Last Flight to 2037
It was to be our last flight back to
Cleveland together. My wife was fast asleep in her seat next to the window as the
plane’s wing lights winked in the inky darkness. She kept her cane propped next
to her for when her arthritis flared up and made it hard to walk. She was too
young to need a cane. I was reclined in my seat reading Proust trying to keep
my mind off how nervous flying made me. It was ridiculous. Being afraid to fly,
a man in my condition. We had had a good time in Tokyo, considering. A friend
took us to some Buddhist temples and nice Zen gardens. We visited the best
doctors in Japan and tried everything—medicine, meditation, herbal remedies,
even contemplated surgery. But then the cancer became aggressive and I had to
face facts. And it was time to go home—for the last time.
About half an hour before our
scheduled arrival time, the plane shuddered and I felt a dull pop within my
ears. The overhead light flickered like a firefly. I assumed we were beginning
our descent.
“Are we there yet?” Jennifer
asked, her eyelids drooped in drowsiness.
“Not quite,” I said. “Did the
pills kick in?”
“It doesn’t hurt too much now.
I’ll be okay,” she lied. Her lips formed a tight smile. “I’m sorry I fell
asleep.”
“What do you have to be sorry for?
The medicine makes you sleepy. Flights make us both sleepy,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. I just don’t want
to miss a moment with you. Time is so fleeting these days.”
“We have time,” I said, patting
her hand. “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I know,” she lied again.
Jennifer leaned gingerly over the
armrest and gently kissed me on the forehead as the steward passed by. The
steward didn’t seem to notice the little display of affection as his eyes were
glancing from the overhead bins to the seatbelts on our laps. He noticed
Jennifer’s cane propped beside her.
“Ma’am, we’ll be landing soon.
Would you mind securing that under the seat?” he asked. “Or I could stow it in
the overhead if you like.”
I was about to protest but my wife
cut me off.
“No problem,” she said and she
handed me the cane to lay down on the floor across our already minimal leg
room.
“Thank you,” the steward said and
resumed his rounds.
The plane touched down without incident
about twenty minutes later, and my nerves began to calm as I spied the terminal
lights through the window. The plane taxied quietly towards one of the
terminals and came to rest on the tarmac. Everyone unbuckled and got up
expectantly, stretching their legs and fumbling with the overhead compartments
as the stewards readied themselves at the exits. I preferred to wait in my seat
with Jennifer until the crowd cleared out of the aisles some.
“How are you feeling, honey?” my
wife asked me.
“Better since I went off the meds,
if you can believe that,” I said. In fact, I did feel better, even though I
knew the feeling wouldn’t last. The intruder inside my body was doing its
deadly work whether I was aware of it or not. Still, it was the calm moments
like these that might make the storm to come bearable. “Although it’s hard now
to imagine feeling worse than I did going through chemo. You know, after all the
aggressive treatments I’ve been through, it still blows me away that doctors
are so eager to kill half of me to get at a disease, to cut pieces off me to
remove a foreign object that never belonged in the first place. It’s like
there’s a race on to see who can kill me first, the doctors or the cancer.”
“Oh dear,” Jennifer’s eyes grew
luminous. “We’ll beat this yet. You’ve been so strong. We’ll beat them all.”
“Yeah, I know,” I lied.
I scanned about the cabin at the
restless parents and fidgeting kids standing in the aisles and realized we’d
been sitting with doors closed for the past fifteen minutes. I looked for the
stewards. Two were partly hidden by a partition near the cockpit. They appeared
to be conferring about something. The blonde stewardess who’d served us drinks
earlier scowled and the steward’s face bore an expression of bewilderment.
After a few more minutes, the
voice of the pilot came over the intercom. He spoke first in Japanese, then in
clipped English: “This is your captain speaking. We apologize for the delay. There
was some slight confusion as to whether we were cleared to dock with the gate,
but that appears to have been cleared up.”
“That’s a relief,” I heard a man
in a 49ers jersey growl.
