Autopilot Engaged by Jordan Castillo Price

Author:Jordan Castillo Price [Price, Jordan Castillo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Fantasy, Free read, Science Fiction, Mystery
ISBN: 9781476195520
Goodreads: 15718127
Publisher: JCP Books
Published: 2012-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

-PRESENT DAY-

“So what are you saying?” Paul asked Dallas. “The cockpit crew’s real personalities ended up in some extra-dimensional Bermuda, and an empty shell was left behind to land the plane and buy you dinner, and do whatever it was that Marlin ended up doing?”

“Rock climbing on the bluffs,” the Captain said. “That was his best guess.”

The three of them had taken over what passed for first-class seating on a ERJ-135: the front row. The Captain sat in the single A-seat with the back reclined as far as it would go. Dallas and Paul were in B and C, Dallas on the aisle and Paul at the window. Paul glanced out every few seconds to see if anything had changed around the terminals. It hadn’t. His anger had long since drained away, leaving anxiety in its place. Anxiety, and confusion, and a burning desire to make the crew’s stories fit together.

“It’s not like the Kaye who bought me dinner was a zombie,” Dallas said. “Or even an impostor.”

“Maybe not,” the Captain said, “but I never have more than a couple glasses of wine—and I’d never go out drinking the night before a morning flight. I definitely wouldn’t have told an FA I’d never met before every last gristly detail of my divorce.”

“Good riddance to that man,” Dallas muttered. “He didn’t deserve you.”

“Some kind of reflection, then?” Paul ventured. “An opposite?”

“Freud theorized there were three structures that make up the personality,” the Captain said. “Are you familiar? The id is supposed to be the primal part concerned with satisfying basic drives. The ego is the thing we’d call someone’s personality. And the super-ego keeps everything in check. When we hit the turbulence, maybe we fragment. Maybe the super-ego ends up here.”

Paul had never had much use for psychoanalysis. It was a scientific contemporary of dirigibles, after all. Id, ego and super-ego might have been impressive theories in the early twentieth century, but in this day and age they seemed as outdated as a zeppelin. Still, at least it was some kind of theory, even if it was based in pseudoscience.

He turned to Dallas. “What about you? Do you think we’re nothing but super-egos right now?”

Dallas considered the back of Paul’s hand on the arm-rest for a long moment, then drew his fingertip across Paul’s knuckles. A shiver coursed through Paul that suggested his id (if that structure did actually exist) might not be entirely gone. “I think there’s more to a person than meets the eye—I just don’t know that I agree the personality is split up the same way in each and every one of us. The part of us that went on to Bermuda with the passengers isn’t an empty shell, and it’s not a big ol’ id, either. Closest thing I can think of? It’s basically us, but we’re coasting along on autopilot.”

Paul didn’t like Dallas’ theory any better than the Captain’s. The thought of his body just cruising around Bermuda without his normal waking consciousness firmly in charge was profoundly disturbing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.