“Chura?”

“As far as you know,” she said. She looked a lot different. Still a pretty girl, but with short, bobbed blonde hair instead of the long black hair she had when I met her.

I know I visibly brightened even though I tried not to draw attention. “Are you okay? Where are your mom and your aunt?”

“They’re fine, but we can’t get out much right now.”

“I can understand. The cops paid me a nice visit the day I met you ladies.”

“Sorry about that. Danetta spent a long time raising the money for the jump, and since I helped she let me go along. Of course, then mom had to go, too.”

“How old are you, anyway? 13?” I was surprised they would get such a young girl involved.

“No, I’m 14, thank you very much.”

“Oh, then let’s get out the hoverchair. You might break a hip.”

She punched my shoulder.

“Did you notice everybody’s faces?” she asked.

I looked around the park. They were the usual folk, business people walking or hovering their way home from work, parents out spending time with their children. Except the fact that they actually had a park to play in, I didn’t see anything unusual.

Then it hit me.

“Nobody’s wearing an oxygen mask,” I said. Young, old, fast, slow — nobody needed help breathing. They could just draw it right out of the air, unfiltered and unassisted. I had no memory of that during my lifetime.

“Really sweeps, huh?”

“All this because of one little note?”

“Aunt Danetta says sometimes it just takes a single clap to start an avalanche.”

“Damn. Oh, sorry.”

“That’s okay, Falcon. I’ve heard worse.”

“You know, even though you and your aunt see this as a great thing, and I gotta admit I’m starting to see the light, era contamination is a serious crime. I don’t know exactly what they might do to you, but they could lock up your aunt for life, and your mom for a very long time.”

“Yeah, we know. But that’s not the worst part.”

I braced myself internally. “Do I want to hear this?”

“You need to.”

She handed me a portable replay device. It showed a news clip of a man standing on a ledge downtown, announcing that he was going to jump if they didn’t get his ex-wife up there. Nobody better come near him, he said, or it was all over.

I looked up at Chura. “What’s he raving on about? The impact absorption shield will catch him.”

She pointed at the screen.

The camera zoomed out to show a crowd staring upward with rapt concern. That didn’t seem right. What was going on? There was no reason to threaten to jump from a building. It would do nothing.

She took the display from my hands, then made sure I was looking in her eyes. “Impact absorption shields don’t exist.”

“What?”

“The man who invented them was never born.”

I leaned over, hand to my forehead. This was not going to be good. “And Danetta’s actions had something to do with that?”

“We think so. Maybe somebody way back in his family tree drowned in a flood or something.”

“A flood that wouldn’t have happened had they dammed the Buffalo.”

“Right.”

“Shit. Oh, sorry again. I haven’t been around teenagers much since I was younger.”

“Trust me, you don’t need to apologize. We all pretty much said that when we saw this news report and mom did some research.”

“Give me some time to sit here and take all this in.”

The man who had invented the, if you’ll pardon the expression, groundbreaking device, was Jacob Beers. He was born in Canada, but most of his family before him were Americans. After losing a loved one to a skydiving accident, and talking to families of other victims, he thought what a tragic shame it was that with all the modern conveniences of life, something as basic and primitive as falling could kill a person.

He dedicated his life’s work to designing and perfecting a system that would catch falling people. At first he was laughed at, and his first few tries caught rain and anything else that fell from the sky naturally. Once the system was “smart” enough to activate only when something alive was falling, people realized the value it could hold in other applications and anxiously awaited the final product.

It was approved and adopted by cities everywhere. Businesses and governments all installed them. Skyscraper developers made them standard equipment both during and following construction. Insurance companies awarded adopters with premium discounts. Emergency rooms and the workers who delivered injured patients to them cheered.

It was considered one of the greatest inventions in human history. Then, Beers went one step farther and tweaked the system to detect falling objects about to strike a living thing.

Now, because of something Danetta changed, all that was gone. Suicide jumps had continued. Malfunctioning skyporters had fallen to kill their drivers and anyone unfortunate enough to be on the street below. Office workers escaping fires had been left with no option but to jump to their deaths. Not to mention the significant if much less numerous skydiving deaths Beers originally set out to prevent.

“We have to go back and change history again,” Chura said.

“I was afraid you were going to say that.”

(continue to Part Seven)