“The local weather is 75 degrees,
light breeze and scattered clouds,” the pilot continued. He paused another
moment before saying: “Our arrival was a bit late. Local time is 9:45 on August
21, 2037. Thank you for your patience and, on behalf of the flight crew, we
hope you’ve had a… pleasant journey.”
There was a slight murmur amongst
the congregated passengers. The steward and stewardesses appeared to be
apologetic as the doors opened and the crowd began to shuffle towards the exit.
“Did I hear him right? Did he say
2037?”
“Yeah.”
“Is 2037 some sort of military
time?”
“No military that I’m familiar
with,” I said. “You don’t think he meant the year 2037? Also, shouldn’t it be
morning now?”
“It had to be a mistake—or some
sort of joke, telling us the flight was late by 20 years.”
I shrugged. After the cabin had
almost emptied except for the crew and a few elderly passengers, I grabbed my
backpack from the overhead and Jennifer’s carryon. She struggled to retrieve
her cane from under the seat and, with a cursory farewell to the steward, we
departed the plane.
The tarmac still seemed slick from
a recent rainfall, reflecting the liquid pools of light from the terminals.
Perhaps it was the cloak of darkness that made distances hard to judge but it
seemed like the terminal was far vaster than I had remembered it. But all that
didn’t seem to matter; I was just glad we were home. Well, mostly glad, except
for a vague gnawing of dread as to what was to come next. I looked at Jennifer
briefly and a sense of longing came over me. I didn’t want to leave her alone
in the world. It just wasn’t my choice. I was already starting to let go.
When we reached customs, I looked about
for the other passengers from our plane but was surprised when I couldn’t
recognize any of the faces. I saw a few men and women in official-looking
uniforms scanning the crowd.
“I told them not to release the
passengers so quickly,” a small man in what appeared to be blue and grey
medical scrubs crossed with a business suit. “They’ll be disoriented. They need
to be processed and acclimated.”
“We’ll get them all. They aren’t
hard to spot,” a blonde woman in similar looking scrubs. Her hair was done up in
a ponytail and she wore a heavy-looking glove on her right arm that covered her
arm nearly to the elbow. Both of them looked fresh out of school. The blonde
woman noticed Jennifer and I and nodded. “There’s some more now.”
I placed my hand protectively on
wife’s shoulder as the two approached us. I knew Jennifer’s attentions were
elsewhere and the reference to being “some more” made me suspicious of these
strangers’ intentions. But as they approached, the blonde woman smiled broadly
at me.
“Hello, sir,” she said. “Are you
from the 2017 flight?”
I blinked. “No, I think our flight
number 008… sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. That was
awkwardly phrased,” the woman smiled. There was a strange momentary glint in
her eye. “Let me rephrase that. You’re from flight 008 from Tokyo, the one that
was lost in the year 2017. I’m afraid this might be hard to digest, but you’re
in the year 2037.”
“Then it wasn’t a mistake,” my
wife gasped. “The pilot did say 2037.”
There was another glimmer in the
woman’s eyes as though tiny black threads were swimming across the surfaces of
her irises and disappearing into her strangely broad pupils. “Ah yes, you must be
Mr. and Mrs. Samuels, in seats 14C and 14D. My name is Sarah Yu. Welcome home.”
“I don’t understand. How did we
end up in the year 2037?” I asked.
“Uh… we’re not entirely sure,” the
young man beside Sarah Yu said. “But this has happened before—recently—and at
this airport. We’re guessing some sort of temporary or sporadic rift in
space-time. Physics is not really my field, sir, but that’s what I understood
from our briefings.”
“Rift?” Jennifer said, scrunching
her face.
“What my assistant meant to say is
that we are medical technicians. We’re sorry we weren’t able to greet you at
the plane, but we were wondering if you would allow us a few moments to conduct
a brief medical exam,” Sarah Yu said.
