The Losing Side of Infinity

“You need an escort. The air’s too thin up there.”

“I don’t need a damn escort,” replied Reya. 

1 out of 411 million. Those were the odds. 

The prize? A free one-way trip to the moon, courtesy of Yurshiro Makayama, trillionaire ultra-genius savior of the world. 

What a hell of a time to win the lottery. 

“You blood-pacted the agreement Ms. Leetlier. If you die, your sister takes your place.”

Reya grimaced. She understood full well the powers of extortion. It worked well when nothing else did. She knew because she’d been Artura once, many years ago. 

Plus, she wasn’t the first to be blackballed and she certainly wouldn’t be the last. 

“Is that what you really want?” Artura barked. 

“What does it matter? If I can’t breathe on the Ladders, what makes you think I’ll survive a lunar drop?”

Artura retreated, exhausted by Reya’s constant need for attention. She opened her mouth to speak, but Reya beat her to it. 

“Don’t answer that,” she said. “I already know your stupid answer.”

A drone hovered above them. Makayama’s face—a smiling cleancut alpha gentleman with waning gibbous eyes—glittered into an animated hologram. Two-dimensional discrepancies dissolved into a clear three-dimensional bodyscape of the man everyone loved to hate. 

“Ms. Leetlier,” he began. “Please join me.”

Artura widened her eyes. She no longer had a say in what happened. He owned her, just as he’d once owned Reya. 

“You heard the man. Start climbing,” she said. “Good luck.”

Reya climbed until she reached the first precipice and swiveled herself up to a bulging joist. 

“Are you ready, Reya?” Makayama asked. 

His voice rushed over her like water over riverstones, flushed with clarity. 

“Is anyone ever ready for this sort of thing?” 

Makayama laughed, nothing more than insensitive cackles. 

“I suppose that’s fair,” he said, “but humanity’s survival depends on it. Someone has the Infinity Gene. They just don’t know it. It’s my job to help them unlock it.”

“And you think that person is me?”

“Not necessarily, but you checked all the boxes. Your DNA is the purest we’ve seen in half a century.”

She crossed her arms in front of her, passive aggressive in the most cliché sort of way.

“Get to the point. I have climbing to do.”

Makayama adjusted his pinstriped suit, flattening its lapels with the palms of both hands. Here was the man who had taken everything from his people, then called it his own in the name of science. 

The King of Exploit. 

The Lord of Manipulation.

The Devil of New Canaveral. 

“You’re scared,” he said. “I know you’ll never show it. You’re too proud, but you’re terrified.”

She scoffed, averting her eyes from the hologram. Loose strands of her disheveled hair danced in the wind—a flock of kites fluttering in a storm.

“You don’t know shit,” she said.

The hologram shifted, then blipped. Even the best technology faltered. 

“Is that why you ran away from us? Hid in the shit tanks?”

It was the first time Reya saw any sort of real emotion from the man behind the tech. She smiled at his sudden intensity. 

“No one looks in the tanks, right?” he pushed. “Why would they?”

Now he was just baiting her. An annoying flush rushed to her face as she scowled. It was her turn to show him some real emotion. She opened her mouth as if to return a jab of her own, but hesitated, choosing to climb the next sets of ladders instead. 

“I don’t think you’re seeing the entire scope of what we’re doing here, Ms. Leetlier.”

The drone whirred into motion, spinning upward to follow her.

“Tracking you was easy. We needed to bring you here so you can be the one to save humanity.”

“You can quit trying to convince me to stay,” she said, alternating her words between rungs. “I’m here, aren’t I? I can’t escape. Artura’s precautions made that quite clear.”

Reya reached the third set of ladders, but sat on the lip of its landing to wipe the sweat from her forehead. The air flowed freely here, void of the smog she’d survived for thirty-one years at surface level. 

“Will you take care of them?” she asked. “If I do what you ask, can you get my family out of the Nuclear Zone?”

Tension released from the hologram’s shoulders. 

“Of course,” he said, back to his over-the-top disingenuity. “I’m a tycoon, not a baron. How much do they need?”

Reya bit her lip, processing. 

“To live freely?” she said. “Ten million.” 

“I can give them five.”

She nodded. 

“Deal.”

It wasn’t until the sixth set of ladders that her legs grew weak and her vision blurred. The air was not air anymore, not the way she knew it anyway. She took each step cautiously, planting her sneaker across the bar before hoisting the entirety of her weight to the next rung, the monotony of it nearly unbearable. 

