of a Glock going off with his hand ed around the slide, ahe chair slide out beh him and the office give way to a suddeion of falling.

  And then he was there, his hand ed around the gun. While the extractor was slow, deliberate, sav and studying the emotional nuances of the memory, whatever the fuck Mr.Filepress was doing was more akin to having your past shot through a ser ser. Submerged Luke shot forward into the day without missing a single bump of memory, then was flung backward to the start of it all, pulling up to the gas station, the gas light a desperate pleading e, and scraped across the 24-hour period in an instant, then bad forth a few more times food measure.

  Then Luke was ba the office, freed of the vice gripped throttling so abruptly that the stillness of his surroundings and the sudden snail’s-pace of his unpressurized thoughts had a whipsh effect, as the eyes looked down at the desk as Mr. Filepress made a motion with his hands that might have been something close to writing, and the legal pad respoo his touch with liquid movements and faint fluttering lights.

  Luke waited there, like a kid with his test being looked over, and g the masked men for some kind of signal, or maybe even a fragment of versation. Fresh from the Filepress-Mindpress, he was feeling very exposed, like he had just undressed in front of everyone.

  But the masks were pointed decisively at the ceiling or out the wide window behind Filepress, where solid bck void was broken ily two pces by one immobile and one rapidly departing light, and Luke got the feeling they just didn’t want to look at him.

  So he gnced across Filepress’s desk. There was a e, a bonsai tree growing out of a ptter of live rounds, 9mm, a g ball set with the spheres painted like mihs, and a small silver or e statue of a hunter holding a bow, various points on his body glowing like stars and a robed figure with torn angel wings at his feet, stuck full of arrows. Just as Luke noticed the angel had horns on its head, Filepress started up again.

  “Well Luke, it seems we definitely use you. As courtesy dictates, Ill give you a day to think it over and send you home with a file that covers all the final details.”

  “You mean like pay?” Luke said, staring at a cigarette Filepress was trying to hand him.

  “Among other things. pany policy, all the fun stuff. Here.”

  “I thought you didn’t like smoking in here. I have a cigar—”

  “This is the file. Smoke it at your leisure and it will run a proje expining anization. Think of it as a training video, of sorts.”

  A brief shaking of hands and thanks for stopping by and all that, then Welding-mask and Sammy stovepipe shuffled him out of the offid back down the hallway.

  “Hey, a word of advice,” Welding-mask said as they all stopped in front of a door beled “utility”.

  “Try and kick the Bliss habit, if you .”

  Luke just stared at him, and Sammy Stovepipe chortled uhe brass. Welding-mask shrugged and Luke stepped into the freight elevator alone and that was it. After a few rumbling seds, the floor opened up and he slid down a chute that spat him out in to the bustle of the Allcity. Guess they hadn’t been listening wheold them he was never ing back.

  The extractor fast forwarded over his aimless flight around the ball and even his frustrated dang in the Allclub, blinked over his day in the Real, gave a ten-times speed summary of his daily visit to Dr. X, and lingered, artistically, he guessed, on Luke's visit to the bliss den, where Welding-mask’s st words echoed in his head, and his owing ughter that brought him to tears.

  What star-bzoned hunter killed the fallen angel? Like any business, Hardworlding has it's elites, its run of the mill, and its meatgrinder botters. ime, Luke gets a crash course in crash dummying. episode, So you wanna be a Hardworlder?