Gravity is Heartless

by Sarah Lahey

  “Your turn.” He jumps up, raises his paws, and creeps toward her. “I am coming to tickle you.”

  “No, you’re not.” Quinn gives him a hard look.

  He drops his paws and backs away.

  “Listen,” she says, “I’m going to Unus. There are 100 million people in the city, so there’s bound to be ten thousand neurologists in the MedQuarter, and I only need one. Then I’ll find a TechHub, get a new Band, and access my Coin. Should take me no more than half a day. While I’m gone, you download everything from the files we just accessed.”

  “Too much. I need more time to develop. My memory is not fully developed, and I am not a storage device. I am an assisted living companion.”

  “I think you could store it if you tried.”

  “I am not a storage device. I am a companion. Your personal companion.”

  Okay, sensitive issue. Not sure if I believe him, but I’ll give him the benefit for now.

  They have nothing else to store the files in, however—no devices, and Mori’s offering nothing. Apparently, he hasn’t developed any lateral thinking skills yet.

  She picks up the cactus Hitch brought and hands it to Mori. “Store it, bit by bit, as you download it, in the plant’s DNA. Set up a basic code system matching the binary zeros and ones to the DNA letters of the cactus. Then synthesize the sequence. Transfer this into a bacterium and infect the plant, the coding and data will go with it. Can you do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be back later today. Once I get my Coin, we’re leaving. If anyone comes inside while I’m gone, hide.”

  She stows her diamond in the pocket of her pants and makes her way below ground, to the Hyperloop.

  Thirty

  Hot people look different than cool people.

  QUINN DISEMBARKS THE HYPERLOOP at Grand Central Station. Her Loop carriage is empty but the station links to Unus’s underground transport network, dubbed the “people funnel” because it’s the only departure tunnel and link to the outside world. She follows the signs, merging into denser and denser herds of people heading toward the exit. The atmosphere is shocking—dense and musty. The air is rank with body odor.

  Her exit point is two kilometers away. She figures she’ll adapt to the stench, but the temperature continues to rise, without relief. Air vents, placed at regular intervals along the tiled walls, are commandeered by groups of commuters who rotate their bodies, trying to find some respite from the heat. The journey is a mindless, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other quest for personal space and fresh air, with thousands committed to the task, all wearing climate suits, all focused on a single point in the distance, all surrounded by the dull murmur of conversations. It’s almost too hot to talk.

  From nowhere, the faint sound of an angel wafts over the funnel of hot people. A piercing, melodic tune—someone, possibly an unearthly being, is singing, and the closer Quinn gets to the exit the stronger the lilting, harmonic sound.

  Quinn reaches the travelator shaft and joins the queue ascending to the surface. Her first glimpse of natural light mingles with a waft of fresh air and a faint but familiar tune—“Eternal Summer,” a classic hit, and one of her father’s compositions. As the travelator ascends, daylight streams into the void and the pitch of the song rises, the lyrics lifting her heart and spirit, and she grins. It’s infectious; people around her begin to smile, too. It’s a good sound, a great song, and the rendition is magical. It soothes and unites the mass of hot, sticky people, reminding them that togetherness is not so bad.

  “I love this song,” says the woman beside Quinn, who is wearing a transparent climate suit over clear knee-high boots and a short red pantsuit. Clusters of red cherries dangle from her earlobes; she’s a fashionista. She gives Quinn’s yellow climate suit the once-over and wrinkles her nose.

  The singer is a young man, tall and thin, wearing an oversize tan climate suit, dark glasses, and a floppy sun hat. He strums a guitar. A brown whippet dog sits next to him. The dog has Vouchers tucked into its collar. Quinn looks from the young man to the dog and back again, wondering if anyone else makes the connection.

  The fashionista follows her gaze. “He looks just like his dog,” she says, then rummages through her bag, retrieves a couple of Vouchers, and tucks one into the dog’s collar. “How can someone who sings like that go hungry?” After looking Quinn over again, she hands her a Voucher, too.

  “I’m not hungry—I just looks like shit,” Quinn says. She steps forward, pats the dog, and leaves her Voucher with the busker. Then she waits to one side until the song is done and the busker collects his coupons. That done, he immediately starts a new tune.

