重力局 The Weight Authority

The hinge

Local gravity is adjustable: the Weight Authority's field stations can set any registered premises between 0.4 and 1.3 standard weight, delivered through the same easements as water and power, metered at the property line and billed by the kilo-hour of relief.

What it cannot do

• Relief is premises-bound: step outside your metered field and the world's default weight resumes instantly. There is no portable lightness — every attempt has ended in a crater or a conviction.
• The band is hard-limited, 0.4 to 1.3: below 0.4 bone and heart fail within months (the sanatorium exception is medical, supervised, and tragic), and above 1.3 is banned as a weapon since the Pressing.
• Relief is zero-sum across a grid sector: lightness sold to one street is weight distributed across the rest. The Authority calls it 'load balancing'; the heavy districts call it what it is.
• The default — 1.0, unbilled — is a legal right. But the grid's balancing drift means poor sectors idle at 1.04–1.08, a few percent of extra weight, forever, on everyone who cannot pay to be exempt from other people's floating.

Geography

Cities stratified by the meter: featherlight financial spires and levity gardens uptown; the great 1.0 middle; and the Ballast Belts — the load-balanced districts where the grid parks its surplus weight and the buildings are squat, thick-boned and proud of it.

The Levity Gardens. 0.5-weight public park, the Authority's showpiece: children arc like swallows, fountains bloom in slow globes — admission free two days a month, and those two days are the city's real religion.

The Ballast Belts. The heavy districts: 1.06 and holding. Stocky architecture, strong-backed trades, and stairs that everyone counts. The Belts' athletes, raised heavy, win everything the moment they compete at 1.0.

The Meter Row. The Authority's fortress of billing: field stations, tamper courts, and the sealed hall where the city's master balance is struck each midnight — the most guarded arithmetic on earth.

The look

Infrastructure sublime: brass gravity meters on every facade, cathedral-scale field stations, uptown towers impossibly slender and Belt blocks impossibly stout — one skyline, two physiques, and the meter needles everywhere, quivering.

Peoples

The Light. Uptown's relief-dwellers: financiers, dancers, the elderly rich buying their joints another decade at 0.6. They prize grace, longevity, the view. Light households host 'full-weight dinners' as displays of humility — the field turned to 1.0 for the evening — and their guests grade the sincerity by whether the chairs are reinforced.

Belters. The Ballast Belts' heavy-raised majority: builders, hauliers, athletes, meter-readers' children who grew up at 1.06 and carry it as identity. They prize strength, endurance, contempt for floating. A Belter coming of age walks the Stair — the city's tallest, at full local weight, carrying the family toolbox — and thereafter owns one sentence no one uptown can buy: 'I was raised heavy.'

Meterfolk. The Authority's readers, balancers and tamper-inspectors — the utility's clergy, sworn to the arithmetic. They prize calibration, incorruptibility, the midnight balance. A meterfolk oath is taken with one hand on the master balance: 'Equal weight, honest count.' The Belts trust individual meterfolk absolutely and the Authority they serve not at all — and both judgments are earned.

Law

The city is nominally governed by its council, actually by the Weight Authority's tariff schedule — the one document that decides where bones ache. Tariff hearings are the true elections, and the Belts pack them.

• The Default Right (1.0 Unbilled) — The Authority's founders tried billing for ordinary weight itself — 'existence rate'. The riots that answered gave the world its constitutional floor: the unmodified world is free, forever, in writing.
• The Anti-Pressing Statute — A landlord once settled a rent strike at 1.3. The tenants' hearts gave out; his statute followed: weight above default may never be applied to inhabited premises, and 'pressing' is tried as poisoning — a weapon in the walls.
• The Drift Disclosure Act — The Authority balanced its books silently on the Belts for a generation and called the extra centigee 'measurement noise'. A meter-reader's leaked ledgers proved otherwise; sector drift is now published nightly, and the Belts read it like weather.
• The Theft-of-Lightness Doctrine — Gravity theft — tapping a neighbor's relief field — is the signature crime: romantic in the ballads, brutal in the courts, since every stolen featherweight lands on the sector's heaviest street. The doctrine's famous line: 'He did not steal from the rich; he stole through them.'

Economy

Currency: Ordinary money — but the tariff is the true price level: rents, wages and even food prices quote 'at weight', and a job posting's field rating matters more than its salary.

Relief flows uphill to whoever pays; weight flows downhill to whoever can't. Around that one flow: the wellness industry of lightness, the strength economy of the Belts, and the arbitrage professions — heavy-raised couriers, full-weight athletes, 0.6 retirement villages.

A day in the life

Morning. The city wakes stratified: uptown rises weightless-easy, the middle at honest 1.0, the Belts already counting stairs — and everyone checks the drift report with the weather.

Food. Belt cuisine is dense and magnificent (heavy bodies burn hot); uptown eats globe-poached delicacies possible only at 0.6, and both cuisines call the other's unserious.

Work. Field rating is the first line of every job ad; heavy work pays light bonuses, light offices pay heavy commutes, and the meterfolk walk their rounds through it all, incorruptible and underpaid.

Night. At midnight the master balance is struck; the Authority publishes the drift, the Belts read their number, and the ballads in the heavy taverns add a verse whenever it rises.

Live tensions

• The drift is the quiet class war in centigees: published now, but still rising — the Belts' number crept from 1.04 to 1.08 in a generation of uptown building, and the tariff hearings are running out of polite vocabulary.
• A folk hero called the Featherwright is tapping uptown fields and grounding penthouses overnight — the ballads adore him, the courts want him, and the Belts shelter him even as his thefts land, by the grid's own law, on their own streets.
• Medical evidence is consolidating that a childhood at 1.06 costs years, and the class action forming in the Belts would price a generation's drift in lifespans — the one currency the tariff schedule never quoted.

Story seeds

• A meter-reader finds a sector that balances perfectly every midnight — too perfectly — and traces the missing weight to a district that is not on any map, floating at 0.4, paying no one.
• The Featherwright's latest grounding drops a hospital's charity ward to full weight mid-surgery, and the ballads' hero must decide what he is when his theft finally lands on the street he came from.
• An uptown heiress at lifelong 0.5 must cross the city on foot at 1.0 for one day — and the story of her stairs is either a comedy or the tariff hearing's star testimony, depending who tells it.

Glossary

• Relief — Metered lightness below default weight — the utility's product and the city's addiction.
• The drift — The load-balancing surplus parked on poor sectors — a few centigees, forever, published nightly.
• Pressing — Weight above default applied to the inhabited — outlawed as poisoning since the rent strike.
• Raised heavy — A Belt childhood at 1.06 — a burden, a physique, and a sentence that ends arguments.
• The Featherwright — The gravity thief of the ballads — beloved, hunted, and heavier on his own street than he knows.