“An exam?” I asked, eyeing the
medical technicians with a sharp eye. Suddenly, I felt a little threatened. I
poked an accusing finger at the them. “Like we’re lab rats—or quaint artifacts
from another time? What’s this all about?”
“It’s okay, honey,” Jennifer said,
taking hold of my arm to calm me. “I’m sure it’s nothing invasive. Are you just
checking us for radiation or toxins, something like that?”
Sarah Yu nodded. “That’s exactly
it, Mrs. Samuels. You have been out of time for a few decades. It’s just a
precautionary measure for your own safety.”
I grunted involuntarily. “I can
tell you already that you won’t find much good in my exam. Do we have to go far
for this… exam?”
“Not at all,” Sarah Yu said. “We
can do it right here, with your consent.”
“Right here?” I asked incredulous.
“Obviously, for your privacy and
comfort, we would do the exam at a proper facility if we discovered anything
concerning in our initial scans. But the initial scans can be done right here,”
Sarah Yu said. She raised her gloved hand in front her chest. Suspended above
the glove, a hollow image of a beating heart flickered in three dimensions.
With her bare hand she grasped at the phantom organ and spun it round. Then she
pinched the aorta and like playdough it stretched between her fingers as they
parted. The heart dissolved until nothing was left but the enlarged aorta, with
blood vessels speeding through its tunnel and disappearing into thin air. The
trick nearly made me gasp. “The glove I wear contains miniaturized imaging
equipment and software to render internal organs in three dimensions. This
little device can do most of what it probably took several rooms full of X-ray,
PET scanners and other equipment to manage. And it does it in real time.”
“That’s… extraordinary,” my wife
said.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” the
male assistant said. “What do you use the walking stick for, Mrs. Samuels?”
“Since I turned 30 a few years
ago, I’ve suffered from severe joint pain from rheumatoid arthritis. I can’t
walk long distances without a cane or wheelchair because legs seize up
terribly,” Jennifer said.
“My goodness, I haven’t seen a
case of arthritis since medical school,” the assistant’s eyes widened eagerly
as if he’d discovered a new species of human.
“Curb your enthusiasm, Walter. I’m
sure Mrs. Samuels does not want to be treated like a lab specimen,” Sarah Yu
scolded. She held her glove momentarily over my chest. “Do you mind, Mr.
Samuels?”
I nodded consent. She slowly waved
her glove across my face, torso and legs. This time no holograms appeared near
the glove but I couldn’t help notice the return of that strange glimmer return
to the woman’s eyes along with the black threads. Furrows began to mar her
impossibly smooth forehead.
“I told you, you wouldn’t like
what you found,” I said. The words almost stuck in my throat. “I don’t suppose
cancer is any less the predator in this decade as it was in 2017 or the
previous 50 years before that. The doctors when I’m from told me it was too
late for a medical solution.”
Sarah Yu’s face brightened. “On
the contrary,” she said. “Your flight may have been 20 years late in arriving,
but I would say that you found us just in the nick of time.”
I glanced at my wife whose shocked
expression was reflected in my own.
“I’ve called up a cart,” Sarah Yu.
“It should be here momentarily and then we can get you both sorted out.”
A small driverless cart arrived on
the concourse. We all hopped on and sped through the terminal. It was at once
familiar and exotic. There were little shops and kiosks, restaurants and
bistros, but many of the names had changed. And even the familiar ones like
Starbucks had gone through at least several facelifts. Many of the people we
passed were strolling and talking to themselves, which I found odd, until I
realized they were carrying on conversations with others unseen. No cell phones
or Bluetooth devices, just a glimmer in the eyes like the one I noticed in
Sarah Yu.
The cart sped through the terminal
and then out one of the exits. As it did so, a canopy extended over the open
cabin and then it whisked them onto a ramp and down the I-480 to the Cleveland
Clinic. Sarah Yu escorted us directly to what appeared to be an examination
room, though it was far less sterile than any hospital than I’d even been in.
