“Birds, Vibrant and Wild” by Owen McManus

Birds. Pfft. Birds wish they could be me.

I look fantastic in the sunset. Two meters tall, my body wrapped in carbon lace and diamond film. Wings that shimmer like transparent satin ten meters wide. Sheer as a dragonfly’s, tough as seashells. Feathers can’t compare. I’m gauzy bright on midnight purple, and pretty from tip to tail. When I’m in the sky, nothing looks better than me. Nobody watches birds anymore. A shame, really.

I streak past the flock. They scatter, all blue-black and noisy. Kicking up swirls of dust and dandruff. I am silent as a flower petal. Swift as a raindrop. For the briefest second, I feel bad for frightening them. They put up with enough random traffic. I’ll have to save feeling bad for later. Right now, I have a show to put on.

Spotting my next target, I angle toward it. A vent column crowning the top of a prefab block tower. Roughly eight hundred meters from the ground to the tip of it. Squat compared to corpo-spires.

Block towers don’t throw off that much heat, but it’s enough to give me a boost. I unfurl my wings, catch the thermal and corkscrew up another hundred meters. Glancing down between my feet, I see Viv glide in right below me. She’s catching the same elevator. Pressure ripples my wing tips. Vibrations ride up the harness and across my shoulders, deep into the muscles of my back.

I pull down my mask to suck cool air between my teeth.

Viv pings me and I roll inverted to see what she wants. She raises her arms and signs, “That way, Aster.” She must be anxious if she’s signing my name.

I know, Viv, I know. I haven’t forgotten the plan. I just want to take it all in. Revel in it. Like we used to.

I re-seat my mask and bank off toward our spire. Only a few more hops to go. Then we’ll be back home. Generous of me to call it that.

We’re tenants, Viv and me. My parents and grandparents were tenants. Viv was a ward of the spire. She says that she doesn’t remember, but we gather that her family didn’t make the trip. She is a flat-out genius. Smart enough to keep out of labor school, anyway. It doesn’t really matter. We’re all just contracts, bought and sold, shifted from corp to corp like livestock. Unless you’re born lucky, or you can find a way to climb out. We could be out. We could be far away from the spire, yet here we are, winging our way back.

I tuck my wings and roll. Out and down, away from the thermal. I’ve gained a lot of altitude, but lost all of my speed. I could open wide and slowly glide my way toward the next thermal, but there is a lot of corp security this low.

Dodging security is woven into us. As kids, we ran with a bunch of rotor-boarding, wannabe anarchists. Avoiding security is all about being quiet and fast. Twitchy. Aggressively agile. We fly the same way. Not like Wills. Wills flew like he rode. Fearless. Graceful. Elegant.

My goggles pick up some warm air. Flicking out my wing tips, I catch the slight updraft and use it to skip like a stone.

Growing up, Viv and I spent our days at rotor-board parks. It’s where all the odd ducks hung out. She was short, dark, consumed with technology and an aversion to most people. I was too tall, pale, and driven by a desperate burn to create something beautiful. On almost all the spectrums, we both fell outside the norm. If there was a place that we truly fit in, we never found it. Rotor-board parks, thrash bands, modding groups, activist meetings, these were the best we could do. Probably why we found each other. Probably why we’ve never been apart.

That’s also how we found Wills. Or maybe, he found us. He was an odd duck, too.

He brought us from the core out to the balconies. We would lay there, hand in hand in hand, staring up and talking about anything and everything. During the day, we would watch birds. Marveling as they navigated aerial shipping lanes as deftly as we darted our boards through crowded walkways.

At night, we would try to stare past the lumosphere. The entire sky, synthetic bright and plastered over with endless video ad rolls. Models and movie stars selling luxury products and vacation spots inland, away from the spires. Each point of light, each pixel, a tiny jellyfish drone. Self-contained, afloat on air currents that keep them charged, linked in a vast network spanning kilometers. We would wait for those brief moments when an area dimmed, revealing the real night sky above. Stars, the moon, Venus, Mars. Blink and you miss them. Wills would utter faint curses at his mother while tracing out constellations in the afterimages.

