Free to Fall

by Lauren Miller

  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. T
he 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.

  Epilogue

  “HAPPY SPRING SOLSTICE,” he says, setting a small box on the table. I can tell he wrapped it himself.

  “I feel like it’s my birthday,” I tease, because it is. I am seventeen today.

  “I hope you like it,” I hear North say as I lift the lid of the box. “Because I can’t return it.” Inside is a folded piece of paper. It’s an email, addressed to me, with the purple NYU logo embedded in the text. Dear Aurora Vaughn, it reads. Congratulations! I am pleased to inform you that you have been accepted into New York University’s Class of 2035.

  “It came this morning,” North says. When I look at him, his eyes are twinkling. “You got in.”

  “That’s funny. Since I didn’t apply.”

  “Oh, but you did,” North replies, and leans across the table to take my hands. “And your application was very compelling. Especially your personal statement. You wrote about the person who most inspires you.” He lifts my palm to his lips and kisses it. “He sounds like an amazing guy.” He lowers his voice now, though it’s unnecessary. The tables beside us are empty, and our waiter is hung up with a party of six across the room, answering questions about the menu. Dining is a more time-consuming affair these days, without Lux to guide the process. There are so many decisions to be made.

  “I know it’s not the same as getting in for yourself,” North says quietly. “But once you’re there, it’ll all be you. And it’s not like Atwater is going to tell them you didn’t graduate from Theden this year. Not that I’m pressuring you to go—it’s up to you. If you don’t want—”

  “I love you,” I say, leaning on my elbows to kiss him.

  He grins. “So you’ll go?”

  “Well, one of us has to get a respectable job,” I tease, and kiss him again.

  When the waiter brings our check, we pay with cash. Six months ago that would’ve raised eyebrows, but not today. People are distrustful now of electronic things, preferring the tangible instead. Dollar bills. Paper maps. Metal keys. It’s not as bad as it was in the days after the storm, when most wouldn’t even touch their phones. The paranoia was pervasive then. A withdrawal effect, some doctors said when the truth came out. When the nanobots shut off, brains were left jonesing for the trust boost they’d come to expect, and it took a few weeks for people’s natural oxytocin levels to recover. By then the story had broken, and it wasn’t paranoia that drove people to ditch their devices, but the facts.

  We heard from scientists first, assuring us that the sensation we’d felt right before the aurora hadn’t done us any harm. The human body could withstand an electromagnetic pulse much stronger than the one the storm had induced. “This was the equivalent of getting an MRI,” a geophysicist said during one of NASA’s many news conferences in the days after the storm. “Our bodies barely registered it.”

  The nanobots in those bodies, on the other hand, were made of iron oxide, a highly magnetic compound, and were designed with a fail-safe in case of malfunction. If something went wrong, an MRI could be used to short them out. An MRI or, as it turned out, a solar-induced electromagnetic current. Nearly twenty years of planning and the Few hadn’t accounted for that.

  It’s ironic, actually, how it all turned out. The Few had chosen the Greek god Hyperion as their sacred project’s namesake. Hyperion, the god who controlled the sun. And yet it was the sun that ultimately destroyed the Few’s Hyperion, in one fiery burst. I guess the Few had misjudged Hyperion’s divinity the same way they’d misjudged their own.

  The floodgates opened a few days later. Without nanobots to persuade them, the one hundred and eleven reporters we sent the Gnosis memo to got to decide for themselves whether to run the story.

  Every single one of them did.

  The FDA immediately pulled Soza’s flu spray off the market, and the Justice Department launched an investigation into Gnosis, Lux, and the Gold. A week before Christmas, a grand jury in Boston issued seventy-seven indictments. When I saw the arrests on TV, I felt sorry for those executives in handcuffs. How many of them were like Griffin, clueless to what was really going on? The true culprits weren’t on those companies’ payrolls, and their names weren’t ever mentioned in the news.

  The Few—they haven’t been defeated. Not by us, not by the storm. They aren’t gods, but they are very smart men. And like Dr. Tarsus said, they are patient. Eventually they’ll try again. But I, at least, am off their radar. For now that’s enough.