“First, let’s tackle Mrs. Samuel’s
problem,” Sarah Yu said. “You say that the arthritis is so severe that you
can’t walk without pain, perhaps at all? Even with medication?”
Jennifer nodded. “That’s right.”
From her purse, she withdrew the
cocktail of drugs she took every day and showed it to the medical technician.
Sarah Yu examined the bottles and then handed them back. Then she waved her
glove over Jennifer’s body.
“Most of these drugs treat the
symptoms but not the underlying causes. And some of them don’t look like they
would work on your disease anyways,” she said. “It’s not surprising really.
Treatments which may work well for some people may not be effective for others.
In 2017, your doctors may not have been able to tailor a drug to address your
specific condition. Fortunately, we are.”
Sarah Yu went to a kiosk next to
the sink. She returned with a glass of water and cup with just two little pills
and handed them to my wife.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Not an immediate cure, if that’s
what you are wondering, but we should have your wife running in marathons by
the end of the year, if that’s what she wants to do,” Sarah Yu said. “The pills
will block two particular proteins which have been accumulating in your wife’s
joints from damaging the blood vessels in her arms and legs. With further
treatments, we can repair any damage to the tendons and joints.”
“How often will I have to take
these,” Jennifer asked. “What are the side effects?”
“These are tailored to your biochemistry,
Mrs. Samuels,” Sarah Yu said. “You should feel no appreciable side effects.
Before you leave, I’ll have enough pills for you to take with you until the
other treatments kick in. I’ll think you’ll appreciate not having to walk with
a cane anymore, which you should at least be able to by the time you leave
here.”
Jennifer looked at me. I shrugged.
“Better take your medicine then. I’d love to see you run a mile.”
Sarah Yu turned to me. “You’re the
more difficult one, Mr. Samuels.”
“I know. I always am,” I said with
a thin smile.
“Had you been born today, we could
have identified with nearly perfect accuracy your likelihood of developing even
the rare cancer you have and editing your genes to prevent the disease from
manifesting,” Sarah Yu said, returning to the kiosk and working the console in
ways that seemed almost mystical to me. “But now the cancer has manifested and
taken root throughout your body. The treatments of 2017 and earlier would have
been insufficient in doing more than delaying the spread of the malignant cells
throughout your tissue. I’m guessing they told you that you had not long to
live?”
“Yeah, they told me a month or so.”
“That must have been hard to take.
I can hardly imagine what it would have felt like to go through all the treatments
only to learn there was nothing to be done,” She turned back and then brought
up a 3D image from your glove. “Here’s a healthy cell from your body. Notice
the small perfectly round holes that encircle it.”
“It almost looks like a golf
ball,” I said.
“Right, now here’s one of your
cancer cells,” she said. “It’s all misshapen and the holes are bigger,
raggedy.”
“Yeah.”
Sarah Yu held a needle in her bare
hand. “In this syringe, I have the cure, a little miracle of nanotechnology
your doctors would have only dreamed about decades ago. The molecules I can
inject you with contain poison which will kill the cancer cells.”
“I have been poisoned before,” I
said sourly. “It was called chemo.”
“This is not chemo, Mr. Samuels.
The nanos are microscopically small, but not small enough to penetrate the
walls of your healthy cell. They will only attack the cancer and leave the
healthy cells alone. One injection and the nanos will do their job. The cancer
will be overwhelmed. If it tries to adapt and return, we’ll know about it
because you’ll have chips in your bathroom toilet that will collect DNA from
your stool which will warn you of the cancer long before you develop symptoms.
Then we’ll adapt the nanos to respond with different weapons.”
I heard Jennifer let out a tiny
sob. There were tears forming in her beautiful eyes. “Do you know what this
means?” she asked.
“I do,” I said. Without thinking,
I fell into her arms and clutched her tightly, my eyes closed to shut in my own
tears. Suddenly, I realized how comfortable I had become with the finality of
my terminal illness. I had embraced my death and kept the living at a distance.
Now my last flight home on 008 would be my first step in a journey into the
future.
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