Baye Column
"Test the walls. Test your fate. We do not need to brave death each day to be courageous, but we must be courageous."
Centenary Testimony of Myla Ward-Harkes:
Friendship Column, 186NCE (2323AD)
We’d always known there was something different about my brother Cody, but it wasn’t until the day after my twelfth birthday that I fully understood just how very different he was. He was in the throes of his cultural project, for which no one was the least surprised he selected the topic of daredevils to study. Cody himself, when he was only twelve, once climbed the trellis above the Geit Park beer garden, and he’d stepped along the top of it, taking care not to trip along the vines of hops growing there. None of us kids knew what those plants were as we were playing out on the green and looked up to see Cody stepping over the grown-ups as our sister Alma might on the balance beam during a gymnastics meet. No flips, no pirouettes, no form to speak of. Cody just walked for the sake of walking, where no one else would think to venture, causing a ruckus as the adults tried to shout him down before he fell onto their tables, spoiling a quiet afternoon. He didn’t fall though.
It was always in him, back then, and the day after my twelfth birthday, as I said before. He was seventeen that time, and the call came to my mother, who was with us at home, overseeing our lessons. She flew into a frantic state when the safety officer called and told her that Cody was in the Ag Column, climbing up the central spire. One of the workers there had noticed damage to some of the lettuces on the lower level. She’d followed the trail of damage upwards with a drone over a hundred meters and was shocked to see a boy, which the city’s narrow AI immediately identified as Cody Ward. He was hanging from the growth cage, climbing.
We kids thought it was brilliant. We erupted in laughter and joked about Cody grabbing us fruits before mother scolded us and ran out the door, leaving us with our tutoring programs. We were shocked and confused by the way she’d reacted. None of us perceived that there could be any danger at all. While the others were debating, I ran out our flat and headed for the Ag Column myself, and the rest of the younger children followed, even down to Zoe, who was only four at the time. We came streaming into the column’s public access, one by one, each of us looking up into the greenery, which seemingly extended upward infinitely unto that strange optical point where all the walls and cylinders seemed to merge into a single green spot, beyond which nothing was discernable. The great cavern of greenery.
At first, I couldn’t see anyone there. There was no one out front. It seemed as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening at all. Then I heard voices in the distance, emanating from the far side of the central pillar. And up above, I could hear the whisper of the Ag drones floating up and down. I immediately began to scan the walls, the cylinders, and the spires for Cody. In my mind—a child’s mind—I couldn’t imagine that a person could climb any higher than the height of the climbing wall in the gymnasium complex in the Alagoas Column, where Cody was a fixture, of course, being among the best competitive climbers in all the Columns. Even that height was impossibly high for me to imagine climbing, fifty meters up the competition routes. I scanned downward from about that level to locate Cody on the various walls and cylinders of the Ag Column, walking toward the voices, my younger siblings in tow. We still thought it was some sort of fun stunt, an exhibition of the sort Cody would pull off to get everyone’s attention.
As I approached the group of adults at the center of the column, I saw my mother, two of my older brothers, Liam and Foster, Mandy, my oldest sister—the boss—and all the staff of the lower section of the Ag Column. Mom took one look at me, her eyes flushed with tears. She instantaneously shifted moods, from some emotion I’d never seen before to an all-too-familiar parental indignation.
“Myla Iris Ward,” she said in that unmistakable tone, “just what the hell do you think you’re doing coming down here?”
And she looked over my shoulders to see the rest of the clan arriving fast on my heels. Mom just looked at Mandy and shouted in a tone I’d never heard from her before, “Get them out of here now!”
As Mandy approached me, I took note of one of the workers, his neck fixed almost straight up in the air, tracking something high up along the central spire. Whatever he was following with his eyes seemed hundreds of meters above the deck where we stood. There was the most insignificant speck moving slowly amongst the greenery so high above.
Mandy attempted to take me by the hand, and I pulled against her, sensing that something was terribly wrong.
“No!” I shouted at her. “Mandy, no!”
Mandy was twenty-two, and this time, there was no playing, no negotiating. She picked me up, kicking and fighting back against her, and she carried me out like I was nothing, not even pausing to give me the opportunity to walk on my own. Behind her, I could see Foster and Liam ushering the rest of our siblings out behind us. And in the background, I could hear mom crying into one of the ag workers’ tablets, “Your sisters are down here, Cody! What if they saw you fall?”
It wasn’t until that moment that it hit me. That impossibly tiny speck on that wall, hundreds of meters up the growth field, was Cody, my brother Cody Ward, and he was still climbing.
