Prologue - Picking flowers
I was out in the nets harvesting carbon flowers on the day before I fell down the well. It's a methodical meditative process which I had always enjoyed. Each time I finished clipping another gnarled black nest of super-expanded fibre out of its place in the net and chucked it into the gurney floating behind me I felt that positive bump of satisfaction you always get from having done something productive. Then I'd unclip the gun from my belt and extrude a new web of fresh carbon fibre in solid protective lines to fill the gap.
It wasn't really carbon of course that's just what we called it. I mean there's some carbon in there but under the hood it's lab built nanomaterial based on designs sketched out from exotic materials. Twisted up tight in on itself, the molecules all curled and stacked in orderly rows, ready to spring out if a decent whack of kinetic energy hits it and engulf whatever did the hitting into one of those big black frozen fractal explosions we call the flowers.
We're talking a lot of energy here, as in you can climb around on them fine, and I've even seen a shuttle brush against them a couple of times with no harm done. But a micrometeor or some fleck of metal or paint or other space junk comes flying in fast enough to punch a hole in the house and wham, the nets draped carefully all around us, will take it out every time before it can do any damage. As long as they're well maintained of course.
All sorts you might find inside. The flowers are dumped into their hopper and broken down to be turned back into more net paste. This takes a few hours and when you open up the hopper afterwards there is always something left behind like the grain of dirt that starts the pearl.
I guess probably every kid Upstairs goes through a phase of collecting them at some point. Usually it's one of the above-mentioned but every now and then it's something odd. We got a boot one time, no foot in it thankfully but you've got to wonder right, I mean it's not as if someone just forgot it out there. And I even heard of someone getting a golf ball, never saw it though, it wasn't at our house and we didn't get out that much.
So there I was taking a break. Hanging out for a few minutes with my gloves hooked into the net and gazing through a gap at the huge swirling churning background of blue and green and brown and white in the distance. I was trying to remember some of my terrestrial geography and see if I could figure out which bit was our namesake down there but to be honest I couldn't even tell if it was on the side that was showing at all.
Then suddenly right across in front of me from my left came a streak of light as something ploughed into the atmosphere and started to glow hot once the friction built up. It lasted as long as I could see it without burning out or breaking apart, angling down into the distance until it was too small to keep track of any more. A lot bigger than a boot, I would think it must have been maybe as big as a whole person.
I wondered if it would make it all the way down. You don't see those ones often and it seemed kind of symbolic you know, kind of poignant, although I don't think I'd have been able to fit the words around how exactly.
I switched my radio off and stayed there for a while after that, thinking about things, and despite where I was looking towards, I was saying goodbye rather than hello. A blinking blue light started up on the edge of my helmet at the bottom of my field of vision pulling me out of my reverie to tell me someone was looking for attention. I opened the audio channel back up to see what was going on.
"Poppy my love, you're down to twenty."
It was just my mum telling me it was time to come in. I knew how long I had left in the tank already of course but one thing you learned young where I came from is that it's always a good idea to have someone else around to double check things. I let go, kicked back my heels and pushed off against the net, setting myself on course to float smoothly back to the airlock of the house. The gurney came trundling obediently behind me.
Part 1 - Out of Time, Out of Space
I was born Upstairs but my mum and dad had come from the ground. Not in the early days when it was all scientists and ex-military test pilots, but in the second wave back in the eighties once there was some heavy industry starting to kick off and there was a big recruitment drive for mechanics, robotics engineers, materials scientists, plumbers, that sort of thing. They'd both trained for and worked in electrical engineering so they ticked enough of the right boxes.
Like almost everyone in wave two they paid for their transport with three years of indentured labour. Then once they were done with that they worked for another two to get the cash together for their own house and a crystal farm. This made our place one of the oldest residentials in the group of private homes, communal dormitory blocks, factories, hydroponic farms, hospitals and other such places which we called Upper London. It shows in a variety of ways but most obviously because a lot of the central rooms and corridors are more squared off and smaller than the more modern geodesic designs which everyone is building with these days.
You shouldn't take us for primitives though, stuck back in the nineties along with our boxy habitats and our acid house. We've added a few extensions over the years and kept up with the times. The living room for example was one of these. It was a huge hemisphere almost six metres across which would have been extravagant in scale back when the first modules of the house were put together but had hardly put a dent in the finances eight years ago when we'd bought it, fixed it on, and hooked it up.
That was where I headed once I was out of my suit. I came in from the hall and somersaulted gracefully (even if I do say so myself) across the room into a pile of soft furnishings causing the whole room to wobble and thrum when I landed. Modern architecture is more flexible than the old solid designs. Kind of like a rigid tent I understood rather than what you'd think of as a house traditionally. You have to adapt.
Which brings me, in a roundabout sort of way, to the tough part. A lot of things were different back in the old days of the early colonisation. Genetic screening was already well advanced though and because of the small size of the population the restrictions were pretty extreme. Mum and Dad both checked out fine of course or they wouldn't have been up here in the first place.
But the problem was that nobody had heard of Fleischmann's back then. I was about eighteen months old when they figured it out and still wriggling around zipped up in my cot hammock. Infants need to remain pretty well secured in low gravity until they can control themselves. You haven't laughed until you've seen a naked baby fire itself spinning and giggling across the room propelled by a stream of piss.
Anyway keeping on track we'd had people living in orbit for years on end at this point and it was starting to become obvious that some of us were adapting better than others. Critically, and most pertinently to the story I'm telling here, despite supplements, exercise, whatever we could throw at them, we had occasional people who kept on losing bone mass.
Genius medical heads were put together and, a few months down the line, there we had it. Fleischmann's syndrome, an inherited disease which had been lurking at the bottom of the gene pool probably since the beginning of time and was completely asymptomatic unless the adult with the condition was exposed to microgravity for a prolonged period. The symptoms started with the kind of early onset osteoporosis we'd already been spotting, the prognosis was that ultimately, however careful you were, and you'd have to be pretty careful, eventually your bones would start to come apart inside you - torn to pieces by your own musculature.
Thankfully it has never got that far for anybody and as long as we keep up the good screening it never will. The poor sods who'd been diagnosed with the full blown version were all put on the next available shuttle back home, Then the population's genetic samples were re-scanned for carriers and emails went out to let the lucky winners know they were going to be having their tubes tied off. Both of my parents got emails.
I don't know how much you know about recessive genes but I'm a bit of a celebrity in certain niche medical circles. It took two weeks for my test results to come back and I bet it felt like longer while they were waiting and then afterwards I bet it didn't feel like long enough.
So amongst other things that explains why I don't have any brothers or sisters. It also explains why I've always seen a doctor more regularly than most children. And then it explains why I'd been in an absolutely foul mood since the change I had known was on the way for my entire life had finally shown up in my tests last month.
You can know all you like that science is reliable, and believe me Upstairs there are few if any more vital pieces of knowledge, but even then it isn't quite real until it happens. I'd always treasured that smallest hope that there was the teeniest opportunity at the far end of the curve, and I'd far more than halfway convinced myself that it was all a terrible mistake, that I was going to turn out normal after all.
But in the end as the old saying goes, nature will not be fooled, and now that I was an adult I had finished my growth phase such as it was. So my body had stopped producing all of those compensatory hormones and my bone density was starting to drop away from the level being casually and effortlessly maintained by my peers.
