«The only way was to try.»
— From The Test
At first they called me mad.
Everyone laughed in my face.
Now I am a national hero.
For years the world had an unsolvable problem. Governments pretended not to see it at first, and as it grew they lost themselves in words and plans to contain it, achieving nothing. Climate change seemed unstoppable and the efforts to curb it utterly insufficient.
One day, while idly fiddling with a biro at work, a strange idea came to me that made me smile.
I thought the biggest part of the problem was transport pollution and that without it we might at last limit, if only partially, the issue of global warming. The trouble with transport was that whatever fuel we used would produce pollution — both in obtaining it and in direct combustion. Electric, diesel, gas, hydrogen. None of these was zero-impact; each carried insurmountable pollution problems.
It occurred to me then to try to imagine a transport and movement system with no fuel at all.
The evening before I had watched a documentary about medieval sieges.
And there came to me a sharp image of a catapult launching a person from point A to point B.
It made me laugh out loud and I set the idea aside, returning to work.
I realised, to my own surprise, that the idea had nevertheless taken root in my mind. It kept rising to the surface, and each time it did I thought it through a little more carefully. I mulled it over for months until what had been ridiculous became plausible.
I genuinely believed it could work.
There was only one way to rid myself of those thoughts: try to make it real.
I told my best friend about it and he laughed in my face, quite rightly.
I told my wife and she looked at me with compassion.
I tried posting it on a forum and gave everyone a good laugh.
I understood it was something I would have to do alone.
I was not discouraged and began designing a catapult for human beings. I asked a couple of engineers for help, using the excuse that it was for a circus.
The first was Marco, a methodical and precise aerospace engineer.
The second was Pavel, and he was completely mad. A former acrobat with the Cirque du Soleil, he had retired after a fall that shattered his leg.
He walked with a slight limp now, but his eyes lit up every time he spoke about flight. He always wore a small silver sling around his neck, a keepsake from his grandfather, a blacksmith in Bosnia. "My grandfather built catapults to hurl stones at wild boar," he told me the first time we met. "I want to build one to hurl people against the sky." I knew at once that he was the right man.
He became my main partner, while Marco remained a technical consultant.
With modern materials technology and sound mathematics, they told me it could be done safely and with a very precise trajectory. It would be spring-loaded — electrically charged.
I said at once that we had to eliminate the electrical component and fit a manual-loading system that was effortless and fast. They did not understand why, but they devised a complex arrangement of pulleys and springs so that the catapult could be loaded with minimal effort. I spent a great deal of time designing a padded seat that would absorb the initial acceleration and remain comfortable even in rain.
The real problem, I realised after the first calculations, was acceleration. A launch at that velocity would generate G-forces lethal to a human being.
That was when I had my most important insight: we must not accelerate instantaneously as a traditional catapult does, but gradually along an inclined launch rail. The engineers designed a hybrid system: the seat slid along magnetic rails for the first twenty metres, accelerating gently thanks to progressively calibrated springs. Only at the end of the rail was the final thrust released. In this way the acceleration was spread over two seconds rather than a tenth of a second. Still intense, of course — like the most extreme rollercoasters — but survivable.
We then added a next-generation visco-elastic gel to the seat, the same used in ejector seats of military jets, and a structure that gently cradled the body in a foetal position, distributing the forces evenly.
My idea was to mount the catapults outside buildings, on rooftops, so that trajectories could be plotted more easily.
The prototype was impressive: built from ultra-resistant, ultra-modern materials. I asked them to add only an electronic trajectory-calibration system controllable from a PC, to give perfect calculations for an optimal and safe flight path.
We positioned the catapult in a field and ran several tests with dummies. The power and reload speed were extraordinary.
The problem we could not solve adequately was landing.
At first I had imagined a soft surface to cushion the fall, but it was not safe enough and was far too cumbersome.
The solution came to me one Sunday while I was walking through a shopping centre with my wife. In the middle of the main concourse I saw a transparent tube with people flying inside it. I went closer, curious, and discovered they were doing indoor skydiving.
I understood immediately that this was the answer.
My wife believed I was going through a serious mid-life crisis, but she tried to go along with me, and I am grateful to her for that.
At first the engineers were sceptical, but as we designed the landing system they grew more confident and their opinion of me began to change — they started calling me a genius.
We designed a tube that provided a soft yet powerful aerostatic braking action, driven by a fan powered by a solar panel positioned beside the tube and connected to a battery to cover periods of low sunlight.
We attached several measurement sensors to the tube so that it would activate only on the arrival of a subject — slowing the descent — and switch off as the subject touched down gently on the floor.
