Free Cosmic Hotel by Russ Franklin

I was around my cousins.
    â€œI’m really very glad to see you, but I’m on the job.”
    â€œ Job , please.” She crushed the cup with one hand, but it was one of those brittle plastic cups whose sides split but popped back into a destroyed shape of itself, and she considered its defiance. “I need to tell you something,” she said, “but not here, okay?”
    Please God , I thought, don’t tell me you are getting married . I wanted badly to tell her what Van Raye had claimed. “I got something I want to tell you too,” I said. “What do you want to tell me?”
    â€œDid I just fucking say not here ?” she said.
    â€œOkay, okay. Give me a second, okay?” I stepped away and found the number to DFW’s lost and found and called, and they passed me off through several numerical choices.
    I watched a middle-aged woman in a beautiful blue dress approach Ursula with a pen and a pad ready. Please, I didn’t want to go to a wedding. She had been dating a guy from Charlotte but that hadn’t been that long, had it? Why wouldn’t I want her to get married? Probably the same reason I didn’t want Dubourg go be a priest. I would lose them.
    Ursula didn’t have the normal light complexion of a redhead. I guess it was all those years in the Wakulla sun, but she looked like anairline pilot, straight, true, and smart. She had wanted to be a pilot since she was a little girl, nothing else. I think those looks and earnestness were why the network and the airline had chosen her for the reality show about the crazy cross-country flight, Flight 000 .
    Regular people auditioned to be passengers aboard Flight 000 from Los Angeles to New York, and the airline cooperating with the network was the unknown Shenandoah Airlines. It was promoted as a “test flight” with four crewmembers (pilot, copilot, two flight attendants) and twenty passengers. When the network and the airline chose the “volunteers,” they signed a waiver and a confidential agreement that the company could do basically anything to the aircraft and the occupants during the flight. This was the catch: The passengers and crew could never tell anyone what had happened on Flight 000.
    The only known flight plan was that the plane would be out of contact with the ground except for normal flight communications, but there were to be no cell phones, no cameras, no recording devices. When the flight was completed, by agreement, the passengers and crew would be given physical exams, would be debriefed and released, and no one could reveal what had happened during the trip. In return, the passengers and the four flight crewmembers, including Ursula (pilot in command), were given guaranteed lifetime gate passes to fly. Any of the Flight 000-ers could walk up to Shenandoah or one of its affiliated airlines, show her ID, and the airline would immediately issue a first-class ticket, bump a passenger if necessary. It was a deal that even airline employees didn’t enjoy, guaranteed flight, no reservation, no pre-notification. The only catch was that if one person broke the confidentiality agreement, then everyone—passengers and the four crewmembers—lost their lifetime passes.
    When Ursula called and told me that she was one of the chosen cast members, the pilot in command, Elizabeth and I had to watch. Twenty ordinary Americans had been chosen, the passengers interviewed on morning talk shows before the flight. “What possibility most frightensyou?” “What is more important, the fame or the lifetime pass?” “What is your worst fear?” “Do you get motion sickness easily?”
    One news personality pointed out that Flight 000 might do aerobatics, and then an aviation expert was brought on-air and the aerobatic possibilities of the 737 were plotted along with possible airframe stresses (barrel roll was the most realistic). What about depressurization, a