Zero 'g' Page 6

  Chapter Ten

  Linus had backed up all the videos that had been taken from different cameras all over the world. Because the network and the cameras were all lost due to having no gravity, backing things up was the best that they could do. Linus made a type of software that would take all the videos and show them all what would happen if there was no gravity present at the time the videos were recorded. It was brilliant software, and the more Carly spent time with the boys, the more proud of them she became. She wasn’t sure she would have been able to pull any of that off without them. By using that software, they would be able to find out what kind of destruction was occurring in different places all over the world.

  Carly looked at the computer screen in amazement. These kids were certainly impressive, and their parents would be so proud if they knew they were taking initiative in helping Earth. They were bright kids and eager to be part of something great. She just hoped that in the end they wouldn’t be disappointed. She had no idea if they would be able to save the planet. There were so many missing pieces that she wasn’t sure if they would even be able to discover what had gone wrong, never mind try to put it all back together.

  Linus had in fact hacked into the system and was giving them all a bird’s-eye view of what was going on around the world. It was a frightening sight to behold. She had never seen anything like what he was pulling up on the screen. The images sent chills up her spine. Linus had linked into various networks around the world and tapped into the surveillance cameras. They could view anything they wanted to. Carly was in awe of the boy’s skills. How could someone so young learn how to do these things? He could get into a lot of trouble for hacking into the government mainframe, though she doubted anyone would complain at this point. At least he was using his powers for good and not evil. He was helping to save the world, and if he had to use some illegal methods to do so, then so be it.

  She looked back up at the ceiling to check on David, who had not moved. He appeared to be sleeping against the ceiling. It was as if he were a vampire taking a leave from the world below. He was curled up in a ball as if he were on the floor. His eyes were closed, and she could see his little chest moving up and down. She felt terribly sorry for the child. What a crazy thing for any child to have to experience. He just looked so sad and lonely up there. Carly considered pulling him down to be with them, but maybe it was better that he stayed out of the way. If he was sleeping, that couldn’t hurt him, either. She wasn’t sure where their little adventure was going to lead them, and if any of them could get some rest, it only could benefit them. It appeared as if they had a long road ahead of them, and she wasn’t certain how it was all going to go down. She only could hope that they would all still be alive and together when it was all done. She shook the thoughts out of her head and focused on the screen once again.

  “So what are we looking at here, boys?”

  Linus looked up at Carly. “Well, I have hacked my way into the mainframe, and that allowed me access to any surveillance camera in the United States. At that point, it was nothing to continue bouncing along the network to get the same access to all the countries all over the world. It’s actually pretty cool.”

  “So, what does that mean?” Carly knew very little about the hacking world. She knew technology could leave people open to being violated or robbed by hackers, but what Linus was doing was a little bit different.

  “It means that we can look wherever we want in the world and see what might be going on.”

  Carly laughed. “That’s incredible, Linus.”

  He smiled. Carly and the team began looking at various places around the world, attempting to get any sort of clue as to how to restore gravity to the planet. They needed to see how the rest of the world was doing. Maybe if there was an area that was better off than the rest, they could determine why that was. Maybe it was something that would stabilize after a certain amount of time. Everything was just a good guess at that point.

  “Do you think that you can find something that might be able to reestablish gravity?” Carly asked Henry.

  “I’m sure of it. There has to be a way. It’s just a matter of finding the right thing. We are all smart people, and we are about as close to scientists as you can be right now. Who’s to say we can’t solve this problem ourselves?”

  “Great, let’s do it. Let’s see what we have out there.”

  Linus tapped a few keys, and camera images started popping up all over the screen. Different areas of the world were right before Carly. There was Ohio, New York, China, and Southeast Asia…and on and on. They could pull up twenty different cameras at a time and take a look. Carly’s mouth dropped open as she saw what was going on in each screenshot. Her stomach rolled, and she swallowed back bile. She had never felt a stronger urge to throw up before in her life. The images before her were not only frightening but gory as well. Chaos and death were everywhere in the world. No one was free from it. Buildings were ruined, and bodies were either lying crushed underneath objects or floating dead in the air. Although she had witnessed some of it herself, to see it everywhere and in large masses terrified her. Oh, dear God, she thought.

  She wasn’t sure if she could process so much damage all at once. It looked like anarchy all over the world, and she wondered if they really could stop it. Could they bring the world back to the way it was, or would they be stuck suffering without gravity until they were all dead? What had happened to the world? How would any of them survive? Carly had to calm down, or she would have a panic attack. She couldn’t allow herself to get that upset again. Things looked bad, but that didn’t mean that it was impossible to fix.

  Seeing so much death, however, made her long once again to be with her family and to hold them close. If this truly was the end of the world, then she wanted to be with them. The problem was, without gravity, it would take her forever to float her way home. The task might even be impossible. If she had any hope at all of ever seeing her family again, they needed to get the gravity back to Earth and fast. Who knows what other catastrophes could befall them without gravity? She certainly didn’t want to be around to find that out.

