Children of Gravity Read online

  Children of Gravity

  By E.R. Jess

  Copyright 2012 E.R. Jess

  Prologue: Weight of the World

  Alessa was patient. She could out wait anyone. She could fill the space between the long journeys through the City-State with the help of a kind of waking meditation. It got her through the hard times.

  Doubt clouded around each of them like a great debt. They were nomads in the frontier of the Free City. Two dozen souls driven like wild animals from their habitat. She had to be patient. What was left of the city was a ruin. A jagged parody of a once-prosperous land.

  Alessa was patient and it was deadly important. She didn't want to let her thoughts wander. She was once a citizen of the City-State. The memories were vague, but sure. She once lived under the care of UPC.

  Kagan and Alessa argued as quietly as they could. They fought about their predicament, productive fights, for the most part. There was not enough food or water. Their shoes were made for a more sedentary and lavish world, not for tracking through rubble, running from patrols. They had three dozen souls to worry about. The Free City wasn't safe for people like them, their group. They argued and she meditated and he made fists. “We must try,” she would say.

  “What have we been doing all this time?” He whispered loudly.

  They were among the peoples tossed aside, the people outside the gates to paradise. But among the poverty and violence of the Free City, that group of souls had a different purpose. They were pacifists, and they were lost in a city that wanted them dead. By the time the sound of tank treads on concrete reached Kagan’s ears, by the time the smell of burning was sent along with stubborn evening wind, and by the time beams of blue laser light cut through the fog trapped in canyons of skyscrapers, it was too late. They could go to every corner of the Free City and still live in fear of social unrest, deadly airborne viruses, carcinogens, warlords and gangs, and UPC, Urban Population Control.

  The losses had already been great, their families, friends, many taken and conformed or shot or diseased. Kagan’s son was arrested by an engineered virus, then quarantined for the whole of his short life. His wife beaten to death in a riot. Kagan himself, deathly susceptible to the ravaged environment around, burdened with an implanted filter and a powerful desire to find a gun and fix things his way. Their shoes failed and their stomachs ached. “We must try.”

  They lived in the Free City. It was a vast ruin, the remnant of a country-sized city. At the center of the Free City, at about half of it's size, was the City-State, a shining technological achievement amongst the rubble. It was the seat of power for UPC.

  UPC disallowed groups of any kind. Gangs, political organizations, and their pacifist movement. If they could survive the wastelands of the Free City, they still had to outlast the reign of the giant sleeping next door.

  “We have three days of scavenging time before the patrols resume,” Alessa declared as she stood with Kagan and addressed the group by a fire. “It will be tiring work, gravity shifts are common in this district.” It was fairly wealthy once upon a time. The gilt and shimmer of the surrounding buildings had long-since tarnished, but the skeletons remained.

  Kagan took over from there, “This is no paradise, folks. If the gravity doesn't knock a wall on top of you or throw you into it, you might find some containers and doors trapped by scavengers. And you might find people like us, only hungrier and better armed.” And considering they had no weapons, that much was obvious.

  They had all agreed: no fighting. They would persevere and survive in the City-State using no violence. They agreed that to survive at the cost of other's suffering was not worth it. Some of them had killed before.

  Kagan looked into everyone's eyes. He nodded, then smiled grimly. Everyone went about their tasks.

  Gunfire rocked the floor and the echo took their breaths. Fire doused, they went quiet. Soon the group would find out if they were to run or hide. They would watch Kagan's hands for a signal. Closed hand: they would find cover and shadows and stay put. Open hand: run. Kagan slid up to a low wall and peeked over. He squinted in the dark. He turned and waited for all eyes to find him, they never left. He sighed inside his mouth. Open hand. They were nomads. And they were trying to leave the city for good and live in the barrens of America.

  Revan

  “I don't do this because I must.”

  Revan leaned over to look into the eyes of the man at his feet. He was some sort of new religion apostle; a short and emaciated fellow battered around by the wasteland.

  “Preacher man,” Revan inhaled deeply as he rose and slipped on some night-vision shades. He looked around, just industrial wasteland for kilometers, “I know this land don’t look like much, but it is not yours.”

  The priest had to cough and choke suddenly, he buried his face in some rubble to do so.

  Revan kicked the older gentleman, kicked him into a pile of scrap. “You're still here?” he asked mockingly.

  The man sobbed and muttered beneath his breath. He kept saying that he was sorry over.

  Revan lit a cigarette. He peered into the cracks and crevices and holes all though out the junkyard through his glasses. He grinned with malice at the site of scores of heat signatures scrambling around like... “Rats,” he sneered. He looked down to the apostle, “I don't do this because I must.”

  “Please sir, please,” The apostle gathered up his shattered wits to face the bitter man standing over him like an executioner, “The City-State doesn’t need us there, and we can’t survive much farther into the barrens. If there is any mercy in you, you will let us stay.” He held himself fast. There was nothing but a warm, smoke obscured smile to greet his words.

