Chapter 2 - Alexandra
Alex began her love of old movies when she was very little, as early as she can remember. Sometimes this led her into mischief.
On her fifth birthday the family had booked a table at a recently awarded trendy restaurant.
Against the upmarket image the restaurant wanted to project, a long queue had developed in the female toilets. The wealthy women were beginning to complain bitterly among themselves. This was not resolved until one elegant but desperate woman got down on her hands and knees and discovered that all the booths were empty. The patron was called. He reviewed the security camera footage of the comings and goings in the corridor outside the toilet then confronted little Alexandra at the family table.
"Little girl...," he began very quietly but furiously. "What have you done?"
Five-year-old Alexandra just looked at him quizzically. She seemed entirely innocent - possibly he was her birthday entertainment. She was a little girl being entertained in a posh restaurant by a mummer pretending lunacy. This drove the patron into a Mediterranean rage as his face twisted and his voice rose despite himself.
"You are an evil little girl!" he growled to the consternation of the other diners. "You must never do that again in my restaurant. I never want to see you in here again!"
Anne and Edmond, her amazed parents, who hadn't even noticed Alex leave the table, became concerned for the man's blood pressure and imminent apoplexy. They thought it best to simply accept his account of their daughter's guilt concerning some unspeakable crime in the 'ladies' restroom'. Despite their doubts they apologised in a global way for whatever offence she had committed saying that she was just five.
Could she really have gone to a strange toilet alone and unnoticed? After all, until now she'd always asked to be taken to the toilet. And what could she possibly have done to warrant such a tirade?
On the way home she confessed to her crime, saying that she got the idea from an old movie.
During a moment of parental distraction, she'd quietly gone off to the beautifully appointed restroom; and finding herself alone she'd locked all the booths from the inside. At that age she was still small enough to slide under the doors. Then she'd returned to the table to sit angelically, eating her meal and waiting to see what would happen.
There was no punishment, unfortunately for discipline's sake Anne and Edmond had laughed uproariously when the mystery crime was revealed. And they were secretly proud of their precocious daughter, rationalising that having been caught doing it once was unlikely to ever do it again.
The meal was a family event. Anyway, all she'd really wanted that birthday were Virtual Glasses and haptic gloves and these had materialised earlier at breakfast when she'd unwrapped her presents from mum and dad.
But when she then sat for hours; her eyes flicking at the virtual screen; her hands twitching in space as she played simulation games, unseen by anyone but her, her concerned parents feared she would never move a limb or exercise again. They decided to give her an interactive gym machine at Christmas.
The gym was soon linked to computer games and quickly consumed more hours of her life: running lifting and stretching. But after a while it began to pale. So, with some coding hints from older family members and some parts purchased on-line she and her equally computer savvy young uncle added 360-degree 3D screens to convert it to a driving simulator.
After that Alex took to adjusting its code in all sorts of ways, tentatively at first and then with more confidence, until she understood every line of every function.
When driving palled the children lifted it from the floor on hydraulic actuators to provide the sensations of climbing and diving so that it became a flight simulator to rival the ones once used by airlines and air forces. It could simulate realistic landings in a variety of aircraft at all the world's major airports.
Then came the scandal and the mystery.
One night 250 terrified, dishevelled and befouled passengers appeared on the MV news swearing that they would never fly again. This was awkward for them as some had no other means of getting home.
The MV news reporter breathlessly explained that the passengers' terrifying experience had included some minutes of weightlessness at 45 thousand feet, followed by a supersonic almost vertical dive - pulling out in a 3G+ recovery. One passenger described how they had been so close to hitting the ground that all she had seen out of the window was a blur passing trees followed by the surprised expressions on faces in cars on a highway they flew alongside for some distance three metres above the ground. Otherwise, it had been mostly clouds and sky and at one point water.
Many were no longer conscious or paying full attention when the plane regained altitude then went into a barrel role followed by a fast series of linked 2.5 G swerving turns. These and other terrifying manoeuvres had lasted for nearly an hour, culminating in the plane's now infamous pass under the Golden Gate Bridge before landing safely at San Francisco.
Alex had hacked into the air communications system and taken over the flight controls of an actual commercial airliner and put it through its paces as if she was the test pilot of an old-time fighter jet.