We grew up knowing that the corporations owned the sky. All the airspace surrounding a spire was theirs. They ferried products and people through it. At night, advertising executives, like Wills’ mother, bought and sold the sky in fifteen-second increments.

Spires are just company towns encased in high-tensile silicates, carbon glass, and the artifice of respectability. All the best schools. High-end shopping. Space enough for hundreds of thousands of tenants. All at the low price of living under the thumb of a corp. Sure, there are elected councils and civil codes, but corps buy and sell those too.

I keep my wings sleek against my sides to gather speed. Dialing in my goggle overlay, I search for heat vents running from faint yellows and oranges to deep, angry reds.

A falcon in the hunt, I hurtle toward one particular building, waiting until the last moments to open my wings. The hot air punches me upward, wrenching at my harness, making my stomach do flips. I lay over on my back and the rushing air buoys me. This is why we do it. This feeling right here. I feel powerful, exhilarated, and free. I missed this. Wills would have loved it.

He would stay out gliding all night just so he could track us down the next day and tell us all about it with breathless excitement. I think it made him feel like a bird. Wills loved birds. We hung on his every word.

Wills was cute. Actually, Wills wasn’t cute. Let’s be totally honest, Wills was beautiful. That helped. I might not have noticed him otherwise. I feel like I should be ashamed of that, but I’m not. Viv felt much the same, and told me so in her usual unvarnished style. I think it wasn’t two months of knowing him before we discussed it thoroughly, and brought him home with us.

We tagged him as royalty almost instantly. Even though he tried to hide it under rotor-board gear, lingo, and respectable riding skills. Just something about the way all the old money families move through the spire. A little disconnected. A hint of unearned confidence. He was third or fourth generation. One of his grandpas was some sort of serial entrepreneur, back when that was a thing.

He started rotor-boarding young, like us. A kind of light rebellion against his mother, I think. It’s pretty normal for tenant kids to engage in risky games, but royalty have access to members-only pools, tennis courts, and team sports. Besides, fear of kidnapping tends to keep them from leaving the upper floors.

Rare that little princelings run off to low-level board parks. Rarer still that they actually love to ride. He might not have come from the same place as the rest of us, but there was no doubt where he belonged.

Traditional monarchies might have withered to a ceremonial state, but family dynasties are alive and well in the corps. Private armies, battles for territory, marriages of convenience, and lines of succession, all healthy and happening. Wills had no siblings, so he was being groomed for the corp throne, and doing anything he could to avoid it. It would have been easy to mock him, but a gilded cage is still a cage, I suppose.

He told us that, one day, he would take us to the peak of the spire. Over four kilometers up. Above the lumosphere. We would see the stars. Unobstructed. Unfiltered. With our own eyes.

He had never been there himself. Spending so much time associating with the lower rabble had tarnished his standing. A patina that his family wasn’t interested in acquiring. Still, we always believed his promise was genuine.

We adored that boy. Still do.

I spread my wings wide and start a slow turn. Viv’s ping buzzes the palms of my gloves. She has fallen back a bit, but she’s still following my line. Her ping lets me know that she is ready for the next phase. I finish the turn and aim straight for the side of the spire. There will be no more vents for a while, so I flatten out as much as possible and glide in. If there was an opportunity to turn back, neither of us took it.

Viv and I did what all good tenants do when they leave school. We started a business. We were plugged into the rotor-boarding scene, and we had some smart garment talent between us. We moved out on our own, down to one of the lower-level incubator centers. To the mostly empty floors where a corp will lease you a combination shop space and apartment cheap, provided you build something they might be interested in acquiring later.

We created a small startup, building reactive armor and other fashionable rotor-board gear. Viv had spent years at that point reverse-engineering processors, tweaking out cheap boards to do the stuff only high-end ones could manage. The chips that we put in our armor were the same as the ones in every board, refrigerator, or jelly drone. Common and cheap. She made the gear work, I made it look good. Real adaptive stuff that absorbs impacts while pushing the front edge of fashion.

