Ring Diving
Ring diving sustained her life. It was an insatiable hunger without which life was pain, at times unbearable. The rush of a dive toward extinction checked only by the most elegant redirection at the last instant, that moment was the culmination of all moments. That final spin at the edge of the vacuum purified her. Poe now lived at the precipice of a Spark’s longevity. She had made it to the age of overcharge. For her, diving was the only medicine for maintaining sanity. The cleansing pull of the void stole the static from her mind. She knew no greater peace than the afterrush.
She stood upon the third circle up from the nebulous maw. She stared across the vast span between rings. The bands grew closer together as they approached the pit and expanded in concentric shockwaves further from one another as they moved outward. The difference in distance between the third and the fourth halo was an order of magnitude greater than the span between the second and the third.
Sid rode across the fourth ring, his stat sending bursts of color in its wake as he skidded to a stop parallel to her position. Across that divide he looked tiny. The explosion flowering beneath him nearly obscured his stat and bottom orb stack in a plume of thousands of thin sparkles. The fourth ring was a safe zone. Sid had always been more cautious than she was. Poe had always chafed at this trait in him. She couldn’t understand his reluctance.
She worried what it meant for him and for their family as he charged. Without a healthy love of the rush sparks risked becoming unstable long before their time. A spark that feared the Non was a danger to the entire unit. The law required intervention for sparks who would not cleanse. In some cases, this meant that they were forced to meet the Non lest the entire family be destroyed as their madness became destabilizing. Ivy was too young for that. Poe saw herself in Ivy. She wanted to give her the chance to learn the joy of diving.
Poe leapt out to Sid’s ring then arced well above him, reaching her dendrite out like a whip and giving him a solid whack on the backside of his top stack. The snap sent him reeling off the ring and spinning headlong, stat over crown toward the Non. He reached out with both dendrites and wrapped the tapered tips around just enough of the diameter of the second ring, enough to get a solid grip to wind up and slingshot back at her.
Sid hit the ring in a fury. The entire band wrenched with a wave strong enough to make Poe veer as she lost contact with the ground underneath her stat. Sid was skilled with his ride. He liked the feeling of the solid ground beneath him. He could ride fast, spinning circles around a ring in every dimension and maneuver with a grace Poe could never manage. Yet she was always on him to dive. He wished she would appreciate his abilities. He didn’t understand why it was so important to ring dive. It was just expected of him. So what if he nurtured a little hedonism for static, he was young, it felt good. He would cleanse if he needed to. What was the big deal?
Poe was reckless in his opinion. She lacked grace. Sure, he had to admit, there was a calm that would wash over him after a dive. But the instant before the loop filled Sid with such a nausea that he usually lacked the motivation. That said Sid was a competitive one and Poe manipulated it. They both knew there was no way he could contend with her dive for dive. Poe had a passion for gliding long and falling fast. A good dive for her could mean as much as a loop-de-loop through three rings precipitating crown raising velocity leading up to a roll around the first so treacherous that she nearly lost color, becoming a translucent gossamer as the vacuum drained her charge. She would brag about the bright red of the first ring, sparkling with pure star fire. Sid never dove within the perimeter of the first ring, he could barely hold on against the pull of the center from the second one.
What Sid could do was ride. He could maneuver in wicked spirals and skid on a dime, sending up controlled and gorgeous showers of light. He could ring hop with an elegance that was beautiful to observe, landing as if rooted, without so much as a tap. But if Poe wanted him to dive, he would dive. He would just be sure to make a show of the prelude.
Sid prepared to dive. Poe watched from across the ring as he accelerated, skimming the rim of the ring on his stat. Sid was a powerful looking spark for his youth. He rode his stat with a skill beyond his cycles. The three orbs that formed his body were well proportioned radiant spheres that glowed orange through the thin translucent skin of his dermis. His bottom orb was slightly larger than the middle orb above it, which in turn was smaller than the top orb of his body. The effect was a handsome concave torso with two slender limbs stretching out from the sides of his top orb. Sid usually maintained these dendrites as sleek single threads. Older sparks like Poe were more agitable and often flared their dendrites into bolts with many mini-tentacles bursting from their primary limbs. Above the top orb of Sid's body, lifted on a thin translucent neck of dermis, Sid's small head orb fuzzed as his face furrowed with concentration. Above his head orb, a diadem of sparks flurried vivid orange to form a spiky crown.
Sid shifted the weight of his bottom orb against the quark, the seat separating him from his stat, to maneuver into position for his dive. His stat was spinning so fast that it vibrated through the quark, reverberating up through his bottom orb and causing his dermis to jiggle ever so subtly all the way out to the farthest tips of his limbs.
Sparkles of light sprayed in his wake. He made a few wind up hops that tilted the ring. He used its return jounce to propel him toward the center. Graceful as ever, Poe charmed her quark to rock with the rebound of the ring. Sid leapt just outside the circumference of the next ring, then rushed past Poe in his descent. His dive was wide and had taken him well outside Poe's plane of orbit. She admired the way he elongated his orb stack in the drop, but then tightened nearly into a coil to take the inside turn. Settling down on the backside of the dive, he tapped his stat onto the ring that Poe had come from with a flourish.