“I think you should’ve taken the escort, Reya,” Makayama chided. 

His laugh echoed through her head—a deflating balloon bouncing wildly in an empty room. 

“I told you,” she said, gasping. “I don’t need one.”

He sighed. The hologram rumbled, something to do with its speakers. 

“Well we’ll see if you’re right. Six ladders down, two to go. Don’t forget—you’re on camera. Say cheese.”

She peered up at the gathering of video drones buzzing several feet from where his hologram hovered. Their shudders snapped audibly, adjusting to the atmosphere’s numbing blasts of wind. 

“The world’s watching,” he grinned. “You're famous.”

Such sinister words for a man displaced. 

Be strong, she said to herself. Just a little bit farther.

She caught a glimpse of the remaining climb. The ladders bent inward toward the cockpit of a hovering rocket the size of a Ford Escort. It sat quietly above a miasmic fuel bubble, sweeping cerulean vapors licking the high altitude crosswinds as they passed.

“Tell me something,” she said. “You’re the richest person in the world, probably the smartest and yet you make your space travelers climb ladders? Are you really that twisted?”

The hologram flinched, then focused even brighter than it had before—so clear, in fact, that she could make out a whitehead-less pimple breaking through the hairline of his right ear. 

“They are a...necessary evil,” he explained. “The ship is linked to the Makayama Satellite String circling Earth’s high orbit. The satellites are paired to my neural network, which is attached here, to my brain. Everything—and I mean everything—runs from my command.”

He stopped, suddenly frustrated. He glared at Reya as if she’d forced him to drink spoiled milk. 

“I can’t divulge all my secrets,” he said, retracting, “especially if we’re on national broadcast.”

“Artura’s pod took me this far,” she said. “Why not the rest of the way?”

She passed the seventh ladder marker as she talked. Each breath flooded her lungs with the pain of a thousand solar flares. 

“The pod you took to the skypad can only climb so high.” 

She kept her body moving— more like stumbling—rung to rung. Her brain ached for relief, every nerve in her body igniting into panicked twitches.

“The ladders are just the last mile—the last 5,280 feet. It feels like more, though, doesn’t it?”

Stratifying clouds floated far below her now, colorless cotton candy stretching among earthen grids below. 

“26,000 feet of elevation,” Makayama grinned. “It’s a long way down from here.”

She reached the cabin, pinning her fingers to the lip of it. She felt stable enough until her legs gave out and, suddenly, the ropes of muscles in her arms tightened to catch her from free fall. She dangled there for a moment in shock. Had she come this far just to lose it all here? To fall to her death at the last possible moment?

Hell no.

She mustered the strength to swing a leg to the platform and clumsily barrel-roll into the safety of the rocket, but her wheezing worsened as the adrenaline left her system. Nothing but dead space filled her lungs now, draining the blood from her face in one swoop of color.  

“Close...the...door,” she managed. 

A few tense moments passed before the door slid shut. The pressure lock engaged and, with a blast of warm air, her vision cleared to a new projection of Makayama manifesting from a marble-sized lens directly opposite her. A grid of blinking lights danced peacefully from one side of the panel to the other as Makayama appeared in full.  

“You just continue to surprise me,” he said.

Reya rose to her feet, but had forgotten what it was like to breathe. The rush hit her like half a dozen coffees injected straight into her veins. Her heart raged, vision saturating into kaleidoscopic shapes and colors. It sent her retreating to the corner of the ship with her knees pressed tightly to her chest. 

“The disorientation will wear off,” Makayama said. “Just give it a moment.”

“The Infinity Gene,” she managed to say. “It’s not real.”

No weakness could break his resolute confidence now. 

“Earth has tethered us down for millenia,” he said. “Its chemical makeup kept us from our true evolution. We know that now.”

“And the Infinity Gene is your magic wand?”

“Full interstellar expansion. Civilizations across galaxies. Infinite opportunity to grow, to build, to make this universe ours. That’s power.”

The rocket kicked and, as if she were in an elevator, Reya dipped into a gravity pull as Earth became dark space. 

“I’m not the villain you think I am,” he said.

The timer on the front window-console read four minutes and twelve seconds until lunar landfall. She settled back into her normal self as the dizziness filtered away.

“Prove it,” she said. 

Makayama grimaced. 

