Falling

• Lizzy Katona, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2013

It was called ‘Falling’.

The new sensation had spread through the streets of 2025 like a virus without confines, eating into every crack and cranny that welcomed it. The sensation was an enhancer, a patch that fitted neatly on the tip of your tongue and fizzed like soft drink. The chemicals reacted with the brain’s synapses, creating a strong, organic awareness when the heart rate slows. It was adrenalin and bliss in a time without such things. You settle down on a couch, roll your shoulders, scratch your nose and you’re eyelids slowly close.

Then you’re falling. Like stepping off a cliff, you’re in a gusty free fall, even though your body isn’t moving. You can hear the wind lash past your ears, it’s so real. Then, as rapid as a bungee cord snapping back, you’re jerking awake, heart thudding, pulse racing, wondering what had just happened. Your mind doesn’t understand why your body doesn’t fit in the picture. Where’s the wind whip? Why can’t you feel the rope burn? That sense of disconnection, where your mind is ripped apart between signals and substances, morphed into addiction.

In reality you’re not really falling. You’re been pulled. The chemicals didn’t just incur a falling sensation; it opened your mind to the world, every world, and made it vulnerable to those more willing to keep your mind safe, more than yourself. In darker planes a pure mind went for a good price and an empty body was worth a fortune, especially in dimensional black marketing.

In the years that followed the first taste of 'Falling' armies were dedicated to preventing unwanted sellers sporing on Earth. But ‘Falling’ was bacterium in a new environment, the black market sellers adapted to the world’s defences and multiplied. Earth would fall, and it would fall without a knotted cord to snap it back in place.

‘Falling’ continued on the streets, the wanting had no ending as poison, simply, goes where poisons welcome. Lost souls and madness-infected populaces warmly welcomed the sensation as it shrouded above nations. Resisting minds rose in power. Chaos, collapse and creation.

Or at least, that’s what I predict will happen.

I held the chemical patch up to the light, eyeing the red, molten veins on ‘Falling’s’ transparent skin. I could reign in a world taken by sensation. When I iron out the kinks… A click to the right caught my attention. My white coat assistant entered through a thick, glass door, took his place next to my steel chair and tightened the Velcro strap, tying my left wrist to the metal. He held out his hand respectively for my other arm and waited. I placed the patch on my tongue, lowered my free arm to the Velcro and closed my eyes.

If you didn’t have the cord tying you to reality, you’ll really fall. Then you won’t come back. Because they’ll have you.