Freefall

by Joshua David Bellin

  Like falling in love. And falling off the map. And falling into despair.

  Booze helped ease the pain, and Griff was always ready to supply that. We’d sit on the balcony of the high-rise where he’d been banished, soaking up the smog and setting sun, doing shots of whatever fine aged beverage his dad had placed under lock and key and strictly forbidden him to touch. As our tongues loosened, I’d talk about my time with Sofie, starting with the race through the UN building and the ride in her helicar, all the way to the interview and the plane ride afterward and the morning I woke up in my tent. Griff would pump me for details—how many bodyguards had gone down, what Sofie had said about Sumati, the look on the helicar pilot’s face when he realized he’d be transporting the infamous Cam Newell—and I’d ramble on, whiskey burning in my belly, thankful I had someone to tell the story to as many times as I needed. Mostly I talked about Sofie: her voice, her eyes, her fire. But I also told him as much as I could about the Lowerworld places I’d visited, the setup of her camp and what little I knew about the operations of her team, my job in the comm tent. He seemed particularly riveted—or maybe repulsed—by what I’d seen that day in her village. But he let me babble on about Upperworld depravity all I wanted—partly, I was sure, because it fit with what he was reading on Cons Piracy, but mostly, I liked to think, because he knew it made me feel better to portray myself as someone who mattered to the movement. As the bull sessions dragged on and I got into minute details of things said and places seen, he’d try to suppress a yawn, try to act interested for my sake. When I woke up the next day, throat dry and head throbbing, I wouldn’t remember exactly what we’d talked about. But I’d feel incredibly grateful that no matter what I talked about, no matter how tedious it must have been to be subjected to endless stories about my breakup with some girl who hadn’t even been my girlfriend, Griff was always there to listen. If there was one positive that came out of this whole mess, it was that I realized what it meant to have a true friend.

  The only thing I never told him about was the time Sofie and I kissed. That was too personal—and too hurtful—to tell anyone, even Griff.

  Because no matter how good I might feel when the liquor was flowing and my best pal was listening, when I was alone, in those inevitable moments before sleep came, the hurt would well up again, as cold and boundless as deep space. I’d tell myself it would go away, tell myself I’d forget her. I had close to forever to forget her, right? Half an eternity to float through black emptiness, asleep, without dreaming, where every trace of who I was on Earth and the things I’d seen and the people I’d loved would be erased as completely as the Earth itself. Sofie would be nothing to me when we touched down on our new home: an acquaintance, a memory, less than a memory. I’d probably never see her again, on a planet with almost two million new inhabitants and our lives likely to be as divided there as they’d been here. She certainly wouldn’t seek me out, and I wouldn’t seek her out either. And if, by pure chance, I did cross her path in some crowded Tower City boulevard of the future, I told myself I’d look right through her, the way I’d always looked through everyone and everything back on Earth.

  But even as I told myself that, I knew it was a lie. I knew I’d been blind before, and Sofie had been the one to make me see.

  Not just see her. See.

  And I knew that once you start to see, you can never stop.

  Otherworld

  Earth Year 3151

  Day

  The minute with Sofie’s bodyguard turns into more like a couple of hours. During that time, I discover his name—Aakash—and not much else. He offers no information on Sofie’s activities since we parted, nothing that might help me understand the chain of events that brought us here. His voice is soft, but his words have all the give of steel. From me he learns much more: the unscheduled arrival of our starships on this planet, the crippling of the Upperworld vessel, the attacks by the biomechanical pods, Conroy’s ploy to hold Sofie hostage while I bargain for his missing son. He nods brusquely at each piece of data, but he shows surprisingly little curiosity about any of it. He’s single-minded in his concern for Sofie. Either he’s hiding what he knows, or everything else is of minor importance to him next to the peril of the girl he’s pledged to serve.

  I find his devotion admirable, even if it’s aggravating. In the face of death, he wants to save her as much as I do. He’ll be a good ally.

  I just hope he never needs to make a choice between me and her.

  One of the first things Aakash suggests we do is rouse others. He knows about the integrated system of tracking and voice commands that were added to the pods of Sofie’s team members before liftoff to prevent unauthorized tampering, but he claims ignorance as to how my tracker got hooked into the system. He also maintains a stony silence when I ask him how Conroy and my mother could have cracked into Sofie’s pod if they didn’t have the right tracker. I wish I could believe he’s impressed by my figuring out the password, but short of delivering Sofie unharmed to the Freefall—or handing over Conroy’s head on a stick—I doubt there’s anything I could do to impress him. It’s more than a little possible, I think, that I’m not the only one with trust issues.

  Aakash produces a homing device from within his pod and announces that he can use it to track down and open the other pods he wants, the ones containing the rest of Sofie’s inner circle. He’s undeterred by the size of the room, the number of pods, the disarray of them all. He’ll search until he finds what he’s looking for.

  “Shouldn’t we be more concerned about saving Sofie?” I say.

  “If what you tell me is true, Chairman Conroy has no plans to terminate her until you return empty-handed.”

  “So we’re going to take his word now?”

  “We will be in a better position to free her once the team is assembled,” he says.

