Mayday in November

     < click > “Houston Approach Control, this is Alpha Charlie Delta Charlie two five eight. Three minutes to re-entry. ETA in sixteen. Please confirm clearance, over.”

     < click > “This is Houston, AC-DC 258. Re-entry access granted on Mooney Niner One Seven Victor. You’re cleared to land runway two five left and taxi to stand 69.”

     < click > “Roger that, Houston, Nose in or nose out?”

     < click > “Just roll over, hot shot.”

     < click > “Affirmative, Houston, over.”

     The second officer glanced to his left, “Captain, did you reset your watch this morning?”

     “Back in time,” nodded the Captain.

     The digital clock on the flight panel flipped back one hour according to the old Daylight Saving Time which never saved any energy but helped to gain once a year one more hour of sleep, and as everyone knows you had to give it back six months or so later.

     The Captain smiled to himself at some odd personal memories flashing past and fast, lost in his world of memento and memento mori, he didn’t feel his copilot tugging at his elbow:

     “Ca..ain..tain..ve..gon..bac..in..our..fli..s..gon..ba..ime!”

     “What?”

     The..boar..con..was..goric..s..owin..a..sit..if..ward..shit..outed.


Note from the Writing Department: Oops, we went too fast in time. This is what you should have read:


     “Captain! Captain! We’ve gone back in time, our flight has gone back in time!”
     
     “What?”
     
     The on-board computer was categorically showing a position drift backward, “Oh shit,” the Captain shouted.
 
     All vectors fit the flight manifest, there was no irregularity, no discrepancy, only an hour flight drift in the past as if the plane had physically returned in space to where it was sixty minutes ago.

     The Captain thought perhaps some wiz kid hacker had hard-coded the flight coordinates with its schedule as it were every time for that very same transport, but that was impossible because the computer system was, like on other aircrafts, updating itself according to flight events.

     The Captain’s rational judgment had always been praised by his superiors, his mental faculties never questioned, his vision was not impaired, his motions not hindered, only his bladder was signaling him it was time to go to the lavatory; he knew this situation was not a virtual reality training flight, nor a risk assessment test; his guts (or instinct, like old sea-wolves) could have told him not to worry; everything was normal, flight pattern unchanged, weather conditions unaltered, no weird smells of burn or fumes, nothing abnormal in the stable impeccable trajectory of the supersonic horizontal aircraft perfectly flight-worthy but... but his ship was undeniably all of a sudden several thousand miles behind schedule.

     The human-failure computer-recovery system kicked in from the entrails of the beast lost amidst the outer space and time warp continuum. Automatic pilot override took over to cope with the situation, namely the sixty minutes tardiness on schedule; meaning that the plane had to make up in speed increment for this unexpected delay, no matter what.

     Now, it shouldn’t normally matter, unless that ‘what’ was the ETA before human failure and that this ETA was sixteen minutes. 

     Well, not anymore. 

     Mathematically, the solution was a simple operation: distance divided by time left to travel. 

     Realistically, more intangibles were to be taken into consideration by the Russian-designed artificial intelligence decision-making application; some of the less esoteric elements not lost in translation were: the response time during acceleration from and deceleration back to regular speed, the triple side-effects of re-entry (euphoria, enuresis, thirst and claustrophobia), the risk factor associated with computer failure, software glitches, unexpected adverse mechanical impact to emergency bailout, and the relative incertitude of being at the right time at the right place. 

     On paper, figuratively, the computer computed the celerity of the aircraft to be, literally, 3.14159 times its current velocity. 

     Technically, the wings of the space plane went delta and the engines went to work like parturients, rat racers, antibodies and other speed freaks, “Be done with it,” they said; the nose of the cockpit turned red and then yellow; the German Schallmauer boomed twice because of the echo of the French mur du son, the English sound barrier and the Spanish barera del sonido were indeed doubled up, one per ear but nobody heard anything, for in outer space there is no air to carry sound waves. 

     “Thirty minutes to landing,” sounded by and for itself: most eardrums had popped in the cabins. 

     Practically, it was of no surprise that the cargo, aka the passengers, should feel the face-lift and belly liposuction effect, aka G-force which everybody knows is a measurement of acceleration and not of forces; and so, skinny or not, bodies were thrown, smashed and sucked into the nearest object, mostly their seats, save for those spacemen and spacewomen in the aisles, galleys and lavatories – one can’t make omelets without breaking the eggs. 

     “Fifteen minutes” was lost in the void of the blasted electroacoustical transducers, woofers and twitters alike. Top security officials at the UFO intergalactic space center were dragged out of their bunk beds to make decisions about that unbelievably fast oddity but it was already too late: AC-DC 258 had made re-entry into earth atmosphere, shining like a comet, melting like a marshmallow. 

     It was that fast: the computer-aided navigational system announced “Five m...” to the recording black box and began approach maneuvers, shutting off the thrusters to cut air speed, raising the nose to cut ground speed, lowering the gears to...

     “Captain! What are you doing? Are you crazy? We’re in the middle of the ocean. Captain! < click > Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is AC-DC 258, over. < click > Captain! < click > Mayday, mayday, mayday, we...”

     < click > “This is Houston, AC-DC 258. Why are you dropping speed and altitude?”

     < click > “We have a problem, Houston. The Captain’s gone berserk. Yes, you are mad. You can’t do that...”
 
      < click > “Is that you, hot shot? What seems to be the problem?”
 
      < click > “The Captain wants to land at 60.000 feet.”
 
      < click > “Good luck. I mean, that’s funny. Oh, wait... let me get rid of that call. Stand by.”
 
      < click > “Houston?”
 
      “...”
 
      < click > “Houston...”
 
      “...”
 
      < click > “HOUSTON!”
 
      “...”
 
      < click – click – click >
 
      < click > “Uh... this is Houston, AC-DC 258. Why are you dropping speed 
and altitude?”
 
      < click > “I told you, he wants to land over the ocean and we’re now at 38.000 feet.”
 
      < click > “Oh yes, right. Stand by. ... ... ... ... ... ... AC-DC 258, disable Captain and take over.”
 
      < click > “Roger that, Houston. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... BANG ... ... ... I’m in charge, now.”
 
      < click > “AC-DC 258, that was a joke. My name’s Luis, what’s yours, over.”
 
      < click > “My name’s Roger, over.”
 
      < click > “Roger that, Roger. We have confirmed murder, hijacking of government property. Proceed to jail. I repeat: go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Game over.”
 
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .

     “Billy Bob Jr! Turn your light off and go to sleep. You’re gonna miss your bus again.”