Chapter Text

The world turned upside down on a Tuesday.

Thomas had been sitting at his computer, looking at pictures of other peoples’ cats. There was a brief moment of unaccustomed weightlessness, followed by a lurching feeling as he started falling. He hit the ceiling half a second later, denting the plaster and hurting his head. He lay there for a moment, rubbing his scalp, which was bleeding profusely in the way that minor head wounds sometimes did. Thomas let out a groan and moved slowly. When he looked up, he saw his cat, Bartleby, staring at him. From the floor.

“Help?” asked Thomas. His cat meowed.

He placed a hand on the ceiling, where he’d cracked the plaster. Bits of it fell past him, to where his cat was sitting. Bartleby, having seen enough, sauntered out of the room. Thomas stayed where he was. He touched the wound on his head, causing his fingers to come away bloody. He stared at them for a moment. There was enough blood for it to drip down; it fell toward the ceiling for a few brief fractions of a second, then reversed direction and fell toward the floor. Thomas looked up at the plaster and blood next to his computer chair, which had fallen over. Everything in the room was sitting just where it had been.

Thomas did what any savvy young person would do in a time like this; he pulled out his smartphone to consult the internet. Unfortunately, when he pulled it from his pocket, he suddenly realized that it was trying to get away with him, fleeing toward the floor. If he’d been prepared, it would have been no work at all to keep it in his grasp, but while he had decades of practice keeping a phone from falling from his grasp, he had no experience whatsoever with keeping a phone from falling up. The whole concept of gravity had been sundered into two pieces: the objective (everything in the world) and subjective (just Thomas). This would have been a pleasant epiphany had it not immediately followed his phone crashing into the ground. He winced when he saw the shattered screen.

The internet wasn’t going to be any help. It was unlikely that the internet would have been any help anyway, since Thomas was certain that he would have heard about it if anyone had ever had their personal gravity reversed; there wouldn't be any readily available FAQs or decades-old forum threads where the issue was hammered out. Still, he would have been able to go online to ask some pointed questions, which might have led him somewhere.

He rose on slow, unsteady feet, until he was standing on the ceiling. When he reached (subjective, Thomas oriented) up, he could just barely touch the phone. The screen was cracked, but there was no way of telling whether it was still working. Even going up to the balls of his feet, he only really succeeded in pushing the phone around. He was finally able to grab it by jumping for it, which brought another dusting of plaster past him as he landed back on the ceiling.

Thomas looked down. He was on the ceiling of the second floor of his house. The actual floors were built for the strain of people walking on them, but he wasn’t so sure that the same could be said for the ceilings. He had no idea what was beneath the plaster. There were probably some joists and insulation, then shingles beyond that. If he fell through the ceiling, what would happen? Would he continue falling into the sky? The thought was sobering enough that he moved away from the windows.

The phone wasn’t working, even after pulling the battery out then putting it back in to reset it. With the idea that this might actually be a dangerous situation to be in, Thomas reached up to grab his keyboard; luckily, it was a wireless one. While he was standing, he wasn’t in too bad of a position to look at his computer screen, though he had to hold into the keyboard with one hand so it wouldn't go falling to the floor, which meant typing with a single hand. It took a few moments to get his computer to flip the output of his monitor (Ctrl+Alt+F1), but then he was in business, with an open conduit to the internet and the wealth of problem-solving it contained.

It was all anyone was talking about. That was a relief -- it was proof that Thomas wasn’t crazy and wasn’t alone -- but it also meant that Thomas was nothing special. There were brief, half-buried thoughts at the back of his mind, that perhaps something strange and unique had happened to him. Maybe he wouldn’t have been Upside-Down Man, but there had been plenty of thoughts percolating, thoughts of money and attention. These all evaporated in the face of the worldwide news.