  “And how long exactly are we going to do this?”

  “I will spend the remainder of the day searching,” he says. “But yes, by nightfall, regardless of my success, we must be on our way.”

  So I’m right: He’ll fight to save Sofie even if he knows he’ll fail.

  I leave him to search for the other pods while I try to find some food in the dispensary, which I passed on my way to the pod bay. My throat’s parched, my stomach a wrung towel. I realize I haven’t eaten since yesterday in the pod creatures’ cave, and though Aakash looks like he can go all day on empty, I want to be fortified for the march to Conroy’s ship. I’ve told my brooding companion about the impossibility of traveling during the day without radiation suits, but he’s not worried. Something else he’s not telling me, no doubt.

  The dispensary feeds me a quick meal of Plop-Tarts and SpaceAde, compliments of Uniform Versatility (formerly Universal Comestibles, before they rebranded). I never asked Sofie if UniVers had another name before that. Considering they supplied the entire Upperworld with everything we ate, I preferred not to know.

  I rummage through storage bins behind the counter for a few minutes before turning up a spare jumpsuit, too tight but better than nothing. No weapons, though, which is what I was hoping to find. When I return to the bay, I find Aakash standing with hands on hips outside the door, the pod he’s freed from the stack resting before him. The top’s been popped, and when I step to his side, I see another of Sofie’s bodyguards wrapped in his shimmering deepsleep aura. One of the new guys who replaced the two who were downed in New York CITI. When Aakash speaks Sofie’s name in his soft voice, the aura breaks up, but the sleeper doesn’t stir. Aakash touches him, shakes him, then turns away, a frown creasing his brow. It seems we’ve hit the first snag in our otherwise seamless plan.

  “There are others,” Aakash says simply. He closes the pod door on his dead comrade and pushes the cocoon-turned-casket out of the way.

  The next pod takes its time responding to Aakash’s tracker, but finally it wiggles through a crack of its own making, nosing other pods out of its way and sailing to a stop at the chief bodyguard’s feet.
This time, when the pod door opens and Aakash speaks Sofie’s name, the white-garbed man inside shivers and moans as he returns from semi-eternal sleep. Aakash says a single word after that: the man’s name, which is Ranjit. His companion answers by vomiting discreetly into the bed he’s slept in for the past millennium. While I tend to Ranjit’s deepsleep sickness, Aakash calls more pods from the pile. How they find their way out of the pyramid, why the entire structure doesn’t collapse, I have no idea. But all arrive intact, their occupants alive. If I thought Aakash’s stoic expression would change as a result, I obviously didn’t know the man. He nods grimly, but that’s about it for his show of emotion.

  One by one I’m reintroduced—in the most visceral of ways—to the members of Sofie’s team, helping them stand and using napkins from the dispensary to wipe the spit and puke from their lips. There’s Basil, the key architect behind Sofie’s worldlink campaign, a balding, middle-aged-businessman type who’s constantly touching his head as if to doff a hat, though he’s not wearing one. There’s Stjepan, who actually is a businessman though his MediTerri good looks make him appear more like a worldlink model, the agent who funneled secret Upperworld contributions into the revolutionary coffers for fifteen years. There’s Mingzhu, one of several women on Sofie’s advisory team, and one of very few members of the revolutionary cabal from MicroNasia, known for its particularly extensive factory prison system. There are a few more, but nothing to brag about. Other than Aakash, Ranjit, and a man named Zubin, the one other bodyguard whose pod answered the chief guard’s summons, it’s more the kind of group you’d want by your side to plan a hard-hitting worldlink exposé than to storm a starship.

  I include myself in the former category.

  But it’s all we’ve got. The pods containing the remaining three bodyguards won’t respond, which must mean they’re trapped too deep in the pile to find a way free. Aakash tries again and again to call them, but no go. The planetary day wheels to night while we extricate pods, orient their inhabitants, fill their famished, dehydrated bodies with energy bars and SpaceAde. Aakash talks to them in the movement’s coded language, a polyglot I never mastered enough to understand more than a few stray words of. I’m getting anxious to leave, but the leader of the bodyguard can’t be moved, physically or otherwise. Protecting Sumati and then Sofie is what he’s done for the past thirty years, give or take a thousand. Though he had no reason to believe the Freefall would land here, that Sofie would be captured, that any of this would be necessary, he responds to the situation as if he’s spent his entire life preparing for this contingency. And who knows, maybe he has.

  My own presence in his handpicked group he doesn’t comment on, but I can tell he’s working it over, trying to figure out if I’m a lucky find or a liability. Or, worse, a double agent for the Upperworld he’ll have to dispose of either before we leave or somewhere along the way to the Executor.

  As day fades to night outside the ship’s windows, he’s finally ready to go. The team’s fed and steady on its feet, the plan’s in place—at least in his mind, because he won’t tell me a thing about it—and we’ve got eight or nine hours of darkness to make our way to the Executor. Based on my own expedition, we’ll also need at least double that to get there. Aakash has obstinately refused to spend time searching for either radiation suits or guns, and to be perfectly honest, I doubt we could find them in this mess anyway. Not for the first time, I think about the relativity of time and space, how twenty hours and fifty kilometers can seem like an eternity to people who’ve traveled beyond the stars.

