What’s up?

4 Non Blondes, Bigger, Better, Faster, More!

15 minutes to impact

The return flight left on time with the same passengers onboard. Heads of state and their families, kings, queens, princes, princesses, their staff. One of the youngest princes and his family did not board the flight, due to the boy getting food poisoning, but everything else went strictly to plan. Eva sat by the window, Joana next to Eva, Maria next to her two girls. Sebastian sat behind his three girls. Four non-blondes, except for Eva’s golden streaks. One happy family among other families, some happier than others, heading home for the Christmas and New Year Celebrations.

• - I miss Eureka – Joana told her little sister. Eureka was the now 8-year-old bulldog Sebastian had given her the Christmas before Eva was born. – It’s so cool that twinstahook lets me have a profile just for him. Look, here is an album with hundreds of pictures of him: videos, sound, visits to the vet, the food he...

• - Me too, I miss Eureka too. I love Eureka.

• - It’s not fair that he can never come with us, he’s part of the family. We treat animals unfairly. You should ask Dad to give you a dog too.

• - Really? I can have a dog?

• - For real you can, silly. Remember mom is always saying We can have anything we want as long as we behave.

• - Daddy, can I have a dog? I will call it God. Please daddy. No, I want a wolf! A wolf with a crown. I’ll call her Flow.

• - Alpha. – Joana said. – you should call it Alpha. In the system of Greek numerals, alpha has a value of one.

Sebastian didn’t answer, as he was too focused on a few things that seemed fishy. Security was not the same as in the first flight. Pilots door was open, and only one pilot in the cockpit. One of the flight attendants couldn’t take his eyes off Eva. What was going on?

Joana had turned 15 in the summer and was, as very old, vulgar people called youngsters like her, a twinstahooker. She was addicted to the social media platform taking over the world, partly owned by a conglomerate of the Nobelqvist empire. The platform allowed users to record visuals and audios 24/7 if they so desired. Joana never tried to, but many of her friends earned special social credit points for staying online for weeks on end, 100% absolutely live, even when sleeping, even in the bathroom. Twinstahooked. Joana posted something on the thing every ten minutes or so. She was, as most children, a perfect fusion of the personalities of the two people that raised her, her mom and her stepdad. Her authenticity and realist prudence came from mommy, her rebellious nature from Sebastian. Joana had been born midsummer, with a chirpy temperament. Light, playful, witty, and as regular a little princess as you get. She had kept Maria together when they lost João.

Those had been tough years for Maria. She had, by all standards, lost her foot, or both feet, feeling utterly unprepared. At the time she had a very small comfort zone, as small as they get. Predictable and methodical, her weeks were as scheduled as a rural Swiss train driver’s.

She was happy, as happy as one can be in autopilot. She loved João deeply. They had hooked up in university, and he was to color her black and white realism.

She absolutely adored being a mother and was a content Portuguese high school teacher in a nearby school. If you were to ask her then if she was happy, she would shrug her shoulders and pragmatically answer why wouldn’t I be?. She had been trying to get pregnant for quite some time, and after a couple of years of intense treatments, the good news arrived just in time for Christmas. Eight months later, in August 2003, Joana brought some well-needed chaos to Maria’s routines. Babies are chaos: no matter how romantic a memory parents decide to have of their kids those first couples of years, no matter how many moments of awe and love and pure, pristine pleasure most parents experience, here and there, over their little bundles of joy, babies are chaos. Especially human babies.

Human babies are by far the neediest, least self-sufficient, of all the species on earth. Most species are born somewhat prepared for survival. Giraffes, cows, chickens, ducks, geese and many other will walk as soon as they are born. Newborn horses walk as fast as their mothers hours after birth. Baby sea-turtles hatching on the beach crawl their way to the ocean. Human babies... well, it takes a couple of months for them to lift their heads unaided. A baby human needs a few months to be able to roll over, to sit up, then a couple more of months to crawl, a few more months to stand, and around a year after being born they can do the walking thing. And the falling thing. A lot. Much later, the running. And that’s just for mobility. Self-feeding and protecting themselves from predators takes a few more... well, years. A decade, maybe. Some are still in their parent’s basements 30 years after birth. It’s our evolutionary trade-off for brains capable of handling complex reasoning and social interaction.

The truth is, nine months isn’t much to mature a human brain. It’s too early in the neurological development to be born. Anthropologists tell us humans evolved this way to accommodate selection, for both large brain size and bipedalism’s upright locomotion, rendering human babies to be born with brains 30% smaller in than those of adults so they can fit through a narrow birth canal. But that’s not the whole story, a big chunk of it has to do with the metabolic burden on the pregnant mother. Either way, babies fill our lives when they pop into the world, and Maria was in eager need for some chaos. Too much order may become a bigger burden than survival.

And so she needed, and welcomed, chaos: the crying, the all-nighters, the constant need for attention, the relentless maintenance. What Maria didn’t need more of was worry, but worry she did. To makes worry worse, she lost her husband when Joana was almost five, and chaos had swelled. The death was declared a suicide, and chaos multiplied. Shortly afterwards, Joana was diagnosed with Type I diabetes, and chaos proliferated. By the time Maria was 40, the big four-oh that slaps the soul, she was a single-mother slash widow, responsible for a vulnerable, ill, but joyful upbeat child. Maria’s comfort zone just couldn’t cope. Out of pure desperation and pragmatism, drowned in noble prudence, she remarried the brother of a friend, and Joana had a second father figure in the house: Diogo. He didn’t last long for reasons we won’t go into here.

Then, in 2011, Maria and Sebastian met and fell, almost instantaneously, in love, saving each other and moving in together. Sebastian adopted Joana, although she ended up keeping the “Thaora” nickname instead of calling him dad, a nickname Sebastian used to be called by in some circles, an imposed one that just stuck and that Joana name. She embraced and accepted and loved Sebastian as her dad, it just sounded weird to call him that. She was eight when he had adopted her and understood what it meant. He adored her, too: they just clicked. Maria wasn’t so happy about the nickname thing, routines and labels were practical for her, but she never interfered. Thaora it was, and a family they were: prudent Maria, rebel Thaora and the alchemic fusion of both, Joana.

• - Hey, a-what’s going on? – Sebastian’s eye caught something it shouldn’t have.

• - I am feeling a little peculiar. – Maria added uneasy.

• - Thaora, can Eva have a dog? – Joana insisted on her sister’s behalf just as Sebastian got out of his seat, heading straight to the cockpit. Bipedal, upright, fast-paced locomotion. His kids were on that plane.