Tech-no Fiction by Thomas Shess
Morning didn’t arrive. It intruded. It came in sideways, with the sound first. A sound that didn’t belong to weather or traffic or anything living. A tearing noise, metallic and wrong, as if the day itself had split a seam and couldn’t be stitched back together. The sky was already awake when people noticed—awake and burning in a way skies aren’t supposed to burn.
There is only one way to be born.
There are a million ways to die.
That morning chose one.
The runway was clean. That was the word they used later. Clean. Swept. Certified. Signed off in triplicate. Men in reflective vests had walked it at dawn, boots crunching softly, eyes down, looking for the obvious things: bolts, birds, shrapnel from yesterday’s carelessness. They missed a strip of metal no longer than a man’s forearm. Titanium. Tough. Patient. Waiting.
It lay there without intent, which is how most disasters begin.
The aircraft that dropped it had already gone. Lifted cleanly. Continued its day. Passengers settling into their seats, adjusting belts, thinking about meetings, dinners, hotel rooms. The metal had no passport. No manifest. No reason to be noticed.
Then came the other plane. White. Elegant. Too fast for forgiveness. A machine built to outrun time itself, skimming the edge of what metal and fuel would allow. Its wheels were doing what wheels have done since the first man decided to roll instead of walk—bearing weight, trusting the ground.
One of its tires hit the strip. At that speed, there is no such thing as impact. There is only transformation. Rubber ceased to be rubber. It became violence. A shock wave tore through the wheel well like a fist through paper. Fragments flew with the precision of shrapnel, obedient to physics and indifferent to prayers.
One piece struck the fuel tank.
Fuel does not explode the way movies insist. It spills. It atomizes. It looks, briefly, like mist. And mist, when introduced to heat and friction and fate, becomes fire.
Someone in the cabin smelled it first. Not fear—fear comes later—but something chemical, sharp, unfamiliar. A kerosene smell with no context. A man glanced up from his newspaper. A woman tightened her grip on an armrest she hadn’t noticed holding. The engines were still roaring. The ground was still rushing by. The math was already finished.
In the cockpit, they knew. Pilots always know before anyone else. Instruments speak their own language, one learned over years and paid for in nights away from home. The words came in lights and needles and numbers dropping where numbers should not drop. They did what pilots do. They tried. Which is to say, they fought the inevitable with checklists and muscle memory and will.
Fire climbed the fuselage like it had been invited.
People on the ground would later say it was beautiful in a terrible way. A long arc of flame against the morning sky. A sound that didn’t fade when it should have. A silence afterward that pressed down on the chest.
The aircraft never made it out of the neighborhood. It did not disappear into abstraction. It fell among houses, among kitchens and backyards a small hotel and ordinary lives that had not signed up to be part of the story. Four people on the ground would learn that proximity is sometimes enough.
Afterward comes the sorting.
Investigators arrive with notebooks and calm voices. They kneel. They photograph. They tag. They draw lines backward from the wreckage, following cause the way a hunter follows blood. They will say “chain of events.” They will say “contributing factors.” They will say “runway debris,” because language, like liability, prefers distance.
They will eventually find the strip.
They will note its composition. Titanium. They will trace it to an aircraft that departed earlier, to a design decision made years before, to a maintenance shortcut signed off with a pen that has long since run dry. They will debate whether the metal should have been there, whether anyone could have known, whether the risk was acceptable at the time.
Acceptable to whom is never written down.
Families will gather in rooms that smell faintly of coffee and disinfectant. Names will be read aloud. Lives will be compressed into dates and occupations and the gentle lies of eulogy. Someone will say it was fate. Someone else will say it was nobody’s fault. Both will be wrong in ways that matter.
Because this was not an act of God.
It was an act of accumulation.
A decision here. A substitution there. A tolerance widened. A warning softened. A piece of metal freed from its purpose and left to wait.
Only one way to be born.
A million ways to die.
That morning chose metal over mercy.
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