16: Chloe – Takeoff

Fire erupted around the windows again, only this time from below. It shot up from the moat, surrounding the lobby’s three-sixty view. I kept my cool only thanks to our newly hardened wraparound glass, the physical representation of being tossed from the frying pan into an oven.

Anxiety had never been a factor in my life before, but the past eleven days had set a new record for how much shit one mind could take. My stomach churned in agreement.

Then the churning grew heavier, the sensation of taking off in a jet or blasting up a hundred floors in O’Toole’s express elevators. The flames outside receded, dispersing through the city blocks. The view grew wider as the buildings around us descended, sliding down from street level until we passed their rooftops and then the rest of the world. The whole island shrank from sight, followed by the coastal mountains. We were flying!

We rose above the peaks and layers of cloud. The earth fell away until we were left floating through open sky.

“Fuckballs, we’re really flying!” I said. “We’re actually flying.”

“Did you have any doubts?” Kinsley said.

Of the countless buildings across Shipyard City, twelve others had joined us. Free of the earth, they revealed they too were of the same design, a ludicrously long tube ten times longer than their already impressive heights had been as skyscrapers. How long had it taken to build them? How had their true lengths been sheathed underground without anyone noticing the entire time?

Now they, or rather we, were out, the towers formed a fleet of ultra thin rockets. They ripped through the skies, leaving contrails against the blue. Kinsley reached over and positioned my arm in front of my face and hit Record on the tablet.

“They’re living up to their names now.” he said, photobombing the footage.

My grip on the device was tight enough to whiten the skin around my knuckles. The building shook as it torpedoed through the atmosphere. Any sudden movements and Kinsley would have two half tablets instead of one.

“What name?” I said.

Kinsley’s laughed. “They’re sky scrapers!”

He beamed like a child, then gasped and pointed past the fleet. A cloud burst up from the earth after us, a singular mat of steam or mist rolling over itself, already dramatic on its own before I realized its scope. It stretched to the horizon.

“What is it?” I said.

Kinsley quivered in his seat. He almost clapped. “It’s the sea!”

“What?” I squinted through the glass. It did look like a sea, albeit one of clouds. It spread from thick patches as it rose. Flashes of lightning burst inside it.

“What, as in the sea, sea? Where the fish live?”

Kinsley’s nod was a fast twitch. “Yes, and the reason we had to be shot out of cannons. I liked the cannon idea. Did you? Very Jules Verne, although his design wasn’t assisted by maglev rails. But it was necessary as we have to reach orbit before the oceans could swallow us. We’d have slipped skyward passively under gravity’s reversal otherwise.”

The rising ocean cloud slowed. That or we picked up speed. The clear sky blue above it darkened. The background vibrations of the building diminished along with the pull on my stomach as we left the atmosphere.

“Ah, now for the fun part.” Kinsley pointed.

A third of the rockets around us fell behind. Another third sped up. We had a clear view when one rocket’s base allowed a lower one’s tip to slot into its waiting hole. Together they formed an even longer tower, a sight already inspiring and ridiculous, before the rocket above joined in. The resulting structure was a flying skyscraper nearly fifteen kilometres long.

Kinsley pinched the tablet and guided my sights to one veering into us. It sided close, so close if the windows could open I was sure my arm could reach it. People waved from inside. My hand waved back automatically before they descended. A hard grate and a thud from below and above signalled our buildings had locked together as well.

“What are we doing?” I said.

Kinsley pointed and I filmed the other rockets fitting into position.

“I’ll explain that in a bit.” He said. “First, you’ll want to see this.”

He tilted my camera down. The Earth was a planet in space now, no longer a world around me. Through the lobby’s warped glass it spread out in every direction, a perfectly round disc with us looking down from a central tower at the height of gods. The cloud of oceans following us had dispersed into a uniform shell around the globe. It grew thicker, switching from a silver grey to a bluish hue.

“Give us some exposition, Kinsley.” I said.

“James, dear. Call me James. I have to hear my family name every time the Foundation is mentioned so I insist on staying as informal as we can.”

“Yeah, so I keep getting told. So explain please, James?”

“Well, it’s quite simple. The higher you go, the colder it gets, and when water gets cold, it freezes into ice.”

“Something I, and everyone ever, learned in preschool.”

“Then draw the logical conclusion.”

I leant forward in my chair and zoomed in with the camera. We were in space for crying out loud. In space, seatbelted to coffee house armchairs in the lobby of a rocket disguised as a skyscraper, itself forming the middle body of a habitation centipede crawling into orbit. Below us a spray cloud spread across the skies of Earth, which according to James Kinsley himself was the entire freakin’ ocean freezing into ice. The highest mountains were probably scraping the bottom of the pan-directional berg with their tips already.

And it hit me. The oceans weren’t falling into space. The water had reached a cold and height where it had frozen, but each microscopic droplet was interlaced with every other.

“The steam molecules crystallize together to form a matrix encapsulating the entire planet. The more water falls, the denser and more evenly widespread that crystallization becomes.” Kinsley said.

“The Earth’s trapped in a hollow sphere of ice.” I said. “Whatever force reversed gravity keeps it up but nothing can leave the atmosphere because all the water’s coalesced into a frozen shell.”

“Very good.” Kinsley said. “The shell is partly formed from the ozone layer, too, of course. Compared to gravity, the water and everything else down there currently weighs about a hundredth of its normal mass, so it falls slowly and spreads out through the air. Ionised saltwater droplets get held in place by the earth’s magnetic field, now the other universal forces are back to normal, attracts others. Good news for when we return.”

“So you’re planning on taking us back?”

“Of course. This rocket isn’t an escape pod, Chloe. Think of it as temporary storage while the Earth is being renovated. When it’s over, we’ll recolonize our homeworld. That shell of ice down there isn’t a barrier keeping us out. It’s a temporary dam to keep everything we need in.”

“Such as?” I said.

James took a deep breath. “Such as air.”