“Crack!” a bright lightning bolt split the dark sky into two. The rain was pouring heavily and it had been going on for a while already. People scurried around outside under the covers of umbrellas, their faces etched with worry and anguish. Kim sat alone in the seat of the bus, gripping her office bag tightly with cold hands, a million thoughts coursing through her mind.
Traffic had slowed to a standstill and she was going to be late for work. Yet again!
It had been a really tedious task, not getting used to things related to her work. It never had been, given Kim Carmichael's prudence and expedience. 'If curiosity killed the cat', then Kim was 'death' itself - the ultimate entity so to speak of, in this conjured feline realm. What had been an impediment was getting used to the nocturnal way of going through mundane routine. When the entire city got ready to sleep, to call it curtains over yet another hectic day, Kim used to get ready to go to work - something she was very adept at, and handled her official activities with great aplomb. As she worked in a BPO that dealt with American outsourcing, she had to synchronise her existence with the American way of life. Right from the 'yeps' and 'nopes' in her diurnal vocabulary to the formal disposition she had adorned in order to impress her customers thousands of miles away - yes miles, not kilometres as that’s how the Americans measure distance! Give them something that they are not accustomed to, and that something would be deemed blasphemous. So much is their ignorance about the rest of the world that their obliviousness is manifested in the fact that for them the
But in spite of these serious fallacies - at least that’s what they are to the rest of the world, certain things that they do is laudable. For starters, time is indeed money to them. In fact, time is priceless, aptly summed up by MasterCard’s catchphrase - there are certain things money can't buy, for everything else there is MasterCard. Well, MasterCard is exactly what Kim was marketing and time was something whose scarcity and frugality she was experiencing. She looked at her watch, an elegant Bvlgari chronometer and it stared right back at her with the implication that it was already a half past ten. She had under half-an-hour to make it to office and start her job for the day or rather night. The punctuality that the American folk tend to adhere to made her demeanour all the more panic-stricken.
"Crack!” this time more resonant and stentorian was nature's call. It almost shattered the night sky into pieces. It only catalysed the pouring of the rain with more vehemance. She tried to make one final effort to organise the many thoughts that were doing their rounds in her mind but this effort of hers like the ones before turned out to be abortive and futile. She peeped out of the window of the bus which had a handful of passengers, and gave a wistful glance at the road ahead, which was full of vehicles, all held up in the water-logging which by now had completely neutralised the flow of traffic. There was no way she was going to make it to office on time.
The thoughts that were doing their rounds within her never showed any signs of abating and began to torment her more and more by the minute. These thoughts ranged right from the chores that she had to undertake in office and the deadlines that these would enable her to meet to the emotional overtures she was going through as a result of the troubles in her personal life. Amidst all these worries, there was one thing that she was obsessed with, something that she considered to be her destiny; if not 'the' destiny of her life, at least her destiny for the present. She called it 'a Bio-Card' and strongly believed that this is the future of financial credit. The ingeniousness of this device was its simplicity! What she had in mind was a biometric implementation of a credit card wherein the card would be replaced by a person's finger prints. When a person is found to have a credit history respectable enough to own a credit card, all that individual had to do was get his or her finger prints mapped into the data base of the credit service provider. That was about it. The next time the individual wished to pay in credit, he or she had to swipe his or her finger in a suitable biometric sensor (the likes of which found in laptops now-a-days can enhance the online version of shopping) at the store instead of swiping the card in traditional and conventional credit card readers, thus giving all the credit-related details of that individual and in turn helping in the completion of the transaction. This naturally would eliminate the hassles of providing the credit card number, its expiry date and entering the three-digit code while shopping online, and also get rid of the biggest bother of them all, the pangs of a credit card being misplaced. Besides this would usher us into a new era of having to swipe our fingers rather than a card to pay – ‘shopping at your finger-tips’ as she reiterated to herself. Indeed this novel idea of hers was her exclusive brainchild. All it lacked was a godfather to elevate it to the point where its benefits can be nurtured and optimized and Kim was sure that one day it would revolutionise the way people looked at credit.