  According to Hershey, my departure from campus was a source of speculation for about a day. Then Rudd left Theden and people began to whisper that he’d had an affair with a student, and everyone just assumed it was me. The school isn’t pressing charges and neither will Hershey, so the rumor has stayed a rumor and Rudd has stayed out of jail. I hate that he’s out there, free, but Hershey says it’s better this way.

  “You wanna stop by the library?” North asks as we step out onto the sidewalk. It’s a silly question. We go almost every night, now that the main branch on Fifth Avenue stays open until midnight. All the libraries do, to accommodate demand. The main branch has more than five hundred public computer terminals, yet tonight, as always, the line of people waiting to use them stretches out of the front door and down the iconic stone steps. This line says a lot about us. It says that we are too wary to use our handhelds, too concerned about our privacy to log on at home. And yet it also says that we are unwilling to cut the cord. We may carry wads of money in our pockets and keep paper maps in our cars, but like moths to a flame, we’re drawn to those screens.

  When it’s my turn, I sit down at the terminal and begin my nightly ritual. Using a fake profile, I log on to Festival, the site that replaced Forum when the government took it down, and check up on the people I love.

  There’s a message from my dad in my in-box, wishing me a happy birthday. He doesn’t understand why I’m using this fake profile, or why I won’t give him my mailing address, but he seems to accept that it has to be this way for a while. I’m not hiding—I refuse to—but I am being cautious. Too much has happened for me to be cavalier with my freedom.

  Beck is next. My best friend snapped out of his Lux-induced stupor the moment the nanobots shut off and he chucked his Gold into the Columbia River before the aurora faded from the sky. He’s using his mom’s old Galaxy now and has started taking pictures on film. There’s been a surge of interest in old gadgets like that. Ivan is making a killing, no doubt.

  Tonight I see that one of Beck’s photographs—taken the day the story broke, as thousands of people gathered in Pioneer Square to burn their Golds in an impromptu bonfire Seattle police didn’t even attempt to stop—will be part of an upcoming exhibit at the International Center of Photography, near Times Square, and that he’ll be in town when it goes up in June. I smile, imagining what it’ll be like to surprise him there. To hug his skinny neck, to spend hours catching up.

  It’s midnight now, and the voice over the PA tells us that it’s
time to proceed to the exit. The library is officially closed. “Just one second,” I say to North, taking his hand as I quickly make one last click.

  Hershey’s profile is the hardest for me to look at, so I always save it for last. She’s still at Theden, which is what she wanted, but the sunny statuses and smiling selfies don’t fool me. I know her better than that. Still, I don’t think I’ll ever understand it, or forgive her for the decision she made. That knowing what she knows, she still chose to stay. Then again, that’s what this whole fight was about, I guess. The terrifying but glorious freedom to fall.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I thank the One who gave me the idea for this book, my ever-present Paraclete. I hope I didn’t butcher it too much in the execution.

  Thank you to the incomparable Kristyn Keene, agent extraordinaire, whose enthusiasm for this story never waned and whose sensibilities shaped and improved it at every stage. And to Kyle Kallman, the best intern ICM ever hired, who liked my crazy idea enough to give me notes on it when he didn’t have to. Sorry for naming a bad guy after you.

  Thank you also to my editor, Sarah Landis at HarperTeen, whose insights and care for these pages left me swimming in gratitude on more than one occasion, and to the whole HarperTeen team, especially Jen Klonsky, Gina Rizzo, Christina Colangelo, Sarah Kaufman (who’s two for two on kickass covers), Jon Howard, Kaitlin Severini, and Alice Jerman for all their hard work and general awesomeness.

  For your amazing expertise on all things nanobot (and for basically giving me my oxytocin hook), a thousand thanks to the brilliant Dr. Katrina Siffred. For my hacker scenes, I’m indebted to Mike Siley, who isn’t a hacker but still manages to be a badass. Please move back to LA. And then there’s Alex Young at NASA, the coolest solar physicist in the world, who somehow explained solar storms in a way my not-scientifically-inclined brain could understand. Without your help, I may never have ended this book, and especially not with a spectacular green glow. And finally, Anne Drewry, dear friend and brilliant doctor, who helped me figure out how to kill all the people I needed to kill in this book, and who also taught me, years ago, the particular joy and privilege of having a “roomie BFF.”