Not much was said within our family about “Cody Ward’s Ag stunt” as the climb became known throughout the Columns. Jorie Daley, the superintendent of the Ag Column, was the one who got credit for talking him down. She convinced Cody, over the drone’s com channel, that the mid-bottom tiers, where the frames were sized for stone fruits, were far too fragile to support the weight of a fully grown person. Only the spider-bots went up there to seed and to harvest. Cody told me he didn’t know whether that was true, but he didn’t think it was smart to bet his life on whether Jorie Daley was lying about it. He found the nearest catwalk and climbed down to the crowd of Ag workers and public officials who’d gathered to try to talk him down.
Mom slapped him, apparently. None of us younger kids were there to see it. We just heard whispers.
The incident changed the trajectory of his life. Or at least it seemed like it did. It might have been that it was always his trajectory and no one had noticed until he attempted to scale the Ag Column. But Cody seemed different after that, more secret rebel than simple mischief maker.
He resented the scrutiny that one act of defiance had brought down upon him. He’d finished his Basics early and had established his record as an excellent student. He’d never been in trouble before. He’d had his heart set on an engineering track in the Foundry Column. Cody didn’t love academics, but insofar as he tolerated coursework, he saw it as a means to an apprenticeship in robotics. He and his girlfriend Abby Plain took third prize colony-wide in the pre-collegiate bird build. Theirs was a thrush, a remarkably life-like and agile flier.
Because of that one lapse in judgement, though, that entire pathway was placed on hold, as was the independent housing track that had already been approved by the Alagoas Column’s board. Everyone felt that Cody needed more supervision. My brothers and sisters all kept their distance, which was, I suppose, what drew me closer to him.
He sulked a lot when I went to his room to sit with him.
“What did it feel like,” I asked him one night, not even specifying what I was asking.
He met eyes with me and smiled. He knew exactly what I was talking about.
“Weren’t you scared—all the way up there?”
“Not scared, Jitterbug,” he said. “It’s just a feeling. My mind has never been so quiet. It’s like a different way of being. It’s hard to explain. I could still hear, but everything went silent.”
He told me to keep it between us, and then he gave me a folder filled with some of the VR files he’d used to research his culture project. They were all different types of films on daredevils of all kinds from Earth—pilots, racecar drivers, extreme skiers, a peculiar subset of skydivers who wore special flight suits. The most intriguing figure of all these remarkable people, whose lives were lived on the knife-edge between death and perfection, was Alex Honnold, for both me and Cody. He’d found in the archive, an old 2D documentary that had been upscaled to VR ages ago, probably on Earth. It captured the day when this young man scaled the face of a mountain called El Capitan in America with no safety measures. He climbed for hours at the peril of death from the smallest slip, surmounting the entirety of the rock face in just under four hours. As I watched his story, I wasn’t sure what was more unbelievable, the utterly breathtaking scale of the mountains of Earth or the impossibly courageous attempt to scale a thousand-meter rock face without so much as a rope for support.
After watching this strange and miraculous drama unfold, even at barely twelve years old, I could see what Cody couldn’t then. That young man wasn’t just fearless, he was meticulous in his preparation, and well-studied. I knew this because I had a friend at the time who was an obsessive figure skater. Alex was like Presha McKenna, who at any spare moment, at any place, at any time, would strike a pose, walking through her routine, mouthing her movements—inner edge, outer edge, jump, land, toe, toe, heel. And I saw the same in that young man, who knew every place on that thousand meters of rock he needed to set his fingers and feet.
Cody was just seventeen. He didn’t know anything.
“They’re not mad at you for doing it, Cody,” I told him, “they’re mad because you didn’t know what you were doing.”
He got upset at the accusation.
“I’ve only been climbing all my life, Myla. All my life. The fruit racks are a thousand times easier than the climbing wall. Everything’s a ladder in there.”
“But you didn’t know about the weight of it—whether it could hold you, did you?”
“How do you know about any of that?”
“I overheard Mandy and Foster talking about it with Dad. You didn’t know, did you?”
He didn’t answer.
“That’s why they’re so upset, Cody. Alex never would have done that. He never would have started without knowing everything. Every step, every move.”
“Are you mad at me, Jitterbug?” he asked.
“Only for not telling me first, I guess.”
“I think she was lying about the fruit racks—Jorie Daley. I got my hands on the bottom of them. They felt solid enough. I think they lied to get me to come down.”
He sulked about it for months, not just the consequences—being stuck at home for another year and the monitoring—but it was the way everyone looked at him differently, as though he’d set out to cause everyone so much trouble. Nobody understood the motivation. As strange as it sounds to say it now, though, I did. I understood. I’d watched all those people flying around Earth in their silly fabric flight suits. Cody had been saying it for years. Here in the Columns, we were shipmates aboard a ship in a bottle, hermetically sealed. Cody Ward wanted to fly, and he was born, as we all were, into a world without a sky.