The thing that really brought it home was a video. It looked like a traffic cam, but it was much better quality than that, so Thomas thought perhaps it was one of those static cameras that TV stations cut to during commercial breaks. It showed a crowded pedestrian crosswalk somewhere in Asia. It was evening in America, which meant that it was early morning in China; people were going to work. One moment the mass of people were crossing the street, the next they were accelerating toward the sky. It was almost exactly what the Rapture was supposed to look like, at least in the movies and television shows that Thomas had seen. There was nothing peaceful about it though; these people were falling, their mouths open in screams that the camera's microphone wasn’t close enough to pick up. It only took a small slice of time for the crosswalks to be devoid of people. That was when Thomas saw the cars; there were people inside them, pressed up against the roofs. A few of the cars started to idle forward, heading towards collisions that their drivers weren't in control enough to stop. That was where the video cut out.

Thomas stared at the computer screen in mute horror. Then he rewound the video and did the math. He advanced it frame-by-frame, making best-guess measurements for height. Because there were so many people, it was easy to get references. He charted the seeming ascent of the people to confirm their acceleration away from the Earth. In the first second, they’d gone ten meters. In the second second, they’d gone thirty meters. That meant acceleration approximated ten meters per second per second, which was almost exactly equal to the force of gravity, only working in reverse.

The second half of the math was much more grim. Terminal velocity for a human was about two hundred kilometers per hour, which they would reach in about twelve seconds. People started having substantial trouble with oxygen deprivation at eight kilometers above sea level, which the people falling into the sky would reach in about two minutes. From there, the air would get thinner, increasing their speed and hastening their death from asphyxia. All this would have happened within five minutes. While Thomas was rubbing his head and fumbling with his phone, people had been dying. Anyone who had been standing outside when the change happened was almost certainly dead by the time he finally watched the video.

It was more than that though. Anyone in a car would have been lifted from their seat, jolted and disoriented even if they were wearing a seat belt. Thomas had felt mildly dizzy after his fall, which must have been from the fluid in his inner ear sloshing around. There would be car crashes, lots of them. Car crashes aside, even if you were stuck in an unmoving car, what would you do? How would you escape to the safety of indoors if you were under threat of falling into the sky? How would people get food? How was anyone who survived this first day supposed to keep on living?

Thomas began downloading a local copy of Wikipedia. If the change had happened worldwide, then it was only a matter of time until basic services were interrupted. Men and women at the power plants would have been thrown to the ceiling, which wouldn’t immediately cause the electric grid to shut down, but would impact their ability to correct any problems. That would lead to eventual failure. The same went for water pressure and internet service. While the five minute download of Simple English Wikipedia was going, Thomas began charging his e-reader to full power and moving over likely looking books from Amazon, grabbing everything that looked like it might be relevant. He reached up to grab his laptop from its satchel and began charging that as well. When he had all the transfers going, he moved to the bathroom and turned the water on full blast. If water pressure went, a bathtub full of water would keep him from dying of dehydration.

Once all that was finished, Thomas sat on the ceiling of his bedroom and thought about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Physiological needs came first; that meant food, water, air, clothing, and shelter. The bathtub full of water would take care of dehydration for the time being. Assuming that he could get down to the first floor, he could eat something in the kitchen. He made a quick mental note to eat things that were frozen or refrigerated first, in case the loss of electricity was imminent. He would have to take inventory, but he doubted that he had enough food for more than two weeks, and that was with rationing factored in. He had shelter and clothing covered just fine, though his shirt and pants seemed to follow the regular laws of gravity, which meant that they would need some modifications in order to reduce annoyance; his shirt was resting on his armpits rather than his shoulders. He'd have to find some suspenders and garters to keep everything where it was supposed to be. Reducing annoyance was high up the hierarchy of needs though; comfort would have to come later.

Thomas began preparing to go looting without any real conscious decision; it simply came to him as a thing that needed doing.

