Story 16. Written by Jim Waitlord

The sun crept gently and warmly over the horizon, casting its gentle light across Martin's kitchen. He sat with coffee in his hand, the familiar hum of his thoughts filling his brain. Today, like everything else, he was thinking about flying. Modern Aviation. All the weirdness that comes with it.

"Statistically," he muttered to himself, almost absently, "is the chance of a bomb on a plane? Small, isn't it? But two bombs? This is fundamentally impossible."

And then, just like that, a strange thought entered his mind. What if... what if he brought a fake bomb? Bait. If he had one, he argued, there's no way there'd be another. That was too much of a coincidence. That's how Martin mixed up cold logic... well, bizarre logic. He packed up his little fake bomb and headed for the airport.

Meanwhile, far away from him, Yusuf thought of his own dark thoughts. Yusuf's mathematics was not about probability, but about inevitability. But he had no bait. He had the real one. His bomb was real, and he moved through the airport crowd as if he were invisible, calm, unseen.

Strange thing. It turns out that fate has its own way of twisting things. By coincidence, Martin and Yusuf sat side by side on the plane. The humming of the aircraft filled the cabin, and people settled in, but between them? The tension was thick in the air.

Martin first noticed Yusuf's bag. He clamped his hands together, as if he were afraid of slipping away. Those fingers are drumming nervously. And Yusuf couldn't take his eyes off Martin's shoes. It was oddly shaped and voluminous. They exchanged a brief glance, and each of them wondered what the other was hiding.

An hour before the flight, the turbulence struck. The machine shuddered. The men gasped and clawed at their arms. Martin tried to conceal his uneasiness and reached for his bag. There was a nervous laugh. "You know," he said quietly, "statistically, two bomb chances on an airplane? It's practically zero."

Yusuf's face went pale. "Two bombs?" Her voice quivered, her hand clutched around her bag as if it were the only thing that bound her to the ground.

And just like that, something clicked. The weight of their worlds collapsed. Martin's feigned courage, Yusuf's true fear - all of this is gone. For a moment they were neither strangers nor enemies. There were only two people who were suddenly submerged in their own electoral maze.

They began to talk. Not yelling, not fighting, just... talking. Yusuf shared his story, his struggles, his regrets. Martin talked about his bizarre logic, his absurd fears, and his feeling that life, in some strange way, is a joke. Somewhere above the ocean, amid the hum of the flight, laughter broke the tension. It was fragile, but real.

By the time the plane landed, everything had changed. Martin left the fake bomb behind and shook his head at the whole absurdity. About Yusuf? He could not do it. He stepped off the plane, turned himself in to the authorities. A way out, he thought. An opportunity for salvation.

The plane landed without incident. Everyone got out safely. Two men, brought together by the strangest turn of fate, walked off the same trajectory and changed. Their paths diverged, but this conversation? He stayed with them. It was fear that started it all, but in the end... maybe, but maybe, just maybe, it brought them some hope.

The odds of impossible