Above It All, And Free?
The highest that the village had ever been raised was 4.35km, during
the great warming of the forties, when the smog was thick and soupy and
lethal. There were rumours of great-grandfathers who remembered the
village sitting on the ground for most of the year, only floating up
during the very worst of the EM storms. Those stories never died
because some wanted to live down there so much that they would believe
anything. The village council responded to such lunacy with a calm,
detached, certainty.
"Go on then, jump, we'll turn off the containment field to let you through."
No one ever jumped.
There were stories about walking between villages, roaming the lands; legends of vast metropolises and cities in flight. Rumours even that some cities had left the planet. Always looking to somewhere else, somewhere perceived better, never focusing on their calm, pretty archipelago of villages. Their idyllic life.
Idyllic until now.
Until the need to raise higher than ever before. They grew the entwined carbon nanotubes as fast as they could, high and straight into the sky. They increased the capacity of the oxygen generators and the semi-permeable filter membrane above. They informed the population of altitude sickness, it's symptoms and cures. And only when they were finally on the up, past the 10km mark, stretching to rise above the radioactive wind, did they realise a more pressing, more difficult issue had arisen: the atmosphere had thinned.
The old and ancients air traffic, and CFCs, and CO2, and EMP testing, had stripped the upper troposphere of oxygen. It had leaked away. Gone.
Now there is nowhere to go. Not up. Not down. The villages built to rise above all that man and nature could throw at them now have nowhere left to run to.
Trapped.
So now, they build. Pull up the sky hook, disassemble, design, manufacture. Cut themselves loose, adrift in the atmosphere, racing to build a shell and motors. Racing to convert a village into a habitat. The final freedom. Floating high above the swirl of weather and life and death. Out there, up there.
It is risky, it is feared; no longer the planet's resources to feed them, support them, cosset them. Just the vacuum, and the hard laws of physics, and a fading memory of what it used to be like living down there, on Earth.
No one ever jumped.
There were stories about walking between villages, roaming the lands; legends of vast metropolises and cities in flight. Rumours even that some cities had left the planet. Always looking to somewhere else, somewhere perceived better, never focusing on their calm, pretty archipelago of villages. Their idyllic life.
Idyllic until now.
Until the need to raise higher than ever before. They grew the entwined carbon nanotubes as fast as they could, high and straight into the sky. They increased the capacity of the oxygen generators and the semi-permeable filter membrane above. They informed the population of altitude sickness, it's symptoms and cures. And only when they were finally on the up, past the 10km mark, stretching to rise above the radioactive wind, did they realise a more pressing, more difficult issue had arisen: the atmosphere had thinned.
The old and ancients air traffic, and CFCs, and CO2, and EMP testing, had stripped the upper troposphere of oxygen. It had leaked away. Gone.
Now there is nowhere to go. Not up. Not down. The villages built to rise above all that man and nature could throw at them now have nowhere left to run to.
Trapped.
So now, they build. Pull up the sky hook, disassemble, design, manufacture. Cut themselves loose, adrift in the atmosphere, racing to build a shell and motors. Racing to convert a village into a habitat. The final freedom. Floating high above the swirl of weather and life and death. Out there, up there.
It is risky, it is feared; no longer the planet's resources to feed them, support them, cosset them. Just the vacuum, and the hard laws of physics, and a fading memory of what it used to be like living down there, on Earth.
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