A Time of Useful Consciousness

Rouse

I WAS STUCK in my own unremarkable hell; attempted slumber on a transatlantic flight.

I'd deployed all the tricks, the eyemask/earplugs, the expensive noise-cancelling headphones, and ridiculous inflated pillow. Despite these efforts the moment I fell asleep my head would drop forward and snap me awake. This cycled endlessly, sufficiently awake to be miserable but not enough to realise sleep wasn't going to work.

After an eternity of this something filtered through, a nagging observation still there after each attempt at sleep. I could smell cigarette smoke, not as if someone were smoking beside me, but that stale stink of old smoke. This pestered me until in a dream I heard a piercing scream that snapped me awake.

Last year I'd seen it happen on a flight. The smell first, followed by alarm, and finally theatrics. I sympathized with the smokers but the nicotine gum was cheap, most flights I'd chew my way through almost an entire pack. On that occasion three of the cabin crew had hustled a man back to his seat and took turns berating the poor bastard for the rest of the flight. The entire incident was the most exciting part of any flight I'd taken, so I was keen to watch a rerun.

After peeling off all the travel accessories festooned around my head, I was disappointed by the lack of any visible high drama. We were still in the night phase of the journey and rumbling around me were a half dozen snoring lumps in the dark.

My throat was a dusty ache and standing I squinted waiting for my eyes to wake up. I shambled my way between the seats, carefully dodging limbs in the aisle. On these large planes each cabin ended with a curtained-off section I'd once seen called the galley on a map.

The galley was brightly lit and the transition from the "night" of the cabin left me blinking. It consisted of a narrow corridor joining the two aisles and was packed with cupboards, toilets, coffee machines, and drinks trolleys. Sitting on the shelf was a thoughtful tray of snacks and tiny blue bottles of water. I downed an entire bottle of water in two gulps before stuffing my travel bag with a few of each before moving on. The smoke smell was lingering and I could hear distant shouting, so I poked my head into the next section.

Empty. I'd never seen an empty cabin mid-flight before. Rubbish was strewn on the floor, bags tucked under seats, thin, tangled tartan blankets, used earplugs, and crushed bottles.

For those like me, the 35 thousand feet champions of the sky that are the frequent fliers, this was a fabled Shangri-La. At some point we must have landed and dropped these people off. I hadn't thought that ever happened.

The smell was here, no stronger, no weaker. I wondered if gasping enough of this air at speed could ever feel like a smoke. Also an empty cabin wasn't something I was going to pass up on. I stretched and then jogged as best I could up and down the aisle. Failing to take any edge off my need to smoke I popped two bits of gum and decided to take a peek in the next cabin.

I held the curtain close at the edge and looked behind it expecting to see the first class cabin crew. Instead, there was another galley, identical to the one I had come from with the same trays of snacks and tiny water bottles.

I paused there at the entrance of that galley holding back the curtain for some time. The jog had cleared my head but the less dreamlike everything felt, the more uneasy I was.

I couldn't remember passing this section on my way in while boarding, and looking back at the cabin behind me I saw that none of the seats had screens. Walking up to the next curtain I prepared an excuse to give the cabin crew as to why I was making the classic faux pax of peeking into first class.

Instead, I was met with yet another empty economy cabin, another 20 rows of plain seats and another galley at the end. Walking briskly, I made my way to the end; another galley, another cabin. I made my way through cabin after cabin, some of the curtains were already pulled back, one was entirely ripped free and lying on the floor. Regardless each cabin was identical to the last, each empty.

Panting, I took a moment to calm down, I could feel the panic rising like some urgent itch needing to be scratched. Leaning over the seats, I opened the window blinds but could only see the dark of night and stars.

Moving back into the galley I detached one of the service trolleys and rolled it into the aisle; it moved smoothly on casters despite easily weighing over 100kg. Riffling through the contents, it was full of unfamiliar brands of soda and miniature spirits. Next, I ransacked the galley cupboards and checked the seat-back pockets in the next cabin. In all cases, there were no magazines, no safety brochures, no corporate branding anywhere.

As I started to make my way back, my foot stuck to the floor halfway down the aisle. Looking down I could see there was a large black puddle of something sticky covering the aisle. I'd missed it in my near panicked run. Kneeling, I gingerly dabbed my finger in the puddle.

As I raised my fingers to inspect, for the first time I looked back the way I'd come. The curtains were torn back revealing an uninterrupted view down alternating dark cabins and brightly lit galleys. My perspective shifted and lurched as I looked. Instead of a straight uninterrupted view, it looked as if I stood at the top of a hill. The floor rose to meet the ceiling, and I had a sudden moment of vertigo as my perspective shifted to the vertical.

Still kneeling I absentmindedly raised my fingers to my nose and sniffed. The smell snapped me out of it, my brain settling on the aisle as a steep slope rather than a near vertical tunnel. I stayed there for some time kneeling in the aisle, gripped by panic, fixated on that smell of smoke and fresh blood.

>> sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

>> iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8080

>> brew install mitmproxy

>> mitmdump -w dumpfile