42. Chloe – Don’t Panic

It took just as long to recompress as it did to decompress, a whole day spent pacing around the room. And by pacing the room, I mean kicking off the walls around my cylindrical little cubby hole, all while giving James hell over the intercom for locking me in while survivors roamed free. In my hometown, no less.

As soon as the lock’s valve handle spun, I flew out past a surprised Charlene and beelined for the TurboLifts, shooting down past a million floors to get to the Hanger as fast as I could. David waved his happy little grin as I approached, although he might have been waving me off with a grimace. It didn’t matter. Any issue he had with me was his problem, not mine.

“Which one of these has a view of Shipyard City?” I said to the nearest rig-indentured drone pilot.

“Hi, I’m Mike,” the guy said, and held out his hand. “How do you do?”

“I didn’t ask for your life story, kid. I need to see my home.”

 Mike dutifully tapped a screen-in-screen, which expanded into a shot of blurry asphalt. I couldn’t tell if it the image was out of focus or blurred on account the stone was charred and melted. A battery icon writ with eighty-one percent sat in a corner, along with a red bar at the bottom advising no-one should fly in dangerous weather. He rotated the camera to show me exactly what kind of weather it was advising against.

“Is that snow?” I said.

He tapped at his keyboard and up slid a reading. The temperature was zero with a wind chill factor of minus twelve. Frost built around the edges of the lens, blocking most of the drone’s peripheral vision.

“Sorry,” He said. “The lenses are antifog, antifreeze, but even sheltering the drone in this apartment isn’t helping. There’s too many gaps for the wind to get through.”

“You can pilot the drone inside buildings?”

“That’s how I got this job. I had an urban exploration channel before all this. Urbots. Had a couple of flying drones and a fiber optic snake probe.”

“Gear like that could land you a lot of secrets from places people don’t normally get into.”

“Yup, and add in this drone’s ultrasonics, I can scan the room or even the whole building, reproduce it digitally for storage. Was there a particular building you want to scan? Your home, for instance?”

“You can archive the environments? Architecture? What about living matter?”

“The Kinsley Foundation actually owned most of the world’s public museums, so anything too big to take with us, y’know, like the pyramids or the actual museum buildings, or the Great Wall of China, they’re scanned and digitally preserved in virtual reality.”

I double tapped an upside down spiral staircase and the camera zoomed in on it.

“Ah, you wanna preserve the upside-down damage.” Mike said. “You’ll have to wait until the storm’s passed but I can do a flyby for you. What do you want to do, 3D print it?”

“There’s people there.”

Mike twisted a knob to stabilize the picture. It digitally removed moving components from the footage

Motherfuckin’ crappo.” He said. “Kim, you have eyes on Shipyard Island. You saw the people there?”

“Yeah,” a girl called from across the room. “We’ve been monitoring them.”

Mike pointed to Kim’s rig. “I’ll pass on control to her. And you. That’s her domain, so she’ll probably be able to help you more than I.”

I patted his arm and eeled around the rigs to the one with a Kim, and she patted a free seat next to her. She also took my tablet without asking. As soon as it latched to the magnetic charger, though, her archived videos became available.

I squinted at her screen first, however. There were definitely survivors hauling ass up the crumbling ruins. They held onto each other, fighting through wind and ice and shock until they reached a bridge someone had erected out of scaffold.

“They’re heading under the park.” I said. There was no mistaking Center Park’s subway signs, not even upside-down and half bent out of shape. “Can you get me a clearer shot of who they are?”

Kim pulled the same magic Mike did, cleaning the image by removing the faster particles of animation. When the pixels settled, a face fizzled into clarity and I freaked out.

“Do you know him?” Kim said.

I nodded, then hit my contacts list to send a message. “Reece, you need to get down here pronto. First grab James Kinsley.”

“Himself?” Kim said. She blinked in surprise, like she was seeing me for the first time. “You’re bringing James Kinsley himself to my rig?”

“Hey, be a groupie on your own time. Tell me how these guys are still down there.”

She brought up a report and skimmed the words. “I postulate that territories experiencing summer prior to the cancellation of gravity were technically in equatorial position once the world left solar orbit, and thus the centrifugal force of the planet’s natural spin has repelled objects from the surface at a consistent rate akin to a reversed gravitationally force. I have literally no idea what I just read.”

“It says the whole world’s a Gravitron now. Y’know, that fairground ride that spins so fast you stick to the walls? Only the walls of the Earth are the ceilings of the city.”

“That’s awful.”

“More awful than getting flung into space or going splat on the inside of an ice shell?”

“Me and my boyfriend went on that ride once and we kept puking all the way through. Those poor guys down there must be puking all over the place, like all the time. I hope they find a pharmacist that’s still open.”

I gave her a sidelong glance. “You married your way onto this lifeboat, didn’t you?”

