2026-10-30

Gravity Quota

On Lower Ceres, weight was inherited like houses. Every family had a gravity quota written into the registry, and every wristband divided it among its wearers: so many kilos for walking, so many for sleeping without drifting out of bed. Inés was a ballaster. Her trade was measuring other people's weight and adjusting their bands, and she knew better than anyone that a body is, above all, a matter of bookkeeping.

Her own account was in the red. Lucía, her daughter, had been born six weeks earlier in the maternity ring, where gravity is barely a rumor, and the pediatrician had been clear: without three fixed kilos of weight, her bones would never learn to be bones. Inés was licensed to give up two. For a month she had been sleeping with her band at its minimum, strapped to the mattress, and she had told no one. The odd thing was that the baby's scale showed a little more every week than she could account for.

That was why the hospital's call about her mother startled her. Amparo had been growing lighter for weeks. Not thinner: looser, as if coming unmoored. The doctors talked about age, about bands losing their grip. Inés went to see her and found her with her feet a hand's breadth off the floor, clinging to the railing with the smile of someone playing dumb.

"This isn't age," said Inés. She opened her mother's registry and hunted for the leak. There it was, small and punctual: every night at 3:12, a transfer of half a kilo to a minor's band. She recognized the code before she finished reading it. It was Lucía's.

"You told me you couldn't give her more," Amparo murmured, not letting go of the railing. "Not in words, but I saw the strap on your bed." "It's your weight, Mamá. It's what keeps you on the ground." "I weighed on this rock for forty years," she answered. "You weigh for two, and the baby for three. Somebody has to be spare."

Inés tried to revoke the transfer and found she couldn't: the law let only the giver cancel it. So she did the one thing she knew how to do, which was count. She added up the three weights, her own, her mother's and the baby's, and saw that together they were more than enough. The problem had never been the amount, only the sharing of it. And the regulations, written for individuals, had never imagined anyone wanting to share.

That afternoon she filed a category that didn't exist: shared gravity. She linked the three bands into a single circuit, so that weight would flow at every moment toward whoever needed it most. There was one condition, which the system flagged in small print: the circuit worked only if all three stayed within ten meters of one another. Any farther, the weight scattered and each of them floated alone again.

Inés read the condition twice and smiled. Then she sat down on the bench in the corridor, Lucía asleep in one arm and her mother's hand in the other, and three pairs of feet, for the first time in weeks, rested firmly on the floor.