Dis-orientation

  After the Bliss, in the dim light of his alcove, Luke pulled back the shades and blinds and stared out the window, if you could call it that, at the void. He preferred having a room he edge of the undead resort. Something about being on the inside reminded him of old horror movies, like the art deco crypt could devour him any time he closed his eyes.

  Out in the bck, frozen white points stood in for stars, adjat worlds that had once been part of a work of simir resorts, now all dead ruins. A sparse cloud of clhts, all different colors and sizes, danced in the sky, some breaking away and shooting off into the dark while others vanished suddenly. It wasn’t the romantient of spaceships you might see in movies ames, but more like the flight of a scrap of reflected sunlight when you move your watch, or the path of a red dot from a ser pointer right after you’re done messing with the cat.

  He thought about the crafts, each with their own pilots and crew, pying out their own tale of bliss addi, and wondered if she was out there.

  The extractor pulled her face from the thick muemory, ed it off, and overyed it on the feed, and high up in the bleachers Luke almost threw up.

  Down there Luke, however, sighed and took out the cigarette. It looked normal, felt normal, and as he bent it in his hand the paper tore at the bend, exposing the musty- gold shreddings of tobacco. He wondered what would happen If he tore it up. Would he be able to wish it back together? Some objects iher were like that. Or would he have to call up Beefeater or Mr. Filepress and ask for another one?

  He decided he wasn’t ied enough in any of it to try. The mysteries and paradoxes and just pin old nonsense of the Otherworld were so vast and numerous that you tripped over three of them going out any of the fug doors, and right now the only question he had was, “Why do I get the feeling that these wannabe dream gangsters have something I want?”

  He pulled a lighter, the archetypical silver Zippo, like the one he had been so proud of as a teen, out of his pocket and got the cig going. It tasted like a regur cigarette. In the Real, he had switched to menthht before switg to a vape for the venience, but this was a cssic red 100 if ever there was one. He inhaled ahe old familiar chill down his throat and in his lungs, then exhaled and the smoke clouded the window and stuck there.

  A sound like a projector starting up before an old film, or the sound as it was depicted in sit s and cartoons he had seen half a tury after the sound itself had ceased to really exist, pyed from inside his ears and he khe smoke had gotten ihem. A light beamed out from the burning end of the cigarette like the projector was hidden within and lit up the smoke like a s.

  It was an old-timey radar circle tdown. 3, 2, 1…

  “Wele to the orientation. You will need roughly ten minutes of uninterrupted viewing, so if you are not prepared, please pause the film by extinguishing the cigarette and re-ig once you are ready. Please note, you may only do so three times before the file disies.”

  It sounded like someone doing an impersonation of a 50’s propaganda narrator or something. Luke found that no matter where he held the cigarette, the light beamed out of it straight to the smokes and the feed wasn’t affected, so he leaned ba the matt and got ready for some bullshit.

  A musical sting pyed, like an old alt-rock riff, and big bold text appeared on the s and slowly came closer.

  “ACE TACTICAL”

  Luke ughed and rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. Up there Luke ughed too. Hell even Dr. X snickered somewhere unseen.

  In small letters below, in a much more professional and less spikey font,

  “A steltion Franchisee”

  Some half-saved memory floated out of down there Luke, of another smokey evening in the Bliss den, and someone saying, as they waited for their ats to clear and delivery to be made,

  “Those motherfuckers at steltion…”

  Down there Luke made a mental note, and the videressed to a title card.

  “Orientation 1:A – For New Hardworlders”

  An animated orb, like a soap bubble floating in a bck void, filled with fluttering lights, some revealing themselves in fshes to be recs of spirits and pces iherworld, appeared on the s.

  “This is the Otherworld,” said the Narrator. “The encapsution of your preseence. All the worlds and all the Sims and everything your Spirit knows is tained in this illustrious sphere.”

  The sphere moved up to the top of the s, so that half of it was out of frame, and another sphere, or at least the edge of it, moved into frame like a glowing horizon.

  “This is the Real. Though you have memory of it, you have never been there. You are wholly a facet of the Otherworld, now and forever.”

  The Otherworld exited stage-top and the Real shrunk down a bit.

  “You may have often wished, as many do, to return to the Real, t your newfound enlighte back to the pce you feel is your home. Of course, this is impossible. But with Hardworlding, you do somethier.”

  The Real shrunk down and became a half orb floating at the bottom of the s, and beams of color shot out from it, projeg other spheres into the bck, like a biology textbook dispys a zoom-in on a cell wall.

  “Much like the Real you is projected onto the soul of your Spirit every day, the Real is stantly projeg itself. Though we ever touch the Real that we know and love, or hate, we i with its projes.”

  The Otherworld reappeared on the s.

  “The Otherworld lives, as the saying goes, and thus is a home for living things. Even its objects are alive, speaking, and stantly active. But, should a thing bee tid, too defioo real, if a thing should die, one could say, the thing vanishes from the Other pletely. But where does it go? Such questions had long fouhe greatest makers, until the solution revealed itself.”

  The Otherworld shrunk, and aner circle came into frame around it. Tiny objects drifted off of the soap bubble and disappeared into the ring with little sparkler effects.

  “The Hardworlds exist below the Otherworld in all dires. They are alternate worlds, infinite in hat at first gnce, seem identical to the Real.”

  The camera zoomed into the ring at light speed and after a wipe, a hotel room appeared on s.

  “Of course, it's not as if these too-real objects were popping into the Hardworlds. It is more accurate to say that the Hardworlds appeared around the object.”