It was in that last year when Cody was still at home that he took work with one of the engineering units framing the interior of the newest column. The project hadn’t taken a name at that time. Cody and the rest of the crews just called it the Thirteen. Outwardly, Cody seemed to be sorry for his stunt, and he did everything asked of him to rehabilitate his standing within the community. When people were watching, he didn’t so much as look up at the superstructure of the columns. He met people with eyes fixed on the level. Privately, though, I knew he was still contemplating, waiting, figuring out when it would be safe for him to start plotting his next climb.
The safety measures for the framing units were quite strict. There wasn’t even an open staircase in the new column as it was going up, and exposure was limited to senior workers. Cody’s climbing background meant he was accustomed to fall gear, but it would be years before the engineering team even gave him a chance to qualify.
He took me down to the site one weekend when everything was shut down. I’d seen pictures of the early columns as they were being constructed, but it was a different sight to see with my own eyes.
The first thing I noticed was how open things seemed. Certainly there were open spaces in the parks and amphitheaters and recreation settings on each of the completed columns—especially the Ag Column and the Arbor Column. But when we got to the top of the superstructure where the new girders were going up, which was about two hundred meters up from the base level at the time, you could look up into the most tremendous cavern you could ever imagine. It was almost unfathomable—eight hundred meters to the ceiling, and from the center of that enormous rock cylinder it was a full two hundred fifty meters to either wall.
I hadn’t started running competitively at that point, but I could see the scale in the empty column even more so than in the athletics level in the Alagoas Column, where the track merely circled the football pitch. The walkways around each of the columns were four times that, but you could never see what that distance looked like anywhere but here. The only other place I’d ever been that approached the enormity of this empty column was the Eliot Hall in the Griffin Column—that and the illusion of the sky sim at night.
“What do you think, Jitterbug?” he asked me from the top of the stairwell. “Pretty amazing, right?”
“I mean, it’s the biggest place I’ve seen that’s not in VR.”
“That’s our column too, I guess. Or it was like this about sixty years ago.”
I was struck by the yellows and oranges in the rock. Very few of us who weren’t engineers ever really saw the walls outside the framework of the columns. It was striking to know that just outside the spaces we all took as the boundaries of our lived reality, there was this raw rock edifice holding our world inside.
“It’s weird, Cody,” I said. “It’s probably the smallest I’ve ever felt in a place. Yet somehow I’ve never felt so closed in.”
“The city, or I guess each column, little sister—they’re all built on illusion, tricking the eye into thinking we live in a normal place.”
I stuck my nose to the cage to see if I could see the interior of that vast rock cylinder without any of the thin metal bars in my peripheral vision. I had to close one eye to do it. Then Cody let me stand on his shoulders so I could look up toward the cranes hanging from the ceiling of the column hundreds of meters up. I got dizzy, as though I was staring into an abyss upside down.
I never saw that visit as anything other than Cody showing off the fact that he had access, and maybe at the time it was just that. I hadn’t climbed so many stairs in my life, though. And I remembered that peek behind our society’s curtains the following year when I first walked the Triangle.
The Triangle footrace, such as it was for me at fourteen, ran down the tube lines between Griffin, Avery’s, and the Ag Column, a thirty-kilometer course at daybreak on the third morning of Carnival—the only time all year when the trams didn’t run. For me, it was another look at the façade. The tubes, of course, seemed so much longer than I’d ever imagined because my only perspective before then was from inside the tram, zipping past at speed. The wall paintings, which always seemed so perfect and dynamic—animated artwork acting out the shared history of our people, of past histories on Earth, of the voyage of our Founders—these murals were part of my everyday life. On foot, though, there was no way I could ever run fast enough to even see a shape, a fragment, a figment of all those dynamic stories in images and colors that I knew by heart. Here, they were just long blotches of color that extended onward like I was on the inside of a tremendous striped worm that couldn’t make up its mind about what color it wanted to be. As I walked and periodically jogged, I played at trying to figure out which colored stripes were which part of which story or picture.
I never took another tram ride again without imagining both perspectives as we sped past in our clear compartment.
After that, I was in awe of the winners of that race, not just in the adult category, where the winner that year set a record, finishing in just over an hour and a half, but in the Juniors division as well, where one of the older boys from Bimini Column broke the two-hour mark. That first race for me was a half-day affair, a social engagement with friends. None of my friends, though, ever wanted to run the tunnels again. I couldn’t wait to get back in there, but next time, I was going to go fast. I had visions of blurring those lines on the wall back into shapes and images. I wanted to set records, to scratch my name onto the wall at the entrance to the Griffin Tunnel with the other winners.
I don’t remember seeing Cody that day, but I must have. I’m certain we didn’t discuss it then, though, because I remember his surprise several months later when I told him how obsessed I had become with running. I think that was after my first podium at a grade-level track meet. I have a vague recollection of him being encouraging. I was seeing less and less of him that year because he had moved out on his own by then and I was engrossed in my Basics courses, athletics, and activities.
