Free to Fall

35

“IT’S PRETTY EERIE, ISN’T IT?”

I’d been sitting on the balcony outside his apartment—our apartment, North kept correcting me—for hours, staring out at the forest of dark buildings. The utility companies had turned off the power grid at three o’clock, as soon as something called a “coronal mass ejection” left the sun’s surface and started hurtling toward ours. The geostorm was officially under way. They were expecting the huge mass of solar plasma to slam into Earth’s atmosphere a little after one a.m. It was 12:30 now.

The past twenty-two hours had been a total blur. The opening we found in the mine brought us up through a stone well and into the woods, about twenty yards from the electric fence around the Enfield Reservoir. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve thought it was as old as it was made to look. There wasn’t a sign commemorating the mine rescue that was accomplished there, or anything at all to suggest that the hole inside it led to anything. Which, I suppose, was the point. It was the Few’s escape route. Their secret way out.

Hershey had been waiting for us at North’s apartment, shaken, but mostly okay. We tried to convince her to come with us to New York, to leave Rudd and Theden behind, but she wanted to stay.

It was harder than I thought it’d be to say good-bye to her. Our relationship would always be complicated, but she was part of me somehow. Part of who I’d become. We clung to each other in the alley behind North’s apartment for a long time. When we finally let go, our shoulders were drenched in tears.

North and I crossed over the RFK Bridge a little after six a.m., just as the sun was rising over the East River. His apartment was on 47th Street, right in Times Square. After a greasy breakfast at the diner around the corner, we went upstairs and slept, North’s body curled around the back of mine, like two commas. The sun was setting when we woke up, still in our clothes. North reached over and twirled my hair. Looking at him, feeling the heel of his hand on my cheek, the hollow feeling inside of me began to recede. We were okay. We were more than okay. We were free.

We’d eaten SpaghettiOs, like he’d promised, for dinner, straight from the can, and now I was here, on the balcony, looking out at the dark city. Blackout blinds hung on the sliding glass door behind me to block out the neon lights, but tonight we wouldn’t need them. None of the billboards were lit. There wasn’t much of a moon, either. Just a faint yellow sliver. There were stars, though, a thick blanket of them in the cloudless black sky. I wondered how often people in Manhattan got to see stars. As often as people in Seattle, I imagined, which was pretty much never. Too much light pollution. There wasn’t any of that tonight. The entire East Coast was blacked out.

There were people on the sidewalk below me, gazing up at the stars. I could tell by how frequently they were checking the bright rectangles of light on their wrists that Lux had brought them outside. Starry nights. The cosmos. The type of experience Lux was designed to steer them away from. Not tonight.

It appeared our algorithm was doing exactly what it was supposed to. Leading people into their “threats” instead of away from them. Lux’s erratic behavior was all anyone was talking about. We’d slept through it, but the app had been busy causing chaos all day. Traffic jams, long lines, people leaving work in the middle of the day. People skipping work altogether. Gnosis was claiming the problems were a result of GPS interference from the solar wind, and they were urging people to stop using the app until the satellites were back online after the storm. Lux users were cheerfully ignoring this advice. The nanobots in their brains were making them trust the app more than its makers, even as they were driving miles off course and walking out of conference rooms mid-meeting. It’d be funny, if it weren’t so sad.

Not everyone was listening to Lux, though. North said there was some chatter online about people “de-Luxing”—uninstalling the app from their phones—and those who were doing it were using hash tags like “guided” and “led.” It wasn’t exactly a movement yet, but #deLux was trending on Forum and all the major news sources were covering Lux’s mistakes. There was no way to know how long it’d take Gnosis to detect the changes we’d made to their algorithm. I just hoped it was long enough to snap Beck out of his nanobot-induced stupor. How many sunsets would it take to remind him what was true?

The radio was on inside. I could hear the voice of Gnosis’s new CEO, a man who was failing badly in his attempts to emulate his predecessor. People still didn’t know Griffin was dead. According to the latest Gnosis statement, he was “getting settled in” at a treatment center in an undisclosed location. Hopefully, the truth would come out as soon as the power came back on. We’d emailed copies of Griffin’s medical file to every news outlet we could think of, along with the Gnosis internal memo about Project Hyperion, hoping at least one of them would run the story before Gnosis discovered the changes we’d made to Lux’s algorithm.

