Elisha Smit sat dejected in the San Frangeles unemployment office. It was July first 2091. It had been four years since he lost his transport rider job due to gravity pollution in the big metro cities, and he was sick of the quiet desperation and the smell of unwashed bodies. Four years earlier, almost to the month, ten million men had been put out of work in three days.
By the northern summer of 2087 gravity pollution had emerged as the dominant problem facing mankind on planet earth.
Gravity propulsion was banned, almost simultaneously, in all the larger metro cities–those with a population of fifty million or more.
In the early 2040’s a research team had discovered the gravity particle, predictably they had called it the graviton. The next seven years had seen the technology applied to traffic safety, then shipping, and finally propulsion.
Any mass, large or small, could be safely, cheaply, and quickly transported anywhere in the globe within a graviton encapsulation.