"GRAVITY: We Don't Understand It!"

I got a C when I gave that presentation in high school. Ms. Pondus was not amused when I spent seven minutes talking about all the things physicists don't understand about gravity instead of the boring things about the four fundamental forces or bowling balls on a foam surface. Spacetime curvature just didn't make sense to me, anyways. Ms. Pondus accused me of not studying hard enough. Of course, that was before astronomers noticed the force of gravity itself was changing.

I wonder what Ms. Pondus would say if she were still around today. The day that we officially lose gravity.

It didn't go away all at once, of course. The news was interviewing physicists left and right after the first announcement. Suddenly, physicists became rock stars. They threw around words like "flattening" and "exponential" and "asymptotic" and said that we would never hit exactly zero gravity. The super brilliant ones talked about experiments that could fix the loss of gravity and save the entire Solar System, and maybe the universe.

That was before the world lost half of its physics expertise overnight, when one annual meeting of a physical society turned into such a wild drug-fueled party that the physicists who didn't go into cardiac arrest were too incapacitated to escape when a fire broke out.

I guess fame gets to everyone. Although some people think it was a terrorist attack,

By the time I was 27, we had built the Arks: Giant spaceships that simulated gravity by rotating. Giant spaceships built to try and retain some of the air that the Earth was rapidly losing to space in low gravity. Giant spaceships that gave hundreds of thousands of humans hope to extend their lifespans.

I'm not sure whether the tens of billions left behind on Earth suffocated or froze first. But I hear the last Olympics had the most amazing pole vaulting the world had ever seen.

Today, though, none of it mattered. The Sun itself was about to reach point where its gravity could no longer keep its hydrogen fusing into helium. The Sun would slowly fade into darkness as its gaseous layers flew away, leaving only a cooling iron core behind.

After that... darkness.

The Arks' solar panels would become almost useless. We would become fully reliant on our own experimental fusion reactor to power our survival.

This was our "zero-G" moment.

The Allied Fleet was preparing for zero-G by extracting hydrogen from the remnants of Jupiter's atmosphere. This hydrogen would become our fuel for nuclear fusion. Without it, we had only weeks to survive. With it, we could buy ourselves a few generations.

Meanwhile, I'm stuck here with literally the crappiest job imaginable here in Nutrient Reclamation. I keep the pumps in working order to turn our shit into something more palatable.

The intercom system roared to life, breaking me out of my thoughts.

"Attention all personnel. Solar output is dropping ahead of predictions. We are transitioning to an emergency fusion core start-up immediately."

"Mike! Ya hear that?" Jay yelled at me.

"Ahh shit, the pumps aren't ready for cooling yet!" I yelled back. "Call up Rachel, this is gonna be ugly!"

While Jay paged our supervisor, I started to turn the valves to divert our water supply from reclamation to cooling. If we were going to have any hope of surviving zero-G, we would need to save ourselves from the excess heat of the reactor.

In a universe where energy was becoming the scarcest resource, we could all die from too much of it.