He offered to train with me in the mornings, which, at first, I was reluctant to do. “I get up early,” Cody told me. “Long before the rest of the city gets up.”
He was restless. His alarm went off at four, I remember him telling me. He would get in a run at the Thirteen, circling the open walkway at base-level and then up the stairs. Cody had to finish his run long before any of the workers showed up to get the site operational again for the day. Then he went to the climbing wall. After that, he went to work. Cody’s program sounded insane to me then. But as my first fall semester of Basics continued and I got more serious about running, all the lines on my coaching app suggested more training, and getting up early was the easiest way to fit it into my schedule.
I still remember our first day, my hands on my knees, gasping for air after half a lap while Cody pushed by me effortlessly two more times. Then he went charging up the stairs like an animal, completing three repetitions as I circled around the skeletal girders of the outer framing.
We were just kids then. I think he was nineteen or maybe barely twenty. Yet here we were, starting every weekday training—for him, it was for climbing meets, for me it was the Triangle. I was determined to win the Girls Juniors before I graduated.
By the end of that first year training with Cody, I’d begun my serious development as a runner. I graduated from merely finishing all three laps as an accomplishment to running all three laps on a program of some sort—interval training, timed distance, form work—all through the coaching program that took movement analysis, data analysis, rated me, and prescribed my next workout. Once I could run with him, Cody would run pace on most of my intervals, or he would give me a race if I wanted, always pulling away at the end and then heading right to the stairs.
By year two, I was running the stairs with him. And I broke the three-hour mark in the Triangle that year. There were only four other girls in the entire Columns ahead of me, only one of whom was my year in Basics.
I couldn’t help but keep track of Cody’s successes on the climbing wall. By then, there were only two men in the city who were even competitive with him. It seemed he was faster going up the wall than he was running alongside me in the Thirteen each morning. Once that buzzer sounded, it was as though Cody morphed into some sort of spider-like creature, its arms and legs spread outward over the wall, far beyond its frame, and gravity would take a six- to twenty-second break, depending on whether he was running fifteen, thirty, or fifty-meter routes.
He would always shrug it off whenever anyone expressed the justifiable awe at such athletic feats.
“This isn’t even real climbing,” he would say to me in private. “It’s fake like everything else around here.”
I was too young then to know how to push back against him. How many times I wished I could have gone back and told him with a mother’s tenderness or a grandmother’s wisdom how real our family’s love for each other was—how our growth together in that place was as real as any family in human history. All the most important things were always real. Cody was just talking about the walls.
During my third year of Basics, I turned seventeen. It didn’t occur to me then as I was training with Cody each day, but I was the same age then as he was when he’d scaled the Ag Column. That stunt was a distant memory for everyone by then. Even in our family it had become more of a joke than any point of family shame or consternation. Even mom thought it was a little funny in hindsight.
We were still meeting at the Thirteen each day. I’d placed third for Juniors the previous year in the Triangle, and that upcoming year I was gunning both for victory and a Juniors course record. Cody would come out to pace me, but we didn’t run together for most of the workout. While I was running, he would sneak off into the superstructure. It happened a little at a time. He’d just say, “I’m going to step away for a bit, Myla,” and he’d vanish for a half hour or so. As it became more frequent, I asked him about it.
“I’m climbing,” he told me. “Just a few sections that I couldn’t do in the open halls.”
“You’re wearing a harness, right?” I asked, referring to the drone-based safety gear speed climbers would wear on the wall in lieu of a rope. They couldn’t stop a fall, but they lowered fall speeds dramatically enough that a fall from even a great height wouldn’t be fatal.
He smirked when he answered. “Of course, Myla. What do you think?”
The truth was that I wasn’t sure what to think. He had grown more responsible. He’d been a fixture on the framing team for five years by then and never had a safety violation. He was practically living with his girlfriend Abby, whom he’d converted into an avid climber. Cody seemed responsible, grown up. The teenage stunts seemed to be far behind him. But one morning I decided to skip my intervals and head straight for the stairs after warming up. By then, the framing for the column was entirely completed, and sometimes, I’d attempt to run it before the workers arrived—a thousand-meter staircase from bottom to top. That was a monster workout I needed to tackle in intervals. Two flights jogging, three flights walking, one flight sprint. I heard him before I saw anything. It sounded like there was a malfunctioning robot out in the gap between the outer frame and the rock edifice of the column. I couldn’t exit the stairway without Cody’s thumbprint. So I climbed another five flights to see if I could get a better angle. And I waited, listening.
It was about six hundred meters up, I guessed. Then I saw Cody climb from the outer thermal shaft into the gap in the framework of the column where the heat sink and ventilator units had yet to be installed. He was wearing a harness, but still. Those shafts ran straight down.
