Freefall

by Joshua David Bellin

  And aced it. Together. Of course.

  “That was, like, a year of my life I’ll never get back,” Adrian said to me and Griff the day our scores came in. The three of us went out that night in Adrian’s dad’s privacar and got trashed at one of the clubs only corponation officials could get into. And their sons, with fake ID codes. I don’t remember how we got back home. All I know is we must have dinged up the car, because the next day Adrian showed up driving a brand-new one.

  Here was the thing, though: If passing the test was cake, training for the colonization was torture. You couldn’t get around it the way we’d done with the OCP. You had to prep your body for the things you might have to deal with in deep space, your mind for the shock you might have to handle when you woke up a thousand Earth-years after the ship departed. Even more than that, you had to prove you belonged. Adrian said his dad didn’t want any deadweight on his ship. He wanted people who’d demonstrated their loyalty to the Upperworld—which meant people willing to bust their asses for the mission. As it was, less than 1 percent of our population was going to fit on the Executor, which a lot of people bitched about. But that’s life: Everyone’s competing for the same limited resources, and only the strong survive. With our dads’ connections, the three of us could cut some corners—scoring nanoroids through their corponation accounts to build muscle mass, for example—but we still had to work. The year before the ship was scheduled to take off in midsummer 2151, our parents pulled us from our Classification like all the other upper-echelon kids, and we went into training overdrive.

  Colonization Preparation—or ColPrep for short—was brutal. Endless workouts in the weight room. Running treads and stairs. Climbing, rappelling, zip-lining. The nanoroids were nice and all, but we discovered that they didn’t activate unless you gave them lots of torn muscle fiber to repair. And then there was all the testing of emergency scenarios, from fire in the command ship to depressurization on the planet surface. Not to mention getting our heads scrambled by some over-aggressive PMP’s experimental deep-space drugs, then getting our balls busted by some hard-ass trainer’s twisted idea of playtime. At the end of each day, we came home and collapsed, our legs like jelly and the trainers’ spit dribbling from our foreheads.

  “Kill me, Cam,” Griff would groan. “Put me out of my misery.” He was barely kidding. We felt like zombies. Zombies who’d totally pissed off someone and were getting the beating of their undead lives.

  The day I first saw her, the three of us had crawled back to Adrian’s apartment after a grueling session in the zero-gravity gym. If you think zero-G is all about floating around and doing effortless backflips like they show in the promos, think again. It’s mostly about having trainers fire projectiles at you while you spin out of control and try to keep everything in your stomach from spewing out of your ribcage. Griff was particularly inept at batting away missiles, which didn’t surprise anyone who’d seen him play ball. He’d taken a nasty blow to the gut, and he kept jumping up to run to the bathroom.

  “Check this out, dude,” Adrian said to me during one of Griff’s unscheduled breaks. He was stretched out on his bed, with the worldlink up and streaming live video.

  I stared at the screen that filled an entire wall of his bedroom. “How’d you get into that, man?”

  “With extreme caution, my friend.”

  “Seriously,” I said.

  “I believe the polite term is ‘hacking.’ ”

  “You hacked a CanAm server?”

  “I hacked the CanAm server,” he said. “Which is easy enough to do, if you’ve got a genius friend who owes you big time.”

  For a second I couldn’t think who he meant, but then it came to me. Or the sound of him puking in the room next door did. “Griff? What’ve you got on him this time?”

  Adrian laughed. “Let’s just say I caught our little friend red-handed.”

  I decided not to pursue that one, because I didn’t want to know. “Since when is Griff a worldlink genius?”

  “Since his dad’s one of our top tech guys,” Adrian said. “Mr. Griffin Senior must have passed along some very choice genes.”

