Freefall Read online

  The panel’s objective was clear and straightforward. Hunt the galaxy. Find a new planet. And go there, leaving Earth and its unwelcome billions behind.

  Mars seemed the likeliest candidate at first, but it turned out to be a bust, arid and hot and deadly to anything that preferred oxygen over arsenic. The panel cast a wider net, found a bunch of Earth-analog planets outside our own solar system, each one heralding jubilation until the final reports came in: gas-based instead of rock-based, too close to a star, tidal-locked instead of rotating. The killer was the one that lay twenty-plus light-years away, well outside the range of our ships’ gravitational drives: Gliese 667Cc, which was by far the most promising site we’d identified to that point. Close to Home, Too Far from Home, the worldlink banners read when the bad news broke. But Tau Ceti e, less than twelve light-years away, was the next best thing, with breathable atmosphere, abundant supplies of potable water, nutrient-rich soil, microscopic life, metals, and minerals. Not as fully developed as Earth, much earlier in the evolutionary process—but that was actually a bonus, considering how much the Lowerworld had fouled up our home planet. Tower City, some people called it, and they weren’t hearing the name wrong. They were thinking of it as another city on a hill, another place to rebuild human civilization. A chance to start again.

  I knew that history the way I knew the two guys I’d grown up with, knew it like everyone else in the Upperworld did, which meant I knew it well enough to breeze through the Two Worlds/New Worlds module of the Otherworld Colonization Protocol. I liked to think I didn’t buy into it wholesale like Adrian, who recited corponational slogans—the Way of Wealth, the Survival of the Richest—as if they were some kind of personal creed. But I wasn’t like Griff, either, who’d gotten into conspiracy theories in the past year and started talking about how everything we’d learned in Two Worlds History was a load of crap. I’d always pretty much ignored the Lowerworld, never had a beef against the Lower-lifes as long as they didn’t bomb my parents’ apartment or hurt my chances of making it off-planet. I wasn’t about to flush my entire past—and, more importantly, my future—down the toilet because of some brown-skinned girl’s haunting eyes.

  That’s what I told myself, anyway.

  But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get over the impulse to stream video of her. To see her again, hear her speak, even if the damn technology wouldn’t let me understand more than two words of what she was saying. Every time I went over to Adrian’s apartment, I vowed that one final glimpse of her would satisfy me, that I’d be able to brush her off as another anonymous Lowerworlder who’d disappear from my life the moment the screen went dark—but every time the screen went dark, the need to see her again grew stronger. Maybe it was because she was inaccessible that I was so frantic to access her. But it felt like more than that. It felt like I was on the verge of something huge—what, I didn’t know—and she was at the center of it.

  I wrestled with myself time and again, but every time, I got pinned. So like some pathetic Lower-life Terrarist strung out on crystal death, I kept going back to Adrian, begging for my next fix.

  But finally, he cut me off. He’d been watching the videos for months, and—being Adrian—he’d decided right when someone else got interested that there was nothing to see. “They’re just pissed because we’re leaving and they’re screwed,” he said. “The sooner we forget them, the sooner we’ll be able to fly out of this hellhole.” I could have tried joking him into it, reminding him of the times we’d stumbled across banned content on the worldlink, like the rogue side channel we discovered at age fourteen that documented how all the ballplayers we worshiped were pumped up on nanoroids. Finding that report had been a real blow to me, but Adrian had laughed and said, “Look, dude, if everyone’s doing it, then no one’s doing it,” and I’d let him convince me. After that conversation, though I knew the games were fake, I still felt a thrill watching the pure white ball sail out of CanAm Clippers Stadium into a simulated perfect blue twilight.

  But this time a sixth sense I didn’t know I had told me I needed to be careful around my best friend. It wasn’t anything specific he said or did, but after a lifetime of feeling free to share pretty much whatever I wanted to with Adrian, this time it felt different: dangerous, taboo. I’d noticed he seemed to think it was up to him to correct any misconceptions about JIPOC he heard from kids in our Classification. Anything controversial, any doubts or misgivings they expressed, he’d be up in their face, telling them if they didn’t like the way things were being run, maybe they should go roll around in the garbage with the rest of the Lower-lifes. He’d never needed to say anything like that to me, of course, because I’d never said anything that sounded like I was questioning him or his dad or the entire colonization effort. Even Griff had enough sense to keep the conspiracy talk between the two of us. But now an uncomfortable feeling told me I couldn’t press Adrian too far, couldn’t risk him finding out what my real interest in the Lowerworld videos was. If I was going to find the girl, I was going to have to do it some other way.

  I couldn’t ask my parents. Even if I could talk to them about something like this, I never talked to them these days. Never saw them. When I was little, we used to be pretty close—they’d take me to Clippers games, cheer for me in Little League. My mom had this thing about eating dinner together and talking about our lives the way all the programmable-food promos showed families doing, which wasn’t as dorky and painful as it sounds. But in the past year, my dad had been too busy stocking the Otherworld ships to spend any time at home, while my mom had been holed up around the clock in her Data Recruitment lab, fine-tuning the deepsleep technology she’d helped design. I’d kept my dad’s worldlink access code, which had let me in on some good tricks for beating the OCP. I didn’t bother with my mom’s code, which was too science-y for me to make heads or tails of the sites it gave me access to. But I thought if I dug a little deeper, my dad’s code might show me a way to find the girl.

