4 - Upside down

The day that gravity failed, Cammie was one of the minority who were not killed instantly (or at least shortly thereafter) in part because, against all logic and common sense, she was one of the few who had actually envisioned such a catastrophe occurring (and indeed had imagined it, or at least variations on the theme, thousands of times over), and taken at least some small preparations against it. Friends, visitors and landlords had always wondered why she had stapled mattresses to her bedroom ceiling with a large, industrial-strength nail-gun, and of course she had never confessed her deepest fear to any of them. She preferred to pass the mattresses off as personal idiosyncrasies. "It makes the room feel more cosy." she would say, which people would generally take at face value, mainly because, when you get right down to it, rooms with mattresses on the ceiling really do feel a bit more cosy, like a cave, or possibly a fort made of cushions.

So when the statute of limitations on the laws of physics finally did expire (as it does at periodic intervals, you may be interested to know, usually several thousand millennia apart), and the majority of people who were indoors at the time were sent flying headfirst into the ceiling, resulting in what must surely be the greatest mass neck-snapping incident since the forty-seven million car pile-up that ended the third age of Trellis over twelve excruciatingly uncoordinated weeks. Cammie, who had been lying in bed reading at the time, simply went from one mattress to another, straight up and into the mattress on her ceiling. If you were to fall from one bed to another about eight feet below the first you would have been similarly unaffected. Her bed was, as you might have guessed, already pre-nailed to the floor. Everything else in her room, her beside table and lamp, her teddy bear, her bookcase and all the books in it, went flying to the ceiling mattresses in an almighty crash. The clothes and shoes in her closet were now in a messy pile on the top of the closet, and the fairy lights she kept strung about her walls now hung in a mirror image of where they used to be.

Cammie had little time to revel in the hubris of knowing that she had been right all along and that all her worst fears, while insane and illogical were, when all was said and done, entirely justified. Her entire attention was taken up by the tremendous and, I'm sure you can imagine, quite horrifying noise of all the other tenants in her apartment building being hurled into their respective ceilings. Some died instantly with a crunch of the spine, some landed safely but with a broken arm that they had flung about their head in mindless panic when they were ejected from their seats, and a certainly unlucky few fell straight into their light fixtures, surviving the broken glass but not the electric death that lay within. All of this Cammie heard from above (which was now below), below (which was now above), and from all sides. Cammie, deeply but certainly not wholly surprised by this sudden turn of events, ran across her mattresses ceiling (which was now, I don't think I have to tell you, very much the floor) and looked out the window to see the extinction of the human race, or at least our particular phase of it, unfolding before her eyes,

Like a shaggy dog that has gotten sick of being wet, the Earth was shaking us off. Cars, trash cans, sheds, trams, potted trees, all the unfixed detritus of the world was falling off the Earth, which was now situated inconveniently in the sky, whilst the bottomless reaches of blue that used to hang above us was now a gaping, endless chasm into which you could fall pretty much forever without hitting anything that wasn't hard vacuum. It was all falling upward in a single great wave, a giant expanding sphere really, if you were to follow the wave around the globe and look at it from afar. Everything that was outside and not rooted to the ground was falling upwards and outwards, at first as one single line of detritus, like the surface of a bubble, but as the various shapes and weights of objects affected their velocities, the wave was starting to break up as the heavier or more aerodynamic things outpaced the others that could not overcome air resistance quite as efficiently.

And then, most of all, there were the people. Those that didn't hit a tree branch or a power line on their way up are screaming, arms and legs flailing madly, confused and bewildered. Billions of voices screaming as one, all over the world. Throw a man off a cliff and chances are his heart will explode before he hits the ground. None of these people ever would. You spend your whole life, working to buy things, a car, a house maybe, working to make a life. You've got goals and objectives. Friends and lovers. You've got a pot luck dinner next week. Inch by inch you drag yourself towards your dreams. You even hold on to the hope that you might make it to one of them. Then some previously unimagined quirk of physics goes and reverses gravity on you and you're unceremoniously sent flying into the skies to spend the last few minutes of your life in confusion and terror. Bugger of a way to go, really. Still, you're hardly alone in the matter, and you'll get a few more minutes than most everybody else.

Cammie watches all of this. There is a train track that passes a few blocks from her house, and from this she sees a train go falling into the sky, it's carriages desperately holding on to each other by the thinnest of threads. One carriage breaks away from the others as the carriages buck and distort against one another. Cammie watches all of this, sees some people flinging themselves from the carriage windows, only to find themselves falling right alongside the train itself. Sees other people gripping their seats in pure terror, like passengers on a crashing plane, concentrating hard, willing the plane to stay aloft. Cammie watches all of this, tears in her eyes, but they're tears for others. She thinks she is safe, you see. Planning is everything, right? But for all her years of planning and thinking about this very thing, she still didn't quite get it, as she realizes to her horror when her apartment building, and every other building in her line of sight, an entire city skyline, uproots itself from its foundation with a mighty roar and also goes dropping into the endless abyss of the sky. Cammie realizes that all are doomed, even those who survived the initial reversal. Everyone is on the way up. Despite the chaos, the world through the window feels oddly still. Everything is falling relative to everything else, so, apart from a ground-level that is rapidly receding above them, the city itself seems oddly familiar. Until she sees a skyscraper in the distance disintegrate under its own reversed weight, collapsing into a falling rubble of dust, concrete, metal and people, some tumbling from windows that themselves disappear as the building loses integrity. Cammie realized that her own building could share the same fate in a matter of seconds and so, without giving it much thought, she hurls herself through the window, moments before her mattresses ceiling collapses into the floor, and her apartment building crumbles behind her with a mighty crash. Splinters of wood and glass and nails are thrown out as her home reassembles itself into so much rubble. All those who survived the initial incident are now either crushed or trapped by their own living space.