  “This eastern sea of rust is a filter, my dear man. It is a drain grate. And every once in a while we have to come out here and shake you loose. Your Free City is no longer under the rule of The Elder. I don't care what freedoms you enjoyed under his leadership. Your ideals and your religions have to go away. Take this, what did you call it, Path of Light?” Revan shuddered. “It's frightening what you people come up with out here soaking up the fumes and eating dirt. Next thing you know, you're spreading the word that your version of the story is better than mine...” Revan leaned down again to touch his fingers to the old man's forehead, “Convince me.” Revan took a seat on a broken pillar and crossed his legs.

  The apostle was breathing heavily and feeling sore. He got to his feet carefully. He spoke as calmly as he could, “Sir, we gather souls to tell them of better times, that they can find guidance in a higher power.”

  Revan made the 'go on' hand motion and widened his eyes impatiently.

  “The Elder tolerated us because we helped people in trouble, which made the Free City safer. We don't oppose UPC, we're no threat. We do not oppose the City-State. I just wanted to help people.” The apostle put his hands at his side and breathed deep.

  Revan stood and dusted his suit off. He puffed on his cigarette and turned away, walking out of the ruined plant.

  “What of us? Please?!” The apostle was quickly losing the strength in his legs. With his mouth open, he gazed into the iron caves all around him. He pushed out his sorrow like letting out a long held breath. The worst was over, or so he assumed. The apostle called to his people scattered around the industrial landfill that had been their home for a month, had been their holy ground.

  He knew it wasn’t done until every one of those people were safe, and if that was going to be possible, he was going to have to be stronger than he was.

  An explosion of blue light hit the apostle in his right eye, a laser sight. Dozens more shone out from the inky fog. The gut-wrenching sound of tank treads pulverizing stone was all that he could hear.

  “I do it because i
t's right,” Revan said to the dust.

  Memory

  There was much that Alessa could remember; odors, visions out of the corners of her eyes, nuances of voices. Faceless men with flashlights ripping her from her father's iron grip. After she had grown into an adult, she could recall broken people that she got to know in the population control camps. Hearing a man echo out Social Serial Numbers. Remembering when her number came up, but what was done to the ‘winners’ in that lottery, that was one of the things she couldn't recall. It was as if by either blessing or curse that part of her mind had been replaced with a numb dread that put her in tears when she brushed passed it, when one of those scents or sounds resurfaced beyond her control.

  Alessa was the only one of their group that had lived among the ruling class. She knew more about the City-State than anyone there, even if much of it was locked away by trauma.

  “An antique ash tray with places for big cigars and little cigarettes,” She was sitting, eyes closed, on an old escalator. She spoke slowly, as if in a daze, “Soft sugary ice cream, a pair of homeless shoelaces drowning in an old swimming pool, a fence, a chain-link fence.”

  “Dwell there, look through it, whatever you can.” Eight, a slight and bright looking man, was with her, looking into her closed eyes as he tried to perceive her memories.

  “I can’t. I cannot,” Alessa grinned nervously. She tossed her head forth. She seethed through clenched teeth, held her hands out and grabbed the memory of metal mesh before her. Let me out she thought. “Let me out,” she said plainly but with great strain.

  “Alessa, I want,” Eight offered his hand to the fear-blinded woman and spoke with caution, “I want you to relax and breathe easy, Alessa. I want you to tell me about the Blank Room.” He held his hand before her, keeping absolutely still. Eight looked about the room and saw that a few people's attention had been drawn to them. He brought his focus back onto Alessa’s shut and tearing eyes. “It's okay.”

  “Right, the Blank Room. Good room for good girls.” She coughed and could smell invisible smoke conjured by her past.

  Eight took her shoulders and held her firm in her chair. “Alessa, it’s fine now, just relax. I’m right here, Kagan is over there.” He gestured to the light-covered figure massaging his chin with concern, “Dernen, Sam, they are all here.”

  Kagan walked up and put his hand on Eight's’ shoulder. He gave him a nod. “It's alright Alessa, perhaps you should wait until tomorrow.”

  Eight could read people's memories. He could cull the depths of a person's mind and walk around in their childhood home, he could watch them grow up and see them as they were in their pasts. He could extrapolate from memory what people might do next. It didn't always work. People often did the unexpected.

  He could sometimes read people from across a room. Others, he would need to speak with for a long while to get into their memories. With Alessa, he had to fight through years of mental engineering and thought control. It was an ongoing process with pitfalls and setbacks. As for Kagan, his thoughts were projected on his face. Eight used to avoid being around him, but he was inundated with stray memories, sour memories that no one should have to relive. Dernen called him an Auspex, named after ancient fortune tellers. The power had saved their lives more than once. Eight had often avoided being directly in danger of someone else's violence. Most of the time it was just a guess or luck. He knew when to duck. But sometimes he could get into someone's mind and see their whole life spread out along a timeline. For good or ill, Eight was born with the power to read the future through someone's past. And as for the people around him, he didn't like what he saw.

  Alessa got up and rubbed her eyes. She smiled dimly and nodded. She took Kagan's hand and gripped it tight before leaving.

  Kagan looked at Eight with questions in his eyes. Eight answered, “It's not too bad an idea to get intel this way. She was under electronic mind control for years, it's logical to assume she retained some information she doesn't know she learned. But I have to tell you, the right way to do this is to dig all the way in her memories, no matter how unpleasant it would be.”