  As Carly and the team began to see the devastation around the world, she couldn’t help but imagine how all these people, despite living in different countries, were all reacting in the same way to the crisis. No one was out there alone. She saw numerous shots of people trying to help the wounded and banding together. It warmed her heart to see it. Humanity wasn’t lost, after all. When it came down to it, people always wanted to help other people. That was what was most important.

  “How very sad that it takes a crisis to bring people together toward one common goal. I mean, look at all of them—they are all working together. It’s just amazing.”

  The boys nodded.

  “Oh, my God.”

  Both Henry and Linus looked over at Carly in alarm. “What is it?” Henry asked.

  “Gosh, I just remembered something. It could be the key.” Carly tried to collect the thoughts in her head before she said anything that would get their hopes up.

  “What is it, Carly? Is it something that can help?”

  “There was one time that I was having lunch in the cafeteria with a doctor friend of mine who also works at NASA. We were discussing Particle B.”

  Henry spoke up. “That was the project my dad was working on.”

  “Yes, they had a team bringing the particle to Earth. It was taking longer than expected, I remember. They had to build the antigravity rocket and then start the transportation process.”

  “You think this is connected to Particle B?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I remember that we overheard one of the scientists talking about Particle B. He was one of the men on the team. He said something strange. I didn’t understand it at the time.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He was discussing the importance of asteroids to the project.”

  “What?” exclaimed Henry.

  Chapter Elevenr />
  Henry was looking at Carly in shock, and she hoped she wasn’t about to get some bad news. While she was working at NASA, it wasn’t unusual to overhear some pretty crazy things. Sometimes both work and personal projects were going on, and people were making discoveries on their own time. She was surprised how much Henry seemed to know about the goings-on at NASA. She wondered if this had more to do with the fact that he was very perceptive or if he had uncovered some of the knowledge on his own. The higher-ups would not be pleased to know that a sixteen-year-old kid knew way more than he should about classified NASA projects. She doubted that Jim Iverson was imparting all this knowledge to Henry. That would be highly irregular and not very smart. No, she had to assume that Henry was bright enough to stumble upon these things himself.

  She had heard so many stories at NASA that it was really impossible to know which were real and which were pipe dreams. Some of the stuff discussed was really farfetched and likely the musings of someone whose ego was getting too big for his or her body. She had spent a lot of time laughing with Karina about just that. But was this just one of such moments? Were the asteroids really a problem for all of them?

  “Are you serious, Carly?” Henry asked. He looked alarmed, and she hoped she wasn’t frightening them unnecessarily. Who was she really kidding, though? The world was turned upside down.

  “Yeah, of course. I mean, I’ve heard a lot of stuff over the years. It’s kind of hard not to. Do you guys know anything about the asteroids? Have you heard anything similar to the discussion I overheard?”

  “Well, I’m not exactly sure if it’s the same, but my dad explained some basic information to me about them. But I never would have thought it had anything to do with this. That’s insane.”

  “Maybe not.” Carly wished she had paid more attention to the scientist who had brought up the topic of asteroids. She just hadn’t believed there was anything to worry about. Who would have anticipated that Earth would lose its gravity? Although the world had in fact changed a lot, while she was mopping the floor at work, she had never anticipated it ending. That was how she felt when she heard about the asteroids. That it was just too impossible and terrifying to even warrant thinking about.

  Henry looked deep in thought. When he looked back up at Carly, he spoke. “The scientists at NASA don’t know anything about the makeup of the asteroids. That’s what I understood from my father, anyway. They don’t have a whole lot of information themselves. Maybe that was the problem; they don’t know what they are dealing with. The makeup is unclear, but they do believe that these asteroids are heavier than normal asteroids of that size. They believe that these asteroids are of totally different material, which makes the asteroids heaver and gives them more mass. But they were still researching the issue when Earth lost its gravity.”

  Carly suddenly felt really sick. “Oh, God. What are we in for here?” Things were bad, really bad, and it was hard not to think about her family. She just had to believe that they were going to be all right.

  “These are scary times indeed,” Linus added.

  Carly glanced at the ceiling where little David appeared to be still sleeping. She wondered if she should check on him to make sure he wasn’t dead. She squinted at him and thought she could see his chest moving with each breath he took. The poor little thing. She was sure that the shock of everything going on around them had exhausted the boy. It seemed as if he had retreated into himself. It worried her, but there was nothing she could do about it quite then. She had to focus on the task at hand because time was of the essence. David would be all right for the time being. The best way she could help him was to figure out the problem and get a solution in place.

  “Could the outages have been caused by an asteroid impact?” she asked.

  Henry scratched his head. “No, there’s no way. If that were the case, we would all be dead right now.”

