I’m currently on a flight from Munich to Hamburg.
A one and a half hours flight. Pretty useless, right? I could have easily taken the train. Yes it takes 7 hours by high-speed train, but honestly, going through security clearance, waiting at the airport, and finding a cab to the city center, probably saves me around two hours max. But I’m a consultant so I’m important, I guess. I have to travel business class and rob the Fridays For Future protesters of their last shred of hope, right? And the most perverted part of the whole thing is that my company even buys the wifi add-on for me. I hate it. But of course I’m going to take out my phone and use it as soon as we are in the air. My primitive brain has been trained for years to fall in love with instant gratification. Reducing my attention span from substandard to the one of a two-week-old golden retriever puppy.
I have been on flights like these hundreds of times. On my way to some meaningless presentation for some meaningless executives that are just trying to save their own asses, as they are on their mission to tell the single mothers they are about to terminate that this is part of the ‘business optimization strategy’ proposed by my consultancy.
But today’s different. Today I’m not traveling to meet some client I couldn’t care less about, today I’m on my way to an internal meeting - partner selection ceremony. I should mention, becoming a partner is the ultimate goal for everyone who manages to survive consulting longer than two years without being a complete mental wreck. All the 15-20 hour days, six to seven days a week, of designing beautiful slides finally pay off and your compensation package moves from ‘I can afford to live in a studio in the city center’-attractive to ‘Urus or Wraith today?’-lucrative.
Honestly, I’m not very superstitious. I do have faith in the numbers in my Excel spreadsheets, but that’s pretty much it. But somehow I had a bad feeling about this trip from the moment I received my invitation. I got my invite mail to the partner selection meeting, including booked flights and a five star hotel stay, 24 hours ago from the HR department of our firm. The partner selection ceremony is kept extremely confidential. Basically, there have always been rumors about the meeting going around the firm, ranging from ‘drinking scotch with old white men which are compensating for something with oversized meeting tables’ to Illuminati-like rituals. I never believed in this bullshit. I have attended thousands of meetings in my life, this will just be a very life-changing one of them. But the ground rule - repeated in the HR mail - is to not tell anyone about your invitation, until the moment you have officially been elected and announced as partner.
Up to now, this was a very normal airport experience, like the ones I have been through hundreds of times before. The same procedure at the security check-in, the same boarding process - me as a platin member checking in first of course - and the same old ‘sitting on the plane as first in line and then waiting for all the other passengers to take their seats’. As I always do, I took a nap until the pilot announced that we have reached cruising altitude and that we could turn our mobile phones back on and use the on-board wifi. And as soon as I clicked on the wifi connection symbol and accepted the airlines’ terms and conditions, everything changed.
Good luck with your ceremony, if you should make it there - SG.
You know, I have never been scared of flights. Heck, I’m rarely scared at all. Up until that very moment. My stomach twisted and I suddenly started sweating. My gutfeel was right after all, there is something wrong with this flight.
I looked around but I couldn’t see any other passengers. There was a velvet curtain between the so-called business class - which looks exactly the same as the economy class on short-distance flights - and the peasants, as we consultants jokingly call people who fly coach. But from what I remember from the boarding, the flight must be maybe 20% booked. Something that wasn’t an abnormality for short-distance flights within Germany. While waiting at the gate I mostly saw replaceable faces of men in navy and grey suits, or women in pantsuits and dresses. Occasionally you could see some groups of students, which probably managed to get a last-minute deal allowing them to forget about their ecological morals (‘The plane will fly with or without me’, right?) for a nine Euro roundtrip.
Everything seemed very normal, even though it is weird that I am the only one sitting in the front rows. Intercountry flights in Europe are usually packed with business people that all have to boost their ego and airline miles by booking business class seats, even though the empty economy rows might be far more relaxing on these flights. But here, no one was sitting in the rows next to me.
I called for the flight attendant, asking him whether he would mind opening the curtain, jokingly saying that I’m getting quite lonely all alone here in the front. Honestly, I didn’t feel like joking at all, but hey we all have our own coping mechanisms. Steven, as the flight attendants’ nametag read, smiled at me, turned into the direction of the curtain - and disappeared to the economy section without saying a word. He awkwardly squeezed through a small gap in the closed curtain, as if he was trying hard not to let me see the back of the plane.
Suddenly I felt the vibration of a text message coming in on my phone. ‘Rule #1: Don’t talk to anyone on this plane. If you fail to comply, I will personally make sure that this plane will never reach its destination.’ Same number as before, unknown to me. SG - whoever that should be - is on this plane. And he has full control over what will happen to me next.