One day he and his team conducted a therapy session on a patient with trauma to a certain part of the brain that they had not worked on before. When the treatment was over and they unstrapped the still partially sedated man from the table, he slowly drifted up. They were so startled that the man reached the ceiling before they could grab him and he gently bumped into it. They had to run and get a ladder from the maintenance man to pull the patient back down and strap him back to the table. The rest is in the history books.
They found that by stimulating and injecting the nutrient solution to a certain area of the brain, the area they finally called the Hover Lobe, humans could hover at will. Women were slightly better at it than men for reasons still not fully understood. One could levitate one’s own body weight plus a few pounds more with no more than the thought that you wanted to rise. A person could maintain a forward momentum of about 5 miles an hour in still air. So it had never become a real mode of long distance transportation.
The lobe was not completely developed until one was fully grown which varied from about age 18 to 23 depending on the person. At that time you had to go in and have the procedure done and from then on until much later in life, you could hover whenever you had a mind to. This ability lasted until old age set in which of course varied quite a bit depending on your genetic make up. But almost always by about 70 you were grounded again, the lobe having aged like the rest of your body. It ceased to function on a high enough level to keep you aloft.
This sounds wonderful except for one small problem. People who hovered too much ended up with brittle bones and atrophied muscles,
along with inadequately exercised joints and other physical weaknesses, they ended up being almost helpless when the hover lobe finally reached the end of it’s life span.
To complicate this situation, the act of hovering brought with it a mild feeling of euphoria, besides the normal delight of being able to glide around above the treetops and see a bird’s eye view of the world. A universal dream of men since time had begun.
People got to hover places they never would have been able to walk or hike to. There was always the limitation of pretty much only being able to take yourself, no gear. But this seemed a very small price to pay for seeing the Grand Canyon from the air. One had to be careful about winds because although you could hover and move about, you were also at the mercy of strong winds, much like the old hot air balloons that no one used any more. So very windy days made hover seeing out of the question.
Of course there were always the daredevil types who thought they had figured out a new way to ride the winds or control themselves. More than one hover seer had been scraped off the side of some cliff where they had met their end. Or scooped out of the ocean where they had drifted out too far and finally had plopped in the water when exhaustion had set in. One had to be conscious to hover.
Exposure was also a problem as not being able to hover much more than your own weight, safety gear was near impossible to take along. And for reasons still being studied, humans only seemed to be able to achieve a height of about 150 feet above the ground.
This also included Mt. Everest. But the winds are so rarely calm there and one can not wear enough clothes to keep warm at those altitudes. Hovering Mt. Everest is hardly ever attempted any more. There were plenty who tried in those first years but so many perished that it has fallen out of fashion to try. Needless to say, hovering did have it’s limitations.
Besides the possibility of accidents by thrill seekers, the real dangers of hoveratrophy were constantly being preached to the masses. And much like the old warnings on packages of cigarettes, they were largely ignored.
The thrill of near total weightlessness was just too alluring.
It was the stubborn and sturdy people like Jason who walked on purpose and really only hovered if necessary to escape danger or on a limited basis on vacations or special occasions. Countless weddings took place in exotic places with the whole wedding party hovering, say over Niagra Falls, that sort of thing. And it was considered bad manners not to join in.
So Jason hovered, everyone did. But he took pride in his physical strength and agility. And had made up his mind he wasn’t going to be a helpless old man in a hoveratrophy ward in his old age.
I suppose you could call him an earthbound freak. Much like the old nicknames for health food nuts like, Granolas, or Nature Boy. While he appreciated the added dimension of hovering to human life, he felt that it was an artificially induced ability that mankind had done just fine without for millennia. And it was good enough for him to keep his feet on the ground most of the time. It did get tiring though to be thought of as a “foot on the ground”, a party pooper kind of person. He thought they used to call people like him a “stick in the mud”.
To be continued. . .