Getting downstairs was a challenge, one that mostly involved standing on the second floor ceiling in order to try to find a grip on the first floor ceiling. He’d never really taken note of the fact that the stairs from the first floor to the second floor had a high ceiling, but now it was all too apparent. If he planned to stay in his house, Thomas was going to have to put some upside down stairs there, secured with nails, or at least make an incline of some sort. Once on the first floor, he made his way to the hall closet, where he found one of the things he’d need to make it in this new world; his climbing kit.

He and Lillian had gotten into rock climbing together. There was an indoor rock-climbing gym downtown that had cheap prices and an auto-belay system that didn’t really require any sort of knowledge except how to wear a harness and how to clip in a carabiner. That had been the gateway that they’d needed. From there, it wasn’t too big a jump to buying his own harness instead of renting one. The shoes had followed soon after, a pair that he and Lillian had bought together, so that their kit matched. He’d bought the rope and carabiners for outdoor climbing, though they’d only done that two or three times at a few of the local spots.

As with most hobbies, Thomas had eventually dropped climbing. He’d considered himself fortunate to have come away from it having only spent a few hundred dollars. There had been other hobbies that had taken him in much more completely, which had eaten thousands of dollars before he’d eventually grown bored. Lillian had kept up with climbing though; that was one of the things that had driven a wedge between them. Climbing had been something they’d done together, a few hours three or four times a week. After Thomas had stopped, it became something that kept them apart for a few hours three or four times a week. It wasn’t too much of a surprise when Lillian said that their relationship had run its course, though it still hurt.

The only reason that his climbing gear was in a closet in his home instead of a cubby at the climbing gym was that Lillian had called him up to ask him whether she could use it. Thomas had said yes, because he didn’t want to feel like an ass, but the only explanation for Lillian borrowing a men’s harness was if she was going climbing with an uninitiated man who didn’t have equipment of his own. Thomas had gone down to the gym the next day (careful to go at a time when he knew that Lillian wouldn’t be there) in order to take his climbing gear back. If she called him to ask again, he could simply say that he’d decided to sell it, or that he’d gone outdoor climbing, or some other excuse. They’d had a reasonably amicable breakup, but that was no reason to let Lillian’s new boyfriend have something of his.

That small, admittedly petty act was now going to put Thomas in the top percentile of people most likely to survive. He started by stepping into the harness, which needed only a few straps loosened to compensate for the pudge that came with months of a sedentary lifestyle. After that, he threaded the rope through and tied the necessary knots, then tested them, mostly to make sure that he still remembered how to tie them correctly. The next question was where to find the appropriate counterweight.

Thomas weighed 190 lbs. He would need to find something that weighed that much just to keep him stuck to the earth. Anything less would just be pulled with him as he fell into the sky, like a teddy bear being pulled from a child’s hand by a helium balloon. Just for the sake of safety, Thomas figured on needing an extra twenty pounds of weight. His other big parameter was movement; the nearest place to stock up on food was a gas station, but that was still three full blocks away. In addition to the problem of getting there, Thomas also needed to consider the problem of trying to get back.

There were weights in the basement, but only two adjustable dumbbells that totaled up to a hundred pounds. They were fancy, because you could dial in however much you wanted to exercise with to within five pounds. In this particular situation (one he had never considered when he was buying the dumbbells) Thomas would have been much better off with separate weights that could all be tied together. After looking around his house for a bit, Thomas settled on using the coffee table in the middle of the room as additional weight. It was a huge, ugly thing, but it was also a hundred pounds, which served his purpose. Lifting the coffee table was far easier than he’d expected it to be; all he had to do was reach up, grab it, and then pull down on it using his full weight. It didn’t feel like carrying anything at all; instead, it felt like hanging down from a pull-up bar so that he was only putting a small amount of weight on his feet.