Exactly the sort of gear a wealthy rider might be into.

Wills became our silent patron. Buying a few pieces at a time through subcorps. Promoting them to the right people. He would bring us coffee, the real stuff, and muffins while we worked. Through Wills, we started doing deals with boutique board builders and sanctioned riding parks. He sold countless sets of riding armor for us. Our logo is still worn by some top riders. Even pro riders from far-away spires. People we have only ever seen in videos.

A small distribution corp bought everything we could make and ordered thousands more. We hired designers, managers, and every odd-duck rider we knew. They got busy building armor. Soon, we moved our shop to a larger spot. The business started to run itself. It didn’t need us anymore.

In hindsight, it was all incredibly obvious. I think that Viv and I were too absorbed in our work to notice that a princeling had done what princelings do. He bought our affection. And our time. A bit twisted, but I think I understand it. My parents had nothing. The only thing they had to share with me was their love. When I brought Viv home, they extended that love to her. Easy as spreading a blanket. Wills’ parents, well, his did the opposite.

One morning, Wills stopped by and told us that he had something to show us. We followed, because that’s what we always did.

I bank hard and spiral, a maneuver I watched Wills perform a hundred times. Rolling, I flick my wingtip off the top of a light pipe, brushing away a layer of filth. There are dozens of light pipes that are meant to run real sunshine down into the core of this block tower. To the places in the middle with no windows. Most of the Corpo-spires employ swarms of drones that clean them, but a lot of the less well-off block towers can’t afford such things. If they can, they are usually in such a state that it’s amazing they fly at all. A few tenants down on the low hundreds will get a little more natural light now. At least until ash and dust cover the intake again.

The roll has left me flying upside down. I stretch out, arching my back into a shallow dive. I’ll trade a small amount of altitude for speed, so I can roll back over and angle my wings into a climb.

I almost don’t see it. A heavy delivery drone scraping the bottom of spire airspace. It hasn’t detected me, or if it has, it doesn’t care. I pull my wings in fast to increase my descent and plummet headfirst. The thing passes over me in an instant, less than a meter from my toes. The turbulence ripples my wings and throws me into a partial cartwheel. Opening up, I roll over in one practiced move.

I throw Viv the OK signal. She responds, signing, “No, Aster.” Using my name like a scolding parent. When she’s scared, she gets angry. I’m sorry, Viv. I will try to be more careful.

It was only a set of plans, a few drawings and schematics, but from the second Wills showed us the wings, we were smitten. He had spent the last month gathering all the material, hardware, and some high-altitude skydiving gear through a few subcorps. He planned to build a set before showing us, but judging by the hodgepodge of chips and smart fabrics he managed to assemble, that ambition didn’t last long. When you know experts, call in the experts.

Viv and I had the first set together and working in a matter of days. All three of them were ready and accepting input in less than a week.

From what we could gather, the wings were originally designed as some sort of extreme sports toy. Somewhere along the way, the plans were picked up in a grazing run by a defense tech corp and all the patent numbers and identifiers were scrubbed.

Smart control surfaces and embedded micro-jets made the wings good at gliding, but they aren’t agile or subtle enough for security work. Nothing a mil-corp would be into.

It seems like they had bought a bunch of little startups, picked them over, and dumped what they couldn’t use into a commercial display sub-corp. The same one that Wills had been ordered to run as part of his royalty training.

That’s where he found the plans. Boxed up and forgotten.

While Viv finished the software for the wings, I started in on the suits.

Viv almost fit one of the skydiving suits. The very smallest one. I took the sewing machine to it, tailoring and augmenting as needed.

When she first put it on, all pale blue and pink with a fairy print motif, Viv rolled her eyes so hard she might have been staring at her brain. Wills and I thought she looked adorable. She kept the color scheme and even had me add extra fairy highlights to her wings. She won’t ever admit it, but I’m pretty sure she thinks it looks adorable too. I might be rubbing off on her.