  A an appeared in the chair, like something out of an old Ovaltine ercial, or, once again, like something out of a parody of those ercials Luke had seen somewhere decades after they had st been aired. The man shrugged his shoulders.

  “You may be saying right about now, “Well, that’s all well and good, but I signed up to shoot to kill and pay my bills!”

  Here the an took out an AK a loose oel room.

  “And you’re right! But before you start a war, it’s important to uand your battlefield. And buddy, the Hardworlds are one hell of a battlefield!”

  The an stood up out of his chair with a big, excited smile.

  “So how do we get there? Well, the specifics will e ter, should you be selected for employment, but for now we’ll stick to the basics.”

  The video returo the Otherworld with the ring of Hardworlds still in frame.

  “Remember those too-real objects we talked about? Well, what if I told you that you too could bee too heavy to stick around?”

  Another wipe, and the an was now standing on a cloud, a Hanna-Barbera version of the Allcity skyline behind him, attag 45-pound ptes to his feet with ropes.

  “That’s right, just a simple teique is all you o say goodbye to make believe—”

  The an dropped out through the clouds, and the camera panned out to track his dest to the Hardworld ring. He struck it with a pop and vanished.

  “And say hello to mayhem!”

  To the director’s credit, Luke jumped up off the mat. The video was suddenly a very real Go-Pro feed of a gunman kig in the door of an apartment aing loose with his AR. Someone responded with full auto fire that fshed and sparked and the tled Luke’s ears. The footage became a montage of gunfights, chases, even parachute jumps, and boat rides, all set to an early 00s al instrumental.

  Up there Luke yelled “Bullshit”, but no one was listening. The narrator tinued, now with a more serious tone.

  “But before you start your new life as one of the rough riders of the Otherworld, let me tell you about the dangers of Hardworlding, which highlight reels and Sims often overlook.”

  There had been something like humanity in his voice, just for a moment, that got Luke’s attention a his mind on edge.

  “Firstly, in the Hardworlds, pain is very real.”

  Another montage, without the post-hardcore soundtrack, of guys sobbing unshot wounds and being dragged out of car crashes.

  “You may think you’ve felt pain as a Spirit, but the muffled dream pain of Gunmaze is nothing pared to the cold hard firings of real nerve endings in a real body. And unlike here iher, there’s no easy way out of it.”

  On the s, a man with his leg mangled got sick of waiting for a make-do medic to stick him with morphine, so he drew his pistol and shot himself through the temple.

  “Well, besides that. Which brings me to the warning. In the Hardworlds, you get stuck food.”

  A CC-TV, streaming from some retail , focused on a line isters.

  “Iherworld, you escape just about anything. Simply summon a door or will yourself away, and even the most powerful principalities have trouble keeping you there. But in the Hardworlds, there’s no easy escape, outside of a bullet, and if you’re not careful, this—”

  The video feed paused and a red circle appeared around one of the cashiers. The camera zoomed in on his face, and even with the drop in quality, Luke could see the “is this my life?”-ness p out of his eyes.

  “— could be you. Because if you lose yourself in the Hardworlds, the Hardworlds will find a rept, and it may not be the yourself that you would prefer to be.”

  The cashier, now on some kind of handheld private iigator video recorded from a car parked across the street, shuffled towards an apartment plex. His ph, and as he tried to juggle his jacket, keys, (already in his hand, clutched tight like a rosary) and thermos, he dropped the tter a cold heavily-creamered coffee flying across the sidewalk and all over his pants and shoes. The thermos made a hollow thunk hat echoed across the street like a musical sting, cutting off half of his swear.

  “And there's only one way t someone bace they’ve “dropped out” as the operators call it.”

  A guy pulled out a gun right behind him and Luke sat up straight. He hadn’t even noticed the guy walk up, either because he had been too focused on the edic tragedy pying out on the sidewalk or because everything about the gunman, from his clothes, athletic wear in muted colors, to his walk, a simir “this is really my life, huh?” march as his soon to be victim, had made him blend into the setting like ay tall boy stu the grass.

  Now, the low-ine-housing-grey-man fired three shots from te away, all of them headshots, which was impressive because the st two were made while the body was mid-fall.

  “And it’s never a very pleasant experience, dying when you don’t know what’s oher side.”

  The gunman skipped towards the car as the camera zoomed in on the body, the pants now ging color from more than just coffee.

  “And that’s if they even find you. The Hardworlds, you will learn in the course of your work, have a way of cealing their octs. They do not want you to leave. They do not want you to be found.”

  Suddenly, the narrator appeared ons. A tall man in a navy suit with wide shoulders and that World War 2 vet straight off the pne look about him, wearing a featureless mask of smooth matte skin-toned metal like someone had smudged his face off. If an insurance mega-corp had needed a masked man for their ercials, this might have been it.

  “To reiterate, should you choose employment as a Hardworlder, you expect physical aal anguish beyond anythiely possible iherworld. But, the danger is not limited to pain, as being trapped forever in these hostile realities is a stant possibility. And, of course, we must sider the time. You expect to spend hours, days, all together years, if you stay in, waiting in hot cars, attics, trying to stay awake in some god-forsaken sewer, while other spirits are dang in the Allclub, killing their enemies, and fug their crushes in Sims.”

  He stopped walking through the grey gradient and owards the camera.

  “In short, is it really worth it?”

  Reverse psychology, or CTA? ime, Luke browses the dream web, looking for dirt on his would be employer, and the void stares baext episode, Dead Stars.