Welcome, listener. My name is Kai. I will guide you on your journey home. Adjust your

auditory settings and open your mind to homecoming, written by Sheila Finch, performed by Martin

Jarvis. This story is brought to you in partnership with X-Prize. Prepare yourself. The future has

arrived. At 4.58am on June 28, 2020, the passengers on board A&A Flight 008, on route from Tokyo to San Francisco,

are cruising at an altitude of 37,000 feet, approximately 1500 nautical miles off the west coast of the United States. A small bump,

otherwise noted as a barely perceptible bout of turbulence, passes Flight 008 through a temporary

wrinkle in the local region of spacetime. What these passengers will soon find out, as they descend

into SFO, is that the wrinkle has transported them 20 years into the future, and the year is now 2040. This is the story of the

passenger, in seat 29F.

Too late now to decide she was doing the wrong thing. Going home, after that stormy family scene four

years ago, full of anger and despair, that had propelled her to take a job in Tokyo, was probably an

invitation for personal disaster. There'd been no communication between Kate and her mother since. Whatever reception she faced at home,

it wouldn't be the welcome she'd come to realize she needed to heal the past. The A&A flight attendant checked she had her seatbelt on for landing,

tray in the upright position. Other passengers stretched, yawned, got things out of the overhead bins, put things away. Kate had only a

very small travel bag under the seat in front of her. They were low now, coming in over the crowded east bay. It looked different from this height, more built up, but at the same time

greener. She didn't remember so many high rises, windows flashing in the sun, places even familiar ones look different when you saw them from

sky. Wheels contacted the ground, the engines roared in reverse. Nervousness brought sweat out on her forehead. Going home was a dumb idea. What she'd done was

unforgivable, that furious fight on the last day blaming her mother, as if she'd been the one to give birth to him. Her mouth suddenly too dry to form the name,

the social worker wrote on the birth certificate. Stupid. Probably hadn't even lived. Deformed and bawling like a sick cat. Twelve months if he's lucky, the Stanford University Neonatal Specialist said.

She hadn't wanted a child in the first place. 19. She just began to get her life together. One stupid mistake. She'd run all the way to Japan. And in four years she turned her life around,

even managing to invest a little. Welcome to San Francisco. An attendance voice said rightly. Local time is 1041. Temperatured. The voice cut off suddenly. Kate stood up, waited in the slow moving line.

Seems like an argument up ahead, something not right. She recognized the businessman from a couple of rows ahead, the one who'd had too much to drink even before he'd boarded. She knew his obnoxious type.

...