Disclaimer: I don't own anything. Don't sue me.
Author's Notes: This chapter has been revised to flow better and whatnot. I am trying a new writing style that is very similar to Kurt Vonnegut's. Try reading his work. Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse-Five is highly recommended. Reviews will make me happy and grateful. Thanks in advance.
Spark
The passenger plane was large. The plane's skin was made of aluminum and it was an excellent conductor.
And what was a plane? It was a tube like thing with wings. Planes carried people and flew through the sky. It was what planes did.
But sometimes they dropped like a rock.
And every time a plane dropped like a rock to make a fiery, limb-infested crater, an engineer would be called in to explain what the problem was. Airlines liked to do that. It was much more cost effective to solve a problem, when an X number of people had already been blown to bits. This was how everybody else in the world knew there was a problem in the first place.
So, every time a new limb-infested crater was made, engineers from all over were sent to find out what was wrong. Sometimes it was faulty wiring, or human error, or lack of maintenance, or lightning, or just some plain old voodoo work. The engineers looked at black boxes, and sifted through the bits and pieces left after the crash, and calculated and calculated and calculated some more to solve the problem. This was what engineers did
After enough of these evaluations had passed, engineers discovered that lightning hit planes all the time. They also noticed that the planes hit by lightning didn't always crash.
"Huh," the engineers said collectively.
They didn't know why some planes crashed and some didn't, so back to the labs they went.
Here, insulation was the key to safety. So, the engineers insulated the important parts that made such a large thing fly, and made sure the skin of the plane discharged most of the lightning by creating a conductive shell.
What was a conductive shell? A conductive shell was engineer speak for an aluminum skin that didn't have any gaps. Aluminum was a conductive metal so it would make a great conductive shell. It was pretty cheap too.
And with this line of logic, the skin around the fuselage was made especially thick. Because if a spark went off in the fuselage, everything would explode, and if it exploded it would kill all the passengers. Blowing up a payload was a bad thing to do, so the engineers tested and tested again and again, and made sure everything was safe.
After a time, engineers also wondered how planes triggered lighting. They tested and examined the phenomena some more, and it just so happened, that if a plane flew through a highly charged cloud, the extra energy would be dispersed as lightning.
A lightning strike would start somewhere on the nose or the wing of the plane, and then travel upward. Such an unlucky plane would obliviously fly through the strike, and the electricity would then hit the vitals of the flying beast. The lights would flicker, but if the plane was well protected enough it would fly away unscathed.
This is what the engineers discovered. They said "Oh," fixed the problem, and moved on.
The engineers fixed the problem, but lightning still hits planes all the time.
And sometimes things break.
And sometimes things fall apart.
And sometimes things explode.
Boom. Just like that.
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On a particular month, on a particular day, at a particular time, a little girl said goodbye to her parents.
They were leaving on a flight for Hawaii. It was going to be the honeymoon that they never had. Japan's travel agency provided such a nice little package. They would get to take lots of pictures in a rented wedding gown and tuxedo, they would breathe in the fresh clean air, they would see the beach and water and sand, and plus, it was cheaper than a week at the Disneyland in Japan.
Safe—they assured the little girl. It was safe, safe, safe. It was only a week. Just seven days. Only one-hundred sixty-eight hours. It was just a measly six-hundred and four-thousand, eight-hundred seconds. They would come back with souvenirs and pictures and smiles.
The last smiles and hugs and kisses were sent and received.
Then they left, and the world fell apart—tumbling out of the sky like a rock.
It was caused by some 70 million volts traveling through a faulty aluminum skin. Manufacturers call such skins a defect.
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The brains inside the plane were defects too.
The pilot was drunk. The co-pilot had some special business in the bathroom. Just ahead there was a cloud. It was charged funny. It was polarized.
The cloud had a positive charge on the bottom and a positive charge on the top and its insides were all negative. It looked black and ominous. Scientists called clouds like these, thunderclouds. These clouds wanted to become neutral. Being charged up wasn't the greatest thing in the world, so something violent would take place for this to happen.
The clouds looked ominous, and still the plane flew. It was what an airplane did. It flew closer to the ominous cloud because the brains of the plane were defects.