But the present situation that had besieged Kim and her pedestrian position in the organisation she was employed in coupled with the enormous lacuna that separated the idea and its successful realisation, the lacuna being the gargantuan progress that needed to be made to bridge the gap, disheartened her time and again. This involuntarily made her crave for the experience of impersonal beatitude, the likes of which one can only disport in Utopia. She started craving for a citizenship to this Utopia-nation. Almost on the verge of getting drowned in this sea of beatific thoughts, she was brought back to realisation when someone seemed to have occupied the vacant seat next to her.
It was a young man, in his teens probably as cherubic and angelic as one can be. Not someone you would notice in a crowd at first glance, rather a very nondescript person with a tinge of enigma about him. It was this enigmatic persona of his that caught Kim's attention. Yet for some reason, he did not seam worldly, in fact he was more of an ethereal character with a surreal presence about him. But what added more murkiness to his presence was his materialisation out of nowhere. She couldn't comprehend the manner in which he could or would have made his way into the bus with all the water-logging in and around the already traffic-laden highway and that too at a non-insomniac hour. This just added fuel to the fire and rekindled the thought process within Kim but this time in a slightly different direction.
She tried to ignore his presence and tuned in to the local radio station but for some reason, she could not get her mind off of this individual. She gave him an askance glance and realised that he was wearing an ID and could figure out that the name of the individual was Aerial Ortega. 'That’s a rather strange name to have', she muttered to herself. The local radio station had periodic weather updates as well as traffic updates, but strangely though, they did not report anything about the inclement weather conditions or the stasis of the traffic on the road, which in normalcy is a bustling highway. All the time, she constantly had the thoughts of Aerial in her mind and had this funny feeling that he was ogling her. Instinctively, she turned to look at him, but he seemed to be as sedate and serene as ever. Although his presence made Kim a little restive, it never frightened her, rather for some reason she wanted to drown herself into his eyes, eyes which constantly offered innuendos of being just the tip of the iceberg, with loads of mysteries hidden beneath, and Kim sure wanted to get to the very bottom of it.
When the ignorance of the radio station to the situation in the highway, suddenly started to sink in, Kim got up totally perplexed. She looked around and to her surprise found Aerial, sitting beside her, gone. It was as if he had dematerialised or teleported himself to a parallel world. She started walking towards the door of the bus to alight and en route realised that the handful of passengers occupying the bus at that time were not moving at all. It seemed like they were in a trance. Still convinced that it was just her imagination and the side-effect of losing herself in the deluge of work, she got out to make her way through another deluge, the one that we generally associate with, the one that awaited her on the other side of the door of the bus, one that strangely and mysteriously enough appeared to be highly parochial with the confines of the parish - limited to just that part of the highway which Kim could descry.
She waded her way through the water, which was knee deep by now, with a hint of fright gripping her gradually. By now she was almost completely bedraggled thanks to the joint contribution of the continuous downpour and the already accumulated water. The preternatural silence was as deafening as it was intimidating. Moments later, the street lights began to wane and there was darkness all over, with discreet presence of lights from the stranded vehicles. But that didn’t seem to help the visibility in any way. Now work was the last thing on Kim's mind let alone getting to office on time. She wanted to get out of what seemed like a mess and wanted to do justice to the curiosity that so frequently engulfed her, the very curiosity which time and again lead her to the bottom of all mysteries and provided her all the solutions.
