Free to Fall

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.