Wills snatched a suit from a set of mil-spec units. Flat black and grey, covered in pockets and webbing. I took my sewing machine and tools to it, perfecting the fit. I added the deepest blue piping and detailing I could find. When he dropped the matte-finish visor, he looked absolutely badass. I painted his wings a deep forest green and added sparkle highlights along the ribs. He’d come twisting out of the dark, swift and silent. Like airborne ink. Sexiest thing I ever saw.

I was the outlier. Too tall for mil-spec suits. Too thin for the rest. For someone like me, who the world doesn’t fit quite right anyway, I did what I always do. I made my own.

Wills acquired sample fabrics and new tools through the corp. He charged them all to R&D, shipped them back and forth between a dozen subcorps, and promptly lost them. Right onto my workbench.

I learned to work the material. Cut, sew, and weld clean seams that bent and stretched in the right places. We incorporated our reactive armor. We reworked the high-altitude masks and fashioned custom oxygen compressors. I fabricated my own helmet and put special cutouts in it to pass my hair through. Sometimes you have to sacrifice a little comfort and safety for style.

We weren’t even three test flights in, and we would never have cared to see another rotor-board.

The videos were Viv’s idea. I think she just wanted an excuse to run a stealth video stream. Cutting through the interference and piggybacking on legitimate signals. Hiding in the noise. Wills was the best glider, so he ran the cameras.

It was my job to dance.

My wings aren’t as agile as the ones Wills flew, and not nearly as finely tuned as the setup Viv uses, but mine are, by far, the widest. The most iridescent. The most beautiful. When I point my toes and raise my chin, when I spread them out wide, I look god-damned glorious.

At least that’s how Wills and Viv sold the idea to me. It took a while, but eventually I started to believe them.

Our first few videos were simple. Just gliding and wide bank turns. Slow movements that I tried to make look graceful, elegant, and easy. Under my mask I was fighting like hell, gritting my teeth so hard my jaw ached. For the first few, Viv and Wills took turns working the knots out of my shoulders.

We got those videos out to the rotor-board scene with instruction on how to tune into the streams. In a few days, we were everywhere. I was everywhere.

It was important to Wills that we never reveal who we were or where we got the wings. It would be tough to link them to him, but that doesn’t mean that someone wouldn’t recognize them. My goggles would record the flights for first-person segments, but we had them automatically edit Wills and Viv out of the stream. Occasionally the software slipped and you could see Viv in the background. She was always so far away that she was only recognizable as a pastel smear.

Wills warned us against flying too close to the lumosphere. Jellies probably wouldn’t be a problem, but there were heavy delivery and cleaning drones up there that most people never see. Units big as train cars. Sometimes corps would trade undocumented carriers up there too. Goods. People. Legit and illegal both. Some of them ran dark through high-altitude airspace where no city law enforcement would see them. Not that they could do much about it if they did.

In turn, we taught Wills how to dodge security. It wasn’t enough to use board-punk senses. We had to teach him to have tenant senses. I think he understood what we were trying to tell him, even if it wasn’t exactly in his nature.

For communication, we each had a set of ancient infrared emitters and receivers. If any of us flashed our emitter in the right direction, the other receivers should ping. As long as everyone followed the flight plan, we should be able to coordinate all of our timing with pings. Viv’s video recording and streaming hardware was built entirely of custom or counterfeit chips and hardened against basic radio tracking. At least that’s what we hoped. If we got zeroed by security, she could always pack up the gear and fly away. We went out every couple of nights with a plan and a set of shared hand signals. In well over fifty flights, I think we only had to bug out a half dozen times.

The meshnet debates over not only who we were, but how we got the shots, were epic. Most people thought we rigged some elaborate autocam setup with multiple rotor drones chasing me. Some people thought it was all faked. Motion tracking and wire work. There was the theory that we were a marketing stunt by a corp down the coast to sell sparkling wine, since I very vaguely looked like one of their logos. A few people thought we were the work of a famous action star and his stunt team. That guy stands on platforms so he never looks shorter than his co-stars. I duck for door frames. Even without something nearby for reference, that ain’t me.