We ran several tests with dummies to fine-tune everything, and after some months the precision and reliability of the devices was astonishing — it felt almost like magic.
We tested various ranges and distances, up to the maximum extent of the trajectory, which was one kilometre.
The engineers said that by building different catapults we could reach ten kilometres before safety would be compromised by environmental variables.
I decided I wanted to test the catapult myself.
My wife was furious and called me a madman.
To maintain a stable trajectory one had to hold a specific position for the duration of the journey and the flight. You had to hug your knees and rest your head against them, curling almost into a ball.
On launch day my wife did not come. My best friend did — he said he simply had to see this thing for himself.
I took my place in the catapult seat and got into position.
I will not pretend I was not terrified.
The harness closed around me with a metallic click that sounded final. The straps tightened across my chest, my thighs, my shoulders. The gel in the seat moulded itself to my body as though gently swallowing me. I heard the hiss of compressed air charging the system.
A low, building hum that made the whole structure vibrate. The progressive springs tensed with a sharp, almost musical sound, like violin strings pulled to the edge of snapping. The computer emitted three beeps. Three seconds. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would burst. Two.
I felt the metal groaning under tension. One. I held my breath.
The launch. It was not gentle. It was a violent shove that pressed me back into the seat for one eternal instant, the gel compressing around me, my cheeks pulling backwards, my stomach remaining three metres behind my body.
Then, suddenly, release. The weight vanished. Wind hit me with a deafening roar. The air tore tears from my closed eyes. I felt my body trace the perfect parabola, suspended between sky and earth, in that weightless moment where everything seemed possible.
In that moment I opened my eyes and began to laugh, grasping the absurdity of what I was doing. It was pure madness. It was absolute freedom. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever experienced.
As I laughed I hoped the landing system had worked as it should.
It had, and the braking was as spectacular as it was gentle. I set my feet down softly and found myself standing hundreds of metres from the catapult, covered in record time. My legs were shaking. My heart was hammering. My hands were sweaty and an idiotic grin was plastered on my face that I could not remove. I wanted to do it again immediately.
It could work.
I then told the engineers the true purpose behind everything we had done.
They said it was mad, but it could work. They insisted very strongly on the mad part.
Pavel became my official partner and we opened a company. Marco stayed on as a consultant — too rational to throw himself into such a risky venture. Pavel, on the other hand, sold everything he owned, including his collection of Olympic medals, to invest in the project. "Medals are memories," he told me. "This is life."
In those months I lost a great deal. My wife left me. She said I had become obsessed, that I thought only about catapults and no longer about the family. She was right. I was spending eighteen hours a day in the workshop, coming home only to sleep. My son was seven years old and I missed his birthday because I was testing safety systems.
When we signed the divorce papers she looked at me and said: "I hope your catapults make you happy." I could not answer her. My best friend stopped speaking to me after I asked him for a loan for the fifth time. He said I had changed, that he no longer recognised me.
Perhaps he was right too. But I could not stop. Not at that moment.
I lived in a small town and I began talking to the mayor to see whether we might start a trial of this new transport method.
He laughed in my face at first, but after endless conversations he came to watch the system in action and approved a simple trial.
It was not so simple. The bureaucracy proved a worse nightmare than the physics.
It took eight months just to obtain the building permits. The council's technical office contested everything: structural safety of the rooftops, noise impact, insurance. Three different residents' committees filed objections. "What if someone falls on my house?" a woman shouted during a public meeting. "And the noise? And the children who might copy you?" A lawyer threatened a pre-emptive class action. I had to sign astronomical insurance policies, taking personal responsibility for everything. In those months my wife — we were not yet divorced — stopped talking to me for two weeks. She said I was throwing away our savings on a mad scheme that would ruin us.
She was right to be afraid, but I could not stop.
I would mount two catapults: one on the roof of my house and one in the warehouse that served as our new company's base. Beside each catapult there would be a braking tube with its solar-panel system. The right to use the system — and all the risk — was mine alone.
When construction was finished I was the laughing stock of the town.
On the first day I used it there was a crowd of people beneath my house watching, and another crowd near the landing point.
Everyone was convinced I was going to die.
I climbed onto the catapult, loaded it by hand in five seconds, and pressed the launch button.
I arrived at my destination two kilometres away in a matter of seconds, with grace and ease. I was a little windswept but completely unharmed.
In the weeks that followed, every launch drew a small crowd that watched in astonishment.
I ended up in the national papers and on television.
I was praised as a visionary trying to change the world.
