The Influencers

They meet on an airplane. Specifically, on an airplane wing. He is on the outbound flight of his yearly vacation when the plane stops in mid-air. Everything else stops, too — even a coffee in mid-spill. But he is able to move. Following a very strong impulse, he forces open the escape hatch and walks out onto the wing, out to the tip, where he sits with his legs dangling, taking in the scenery below and remembering things. Far across the sky he sees another airplane in pause mode, and hears a tiny wail, “h e l p…”

He stands and steps off the wing, sinking several feet, but finding a firm footing. As long as he keeps moving, his feet have hardness below them. He walks on the glass-bottomed sky for nearly a mile, watching the earth below for the slightest proof that he is advancing. A row of electric poles that showed from the side when he began is now almost a row of dots — he has traveled a real mile, though it never looked like he was moving at all. 

The woman is pacing the wing, frightened and irate in turns, desperate for someone to blame, and picking him. He knows a way of climbing upward in the air, a fast kind of clawing and stomping, and he gets up on the wing with the woman. He beings to explain. It takes some time for her to see reason. And then, just as he told her would happen, a very large cloud comes into view, boiling towards them, a dark thunderhead shooting bolts of lightning, its engines rumbling. And then it encloses them, bringing a gangplank to their feet, which they cross, entering fully into the cloud, walking to the inner region of it, and here the engine noise is canceled out. It is a place of solidity and pleasant sound, an immense auditorium full of people and activity. It’s a convention center in the sky. His job of explaining is easier now. “This is the main floor. There are also lounge areas, snack bars, a wonderful garden, and a couple of genuinely great restaurants. And there’ll be a bedroom reserved for you. Everything is included, and free. Come on, let’s check in.”

She is the nervous type, but within an hour she is taking it all as a given, and begins to enjoy herself. Her natural curiosity comes to the fore. She enjoys being introduced to the people he knows from previous years, and the coffee bar is excellent, and she is excited for the first lecture to begin. It is all so exciting and enjoyable. Every presenter is masterful is one way or another. And it is all very flattering. Every attendee, she learns, is a person of rare ability, with a very important role to play in the destiny of mankind.

“You don’t have to take notes,” he tells her early on. “You’ll remember everything. The coffee, the altitude, I don’t know what it is, but our brains are highly activated right now.”

“Maybe the oxygen is supercharged in some way? Maybe it has to do with time being paused out there, but active in here?” 

“Could be any of that,” he replies.

She thinks she might fall in love with him, or he with her, but soon learns that sex is not a consideration here. Or that everything is sexual here, with the attraction being so thoroughly and evenly dispersed to every aspect of the experience, that no person or thing or idea draws desire either too much or too little. She is in love with everyone here and everything here, and feels equally loved from every direction.

She rediscovers a part of her personality here. A quality she has not manifested in a definite way since she was very young, before starting school. It is the ability to convince people of something. She takes part in work groups where this ability is brought out. In these sessions the participants sit above a circular stage watching hologram performances of people interacting in all kinds of real-life situations — family gatherings, store checkout lines, a hiking trail, a highway accident, a hotel lobby late at night, a social media discussion — and in each scenario, the discussion turns to politics or religion, and instead of an argument, someone’s mind is changed. At the moment of the mind change, the person’s body takes on a brightness and vividness that wasn’t there a moment before, accompanied by a swell of music, a sublime kind of hitting-the-jackpot effect, indicating that, once again, the power of persuasion has triumphed. It gives her a rush of feeling each time. For the first time in her life, she is someone who can cheer with joy in a crowd. Each of these performance pieces is actually a replay of a real incident. The hero of the piece is always someone in the room — and they stand to accept the applause of their colleagues. “I can do this, too,” she thinks. It is a self-knowledge as sure as any she has ever had. She feels a dormant, childhood power rising up in her.

And then the session leader asks her, the new member, to role play several situations, with other participants playing characters. She encounters an old friend at an ATM machine. She chats with a young man on a tech-support line. She picks her sister up at the airport. In each scenario she gets better. Her childhood powers of persuasion are not only all they used to be, they’re stronger than they used to be, augmented now by adult savvy — and by all the training and enthusiasm of the past week.

Every Influencer, she has learned, will have their own style. Hers is a mix of beguiling charm and impatience. People find themselves wanting to be goaded by her. It got her many an extra snack or present or privilege, back when those were the things she lived for. Now her gift is bent on higher goals.

“You are the people who change the world,” says the chairman of the Cloud Ship in the final session of the final day. “You’re the gifted ones, the crucial ones. The butterflies with the power to effect monsoons of greatness. We who have come here from the future have sought you out, and we are here to train you, to assist you, to encourage you, to bring your powers to the fore, for the usefulness of all mankind. You do what elections and Supreme Courts and wars and literature and disasters can never do nearly as well. You are the changers of hearts and minds.”

The days and nights of instruction and inspiration, the atmosphere of fraternity and mission, the enveloping pleasures of physical comfort and beautiful surroundings and excellent meals, it saturates her with desire to use her gifts, and with certainty that she can and must do her part in bringing about a better future than the one that would happen naturally.

“We leave in the morning,” he tells her. “They’ll take us back to our planes, and time will resume. We’ll use our gift for a year, then be brought here again for additional training and, haha, more of our just desserts. Let’s take a last walk around the deck.” When they are at the far point of the promenade, he takes her out onto a catwalk used by the maintenance crews to service an external part of the engine. Fog blocks the view behind them, and the engine is very loud here, almost deafening. 

“This is the one place where a person can see through to the outside Earth,” he tells her. “It’s my favorite view. Just lean out a little. I’ll hold you.” And when she does, he pushes her. She falls and is sucked towards an enormous intake funnel. But he keeps his hold on her wrist and lifts her back up to the catwalk. Her screams were swallowed up in the engine noise, and her curses are, too. She pummels him with her fists, kicks him, knees him in the groin, tears his face with her nails.

The terror does something to her. For him, it is the physical pain.

“What in the fuck are we doing?” she asks.

“We’re being programmed,” he says.

“All this?” she says, disbelieving. “A whole freaking satellite from the future? For…for this crap? To make people believe…to believe that dumb fucking sociopath is some kind of political messiah?”

“Yes,” he says. “This is the thing it gets harder and harder to see. I mean, they treat us like we’re angels. And the meals —“

“Oh my god, the meals!”

“I felt like this was my last possible chance to clear my head. And you, since you’re new —“

“No, don’t apologize,” she says. “I’m glad you did it. You had to do it. But now what? Can we escape?”

“We can do more than escape.”

“You mean we can — “

“We can bring this fucker down.”

“How?”

“Throw ourselves into the jet intake. I mean, I think it will bring it down. I’m about fifty percent sure.”

“If we both do it, wouldn’t that make it a hundred percent sure?”

“I don’t think it works that way.”

“What’s the worst that could happen?”

“We die and it doesn’t make a difference.”

“But if it works?”

“We die and it does make a difference.”

“Maybe we wake up in our real lives?”

“I mean…yeah, maybe.”

“This is big.”

“Not to rush us, but I think we better decide fast. Can you feel this wearing off a little?”

“I think I do. I’m starting to feel all rosy and super-confident again.”

“It’s now or never, Bella.”

“Well, Frank,” she says, and looks at him like she wants to memorize him. And then, “May we change the world.”

“May these assholes not.”

“Bingo,” she says.