By our tenth video, I started changing my suit for nearly every flight. At first, it was small stuff. Glowcloth panels attached with pins and vintage belts purchased from ground-level shops outside the spire. Soon I was making outfits with brand new styles, colors, and cuts. Ball gowns, sport uniforms, and workwear. I would hide the harness with wraps and drapery. I made a skintight suit with a gradient that ran all the way across my body, from deep navy blue on my right wrist to fire orange on my left ankle. Vibrant white gloves and boots to finish the look. I designed a long flared skirt using smart wire so that it would fold out of the way and not get tangled in my wings. I attempted cutouts to show some skin, but it gets pretty cold up there. Wills brought in the diamond film and that achieved a similar look. Revealing, but insulated. From that I made an outfit that was ultra-form-fitting and always looks wet no matter how it’s lit. Each outfit was a new fashion and engineering challenge.

As my confidence grew, I shed pieces of my armor. The costumes became more daring and bold. Our viewership grew. Posts on meshnet boards began asking for specific costumes that referenced their favorite pop culture icons.

We started or ended every video by buzzing past one of the higher levels of the spire. I would usually fire off a rude gesture or three with gaudy lumosphere ads blazing in the background. We all learned to sign swear words from around the world. I saved the worst of them for when I flew in front of corp logos. I knew the videos were getting traction when we saw our customers flashing vulgar signs at each other from across the board park.

We spent more and more time away from work. Our team didn’t really need us anyway. The orders kept rolling in. Our riding gear kept rolling out. Wills stayed at our apartment more nights than he didn’t.

Corp news never officially reported on our flights. They did issue a spire-wide warning that anyone caught trespassing in spire airspace would be prosecuted and fined. Take-down filters stripped our videos off official channels as soon as they went up. That didn’t stop them from saturating all the right communities.

And here we are again. Making another video, a new show. One we hope everyone will see.

Flying was the first time I felt truly beautiful. It was a beauty we made together. Piece by piece, month by month. Wills gave me wings. Viv gave me a way to show them off. This seems the least I can do for them.

* * *

The cleaning drone swoops in from behind, just over his shoulder. A heavy six-rotor, moving fast. Wills doesn’t hear it. Aster’s scream is lost to the wind. They are seconds apart, but the distance between them is impossible. The machine passes right through his wing, shattering it from the tip to harness. Something in the drone responds to the impact. It fires off grapples trying to secure itself to a wall or tower or anything nearby. One of the grapple pads passes through Wills’ other wing. One through his suit, through our armor. It lodges itself somewhere inside. The winches reel instantly, pulling the six-rotor into him. The rest is a terrible blur. The drone drops, hauling Wills down, through the smog layer, and out of view. Bits of wing swirl in the wind. Like dandelion tufts. Aster glides away, unable to turn and chase after him. Unwilling to look down. Helpless.

In the distance, Viv signs, “no.”

* * *

I level out, drifting over the rising curve of the spire. Rubbing my thumb against the tip of my index finger, I adjust the detection range of my goggles. There is enough heat rising from the outer walls of the spire to carry me up in slow spirals, but I’m searching for a fast lane. There is a port off to the right. I think it’s a compost digester. Heat is just ripping out of there.

Dozens of spires, just like this one, dot the coastline. All of them sunk into the earth like ticks. Face down in pit mines lapping up heat, water, and minerals. Asses in the air venting any excess. Legally, they are supposed to capture and redistribute surplus energy to ground-level buildings, but they rarely do. It just spills out from vents like this.

I look over my shoulder and see Viv falling back into the distance. She is searching for a perch to set up her video gear. She will probably post up around one of the taller block towers and ping me when she is ready. Following the plan, I will stay on this side of the spire, so she can get the antenna to lock on. If everything works out, we will be streaming this show live.

After it happened, after Wills was gone, Viv packed up the broadcast rig and flew away. I didn’t see her for three days. She sent me messages every few hours. She was safe but wasn’t ready to come home yet. I could only reply, “OK.”