“How can you not see what I see? How can you not believe that the rewards here far outweigh the risks?”

The projection speaker rattled as the volume in his voice increased. Annoyance crept into his already cracking tone. 

“Humanity has fought for decades—centuries—for what we are on the verge of discovering! Can you imagine what 1960s America would’ve done to find the Infinity Gene? Or—God forbid—the USSR? China? Where would we be today if they’d known about it?”

“Well, for starters,” she said, “I wouldn’t be here.”

The console clicked time into space—three minutes and fourteen seconds. The low rumble of the fuel cells meant a steady approach. 

“You kill people,” she growled.

The hologram launched itself toward her. 

“So I can save millions!”

There it was—the anger, the rage in being told no. 

She shook her head. 

“I learned who you were a long time ago, Shiro,” she answered. “A murderer.”

She lifted herself from the floor and slowly made her way to the console. 

“We’ve landed,” Makayama said, calmer now. “It’s time.”

She extended a hand, but it was too late. She leaned over an empty basin and retched. Sloppy sounds of splashing bile filled the cabin while Makayama watched impatiently. 

“Altitude sickness,” he said. “It’ll pass. Good news—it won’t affect the outcome.”

Reya wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, taken aback by the bulge of her knuckles through the skin of her fingers. Sure, the last couple of years had taken a toll on her, but she was slowly withering away into nothing but bone and skin. That would have to change when she returned hom. 

Destiny, she thought. 

Isn’t that what they called it? 

She closed her eyes, remembering the face of her sister back home alone in the gateway, smears of dirt across her face. 

This one’s for you, Tai, she thought. Godspeed. 

The basin wobbled as she slipped a hand into the mess, swirling her fingers until she clasped a miniature rectangular block. Makayama watched in dismay. A look of sheer disappointment flooded his eyes. 

“Come on, Reya. I never took you for a fool,” he said.

His eyes fell to the gadget in her fingers. She wasn’t hiding it. His expression told her everything she needed to know. 

“So the whole thing about your family was a ploy?” he laughed. The anger in his words crystallized. “You’ll have to do better than a virus you bought in the Glades. You forget I’ve been doing this for twenty years now. None of this fazes me anymore.”

She smiled—the same sinister grin he’d used to mock her earlier. 

“It’s not a virus. It’s a hack. Goodbye, Makayama.”

Time slowed. She sprinted for the mainframe, swinging her arm forward as the hologram screamed, wide eyes and bared teeth. She slid the device into its input above the marble lens as the cockpit door swung open and vacuumed her out into the empty. As she peered backward in those final moments, the last thing she saw was the dead fizzle of Makayama’s hologram. 

Somewhere in the distance, the universe cracked in two. 

“The world is still reeling from the news of trillionaire, space tycoon Yurshiro Makayama’s death on Saturday afternoon. 

“Authorities suspect a hack in his newest venture—BrainLink technologies—led to his untimely death, but that’s where the trail of possible foul play runs cold. An M-Technologies spokesperson told us that Makayama’s neural chip met interference, then went dark before they had a chance to run diagnostics and identify the problem. He died shortly after.  

“Makayama is most known for his controversial agreement with the United States government to enact an annual, one-person Infinity Gene Moon Trial into legislation. 

“To date, the Trials have resulted in nine deaths and the Infinity Gene remains undiscovered. This year’s candidate was a fourth-generation outer limits resident thirty-one year old named Reya Leetlier. Initial analysis of the Trial shows Leetlier was killed in a malfunction of the TS99 rocket’s cabin door when it opened unexpectedly.

“Neerita Makayama, Yurshiro’s first born son, will take over his father’s responsibilities at M-Technologies in the hopes of keeping his father’s legacy alive. The Makayama family requests that people respect their privacy during this difficult time.”

Tai stood in front of a dirty pane of glass. The storefront had been locked and bolted in chains, but the projector screens continued playing snippets of the nightly news. 

She dyed her pixie-cut vanilla blonde after Reya’s accident to hide the uncanny resemblance to her sister, just in case the feds came snooping, but they hadn’t, at least not yet. She liked it in an odd, eccentric kind of a way. She appeared more riot proof this way.

She turned to face an empty street, cradling a glass tablet in the crook of her arm. On it, the screen flashed three words in bold type. 

LUNAR THERMAL READING, it blinked.

Tai smiled. 

“Okay, Rey,” she whispered. “Time to get you home.”