“Somehow, I had the presence of mind to reach up and yank the ejection handle above my seat.” Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, p. 338.
* * *
Somehow, I had the presence of mind to reach up and yank the ejection handle above my seat. It’s something you train for in drills. Accurately identifying the moment of no return. But nothing prepares you for what it feels like when you actually do it.
There was no simulator console blinking red, no soothing female voice congratulating me on making the most of an irretrievable situation or, more likely, explaining to me how I’d overreacted, needlessly abandoning a state-of-the-art flying machine to a fiery death, assigning me double simulation sessions to fine-tune my reflexes.
We all knew the training modules were programed to err on the side of saving the aircraft, not the rookie–or even the intermediate–pilot. Only when you’d logged hundreds of hours as a fleet runner did the balance begin to slowly shift, the zone in which the simulator recognized “eject and abandon craft” as a valid response to a catastrophic event begin to gradually expand.
But I don’t need a computer to tell me this much: if I hadn’t pulled that handle, I’d be dead right now; a smoldering hulk of charred wreckage at the bottom of this canyon.
I’ve had some time to think about it, sitting here in the escape pod, as it dangles from an impossibly thin strand of nylon, the last line connecting it to the parachute above me, caught in the only branch left on the only tree visible for miles around. At least, it used to be a tree. It’s now little more than a sand-blasted stump of bleached driftwood. It’s incredible, really, that that either the nylon thread or the tree’s branch has held the weight of my pod. That both have done so, for nearly two hours, as the wind turns the pod in slow concentric circles, out over the sheer cliff of the canyon and back again, is truly inexplicable.
As I think this, there is a sharp crack and the pod drops suddenly, just as it swings out over the void. My eyes squeeze shut, my heart leaps to my throat. But the thread holds.
That’s it, I tell myself. On the next in-swing I’m going to unbuckle my belt and slam myself as hard as I can against the floor of the pod. The thread is going to break eventually, and I’ll be damned if its going to do so while I’m dangling over 1000 meters of nothing and a rocky streambed.