DANIEL CLARKE X
VIKTORIA BURGESS
AIRPLANE MODE
Thank you for travelling with us today, whether by choice or otherwise.
Please take a moment to put your life on pause. Place all your limbs in an upright, locked position, disregard as much physical sensation as possible and lower your expectations now.
Do not attempt to make eye contact. Ensure that your appearance, odour, and opinions are kept within minimum acceptable norms. Keep extremities, including body-parts, fetishes, and politics inside the armrests at all times.
As we taxi towards the runway put away anything you had intended to say to relatives, loved ones or significant enemies. These can no longer be transmitted as they may interfere with the navigation systems.
Do not look down. Do not attempt to remember any physics you may have once learnt about how this insane projectile is hurled towards its destination. Realistically, the nearest exits are 12 hours and 10 thousand miles away.
We have now begun our final descent.
It may come as a surprise that we will be landing approximately two hours earlier than advertised and at a significantly sharper angle than is safe for your fragile human bodies.
It has been a long flight and you have been a singularly restless and non-compliant cohort. I think we can all agree that the best thing is to just to get this over with as soon as possible.
Do not be alarmed.
Being alarmed will only make you tense and that will make this next bit even more uncomfortable.
Passengers on the right may be able to see the mouth of the River Styx as it empties, steaming, into the sulphurous lakes of fire for which our destination is so rightly famous.
Your screams have been duly noted and will be included in the passenger response survey. On behalf of the airline and the crew I would like to say that this really wouldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of people.
Your baggage, which in all likelihood, got you into this mess in the first place. Nonetheless it will be waiting for you on the carousel.
Feel free to go around as many times as you like.
SEPARATION
We were a long way from nowhere, just the way I like it.
I say “we,” but my only companion was Ariadne, a Cessna DC6. She kept me up in the air most days and dry enough most nights. And when I say Cessna DC6, I’m talking about a plane with more parts replaced than my father’s axe.
That’s the joke, right? My father’s axe is 50 years old. It’s had the head replaced nine times and seventeen new handles. Same axe. Same small plane, with the personality of a thousand ancestors. Ornery, proud, grudge-bearing ancestors.
Me and Ariadne, we knew each other pretty well. She talked, I listened. I could hear the difference between an idle complaint and a stoic admission that something was properly wrong. Right now, she was telling me we ought to be on the ground and she was in no mood to wait.
Banking left gave me a better look at the landscape. Below I could see the ocean to the South. The land was cut-through East and West by a river that burst out to sea, slicing along the base of formidable cliff. It looked like to great landmasses had been pushed together, squeezing the waters but not quite able to close the gap.
I could see no viable crossing, much less a bridge. Whichever side we came down on, that would be it. That would be the setting for everything that came after.
If I needed to hike out, I’d find a town sooner or later, but different towns make different paths. Somewhere I could hitch to an airfield or get a job for long enough to buy parts. Hitch back, hike back, fix her up and go. Or maybe a port and I’d come back with a boat. All the possibilities in the world but half of them were going to vanish any second now.
Another option occurred to me. I imagined standing with my hand on the hub of Ariadne’s propeller. I could carry it with me; just in case, just to have the option. Rebuild her from the nose back, leaving the rest here to be some other plane.
I knew that I wouldn’t.
You have to draw the line somewhere.
