Seat 42E: Last
When a documentary filmmaker finds herself propelled twenty years into the future, will she discover a world better or worse than the one she left behind?
In 2017, I was invited to contribute a short story to Seat 14C, an online science fiction anthology edited by Kathryn Cramer and sponsored by XPRIZE. Each story spotlighted a different passenger on ANA Flight 008, which departs Tokyo in 2017 but somehow lands in the San Francisco of 2037. This was a year before the television series Manifest used a similar concept, but the point of the XPRIZE project was to highlight the myriad ways technological progress could have made the world a significantly better place in the intervening two decades. Looking over the seat map, I chose to put my character in the last row of the plane so she’d be the final passenger to debark. That was the birth of “Last.”
The Seat 14C website is no longer live, but in 2020 the science fiction podcast DUST chose some of the stories to dramatize for its second season. “Last” was performed by Sarah Drew from Grey’s Anatomy. You can read the story here or listen to the audio below from Spotify, though I would recommend making a cup of tea and settling in for the audio experience.
SCENE 1 – INT. ANA FLIGHT 008 – 10:51 AM
Yumiko Hall was last to understand what all the commotion was about. Minor mid-Pacific turbulence had kept her from sleeping earlier in the flight, but exhausted dreams had at some point stolen over her. Visions of her mother crumbling to dust gave way in a smash cut to the bleary reality of her middle seat in the middle row at the very back of the plane. They were on the ground at SFO, braking hard. Despite the chiding of the crew, passengers were standing in the aisles, hunched, peering out the windows, pointing, chattering.
She shivered and stretched in her seat, blinking away sleep. She reached into the seatback pocket for her phone almost reflexively and switched it out of airplane mode. She ached to be home with Kasim and especially little Akiko—an ache as deep as the ocean she had just crossed, as specific as a shoe that refuses to be broken in. Akiko would be eight days old today, which meant that Yumiko had now missed thirty-seven and a half percent of her daughter’s young life. If she could have blinked herself home immediately, she would have. She never enjoyed the commute home from the airport, but today she dreaded it.
Today she was bringing home a share of her mother’s ashes.
Yumiko checked her phone. No signal yet. She was anxious for an update from Kasim, eager to let him know she’d be home soon, hungry for the sound of his voice. She stared at the screen, willing it to connect, heedless of the increasing babel around her.
The plane had stopped. The seatbelt sign was off. The massed passengers strained toward the exits. Yumiko reached for her backpack beneath the seat in front of her before remembering, yet again, that she’d been forced to check it at Narita. She felt unmoored without the weight of the lead-lined canister on her back, a balloon that might drift away and never come back to earth.
She felt a strange gulf opening between her and her fellow travelers. They knew something she didn’t. She should have cared about that, but she didn’t.
Yumiko felt the emptiness of the cabin expanding behind her as she shuffled slowly ahead. She was last. Last again. To distract herself, she concentrated on how she would frame herself—bereaved child, new mother—if this were a scene in a movie. Camera there, among those seats to the fore, herself in shallow focus, partially eclipsed by the blurry passengers ahead, her face dark and indistinct against the brilliant light from the windows. A strong woman, a portrait of grief and determination.
No, that would be a lie. A cliche and a lie. She wasn’t strong. Her mother was the strong one.
At last passing through the door of the plane, she glanced at her phone. Still no signal.
Something was wrong.
It wasn’t until she emerged from the jetway into an unfamiliar arrival lounge that she began to see how wrong things were. Twenty years wrong.
SCENE 6 – EXT. SAN FRANCISCO INT’L AIRPORT – 12:32 PM
Bereft, Yumiko stumbled out from the terminal into the warm light of a sun just past its zenith. A sun in the year 2037.
The glasses that sat awkwardly on her face darkened against the glare. A blinking green target appeared in her vision, superimposed over a tiny yellow car that was pulling silently up to the curb. A line of green text announced:
YOUR PERSONAL TRANSPORT HAS ARRIVED.
Happy people chattered around her in a dozen languages as she ducked into the car. Could any of them have looked at her and guessed that what was twenty years for them had been only three whirlwind days for her? That she had no idea how or where to find her husband and daughter?
Yumiko was not a woman given to crying or self-pity, but when, just off the plane, the reality of her situation had become irrefutably clear, she had fled to the nearest restroom and lost track of time sobbing in one of the paperless stalls. She pulled herself together at the mirror, hands braced on the edge of the sink, composing a shot in her mind with the camera hovering somewhere behind her left shoulder. “One step at a time,” she told her reflection. The same way she’d gotten through four films and an arduous pregnancy. “Take this one step a time.”
