Influx

  Alexa looked grim. “Be careful, Jon. You can easily kill yourself with this equipment—especially in a room this size. It could be a hundred-foot fall right into a brick wall—and then you might collapse the brick wall, if you’re not careful.”

  He took a deep breath and reviewed his familiarity with the controls. “No. No, I think I’ve got this. Worst-case scenario, I just pull back with my left toes on the controller, and I go into weightlessness. Right?”

  She nodded. “Right. Remember that if you get into trouble.”

  Cotton frowned. “It’s a bit more than that. Weightlessness is all well and good, but watch the direction of down near walls and furniture. They were designed with a pretty boring direction for down in mind, so don’t go wrecking anything.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve got this. Hell, I invented this.”

  “Let’s not get cocky.”

  “Here, I’m going into equilibrium. Start undoing the straps.”

  Alexa stepped forward, keeping most of her body weight outside the altered gravity field as she started unfastening the straps from Grady’s gravis. In a few minutes he was floating free.

  “Ha, ha!” Grady flexed his arms and started doing a Russian folk dance in midair. “Hey! Hey! Hey!”

  “All right. Enough of that. Try to move toward that doorway.”

  Grady did one last “Hey!” and then he directed his right foot toward the target. He concentrated, and then, keeping his left foot level, he slowly ramped up the force of gravity.

  Too fast—he was already falling at thirty miles an hour toward the doorway.

  “Left foot! Pull back!”

  Grady gripped the left nodule controller with his toes and brought it back to zero gravity—but his momentum kept him going forward at a considerable clip.

  In a moment of clarity, he twisted his right foot and ramped up the gravity slightly in that direction, turning in an arc back the way he came—like an ice skater burning off momentum by digging in his skates.

  “Watch the shelving!”

  Grady just barely bumped the shelving unit as he came to a stop—while the new direction of down caused one shelving unit to lean sideways, spilling everything off its racks. Grady immediately pulled back into a gravity equilibrium, and all of the items on the shelves started floating—lots of small valves and electronic components.

  Cotton grabbed his head with his hands. “For fuck’s sake! Look at the mess you’re making.”

  Alexa nodded encouragement. “That was good thinking, Jon. Your knowledge of physics is going to help you here. Newton’s first law. Uniform motion.”

  Grady nodded. “Right.” He patted the shelf in front of him. “Thanks, Isaac.”

  “Now try it again.”

  Cotton added, “And this time try not to almost kill yourself.”

  Grady ran through his knowledge of the controls again and mimed his planned actions. He finally looked up. “All right. I got this.” He looked across the room toward the doorway, then pointed. “I’m heading right over by the entrance.”

  “Not too close. The doors might fall through.”

  “Okay. I’ll stop ten feet away.”

  “You sure you’re ready?”

  He clapped his diamondoid-armored gauntlets together. “Hell, yeah!”

  Cotton mumbled to Alexa. “I don’t think I can watch this.”

  “O ye of little faith, Cotton.”

  “You forget who I was until recently.”

  Grady took a deep breath and then altered the direction of descent. This time he gradually increased the force with his left toes, pushing forward only slightly. He began to glide above the floor, some of the debris falling along with him, scraping on the concrete as it did.

  “Well, now you’re just scattering the mess around.”

  Grady concentrated on the door as he maintained a steady five-mile-per-hour pace. He called back, “I can see it now. You’ve got to have a very fine touch in close spaces.”

  Alexa nodded. “Right. You’re doing excellent.”

  “You really have to be careful what you get near. Otherwise you quickly get a cloud of debris around you.”

  In a few moments, Grady eased back on the controller, and this time, he lowered his pitch until he could drag his foot along the floor. In a moment he leveled it out and came to a standing stop almost exactly ten feet away from the doorway. He then put himself into half gravity with down being down. Locking gravity, he turned to face them, arms spread wide. “What do you think?”

  Alexa nodded. “Nicely done. I think it’s time we take it up a notch.”

  Grady raised his eyebrows. “Meaning?”

  Cotton answered for her. “Meaning it’s time for this little birdie to leave the nest.”

  • • •

  Grady stood on the flat silver roof of the Fulton Cold Storage building—the multistory painted sign looming behind him. It was about two in the morning. The lights of downtown Chicago were visible in the distance, but otherwise the streets ten stories below were quiet.

  Alexa stood next to him in her formfitting tactical jumpsuit. Her own gravis was integrated into its nanotech fabric, while his looked clunky by comparison. It was a sultry summer night, but he was dressed for wind, with a sleek pair of windsurfing goggles that Cotton had given him.

  Alexa walked over to the parapet at the edge of the roof and looked down. “Let’s not stay too close to the ground when we get up there. No sense in calling undue attention to ourselves.” She walked back to him. “Besides, the higher up you are, the more time you have to deal with mistakes.”

  Grady nodded. He was actually starting to feel nervous.

  “You’ll be fine. I’ll be right there.” She spoke into her microphone, and he heard her voice right in his ear. “I mean it. You’ll do fine.”