I waited for him at the entrance while he keyed into the stairwell with his thumb.
“Cody?” I said. “What the hell are you doing in the air shaft?”
“It’s the only contiguous climb from bottom to top.”
“Would that thing even fire for long enough to catch you?” I asked him, gesturing to his harness.
He shrugged. “Why wouldn’t it?”
“They’re designed to slow a fall when people are bouldering below the red line at the gym, not six hundred meters up in the air shaft.”
“You still fall at the same speed, Myla. Believe me. I know.”
“But what are you doing in there?”
“You know what I’m doing. I’m going to climb this column before the air system goes live next year. I do a section at a time to test the wall in there, to feel the pattern. Repeat it and perfect it as each section goes up.”
In the moment then, as difficult as it is to admit it now, I said nothing more about it. Cody was so self-assured. He walked with such overwhelming confidence in what he was doing that I didn’t challenge him. I had a terrible feeling in my gut about what he had been doing under my nose. Even though I knew that he intended to climb the whole column, I did not think—or at least I did not know for sure—that he intended to free climb it without a harness. And I did not ask. I merely hoped.
He looked at me that day, in that stairwell, so early—it couldn’t have been later than 5:30—and in his eyes he declared without saying anything that he believed we had always had an understanding, and he begged me not to be betrayed, hinting at the shame he would feel for me if I went outside the wordless pact and told our secret to our whole tiny self-contained world. All this with a look as he passed and began to walk down, skipping steps at a time, leaving me to contemplate my place as brother’s keeper. I remember thinking that very phrase on the way down—brother’s keeper—and thinking, Cody Ward will not be kept. Not by anyone.
The concerns I had over Cody’s venture dissipated over the next several months. I won the Juniors at the Triangle and set a course record, and though we celebrated the accomplishment, both Cody and I had the same mindset—that I had one more year to go—one more year to put Myla Ward’s time so far ahead of past holders that future runners would think twice about even trying to catch me. The stripes on the wall never did get shorter, though.
The morning after winning the Triangle, I was back at the Thirteen with Cody, training. We weren’t racing anybody else anymore. We were competing against ourselves. That was the focus. A few weeks after the Triangle, though, I found myself struggling to focus. I kept thinking about our little society, about humanity, all those people on Earth. I could keep pushing myself and beat every woman in our bottle world, and when I looked in the archives at records of races run on Earth—those women ran marathons at paces that were unfathomable to me. It seemed as though there were places on Earth where people had been built to run. The Columns was not such a place. And even if I did, through a lifetime of work and dedication and perseverance, somehow manage to best these long-dead women, who would know? Who would care?
I was, at seventeen, getting the first taste of the crisis in meaning our little society had been struggling with since its inception. Why keep going? Because the founders did? So that one day, generations in the future, when we could finally build enough infrastructure to leave this star system, our distant children could go explore the stars like our long-dead ancestors intended?
It wasn’t long before my times started to reflect my growing disillusionment. I was beginning to realize for the first time in an adult way that we truly were stuck—prisoners of the Columns more than free actors. I couldn’t think about anything else as I ran, where before, my singular focus was the running, my time, my form, my tactics, every drill, every interval, every rep.
Cody met me one morning around the four hundred level. I was slow and he knew it. By minutes, not seconds.
“Let’s get dinner tonight, Myla,” he said. “They have falafel in at the Four Cs this week. I have something to tell you.”
He knew my weakness. All those miles required fuel, and I always kept the calorie counters rolling. Apart from the endorphins of a good run, a good meal was my other true pleasure.
My tutors noticed my focus dipping considerably over those weeks after the Triangle. You couldn’t really hide anything. They mapped eye speed, distraction quotient, and motivation in aggregate. It was only a matter of time before I got a referral, and avoiding one was frankly my only motivation to progress in my academic lessons.
That afternoon I was working in the Pace Lounge on the outer causeway of the Arbor Column. The Japanese cherries were in full blossom. I told my numbers tutor I was tired and wasn’t feeling well. It squawked back immediately. “It is not uncommon, Myla, after a person has achieved a major goal to have a crisis of purpose. Would you like me to schedule a meeting with a counselor?”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine. I can manage.”
“It is also known that people can work through these issues in time. Perhaps that is what you need.”
“Space too,” I told it. “Please don’t ask me again.”
I was far enough ahead in my year three courses that taking an afternoon off wasn’t a problem. So I walked among the trees and took a nap on the cool grass. In the afternoon, I met with a few friends who were just getting out of dance class. We talked about our futures, our plans for fourth year and after. Not a single one of them cared a whit about the Triangle or running. Wan was a jazz pianist, who danced with the others for fun. Jesa and Friar were dancers.
The falafel was crisp and salty and delicious. Cody and I were both so hungry and engrossed in the food that we hardly said two words to each other until I was stuffed. I wasn’t sure whether I was just that hungry or whether Jorie Daley was doing something different with the tomatoes and cucumbers, but I could not stop eating the salad.