  As the blissful effect of “Eternal Summer” evaporates, Quinn’s heart jolts so hard it takes her breath away; her father—she needs to call her father. He’ll be crazy with concern for her.

  ***

  The world outside the station is just as hot, but at least she can breathe and the air no longer smells rank; instead, it smells faintly of chili. She looks around. Nearby, a vender roasts large, mealy worms in marinated spices. A queue for the rich protein dish quickly forms.

  Quinn moves away. Looking up, she sees how a massive conifer breaks through the roof of the station, providing an overhang and some shade. The Locale sign next to her reads, GRAND CAPITAL. She scans the city blocks.

  Unus is not a grand city, in the sense that the architecture does not sing and the boulevards do not pulse with cosmopolitan life. Quinn is convinced the city is grand only in the enormous volume of people who call it home. The crumbling buildings and mazes of traffic are not doing much to lift the spirit of anyone here. At zero latitude, it’s unbearably hot, noisy, and crowded. She has never seen so many people in her life, and she’s beginning to realize there is a significant difference between people who have access to cool air and those who don’t. Hot people look different than cool people. Hot people have poor skin, broken teeth, and artificial limbs. Some of the hot people are very old. She didn’t think people could look that old and still be alive, and she hasn’t seen reading glasses in twenty years. Quinn’s point of reference for the world is Hobart. She has led a cool, yet sheltered, existence. I’ve been living in a bubble. I blame my parents. What were they thinking?

  The buildings surrounding her are a mix of half-finished, half-decapitated timber, stone, bamboo, and cardboard constructions with unused water tanks fixed to the roofs—a hangover from rainwater collection days, the population’s thirst is now quenched by filtered seawater—and makeshift sewers below.

  Unus pays homage to transport and the wheel. Crows rush past on electric blades, hydrobikes, mini autos, solar bikes, and solar tuks, and transport Convoys, six deep, float above the lines of traffic. Drivers yell and swear at each other, blaring horns, and a group of transport police fly over on hoverbikes, settling the agitated drivers. Thousands also trek the pavements on foot, with women carrying children, men carrying children, children carrying smaller children, and smaller children carrying chickens, roosters, and rabbits by their legs, ears, and tails. These are not beloved pets.

  Quinn’s destination is the MedQuarter, ten kilometers west of the city center. She could pick up a Transport Convoy, but after the crowds and the stench of the exit tunnel at Grande Central, sitting in a hot, metal box-on-wheels is not enticing. She’ll walk; maybe after she accesses her Coin, she’ll hire an Automated Vehicle, AV, and arrive in isolated personal comfort.

  Then she notices that the AVs she’s seeing are all stationary, lined up in neat rows along the side of the street. She approaches a young female vendor wearing a silver metallic climate suit, her bright red hair pulled into a ponytail. The vendor waves a hand in the air. She can’t help; one of the AVs was hacked and if one goes, the whole fleet is grounded. It’ll be days before they are running again.

  So Quinn heads west. She can always get a Convoy back.

  Unus is laid out on a grid system, with no twists and turns like Harmonia. It’s all straight lines and right
angles charged with rectilinear energy. The layout is an enabler for transport, and everyone has somewhere to go.

  From Quinn’s balcony in Harmonia, Unus looked like a conglomerate of built structures—offices, Pods, apartments, and houses—but from the ground, it’s green and lush. Vegetation rises through the rooftops of buildings, trailing over awnings, growing in the spaces between apartments. Quinn sees herb gardens, fruit vines, pots of vegetables, and masses of fast-growing bamboo—not the organized, contained greenery of Harmonia but a natural, rich cornucopia, cultivated to feed the human population.

  A neon sign across the street indicates a TechHub. Perfect. She’ll get a new Band and access to her Coin. Only twelve lanes of traffic are keeping her from independence. There are no crossings, but vehicles are programmed not to hit people, so she ventures out.

  She’s only made it across the first lane when a Transport Convoy misses her by a thread. Losing her nerve, she backtracks to the pavement. Down the street, a child runs across the road; he’s about to be pulverized until an augmented pedestrian crossing appears under his feat and every vehicle pulls up. A smart crossing. She sees how it works and then uses it herself, makes it unscathed across twelve lanes.