  She moved about thirty feet away from him. “Now remember that if we get close to each other, our gravity fields will interact. You’re a physicist, so you can probably estimate the interactions better than I can, but just don’t forget it.”

  “No. I’m ready. Let’s do this.”

  Alexa held up her hand. “Equilibrium.”

  Grady made adjustments. “Check.”

  “Power up.”

  He activated his gravis. “Powered up.” He was suddenly floating in microgravity.

  “Push off the roof with your legs. We don’t want those rafters in your gravity well when you fall up.”

  Grady bent his legs and pushed off into space. He laughed nervously as he rose ten, twenty, and thirty feet above the roof, seeing more and more of the surrounding city blocks as he did so. He gazed around. “This is beautiful!”

  Alexa was quickly up to his height, putting a finger against her lips. “Not until we’re higher. Voices carry in open air.” She pointed upward. “One quarter gravity, twelve o’clock high, please. I’ll meet you at one thousand feet.”

  With that Alexa began to fall upward.

  Grady nodded to himself and activated his controls. Instantaneously he was falling upward as well. As he did, his view of the surrounding city streets increased. He felt an instinctive fear, but it was counterbalanced by his brain’s full belief that “down” was actually just above him—not below. So when he looked at the cityscape, he felt as though he were examining the sky overhead. He laughed nervously as the view kept expanding.

  “Jon!”

  Grady looked up to see that he was rising past Alexa. He brought himself back into equilibrium, and she rose to meet him. They were now at eleven hundred feet above the meatpacking district. The view of the Chicago skyline was breathtaking.

  “This is really something.”

  “Keep an eye out for helicopters. If you get seen, go fast—anywhere but the safe house until you lose them. A typical helicopter can do about a hundred and fifty miles an ho
ur—which is faster than terminal velocity. So your best bet is evasive maneuvers. You’ll find that with the gravis you can change directions much faster than normal aircraft.”

  Grady was still gazing all around, a grin on his face. “I can’t believe this. It’s like a dream.”

  Alexa nodded. “It is pretty amazing. And I’ve seen some amazing things in my day. Back when I was a field operator in the ’80s . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Never mind. You ready?”

  He nodded.

  “Follow me. If we get separated, I’ll find you with my thermals.” She pointed ahead and to the left. “See that tall building over there? John Hancock Center. Let’s head toward it.” She tapped her ear. “Keep in touch by q-link.” She shot him a quick grin as she lowered her visor. “And try to keep up.”

  With that she twisted around and fell forward, back first, twisting like a high diver as she disappeared into the night.

  Grady felt a thrill unlike anything he’d ever known as he jammed the controller forward and suddenly felt the universe draw him toward the horizon. The wind buffeted him at a hundred and twenty miles per hour. He glanced below, and it was as if this was the BASE jump to end all BASE jumps—with the city of Chicago serving as a jagged cliff-face down which they were both falling. Grady moved his hands as airfoils and adjusted his position with increasing ease. He screamed in joy as he fell across the sky.

  “Try to keep the screaming to a minimum. We don’t want to attract attention.”

  “Right. Couldn’t help it. Sorry.”

  Forty-story condo buildings were gliding by below him—or to the side of him in the current gravitational context. He was passing by a narrow river crisscrossed with bridges. Up ahead he could see Alexa falling with her arms tucked against her sides—aiming like a bird of prey toward her target.

  Grady did likewise and instantly felt a speed increase. He could also see below more easily that way. The wind roared past his ears.

  In under a minute they starting closing in on the hundred-story Hancock building. Grady eased up on the gravity along with Alexa, and they coasted to a near stop as the wind buffeted them.

  She pointed. “See that building there with the four small towers just to the left of Hancock Center?”

  “Yeah, I see it.”

  “Let’s see if you can land on top of a tower.”

  Grady sucked in a breath. Falling in the open air was fantastic, but he remembered his close shaves in Cotton’s workshop.

  Alexa came up within twenty feet of him and spoke directly, instead of over q-link. “You need to be able to do this without hesitation, even in wind.”

  “Yes, of course you’re right. I’m on it.”

  Grady eased his “down” in the direction of the tower, keeping it to barely any gravity at all. The roof of the building slowly approached him. At first glance he’d thought this was an older, art deco sixty-story building, but now that he was getting up close, he could see it was newer than that—paying homage perhaps. The art deco look here had an ’80s blockiness to it. The roof of the building was capped by four identical purely ornamental towers—square boxes of metal with small pyramids atop them. He focused on the nearest one, and as he glided closer, he modulated his pitch, adjusting the angle of his foot as necessary.

  “Remember to reduce your gravity after you land. It will prevent damage to the structure.”

  Grady gave her a thumbs-up sign and turned back toward the approaching tower. It was barely ten feet away now, capped by a large square point made of steel, about three feet wide. A lightning rod stood above that. He glanced down to see the roof of the building some forty feet below. The other towers nearby. And the Chicago streets hundreds of feet below them all.