“I’m not going to tell you when I’m doing it, but I’m going to climb the Thirteen,” Cody blurted out.
Then he looked up at me to gauge my reaction.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing really. I just wanted you to know. I feel like someone should know. But if I told anyone else, they’d never let me try it.”
“You’re going to free solo it?”
He nodded.
I sighed.
“I know what’s bothering you, Myla.”
“About the climb?”
“No. Since the Triangle. It’s all the same stuff.”
“It does bother me, Cody. It does. I remember. You could fall. That’s why mom and all them were so scared in the Ag Column.”
“Mom won’t know about this till I’m done. I’m going at night. It’ll give me a full eight hours after knock-off. Honnold did it in four, and that was real rock.”
“You’re not going to try to catch him, are you? Rush for the time?”
“No. It’s not the same. Even if I was faster, which I won’t be, the first thing I’d say if anyone else did it was that the climb’s just repetitive. Same moves, over and over—no nuance. No one will ever equal Freerider.”
“Then why do you have to do it free, Cody?”
“See. I told you I knew what was bothering you. That’s it right there. Bottle fever.”
“Bottle fever?”
“Yeah. That’s what one of the guys on the frame team calls it. I looked up similar things on Earth. They got it too, people living on small islands or isolated communities. Only they could go on a trip or something.”
“Yeah, but I bet they didn’t do what you’re doing to cope.”
“Some people did. Sure. They used to have sword fights and shootouts, drive fast cars, swim in the ocean with sharks. Nothing’s new here except us, sealed in, worshipping the bravery of the very ancestors who sealed us in here.”
“I thought you’d given up on all that daredevil stuff, Cody.”
“No you didn’t. You just ignored it and pretended I was doing something else. You should understand. You’re just as obsessed. You just haven’t figured it out yet.”
“What do you want from me? You want to climb it, and you’re so sure nothing will happen, why even tell me?”
“I want somebody to understand. Everybody pretends like me climbing the Ag Column was so crazy they can’t possibly comprehend it. Then they pretend that this life is satisfying, that there’s no gigantic hole in all our lives.”
“It is crazy, and I don’t understand it, Cody. I don’t. You could just climb it with the harness on. What’s the difference?”
“There’s a difference,” he said, “believe me.”
I shook my head.
“In all my research I did, on daredevils, I found out there were a ton of scientists who studied them—their psychology. They gave all kinds of plausible explanations for the behavior: neurological, evolutionary, biochemical, cultural. You know the best reason I ever encountered in my research about why they risked death was from the mouth of a big wave surfer who was asked by an interviewer why he dared to ride ocean waves the size of skyscrapers. Do you know what he said, Myla?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes. That’s exactly what he said. Those three exact words. ‘I don’t know.’ The universe makes us who we are. It is for us to be. I’m just going to be me, Jitterbug. Let somebody else explain the why.”
“Are you going to tell me?” I asked.
“I’m telling you now.”
“No, I mean when you do it.”
“Oh. Um. Do you want me to? I’m not telling anyone else. I’m going to program a couple drones to mirror from twenty meters or so.”
I took a deep breath. “Somebody should know, right? Don’t you want some moral support?”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
“Are you telling Abby?”
He shook his head.
“Yeah. She’d kill you before you even got a chance to step into that shaft.”
“More or less.”
“Don’t surprise me,” I told him. “Somebody should know. Just please promise me you’ll step into the heat sink if you need to bail. Alex did. He needed two tries.”
“I’ll never get a second chance, Myla, and I won’t need it. If I can’t do it now, it ain’t happening.”
“Just promise me. If you get in trouble, Cody.”
“I know. I will. I don’t take anything for granted. I’ve planned every step.”
I expected in the days following that conversation that Cody would ping me in the early evening to tell me his climb was on. But a few days passed, and then a couple weeks. The ventilation shaft and heat sink had been completed for months by that time. They were slated to begin testing the system, so the deadline was certainly approaching. Once they turned the power on to the lower levels, that was it. The temperature in all six of the shafts would never get low enough to permit a climb. He’d have no chance of gripping the wall dripping sweat like a distance runner.
We still trained each morning, but we didn’t talk about the climb again till the morning of. Cody met me at the lobby level to thumb me into Thirteen Column. He smiled at me and said quietly, “22:30. Come alone.”
“No training today?” I asked him—I guess my way of confirming the obvious without speaking it directly.
“Resting up. Have a good run, Myla.”
“Okay,” I said.
I ran that morning with a certain vigor, perhaps my way of setting aside obvious fears. I did two laps of intervals and went right for the stairs. I knew that space—that stairwell—about as intimately as any space in the entire Columns, perhaps with the exception of my bedroom.
