Gravity – I’ll assume you know what that is. I suppose every kid learns something about it at some point: what comes up must come down, Newton’s laws, the planets and their orbits, black holes, rocket ships escaping the (comparatively) measly gravity of Earth? However, maybe you haven’t thought about the enormity of it, the totality of it: gravity used to keep humanity firmly anchored to the ground, along with everything else on Earth, after all. Think about it: plants and trees have roots that keep them secured to the ground, with their roots drawing up water to counteract gravity; the animal kingdom developed muscles just strong enough to leap and bound across the surface of Earth, with gravity also determining how hard their heart must pump to keep up circulation; the tides lapping against the shores of the world, day in and day out, due to the Moon’s gravity, around 250,000 or so miles away. And that’s about a sixth of the size of Earth, or was, anyway. Gravity keeps Earth’s atmosphere in place, allowing for a water cycle and breathable air. You get the point. Basically, we evolved under very specific gravitational conditions, and when humanity learned to escape it, to set out to conquer the stars, we didn’t realize how much we needed it. How we mere, foolish humans, like rebellious teenagers, went against the firm, yet caring command of gravity, only to find we’re not as adaptable as we thought; only to leave Earth completely unprepared.
The Massacre of 2236. At the time it was defended, even celebrated. Hell, it’s still defended by the corporations responsible to this day. “They were monsters”, the newsscreens cried. No, they were people. The first, in fact, to colonize a planet much larger than Earth, and more than 500 light years away, to boot: Kepler 22b, which was its name before it was colonized. These colonists were left there at the end of the 21st Century, your century if my “calculations” are correct, and were more or less abandoned for about a century and a half, give or take a decade. They lost contact with our nearest base sometime in the early 2100s, and when we went to check on them, over a century later, they were unrecognizable, becoming grotesque caricatures of their former selves. The gargantuan gravity of the planet had transformed them at a rapid pace: their bones had become cartilage, their muscles unable to handle the massive gravity. They had flattened since their hearts could no longer bring blood up from the bottom of their body, where it pooled. A first-hand account from a scout sent out on the mission to check on them had written that they resembled giant, fleshy pancakes, as their limbs had shriveled up from lack of use. They spoke no recognizable language, as they no longer had vocal cords that could escape the vice grip that gravity had wrapped around their throats. They could not type, sign, or write out messages, either, as their limbs were now useless. If the scouts had not panicked upon seeing them, they would have discovered they still could understand us, if we could not understand them. Sometimes I think it was right of the scouts to put them out of their misery, to free them from the prison of their own flesh… but then I remember how they were unable to move or scream against the barrage of molecular lasers, unable to communicate that they were still sentient, that they still remembered what they once were.
Upon the retrieval of their fleshy remains, which were left out for a few days as the unflattened scouts set up the Terragravity device, they were sent to the nearest base and examined. To put a long, messy, and complicated story short, they were found to still have, albeit slightly deformed, human brains and organs. The so-called “heroes”, the scouts that killed the original troops, had the planet named after their commander, Jay Pareshi, and is currently called Pareshi Etal, a combination of Pareshi’s last name, and a portmanteau of the Latin phrase et. al. This name came about because the company that sent them there wanted to reward the entire crew by naming the planet after them, but the systems that processed the name didn’t allow commas or periods. That was their solution. I digress, still a dumb name for a planet, especially since it’s named after someone who ordered to fire on a bunch of helpless flesh blobs. This honor was rewarded to them in the first place because of money, unsurprisingly. They were sent there not to set up some sort of station for scientific research, but to set up a colony equivalent to a modern feudal settlement, with monopolies taking the roles of lords.
These companies incentivize workers to live off of Earth by granting charters and stocks to groups of settlers, who then have to settle for the company and produce their products. By doing this, the company also has a claim to the planet for their private use, under the Agreement of 2156. All shops and commerce are created and regulated by the company, and Universal Earthen Law (UEL) is expected to be upheld, however, as expected, that is not necessarily the case. So because these scouts got rid of something seen as a threat to their promoter’s settlement and therefore allowed the company to set up, they were praised and given some stocks. This has turned into intergenerational wealth, and now their descendants are obscenely rich. The company also took the skin from the flesh pancakes and turned it into leather, which is now some of the most valuable in the Sagittarius arm. There have been some ethical issues arising from, you know, taking the rotting flesh of mangled human beings and selling it as high-quality leather, but ethics didn’t sell in the 21st century, so why would it sell now, 400-odd years later?