  The TechHub is inside an arcade. This is a precinct dedicated to the slightly weird and vaguely creepy people who call themselves creators and makers. They make objects using their hands. These are sometimes functional—things like simple spoons or bowls. Others favor more artistic, sculptural endeavors—carved blocks of wood or stone. For them, the joy is in the making.

  In the first stall Quinn passes, a man wearing a heavy black apron polishes tools no one will ever use. He sharpens the blades on a spinning wheel, honing them over and over. Then he lovingly wipes them down and lays them on a cloth in rows of gleaming silver metal. A pointless activity. Meaningless work. He smiles and nods toward his shiny tools, offering Quinn a closer look. She touches a blade, grazes it with her finger, and it draws a drop of blood. She’s amazed; she felt nothing.

  “Hostile,” the man says, “like people.”

  Opposite him, on the other side of the tunnel, two drones paint a mural of a woman’s face framed by a rainbow: Maim Quate, the political leader. The slogan reads, “We are the 99.9 percent.”

  Beside the mural, an older woman weaves a giant tapestry, her loom covering the entire wall, floor to ceiling. She works the threads from the top to the bottom, and she’s almost done—half a meter of work to complete before she’s finished. On her knees, shuttle in hand, she vigorously works a section, back and forth. She glances up at Quinn. “What can you see?” she asks.

  “A city, a megacity—high-rise buildings, cranes, bridges, and a highways,” Quinn says. The work is colorless, everything in monochrome.

  “Appearances deceive,” the woman says. “You won’t find the truth standing there. Move, take another look.”

  Quinn moves to the right, and the view is altered. There’s an image under the city—a new landscape with mountains and valleys, a shimmering, sparkling rural scene. So clever, thinks Quinn. The woman has two shuttles, one for the black and grey threads and one with a fluorescent, gossamer yarn, and she painstakingly weaves them together. Quinn spies ridgetops, valleys, and a river leading to a harbor and village. Then she sees the sheep, the sheep with curly horns. It’s Kerguelen. Mt. Cook and the glacier.

  “The truth is hidden,” says the woman, “under the mountain.”

  Silently, Quinn moves away.

  Farther on there are stalls selling insects—dried, fermented, salted, or preserved. There’s a vending machine serving shots of alcohol and stalls selling old-fashioned ornaments and shiny new Tech. A man shows her plastic that disappears—“Completely vanishes, disintegrates into nothing,” he tells her.

  “Nothing comes from nothing,” she replies.

  The stall owners are keen to sell her their products. An auburn-skinned woman, tending a metalware shop, attempts to wrap a bronze choker around Quinn’s neck. She has a beautiful, heart-shaped face with arching eyebrows, and wears colored scarves around her waist. She’s insistent that Quinn take the jewelry.

  “Sorry, no Coin,” Quinn says.

  “The bracelets,” she says. “Swap you—this choker or this ring.”

  Quinn shakes her head.

  “Take both.” She presses them into Quinn’s hands, but Quinn places them back on her table and moves away.

  A sign indicates that the TechHub is farther on. The arcade narrows into a smaller tunnel, dipping below street level. It’s dimly lit, but shafts of green and yellow light break through the gloom and the path is well used, many people coming and going. Quinn follows them into the grotto. Inside, the space is filled with trees and shrubs. Some of the trees are twenty meters tall, their trunks crawling with moss. Ferns dangle from the canopies and dense, brown funguses and toadstools clump together at the base of the trees. As she moves farther inside, Quinn comes across piles of relics and pieces of machinery. Masses of titanium laptop cases, still glistening, and a bicycle growing out of a tree, then a chair, and a window, are all encased in the branches and trunks of trees. Once a junkyard, now the vegetation fuses with the debris.

  Suddenly, someone bumps into her. What the . . . ? She is shoved again, hard, in the back, and stumbles forward. “Hey.”

  Heavy hands grab her shoulders, force her off the path and into the undergrowth. Her assailant is strong; he plants her face into a tree, presses his weight against her, and then she feels cold steel over her carotid artery. She’s in trouble.

