Grav Jumpers
2170: Lieben Oracle V1
A transcription from the recollections of the Mater Machine Lieben.Grav Jumpers evolved from the Atmospheric City of Abha, where Abhans grew to worship the sensation of gravity. What would a society developed from a multicultural framework of cooperative scientists, engineers and would-be colonists come to worship? At first, the desire to complete the parameters of the Abhan Experiment were tantamount to a level of belief, yet as the population aged and the original Abhans passed away, so too did their vehemence. Gravity itself, the pull of the planet felt but never walked upon, became the object of religious devotion.
The first Gravity Jumper was an unnamed boy, who tripped off a construct in mid-rise, and tumbled into the containment gel between the engineering/mechanical decks and the city's top disc.
"I felt it, Mummy. I felt Earth." Whispers grew, impressionable youths climbed to the top of the same construct, and pitched themselves off for a brief and futile plunge into the thin atmosphere. Each time they landed in containment netting, became a bother to the engineers who tried to busy about their daily monotony and keep the atmospheric biodome in repair. I sent NEO-Ns down to catch the children, then the adolescents and young adults.
"Mais pourquoi? Why? Because he, like many of the displeased youth of this utopia, wants off. What do you think you’ll find on the Earth, Break? What is it you think is there?”
Both hands on his childhood duvet, Break crinkled his knuckles and pushed slowly off the creaking mattress. He reached to me, the back of his fingers brushed across my temple, down my cheek. Seon-Bae Sah-Bum Nim growled with a puff of incense. Break hesitated, but kept his hand on smooth skin.
“Fresh air. I want to feel the breeze on my face. I want to know what rain feels like on my hair. Don’t you? Don’t you wonder what the weather is like? What it’s like to climb a mountain or ride a boat? Don’t you wish you knew what we’re missing?”
In his eyes, the great malaise, the sickness of space travel the originators of the Experiment were waiting for all those decades since Abha began. A perpetual part of the human condition, wonder of what life was like in another corner of the world. These people were keenly aware if they jumped off the edge of their world, they wouldn’t reach Narnia, or London Town. Was it possible for a slim sea of humanity to last in a bubble for more than a few exploratory years? What happened when their children’s children, those who had no memory of the ill planet below, wanted to know what the sun’s warmth was like until it burnt their skin? In Break’s eyes, I saw why the Therese Manon and the other paintings of the Artist were more precious than the only kingdom in the sky.
These people will never leave. They will never ride raucous seas and take the underground, or the skytrain or a plane to Hong Kong or Bruges. They ran in circles, swam in holographic pools and spent their leisure hours in tunnels meant to emulate the places they know somehow they miss.
Isle of Noises (Lieben Cycle 4) by Sapha Burnell
A religious sensation was wrapped in beat poetry, experimental films and hushed conversations. One spot alone became the temple to The Jump: a weakening in the Ahban membrane which gave the briefest glance of the Arctic Tundra below, a streak of deep blue ocean. While the option to repair that weakened membrane presented itself, humanity needs something tangible to cling to, and subtly pushed supplies and repair priorities above the Jump Temple. If my beloved Abhans require one small piece of the world below, their Mater Machina will see to it.
It is a religion without dogma, or orthodoxy. There are no creeds. Perhaps in the coddled disc of their sequestered city, the sensation of danger and velocity is as close as they can come to harm or deprecation. Perhaps a sacrament to progress, and its' experimental expanse.
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