Now, I mentioned a little thing called Terragravity, right? It’s a device implanted in the ground of a planet, asteroid, space station, or whatever else, that sets up a field of a certain diameter to 1G, the gravity level of Earth. It’s also important to note that it’s manufactured by a company called Starchildren and Co. After seeing what the effects of too much gravity did to relatively normal human beings over a century and a half, Terragravity became essential for settling, or even working on, other moons, asteroids, and planets. Now, I have no effing clue how it works, all I know is that it does. This device also happens to be controlled by one monopoly: Starchildren and Co. Yeah, them again. They control the manufacturing, the shipping, and the prices, and can control the devices remotely under certain legal circumstances, not that they care to follow those circumstances. I’m not a legal expert either, but shutting off a vital component of human survival without a warranted reason is probably illegal.
Anyway, this little loophole they found led to the infamous settlement, if you could even call it that, of Ida, hailed as a “popular tourist attraction for all!” Well, except for the people unfortunate enough to be living there. This little asteroid, a mere 36 miles across, isn’t anything remarkable, although it had an even tinier moon called Dactyl at one point. Located in our very own Asteroid Belt, Ida was the perfect location for a little mining operation, leading to the creation of a sprawling metropolis called Star City, a very creative name, might I add, named by the lovely suits in the amazing Starchildren and Company.
As a town founded solely on mining, it was inevitable that the resources began to run dry, especially after being at it for a century or two, causing the city to miss their payments to Big Brother Starchildren and Co. As I’ve mentioned before, Starchildren and Co. can control their Terragravity devices remotely, so when Star City began missing their payments, they began shutting the gravity off, regardless of legality. On that little rock, I’ve seen personal transport devices float away with their drivers still in them, toys abandoned by children rushed inside floating up into the infinite blackness, and, most disturbingly, a gaggle of nurses, doctors, and family members attempting to grab a patient that was floating out the window, only to be dragged into the hungry maw of space themselves. You know how people say if you try to save a drowning person, they’ll try to drag you down with them? In reverse, that would be being dragged into an uncaring, boundless black void, with only the certainty of death to comfort you.
Now, in order for Starchildren and Co. to milk every dollar (at least I think that was the currency in your time. History ain’t my strong suit) out of Ida and Star City, they began advertising its poverty as an “exciting tourist attraction”, playing off the fact that its gravity could be turned off at any time, but, for a nominal fee, you wouldn’t be affected, so you could watch people desperately trying to save their livelihoods, and bound around the tiny asteroid without worrying about the same fate befalling you! Sounds great, right? To tourists, it’s a sick kind of entertainment: heads craned to the infinite blackness of space, now marred by objects and people floating with neither rhyme nor reason, while the tourists get to sit, watch, and see how many objects they can spot.
I don’t know the exact time frame in which Starchildren and Co. began advertising this travesty as a tourist attraction, however, it was only sometime in the last century, when the mines began to run dry. The residents needed to keep Star City profitable so they wouldn’t have to move, or potentially worse. They were essentially forced into being turned into a novelty because they couldn’t bring in a profit. By then, Star City was a bona fide money sink, leaving them with no other choice because the vast majority of the residents living there also couldn’t pack up and move. Even in the short period since this “agreement”, the effects of the regular loss of gravity have had a tremendous effect on the residents: the area has some of the highest rates of PTSD under Earthen rule, a dwindling population, an even more abysmal birth rate, and a high rate of malformations caused by the frequent exposure to low gravity. They say you can tell a Star City resident from a mile away: the low gravity has caused them to have gangly, stretched-out features.