  “We’ll never make it in a single night,” I tell Aakash. “And the sunlight will crush us unless we find someplace to hide.”

  “You know this,” he says gravely, but there’s a note of suspicion beneath the unflappable voice.

  “I could take us back to the cavern,” I say. “Though I’m not sure we want to tangle with those things unarmed.”

  The others nod anxiously. They’re no more warriors than I am. Only Ranjit and Zubin seem unfazed by the prospect of facing the monsters at night, the sun by day.

  “So are we going to search for suits?” I ask Aakash one last time.

  To my complete surprise, he smiles. “That will not be necessary.”

  The planetary night falls. There’s only one star to guide us all. I can hear her voice calling me, as clearly as I heard it all those years ago. The first time I saw her on the link, the words she spoke showed me a world I’d never known. The last time I saw her, her words tore my world in two.

  I speak her name once more, and then it’s time to go.

  Earth, 2151

  Upperworld

  The first and only meeting of the Joint Upperworld-Lowerworld Intercorponational Panel on Otherworld Colonization (JULIPOC) took place in New York CITI, a mere two months before the official date of departure. That was an insanely short window, considering the enormity of the task: selection of passengers, transportation to the boarding site, the boarding itself. Under my dad’s supervision, the Executor and its sister ship, the Freefall, had been stocked for departure, and according to Griff, his dad was well ahead of schedule in programming the ships’ systems. But those preparations had been made with the Freefall as a supply vessel, not a passenger line, and whether it could be reconfigured in such a short time to carry hundreds of thousands of deepsleep pods was anyone’s guess. Then there was the whole question of what might happen when the passenger list for the Lowerworld ship was announced. The Upperworld screening and selection had taken place over years and had been tightly controlled to guarantee mission compatibility. Though Sofie’s team had agreed to 40 percent representation on the starships as their upper limit, they had yet to declare the specific number they had in mind, much less how they were going to go about making their picks. But it was clear that there’d be no time for prescreening, which meant who knew what kind of people would end up on board, what kind of bribes and threats and other forms of chaos would win them a seat off-planet. And that wasn’t counting the chaos that might ensue when the billions who were denied a place on the ship discovered that they were the ones being left behind.

  The world was going up in flames as it was, which was exactly why we were leaving. But it might go up in flames a whole lot faster before we had a chance to leave.

  I considered going back to New York CITI, back to the old UN building, where the council was being held due to the now symbolic significance of the site. Griff didn’t say anything, but I knew he’d swipe his dad’s security clearances and hop the first bullet train with me if I asked. I didn’t, though. In the end, I decided I didn’t want to be there, just another face in the crowd, listening and watching like I’d done before this all started. I didn’t want to see her and not have her see me. Or, worse, have her see me and not care.

  But I did watch it on the link, with Griff. Whatever my feelings for Sofie might be, I wasn’t about to miss something this important.

  All the public channels aired the council. In fact, you couldn’t find a worldlink site where anything else was going on. Déjà vu set in as I watched the crowd assembling on the street outside the UN building, the officials passing through the security checkpoint, the panel members seated at the table in front. I saw Adrian’s dad in his gray JIPOC uniform, the other JIPOC board members and CEOs of the world’s corponations in their dark blue or gray suits, the many-hued delegates from the Lowerworld. Something much stronger than déjà vu gripped me when I saw the white-garbed bodyguards, then Sofie’s purple robe and black hair, the jewel on her forehead flashing in the dingy room’s spotlights. The lenses focused on her, showing me endless close-ups of her smiling, chatting, leaning over to have something whispered in her ear by other Lowerworld delegates, some of them people I’d met. She seemed as relaxed and confident as she’d ever been. And why not? This was her moment, the thing she’d fought for years to bring into existence. This was the vindication of her struggle, the consummation of her dreams. This was who she was.

&n
bsp; This was her without me. This was what had drawn me to her in the first place. But it had drawn thousands of others as well, millions of others. Billions of others. She was a bright light in a dark world, and anyone who’d lost their way would be drawn to her. I’d been a fool to think a light that brilliant could shine for me alone.

  My heart leaped to my throat when I heard her speak.

  “Mr. Chairman,” she said, her voice exactly the same as the one I’d been hearing on the link and in my dreams for the past month, “on behalf of the Lowerworld people, I thank you for welcoming us to your celebrated city. I am sure this council will forever be remembered as a defining moment in human history, the time when the Upperworld and the Lowerworld put aside their differences in the name of justice and the future of our race.”

  The lenses showed Chairman Conroy’s reaction. Griff suppressed a laugh at the sight of him. I had to admit, it was pretty funny to see our old friend’s dad looking like a man forced to gag down a snake sandwich. The poisonous kind.

  Sofie, either not noticing or not caring, continued. “I know we have much business to attend to, and I know time is short. But if the chair will indulge me, I would like to begin with a few words as an expression of our people’s goodwill. A prayer, if that old-fashioned term still holds meaning. It will not be long. With eternity stretching before us, we may perhaps spare a moment for such a thing?”