By the time she cleared Passport Control, her backpack was the last item left on the ANA 008 luggage carousel. Her fellow passengers were nowhere to be found. Her credit and debit cards, as she soon discovered, were useless, and the two ¥5,000 notes on her person yielded less than forty dollars at the currency exchange. It was in panic and desperation that she entered the Travelers Aid office, where one Ms. Fitter had arranged—this.
“Hello, Yumiko Hall,” said the car in the plummy voice of some vaguely British actress. There were two seats inside—one of which folded flat to make room for Yumiko’s backpack—but no driver. “Welcome to SafeFrancisco Transit, a transportation solution in association with the San Francisco Department of Human Services. I am fully electric and powered entirely by renewable energy sources. I see that your destination will be the Willie Brown Towers in Bayview, San Francisco. Is this correct?”
“Um, as far as I know.”
“Very good,” said the car. “Please fasten your safety belt so we can begin.”
The moment she snapped the buckle together, the car swung smoothly away from the curb. Yumiko caught her breath as they merged into a stream of vehicles in a maneuver that seemed destined to result in a collision.
“Our travel time will be approximately fourteen minutes,” said the car.
Yumiko gaped. “Are you serious?” she said. “Bayview in fourteen minutes?”
“Traffic conditions are optimal at this time.”
A riot of colors flooded Yumiko’s vision, whirling and resolving into the patchwork of a three-dimensional map. Her stomach lurched as her viewpoint swooped in over the field of geometrical shapes, finally matching speed with a yellow ball that rolled like a blood cell down a silver artery in perfect sync with its neighbors.
“As you can see—”
Yumiko ripped the glasses from her face and leaned back in her seat, breathing hard. Ms. Fitter could not have been more kind or accommodating—setting up this ride, temporary shelter, and even a limited debit-chip allowance—but she had cautioned that the augmented-reality glasses would be disorienting at first. Now Yumiko massaged the bridge of her nose and concentrated on keeping the meager contents of her stomach where they were.
“Ms. Hall, are you all right?” the car asked. “Your pulse is elevated. Do you require assistance?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said. She rubbed the canvas surface of the backpack beside her, this artifact from 2017 that now contained, in addition to her mother’s ashes, a keychain with her temporary debit/identity chip and an emergency safety beacon, both paired with her glasses. What were Kasim and little Akiko doing now, in this strangely retooled future world? Was he still writing code for high-speed trading systems, or had he moved on to something shinier? And what had she grown up to become?
Yumiko risked opening her eyes again, needing a step back from the precipice of despair. The car was traveling north on 101, but a 101 surfaced in some lustrous black material that almost seemed to swallow the sunlight. The vehicles around them—most carrying one or two passengers, but some entirely empty—rolled silently along the road, occasionally trading lanes in some unpredictable yet coordinated dance, while for the most part maintaining identical speeds and separation.
To either side she saw the familiar sprawl of office parks, but nearly every roof was topped with solar panels and vertical wind turbines and beds of grass or flowers. Interspersed among the structures, particularly thickly to the east along the edge of the brilliant bay, were towering turbines that spun on a vertical axis like spiraling silver ribbons of DNA. There were also mysterious arrays of thin black spires whose purpose Yumiko couldn’t begin to guess.
“What are the tall black things over by the water?” she asked.
“Those are carbon sequestration units,” said the car, “colloquially known as scrubbers. They are clad with a responsive piezoelectric nanolayer that captures molecules of carbon dioxide and methane from the moving air. Ionization around each unit also helps funnel more of these greenhouse gases in toward the cladding. The carbon is then deposited underground, where it can be repurposed into building materials or put to other varied uses. The Willie Brown Towers, in fact, are constructed from that very sequestered carbon.”
Yumiko pictured herself in a high-angle shot, camera tracking with the car and peering down at her upturned face as she took in all the wonders around her. How difficult a shot would that be to pull off in the here and now? Would filmmaking even still be a viable path for her? If so, then maybe she could find a way to put across how stupendous and terrifying a place this was to a wandering stranger like her.
She found herself wanting to share her amazement with Kasim—but then she remembered, sadly, that all this change would have crept up on him gradually, and that he would no doubt find it utterly banal.
“Can you place a phone call for me?” Yumiko asked.
“I can request a connection for you, yes,” said the car. “If, that is, the target’s contact information is publicly accessible.”
Yumiko tried to hold onto hope. “The name is Kasim L. Hall,” she said, and spelled his first name.