He assembled everything in the basement, where the ceiling was much lower. That way he could reach up towards the floor without having to try for extra height. He used the coffee table and the weights together, wrapping his rope around them several times and tying the knots as tight as he could. When he was finished, he pulled himself up and dangled from this contraption, so that his feet were a few inches from the ceiling. He tugged on it in a few different ways, then began swinging himself from side to side in order to do a stress test. If it failed here, he would fall a foot or two to the basement ceiling. The worst that would happen would be that he would bruise his tailbone. If the counterweight system failed out there, he would fall into the sky, where he would die of hypoxia and presumably become a floating corpsicle. Everything held, which meant that it would be safe enough.

The only thing keeping him back was the thought that perhaps gravity would take another turn. Before today, his prior probability for the personal gravity of everyone in the world reversing direction was in the thousandths of a thousandth of a percent, but after it had happened once, his prior probability that it would happen again necessarily had to increase by a very large margin.

If he knew that gravity was going to go back to normal in the next few days, he would certainly stay in his house instead of venturing out; food and water weren’t going to be an issue in the immediate future.

If he knew that gravity was going to stay in its current configuration indefinitely, or at least as long as the next month, he would leave the house as quickly as possible in order to gather enough food to prevent starvation, and ideally gather whatever supplies would be needed to survive into the future, beyond the timescale of months.

He could try to split the difference and bide his time. Even though he had no way to gauge the odds of gravity returning back to normal, he knew that if t was the time since the change, then as t increased, the odds that gravity would change back at t+1 decreased. Every passing minute made him marginally more confident that this was simply the new order of the world. So as t increased, the confidence in the necessity of making this perilous journey would also increase. Unfortunately, looting had definitive advantages for the people who moved first. Worse, waiting too long would begin to exhaust Thomas’ supplies, not just in terms of material things like food, but willpower and mental acuity as well. If he stayed at home with not much to do, with the gears turning, would he still have the courage to embark tomorrow?

He wore an old biking helmet, which would hopefully protect him in the event of a sudden acceleration towards the ground. In his backpack, one he hadn’t used since college, he put two liters of water, a number of snacks like trail mix and protein bars, a first aid kit from the bathroom, his wallet, and his laptop, which was now full of charge and loaded down with every resource he’d thought to cram it with. Backpacks were unfortunately designed to be assisted by gravity; their straps rested the weight on the shoulders. He had to use carabiners in order to secure it to his climbing harness, but that put the weight right on his legs, which were already carrying the weight of his body in a way that the human musculoskeletal system wasn’t designed for. The last thing he grabbed before setting out were two flashlights, in case it had grown dark by the time he returned. His cat watched these preparations with idle curiosity.

Thomas’ inner ear had finally stopped fighting with his visual cortex. In the beginning, the inner ear had been saying that he was right side up when his feet were on the ceiling but his visual cortex had been saying that he was upside down, likely based on decades of training in making just that determination. It was mildly disorienting, but nothing that he hadn’t been able to handle. Now though, the inner ear -- which was much more insistent -- had won out. The houses and trees were stalactites on the roof of an enormous cave so tall that the bottom was invisible.

With a deep breath and not too much more time for second guessing, Thomas set out toward the garage. Movement was a matter of lifting up one of the dumbells and swinging it forward, then swinging the other one forward, then reaching up to grab the coffee table and awkwardly rocking it. It was slow, but seemed safe enough. After a few cycles of this, Thomas was out of the house and dangling into the open air. There was nothing to catch him if his counterweights or ropes failed. After debating it for a few moments, he left the door partly open so that Bartleby could escape. There was no sense dooming the cat to death by starvation if Thomas fell into the sky.

The trip to the garage took fifteen minutes of awkward movement, where before it had taken a handful of seconds. Extrapolating from that and accounting for increases in efficiency as he got better at it, Thomas still would have taken half a day to get to the gas station, which was the nearest point where there was food to be found in quantity. It was bad enough without the psychological terror of looking at the sky and seeing a quick death by oblivion there. Fortunately, he had a car.

