Alone in the passenger cabin of a corporate jet, Boogie Wu declared out loud, partly to herself but mostly to her father back home, that she was through with trying to impress the world. This time, she intended to fix the world.
The jet started its descent toward Santiago International Airport and her stomach floated. First time in Chile. First time presenting at the International Congress of Mathematicians. Definitely her first time in an airplane like this, all cherry wood paneling and buttery leather seats. Amazing the resources her employers at Magenta Corporation would provide when they had to.
The plane tilted alarmingly, inclining almost sideways. She gripped the armrests. Was this normal? There were no other passengers to ask.
Everything would be fine. She filled her lungs. Exhaled for an eight-count. Tried to settle her mind by allowing it to go blank.Â
Instead, her brain threw her an image of herself onstage at tomorrow morning’s plenary session, in front of the audience of mathematics VIPs, a thousand pairs of eyes drilling right through her, scouring the inside of her skull for any scrap of doubt or error. The conference would be a jangle of voices and faces and name tags and chatter. Social anxiety fluttered in her gut like frantic tiny birds. But all that was worth enduring, now that she finally had permission from her bosses to share her proof.Â
She curled up in the overwide seat and hugged her knees as she imagined presenting the final extra reveal she had in store at the end. A “One more thing” the world needed to know, but that she definitely did not have Magenta’s blessing to announce.Â
She sat up straight and let the thought drift away.Â
Feet on the floor.Â
Breathe. Hold. Exhale through the nose.Â
She’d come this far.Â
The plane dropped toward the runway at a steep angle. In this small aircraft, every bump and wiggle felt much more intense than in a heavy commercial airliner, so this might be typical.Â
The pilots’ voices came from behind the cockpit door, loud and with exaggerated calm. The plane tilted again and the engines whined at a higher pitch.Â
Through the window, she estimated the craft’s rate of descent and plugged that into a visualized vector of the left wing’s edge. The result in her mind’s eye confirmed it. The wing’s path intersected with the planar surface of the runway.Â
They were about to crash.Â
Her heart tried to punch its way out of her ribcage.Â
More muffled conversation, calm but urgent, through the cockpit door. Then one of them, unmistakably, said, “Mayday.”
She flung herself into the rear-facing seat on the starboard side—her mental 3D model showing it would be farthest from the point of impact. Pulled the seatbelt tight and bent into the brace position, tensed for the worst.
Head tucked between her knees, it struck her how hopelessly optimistic the inventors of the brace position must have been to believe a body—a tube of meat on a fragile chassis of bones—would provide any impact protection at all for a delicate brain.
A teeth-crunching slam of impact. Metal screamed, tortured by shearing forces. Her heart jackhammered as something flat and heavy thumped her hard across the head and shoulders. A jolt and she was flung upright, seatbelt yanking back hard.
In horrifying slow motion, the cylinder of the corporate jet’s cabin came apart and spilled its contents across the runway. Leather seats, a cabin wall, and the entire lavatory in a single block all came away and tumbled out like prizes in the world’s most expensive piñata.Â
Steel screeched and sparked, grinding against asphalt. Next to her, the seat she had been sitting in earlier disappeared, shorn from its metal struts.Â
A ferocious whump of heat blasted from the left. She heard more than felt the side of her face sizzle and learned what burnt skin smells like. She squeezed her eyes shut and thought about breathing.Â
With a jerk, everything halted.Â
She hung upside down by her seatbelt. Something dripped upward into her eyes and she didn’t know where her legs were. She breathed. A thought came to her as a small celebration: this breath confirmed her brain could still send signals to her lungs. She was alive.
She blacked out.Â
Possibly for a few minutes.Â
Maybe a thousand years.
She was flat on her back, looking up at the sunset sky while somebody wrapped her right hand in white gauzy material. Her legs existed again, and a white-hot bar of agony flared in her left thigh and hip. Red lights flashed. Voices floated above her, some talking, some shouting, but she couldn’t understand them. She tilted her eyes and found light flooding from the open doors of a van, with the word Bomberos across the top.Â
Off to her side, a man screamed. She turned her head toward the sound and a bolt of pain-lightning zapped from her neck down to her ribs. Emergency personnel surrounded the pilot, his uniform torn and his white shirt crimson with blood. They lifted him off the runway onto a gurney. A horrific wound left half of his face exposed and meaty. He saw her.
“Her fault!” he cried. “She invented the auto-land AI!”
This was news to Boogie. Who would have told the pilot that? She tried to swallow the dread that formed in her throat; her work couldn’t be responsible for the accident.Â
Could it?
Beyond him, a medic pulled a sheet over another long shape on a gurney. The gold-trimmed sleeve of the copilot’s left arm dangled.
Boogie’s gurney jolted into movement and her entire left flank seared. Medics surrounded her. She looked down at her legs—a complex gory mess of flesh and skin and denim—and wished she hadn’t. Her vision blurred and something soaked the cushion under her head.Â
The lights and the shouting became small and far away, and the sky above darkened from dusk to night. Was the light really fading so quickly? Or was that her?
Tomorrow she would not get her chance to fix the world.
