By Peter Merkl
I was asked to assist in dealing with an inflight emergency on my transatlantic flight.
Just after midnight on a recent transatlantic flight, I was awakened by a frantic, teary-eyed stewardess. “Mr. Harrison,” she whispered while tapping my neck pillow with a trembling hand, “may we have a moment?”
I squinted up and saw she was surrounded by three men all of whom seemed quite calm. “Mr. Harrison,” she implored, “wake up! It’s an inflight emergency!”
I opened my eyes, and she asked, “Do you hear anything strange?” My spine crackled like frying bacon as I struggled to sit up straight in my traveler’s thrombosis inducing coach seat. I craned my neck and heard a low roar and a scraping sound.
“Yes.”
“That’s a Tyrannosaurus Rex we’ve trapped in the lavatory. He’s trying to free himself by clawing through the outer fuselage of the aircraft.”
“You want me desperately, right? I’m Indiana Jones?”
“No,” the small, bespectacled man standing to her right smiled reassuringly and said, “you’re not dreaming. I’m a geneticist and the CEO of Gendyne Systems. Utilizing cutting-edge breakthroughs in multifarious scientific disciplines, my startup has succeeded in creating a real, baby T-Rex! I know, right? It will be announced to the world tomorrow!
“But I’m afraid the recent creation of a dire wolf by a near-peer competitor forced us to move a bit too quickly, and the T-Rex is now experiencing an unforeseen growth spurt of about one inch every fifteen seconds. He burst out of the overhead bin and now barely fits in the lavatory we shoved him into.”
“Wait a minute, I’ve seen you guys on bigtime podcasts. What are your names again?”
The stewardess interjected, “Mr. Harrison, please. We must protect the privacy of our first-class passengers.”
“Why are three billionaires flying commercial?” I asked.
The shark-eyed AI magnate standing behind her answered, “For the good of the planet, we three must never die. Our odds of survival are 0.0003% greater on a commercial transatlantic flight. Would you agree to sacrifice your life to save the rest of the passengers?”
“Do your seats really fold flat in first-class?” I asked, fingering my neck pillow.
“Yes, but it’s cramped. Not at all like my Gulfstream; I never appreciated how luxurious it is. A self-teachable moment I’ll be self-mindful of while tripping by myself on ayahuasca. And, as I look around at you steerage sardines back here….”
“Would I sacrifice my life? What do you mean?”
“I’ve determined that you’re the most infirm person aboard and are, therefore, expendable and must be fed to the T-Rex in order to slow its efforts to claw a hole in the fuselage.”
“Infirm?”
“You have a head cold,” he explained. “Utilizing cutting edge AI paired with breakthrough quantum computing, I hacked into the medical records of every economy passenger. We’ll be releasing this completely free AI capability to the world tomorrow. There’s only about a twenty percent chance it will result in human extinction, but there are many other species. I have to release it untested; I’m sure you’ve heard the Chinese are breathing down my neck.
“Why only economy passengers?” I asked.
“Then what’s the point of having first-class?” he snapped.
“A head cold makes me the most infirm?”
“It’s lingering,” he responded.
“Isn’t killing the infirm what Nazis did?”
The stewardess glowered at the third man, a very famous podcaster; he was short but ripped. He looked sheepishly around the plane and whispered, “I’ve recently interviewed several experts – well, they’re not really experts – about Nazis. I had to! Call Her Daddy is killing it! Anyway, they said the Nazis were not really bad guys, just wildly misunderstood.”
“Aren’t you guys Ivy Leaguers?” I asked.
The geneticist and the AI guy nodded as the podcaster stared down at his bare feet. The AI magnate asked, “What does that have to do with anything?
“Are there any Jews on board?”
The geneticist smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand, smiled at the AI guy, and asked, “Wow, how did we miss that?”
Suddenly, there was a loud bang, the lavatory door imploded, our oxygen masks dropped, and we plummeted toward the Atlantic. Only the pilot’s heroic efforts kept us from slamming into the ocean. Then he somehow steadied the plane and limped all the way to Heathrow. Thanks to him, stunning advances in genetics, AI, and journalism will continue unchecked forever.
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