15

Name: Balbino Edvaldo

Yes, this will serve as well as any other name. Perhaps you'll even keep it, should you one day recall your own.

You decide against inventing a family name for yourself—you have no family you know of, after all.

You have lately been considering how falls affect your insubstantial form. It is soon evident that you can't suffer injury from falling. Your greater concern is whether, with sufficient downward velocity, you might pass into the ground and find it difficult to free yourself. If, say, you fell from a plane, might you remain locked forevermore in the ground below?

And so you test yourself. You enter the southernmost of the city's twin Harbor Towers, one of the more desirable areas to live in the city. You climb to the tower's fourth floor, choose an apartment overlooking Back Bay, and walk out through its wall.

You fall to the quay below. A little more slowly than a solid body would fall, you note. The fall does not harm you, of course, and you note that you have fallen through the concrete of the quay just a little, so that it rises up to your ankles. You step out of it easily enough.

You tilt your head, looking up at the tower looming over you. It is forty floors tall.

You jump from the seventh floor, then the twelfth, then the eighteenth, then the twenty-third, and you achieve a similar result each time. Each time you strike the quay below, you sink through the ground, up to your knees or thereabouts. This seems to be the limit of the depth to which you can enter the earth below.

Time for the big jump.

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