Physicist
Alan Whitfield
He discovers the loophole that makes the impossible practical — and unleashes consequences he never intended.
01
The new economy
Freedom has a recalibration schedule.
A new labor class emerges: flying laborers who carry cargo and people through city skies, their ability to fly tethered to a recalibration schedule their employer controls.
The wealthy buy their freedom outright. The poor rent theirs, one shift at a time — one missed appointment away from falling.
Amy Okafor sees the danger before almost anyone else. A community organizer with no reason to trust the men selling this future, she builds a labor movement — a fight for social justice — from a folding chair in a laundromat back room into a political force nobody in power can afford to ignore.
Not everyone wants the sky opened. Oil magnate Daniel Reyes watches a technology that could make his industry obsolete overnight, and answers with a patient, deniable corporate campaign to slow it down — turning Gravity's Price into a political thriller as much as a technothriller, fought in boardrooms and hearing rooms as much as in the sky.
Organizer
Amy Okafor
She understands that a technological revolution can still reproduce the oldest inequalities.
Oil magnate
Daniel Reyes
He wages a quiet corporate and political war to protect an empire this discovery makes obsolete.