  “And that's not an option,” Kagan shrugged, “We have a hard enough time out here. We are about to leave the Free City and walk off into the wilds with nothing but the setting sun for directions. We can't leave what's left of Alessa behind.”

  Eight forced a grin. “Her memories have been haunting her for years. Half-memories that she can't grasp. I have to delve them to the surface so they can be dealt with. I don't want to do it, but we might have to some day.” Eight swore under his breath and spoke softly, “And she's supposed to be the stable one.”

  “No, just the one that supports us,” Kagan said.

  Chapter 1: The Redlist

  Makz could recall happenings from when he was very young; when memories are supposed to be recorded over. He lived in a dark part of the city, and he knew specifically that he did not like it.

  It was raining over a shallow basin, a retention pond made into a playground. Great halves of tires leapt up like snakes and dove back into the gray sand. Tangled and rusted pipework grew in otherwise empty spaces around the yard. Children like him would play in the mud at the base of a drain pipe.

  They would hold their pinkies up to the space station in orbit over the heart of the City-State. Ilios, a behemoth that rivaled the moon in size from their perspective. Makz remembered wanting to be there, looking down.

  One day a man came up to him and he spoke: “Makz. There are a couple things that need to be said, first of all you can’t stay here. I know you are young; what, seven years old? You have a to find a way out. You are important, you are something to be worried about. See, time is all fucked up out here, and it is so easy to run out of it. You see what I’m sayin’? No, okay, just trust me. You have to look out for your future.”

  Long ago, Makz had simple motives in life; avoid pain, find love, survive until life becomes overwhelming. The man Makz made himself into may not have been everything he wished for.

  He hurt people. Makz found life in his corner of the City-State, a Free City domain known as the fringes, to be tough. The fringes were not a pleasant place. Problems were all around him: people, scores of them were to blame. It wouldn't be long before his part of the city became a ruin like the Free City. Too many souls for hell, he thought.

  To keep the peace, Makz took on the role of a vigilante. Makz patrolled, by himself, around his sector looking for unorthodoxy. UPC, the City-State, ignored the fringes for years; it was no threat to them. People stuck in vice rarely had a philosophy to challenge the superpower. But Makz carried on in his role. He would drag anyone causing trouble to the local militias or he would end them with his own hands. Makz himself never lived under the direct rule of UPC, just in their shadow. He was a believer.

  Since Makz was a teenager, he had habitually used a state-approved narcotic called Pulse. That substance, when injected through the skin via a device with an array of tiny needles, caused the muscles to work faster and harder, it put the user in a cloud of cogent euphoria. Some effects were different in each person, and even with each injection; hallucinations, synethesia.

  Makz was under its control. Since UPC seemed to have given up on the fringes, Pulse was no longer dispensed and had to be synthesized locally. Makz used it as an escape from the harshest of realities, the realization that immortality came in a bottle; a dark gift that consumed the user as fast as it was consumed. But Makz didn’t want to live eternally, not like that, not there.

  0

  “Morning, again.” Makz spoke through tired tears into Glori’s sleeping ear. He kissed her awake.

  “What time...” She muttered, her eyes still shut.

  “Early.” Makz let his hand trace from her outstretched arm down to the underside of her naked breast. He touched her as if she were very fragile, as if she were made of ash and a breeze would lift her away a layer at a time. He kissed the side of her mouth with the same intense care.

&nb
sp; Glori was still in slumber and made no effort to enter her consciousness. She let him make quiet love to her as she lay dreaming.

  The loveless hiss of a dermal injector drifted to Makz's ears as he reeled back. The drug had hit him like a bullet. He let his hands fall to the cold pavement. That day's injection was not an unusual surprise. He felt a wave of intense apprehension towards anything that moved. It was going to be a bloody day. His fists were rock solid hammers that could beat down a building. He could kill with a thought.

  The world looked like it was viewed through a camera's viewfinder. He was twenty feet tall and moving a mile with each step. Makz looked up in dismay at a man sitting on a street side guard rail. His first catch.

  It was at the torn border of civilization and chaos that Makz patrolled. A zone with no real police. There was an odd balance there; workers and the desperately poor intermingled in a sea of makeshift bars and brothels. The roads were useless, having been destroyed for years. They were now open markets selling the scraps from the City-State. The man Makz spotted was apparently in between worlds, perhaps he'd lost his ability to support himself, struggled with addiction.Not the point. A voice in Makz's head clamored for blood. Makz stood over the man, apparently inebriated, down on his luck, head in hands. Makz knelt down to his face and peeked between his fingers. He tilted his head to see inside his hands. There was a broken man in there. And that was the end of the line.

  “Get on your feet,” Makz grunted in a long breath. His palms itched. His heart thumped.

  The man stood shakily and put out his hand to calm Makz. “I'm coded, here,” the man said as he held his wrist out displaying a circular bar code. It meant that the man had been conformed or was prepared to be.

  Makz slapped his wrist away. “You're out past curfew.” Makz grit his teeth. His eyes twitched. He was going to explode.