Cody’s impromptu climb through the lettuce in the Ag Column was five years in the past by then. He’d been seventeen. My age. Five years. He was almost twenty-three the day of the climb. Honnold had been in his early thirties. His physical and mental peak—the pinnacle. I remember thinking that Cody was too young. It was too soon. He’d spent five years meticulously preparing, and it was still too soon.
When Cody thumbed us in that evening, it felt strange. All that time, and we’d never been caught, if that was the right word for it. It never felt as though we were sneaking into a place we shouldn’t be. We’d just been using an open space when nobody else was there. Other runners used the stadium steps or the back hallways around the amphitheaters or Griffin Hall after hours. But that evening it did feel strange. It definitely felt like we were sneaking in.
When we got to the perimeter of the Column, he headed for the fourth shaft. I headed for the central stairwell. I gave him a brief hug, and he told me he’d see me in a few hours, either at the top or at one of the heat sinks if he bailed out.
I had trepidations of course, but I didn’t have to watch, like Alex’s team did. Cody had the drones. And you couldn’t see into the shaft from the outside anyway.
The only real problem areas Cody had talked about were the bottlenecks. They were located at every two hundred meters and were framed for the giant heat conducting units that transferred thermal energy deep into the rock outside the column—yet to be installed of course—but the shaft got subdivided into quarters there, and each narrow quarter was smoother than the inside of the rest of the wall. I expected he would hit the first one a little past the hour mark.
I had Cody’s key-fob for the interior walkways in case he needed me to pull open one of the interior doors to the heat sink. He could exit the thermal shaft on every other level, so I was trying to walk up the steps at about the pace I expected him to be climbing. I didn’t want to leave him in there long if he needed me to help him out. But I didn’t expect him to need me. I expected to be nervous and jittery for the first hour or so and then be bored for the rest of the night, listening in as he called out his benchmarks over his earpiece. He hit the first two at fifty and one hundred meters fast. He was cruising and feeling good.
“All good at one fifty,” he said at the third benchmark. “Taking it steady, Myla. Feeling strong.”
It was a surreal feeling to think that somewhere through that structure, my brother was climbing, looking death in the eye each handhold, each step up. I could only imagine how exhilarating it was for Cody.
It was eerily quiet in the stairwell that night. I couldn’t hear anything. I didn’t hear a thing when it happened. I called him from the two-hundred-meter mark on the hour, and there simply wasn’t a response. Waiting those seconds for his reply, I couldn’t have imagined that the fabric of the universe had been altered forever without the least indication. How long do I wait? I remembered thinking. What was a sufficient amount of time before I believed it was possible.
I still don’t know how long I was up there before I began sprinting down, calling out every several flights, imagining I’d hear his voice reassuring me that the comms had just glitched or that he was at a point he couldn’t be distracted. All the way down, there was no response.
I sprinted to the fourth thermal shaft, prying open the service access as I’d seen Cody do a hundred times before. It was brighter in there than I’d envisioned—bright enough to burn the sight into my memory forever. Still, I couldn’t believe in that last innocent moment—the impossibility of tragedy in our bottle world. It could not be Cody there, broken and lifeless. My heart was racing, but my emotions hadn’t caught up. He’d landed on his side. The right side of his face had hit the ground, shattering his skull almost to the midline. I knelt and touched his shoulder, and still I didn’t believe. “Cody,” I said, gently shaking his upper shoulder. His left eye was open, the white of it flushed with blood, but I remember thinking that his iris, the light gray, the black of his pupil, and the clear shining orb of his cornea were a perfect glass marble, sublimely beautiful. “Cody,” I said again, shaking him. That was when the truth hit.
I had never experienced a moment like that—when so much changed irrevocably in an instant. I didn’t know what to do. I called my oldest sister Mandy and told her to get Foster and Liam so they could help me carry Cody home. They didn’t understand why I was telling them he was dead. I don’t remember the words. I remember being torn about leaving him when they got to the door at the base of the Thirteen. I had this image in my mind, of Foster and Liam picking him up in a blanket and carrying his body home. For a while I was confused about it, but I never did leave Cody’s side to open the door for the safety personnel who arrived. Afterward, for the longest time, I remembered seeing Mandy and Foster in the thermal shaft with Cody’s body that night, but it had never happened, that false memory. They never came inside.
The pain I carried I could never have imagined. Cody’s loss was impossible to bear. He was my closest friend. He was the only one who’d have stood by me then, who’d have cared nothing for the things people said about me.
Before the fall, my worst fears couldn’t have touched the pain of losing Cody, and my imagination had gone only that far. I never imagined they’d blame me for it, and I’d never have guessed what would come flooding out of me in return—contempt. I was in far too much pain for public scorn to even register. And then, my own family—my mother, my father, my brothers and sisters—it seemed that no amount of contrition was enough to soften their resentment of me.