But not by everyone. Senator Carmine Battaglia, a parliamentary representative for the region with national ambitions, saw my project as a threat. He held shares in three car companies and had close ties with the oil firms. Two weeks after my first public launch he called a press conference. "This system is a dangerous folly," he declared before the cameras. "Launching human beings like projectiles is inhumane. It's only a matter of time before someone dies." He was right, of course. But his motives were something else entirely.
In the months that followed he did everything he could to stop us. He filed parliamentary questions. He commissioned fraudulent environmental impact studies. He persuaded the engineers' association to revoke Marco's licence. He stirred up the residents' committees against us.
The worst moment came when we discovered he had bribed one of our technicians to sabotage one of the safety systems.
Pavel uncovered it by chance during a night inspection. The technician confessed everything, in tears: Battaglia had offered him a hundred thousand euros to cause an accident "not fatal, but serious enough to frighten people." We called the police. The technician was arrested.
Battaglia denied everything, naturally. He had covered his tracks too well. But we knew. And he knew that we knew.
The silent war lasted two years. Battaglia used every legal and illegal means to stop us. We held on. The success of the system, the data on reduced pollution, the enthusiasm of the public were all on our side. When the national government finally gave us the green light to expand, Battaglia lost.
His car companies lost billions. He lost the next election. The last time I saw him was at a conference three years ago. He had aged badly. He looked at me with a hatred that had never dimmed. "You have destroyed an entire industry," he told me. "Thousands of jobs lost. Families ruined. And for what? To make people fly around like stupid birds." I did not reply. What could I have said? He was right too, in a certain sense. Progress always has a price. And someone must pay it.
The town mayor became a courageous pioneer and grew enormously popular.
After a few weeks in which people noticed the ease and convenience of the new transport method — no queues, no dead time — the first requests came in.
Some people wanted catapults of their own to get around.
This was problematic, and I said as much to the mayor straight away.
We would have to reshape the town to suit that kind of transport if we wanted to run a meaningful large-scale trial.
The mayor took a long time to decide, and many words were spoken. The project required enormous investment: we estimated around two hundred million euros for a town of thirty thousand inhabitants. The council could not afford it.
That was when the national government stepped in, having scented the enormous publicity and environmental potential of the project. They offered us a non-repayable grant as a "pilot city for sustainable mobility." The European Union also contributed funds, curious to see whether the idea could hold up. Private investment arrived from technology companies eager to be associated with innovation. In total it took a year and a half just to assemble the financing and defeat the legal challenges from those who opposed us.
In the end the mayor was persuaded — and persuaded the council — after they tried the catapult themselves.
They decided the town would try to become the first city with catapult-based transport.
It took us a year to design the routing in a sensible and efficient way.
What emerged was a masterpiece of precision. The city was to become like a clockwork mechanism in which every cog meshed perfectly with the others.
We had decided to do things properly since we were at it.
Every building would be fitted with a catapult and a braking system. The catapult would interface with a computer and all you had to do was enter the code for your destination to plot the appropriate trajectory. If the destination was more than ten kilometres away you would take successive catapults until you reached your chosen point.
For busy locations such as shopping centres, the town centre, squares, businesses and municipal offices, catapults and landing points sized for the volume of people would be built.
We did not stop there. During the discussions someone asked whether the system could be used for rubbish as well.
It was inspired. With a system of smaller catapults and different parameters, refuse could go directly to the landfill without any need to collect it from the streets.
The same logic applied to the movement of goods, including heavy ones. We built a system of larger, heavier catapults to shift materials, doing away with lorries.
What emerged was a dense web of catapults and trajectories across the entire city, which raised a fundamental problem.
The trajectories crossed one another. This was a major obstacle to overcome.
We began by dividing them into three groups: human, refuse and material transport. The refuse catapults were smaller, so they operated at lower trajectory heights, while the material catapults were larger and used higher altitudes. In between ran the passenger trajectories.
Following this division, modifications were made both to the catapults and to the landing systems, mounting them on slabs that could move so as to adjust trajectories.
To manage any crossing of trajectories we developed an artificial intelligence that coordinated the launches and arrivals of every device.
On paper it would work.
The council gave its approval, awarding the contract to our company, which was also the only one in the sector.
Seven years later the whole ecosystem was built. They were not easy years. The first two were spent entirely on design, simulation and obtaining safety certifications.
Then three years of construction: compulsory purchases, disputes with building owners who refused catapults on their rooftops. Two further years for testing and training the technical staff who would manage the system.
In the course of the work we had made several changes. We had created spheres to contain materials and refuse, preventing scattering during flight, and we had built catapults capable of launching up to twelve people simultaneously using purpose-built capsules.
