Touch Down in 2037

The smooth impact the eel-plane made on the tarmac could be seen by some as mankind giving mother earth a fist bump. It was enough to wake me from my soon-forgotten dream. The year was (not) 2017.

As I departed from the plane and looked for the terminal where my layover flight awaited, I was completely oblivious to the babel of human and non-human voices at SFIA. My ears were incapable of understanding anything save the solid thudding of my heart moshing like a cokehead against my ribcage. It had been like that ever since I got the call from Vic, my oldest. My eyes had seen nothing much since, downturned, they saw my hands let slip an old gray IPhone case back in Tokyo. Terminal 11, when I finally found it, was nothing but vague shapes and blurs.

As I presented my ticket to the aerobridge clerk, I thought once again:

how can my boy be sick with cancer?

It took a rifle-burst of delighted laughter exploding from the lips of the petite African-American lady who took my ticket to really bring home the fact that there was something was off about this airport...

“Desmond! Come here guey, we got one from 2017!”

A wide-eyed Desmond interrogated, “nah! Yo ...uh .. Juan man, what was ex-president Trump like?”

I responded with a glower and a hesitant “uhm...”

The petite lady looked overjoyed.

“Oh, he don’t even know!”

While she spoke, her eyes were snapping open and shut quickly as if she was taking pictures.

“Papo, you in the year 2037 now!

“So here’s the story papo. Some folks in Scandinavia or somethin’ had an AHI that went exponential back a few years ago, and before they could terminate, the lil shit bit a couple of wormholes right through our timeline... apparently, into yours!”

“Oh, we’ve gotten all sorts of exotic things come through the Fog City Reality Highway. D! You remember those two-dimensional cartoon dudes ... uh.. Rick and something? And then, in May there w—”

A woman in her thirties with what appeared to be a skinny, furry snake coiled around her shoulders abruptly exclaimed,

“Oh my God! Is this guy another one of the reality expats!? Sir can I please take a picture with you!?”

My hearing capability was momentarily zapped back to life, but something appeared to be wrong with my vocal chords.

“uhm...I...I’m in the year 2037?”

Paternal preoccupation whooshed through my mind like a forest fire.

“Ayuhhh... I’m sorry people, but I need to be in Bogota right now. Are you going to take this ticket or not?”

The clerk smiled broadly.

“No sir, it’s been against airport policy to use paper tickets since I was una chiquita, however, you can board this flight on the house if you let us take a picture with you – one thing ya might find about the future is that people are a lot less concerned ’bout money!"

Probably true. Surrounding me were people boarding my plane without so much as a glance at the clerk lady. However, all I heard was that I would get to go home.

And I was off again.

I sat down and my eyes flicked to the monitor in front of me. I knew from watching sci-fi my entire life exactly what would happen if I pressed the picture of a sleeping guy on an intercontinental flight in “the future”. Artificial sleep came like a ghostly tide and gently covered my racing mind in warm murky water.