I got her to set up a clip show of the survivors’ journey and fast forwarded from the moment her drone took interest in a protruding scaffold. People clambered across it before a block’s worth of roof shingles rained cloudwards, and they crossed it again on the other side of the building, almost all making it over until a slip dropped a family of four the same way. Then later, one night, a fire destroyed their bridge, leaving them only half their resources until two almost familiar faces followed the drone back to the others to help. The name of those guys stuck to the tip of my tongue, but then a suicide took center stage and his death split the group in two. The first half left while the second wallowed, only to find out the former faction had taken inspiration from the previous drops and merged all three into a single ritual self sacrifice. The camera tracked their fall into the eye of a storm, the same storm now blowing Arctic temperatures at hurricane speeds. The last survivors hurried to shelter in the underground ruins of Center Park, strangers banded together against a common threat. Faces I didn’t recognize, not fully. All except one.

“What do you want?” James said next to me, making me jump. “And did you have to send your attack dog to fetch me? I can be messaged just as easily.”

“I know one of the survivors.” I said. He has to be the one leading them. He’s the only one there with the skills they’ve been using to traverse the city.”

Reece leaned in behind James. “I’ve got some experience monitoring situations from the air, and she’s right. They’re clearly heading to the mountains. Maybe there’s caverns in it they want to hide in. That’s a bridge in the distance, right? Does the road cut through a tunnel?”

I tapped at my contacts again, this time putting in a direct call. “Hey, Nina. Got a question for you.”

Through the screams of children, a haggard pair of eyes squinted at us. “Chloe? Is that you?”

“Yeah, I’m with Mister Foundation down in the Hanger. We need to know something.”

“That’s my daddy!” Kim Yao said behind Nina. “Daddy! I got a hundred percent in calculus!”

“Well done, hun.” David said from two rigs back. “Tell me about it later.”

“Okay, I love you! Bye-bye daddy!”

He returned to his work.

“Daddy, you didn’t say bye-bye!”

David looked up. “Give the screen back to your teacher.”

“But you’re being rude!”

“Good. Bye.”

Kim’s smile dropped.

David actually said the word “Sigh. Bye-bye, honey.”

And her smile perked up again. Sje flipped off the wall, back into the fray of children bouncing off the walls.

“Sorry.” David said.

“It’s fine. Seeing there’s a big ol’ softie under your hard shell makes you worth knowing. Now, Nina, we need to ask you about—”

“Nina!” Lilly called behind her. “I could use a spare hand in here. Who gave these kids sugar?”

“Give me a sec, I’m on the phone right now.” Nina said. “And it wasn’t sugar.”

“Talk to your friends in your own time, I have forty kids here.”

“This call’s important! It’s important, right?”

“Is it?” James asked me.

Lilly leaned in through a cloud of kids. “Is that James Kinsley himself?”

“Hey, Lilly.” I said. Yeah, It’s Kinsley. Mind if we borrow Nina for a moment?”

She hesitated. “Okay, but please make it fast?”

“You got it.” I said, watching her shoo more kids away from the screen.

“That hair.” James said. “Is she a relative of yours?”

“She’s a fan. Now, Nina, what was at the Shipyard Bay Power Plant? We’ve found survivors trying to get to it.”

“The bay Power Station? Really?”

“Really, really.”

“That’s where I was the day Dick married me. Originally I wasn’t going to sign in the budget for it. We had enough power.”

“So what changed your mind?”

“He did.” She said, pointing at James. “Dick showed me the Foundation’s plans. He told me how it wasn’t fair for, well, you Mister Kinsley, to decide who lived or died. To make it really fair, he said people should be tested in the very event you’re avoiding.”

“What did he do?”

“There is no power station in the mountain. At least, not one that would power a city. It’s more an industrial level generator for those inside. We told the public we built it inside the rock to conserve the natural scenery and contain any potential fallout, but the reactor is for facility use only.

“One of the survivors I saw, I know he worked on that facility. What was its purpose?”

“There’s old pirate tunnels and caves running through it. Dick convinced me to fund his project, you see. He reinforced the structures so anyone who knew about them could take shelter there.”

“And there are people already inside.” James said. “Our drones were hijacked by someone on the surface. I’d very much like to know who that is.”

“Why?” Reece said, “Even if there is someone in there, or those survivors reach them, we’re talking about icebergs the size of countries and as thick as tectonic plates falling on them. Even if the mountains somehow survived all that falling in them, we’re talking about a flood of ice that’ll crush the surface like a pancake with sheer weight alone.”

“Nina, I need you!”

“Don’t panic. I’m on my way.” Nina said. “But before I go, Mister Kinsley, my husband mentioned you several times. He told me quite plainly this wasn’t a way for those less fortunate to survive. If it was as easy as burying our heads in the sand, we wouldn’t have flown up here. He liked to test people, my husband did, to measure their mettle against a latent hypocrisy. I don’t know what the answer you’re looking for is, but I know you’ll find it with your humanity. He told me this is a test every one of us will have to take before all this is over.”

She hung up with a sad smile and we waited on James to figure out O’Toole’s cryptic plan. When he said nothing for a solid three minutes, I searched back through the footage for that familiar face. That madness was as familiar to me as my own reflection, attractive in its promise, irrepressible and inspiring in its insanity. But if what Nina said was true, I’d never see it again in real life, so I shed a tear for the good times, and our mutual friend and lover.

“Glad to see you’re still alive, George Travers.”