“I show four Kasim Halls in the Bay Area, but none with that middle initial. In the fifty-one states, I see a total of eighteen exact accessible matches. I can send profile photos to your glasses, if you like.”
Yumiko sighed, blinking hard. Why not cut out the middleman? “Is it possible to make a detour on the way to Bayview?”
“Within reason. My time allotment on this assignment skews to the generous side but is not unlimited.”
“It shouldn’t be too far out of your way.” Yumiko recited the address of a house on Winfield Street in Bernal Heights.
“Yes, that’s manageable. We can be there in approximately seventeen minutes.”
Traffic was cooperative—which Yumiko was beginning to think might be a new defining characteristic of “traffic.” Yumiko’s heart pounded when she first caught sight of Sutro Tower atop its hill, so close to her home, now ringed by an entourage of turbines and scrubbers and other arcane structures.
They in fact made it to Winfield Street in fifteen and a half minutes, her nerves keying tighter with every curve and corner. To the west, high above the houses, she could see the ridge that split the city. Fog massed along its top like cream on the lip of a cup, poised any moment to spill down the hillside.
The car dropped her off in front of the neat, narrow Edwardian and began circling the block as she mounted the front steps. The house, once vibrant purple, was now painted robin’s egg blue, but otherwise was still as well maintained as when she’d left it three days earlier. The only other obvious difference was the array of small solar panels on the roof.
Yumiko waved away a cloud of gnats that coalesced around her head. She reached out to ring the bell but froze. She had noticed the brass plate on the door, which read:
B.L. & C.J. WISNIEWSKI
SCENE 9 – EXT. SILVER TERRACE, SAN FRANCISCO – 2:20 PM
Walking southeast on Palou Avenue—her belly full and warm after she’d run across an unexpected okonomiyaki shop—Yumiko prickled at the eeriness of it all. To her, this neighborhood had always seemed a little barren, with its low houses butting the sidewalk, its smattering of trees, its sere patches of grass. But now this long, rolling street was swaddled in green, from the trees that lined the sidewalks to the gardens thriving in what used to be driveways and alleys to the vines twining down from many roofs. The sidewalk was cool and shady despite the fierce afternoon sun. The only sounds were the whispering of leaves and the palaver of birds, pierced by the occasional zinger from a contrary parrot. Even the omnipresent cars passed as silently as monks. It felt to Yumiko like a thousand years had passed, not just twenty.
But what struck her most poignantly was the smell. The air quality had been fine for as long as she’d lived in San Francisco, but now—now the smell now was actively fresh, an improbable combination of sea air, cornfields, orange blossoms, and loam. It was as if she had wandered into some limbo land woven from the warp of her Hakone childhood and the weft of an American dream that had never quite been hers. It made her ache for the mother she had always known, and for the daughter she had only just met.
A park with a small playground opened up to Yumiko’s right. Weary, she removed her heavy backpack and took a seat on a bench, at the opposite end from a young woman in glasses and a pale blue hijab. After the letdown at her old house, she had released the car and sent it on its way. She couldn’t just sit back and passively accept this miraculous city that had moved on and forgotten her. She needed to see it up close. She needed to walk it.
Yumiko watched a group of half a dozen small children clamber on a jungle gym, while in the flower bed beside her artificial bees enameled in white and silver stole like cat burglars in and out of columbine blossoms.
The woman in the hijab said something in a language Yumiko didn’t recognize. Yumiko turned her head. The woman was looking at her with eyebrows raised, smiling and tapping her glasses. The frames cast a bluish light around her eyes.
After a moment, Yumiko understood the woman’s pantomimed question. She removed her own glasses from a pocket of her backpack and put them back on.
The woman spoke again, gesturing at the jungle gym. A line of text—subtitles for real life—appeared in Yumiko’s vision:
DO YOU HAVE CHILDREN?
Yumiko pressed a fist to her mouth. Her heart felt like it would burst. In Japanese she said, “I left my baby behind,” and felt her face begin to crumple.
The woman’s eyes widened, and Yumiko sucked in a shuddering breath, ready to wave off any sympathy or concern. The woman pointed at Yumiko’s head and spoke again.
MY GOD, ARE YOU FAMOUS?
Yumiko realized the air around her was again swarming with gnats. She stood up fast, swatting at them. “What are they?”
MIDGECAMS. THIS CLOUD SAYS IT’S FROM TMZ.
She heard those initials clearly enough, despite the language gulf. “I’m not famous,” she said. “I’m just lost.”