Now she is flying through space, and it's oddly quiet. She thinks that the wind should be roaring in her ears, and it takes her a few moments to realize that the air, a gas previously held to the skin of the world by gravity, is also falling outwards at the same rate as everything else, so there is no rushing air- all is eerily calm. It is less like she is falling that she is simply floating in space, with the content of the planet drifting along with her However, the air must be getting thinner, she immediately realizes, as it gets further from the Earth and has to fill more and more space. She has no idea, but assumes that she has mere minutes before the air thins out to a point where she will lose consciousness. She, along with everyone, has a scant few minutes to live, and even less time to decide what to do with them. Again she makes a split-second decision: If I'm going to die, she thinks to herself, I should be with Lachlan when I do.

She has never sky-dived before, but it seems that navigating herself on air currents comes surprisingly naturally to her. She holds out her arms and her speed it checked- she points her body forward at an angle and she flies forward through the air like Supergirl, an arm outstretched in the direction she wants to go. She flies forward, angling her body left and right to steer around debris. Even with buildings falling apart around her, larger ones being slowed up and falling behind the main body of debris, they have still maintained their positions relative to each other, so it is fairly easy to navigate herself to where Lachlan's house used to be. Such is her speed as she falls, she flies her way down from one end of where, in her mind, the high street used to be, to the other in a matter of seconds, a walk that used to take half an hour, back when there was a street to walk on. She flies by the Coles, seeing cabbages and carrots and trolley-boys pouring out of the now shattered glass windows. She sees her old bank, which was a sturdy old brick of a building that now, though upside-down, still looks much the same as it often did. As she flies by she sees people huddled together on the ceiling, too scared to investigate the madness that is ongoing outside those hard, colourless walls.

Curling her shoulders and leaning to one side, she peels off to the left through a gap in the two buildings that used to corner Lachlan's street. She sees that his house, being somewhat small, has dropped a little further down into the sky than the others, so she makes herself into a narrow arrow in order to drop down faster than she has been doing. It takes her a few moments to close the distance and then she is there, guiding herself right into the front door, where she grabs the handle and steadies herself, turning herself right-side up, then yanks the door open. It must have been a sturdily constructed building, she thinks in the back of her mind, to not have fallen apart yet.

She pulls herself through the door, and steps onto the ceiling of the inner hallway. After the chaos of the falling buildings outside, it seems supernaturally calm and together. The building does not creak, the walls do not bend. Had she not experienced what she had just been through, she would have thought this some sort of bizarre practical joke, hey let's turn the house upside down and freak out Cammie. The light fixture that used to hang from the hallway ceiling lay curled and broken on the floor, as did a small table and some keys. Apart from that, all seemed utterly, disturbingly normal. She took a few steps down the hallway towards Lachlan's bedroom door. It is now high above her, so she has to step onto the shelf of the doorway to reach the handle, which she turns and gingerly opens, hoping every second that she will not find Lachlan's body, neck twisted at an unnatural angle, on the other side.

Lachlan's room is a mess, not that different from how his room usually was, except that now the mess is on the ceiling and the floor is strangely empty. The only major difference is that his bed now lays upside-down on all of his upturned clothes and magazines. She drops down onto the clothing-strewn ceiling and steps towards the bed. It's a light wooden frame, so she has no trouble shoving it aside, expecting to see Lachlan underneath. Except it is not Lachlan, it is Anthony, the man she met in the cafe earlier in the day. The man with the papers. He is sitting, half-concealed, in a pile of clothing and bedding.

"What are you doing here?" she asks.

"Looking for you." he replies, smiling. "I thought I might find you here." He holds out his hand to her. "Want to go into outer space?"

She takes his hand, lifts him up from under his pile, underwear and socks falling from him, and together they go to the window. The building has now fallen past the Earth's long-since-departed stratosphere, and outside the window it is dark and starry, like night.

"Look." Anthony gestures with his free hand, pointing up at the Earth, which now hangs above them, giant in the sky, glowing with a brilliant blue. She sees the oceans, she sees the continents. It has freed itself from the bacteria that was mankind, that was technology, and it is alive and free once more. She feels her eyes welling up with tears once more, but she does not cry. Anthony squeezes her hand.

"It's almost worth it, isn't it?" he asks.

She looks at him for a moment, his image blurry through the tears. He is smiling, a normal smile, totally unlike the one he used in the cafe.

"Almost." she says, then returns her gaze to the Earth, bulbous and massive against the night sky, but receding slowly.

This is what happened, the day that gravity failed.