Each capsule had internal compartments for luggage and shopping bags, sealed to prevent them flying around during the flight.
We also had to address the problem of excluded categories. Elderly people with heart conditions, pregnant women after their fourth month, children under twelve and people with severe motor disabilities could not use the catapults for medical reasons. For them we maintained a free electric shuttle service, funded by the council.
It was not the perfect solution, but it was the only possible one. Around fifteen per cent of the population remained excluded from the system.
And then there was the weather. With wind above forty kilometres per hour or heavy rain, the system shut down automatically. The AI calculated trajectories in real time to compensate for a light breeze, but beyond a certain threshold it became too dangerous. This meant the system was unusable for around thirty to forty days a year.
On those days the emergency electric buses returned to service, and it was total chaos because nobody was used to waiting any more.
Obviously not everything could be launched — larger and heavier materials still had to be transported by land — but by our estimates this would reduce vehicle use by around eighty-five per cent. That figure accounted for the fifteen per cent medically excluded who used the shuttles, and for the days when bad weather drove everyone back to traditional means.
For a month we ran the whole system using huge numbers of dummies simultaneously to make certain that no dangerous crossings ever occurred.
There was not a single accident. Every launch was a success.
The mayor then gave the green light for the first real trial.
None of us could have expected such success.
Within a month the majority of the population was using only catapults to get around; only a small number of holdouts still did not trust the safety of the system.
This method of transport was infinitely faster and more practical. But it was not only that. People had discovered something unexpected: flying was a drug.
That moment of total suspension, those few seconds in which the body floated through the air following the perfect parabola, produced an euphoria no car could match. I have seen office workers leave work with shining eyes, impatient to launch themselves. I have seen young people making unnecessary trips around the city just to feel that sensation again. The metallic click of the harnesses closing, the hiss of compressed air, the three-second countdown became the soundtrack of the cities.
And then the sudden silence of flight, broken only by the wind. Many said that those few seconds in the air were the only moments they truly felt alive, when their problems stayed behind on the ground and everything seemed possible.
The mayor decided to ban cars and transform the whole town into a pedestrian area.
Meanwhile enormous numbers of people were coming from outside to see with their own eyes what was happening.
Before long many other small towns were requesting to switch to this type of transport.
There were accidents, of course. The first fatal one occurred eight months after launch. A fifty-two-year-old man had not fastened his safety straps correctly and during the flight slipped out of the capsule, falling from sixty metres. He died instantly.
I still remember the telephone call. I was at dinner when the phone rang.
I rose from the table and never sat down again. I spent that night in the office with the lawyers, preparing for the media storm. The man's family sued us for negligence, claiming twenty million in damages. They lost in court because the safety systems had logged the alert the man had ignored, but I decided to pay half the sum requested all the same.
I could not sleep for thinking about his children.
Three weeks later I went to the cemetery. I do not know why. Nobody had asked me to. I took Pavel with me. We stood before the headstone.
Marco Bellucci, 1972–2024. Father, husband, friend. There were fresh flowers.
Pavel stared at the stone without speaking.
Then, suddenly, he sank to his knees. I had never seen him cry. "I have killed a man to realise my dream," he said in a broken voice. "What have we become?" I knelt beside him. I wanted to tell him it was not our fault, that the man had ignored the alarm, that statistically it was inevitable.
But the words died in my throat. We stayed there in silence for an hour. When we stood up, Pavel took out his grandfather's silver sling and laid it on the grave. "I'll see you when I fly for the last time," he whispered. He left it there.
The next day he bought an identical one that he still wears today. But I know it is not the same.
There were three more fatal accidents in the two years of the trial: a mechanical failure, a cardiac event in flight, and an AI error during a sudden storm. Four deaths in two years, against an average of fifteen deaths a year from road accidents in the same town. Statistically it was a success.
Humanly, every death weighed on me like a millstone. I know the names of all four. I repeat them every morning when I wake, like a prayer or a penance.
Twenty years have passed since the end of that trial.
Fifteen years ago I received a phone call. It was my son. We had not spoken in eight years. He was twenty-two, studying engineering. "Dad," he said, and that word hit me like a punch. "I'd like to take my first flight with you." We met at the main catapult in the city.
He had become a man. Tall, with his mother's eyes. We embraced without a word. We climbed together into the double capsule. Before the launch he looked at me and said: "I hated you for years. I thought you were a terrible father who had chosen his flying machines over me." I clenched my teeth.
"Then I tried flying," he went on. "And I understood. I didn't understand why you did it, but I understood what you created. This moment, here, now, suspended in the air with you… Maybe it's worth all the birthdays I missed." He pressed the launch button. We flew together, father and son, for the first and only time.
