The Sky Below

I had always thought the sky belonged above us. Vast. Blue. Infinite. But that was before the Fall — before the Earth cracked and flipped, and what we once called “up” became something else entirely.

They say it started with a tremor. A ripple deep beneath the crust that expanded like a heartbeat. One day the ground hummed; the next, cities crumbled. By the time the tectonic plates began their impossible rise, the sky was already bleeding into the earth.

That was ten years ago. Now, I live in Aeria — a city suspended from the remnants of the old world, hanging above what used to be the sky. We call it the Inversion. Gravity reoriented itself during the cataclysm. No one knows how or why. Scientists had theories: dark matter anomalies, polar shift, a failed experiment. Conspiracies roamed as freely as the wind. But the truth? It didn’t matter. When the ground dropped and the oceans spilled upward, survival became our only religion.

I’m a Sky Diver.

Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? People imagine fluttering capes and graceful arcs through clouds. The reality is metal suits, oxygen canisters, and wind that claws at your skin like broken glass. My job is to descend into the Sky Below — the reversed abyss of what was once our atmosphere — and scavenge. Ruins of skyscrapers float in fragments, suspended in low gravity pockets. We search for relics: data drives, tech cores, sometimes even canned food sealed in corporate bunkers. The past is our currency now.

Today’s dive is different. There’s a whisper about a find. A beacon flickered to life three days ago — an old Earth signal pulsing out from 600 meters below Aeria’s edge. That kind of thing doesn’t happen by accident.

I’m joined by Len, my partner for the last four years. She's tough, with a laugh that sounds like gravel sliding over steel. Neither of us speaks as the hatch opens. The wind surges in. The sky beneath us churns with clouds turned upside down, thick and roiling.

“On three,” I say, gripping the edge.

“One,” she replies, her voice crackling through comms.

“Two.”

We jump.

There’s a moment — always — where your brain rebels. It screams that this is wrong, that you’re falling up. The horizon flips and the clouds rise toward you, not away. My stomach clenches. I blink hard, breathe through the fear. Gravity tugs me down, which is really up. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been diving. The inversion messes with your soul.

Our descent stabilizes as we fire the pulse dampeners. The blue around us deepens. Wisps of cloud scatter. And then we see it — the structure. Half a tower, broken at its base, tilted at an angle. Its name is still legible on the steel spine.

Which means this tower might hold data. Real pre-Fall intelligence. Stuff that could fetch more than water or power cores.

We land with a harsh jolt on the tilted edge of a broken floor, magnet boots clinging to the metal. The air is thin here, breathable only for short bursts. We split up, each scanning different wings of the ruin.

My HUD flickers as I move through a rusted corridor. The silence is ancient, disturbed only by the occasional creak of steel straining against the wind. I find an elevator shaft — empty — and rappel down.

It’s there, in the control room of the tower’s base, that I find the source.

A black box. Still pulsing red. Still alive.

I unhook it carefully, sliding it into my chest vault. As I do, the console beside it springs to life — barely.

“VOICE IDENTIFICATION: GRANTED,” it wheezes. “PROJECT ORION… ACTIVE.”

“Len,” I whisper. “I think we’ve found something big.”

Her voice crackles. “How big?”

“Global. Maybe orbital.”

Static fills the line for a beat, then: “Let’s bring it home.”

But as I rise, I see movement — another diver. Not one of ours. Black suit. No insignia. Mercs, maybe. Raiders who hunt for tech and don’t bother with survivors.

He sees me. We both reach for our weapons at the same time.

I fire first.

He jerks backward, suit venting compressed gas. He tumbles up — down — into the sky.

I’m shaking. Len meets me at the extraction point.

“They’re watching us now,” I say. “This box — they want it.”

“Then we don’t give it to them.”

We launch the ascent boosters. The sky below stretches out, endless and bright. The clouds seem gentler now, like they know something has changed.

Back in Aeria, we plug the box into a secure terminal. The data spills out in ribbons of light. A voice begins to speak.

“Welcome to Project Orion. Humanity’s backup.”

Len looks at me, eyes wide.

The sky below may have turned us upside down. But maybe — just maybe — the future is still somewhere ahead.

Even if we have to fall to find it.