  “Bracelets. Take ’em off.” He leans back a little, giving her room to free her hands.

  She shakes, fumbling with what she thinks is the clip of one of the bangles, but she has no luck, she can’t undo it.

  “Hurry.”

  “I can’t.”

  He leans back a little more, enough for her to free an arm. Her left arms slips out and knocks him hard in the side of his face. Off guard, he reels backward. She turns and kicks him, once, twice, and he stumbles, then falls to the ground.

  “Hey.” A flash of colored scarves appears through the undergrowth; someone is coming. “What’s going on?” The woman from the arcade emerges from the trees and she’s not alone—there’s a male companion by her side.

  Quinn’s assailant collects himself from the ground and takes stock. Realizing that his position is tenuous, he backs away. The woman’s companion draws a large, curved blade from his pantaloons and flicks it; it strikes the robber in the forehead, dead center. It cleaves him open, and he keels over, dead.

  The woman steps over the body, focused only on Quinn, and grabs her arm. “Who are you?”

  Quinn pulls away. Seriously, this man’s brains are leaking all over the ground.

  “Where did you get these?” the woman demands. “I need to know. The bracelets, where did you get them?”

  “Okay, okay, calm down,” Quinn says. “A friend gave them to me.”

  “You’re lying. You’re a thief. A lying little thief.”

  And you’re a lunatic. “It’s the truth. Tig gave them to me.”

  The man retrieves his blade from the robber’s head and casually wipes away the blood. The woman signals for him to point his weapon at Quinn, but he shakes his head and keeps it at his side. The woman glares at him. Reluctantly he lifts the blade slightly and points it, in a vague way, in Quinn’s direction.

  “We must sort this out.” The woman pulls up her sleeve, revealing half a dozen bangles, and singles out a red band similar to Quinn’s. “If you have been with him, I need to know.”

  Oh, shit. Really? Do you really need to know? Quinn stares at her, then swallows hard and looks away—at the ground, at the prostrate body of the dead robber lying on the ground, at the cleaved skull of the robber lying on the ground, and then at the blank expression of the young man welding the scythe. How in the world did she end up here, between these two clannish murderers and a slain robber? Finally she faces the fraught, urgent woman.r />
  “It’s only fair that I know,” the woman says.

  Oh good lordt, this couldn’t get any worse. Please don’t let her be his wife, and if she is, please let him be dead. We did it five times in one night, does that count as one time or five times? “Okay. Yes, we may have—”

  “Come with me.”

  Quinn shakes her head, “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “Come. Please, this must be settled. You understand, I can’t live like this? I will die.”

  “You won’t die.”

  “I will! I will kill myself.”

  Oh, for fuck’s sake. “You’re not going to kill yourself.”

  The woman signals to her male companion for the blade. He happily hands it over. The woman holds the blade to her neck, and Quinn stares anxiously at the man, seeking clarification and help. Is she really capable of doing this—and if so, shouldn’t you stop her?

  “She’s crazy. She’ll do it,” he confirms. He shows no intention of intervening.

  The woman pushes the tip of the blade firmly into her neck and a trickle of blood runs down toward the handle.

  Quinn steps back and considers the scene: a beautiful but weary-looking woman with almond-shaped eyes and a languid neck that may be about to be severed; an impassive young man willing to let the beautiful woman slit her own throat; and a dead man on the ground. She decides she’s had enough. “I’m done.” She turns her back on them and begins to walk away.

  “Wait,” the man calls. “You’re the one, aren’t you? The one from Hobart.”

  Quinn freezes to the spot.

  “He’s here in the city,” he says. “If you want to see him, I’ll take you back to our State.”

  The woman drops the blade. “You’re a traitor. You betray your own family.”

  He ignores her and picks up the blade. Calmly he cleans the tip, then glides it back into its sheath.

  Tig is alive and he’s here in the city. Do I want to see him? Yes, I’d really like to see him, and I’d like to find out what happened to him. But a one-night stand is just that: one night. It’s so awkward. But we’re adults, it’ll be fine. My mission is to find Lise; that’s my priority. And I’m pretty sure I need his help to find Lise.