The video from my necklace went to only two people—Dean Atwater and Rudd. The email accompanying it explained that if anything ever happened to me or to Hershey, or if I ever sensed that the Few were trying to find me, the footage would go public. I had no doubt that I’d bought their silence. There was too much at stake for them both.

“Our cutting-edge infrastructure uses light and fiber optics instead of metal,” the new Gnosis CEO was saying, “insulating our devices from electromagnetic interference, so users will be able to use their Golds and G-tablets with no problems during the outage. Of course, GPS requires satellites and, unfortunately, those we can’t immunize. But be assured, once the solar storm has passed, Lux will once again function without error.” I cringed. Without error. “In the meantime,” he went on, “we are recommending that people refrain from using the app and remain indoors for the duration of the storm.”

No mention of the worm North released into their network. Lucky for us, it appeared Gnosis couldn’t bear the bad publicity of a successful hack, so they were burying it.

“What are they all doing?” I heard North ask. I’d forgotten he was beside me. I followed his gaze over the railing of the balcony. There were now at least a hundred people on the street below, all looking up at the sky.

“Seizing an opportunity,” I said wryly. And the truth was, a starry night was an opportunity. To be awed and overwhelmed by the infinite unknown. To brush transcendence. The Few knew this, which is why they’d been so careful to keep people sheltered. Transcendence was transformational. That’s what made it so risky.

“Rory, something is happening,” North said then, getting to his feet. “There are literally thousands of people in the street.” He was right. It was beginning to look like New Year’s Eve below us, with people standing shoulder to shoulder in the plaza below. Since the EV charging stations turned off when the grid went down, the only cars on the road were a few gas-powered ones, which was good, because people were spilling out into the street.

My stomach twisted. It was our fault they were outside. What if something bad happened out there? A riot or something? Or some unforeseen effect of the solar storm? There must’ve been hundreds of thousands of people outside now. And it wasn’t just in Times Square, either. There were people as far as I could see down Broadway, and on balconies and rooftops, too. Was this all for the stars? The sky was beautiful, for sure, but it wasn’t anything particularly spectacular. No comets or meteors, no low-hanging moon. So why had it topped every user’s opportunity list? This evening’s sunset was more breathtaking than this was, and Lux had brought far fewer people outside for that.

I was staring down at the crowd, watching the masses interact with their screens. They seemed as confused as I did about why they were outside in the middle of the night. Most of them weren’t even looking up at the sky anymore. They were tapping their screens, waiting for Lux’s cue to call it a night.

I was willing them to go back inside, when I felt a prickly tingling, like static, deep in my bones. It only lasted for a second, then it was gone. Beside me, North shuddered. He’d felt it too. From the gasps and murmurs on the street below, I guessed that everyone had.

“What was that?” North asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, my heart fluttery in my chest. The hairs on my arms were standing on end, and my tongue tasted like copper. “Was it from the storm?” I peered over the balcony. It was hard to tell in the dark, but everyone seemed okay.

Just then North inhaled sharply. “Oh,” he breathed. “Aurora.” It was odd to hear him use my whole name, and even odder the way he said it. Just then there was a collective gasp below, followed by a wave of more gasps, as eyes flew from screen to sky.

Every cell of my body was sharp with apprehension, I tilted my head back. At the exact moment my gaze hit the horizon, I heard my name again, this time in my head.

Aurora.

I trembled when I saw it, the wondrous neon array. Spectacular and eerie and electric with color, it took my brain several seconds to take it all in. The downward slanting green streaks, the upward slanting purple ones, the pool of colors where the two lines met. The breathtaking aurora forming a crude outline of a dove with its wings outstretched. Light-headed with wonder, I sucked in deeply, filling my lungs with the cold night air. Space seemed to retract in that moment, drawing me nearer to the infinity above.

North reached for my hand and held it, both of us staring, awestruck, at the sky.

“It’s for you,” he whispered.

Below us were the muffled sounds of conversations. I tore my gaze away from the sky and looked down at the street. One by one, tiny rectangular lights were blinking off as handhelds timed out, but no one seemed to notice. Their eyes and minds were elsewhere. On the sky. On one another. For the first time in a long time, connection had replaced connectedness. I’d never seen anything like it before, not on this scale. The effervescent pulse of human interaction. People turning to faces instead of screens. It was a splendor of its own.

Hope filled every crevice of my body, and the smile that stretched across my face came from the deepest part of my soul.

Well done, the voice whispered. Well done.