Ties That Bind

“So, what does it do?” Penelope asked.

“It’s going to make me like Superman!” Jack crowed delightedly.

“Will it give you super strength?” Penelope asked.

“Uh…” Jack rolled his eyes up in his head for a moment. “No, actually, it won’t.”

“Will you be able to fly?”

“Yes!”

“Will you be bulletproof?”

“Yes!”

Penelope was quite excited. This was absolutely the first thing that had emerged from Jack’s laboratory that wasn’t dreadfully dull, like shielding components for antennae. This was a device that actually did something.

“Look!” Jack cried. He dropped a sphere about the size of a medicine ball from shoulder height. It fell about a foot and then slowed down, rocking back and forth in space about four feet off the ground.

“It floats,” Penelope said, “Is that all it does?”

“No, it isn’t floating,” Jack corrected her, “It’s shielded from gravity.”

He picked up a Webley-Vickers pistol from the laboratory bench, pointed it at the sphere and fired. The bullet careened off the concrete floor with a spark and a whine.

“Whatever lies inside the sphere is protected from the effects of mass. No gravitons or gravity waves can penetrate. That is what keeps the sphere from falling. It’s a quirk of geometry. It’s like it’s balancing on the tip of a point in eight-dimensional space.”

“Wow,” said Penelope, “that would be an exciting concept if you could scale it up.”

“Look,” Jack said. He unbuttoned his lab coat, loosed it from his shoulders and let it fall. He was wearing a sparkling one-piece jumpsuit with a matching floor-length cape. This was important work. It was time for beta-testing. It was time to set right all of the wrongs in the world. He could use the power of the suit to wrest power from those who would exploit others. He would change the world.

Jack opened the shielded doors of his laboratory and was immediately sucked far off into the stratosphere. Once he got past thirty-thousand feet he found it very cold and difficult to breathe. He was long dead before he slipped past the last thin vestiges of Earth’s atmosphere. And he wasn’t alone. The air was full of people and dogs and cats and boulders and cars and Xerox machines and the brightly colored gravel that goes in the bottom of aquariums. Jack had broken gravity and solved all of the world’s problems with equity simultaneously. And so followed an paralleled time of peace.