It grew so uncomfortable, I could not wait for housing to come through, and I felt in those moments that none of my siblings or former friends would take me in. I slept for three weeks in a quiet inconspicuous corner of Palady Park in Friendship Column where I knew none of the faces, though surely, they all knew me.
And still, every day, I ran.
There’d been no serious crime in the Columns in generations. There was talk of a trial; though it was debatable what charges could be brought. I wondered exactly what punishment they could levy against me that would be worse than being imprisoned inexorably for the rest of my life in a society that regarded me as they all did then.
I ran harder and harder. I knew that Cody—as angry as I was with him then—he’d have had no tolerance for me quitting on his account. And as I ran, I thought about this life. In some ways our existence in this place was no different from any person’s on Earth in the days before technology, before science, born into a chain of humanity, fixed in a link that captured them in place, hardly significant to the whole, with no movement, no understanding of the stars much less their place in them. Here we were, far out in the stars with an understanding of our place but no possibility of changing it. No enemies, no predators, no risk of famine, exposure, or natural disasters. I wondered sometimes, imagining I was speaking with Cody as I ran, whether we could truly be people if we never felt the wind or the rain, never heard thunder or the sounds of birds, real birds singing in the trees.
At speed, when I sprinted, I could feel a breeze the still air made, even hear the sound of the air rushing past my ears. Children would run through the grass in the parks sometimes when it was being watered, laughing while pretending it was rain. And the birds we made, almost all were engineered to sing. Those experiences, though, were never genuine enough to delude us into thinking our life was comparable. Was it any wonder that a boy like Cody stumbled upon the art of manufacturing danger?
I was angry at life for nearly five years. I did not go home again for at least that long. I was mad at them for blaming me, and they were all appalled that I hadn’t apologized to their satisfaction, even though nothing I said or did could ever make it right again. None of them took a breath from their anger for long enough to realize that my heart had broken.
I couldn’t say when, but a day did come, years later, when enough time had passed that people didn’t talk about Cody Ward anymore, the boy who’d fallen from the new column.
That new space opened around then—the residences, the recreational areas, the dining outlets. The Thirteen became the preferred placement for all the graduates and young couples for many years after. They named it Baye Column after the longest tenured city manager in the history of the Columns. She was born some four generations after the Founders arrived here and had been long forgotten by everyone except our city’s most tedious functionaries.
I have lived long enough now that this history too is all but forgotten. I am a great-grandmother so many times over it is almost impossible for anyone to imagine that the name, Myla Ward, scratched as it is still onto the Griffin Tunnel wall, could possibly belong to me. I don’t know whether my siblings talked to their children about Cody. I know I didn’t. It was too painful.
As my centenary testimony neared, I debated going down this course. The expectation is for the occasion to be joyous, to tell stories of the grand times of our youth and to exhort our children’s children’s children to rejoice in theirs. That is the expectation. Everyone smiling. It’s hardly a time to speak of the dead. But I look around and see a society of such gentle creatures, that when we do regain the capacity to crawl back out of our hole, I fear we will only scare at the sight of our shadows and scurry back inside.
The nearer I get to joining him, the more I remember of my brother Cody Ward. And the more I remember, the more I think he must be remembered. For in order to emulate, we must first remember.
I say with a sister’s love and admiration, that to brave space again, we will need a fool’s courage once more. I look back with nearly eighty years’ knowledge and pain, to that day when Cody fell, and I say that his spirit must be reborn in us, or we will forever here reside within this bottle world.
This though, will never be a matter of our choosing. So I ask you to speak it to your children. The decision is now theirs. Test the walls. Test your fate. We do not need to brave death each day to be courageous, but we must be courageous.
I have a final memory of Cody that has absolutely nothing to do with climbing. He was about ten, so I would have been four or five at the time. We were lying on our backs out on the field under the sky sim, looking at clouds, and he was trying to make me understand that it wasn’t the real sky.
I remember asking him, “How do you know it’s not the real sky? And what is the real sky if it’s not that?”
“It just looks like it, bug. If it was the real sky all the rooms in the world would fit under it.”
“That isn’t possible, Cody.”
“Yeah, but all the columns are in a rock. And there’s a sky over that rock too, up on the surface.”
“How could a sky go over everything?”
“The same way the stars go on forever. It just does.”
“I don’t believe it,” I told him.
“You will someday, bug,” he said.
“It looks so real.”
“There’s also a place, mom says, somewhere up there where the stars meet the sky.”
“I don’t think so,” I told him, at that point just to annoy him.
He stopped talking and lay there with me on the grass, looking up at the clouds as I tried to picture an edge to the universe where the sky touched the stars. That’s how I choose to remember my brother Cody now. If he is anywhere waiting for me, that’s where I want him to be.