The next morning I went to work. I cut pads and welded seams. If any of the people we had hired knew about our gliding excursions, they were cool enough to not talk about it. None of them knew what happened. None of them knew what we had lost. I sat at my workbench. Silent. I stared at my hands, at the work they were doing. They didn’t seem to be mine. I felt thin. Like a string, a single pluck away from snapping. Unable to speak with anyone. Unable to eat.

When I returned home, I collapsed to the tile just inside the doorway. I cried until my voice failed. Until no sound left me. I stayed there, on the floor, all night. I couldn’t drag myself the distance to our bed. It was a lifetime away.

I did it all again the next day.

We never found anything of him. He was gone. Someone from a corp must have scooped up his body. They saw what happened. They sent in a crew. They covered it up.

I watched news feeds and searched for accident reports from public access terminals. I searched deeper on shadow terminals. No report was ever filed. No missing persons. Nothing. It was like Wills never existed. Like he didn’t matter.

How his mother lives with herself, I will never know.

When Viv walked in the door, vibrating, on the come-down from a days-long bender, we cried in each other’s arms. We cried until tears stopped flowing. We didn’t talk about it. There was nothing to say.

A week later, our distributor offered an unfathomable amount to buy us out. Wills had prepared one last scheme to purchase our love. We sold.

I ride the thermal up, holding the valve on my mask closed to keep out the stench. The air above me is clear tonight. Sometimes clouds dip low enough to swirl around the spire tips and seep like fingers though the grids of jellies. I hope that clear air will make this easier.

Viv pings me on the way up. I wave my arms in broad arcs to respond. She should be able to track either my suit or the autocam. Speaking of. I peel the autocam off my thigh and toss it out behind me. I hear the rotors spark to life with a high-pitched whine before it falls back and the sound fades into the wind. Showtime.

I won’t have enough speed to reach the top, so I circle in tighter to the spire. In close, where the air is climbing. I’ll be spotted by hundreds of security cameras this close to the building. Not a big deal now. I mean, they would have to catch me.

I see some cleaners orbiting the upper windows, but no active security. Royalty always want a nice, clear view of their domain.

It took us over eight months, scouring the streets and alleys outside the spire. We bought up jellies from ground-level chop-shops where they part them out and sell all the bits to modders and counterfeiters. We bought drone processors and accessory boards to search for vulnerabilities. No matter who makes them, they all use the same set of chips. Unsurprising, really. Viv tore them all down with microscopes and reverse-engineering software.

In our research, we found that most of the mid- to high-altitude drones have their collision avoidance switched off. That technology is built right into the core of the chips, and very cheap. But it is also patented and licensed. Activating the license would cost a tiny fraction over the lifetime the drone. Unless you choose not to turn it on.

That might be the worst part. It wasn’t malice that took Wills from us. It wasn’t premeditated. Negligence killed him. Greed killed him. A scrap of profit for some mid-level corp stooges. The choice to leave collision avoidance off might have been made by the corp who bought the drone. Maybe the ones who maintained it, or the ones who built it, or the ones who sold it. Absolutely no way to know. There was no path to justice for us. For him.

It took us the entire eight months to realize, sometimes justice isn’t what you need.

Viv figured out the technical details. I planned the show. Viv should have it streaming live by now. Just one more thing left to do.

I spot an open vent. Hot air pulled all the way from the depths, through the core of the building, and exhausting up here, where the royalty live.

I swoop closer, catching my reflection in the tinted glass. I know they will already have the live feed from the autocam up here, but I give them something to look at anyway. I just hope Wills’ mom is watching. I think she should see this.

I lay back into a slow loop in front of the windows, pulling in close enough to brush them with my wing tip. A satisfying scraping vibration resonates up the wing and into my harness. The sound inside should set off some alarms. Drifting over the vent, I scoop the updraft.

I rocket up through the lumosphere knocking away dozens of jellies before one of them is close enough. It’s radiating a vibrant teal, so bright that the auto-tint on my goggles kicks in. I reach all the way out and touch it gently with two fingers. Just a brush as I pass. Light as a kiss.

I breach the top of the lumosphere. Feather-light jellies twirl up behind me, caught in the wake of my wings.