Getting into the car was an ordeal. Opening the car door was easy enough from his dangling position, as was lifting the weights in, but the coffee table proved unwieldy. Without it, Thomas would have no way to get out of the car without risking death by falling. He eventually crammed it into the backseat with some difficulty by moving his weight around, but the ropes meant that he wouldn’t be able to fully close his doors. He got in the driver’s seat by flipping himself around, pushing his hands against the ceiling of the car, and then hastily buckling himself in. The average seat belt wasn’t really designed to keep someone from floating up, but it was better than nothing. He clipped himself to his seat belt as well, so that in the event of a crash he would have some redundant mechanisms keeping him stuck to the earth.

Driving was a slow, painful process. In fact, everything outside the house seemed to consist of awkward and tedious processes. The car functioned the same as it ever had, but the pedals that controlled the gas and brake were difficult to reach because he had to work against gravity. Blood was pooling in Thomas’ brain from almost the moment he had turned himself upside down, so after he was out of the driveway, he had to turn the car off, turn himself around so he was sitting on the ceiling of the car, and wait to regain some semblance of proper blood flow. This mostly confirmed his initial thought that everyone who had been in a car or truck when the change happened was not long for the world.

During that rest, Thomas began thinking in the long-term. Stocking up at the gas station would mean that he could survive for a matter of months. He would be able to set out rain barrels, which would take care of water easily enough by the time his bathtub cache had gone dry. It was early September, which meant that winter would need some thinking about. His house was insulated, but he had to assume that electricity would be a thing of the past when he would need to heat the house. That meant he would either need to move to a warmer climate, with all the problems that driving there would involve, or find a way to make a fire every day in a house that didn’t have a fireplace. Thomas was thinking like a scavenger, but eventually there would be nothing left to scavenge. He would have to learn how to farm, but with all the added effort of clipping weights to himself. He would also have to scavenge weapons from somewhere in order to be able to hunt.

But beyond those concerns, was there a life worth living in this new world? A conservative estimate said that maybe 20% of the people in his city were now dead. More would die from wounds they had sustained in those brief, unexpected falls that had marked the change. How many people had broken bones with no hope of emergency services or doctors coming to help? Starvation (and the desperation that came with it) would eventually claim more lives. Everyone that survived would be reduced to subsistence farming.

Yet even with these thoughts, Thomas continued on. If there was no life worth living with things the way they were, suicide was as easy as unclipping his harness, but there was no way to chart out the course of the future with the information he had available to him.

When he pulled up to the gas station, he was surprised to see people inside. He maneuvered the car as close to the front door as possible, then opened his car door. An older man, who was standing on the ceiling of the gas station next to a rack of postcards, opened the door.

“You an idiot?” he asked.

“Excuse me?” asked Thomas.

“Why in the hell are you out driving?” asked the man. He rubbed his head. “We seen too many fall into the sky. Indoors is the only place that’s safe.”

“I needed supplies,” said Thomas. He wasn’t sure why he had thought there wouldn’t be people in the gas station. In his head, he’d matched what was happening to the patterns that the movies always presented of apocalypses. Maybe that was because he’d seen the video of all those people falling to their deaths; it was easy to imagine what had happened as being the Rapture. He’d thought that if he was going to run into anyone, it would be another looter. Yet now that he thought about it for five seconds, of course it made sense. A gas station almost always had at least one person in it. When the flip happened, they would have ended up on the ceiling. In a zombie apocalypse, the gas stations ended up abandoned, because the workers didn’t really have a reason to be there. But here, they wouldn’t have had any ability to leave.

“Supplies?” asked the man. He rubbed his head again. “Well, come on in, I guess. How is it out there?”

“I didn’t come too far,” said Thomas. “Just three blocks.”

A woman was sitting cross-legged on the ceiling with a phone in her lap. She wore a t-shirt with the local college’s name emblazoned on the front. The older man was wearing a button-down shirt with his name on a patch. Thomas mentally labeled them customer and attendant. There were two cars out by the pumps though, which meant there was an extra person not accounted for.