Sid gazed across the spans of the only world he'd ever known. It was a landscape that gave him a sense of comfort. He and his sibling sparks cohabitated in a world of five rings, three of which were comfortably habitable. No one could ride the ring closest to the maw, the pull of the Non was too powerful even for the most charged of sparks. Meanwhile, the fifth ring was unpleasant to spend too long riding. The atmosphere beyond it was a loose mesh of multicolored filaments that swayed and bent like living things brushing one another in an eternal orbit around their world. The strings gave off a radiation that was agitating. Most sparks swapped around with their siblings hopping from ring to ring within the middle.
Between the farthest ring from the center and the zonule one band in stretched a dark space perhaps two thousand orb stacks of a spark's body long. For the most part, the rings extended in parallel planes both rising and expanding out from the nucleus but given enough of a nudge they could be tilted noticeably. Ring tilting was occasionally amusing for young sparks like Poe and Sid's little sister Ivy, usually before they were old enough to know the joys of an afterrush. Once a spark learned to dive, ring-tilting quickly became one more technique in the diving game.
Despite their differences, Sid watched Poe dive with the admiration of a younger sibling. She burned vivid red as compared to his youthful orange. Her orb stack tapered upward, her roundedness accentuated at her bottom. Despite her sleek femininity, Sid knew never to underestimate her. Her physical grace was supple but her intensity burned hot and potent. She took a tight roll around the fourth ring, gathering the energy and momentum to launch herself clear out to within a dendrite’s tip of the strings. Just as it looked as if she would collide into the atmosphere she reached around the fifth ring with a dendrite stretched so long and thin that it nearly looked like one of the strings itself. She whipped herself back, racking her orb stack in awkward whiplash and launching violently at the first ring. She came so close that sparks from her crown cascaded into the center. She would emerge defrazzled, refined to imbibe fresh energy. Rejuvenated.
“Some day, Sid, I bet you’ll be able to dive like Poe,” Ivy zapped, trying to be supportive.
Poe could still remember Sid floating around the far ring, trying to gather up the orb stack of his body from the yellow ether. She mused back to when she'd first noticed that Sid's orbs had begun to gather an orangish hue and his stat generate a ridable spin intensity. That was before her oldest sibling Abe had taken his last dive and just before Ivy had been born.
Ivy was a young spark freshly born from the center ether. Barely yellow, she'd only recently collected her orbs together. Her ride was clumsy and rigid but at least she'd learned to accelerate, brake and reverse. A stat can feel like an alien appendage for a young spark. In the excitement of adolescence a stat warming up can really seem to have a mind of its own sometimes.
Ivy revved her stat and slid along the band of the ring for one full revolution as she prepared to jump to the next ring but spun out at the last moment. Her limbs flailed as she tried to right herself out of spirals around the ring. She whipped around frantically trying to keep her stat set on the ring. At least she'd managed to stay on, she thought.
Poe rounded the adjacent ring. "Give it another try," She zapped. "I'll throw you a dendrite if I need to." She extended a long limb from the shoulder under her top orb to show that she could catch her if Ivy missed. Poe's face flared in the thin dermis of her small top orb. Ivy couldn't say no to a face like that. She used the fading momentum of her spiral to right herself confidently then made a clean arc before jumping. For an instant, her aim had seemed just right but then the pull of the center took her in its undertow.
She hadn't accounted for the change in the force of the vacuum between rings. It rended her and pulled her off her curve. Seeing Ivy fall out of Poe's reach, Sid dove. He spread his limbs wide and let the gap between orbs strech so his dermis expanded into a thin membrane illuminated by the solid glow of his orbs. He grabbed her by the tip of a dendrite, then threw her back. She tried to whip her top orb around to see her original ring approaching but ended up thrashing herself off course. She missed her ring and spun out into the static backfield of the strings.
She got hit with a nasty blast by the strings. It zapped the flux out of her. The painful instant lasted an eternity. She spasmed and with a jolt of her stat launched herself back toward the rings. Across the gulf of the atmosphere she had plenty of space to slow down. Gliding unpropelled, she easily settled back onto her favorite ring. "Blasted things," Ivy cursed. Poe acted the older sibling and corrected her, "If not for the strings, sparks would just tumble into forever before they could even collect together their light." Poe had seen the intensity with which a spark's light is spit from the center during birth. The birth blast ricochets off the strings then pools on a ring where it collects into a spark. Poe smiled as she thought of Ivy's birth. "Learn to ride before you dive, little spark," Poe zapped. All the while, she glowed with pride at her sister’s willingness to dive so young.
A little shaken, and a tad fazed by Poe's chiding, Ivy decided to just circle for a while and refuel. For now, she would just watch Poe and Sid dive. Someday, Ivy thought, she would be the greatest diver of the circle, but for now she could only learn.