Actual stars. First a small handful of bright points and then a chorus of glimmer. The sky up here is awash in distant lights. Like a piece of glowcloth stretched tight across dark skin. Sleek and exciting. It’s unbelievable. I peel back my goggles and bask in the soft and distant twinkling. Tears stream up, frosting my eyelashes. I want to glide here forever, but it’s time to close our show.

I tip slightly and dive back down into the lumoshpere.

A jelly to my right blinks on. Then another, and another. The swarm of thousands cascades to life around me. The update is passing between them.

There was nothing we could do to shut down the lumosphere. No way to actually hurt a corp. Not really. If we disabled any part of the network, there are thousands more jellies sitting in storage just waiting to replace them. All of them have layers and layers of redundant safety and reliability checks.

Instead, we will leave it all in place. With a few changes of our own.

Viv wrote a tiny update package. She assures me that it’s simple. What she considers simple would take most people weeks to puzzle out, even if she was explaining it to them.

It boils down to this. Every single one of these chips has a built-in test and demonstration mode. It lives in a tiny bit of protected storage. Turns on the radio, flicks lights, cycles the micro-turbines, checks systems and battery level, that sort of thing. It’s just enough space to hold some instructions and a small album of pictures and videos. The demonstration runs about thirty seconds. After that, the chip sends an “OK” and switches to receiving signals from the spire. Layers of security keep the jellies and cargo haulers from listening to radio signals outside their network.

Our package writes an all-new demo mode and hijacks the radio, sending out an update to every jelly or drone anywhere within radio range. Every chip within its trusted network. At a semi-random interval, one of the updated jellies will fire off the update again, causing a sort of digital mass panic, triggering demo mode on all of them.

The only way to install our hack on that first jelly was by physically touching contacts on its shell. Which I just did with the two data connectors sewed into the fingers of my glove. They were so high up in corp airspace, no one ever bothered to lock out the physical contacts.

As I fall back through the lumosphere, the jellies part to let me pass. A heavy drone below me slows and veers out of my path. All of their collision avoidance systems have been turned on.

I look up into the lumosphere. Intense dots of light resolving to an image as I fall farther away. It isn’t long before I see him. The curve of his brow. The angle of his jaw. His open, contagious grin.

We took what we had of Wills, images, video clips, and buried him deep in the fabric of the network. He lives there now, in the startup code of every jelly and drone that contacts the mesh. Our grave marker. Our memorial.

Without taking the entire network completely offline, there will never be any way to fully extract him. Any new jellies added will get the update and pass that on to the rest. Same with any cargo drone that comes close. All transports on the way to other spires will carry the update and spread it. The corps will never agree to turn the whole network off to purge him. It’s worth too much.

Viv turned off the ability to receive mass network updates from the spire. They might still be able to broadcast to the lumoshpere, but we hold the keys. If they try to remove him, we’ll go out and put him back. As many times as we have to. Did I mention she is very good at this sort of thing?

Every night, once every hour or so, everyone under the lumosphere will see a few seconds of Wills. His face, shots of him testing the wings, suiting up. An early flight or two. Pictures of him laughing at our home or sleeping in a chair. That part of the show is for us.

Then the entire lumosphere will dim and reposition to reveal as much of the real night sky as it can. Actual stars. Constellations. A clear view of the moon. All of it. This part is for Wills.

The sky will be safer for anyone who wants to fly in it. Even the birds. We will fight to keep it that way.

We have already sent wings and suits to dozens of our friends. In a ground-level warehouse, safely outside the spire, we’re making more. A brand-new flock to fill the sky. Vibrant and wild.

I open my wings wide and glide slow on my back, looking up at our show. The cam floats just over my shoulder sending it all out live. The pinhole glint of stars. The pale, full face of the moon. Thirty whole seconds of something beautiful.

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Owen McManus is usually a video game artist, but somewhere along the way he developed a nasty writing habit. He lives with his wonderful family in Calgary, Alberta where he can often be spotted riding a bike. Even on days when that seems a bad idea.

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