3 - The Plunge
3 – The Plunge
Braap braap braaap!
“Mmmm!”
Jude didn’t even cut him a break this morning. All George wanted was the warm, blissful void of sleep to carry him away forever, but Jude had a different idea. His hand wasn’t halfway to the snooze icon before she switched on the ejector and Rosa’s fields kicked him from bed and set him on his feet.
“Eeesa new day, Mister Jorge! You gonna love this!”
"Mmmraaahhn..." George blinked at the indignity, shook his head, and staggered over to the window for his morning face-plant.
Crud, it’s too early. The sky was barely showing pre-dawn. He usually snoozed until just into the opening acts of sunrise. Why was he up so early? He stared down to the Deck, barely visible in the gloom. The globelike buildings twinkled with nighttime lights like a store-front display of galaxies-on-a-stick.
We are one lucky species.
A decade before Fenrir’s Impact – the most recent extinction event written into Earth’s date planner – a researcher trying to find a cheaper way to move cargo into orbit had invented a way to levitate large objects. Robert Krishnashankar failed at his quest, not even getting halfway there – even the most robust kinetic generators couldn’t project fields over thirty miles away. The fields just unraveled, decimal points and integers dripping out the sides of the calculations and pooling in a riot of mathematical chaos. Krishnashankar didn’t manage to reach orbit, but he did open up a whole new real-estate market; given dedicated fusion plants for ground-based projectors, his fields could hold large masses aloft indefinitely. Condominiums popped up into the stratosphere, forever above the smog.
When humanity failed to divert the asteroid Fenrir and found themselves without the means for more than a few people to abandon the planet – there was not enough time to build massive, wasteful rockets, not enough fuel to lift them, and there was nowhere ready for them to go anyway – they’d set to building shelters to weather the Impact. Instead of bunkers under mountains, Robert had proposed stratohabs – lots of them, huge ones, with fusion plants and levitation generators anchored deep in the thickest, most solid cratons Earth’s crust had to offer. “If we shelter in the sky, in the light of the sun, we will stay strong, and reach for the stars,” Robert had famously said. “But if we cower in darkness, what will happen to us?”
And so we survived, George thought. And we thrive. But what’s the point if I can’t sleep in as late as I want?
How was he supposed to follow his routine when Jude and Rosa conspired against him? PJs on the floor, trip over the clutterbot, shower, shave, dress - he didn’t know how to do that this early.
He glared out at the city of stratohabs, hating them for looking so shiny, when he felt so not.
Nothing good comes from getting up this early. Only doom. Doom. Doom...
Fingers curled around his shoulder – fingers gentle enough to hold a newborn, yet strong enough to haul it kicking and screaming from the womb and into the cold, hard, bright world.
Well this is new.
Jude hauled him upright and pressed Comet’s leash into his hand. George looked down into the little dog’s bug-eyes. Comet was many things, but a lot of him was Boston terrier.
George blinked. Comet licked one nostril clean, and blinked back. "Mornin’," he said to the dog. "Whaddya wan’?"
Jude patted George’s stomach. "You’re showing your age, Honey. Take Comet for a run." She clicked a venture-belt around his middle.
"Coffee."
She lifted his chin to look in his eyes. "I’m turning you around. No more running late, and no more pudge."
"Coffee...?" he pleaded.
"Run. Then coffee."
"Rmmm..."
Jude didn’t budge. “You’re going to live long enough to get us into an upper-deck unit, George.”
“We’re leaving. Operation Dandelion...”
She tsked. “They’ve been hitting delays since we were kids. If it happens, then you’ll get fit on Europa. Till then, you’ll get fit on Earth. Project George suffers no delays.” She activated his venture-belt.
Defeated, George made for the window. The building constructed a kinetic-field jogging track around their level; opaqued, textured, and railed. George put a venture-collar around comet’s neck. Like his belt, the collar extruded a smart-field of variable permeability around the pooch. It was always cold above the Deck – in the stratosphere – and the air was deadly thin. The personal field hept them warm, pressurized and properly oxygenated. A framed permeable aperture formed in one window, leading outside. Not liking it one bit, George shuffled onto the jogging track to wage war on his paunch.
At least the venture-belts gave the sensory illusion of being outside at ground level on a sunny day. With high-tech production facilities below, beautiful living space in the sky, and all human knowledge archived and accessible, technological advancement had hardly even hiccupped at the Impact. Some technologies – kinetic fields and nanotech, to name a couple – even advanced out of necessity. Not too shabby for post-apocalyptic survivors.
George jogged the girth of his lower-slope level of the condo tower, taking in the panorama of a robot-built city which prospered on the fruits of robot-run factories down below the Deck.
Jude was right. George knew that. Jogging would do him some good. If nothing else, it gave him some quality time with Comet, who would have been his favorite person if he weren’t a dog. And anyway, being out here in the fresh air, getting some exercise, it really did feel good.
Not that he was actually running. He’d worked his way up to a speedy walk. Baby steps, he told himself. Already he was dripping sweat. Progress, yeah. This is progress! Before long, he’d be a paragon of virility, back to the Adonis who’d snagged a bombshell like Jude when they were young.
He didn’t really remember being an Adonis, but it was a nice thought. He’d always had the nerd-gut... But no longer! Adonis I will be! He picked up his pace. Every morning! Discipline! Yes, he could do it! He could do anything! He’d have the body of a Spartan! (Rock-hard and sexy, that is. Not malnourished and severely lacerated.)
The promise of renewed sexiness out in the crisp open air fueled his soul. For the first time in years, George broke into an honest jog, lifting his chin so the rising sun could bathe his face and be jealous of the glory that was George Munson.
