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SCIENCE FICTION
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.