“So you’re here to loot us?” asked the woman.

“I can pay,” said Thomas. He was about to unzip his backpack when he realized that it would be disgorge its contents onto the floor if he did that. “I can pay,” he repeated lamely. Most of his money was in the form of credit cards, not cash. Both were now of dubious worth.

“I don’t blame you for looting,” said the woman. “It’s what I would have done, if I thought I could make it to my car.” She pointed to a silver Toyota next to one of the pumps.

“No one is looting anything,” said the attendant. “I don’t know that I can let you just buy things though.” He frowned in thought.

“You can have whatever you want,” said the woman, “So long as you help us get out of here.”

“Now hold on just a minute,” said the man. He turned to the woman. “You don’t have any claim on what’s in this store.”

“What’s the plan then?” asked the woman. “We were stuck here until he showed up. Our options included trying to get into one of the cars or staying here until the power went out and we ran out of food. You were planning on splitting food with me, right?”

“I suppose,” the man said slowly.

“Well, if you take into account the fact that I would be eating half the food in this place, then if this guy leaves with me, it seems like he should be entitled to some amount of the food as a reward.”

“My name’s Thomas,” said Thomas.

“Juliette,” said the woman. She held out her hand, which Thomas shook.

“Randall,” said the attendant with a nod. “Now I suppose I would split some food, if it came to that, but maybe this whole thing works itself out. Maybe I can explain to my boss that I couldn’t let you starve, but that’s a whole heap different than letting you take off with half the food.”

“It won’t just be food,” said Juliette. “We’ll need batteries, rope, flashlights, I saw some patching kits over there, tools we can use, things like that.”

“No,” said Randall. He shook his head. “That’s too much. Things you need to survive, that’s one thing, but you’re talking about the long term. You can’t use these resources to hunker down on your own.”

“I’m not hunkering down,” said Juliette. “I’m going to launch a rescue mission.”

“You’re what?” asked Thomas.

“A rescue mission,” replied Juliette. She turned to look at him. “Most people are trapped inside their houses or places of business. Everyone who survived the initial fall into the sky is safe, so long as they stay in one place. But in the long term, we’re going to need to work together if we want to pull through this. Right now, I think our first priority is going to be mobility.” She pointed at the ropes and harness that Thomas was wearing. “I assume you know where we can find more of those?”

“There’s a climbing gym downtown,” said Thomas. He felt slightly dazed. Though neither of them had mentioned it, his head was still sticky with blood where he’d hit it on his ceiling.

“We’ll go there first,” said Juliette. “Wait, there’s a gym a block from here, maybe we’ll stop there first in order to get some weights. We’ve got to figure out a foolproof method of moving around and weights are going to be part of that.”

“I didn’t agree to anything,” said Thomas.

“You have some rudimentary understanding of rock climbing,” said Juliette. “I need you. And what are our other options here? Grab as much food for ourselves as we can, hide out until civilization crumbles, then starve to death or be reduced to hunter-gatherers? That’s crap.”

Thomas wavered. “I don’t think two people can keep civilization together.”

“Of course not,” said Juliette. “Civilization is a process, one that take more than a handful. But the first step is getting mobility, not just for us, but for a small core of people. We need to do it while the communication networks are still up and running. Furthermore, we need to build communication networks that can survive a temporary or even semi-permanent loss of power. Hand-cranked radios, if we can find them. Walkie-talkies, maybe. If I’d had my laptop, I’d be downloading as much information from the internet as possible, survival manuals and schematics for how to build things back up if it comes to that … but before any of that, I need to secure a way out of this gas station. How about it?”

Thomas paused. She’d just thrown his plans into disarray. She’d driven a sense of hope into him like a stick stuck into the wheel of a moving bicycle. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll give it a shot.”