And the track flickered out of existence.
Is the wind picking up? Too many variables shifted around at once for him to catch on at first. Why are all the buildings rising? Izzit OpDandi? But the test--
Comet bobbed at eye-level on the end of his leash, howling. He looked up and watched his jogging track wink back into existence.
George said, "Oh."
He started screaming.
He hauled Comet in and crushed the little dog to his chest. At times like these, George needed comforting.
He looked down at the Deck, only just below him and closing fast. He screwed his eyes shut. That was the bottom of his world. Sure, he knew it was only clouds... but he also thought of it as the bottom, a barrier. He waited for the squish.
Cold, damp air whooshed around him. The wind here was like nothing he’d ever imagined. It hit like a shuttlevator, tossing him back and forth through the clouds like so much refuse. The stratosphere was calm, but down in the troposphere it was a different story. George spun and tumbled through the sky, screaming. The venture-belt struggled to keep him warm and protected. He would have lost Comet but the dog, in a move of timely genius, had clamped down onto the extra flesh of his left moob. George wasn’t a fan of the maneuver, but was too preoccupied with terror to object.
Wwwwwhhhhhooo—WWHHOOSH!
The sound overpowered his screaming, his fear of falling, his everything, exerting dominance over all of local existence. A blast of air indicated that, nearby, something big was coming out of the fog. Some primitive and powerful part of his brain exerted itself, sending a message to his higher functions that went something like: It’s close. It’s bigger than me. Shut the hell up and don’t move!
The sound faded and George forced his eyes open. He was in a white world, fast fading to grey, darker and darker. Comet shivered in his arms, scratching to dig deeper into a safe, soft, comforting place in George’s abdomen. Puppy instinct. George would have done the same, had there been a big billowy bosom around for him to hide in. Not finding that, his brain settled for full-throttle gibbering panic.
I’m gonna die my family will never know what happened and probably won’t care I’ll just be dead and gone and they’ll probably think I jumped but of course I didn’t jump I fell and the failsafes always catch the jumpers why haven’t they caught me I’m falling down and down and down into the space below the Deck and what’s there anyway poison radiation factories robots ice nothing nice everything just hard and cold and deadly and I’m gonna splatter it all up!
Lights glimmered not far off, zooming upward, coming closer as the wind blew him toward the flank of the Column.
I’m not even going to hit the ground! I’m gonna splatter like a gnat on my own building!
The sound built again, a whistling, humming rumble that increased until George’s brain hurt. Then it came for him, looming out of the fog to the left of the tower, sweeping around, a curved vertical blade half a mile long slicing through the sky like the sickle of Death. The bow wave of the fog-shrouded blade pushed him back, and the spinning wall of doom scythed by inches from his nose.
His higher functions kicked in for a distracting moment. Oooohhh, a vertical windmill built around the trunk of the Column, harnessing power from the eternal winds, supplementing the reactors. Probably goes a long way to absorb the impact of constant, shifting winds, taking the strain off of the kinetic field generators and stabilizing our habs. That’s kinda genius. Why don’t we--
The blade passed and the suction in its wake pulled him toward the trunk, inside the path of the helical blades.
His primitive reptile brain chimed in: You can scream again.
And so he did, bellowing as the swords of titans whirled around him, flickering the fading light.
Inside the barrel of the vertical turbine was an enormous cyclone. He spun, lapping the girth of the Column again and again like confetti caught in a fan, watching the bottom of the turbine approach; his twisting fall kept him away from the turbine blades. He was going to fall out of the bottom of the massive cylindrical apparatus, through the gnashing teeth of the axles which held the turbine blades to the column. That wasn’t going to go well for him.
Then the wind picked up as he fell into a new atmospheric layer and he popped out of the side of the turbine and continued his fall. It was peaceful, relatively speaking, and he took a moment to breathe as the mechanisms of his venture-belt adjusted to the new external pressure.
He fell past the Deck, out the bottom, into a vast, dark cavern. Bright Columns stood as far as he could see, a forest of titans – the feet of his city.
His throat was raw from screaming. He was so utterly helpless; babies had more power over their destinies than he did right then. The Column zipped by off to one side, and there was nothing he could do. The realization brought with it an odd serenity. There was a glow in the darkness below. As heartbeat after heartbeat thundered through his ears, he entered a strange state of consciousness: death was imminent, but he wasn’t dead yet. Panicked, awestruck, alone and amazed, he turned to watch as the glow below resolved into the fabled surface of Planet Earth.
It took some time. Twenty miles is a long way to fall.
He saw blocky, rugged buildings far below, all metal and pipes and actinic lights festooning gargantuan rectangular structures. Things moved about them, machines of all sizes. There were tiered pyramidal structures, each level blazing bright. His own home’s Column was off to the right, conduits, railings and tracks zipping past as he fell.
As the ground rose closer his venture-belt spread its field out thin, increasing his drag and slowing his fall. Power-consumption-rate warnings flared before his face as the maneuver chewed up the battery. He checked the nearest Column for reference – the venture-belt had slowed him to less than terminal velocity, but he was still going to pop like a bag of jelly when he hit the ground.
He looked down. There was a mess at the bottom; something like ancient cliff-dwellings clustered at the base like a hive. Something monstrous had smashed into them.
And I’ll be next.
There were men – men! - standing on little flying saucers hovering over the mess, milling around on the ground. How can there be men down here?
He wouldn’t get to find out. George could already pick out the pile of rubble that had his name on it. This pile was made mostly of metal and pointy bits. Lots of pointy bits.