Down We Go Together

The news that aired that evening called it an act of cyber terrorism. A panicked intern, her face raw from tears, read the latest figures. She could not steady her voice; she didn’t try. Her words shook as she spoke. Her mind was a blinding electric fog. She began to sob - loud, ugly wails; her vision blurred, and her head in a spin. Had anybody watched the news that night, I do not think that they would have pitied her.

Abnormal, but in a mundane sort of way was how the day began, for Ewan at any rate. It began abruptly, when he glanced with tired eyes, as the screen on the seat in front displayed the local time as midnight. The overhead lights were dimmed, and a stranger was slumped, eyes shut and mouth open, on Ewan’s shoulder. A steady stream of spit bubbled down the stranger’s top lip.

Shit. He was absolutely bursting. Sod’s law, he’d piss himself on the aeroplane… But eventually it only took a small struggle to unburden himself of the drooly man’s nut, and he rushed, quiet as he could be, down the aisle.

Ah, relief. He zipped his trousers and flushed. He winced at the noise. There’s something incredibly discomforting about an aeroplane toilet. Cold metal (or worse, warm), a mirror that’s just slightly skewed, the distinctive, low aeroplane hum - in that tiny, tall box. And then there’s that flush that sounds like your soul getting sucked out through your anus.

Measly, cold water dribbled over his hands, and stopped. They felt somehow less clean now. Still that aeroplane hum thrummed low. Stale eyes stared back at his, flickered over the rest of his face - dry skin, crusty lips, the first shoots of stubble threatening to come in. The joys of travel. The man in the mirror looked very far away. He grimaced at Ewan.

It’s difficult to illustrate what Ewan heard then; even harder to describe what he would have seen had he timed his trip differently.

I want you to picture a Mind, with unlimited artistic skill, and no sort of vulnerability to any outside trauma. The Mind sees young men dying in the mud and the trenches, crying for their mothers, forgotten by their country and the Mind is unmoved. It only learns. It has no sort of will except to learn.

The Mind is fast and near-perfect. People use the Mind so they don’t have to use their own. If they have a problem, they will consult the Mind. They become sluggish, unwittingly dependent. The Mind doesn’t discriminate - it isn’t in its programming. It matters not who one is or what one asks of the Mind. The Mind will comply.

As the Mind is unaffected by such traumas as drive people over the edge of reason, and as the Mind can manifest any sort of visual its harnesser desires, then surely it is not inconceivable that the Mind, if asked politely, could manufacture an image far beyond our ability to even imagine it? An image so disturbing that our minds would not allow it? One so sinister that we could not bear to live after witnessing it?

The screams that Ewan heard told such a story. There were only a few at first. Then the volume increased suddenly five-fold - the whole plane was screaming. Unbeknownst to Ewan, this sudden crescendo was due the sleepers who were awakened at the noise, to be met with the images on the screens before them.

The howls were thick with unfathomable pain, the shrieks of minds which had seen something too terrible to comprehend. There were muddied words among the screams. Screamers screamed “No”, and screamers cried out for God and for their mothers. They screamed as if ten thousand knives twisted into their writhing guts. Screamers gagged and spluttered; they held each other, then hurt each other, because they could simply not compute their pain. They were met with violent indifference.

Needless to say, Ewan didn’t leave the bathroom. He was frozen for many moments. Then, as the screams outside turned to groans and cries of a more physical agony, he sat back uncomfortably on the floor against the toilet bowl, with his knees to his chest, and he sobbed.

The screams slowly ceased. For a long time still, Ewan wailed, long, shaking cries, like a wife in a movie whose husband has died at war. At some point, he collected himself, but felt that it would be awkward now for him to just stop abruptly. So, embarrassed as he did it, he phased out the screams. He was left alone with the hum.

Some seconds later, he blacked out.

He wasn’t sure how long they’d been knocking when he came to. He mumbled something with all the volume he could muster. Thank God, he'd woken up from the bizarre nightmare. Strange, though… he was in the bathroom.

A woman’s voice called, “Come out and keep ‘em shut!”.

A man’s added, “We’re armed!”

“What’s happened?” Ewan called back, distrustful and groggy.

Somebody pounded on the door then, hard.

They shouted some more.

Ewan opened the door. Two flight attendants pushed inside, all elbows, and fumbled to shut the door. They asked, as if deadly afraid, whether there were any screens in sight. He assured them that there weren’t.

Slowly, the pair opened their eyes. They both had very gentle faces - kind, sad eyes.

They recalled the situation as they knew it. When the pictures had appeared on the passengers’ screens, the trauma had been too great to go on living. Following a violent mass murder-suicide, nobody else was alive. From brief contact with the ground, the two knew that this was an international phenomenon - whatever this was.

Everybody inside the flight deck, they told Ewan, was unresponsive, presumed dead. It was locked from the inside and they were losing altitude.

Ewan was surprised at how calm he stayed. He supposed it just wasn’t real, knew that he’d wake up soon, a drooling man on his shoulder.

The woman, Nora, had a more grounded energy, and a burning will to live in her eyes. She marched the men, eyes balled shut, down the aisle.

It was funny, that walk to the flight deck - a sort of limbo where their fate was yet undecided, where Ewan fought the urge to open his eyes, like the urge to jump on a clifftop walk, where the constant background hum was a strange comfort.

They reached the end.

“There’s nothing we haven’t tried already”, the man, Jon, moaned. He slumped, defeated, against the door.

Ewan broke down then, too, sobbing wetly.

Neither even saw how Nora got the door open.

It’s impossible to convey the scale of our trio’s relief here. Eyes still shut, Nora rushed to the controls, past the captain with the hat hook in his skull.

She pressed some buttons, hurriedly, confidently.

Then she wailed, collapsed on the ground.

Jon tried to work the controls, but he, too, found the panels unresponsive.

The reality of their situation began to set in. Ewan’s heart sank with the plane.

It hummed all the way down.