"one of the only insurance providers to include a kaiju damages plan"

December 4, 2021 7:37 AM

"They had asked about the top-tier package, with full coverage from any damage incurred from acts of kaiju. The yearly cost was more money than I’d ever made in my life." "One Hundred Seconds to Midnight" by Lauren Ring (published this year; available as audio and text) is a suspenseful speculative story about air travel and human decency. Naomi Shihab Nye's short poem about those same subjects, "Gate A-4", starts: Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement: "If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately."

Ring previously.

posted by brainwane (11 comments total)

Thanks for this. As a one sentence horrir story:

"Workers’ compensation isn’t a big-ticket item."
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 8:45 AM on December 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

It felt a bit unreal that everyone in the airport just accepted their fate. Even if someone couldn't get away in a plane or car, they still had legs. Running away seems like it would drastically improve your chance of survival.
posted by ymgve at 9:05 AM on December 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

Gate A-4 made me cry.
posted by Archer25 at 9:14 AM on December 4, 2021 [6 favorites]

Gate A-4 is perfect and I have been in that situation a zillion times. Thank you for posting it.
posted by lauranesson at 9:23 AM on December 4, 2021 [5 favorites]

Gate A-4 reminds me of this story of my own:

When I was flying home from a year in Brazil as an exchange student, I had a flight get delayed out of Rio. It was already a late night flight so the delay made it crazy late. The airline offered us meal vouchers, but what good are meal vouchers when every restaurant in the airport is already closed? It was before cell phones and the internet, so all we could do was sit and stare at each other everyone got hungrier and the kids (and a fare few adults) got crankier.

But because my host families all knew I loved pao de queijo, every family had brought me some to the airport in Brasilia when they came to say goodbye. And while I wasn't able to feed an entire 747 worth of people, 9 dozen pao de queijo went a long way with the kids. They seemed to make everyone feel better, even if they didn't actually get one, and then people started talking to each other. The plane eventually took off at about 4am and we all got served gross airline dinners for breakfast as fast as the flight attendants could possibly serve them once we got in the air.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:24 AM on December 4, 2021 [6 favorites]

I plan on wrapping my offroad cybertruck (should they ever make one I can afford) with some combination of these looks and "特別捜査隊第七怪獣大量災害検査ユニット"
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 12:21 PM on December 4, 2021

Running away seems like it would drastically improve your chance of survival.

If something is throwing debris around at high velocity, be it a tornado or a kaiju, please remain indoors.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 4:11 PM on December 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

>Running away seems like it would drastically improve your chance of survival.

I feel the general idea is that if you knew *exactly* where the Kaiju was going, you could try to run. But if the projected path is 20 miles wide, and you're anywhere near the middle, you could run a mile and end up closer to the monster's eventual path rather than further. staying indoors might be better. Since this was a story, we as the readers could be pretty sure the protagonist was going to be smack dab in the monster's actual path. But the characters didn't know that.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 9:27 PM on December 4, 2021

I probably used to know the Palestinian lady in the Gate 4A poem. There were and still are lots of Palestinian refugees in Albuquerque.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 9:55 PM on December 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

I enjoyed the set up and the all too believable way humanity (and insurance) would adapt to world ending awfulness. Personally, I can see the sort of turtling up response, as the story pointed out, planes were all diverted, rideshares were all doing their best to flee the projected path, and the airport was likely the most sound structure around. The sense of fatalism, the calm acceptance, I thought, was well done.

Something about the ending, though, felt a little too pat, a little too “and here is the lesson I’ve learned” on the narrator’s part. Still, reading it on the way to work, there were a couple moments where I felt my breath catch just a bit at how real, how hopeless it became. Surviving a Kaiju attack by hiding in a tornado shelter, it takes the idea of giant monsters and slots them into the sphere of tornados and hurricanes, natural disasters that just take lives at random, leaving one side of the street untouched while leveling the homes on the other side.
posted by Ghidorah at 11:16 PM on December 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

The poem Gate A4 is absolutely lovely. Reminds me I should spend more time at poets.org, starting with Naomi Shihab Nye's other works.

I enjoyed the Midnight story too. I had my "I travel too much" moment on a totally unimportant business trip. Coming in for a landing the plane swerved away from the terminal and towards a remote runway. Watching all the emergency vehicles headed out to meet us there. Thinking of my family and wondering "why am I doing this?" (Just a landing gear false alarm, but it started to change my life)
posted by evilmomlady at 4:29 AM on December 5, 2021