  Carly’s eyebrows rose as the thoughts ran through her mind.

  Chapter Twelve

  Carly was terrified. Earth had lost its gravity, and there was a strong possibility that they were going to have problems with asteroids. It sickened her that they had all allowed the world to become a shambles. She just hoped that it wasn’t too late to save the world and the people in it. So many deaths had already happened, and they needed to put an end to the problem before the population decreased anymore. She wondered where the rest of the scientists were from NASA. Someone had to do something, or they were all doomed. How amazing would it be to have a collective group of scientists working on the problems? Instead, it was just the three of them. And none of them had any real knowledge of what had gone down behind the scenes at NASA. She hoped that Iverson was at least still in the NASA building somewhere. He could be the key to everything, since he had been working on Particle B. He might know exactly what had happened and whether or not it could be fixed.

  As Carly thought about the loss of gravity, an idea started forming in her brain. For years, research teams and scientists had scoured Earth for new ways of creating energy to sustain Earth’s gravity and to sustain the massive amounts of technology people used these days. Was it possible that the very act of saving the planet was what was causing it to fall apart? Had they just done too much at that point? Earth was now having a hard time surviving with everything they had taken over the years.

  “OK, so one quick question to you guys: what is the gravity of the moon and Jupiter?”

  Linus spoke up. “The moon has 16.6 percent of Earth’s actual gravity, while Jupiter has 2.4 times the Earth’s actual gravity. Why do you ask?”

  “Hmm. OK, but according to Newton’s law of universal gravitation, the larger an object’s mass, the more gravity it has, right? Maybe that’s the key right there. The main problem is that Earth isn’t as heavy as it once was.”

  “OK, Carly, so what are you saying here?” Linus asked.

  She was nodding, still lost in thought. “Well, I think I may know why Earth lost its gravity.”

  “We’re all ears,” Henry said. They watched her intently.

  “So, my theory is simple. It’s been right in front of our eyes the whole time. It happened due to the mining of our natural resources over several centuries; the continuation of global warming, which made the polar ice caps melt; and dumping all resources into space. We overdid it, basically. Because of this, Earth has lost a large amount of its mass, and that is why Earth has almost zero gravity. As civilians, we were stupid, and we took more than Earth could afford to give us. It was pure and simple greed. And now, we are going to pay the price for it.”

  Henry and Linus both nodded their heads in agreement. There wasn’t much else to be said. They were all in a lot of trouble.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Carly and the boys sat cramped in the moon room that Linus had built. It was truly a marvel, and it was just another reason why Carly loved science so much. Where else could you discover such marvelous things? In no other profession was there the opportunity to be around great minds and discover new possibilities. To truly search Earth and beyond for more discoveries…It was enough to make Carly catch her breath. She loved every aspect about it. Linus’s invention was no less miraculous. He would go far, especially considering he was only a kid. How much further would he go in life with such talents? That is, if they all lived to see their futures. At the rate the world was falling apart, there were no guarantees that any of them would even see the next day. She looked around the small room, hoping that the boys would in fact have a future.

  The room was tight and painted blue like a deep night sky. It had the illusion of stars all around, which made her smile. There was still a kid in that young mind, after all. She was still amazed that they were all sitting instead of floating around. Her body ached all over from the excessive use of muscles throughout the day. They needed rest more than anything, but she didn’t think they had time for such luxuries.

  There was enough room for only two of them due to the gravity exchange. Adding one more w
ould have offset the balance and had them all floating again in no time. David had still been asleep on the ceiling, so she had left him there. He was probably better off there not having to hear the horrifying things they had to discuss in order to figure out what to do next. She checked on him often, though; she didn’t want him to wake and believe he was all alone. She couldn’t imagine what it was like for a child to be separated from his family at a time like this. She was thankful that Rose was at least with her mother, someone she knew would protect her. The day had been traumatic enough without the boy having to believe he was alone in the world. She would protect him for as long as she could. She would make sure that nothing happened to him. That was the most that she could offer in such a crisis.

  “So, how do we fix this?” Linus asked. Carly looked to him for a moment, trying to gather her thoughts. She was so thankful that she could catch her breath for a moment and just think.

  “Well, we know why. Earth has lost its gravity, right? At least, we think so. So, I’m thinking the only way to restore Earth’s natural gravity is to increase the mass of Earth. Makes sense, right?” Carly said. She waited to see if they would also come to the same conclusion.

  “Yeah, of course, it makes sense. So, how do we do that? It’s not exactly going to be a walk in the park. In fact, it may be impossible,” Henry said, shrugging.

  “Yeah, I understand that it’s an extreme course of action. But what other choice do we have? I have no idea if anyone else is even doing anything to help. The scientists have disappeared for the time being. Your dad is missing. We may be the only hope the world has, so we can’t exactly just ignore it,” Carly said.