Sky Spy

I remember feeling a sense of dread as I looked up at the multiple shades of grey above me before quickly removing the heart-shaped locket from in front of my eye. The locket had been customized exactly to my liking, as any of us could do if we wanted to pay a little extra. It was a glittery, almost ethereal rose gold with pearls etched along the outline of the small, delicate heart-shaped diamond. These were our lifelines--we could not lose them (we’ll get into what happened if we did lose them later). The lockets kept us connected with each other and with what was happening around us. The weather seemed to be getting worse, and it was probably a good idea to head inside. The last thing I had wanted was to be carried away in a large gust of wind right before my high school senior prom. Before I have to go...up there. It was my only chance to experience something normal; something that people in the past used to be able to enjoy--something we haven’t enjoyed here on Earth in a long time. Priorities were different in 2410 and the community of Edenview definitely was eventful, but not in a good way. For a while, things had been normal. Chaotic, but structured. Safe, but boring. I remember sitting at my desk in my room with a pen, doing my daily journal entry. I felt so stuck and I didn’t understand the point of life. I still do and I still don’t. We’ve had a routine, but we’ve never relaxed or took the time to have fun. It was all about working. We all had our own roles to play. Once you turned eighteen, you were instructed to be a fly-er, meaning you had to partake in daily tasks 15,000 at the minimum in the air (more experienced fly-ers go as high as 45,000 feet--we’ll get to how later). You would think that in the future, the population would be less--however, it had actually increased overtime and it was majorly overpopulated. Life was more...intense.

It had been overcast and dreary for the past few weeks now, as if something dark was coming. My chest had filled up with anxiety and fear but I did my best to ignore it and do what I’d been taught--head up, suck it up and suit up. And believe me, my instincts were never wrong. People refer to me as, I guess you could say, the Nancy Drew of Edenview. Remember her? I know, she’s old news by now. When was that, the 1930s? That was well over a thousand years ago. In other words, I’m the town’s spy--the investigator--the sky spy. And I’m not the only one. Furthermore, not only is the sky consistently chaotic, filled with people, cars, transportation and arraigned buildings every which way, but the colors have also grown brighter as the world has progressed more into the future. The sky has a blinding sheen to it at all times and we actually don’t have what is considered to be a nighttime here in Edenview. The heart-shaped lockets both protect our eyesight from the intensity and work as binoculars, a device that people used in the past. The zoom function on the heart-shaped locket assists us in locating loved ones or, in my nosey case, to spy on people when I’m bored. Which is, like, all the time. But I have a strong feeling that any amount of normalcy is about to change.

One would think that in the year 2410 weather wouldn’t have been an issue, however, controlling the weather seems to be the one thing people haven’t been able to do yet, despite Planet Earth’s top tier, most advanced technologies. I mean, in the time that I had been looking up at the sky, it was almost hard to see past all of the different fly-ers up there. It honestly always seemed dangerous as heck up there; I guess society had enough time to establish some sky rules to regulate speeding and such. There were policemen up and various other safety protocols stationed in place, waiting to catch a speeder or a drunk fly-er. Additionally, I had never thought that flying cars were a logical idea, but they had been around for a while at that point. I guess flying cars allowed people to get to places faster as they naturally moved faster and there were less cars in the sky than on the ground. Actually, most people still decided to drive safely on the ground. The sky was still fairly crowded with fly-ers and it only helped out with the crowdedness down on Earth a little bit, but that’s due to our, once again, annoyingly overpopulated earth. The government had posed the choice as to whether one wanted to fly or drive their car as an option. I was still undecided at that point on what I wanted to do when I turned eighteen. Part of me had loved the idea of being able to be up in the sky, while part of me would have rather just stayed down here. Either way, whatever decision I decided to make would change the trajectory of my life completely--one for the good and one for the bad. I wish I could have told myself what was in store, but I guess making the wrong choice is bound to happen at some point...some choices were just more dire than others.

Some local inventors had developed this idea called the Fly Pack, where people would literally put a backpack type device on their backs and the straps essentially sprouted wings that allowed them to fly through the air. It was another means of transportation, and part of me had always wondered if it was going to cause way too much chaos in the sky. At that point, I had envisioned in my head the latest headline, projected across the sky throughout the city: EDENVIEW TRIBUNE: JUNE 27TH, 2410: THOUSANDS OF CASUALTIES DUE TO COLLISIONS BETWEEN FLYPACKERS AND FLY-ERS! STAY ON THE GROUND! I would have liked to believe that I was savvy enough to maneuver around all the idiots in this city, though maybe I wasn’t as smart as I thought. In my eyes, I had made it that far and I was already almost eighteen. I literally thought I was basically indestructible. Still, all this talk makes me think about just how much happened in that sky...in that town. It seemed so incredibly boring, but under the surface and above where the sky met another dimension, there was so much more going on that only a handful of powerful people knew and, well, me.

It would get tricky whenever the weather got tumultuous, which was most of the time. The authorities would try to prevent fly-ers from having access to the sky by enforcing essentially a shield and a lot of businesses had to shut down. Also, people had to remain on the ground as the lightning hit up there more forcefully. There’s always one, though, who doesn’t listen and gets seriously hurt. There’ve even been thousands of deaths over the last decade, but I would rule that out as natural selection. It turns out that government officials were hiding something far more suspicious and were covering up a lot of stuff. I was someone who despised authority and who never liked to follow the rules...I feel like an idiot for being duped by them. I guess I thought that they had changed and that, for once, the good people were in charge. I was far from right.

I guess a part of me had also been agitated that I couldn’t go up there yet. Two. More. Weeks. I had always had such a love/hate relationship with the sky. Part of me wanted to be up there with everyone else—flying, breathing and experiencing something different...something new. But a part of me also hated how people treated it. Our city, which was one of the most overpopulated cities in the entire world, treated the immediate sky as if that’s all there is. But I knew there was more to it, and more specifically, there was more above it. The only others who believed me were the other designated spies and my friends. To adults, I was just a high school senior who was only just about to graduate, filled with ignorance and unrealistic expectations. To them, space was a thing of the past and it no longer existed. You know, just like the dinosaurs. It wasn’t really as if people necessarily believed that space didn’t exist...they just ignored that it was ever there. The government had also manipulated the majority of people that space was purely a myth, and are we really surprised that so many were brainwashed into that way of thinking? It had always been known that people were never capable of thinking for themselves, as evidenced from history books.

It infuriated me that people completely ignored all of the proof and facts about space. They pretended it had never even existed. They pretended that all the endless years of research didn't exist. It’s as if all of it was for nothing. It was all for nothing. In 2410, the world had rewritten history; the world had literally erased space’s existence. I bet that people back then didn’t ever anticipate that the people of the future would completely disregard space. They probably even proposed that we’d be living in space, but it turned out to be quite the opposite, really. In 2410, a person was condemned if they so much as mentioned the word. They were arrested. Punished. Publicly humiliated and, in extreme cases, publicly tortured. That’s why I had never done more than think about it, but the problem is that I thought about it constantly. It consumed me to the point where I did something about it.

And then, as if on cue, the heart-shaped locket around my neck glowed and beamed, vibrating intensely against my chest. “CITIZENS OF EDENVIEW, PLEASE BE AWARE THAT WE ARE CURRENTLY DESCENDING EXACTLY 1,704 CITIZENS TO LAND. WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE WORSENING. TAKE PRECAUTION IMMEDIATELY. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” I clutched the locket tightly, looked up at the sky...and ran.