She got this idea from an old movie: The Taking of Flight 777. Apparently, the old Boeing 777 was one of the first 'fly by wire' commercial aircraft capable of being flown from the ground, like the military drones of the early 21st century.
The Taking of Flight 777 is a spy farce, a comedy, thinly based on a real mystery. Conspiracy theorists had alleged that a missing Boeing 777 had been taken over from the ground and flown for hours to a deep Pacific trench where it's 'black boxes' would never be found.
As a ten-year-old, Alex had replayed the old movie many times and could quote most of the funnier lines. It starts with a solemn introduction accompanied by script forming and disappearing into a vanishing point. Necessary because few people learn history anymore.
The Taking of Flight 777 - the MovieIntroduction - spies:In the late 21st Century with our single world economy and worldwide laws, the role of spies may be difficult to understand. Spying is an ancient profession and spies still existed at the beginning of the century when wars could still happen between various separate, independently governed regions, that were called countries. They were much bigger than our Home Towns but smaller than our Continents today. Each of these separate 'countries' maintained armies and purchased military weapons to arm them. 'Defensive' armed forces were encouraged and sponsored by an international arms industry that made military vehicles, guns and ammunition. Nevertheless, wars were relatively confined to hostile regions. So much of this expensive hardware was just used for training, until it became outmoded and needed replacement. Efforts were made to ensure that new weapons quickly replaced the old. Sometimes, if the armament industry was lucky, hostilities could be encouraged so that larger countries would go to war and different designs could be tested in actual battles. A man called Eisenhower who was President of one of these 'countries', and was once a general himself, warned that the continued existence of a military-industrial complex would lead to perpetual war. Spies played an important part in keeping the levels of suspicion, confrontation and international competition sufficiently high to justify massive ongoing defence spending. Tensions could also be raised by spies and their agents fostering the grievances of often deluded revolutionaries, freedom fighters, jihadists, mercenaries and terrorists. These were usually relatively harmless until provided with explosives, arms, ammunition and other military materiel. Religious schisms were particularly useful in promoting this market opportunity for the military-industrial complex. Agencies who managed spies would send them on 'missions' to steal information, create mayhem or kill adversaries. Often the spies themselves were 'pawns in the game' and had no idea of the real purpose of a particular 'mission'. Synopsis:The date is early in the 21st century. Our protagonist, the bumbling Agent 777, is the last surviving agent of the United Nations Secretariat for World Harmony (UNSWH). Each of her more competent fellow agents has been killed in the Agency's mission to rid the world of the military-industrial complex - represented in the screen play by the Sinister Syndicate (SS). In the opening scene beautiful Agent 777 tumbles out of bed onto the floor semi-naked. As she burns her breakfast toast and throws the flaming toaster over the balcony, she naively tells her boyfriend, her remaining fellow spy, that she can't understand why countries need defence forces anyway. He seems not to notice the conflagration and exploding cars in the parking area, caused by the flaming toaster, as he explains the economic importance attached to the arms industry; the huge wealth some people accumulate through it. The SS employs tens of thousands of people, he tells her, with extensive interests in electronics and aerospace in: Britain; France; Belgium; Italy; Germany; the US; and Russia. They also have subsidiary interests and licensing deals in China; India; Japan; Israel and even Pakistan and North Korea. The jobs of all the people who are engaged to fight for their individual countries depend on the ongoing tensions and conflicts that the SS sponsors and supplies. He seems not to notice the big red arrow that appears on screen poking at him, indicating that this includes spies like himself. As he leaves the building, he is shot by an SS sniper. Agent 777 visit's him in hospital and causes him additional injuries in a series of hilarious bumbles with hospital equipment: scalpels; tubes and so on. During this scene there are amusing cuts to other places in which various generals and the heads of the KGB, CIA, MI6, together with many other services, oligarchs and billionaires fight amongst themselves while conspiring against their new common enemy: Agent 777. As she leaves the hospital SS assassins have been dispatched to deal with her. But bumbling Agent 777 repeatedly escapes the attempted assassinations by being completely unpredictable and hilarious: catching a high heel in her dress on the dance floor and tripping into other dancers bringing them down in a heap just as a bullet is fired so that the sprinkler system is hit instead and drenches the world's top military brass at the function; mistakenly taking the car that doesn't explode after