She looked around with anxiety and apprehension and was overwhelmed by the stasis of the world around her. The world by now seemed to her like it had donned a garb of darkness all over itself and this garb was an indicator of the extent of fear that had beset Kim. But suddenly out of the darkness, she saw a scintilla of light on the side of the highway she had started to tread, and when the dust had settled, it was Aerial who had materialised again and out of nowhere. This however did not frighten her at all. Rather his charismatic presence only made Kim wanted to get closer to him. She was attracted to him just like a fire-fly gets pulled towards a source of light. All she wanted was to unravel the enigma surrounding Aerial. She had this gut feeling that this individual had to be someone important to her. She got closer to him making her way through the water all around her, which for some strange reason did not seem to disturb or bother Aerial at all.
When she was at a tangible distance, she could perceive Aerial's beaming smile - a smile that was full of warmth and compassion, with no menace whatsoever clinging on to it, a smile which only opened a barrage of questions within her mind. "Hey Kim, my name is Aerial Ortega", he spoke first. This nearly flabbergasted Kim, and kicked off a new stint of neurosis within her. She started looking for reasons that could explain Aerial knowing her name. But before too long, Aerial continued, "I am from the future. I am the man you go on to marry and I am here to save your life! You are a very capable and talented individual and your business acumen will take you to the very zenith of the work you are undertaking. I am saying all this because I have seen it happen right in front of me. But in order to savour the view from up there, you have to live!"
Zenith or nadir it did not make sense to Kim at all. That was beyond Kim's mental frame of reference. Yes, she found Aerial very attractive, attractive enough to get her closer to him rather than repelling her. Yes, she started to look at him as the savior, her last resort in this tribulation that she was undergoing, albeit subconsciously. She knew that there was something Vulcan and eccentric yet serene and luminous about his presence. But what was he talking about when he said that he was here to save her life? Was her life in peril?
Before Kim could lose herself completely in this new cataclysm of thoughts, she could feel a huge gust of wind, with a magnitude that was high enough to sweep her off her feet. Not allowing any time for realisation to dawn upon her, she heard a thunderous noise. Instantaneously she turned around and noticed that a gigantic oak tree that was on the side of the road next to where her bus was held up in traffic had fallen on the bus. The massive impact that the mammoth tree would have had on the bus was beyond Kim's imagination. Not many people in the bus would have survived the impact. She was completely overwhelmed by the occasion, and in a state of both astonishment and with gratitude filling her heart to the brim, she turned back to thank Aerial. But Aerial was gone. He could not be found anywhere around.
She could suddenly feel vibrations on her forehead and a few honking horns were audible to her in a feeble manner. She got up in a jiffy. She had fallen asleep with her head leaning on the window of the bus. She was caught in this labyrinth called traffic which had only one way out, that being the road ahead. Matters were made worse by the water logging which was a direct upshot of the heavy downpour which had momentarily shown some respite, although it was still coming down in the form of drizzles. The first thing she noticed after she got out of her forty winks was a giant oak tree on the side of the highway right in front of her window swaying precariously in the wind.
Trying to convince herself that it was nothing more than mere coincidence, she looked over on the other side to find this enigmatic character with an ethereal presence about him occupying the seat next to her, a seat which was vacant until Kim dozed off. She found that he was wearing an ID and when the name read 'Aerial Ortega', a chill feeling gripped her, sending shivers down her spine which made the hairs on her ends stand. Aerial seemed to have a newspaper in his hand, and one of the front page headlines seemed to read something like this;
'MasterCard posts record profits in Q4 beating all expectations'. A closer look at the paper revealed a picture of Kim labeled Kim Ortega, CEO MasterCard and the first few lines of the article said, 'Spurred by the innovative 'Bio-Card' touted to be the future of credit in finance by its inventor Aerial Ortega, MasterCard CEO Kim Ortega, wife of Aerial gave this ground-braking revelation to the rest of the world in Purchase, NY, the company's HQ'.
Acknowledgment:- Although this story was written by yours truly, I needed a foundation to build it on and the first two paragraphs, the ones in italics "“Crack!” a......again!" was that very foundation, which in turn was laid down by SAPtak. So, a big thanks to SAPtak without whom, this Sears Tower wouldn't have been possible!!!