I’m not a scientist studying Star City, by the way. I don’t consider myself an activist, either. I’m not from Star City, I don’t have family there, and I’ve never lived there. In other words, I don’t have any connections to the place, other than pity. However, after serving on several Earthen military outposts for roughly fifteen years of my life, I, unfortunately, took up a job with Starchildren and Co. as a transportation official. All I do is take people from one location to another, like an interstellar bus driver, or, more accurately, an interstellar taxi driver. Because of that, I’m not directly involved in anything illegal, however, when the shady businesspeople you’re picking up are making their shady deals on your ship… I mean, what exactly am I gonna do? Leave them to the mercy of space, while going hyper-light speed? Report them to their bosses that are just as, if not more corrupt? You know, sending this letter to the past ain’t exactly legal, either! Besides, I can’t afford the luxury of being perfectly moral.
That being said, due to those shady businesspeople, I’ve had a lot of experience driving back and forth, to and from Star City: from executives of the company looking to check up on their precious investment, to tourists from the outer reaches of colonization dying to get a look, to citizens of the lonely, little rock that had finally scraped together enough money to finally get away. I’ve also been stationed on Ida during my time in the military, but that was a long time ago, before all the mines dried up.Every time I’ve visited since it’s just become more dilapidated and deteriorated with abandon. Do I feel partially responsible for shlepping around the architects of its destruction? A bit, admittedly. If I didn’t, however, I wouldn’t be getting paid, because the people I’m transporting practically own me. I also wouldn’t be able to save the few people I can, because as sick as it is, Starchildren and Co. would take away my ship, leaving the people I’m taking away from Star City to rot. So, I’m choosing to see it as doing what I can with what I have. I have a ship and a job with Starchildren, so I’m taking people away from their pathetic, little, rock to somewhere that isn’t as pathetic and little. Unfortunately, being employed by Starchildren and Co. means that I can only take them to other Starchildren settlements, but they’re better than Star City.
Honestly, I wouldn’t have taken the job with Starchildren and Co. if it weren’t for two key things: one, the pay is excellent, and two, they’re somehow more moral than most of the other monopolies out there right now. Remember what I was saying about those human pancakes before? Starchildren weren’t the ones responsible for that. I mean sure, they supplied the Terragravity device, but since gravity is so essential, they’re kinda legally obliged to do that whenever another company settles off-world. The company responsible, KONGO, dominates inter- and intra-stellar shipping. They toted that leather they made as an exclusive product that you could only get through their network, and in the centuries since, everyone’s seemed to have forgotten about it. The company still exists, by the way, so it’s not a matter of a defunct corporation that’s fallen into obscurity; people are just too used to this world to do anything about it. They’re still doing the same shit they did back then as well, but I’ll get to that later.
So, what have I decided to do? Well, I can’t do much in my time: most of these companies are headquartered on Earth, and our dear home planet is now reserved for the richest of the rich and is heavily guarded, so I can’t exactly do any protesting. I can’t exactly commit any acts of terrorism against the outposts of these companies: despite the minuscule amounts of law enforcement, property damages will definitely get you in the hot seat, and besides, I only have access to the colonies of one company among hundreds. So, not much I can do there, either. I also don’t have the money to lobby (read: bribe) politicians, or to sue these companies, but I do have enough disposable income to use our inter-time post offices.
These post offices are intended to be a gimmick: usually, people send letters to their older or younger selves, or send letters to descendants they’ll never meet, or what-have-you. They have technology dating all the way back to the 20th Century, including the ancient computer I’m writing this on, which they basically hook up to time machines. They have some very strict regulations around them because it’s a system that can very easily be abused, ironically enough. You’re not supposed to send random posts several centuries into the past, for example. I, however, have run out of options, because the only way anything’s going to get any better is by attacking it at the source. To be honest, when I’m sending this post isn’t exactly at the source, but at this point in history, you guys have the technology to receive it, and hopefully the sense to do something about it, which is good enough for me. I have no way of telling whether or not you guys received this letter, as you guys do not have the technology yet to send anything back, so the most I guess I could hope for is waking up one day and realizing my entire reality has shifted.
There ain’t much of a moral to this story: just do better. For me, for your descendants, for Star City and Ida, for those unlucky settlers on Pareshi Etal, for the human race. Oh, yeah, and think more about gravity when you guys start trying to go to other planets and stuff. If anything, just avoiding the Massacre of 2236 and what happened to Star City will be enough for now. So, people of the 21st Century, take heed, will you? If you don’t, I fear I risked my life for nothing.
-Your friendly interstellar taxi driver, 2431