  I was wrong.

  Even though his code was a hundred steps up from mine, it turned out to be a nonstarter too. Probably he had a higher-level code he wasn’t letting me in on. Whatever, the only things I could access were decades-old footage of Lowerworld riots and the weekly report of mass executions, Terrarists the Intercorponational Colonization Protection Agency (INTERCOLPA) had caught plotting to set off a nuclear bomb in an Upperworld city or conspiring to steal the plans for our ships’ gravitational drive. I couldn’t even find any references to Sumati, which either meant she wasn’t classified as a Terrarist—which I couldn’t believe—or, more likely, that her profile was so highly classified I couldn’t get at it. With Griff’s help, Adrian had hacked into the heart of the CanAm security network, so it wasn’t surprising that every time I ran a search for “current Terrarist attacks” or “active ConGlo cells” or any of a million other keyword combinations, the best I got was an Access Restricted message. Most of the time I didn’t get that much. The link simply snapped, and I was left staring at a blank screen.

  After weeks of trying every search strategy I could think of and getting nowhere, I realized there was only one way I was going to find the sites I was looking for. If I couldn’t work through Adrian, I was going to have to get Griff to show me the way in.

  Me and Griff—or Richard Griffin III, but I’d always known him as Griff—went back almost as far as me and Adrian. Twelve years to be exact, ever since his dad took the JIPOC job after years of hopping between corponational positions in the Lowerworld. Griff’s mom had died a few months before they moved, so I guess his dad decided to settle in one place so Griff wouldn’t have to keep joining new Classifications. If Adrian’s first appearance in my life was just off the edge of the memory map, Griff arrived right when I was starting to make firm connections, which meant that when I thought about my childhood, it was Adrian’s outline but Griff’s face that popped up. Like he was a mirror to my past, and I was seeing my own life in his face.

  And what a face. Grif
f never quite settled into the looks he was given, not when he was a pudgy, buck-toothed kid, not after he transformed into a scrawny, snout-nosed teen. There were no pictures of his mom around his apartment, but I always hoped for her sake she didn’t look anything like her son. Red hair and freckles everywhere, like his freckles had hair or his hair had freckles. I never figured out which. He told me once, laughing at himself, that his dad had invested in nanocosmetics for his thirteenth birthday, but those had only made matters worse. “The bots took one look at me and ran screaming,” he said. Griff laughed all the time, but not like Adrian, the way Adrian’s laugh had that commanding tone to it, like: I’m laughing—you’d better laugh too. Griff laughed because he found the world ridiculous, because he was convinced it was all a cosmic gag some shadowy forces were playing on everyone else. At least, that’s what he said, him and his conspiracy-nut theories. With Griff, you could never tell if he was bullshitting. I don’t think I’d ever had a serious conversation with him, and that was fine with me. I certainly didn’t intend to have one now.

  “Dude,” I said to him one day after ColPrep. We were hanging out in his room, Adrian off doing something with his dad for a change, which made me feel relatively safe. Still, I tried to approach the subject like it was no big deal. “I was thinking about that video we watched with Adrian.”

  “You had to remind me?” Griff said. “As I recall, I was puking my guts out at the time.”

  “They’ve got to toughen us up somehow, man.”

  “Yeah, but what’s the rush?” he said. “They can’t bioengineer the hell out of us while we’re drifting through space? By the time we step off the ships, we could be freaking supermen.”

  “Maybe there’s something they’re not telling us,” I said in a spooky voice. “Isn’t that what Cons Piracy is always saying?”

  “There’s a million things they’re not telling us,” Griff said with a laugh that came mostly out of his nose. “You know, about Survival of the Fattest and all.”

  “Survival of the Fattest?”

  “Yeah, how the fattest cat squashes all the scrawny little kittens,” he said. “Isn’t that the way it works?”

  I cracked up. This was vintage Griff. “Anything else?”

  “I could write a book,” he said. “Corponational corruption, insider deals. The whole thing’s more a leveraged buyout of space than an attempt to save humanity. But none of you pretty boys seem to care about that as long as you get your free ride off of this dump.”

  I laughed along with him for a minute more. Then, trying to make my voice sound nonchalant while my heart thumped wildly, I said, “But seriously, how’d you get into that shit? It was wild.”

  For a second Griff looked startled, then he laughed again. “The video? I don’t know, I was fooling around one day, and that’s what popped up. There’s a lot of crazy stuff out there. As all good conspiracy theorists know.”

  “But how’d Adrian find out about it?” I asked, feeling both nervous and giddy, the way you feel when you do your first drop in zero-G.

  Griff stopped laughing—instantly, like my question had cut the power to his face—and the smile slid away. “What did Adrian tell you?”

  “Nothing, man.”

  “He must have told you something.”

  I shrugged, tried to steer us into safer waters. “He said you were, like, the hacking king.”

  Griff didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he exploded. “Goddamn it. I should have known he’d . . . What exactly did he tell you?”

