Airplane Mode by Elliott Downing

“If you ever met a god,” she said, “the only rational course of action would be to kill it as quickly as possible.”

Cassandra travels on airplanes for a living, but now airplanes have begun to follow her. A state-of-the-art spy plane with no official owner circles over every city she visits. A darkened fighter jet lurks off the wing of her red-eye flight into Reno. On the ground, the surveillance apparatus of modern life seems to be taking a peculiar, specific interest in her.

A reclusive computer hacker, recently fired from an agency without a name, summons Cassandra to a meeting in the middle of nowhere to share an urgent message: Something more than human has been growing in the cracks of our world, and it might not remain ours much longer…

Airplane Mode is a tense and disorienting work of present-day science fiction, set in the nowhere land of air travel and the everywhere land of ubiquitous surveillance, that explores the darker contours of the technological world we’ve created and speculates about how it might end.