The swarm was already dispersing as Yumiko scooped up her backpack and hurried on her way. She concentrated on imagining what kinds of shots she could achieve with tiny cameras like those.
One step at a time.
SCENE 13 – INT. BROWN TOWERS, STRUCTURE 6 LEVEL 20 – 7:58 PM
That evening, Yumiko shrugged her backpack on, locked her temporary pod, and stepped into the claustrophobic elevator. From her high window she had seen the fog rolling in across the complex, gilded by the waning sun, while rooftop solar collectors on stalks folded their panels together like flowers going to sleep. She wanted to be down below, out of the light. She wanted to lose herself in the fog, and forget.
The pod itself was a marvel of efficiency, everything she could have needed within a few steps of everything else. Each pod was fabricated locally, fully furnished, then slotted into place like a puzzle piece around a central core in the skeleton of the building. Pods could be moved intact, or even shipped to another city if someone didn’t want to go to the trouble of packing all their belongings. What’s more, she had already met some of her neighbors, a family of three refugees from the war in Venezuela, and they were lovely, generous people. And the whole complex was built on the decontaminated remains of the naval shipyard at Hunters Point, which should have kindled in her at least some pride on behalf of her adopted city.
But as Yumiko made her way out onto the foggy commons, the structure at her back felt more like a looming dreadnought than a miracle of science. It was at the built-in computer terminal in the kitchen niche that she had finally found a couple of recent news articles referencing her husband. A team he led had won an XPRIZE in neuromorphic computing for work on predictive intelligences designed to guide large-scale climate-engineering projects. He had traveled to the ceremony from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Where he lived with his wife of twelve years. Tahira.
There was no question it was him. In the photos he was older, graying, a little rounder in the face. But he was smiling that same dazzling smile she had fallen in love with when they were insecure young students at San Francisco State, both far from home. She wanted to send him a message, but she was too afraid to do it.
Yumiko no longer felt like a character in a movie. Now she felt like a woman marooned at the end of the world.
Tendrils of fog snaked around her like a winding shroud as she walked. She shivered in the thick flannel hoodie she had found waiting for her in the pod’s closet. She had her glasses on because she could no longer bear to look at this world through naked eyes.
“Okāsan,” Yumiko said quietly, addressing the canister on her back. She was trying to imagine her mother walking beside her, but all she could picture was performing kotsuage the previous day—she and her younger brother in black kimono, standing across from each other over their mother’s cremated remains, picking through the ash with chopsticks and depositing chunks of bone in a stone urn. If only she had stayed in Hakone for another day of mourning. If only she had done what her conscience—or her mother’s spirit—had told her to. “Okāsan, why did you have to go?”
A glowing red target appeared suddenly in her vision, with a dot blinking near the circumference of its lower right quadrant. A message flashed beside it:
IT IS POSSIBLE YOU ARE BEING FOLLOWED. ALERT POLICE AND NEIGHBORS? BLINK THREE TIMES FOR YES.
She remembered the keyring in the pocket of the hoodie. She stopped and turned slowly until the dot on the target was directly above the bullseye, moving closer. Yumiko squinted past it into the fog. Another message flashed:
DO YOU REQUIRE ASSISTANCE? BLINK THREE TIMES FOR YES.
A shadow emerged from the fog, a slight figure. Yumiko took off the glasses and put them in her pocket. “Hello?” she said.
The figure came closer, resolving itself into a girl. No, not a girl. A young woman. Straight black hair and a purple San Francisco State sweatshirt. Pleading look on her face. It was like staring into a mirror across time.
“Are you—?” the young woman said. “Are you my mother?”
Yumiko’s breath hitched. “Akiko?” she whispered. “I assumed—”
They surged together.
“I thought you were dead,” the girl sobbed against her chest.
Yumiko stroked her hair. She could barely speak. “I left you three days ago,” she said. “I’m so sorry. You were too little to come.”
“Your holo was everywhere this afternoon, but I was the last one to hear. I was last.”
Yumiko shook. “Oh, my God. My baby, my little girl. I missed everything. Everything.”
“Mommy. You don’t have to miss anything else.”
The two young women clung to each other in the gathering fog, watched over, perhaps, by a ghost. All Yumiko wanted was for the moment to last. ∅
With thanks to Fawn Fitter and Kareem Lawrence for help with certain details of this story.
The story itself was very well written, and enjoyable. I was able to put myself in Yumiko’s shoes, and feel the anguish she felt, and then the joy and relief when her daughter found her.
Loved this. I remember reading it the first time when it came out.