innocently causing the war mongering Prime Minister to get into hers; accidentally falling through a glass window into a swimming pool just as the poison gas is released into her hotel room; inadvertently pushing a bishop, who is actually an assassin, off the top deck of a cruise boat; and so on. In exasperation the head of the SS security is charged with dealing with the matter personally. She sees an opportunity when Agent 777 is given a mission to board a plane where she's to steal some sensitive SS technology from engineers travelling on Flight 777. The SS wants these engineers dead over a patent dispute so the head of security can kill two birds with one stone. At the airport there's hilarious confusion between the Agent's number and the flight number: 777 no I'm 777, yes 777, no 777! This results in a long line of angry travellers; management being called; and Agent 777 running in and out of doors, pursued by airport staff and angry passengers, in addition to would-be assassins from the KGB, CIA and MI6, in a slap-stick - French Farcical scene. Meanwhile the head of the SS security has boarded the plane dressed as a stewardess. She is waiting to ensure that Agent 777 is aboard and firmly strapped in. But the remote pilot who has control of the plane from a control room at SS headquarters, responds to an OK from air traffic control and taxies the plane to the head of the runway, much to the consternation of the pilots on the flight deck who can do nothing. The remote pilot has locked the doors to the flight deck and taken-over the communications. It's very funny when the fake stewardess runs up and down demanding to bewildered passengers to be let off - alternately hammering on the flight deck door and emergency exits to no avail. Agent 777's zany incompetence results in her running from the terminal building to the plane as it begins to move. In a comical attempt to get on board she climbs up the slowly rotating nose wheel as the plane taxies. Then as it takes off, she's seen struggling against the wind; and just as the wheel bay is about to close, carrying her to certain death, she falls; yelling hilariously all the way down, to a huge splash in the South China Sea that throws a tall shaft of water towards the disappearing plane. Nothing seems amiss as the plane follows the expected flight path. Then suddenly, when it reaches a traffic control blind-spot, it unexpectedly climbs to maximum altitude before depressurising the cabin, killing everyone on board. Seen through a window the SS security chief's head blowing-up like a balloon then exploding is the funniest scene of all. Then it flies away into the distance to a remote ditching spot, where any flight recorder evidence of interference from the ground will be erased forever. Agent 777 is rescued from the water by the handsome hippy, Peace, on his yacht The Eisenhower. Now Peace has his chance (music background: 'Give Peace a Chance'). He uses the primitive Internet to expose the gruesome murder of the passengers on Flight 777 to the World. On screen, the entire military-industrial complex is seen collapsing like dominoes and puffs of smoke around the Globe. A peaceful new world order has been established, free of arms manufacturers and army navies and air forces. As the final credits roll Peace and Agent 777 are attempting to sail off together into the sunset. But in a final bumble the sails and halliards have become completely tangled, thanks to zany but desirable Agent 777. Laughing happily, she and Peace tumble together and embrace in a bed of tangled sail. |
Taking over a plane seemed like a good idea to ten-year-old Alex. She had no intention of deliberately hurting anyone or stealing the plane but she had not considered the psychological of physical impact of her joy-flight on the passengers. Fortunately, the general public health is so good these days that no one actually died but there was a good deal of bruising and few had retained the contents of their stomachs or bowels.
Because of her age and because she'd landed the plane safely, her influential great-grandfather hushed it up within The Cloud and the plane's unusual behaviour remains yet another unsolved mystery in the world of aviation to this day.
Soon, after the dust settled on that incident, Alex began to refuse school. She was already a fluent reader and a very good student. She found school boring. She said she could learn everything she wanted to know in The Cloud.
Surprisingly to family and friends her father, Edmond, became very involved giving her advanced coding challenges and engaging private tutors to work with her when he decided she needed more skills.
But soon her mother, Anne, became concerned about her social isolation. She enrolled Alex in an exclusive school that gave drama and music classes and had a children's orchestra.
Edmond insisted on a mix of practical classes like art and metalworking classes, where she learnt to weld and use an old-time lathe with no numerical control; a project where with others her age she restored an old internal combustion car; and one where they assembled then programmed an old-style industrial robot to replace the head gasket in under two minutes.
Alexandra had become one of her parents' 'projects'. But she also had her own time in which her younger Uncle Charles played a central part. And the mischief continued.