  A wind blew him slightly to the right, but he corrected, and in a moment he grabbed onto the cap of the metal pyramid with his gauntleted hand. Moments later he wrapped his arms around the spire, and lowered his gravity to almost nothing, but pointed in the direction of actual gravity—just enough to keep him in place. He clung to the top of the spire and looked back up at Alexa floating in space a hundred or so feet away.

  “How was that?”

  “Excellent. Did you feel how the structure started taking on your gravity field?”

  “Yeah. I dialed down the intensity just as I got in close. Seems to work all right.” Grady looked out across the city, and then down. Whoa. He was up in a place where he’d normally be frightened out of his wits, but changing the direction of gravity seemed to chase off vertigo. Looking around he felt a little like King Kong atop the Empire State Building.

  “Now remember, when you push off, don’t just hit full gravity upward, or you might rip the top off the tower.”

  Grady nodded and pushed away from the building at nearly zero g before increasing it moments later to gain altitude. “How’s that?”

  She came nearly alongside—just far enough away so their gravity fields weren’t tangled. “Good. Okay, how about a bit of high-speed maneuvering?”

  “I don’t want to go through any skyscraper windows tonight.”

  “No, we’ll head down there.” She pointed out toward the water, where long lines of stone outlined a harbor. A lighthouse blinked occasionally at its tip. “Along that quay, near Chicago Harbor. I’ll meet you down at the lighthouse. Go fast, now!”

  She did a backward somersault and then kicked in full gravity—sending her soaring downward at an angle toward the lakeshore a mile away.

  Grady felt the thrill of the chase and immediately fell downward after her. He was rapidly getting a feel for how to direct himself and how to increase or decrease his speed. It was a physical experience of the laws of motion he’d studied for so many years. He could almost see the mathematical arcs he was tracing through the air as he increased this variable or decreased that one. Living proof of his perceptions.

  Grady hurtled through the night air, passing over the rooftops of shorter skyscrapers at a hundred miles an hour. Once clear of the last row of buildings, he angled down toward the lake, aiming for a spot about a half mile from shore. He descended to five hundred feet and sped silently across the dark water.

  As he came up to a few hundred meters from the blinking stone lighthouse at the end of a lone stone quay, he eased up on the speed and brought himself to within yards of the water’s surface. When he reached the lighthouse, he rose to a full stop alongside the railing at its peak, where Alexa stood waiting for him patiently—apparently in normal gravity.

  She smiled. “You’re taking to this quickly.”

  He floated ten feet away from her like a child’s balloon on a string. “It’s like everything I imagined. It seems so natural.”

  “Just don’t forgot the old rules of physics when you take the belt off.” She looked up. “We still need to experiment with interlocking gravity fields. It’ll be safer if we go high up for this.”

  “How high you want to go?” He craned his neck into the cloudy sky.

  “How about just below the cloud deck? Meet you up there?”

  He nodded, but even before she launched, he did—laughing like a maniac as he plummeted into the heavens.

  He glanced back at the city as he kept rising. It was truly breathtaking—the best elevator ride in the world. It wasn’t until about four thousand feet that he started coming to the bottom of the cloud cover. He dialed to equilibrium and stopped slowly. The mist was clearly defined and dense above him. It was also much cooler up here, and he could feel the dew point was near, as moisture seemed to be coming out of the air.

  He looked down to see Alexa rising up, and in a moment she was across from him at a distance of ten yards. The clouds formed a roof above them, but there were gaps here and there where he could see the stars. He could smell the moisture. Below them the city of Chicago glowed in the night.

  “All right, Jon. Let’s fall toward each other slowly—o
ne tenth gravity. I want you to try to grab my hands as we pass.”

  “Like objects passing in space.”

  “Right. Our gravity fields will make it seem like we’re objects of much greater mass, so we’ll behave like stars passing by each other—we’ll disturb each other’s trajectory.”

  “Okay. Say when.”

  She nodded. “Go.”

  They started falling toward and past each other, but as they got close, their trajectories were disturbed to a degree Grady felt that he could anticipate. They were now proof of the physical laws he knew so well. They sailed past each other on altered courses.

  Grady shouted back. “Let’s try it again. This time come in at a slightly steeper angle toward me. Just slightly.”

  “Change your angle of descent.”

  “Done. Here . . .” He looked ahead as they started to drift toward each other again. He felt it the moment their trajectories interacted. A tug as he fell in toward her, and she fell in toward him—then they passed, brushing outstretched hands.

  And then they began to orbit each other, revolving without either one adjusting their controls. They were now a binary system.

  She smiled lightly as they continued to go in circles, getting closer with every revolution and spinning faster. “We could get dizzy doing this.”

  He nodded but watched her face in the semidarkness. “How many more until we meet, do you think?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know . . .”

  “I say six.”

  “Six, eh?”

  He nodded.

  “All right.” They went around again, gradually increasing speed. “That’s two.”

  He kept his eyes upon her as the natural laws of the universe brought them closer together with each revolution.

  “Four.”

  At their sixth revolution they were face-to-face. They locked hands until their rotation began to slow. They turned to look at city lights far below.

  “How did you do this, Jon?”