44. Chloe – Droning On

While we sat around a cluster of viewing screens to keep tabs on Earth, the people on its surface managed to lose even more of their number. We had eyes on the largest group, a dozen or so lucky bastards from my old hometown, but quickly found a few hundred smaller gatherings and families dotted around the globe. Those furthest from the equator had the best time of it. Unlike my friends in Shipyard City, they got to play in the same kind of gravity we enjoyed. None at all.

Mikey and Kim pulled an all-nighter, then called in friends to man their rigs when they couldn’t stay awake. The more Eye in the Sky we had, the more we learned about the world we left behind. For every wonder worth saving, the drones unveiled a thousand worth damning, enough for a lifetime of nightmares and therapy. Every piece of art worth keeping had been packed and launched into space with us, making the earthbound statues on our monitors priceless in ways I didn’t want to think about.

“What can we do?” I said. “How we gonna fix this?”

James squeezed my shoulder with what probably passed as affection in his mind. “There’s nothing more we can do. We’re assembling our orbital elevators, but the nanofilament winches drop them one way. They aren’t designed to winch them back up again.”

“Oh, so you wrapped them around those big ass spindles by hand last time? If they can go down, they can come up.”

“It could put everybody aboard this space station at risk, and all for no guarantee of success.”

I grabbed James’ collar and hoisted him off his feet. Score one for scrawny girl in zero-G. “You listen to me, you sumbitch. You might have saved all your fancy thinkers and your super soldiers, and all that art and history, and whatever else you think’s important, but if you don’t so much as try to find a way to save them brave little toasters down there, you won’t have saved the most important part of what it is to be human.”

“Our intelligence?”

“Your humanity, dumbass.”

I let go of his neck and he stayed put in the air, frowning into the middle distance. I clenched and unclenched and tried to control my breathing while his lips blinked like a fish.

“You think I’ve abandoned my humanity?” he said. “Because it’s your friends whose lives are on the line? Or did you forget you’re floating in the very vessel we built, out of our own resources, and yes, our humanity, to save everyone we could, including you?”

All eyes swiveled my way like we were having a debate, and I lost control of my breathing again.

“No, you didn’t abandoned your humanity. You’re in the process of doing it right now. Don’t you dare try to justify someone’s death with lives you saved. We aren’t a balance sheet you can tick off. What, you save fifty-one percent, the other forty-nine won’t hang in your conscience?”

“That’s not what I—”

“That is exactly what you said. Hide behind your non-answers all you want, Kinsley, but you hired me to expose you for who you are, remember? I report on you to keep you in check. Well I’m checking you, asshole, and your loyal followers will be checking it out in tomorrow’s upload.”

James stomped on the nearest column and propelled himself backwards across the hanger. He zipped out the door, to the TurboLift suite, just as Mikey and Kim returned to work. They dodged the flying geriatric with almost delayed reactions, clearly in need of more sleep.

“You two are clearly in need of more sleep,” David said as they sat back in their rigs. “A couple of hours won’t cut it.”

“We’re fine,” Kim said, “Mikey introduced me to the Caffeine Nap.”

Mikey sucked out the contents of a coffee sachet without bothering to heat it. “You drink something caffeinated before you have a quick sleep. Apparently it helps wake you up again after.”

“Does it work?”

“Well, I’m awake,“ he said, “but I don’t feel it.”

He took control of a drone at ninety-nine percent charge and flew through a building the survivors previously passed through. Halfway in, he stopped and retraced its steps, aiming the camera at a former solidly walled room, now nothing but a cage of rebar. Lying halfway under the arm of a crusty sofa was a small, green bag.

“Looks like we got our heroes something to keep ‘em going,” he said.

The drone’s small arm extended to snag the bag, and when it pulled back, a crushed but unopened pack of peanut brittle slid out in its claw.

“You saw that?” I said. “And got it out? What are you like when you do feel awake?”

Mikey shrugged. “I used to get friends’ birthday gifts from the claw machine at the bowling alley. Nobody’s better at the crane game than me.”

His laden drone took the sweet stuff into the air and found the survivors packed around George a few streets over, fussing over him like he’d come home with a grade-A report card. Kim was already filming them from the outside, and we got a third person view of Mikey dropping the peanut brittle on George’s head. When he realized what had slid into his hands, he mouthed a distinct “Thank you” at us, to which Mikey managed to acknowledge with a nod of the drone.

“Hey, I said, nudging him, “think you and your pilot buddies here can manage more of that?”

“I can do one better,” he said. He cleared his throat and tapped his ear piece, and his voice echoed throughout the hanger. “Hey, I need volunteers at the drone rigs. We got friendlies alive on the surface and they need all the help they can get.”

As soon as he hung up, five kids from Reece’s class jumped into the rig bay and called in to volunteer. David approved them, and with the kids on board, we now had an even dozen working the fleet. Reece himself took the last position.

“I didn’t expect you to join in,” I said.

Reece coughed into his fist and hid his face. “I just didn’t want to be stood up by my entire class.”

I recounted the volunteers who’d jumped in front of him. “You fired all but five kids from your class?”

Reece tutted and pointed back to the hanger, and I dropped my tablet when I saw what he pointed at. Or, more accurately, I let go of it, since it simply floated by my thigh, the same way the line of volunteers streaming out of the TurboLift suite floated over to our position. At least eighty crew members queued for their chance to use the rigs.

“Where’d they come from?” I said.

Kim leaned over and showed me security feeds from every floor. “There are volunteers wanting to help from every level. What did you think would happen if it was made public there were survivors down there?”

“James didn’t want them to know it.”

Reece and David called them over and sorted them into rank and file. Within a half hour, drones flew across the city, ransacking every open space for food, cans or small drink bottles, anything they could find to keep our heroes marching. When word spread of what we were doing, more volunteers than we had rigs for showed up to help, and I messaged James with footage of the lines waiting their turn to help.