  “Or some degenerate ones,” I said. But I had to admit, I was impressed. I’d never come close to breaching the Ultimate Security Wall on the worldlink, not even when I was studying—aka cheating—for the OCP. No one in the Upperworld had access to Lowerworld feeds except the top corponation officials. The CEO and sub-CEO of the four Upperworld corponations, the VP of operations (i.e., my dad), the top top guys. The chief catastrologist and his catastruarial team, probably. I knew Griff’s dad was head honcho when it came to JIPOC starship technology, very hush-hush stuff, so I guess I should have figured he’d have the clearances to keep an eye on the Lowerworld. But my dad had never let me watch a restricted channel, and I doubted Griff’s dad would be happy if he knew his sixteen-year-old son had stolen his codes and was using them to snoop on Lowerworlders through the link. “That’s crazy, man,” I said.

  “You want to see crazy,” Adrian said, “just get a load of what these Lower-lifes are up to.”

  I watched. Most of the screen was dedicated to an approved channel, with promos for Otherworld Colonization fluttering across the feed like brightly colored streamers: Out of This World! and Get Away from It All! But way down in the corner, squeezed into a little box, Adrian had managed to hack into something I’d never seen before: a live, for-top-guys-only feed on the Lowerworld. The place-stamp said it was from SubCon, but it could have been anywhere outside the Upperworld for all I knew. Adrian performed some more hacking gymnastics and maximized the lens, crowding out the approved channel and using the 3-D function to make the Lowerworld feed pop off the screen. The image was grainy, the sound bad, a crackle like constant throat clearing. I made out a crowd of Lowerworlders—they had to be Lowerworlders, with their brown skin and robes and veils—standing in some soggy, polluted street, trash piled to the windowsills of their chicken-coop houses. Or maybe their houses were made of trash. That’s what everyone said, and I had nothing to prove them wrong. The crowd was big, hundreds of them at least, and more kept coming as I watched, streaming in from the corners of the screen. I didn’t get how they’d been allowed to gather, so many of them in one place, without the Peace Corp. coming to clean them out.

  I watched, fascinated. I’d heard countless stories about the Lowerworld in Two Worlds History and watched stock footage on the approved sites, but those were all the same. The Lowerworlders had wrecked the planet, they were trying to get their hands on nukes to blow the whole place up, they lived across the ocean, safely walled off from the Upperworld, in the ruins of the once-beautiful cities they’d bombed to pieces after the Upperworld corponations pulled out. I’d memorized those stories well enough to pass the Separate Destinies module of the OCP, but I’d always wondered what it would be like to see the place for real. Bad as the feed was, the image on Adrian’s screen seemed like the answer I’d been waiting for. It was as if I’d stepped out of my own world and been let in on some huge secret they’d kept from me my entire life.

  Then one man with a pile of rags wrapped around his head climbed on top of what looked like a collapsed house and started talking, waving his arms as he spoke. He had a high-pitched, squeaky voice, and I couldn’t understand a word of it.

  “What’s he so worked up about?”

  “Probably has to take a piss,” Adrian said with a laugh.

  “TranSpeak, please?”

  “Come on, man, this is classic.”

  “I want to know what he’s saying, dude.”

  “Oh, all right,” he said, and clicked the link.

  “Otherworld colonization,” the guy on top of the rubble said, shouting in a voice so loud you could hear the strain even over the TranSpeaker, “is a right, not a privilege.”

  The crowd cheered. Some held signs with marks that looked like red crayon squiggles scrawled on dirty white cardboard. When Adrian hovered the cursor over the signs, I saw that the mark
s formed words, reading Justice Now and Our World Too, Not Two Worlds and something I didn’t recognize, the word “Sumati.”

  “The Upperworld has taken this planet’s riches from us, retreating to their walled citadels to lap up their ill-gotten wealth, and now they intend to leave us behind to face the ruin they have created,” the speaker continued, his voice rising impossibly high. “They are like locusts, traveling from world to world, using up each in turn and moving on to another.”

  “It gets better,” Adrian said.

  “Is this on a loop?”

  “It’s the same thing every day. They’ve been at it for months.”

  “The Upperworld corponations believe that only the wealthiest few should have access to Otherworld colonization!” the guy screamed. “But the prophet Sumati speaks differently.”

  The crowd cheered so loud at this final statement it was deafening, even on Adrian’s screen.

  “Sumati?”

  “The top Lower-life,” Adrian said. “The one they’re so excited about.”

