Landing in the unknown

New York airport, 9:32 p.m, Friday.

Year 2012.

It was Friday night when it all happened.

Henry Maslow has remained for that half hour playing on his cell phone a new racing game that he had obtained in the app store of the mobile device while he waited in one of the chairs in the waiting room at the airport for his best friend to come down from the plane to take him home.

But what Henry didn't know was that his best friend was now being processed into mandatory quarantine because of the US government seizing the entire plane and its passengers that came from the Belgium airport that night.

When the plane took off through the skies of Belgium, everything was going perfectly, however, once on board and with the passengers locked inside a plane in which they could only walk down the aisle when they wanted to go to the bathroom Everything for these two hundred passengers on the flight, including the pilots and the stewardesses, ended up changing their lives forever, as a too powerful turbulence embraced them along the way, for an instant, everyone believed they were going to die, even the best friend of Henry thought so, until then they ended up on solid ground and everyone deduced that everything was behind them.

More, however, things did not happen that way, since as soon as each of the two hundred passengers began to get off the plane, they were taken in single file to a control center that has been improved by the United States government being inside a warehouse where they kept the plane for when it was not in service.

There were soldiers surrounding the area, and people who even came disguised as if they were again living the terror of a pandemic, since they were wearing their white biosafety suit so that the virus would not fall into any part of their bodies and would not end up making them sick either.

Henry, and the other passengers were amazed to see what was happening, and in their heads, there were thousands of questions that were eagerly waiting to be answered soon.

"Do you know what's going on here?" one of the passengers asked Henry, the passenger was a forty-five-year-old man, dressed in a suit, and was accompanied by his briefcase, when Henry saw him, he assumed that this might be a very prestigious doctor and that he was coming back to New York after hosting a couple of medical conferences in Belgium.

"No, no idea, I'm just as surprised as you, I just hope they won't want to keep us here all night, my best friend is waiting for me to take me home"

"I understand, how old are you boy? You must be old enough to have gone alone on a flight of so many hours to the country of Belgium" said the supposed doctor, while he remained walking next to Henry, showing interest in having a conversation with a stranger that would soon be much more than that.

"I am nineteen years old, I study at the university, mechatronic engineering, and because of my excellent average, my parents gave me this weekend trip to Belgium, they wanted me to go alone, you know to take a breather before the final exams arrive semester" Henry replied to the man who was walking next to him.

"Mechatronic engineering is a very interesting career, and if you let me advise you, for your degree project, you should think about creating an intelligent machine that helps medicine efficiently and effectively. Believe me, if you decide to venture into robotics, on the medical side, will be your best option, it will make you a billionaire"

Those were the doctor's last words to say to the boy before they both entered the warehouse run by the US government. Henry walked away from the doctor as soon as one of the soldiers in charge of bringing the passengers to the place took charge of taking him personally to the interior of a makeshift room with a table, a couple of chairs, and around it, false walls made of white plastic cloth.

"Sit here and wait, don't want to run away because we have authorization to arrest you if you try" the soldier told Henry.

Henry couldn't say anything, he was really too nervous to want to say or do anything about it, and he just waited for whoever it was to show up inside that place to explain to Henry what the fuck it was all that was happening.

Soon, five minutes later, a white man with reddish hair and brown eyes appeared inside that simulated room to sit in the chair opposite where Henry was.

This man was dressed in a suit, and he had such a serious look that Henry was terrified that even his skin crawled.

"Good evening, Henry Maslow, I'm General Higgins, I know you're wondering what you're doing here, why we've detained you when you got off the plane, and why there's military in the area, right?" said the redhead, looking closely at

Henry's eyes, as if by reading them, he wanted to know what the boy had to say.

"Yes, the truth is if I want to know what's happening, the atmosphere in this place feels too heavy" Henry replied, trying not to sound too scared and amazed at the same time in front of that man.

"Well, Henry, I want you to remain calm, because what I am going to tell you right now is a confession that is not going to be easy to swallow, but this is something that each of the two hundred passengers has to know, not you. You have landed in the time you thought you had, you have landed in a new era in the history of humanity" said the redhead, Henry has been staring at him as if to check that what he was doing was not crazy listening.

"That? What are you trying to tell me?" Henry has asked the subject, trying to pay attention to his suggestion that he want to stay calm in order to assimilate the situation.

But the redhead has been looking at Henry with such eyes that Henry has come to suppose that this man was thinking that he was going to lose patience with him.