“Commendable,” he sent back, “But you still need to convince me there’s a chance your friends can be safely rescued. I won’t put the people already saved into unnecessary danger”

“Everyone here’s convinced it’s possible,” I said. “Why do you think they’re working towards it? Y’know, for an atheist, you really ought to have more faith in people.”

He didn’t reply after that.

The drones gathered the treasures in a large pile, in the path the survivors were expected to take. When night fell, or at least when the sky mostly darkened, the majority were ordered back to their original locations. A half dozen little crafts were left on the immigration watch where David had them rest at key points, and turned off their flying systems to recharge in the wind. Kim’s drone stayed with the group, updating us on their location. When they neared the first resting drone, it took over recording them as hers laid in its place to regain power.

The majority of volunteers hung around to see what would happen. The rest left to tell their friends they’d done something good and life-changing. Barely an hour passed when I got the call from James Kinsley himself.

“Miss Heralds, you need to deal with the damage you’re causing,” he said. “We can’t have unsubstantiated rumor flying about.”

“And what rumor would that be?” I said.

“There appears to be a general consensus that we’re about to launch a rescue operation for those poor unfortunates you’ve gathered fans around. I’ve issued an explanation to the section chiefs of the ArkRing, informing them no such plan is being put into motion. You need to inform your precious public the same.”

“And just why can’t we? You cast a line, you reel ‘em in. What’s so hard about that? And don’t give me none of that impossible to calculate, four-dimensional trigonometry crap. Remember who you’re talking to.”

“Chloe, my engineers assured me we can reel the Nano lines back up. Calculations aren’t the problem.”

I raised a skeptical eyebrow and folded my arms. “Then what exactly is?”

He sent an animation to my tablet and talked me through it. “We need to lower six orbital elevators, simultaneously, and retract them after two hours. That’s a minor timing problem. The first of our main three problems, however, is our pilots aren’t prepped to suddenly go from zero gravity to flying about through both gravity and atmosphere again.”

“Hah,” Reece said. He stood and stretched his arms wide. “Being a pilot’s about feeling your craft. It’s an art, not a science.”

“Technically, science is an art.”

Reece cupped his hands and yelled into the hanger. “Recruits to your positions! We have a rescue mission coming up.”

He jumped into the helicopter nests and David followed him. Volunteers streamed after them both.

“I literally just told you we had no plans to save them,” James said. “There are two other factors we need to consider.”

“Hey, “ I said, “maybe it’s about time we tried making new news instead of just reporting it. Whatever the problem is, we can overcome it. That’s what you do, isn’t it? That’s what the Kinsley Foundation does.”

His gaze was sad through the camera. “No we can’t. Because you can’t drop those elevators without gravity. They’ll just unspool around the hull. Also, we need a clear path to the surface, which will only be available when that ice shell comes crashing down on the very people you want us to rescue from it.”

I stalled. “But…”

“It’s an empirical fact, Chloe. Unless your friends can somehow survive the falling skies, everything they accomplished until now has been for nothing.”

I dropped my tablet again and collapsed back into my seat, and Kinsley’s spool problem was highlighted there and then when both it and I stayed floating above it.

“You have my sincerest condolences, Chloe,” James said, “but it’s best we don’t get people’s hopes up. Spin it as a mercy mission in your report. Let them have their snacks and sugary drinks, and after that, well, I’m sure there are enough nearby pharmacists still stocked with Repose strips.”

This time, I stormed out, swiping left on James’ stupid prune and launching myself at the central pillar. Reece and his kids were already preoccupied with pre-mission preparations, and I slipped out to the TurboLift without anyone calling after me.

Back in my office, I flicked through every cover piece I’d uploaded in the past nine days. Small articles, mostly deriding James and his stupid vision, and reports on the technology surrounding us in this space station. How could one man be so naïve, yet accomplish so much? How could he have the technology of the gods and not be able to save those who needed it most?

Asking us to make his decisions for him? Convince him to take chances? Inform him if he was doing something I disapproved of?

I hated him in that moment, and that’s what I wrote. It took all night and all the coffee I could stomach. Line after line of everything wrong with the Kinsley Foundation and James Kinsley himself. We had more food than we could use in the time we expected to be up here, indestructible cables that could reach down to the surface of the world and haul our loved ones out of danger. We had the means to survive and flourish and he wouldn’t make one damn executive decision to…

I stopped typing. Son of a bitch.

He wouldn’t make that decision for us. Couldn’t. It went against everything he stood for. Instead, James had showed me everything I needed to report on his setups and tell everyone alive what was possible. The damn fool was a goddamn genius.

I erased the article, practically a book in itself. Several thousand words blinked out of existence and for once, I was glad my time was wasted. After all, it hadn’t been a waste of time. Writing put everything in perspective.

Stories inform people by moving them. So I’d tell it.

Can you convince me there’s a chance worth taking? No, but O’Toole had, by way of Nina, the city’s former mayor.

Can you share the blame? I shook my head. “That’s on you, James. But we can take responsibility and decide together.”

I loaded up footage of every step the survivors had taken on Earth, filmed by drones spying on them since the world went topsy-turvy. I reported on the trials and struggles they faced, their victories and failings and morality. At times, their choices disgusted, at others they were only human, but through it all, Holden and his ridiculous determination led him to the same conclusion O’Toole had set out for both sides to reach. There was a chance, a slim one, but one I could use to convince those already saved to try and save their fellow humans, and with it, save their humanity.

The new opening line clacked under my fingers and appeared on-screen.

“If you’d asked me just two weeks ago, to picture the end of the world, it wouldn’t have looked like this.”