  “What, is he some kind of Terrarist big shot?”

  “She,” he said. “But yeah, they’re all Terrarists.”

  We watched some more. The guy on the trash pile got even more excited. His voice rose to a pitch where you couldn’t make out the words even with the TranSpeak function. Maybe he’d run out of things to say and was just screaming. The crowd went crazy. They waved their handmade signs and jumped up and down in their bedsheet clothing, and some of them did this strange dance, dipping forward at the waist and bobbing up and down. It was mesmerizing and exciting and a little bit scary all at the same time. Adrian said that when they got really worked up, they threw themselves in the dirt and rolled around in their own garbage.

  The toilet flushed, and Griff came out, looking queasy. “Damn, Adrian. Haven’t you watched enough of this shit?”

  “You missed most of the show,” Adrian said. “But the best part’s coming.”

  Griff grabbed a chair and sat, the material shaping itself to his body. It must have detected how messed up his biorhythms were, because it started to massage him until he shut it off.

  “You realize we are totally screwed if my dad finds out,” he said.

  “You’re screwed,” Adrian said. “I’m just an innocent victim of your criminal propensities.”

  “Thanks a lot, man,” Griff said, flipping Adrian the bird.

  But he watched while the scene unfolded. Many of the people on-screen were down on their knees in the dirt like Adrian said, except they weren’t rolling around, more like bowing to the ground with their hands spread in front of them. The speaker waved his arms so wildly he lost his balance and slipped, which made Adrian crack up. Flames appeared in the corners of the screen, torches held high by some of the people in the crowd. Then, all at once, the sounds from the crowd ended and it got really quiet, so quiet I thought the audio had gone dead. But I could hear a sort of hissing, which might have been static or might have been the light rain that had begun to fall over the bodies and the muddy streets and the piles of trash.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “Just wait,” Adrian said, his voice and eyes eager.

  I watched. The feeling that I was about to be let in on something hidden made my heart pound.

  A small knot of men was moving toward the place where the speaker stood. They looked like the rest, brown skin and sharp dark beards, but the way they walked and the identical white jackets and pants they wore gave them the appearance of private mercenaries in uniform, marching to the front of the crowd. In their center stood a dark figure, much smaller than them, and in purple instead of white. I couldn’t see the person’s face, but I could see enough to tell she was a woman.

  When the men in white got to the front of the crowd, they spread out in a line behind the woman, giving me my first clear look at her. She was short, dumpy, maybe sixty years old. A purple sheet fringed in gold wrapped her, muddy where it dragged on the ground. Her graying hair hung over one shoulder in a single long braid. She had a spot of red centered on her forehead. I thought it was blood at first, but looking closely, I saw it was too perfect for that. A single spot, like a laser scope about to put a bullet in her brain.

  “Sumati?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  She raised her hands, palms out. The crowd had fallen to the ground, but they weren’t moving. In fact they held themselves perfectly still, with their heads pressed to the muddy street. They looked like they were riveted by the woman’s presence, waiting for her to say something. The man who’d done all the screaming had come down from his perch and joined the others, and like them, he was too busy bowing to say anything more.

  I held my breath. For a second I felt like I was there, waiting with the silent crowd for the woman to speak.

  But she didn’t. She just stood there in front of them, with her hands in the air, and they stayed on the ground like she was holding them motionless. All the Two Worlds sites said that Terrarist leaders exercised absolute control over their recruits, making them do anything they wanted, like strap explosives to their chests and blow themselves up in the middle of a hotel or a shopping center. They’d get their underlings strung out on crystal death or worked up on some ancient religious bullshit—who could tell the difference?—and have them run around dressed in costumes or covered with tattoos of extinct animals before their leaders blew them up from the safety of their headquarters. And then the leaders would claim they’d done it because they loved the planet Terra, and that the animal trappings were a way of showing their great love for the beauty that was gone, which made a whole lot of sense when they were the ones blowing things up. It was why the Upperworld corponations had pulled back behind walled cities, and why the Lowerworld cities were piles of rubble like this one.