When we landed I was crying. He embraced me again and whispered: "Thank you for giving me the sky, even if you took yourself from me." We never spoke again of those lost years. Some wounds never close entirely. But now he has lunch with me once a month.
And every time, before we say goodbye, he tells me: "Fly high, Dad."
The whole world has now switched to this system. The larger cities were a fine challenge, but we managed to overcome that too.
Pavel and I are the wealthiest men in the world. He still uses catapults every day to go everywhere, despite being seventy and having a bad leg. "The day I stop flying is the day I die," he always tells me. He still wears his grandfather's silver sling around his neck. Sometimes he kisses it before a launch.
Last year the first person to circumnavigate the globe using only catapults achieved his goal.
The entire journey was not, of course, made in the air: to cross the oceans he used the catapults installed on platform ships we had positioned every ten kilometres along the main maritime routes. These were automated floating structures, powered by wave energy and solar panels, serving as transfer stations.
The journey still took three weeks because he had to wait for the ships to be in the correct position, but technically he had done it using only catapults.
The network is now so extensive that you can go literally anywhere by moving from one catapult to the next.
Emissions and pollution have fallen significantly and cities are experiencing a new era of growth because they are all now pedestrian-friendly and the quality of life has improved enormously.
Architecture has changed entirely. The rooftops of buildings are now reinforced platforms with enormous golden mechanical arms reaching towards the sky like the hands of giants ready to welcome travellers. At night the lights of the launch rails create artificial constellations that draw luminous trajectories above the cities.
The old roads have become hanging gardens and parks, because nobody needs asphalt any more. Children play where cars once hurtled past. It is beautiful. But there is a price.
Pavel calls them "the exiles of gravity." They are the people who for medical reasons can no longer fly.
I see them often, sitting on park benches with their gaze turned upward, following the invisible traces of those flying above them. Some fall into depression. There are those who have developed a genuine addiction to the adrenaline of the launch, to the point that ordinary life on the ground seems unbearably grey and slow.
I once met a woman who had suffered a heart attack and had been forced to stop using the catapults. She told me that every morning she woke up and for a moment forgot, then remembered, and felt as though she had died. "Looking at the sky is like looking at a world I no longer belong to," she told me. "It's like being the only person who cannot fly in a world of birds."
Pavel has opened psychological support centres for the exiles. He says it is his duty to care for those who remain on the ground. I do not know whether we have created something marvellous or whether we have simply found a new way to make some human beings feel excluded.
Sometimes I still think back to the day that idea came to me, and every time I am struck by the clarity with which it arrived. And by how impossible it once seemed to realise.
This morning something happened that I will never forget.
I was at the window of my office on the fiftieth floor, coffee cup in hand, watching the sky scored by its invisible arcs. Thousands of people flying from one side of the city to the other. Then, down below, I saw a scene that stopped my breath.
There was an old man sitting on a park bench. He must have been eighty, perhaps more. One of the exiles. He was watching the sky with that expression I now recognise at once: nostalgia, pain, exclusion. Standing beside him was a little girl, perhaps six years old.
His granddaughter, most likely. The girl was pointing at the sky, excited, tracing with her finger the trajectories of the bodies flying above them. The old man was smiling as he watched her, but his eyes betrayed an infinite sadness.
Then the girl did something wonderful. She climbed onto her grandfather's knees, took his face in her small hands and turned his head downwards, towards her. As if to say: don't look up there. Look at me. I'm here. And the old man embraced his granddaughter and began to cry.
I stayed there, the coffee going cold in my cup, watching that scene. Above them, a sky full of people flying. Below, two people holding each other. And I understood, in that moment, what I had truly done.
I did not create a transport system. I did not save the planet from pollution. I did not revolutionise the world.
I redrawn the boundary between sky and earth. And now, for the first time in history, that boundary passes through the heart of every human being. Those who fly and those who stay on the ground. Those who look up and those who look down. Those who live for those seconds in the air and those who must find another way to feel alive.
My son has forgiven me, but he has not forgotten. I still repeat the four names every morning. The woman who had the heart attack still watches the sky with the eyes of someone who has lost paradise.
And I — I am the man who gave the sky to humanity.
I still do not know whether that makes me a hero or a monster.
But as I watch that girl embrace her grandfather, as I hear the distant hiss of a catapult loading somewhere in the city, as I see the golden arms reaching towards a sunset that stains the sky orange, I think perhaps that is not the right question.
Perhaps the question is: is it worth flying if someone must stay on the ground?
And the answer, damnably, I still do not know.
Thanks to catapults.