It was just a day like that. The heavens decided to strike an aluminum wrapped plane with lightning; just like how Timmy decided to stomp on ants last Sunday.
There was no reason. No reason at all.
It happened because life was unequally unfair.
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Meanwhile the parents of the little girl were excited. They didn't know the plane was heading toward an ominous looking, funnily-charged cloud.
Instead of being frightened for their lives, they talked excitedly about expensive food, artificial beaches, and cracks in the earth were it bled molten rocks. This was how Hawaii was created. The earth bled, and the molten rocks spewed forth, then cooled down and covered the earth-wound like a scab. People were attracted to violent things like this.
The two of them were traveling to the most wonderful scab in the world. They were still very happy when the turbulence started and the lights began to flicker. At this point they were fixated on the in-flight movie, and focused on eating their in-flight snacks. They rolled and tumbled in their seats. It was sort of like a massage.
They smiled and ate and watched the screen in front of them, because turbulence was normal in any trip.
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There was a bright light. Faster than the blink of the eye, it traveled to his eyes at the speed of light. The pilot twitched. Bright lights equated to a sharp pain in his brain. It seared his existence, and all he did was twitch. It was all he could do because he was hammered, drunk to oblivion, bucked off the bull and thrown half-way across the moon.
The flash of light that seared the pilot's brain was actually the beginnings of a lightning bolt. It had started from nose of the plane, and by the time he twitched, the plane had already started to fly through the bolt.
The pilot didn't take much notice. Nothing mattered anymore. He wished he could die. He felt miserable, and crappy and all alone. His wife had left him the night before. She had just up and left him; thrown a shoe at his face and ran out the door with his dog. This is why he was drunk. She had left him all alone. Alone. Alone. So pitifully alone.
He wished he could die. He couldn't go on.
And luckily for his wife, they hadn't divorced yet, so she got a hefty compensation from the airline when her husband died.
She also got his dog.
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Lightning struck.
A fickle thing, that bolt of lightning was. It wanted to travel in the fastest, easiest way ever. There was no stopping. There was no waiting. All it wanted was to go from Point A to Point B, now, now, NOW.
So it struck, and the lightning traveled through the conductive aluminum shell like it was designed to do. This was because the aluminum was conductive. It was the fastest, easiest, way from here to there. Easy and fast. Easy and fast.
Then it hit a road block.
The lightning found a gap in the aluminum skin and saw that air was blocking its way.
The skin was a defect. This means the shell had a crack in it. Easy and fast, the lightning wanted. Easy and fast, easy and fast—so the lightning took the path with least resistance.
It jumped to the fuselage.
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Planes run on very volatile material. The fuel came from dead dinosaur excrement which had been buried under the earth for millions of years. The fuel was volatile, which meant that only a little bit of energy needed to be expended to activate a combustion reaction. Chemists called the energy needed to start any reaction, activation energy.
And what was a combustion reaction? A combustion reaction broke down molecules and gave off heat and water and light.
This would be a large combustion reaction.
After the pilot twitched, and the lightning began its journey—inside the cabin, the passengers noticed the lights were flickering. There wasn't enough time for them to know something was wrong. There wasn't even enough time to scream.
The lightning jumped to the fuselage.
A few microseconds later, the plane went boom and heat and water and light were created in the process.
And the ball of flames blossomed and withered away like a shy flower in the night.
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Something broke. Something fell apart. Something exploded.
And an ocean away, in the little island nation of Japan, a little girl got the bad news.
The people said that her parents had gone to a better place. They said they were terribly sorry. They said it was a tragedy.
The girl thought her parents were going to the happiest scab on Earth, but it turns out they had gone someplace else. They left her all alone. Alone. Alone so pitifully alone.
The people told her that others would take care of her. She wanted her parents. They told her that her parents would never come back.
She was abandoned at an early age. Psychologists call this trauma. She would be scarred for life.
Kino Makoto would never heal.
A plane with faulty brains and a faulty skin exploded in midair over the Pacific Ocean. It killed 83 people and traumatized a small girl.
All it had taken was a spark.