  But if Sumati was giving the people in the street some kind of order, it wasn’t evident to me. And the people weren’t running around wild. They were bowing. Listening. Waiting.

  Like me.

  “Is something supposed to happen?” I said.

  “Any second,” Adrian said tensely, almost a whisper.

  A shot rang out. I flinched, thinking it came from the room and not the screen. The crowd leaped to their feet and scattered, muddy robes flying behind them, shrieks filling the air. Some of them scaled the walls of garbage and took off across the rusted tin roofs, while others threw themselves into doorways or alleys or any crack that appeared in their maze of a city. In seconds the crowd had disappeared. I expected to see Sumati and her heavies break for cover next.

  But they didn’t.

  I could see the Peace Corp. approaching, a whole squadron in glistening white uniforms marching in tight formation, rifles at the ready, the yellow-and-green SubCon logo emblazoned on their chests and on the energy shields some of them carried. It was bizarre, this show of force against one old woman who stood there silent and frozen, arms raised. I knew that corponations like SubCon and Frackia had a much tougher job than CanAm, since it was their responsibility to keep peace in the sprawling, unruly geography of the Lowerworld. But it still didn’t make sense. The crowd was gone. The woman stood unmoving, unresisting. What had she done, and what were they about to do to her?

  The Peace Corp. snapped their black visors down to shield their faces. They leveled their rifles, taking aim. I leaned forward, a sick feeling in my stomach, unable to stop myself from watching.

  But then something tore my attention away from the old woman and the guns trained on her.

  Coming up behind Sumati, in an identical purple robe fringed with gold and a long braid of jet-black hair, was another woman, much smaller and slimmer. With a shock, I realized she wasn’t a woman but a teenage girl, no older than me. Her skin was the same pale brown as Sumati’s, and she had the same single red dot on her forehead. Even in the grainy worldlink video, I could tell that she was beautiful: high cheekbones, full red lips, curves beneath her robe. The way she moved made it look like she was
floating, like she was the ghost of the old woman from years before. She hadn’t covered half the distance to where Sumati stood when she held up her hands as well, and with my gaze fixed on her, I saw that her eyes met the Peace Corp. calmly and without fear.

  Her eyes.

  Their intensity shot through me like an electric current. They were a color I’d never seen in a human being, a summer sunset gold. My heart beat faster, and though I knew this was impossible, I couldn’t get over the feeling that those incredible eyes were looking not at the Peace Corp. but at me.

  Then her voice rang out, loud and clear but in a language I couldn’t understand, as if the TranSpeaker had jammed or something. I heard her say the word “Sumati,” and I thought—but this made no sense—she said “CanAm,” too, but the rest was beyond me.

  “TranSpeak—” I said.

  There was a buzz and the image slanted and broke up, and the next thing I knew we were staring at a blank screen.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  Adrian shrugged. “It’s always like that. They’re about to take Sumati down, then we lose the feed. Then the next day, she pops up in some other Lowerworld hellhole, and the same thing happens all over again.”

  “But what happened to the girl?”

  “Girl?” Adrian toyed with the link, trying to bring the feed back up. “Dude, did you get a look at that hag?”

  “I saw her,” I said. “But there was a girl. Dressed the same way. She said something. In their language.”

  “Damn it,” Griff said, and jumped up to hustle to the bathroom again. Adrian laughed as the door slammed.

  “There’s six billion breeders over there,” he said. “The Lowerworld population’s, like, totally out of control. You expect me to keep track of one in particular?”

  “No, but . . .”

  He had the feed back on and was surfing sports channels. I figured I could get in one more question before the subject was done. “How does Sumati get away?”

  “How the hell do I know?” he said, eyes fixed on the on-screen menu. “Maybe they’ve got some escape route. Or maybe there’s a whole bunch of them dressed up the same. All I know is she shows up in a different Lowerworld corponation every day, from ConGlo to MicroNasia. The local Lower-lifes are dancing around in their skivvies, listening to some hopped-up street preacher, and then she comes along and stands there until the cops show. It’s like she’s their god or something. And they can’t wait to hear what she has to say.”