3 guessed that our destination would be Hypercity-6, where the most fragile people on earth lived. These were people who couldn't bear the sight or touch or even the thought of people like themselves -- let alone, people that were different. Immortalized in the film, "Town Without Infrastructure," Hypercity-6 was located in the most repartitioned and most renamed country in all history, with an economy based almost entirely on servicing the small refugee boat colonies, huddled together, just offshore. This, of course, made it a hotbed of all kinds of shady, poly-lingual transactions, where simple misunderstandings and mis-translations could be parlayed into profits of millions of Dolarios by any random conman/hustler slimebag-wannabe. 4 After we'd been in the air about an hour, the person sitting next to me woke up and started talking to herself, loud enough for everybody to hear. "You assholes just think you're running away," she started. "But this flight's really the police garbage special, the Dingleball Express -- destination: some place in the middle of the Ocean, miles from any land. "Any second now the pilot'll come on the loudspeaker and apologize for putting the plane on auto-pilot and bailing out with the rest of the crew. Happy landings." Throughout the plane, heads turned suddenly to look out the window for the signs of parachutes. But no one spoke. Everybody was too afraid or too shy. Finally a stewardess came up to me, really angry. She thought I was the one doing the talking because I was clearly the biggest asshole around. "Nobody is ditching this plane," she said, stridently. "This is a regularly scheduled flight which has never been ditched before and isn't going to start now. "Just because it's filled with the kind of people that society, civilization and History would be better off without, doesn't mean we're gonna drop our professional standards and oaths and risk the lives of people like me, just to get rid of a few people like you."

5 fter dinner, I looked over at my seatmate who'd just covered herself with a blanket or dropcloth, for privacy. A small circle of light filtered out through the fabric, as did muffled snatches of her professional, TV-anchor voice, filled with (what sounded like) weepy nostalgia for the good old days of World Race War XXIII, and the old stories of A Boy and His Animal and His Island -- and His Time Machine. She had suction-cupped a small satellite uplink dish to the airplane window, so her broadcast could reach all the receivers in the world. And a flexi-LED panel, sewn into the outside of the blanket, flashed the words "On the Air: Do Not Enter," in red, so a flight attendant or fellow passenger wouldn't accidentally lift the blanket and destroy the magic of her on-screen persona for billions of viewers. 6 After 2 hours in flight, only the pilot and co-pilot had actually bailed out, and eventually, the stewardess just brought the plane down on a narrow, dirt airstrip at the center of a sleek, architecturally-advanced complex of spare white buildings and hastily bulldozed runways of widely varying capacities. The passengers were all unharmed, but a few crew members were killed when the front landing gear snapped off on first impact with the ground. 7 Since there were no stairs here for the plane, we had to take the emergency chute out the side door directly onto the field. My seatmate slid down, still next to me, still under the blanket, still broadcasting to the world. -- A real trooper! As we hit the ground, we could hear the airport loudspeaker looping endlessly through old messages -- announcing flights that no longer flew and paging people who no longer existed.

8 n the field, a circle of old Cadillacs surrounded the plane. The man in the lead car stood up to speak to us, and rambled off something in Pig Esperanto. "Oh Jesus," somebody whispered, and did a rough, interpretation for the rest of us, as the Commandante spoke. "The Nazi-Democrats have taken over Dallas Abbaba," he translated, haltingly, "And nationalized KissAir while we were still in flight -- resulting in our plane being re-routed from nowhere to here." Then the Commandante's face broke into a broad smile as he finished. "He says that we should feel honored to have been selected for use as political fodder," the translator said, not smiling at all. 9 There were about 20 Cadillac convertibles from the '50s and '60s, all with their tops down and exactly 3 people already in each. The flight's remaining crew got into these Cadillacs, one by one, one to a car, each taking the fourth seat, and when the 8th car was finally filled in this way, the procession drove slowly off the runway. 10 A few of the abandoned passengers started walking towards what appeared to be a terminal building in the distance. My former seatmate had finally stuck her head out of the broadcasting blanket and now wore it like a poncho, with her camcorder/transmitter on a lightweight chain around her neck The LED panel, which lay flat against the small of her back, now flashed "Please Stand By" in a soothing deep green. 11 Eventually, because there was nothing else to do, we joined the other passengers standing around next to the large white building which, close up, turned out to be just a huge sheet metal box with a huge flip up door that no combination of people could budge. Beyond it was a 12-foot-high cyclone fence, topped with (possibly) electrified barbed wire. This surrounded us on all 3 sides and stretched back the full length of the runway, where it was unclear from this distance if it was closed on the fourth side, or just went on forever. A flat, dry, empty field, extended everywhere, in all directions, outside the fence, ending at the horizon, yet bird songs and insect sounds could still be heard along with the occasional faint animal noise. And the air was still warm and humid, even though the sun was about to set. 12 Beyond and exactly parallel to the first fence, was another similar fence, maybe 100 feet away from it. Then, 100 feet or so past that, another fence, and another hundred feet past that, another, and then another. Beyond that, it was hard to determine just how many more there were, as the seemingly endless layers of criss-crossed metal wires simply blurred, at great distance, into a solid mass. One of the passengers had climbed the first fence and, somehow, successfully made it over, just as we arrived there. But now he was standing facing the second fence and staring through it, into the distance, at the third and fourth. Then he stepped back and looked up at it. "It's even higher!" he screamed, in a rough, high-pitched, anguish. "A foot higher, at least -- and the next one is at least another foot higher! -- And it just goes on like that -- forever!" He sat down on the ground with his hands crossed on the back of his neck, holding his head between his legs. 13 I couldn't take it anymore, so I grabbed my seatmate's camcorder, flipped it on, stuck it in my mouth, and started cablecasting to the world. "Ladies and Gentlemen," I began, hurriedly, excitedly, "I speak to you tonight from a deep pit at the center of the earth where, gathered around me, are the leaders of many great nations, and the scions of many great families and genomes. "We have come here together, at this turning point in history, in order to end our lives in accord with the ancient, secret practise that guarantees immediate reincarnation as micro-organisms living inside you. "And so, before we leave, we need to ask you to please refrain from trying to fight off or cure any future disease or sickness you might have -- as it well may be one of us you'd kill. "Thank you in advance for your cooperation."