  “He didn’t tell me anything, man,” I said. “Not one goddamn thing. He said you showed him how to get into the Lowerworld videos. So you two could piss your pants laughing at the Lower-lifes behind my back.” All of a sudden I felt myself getting angry. “Were you ever planning to let me in on it? Or was it supposed to stay your little secret?”

  “God, Cam,” Griff said. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Oh, so what was it?”

  “It wasn’t anything. At first. But I’m in deep shit if my dad finds out that Adrian knows. It’s not a game anymore, dude.”

  “It’s a bunch of Lower-lifes shouting crap from a pile of garbage,” I said. “Isn’t that what Adrian says?”

  Griff shook his head. “You don’t get it, man. Adrian doesn’t either. It’s different this time. Bigger. With Sumati and her disciple—”

  My heart jumped. “I want to see it again.”

  “No way.” He shook his head, over and over, like that might physically stop me. “This is why I didn’t want to show Adrian. You see this stuff, it gets inside you. You’re not the same afterward. You—”

  “I said I want to see it again.”

  Griff tried a smile and a change of direction. “I can also hack into the smut sites. The really hardcore ones. With interactivity.”

  “Now, Griff,” I said, handing him the link controller. “The same site. The crowd, the guards, Sumati, and—the other one.”

  “God,” Griff said, taking the controller. His hand shook. Realizing I’d accidentally intimidated him into doing what I’d tried to do with finesse made me feel ridiculously good, the way—it hit me—Adrian felt most of the time. Strong. Powerful. In control.

  Forget finesse. I just wanted in.

  And I got in. Griff muttered to himself as he fooled with the link for a minute or two, and one by one all of the lenses showing the permitted sites blinked out, like city lights disappearing before the dawn comes. What was left was a massive glowing silvery field, a nebula on his bedroom wall, and with the controller in his hand, Griff reassembled the pulsing bits of stardust until they formed an image, much clearer and sharper than on Adrian’s screen, so highly defined I was half convinced the people from that faraway world could step through the wall and stand right in front of me. “Surround,” Griff said, and the figures did step off the screen—or, instead, we sat in the middle of them, with projected bodies all around his room, so close I could have touched them if they’d actually been there. I stood and walked among them, through them, their flesh offering no more resistance than ghosts. Nothing had changed—the muddy streets, the tin-roofed houses, the veils and turbans, the street preacher, the torches, the bowing and silent crowd. The feeling of déjà vu was so strong it felt like it came from somewhere much deeper than the weeks I’d been watching this scene on Adrian’s bedroom wall.

  But it wasn’t a replay. It was somewhere else. It was live. And it was real. It was, I felt, more real than anything I’d seen on the worldlink. Maybe more real than anything I’d seen off the link as well.

  And she was there.

  The girl, coming up behind Sumati. The black hair and purple robe. The red jewel flashing above her golden eyes. I stood right in front of her, so close I would have felt her breath if there’d been anything to feel. This time, when she stretched her hands out in a copy of the old woman’s gesture and spoke the words I couldn’t understand—“Sumati” and “CanAm” and a bunch of sounds that meant nothing to me, though I knew instinctively they were the same as before—I imagined the air stirred by her voice.

  “Something’s wrong with the TranSpeaker,” Griff groused, monkeying with the controller. “It always cuts out on her.”

  When the girl’s eyes rose to confront the Peace Corp., I expected those eyes to stare straight through me, at the soldiers who were their real target. I was on the other side of the world, after all, and though I could see her, she couldn’t possibly see me.

  But her eyes shifted, focused, fell on mine. Up close, their golden irises were rimmed in a shade of green or blue. They locked on me, and my heart caught in my throat.

  She saw.

  The thing I’d buried at the core of my being. The thing I couldn’t see by myself, though I knew now that it was there.

  She saw me.

  “Satisfied?” Griff mumbled, looking down at the controller in his hand.

  I sat, legs trembling, as the video disintegrated and the girl was swept away like a handful
of stars. Now that my high was fading, I thought about apologizing to Griff, saying something to soften the blow, but I knew anything I said would make it worse. We hung out for another hour, not talking much, not watching much, and when I left, he threw me a half wave that looked like a plea.

  That night, alone in my room, while I tried to rinse the foul taste of what I’d done out of my mouth with CanAm AquaNova water that had been distilled and purified and desalinated and I hardly knew what else, I struggled to understand what was happening to me. It seemed like, up to this point, I’d been watching it happen, careening along behind it as if it wasn’t really me. But it was me. It was happening.

  The only question was, what was it?

  For the past few weeks, I’d been watching a beautiful girl on the worldlink. That was nothing new. I’d watched beautiful girls on the link all my life: in colonization promos, in flicks and techgames. If I’d taken Griff up on his offer to show me the smut sites, I’d have seen more beautiful girls, and I could have made them say and do pretty much whatever I wanted. But there was nothing real about that, nothing worth risking anything for. Even the girls I’d dated had been like the videos: surgically reconstructed princesses on an interplanetary ego trip. A week after I cleaned their data out of my selfone, I couldn’t remember their faces.