My suitcase, a too-clever-by-half smartcase named Trippy Dee with a voice like poured honey, tartly notes that I am setting off on April Fool's day, the day also chosen by the International Molecular Travel Administration to launch its new baggage teleportation service from Johannesburg - sending your baggage, as the company likes to boast, "anywhere you want your bits and pieces to go".
The test phase has not been encouraging. Thousands of bags have indeed been successfully teleported from Imta's Ethergate at the ancient OR Tambo International Airport, but many have arrived - how to put this politely? - mongrelised.There were those viral pictures of the €80,000 Louis Vuitton leather-bound, titanium-hasped "smart steamer trunk", with its built-in Travel Assistant, who proved that "he" wasn't smart enough to avoid arriving in Santiago, Chile (instead of Shanghai, China), with the leather straps bound around a greasy nylon sports bag that a member of the East German shotput team had left aboard a Tupolev en route to the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Oh, the horror.
Trippy, apparently unconvinced that the matter (get it?) is resolved, offers to re-schedule my holiday.
"The eclipse won't wait."
"There is another one in 2025," she replies, then reels off the list of total eclipses up to February 2100.
Some days I miss my old wheelie bag.
 11.18am. Drive timeWe are heading to the airport in a Grabber Driverless, ordered earlier by Trippy who, having checked all the traffic apps, is arguing with the car.
Grabber has long ago swallowed low-tech rival Uber. Seems it got some of the old corporate culture too - the car's OS has attitude. In a different era, it would never, but never stop to ask for directions.
I can tell Trippy is annoying Grabber by the red tide of phone alerts. And because the car is lurching around like a drunk bronco.
"Kids," I yell. "Stop it!"
We hustle through the traffic, slicing and dicing lanes (a real cowboy, this Grabber) until the hologram of OR Tambo's control tower reaches up over the horizon.There is a long pause as the clerk scans the case. A red shimmer.
"Fool ding bi (crackle) see kill?"
They're a bit uptight, these Imta clerks. Ever since some not-so-smart checked baggage in the hold of a Swedish Airbus went rogue and ganged up on the aircraft's own computers and altered course for the moon -with sad results - everyone's jumpy.
"Bah-sai-kul," I say in my slowest Joburg drawl. The holoclerk shimmers greenly. The case is sucked onto the conveyor and is gone.
"To Immigration," says Trippy. Along with checking me in for my flights (and getting me Seat 24A, my favourite), she has also sent my biometric data and e-passport to the airport cloud server where Security can see it.
We stroll slowly through the turnstiles. No alarms. No buzzers. No meaty analogue hand on my shoulder. My data is good.
Midnight. 48,000 feet
We are somewhere over the Sahara, not that it matters because instead of the parched sandscape, the roof panels of the Panoramic Airbus are showing a 360° view of a waterfall of pure, glistening spray falling perfectly, like an Olympic diver, into a rainforest pool.My memory-foam seat has moulded to my body. The seat vibrates softly, ensuring an even flow of blood to my limbs and soothing the unvirtual pain in my butt. Every few minutes, the seat pumps a calming mist into the air with a gentle pffft.
I feel weightless and wonder if whatever sleep hormones the airline has put in the spray are properly legal.
The passengers are all perfectly agreeable, lost in their own digital realms, watching movies from the Cloud, chatting to lovers, mothers, brothers ... Some stare at the waterfall in its perfect shining loop.
I'm thinking of a time when they crammed us into tiny seats and threw cremated food onto tray tables thick with germs and made us queue in nights soaked in diesel fumes, waiting for angry men to flick through our paper passports then herd us into the long, glittering moneytrench of an airport shopping mall.
Now, we who once were treated merely as self-loading cargo float over the Earth in flying, always-on, dreamy massage parlours. Some things do get better.
6.32am, April 4. San Francisco
Our approach over the Bay feels like gliding down a velvet rope. In the Gulf, I changed planes to the Lockheed-Martin Quesst, the equivalent of a passenger-carrying missile. No panoramic shades here - this beauty goes supersonic, right up at the edge of space.
"I hate space," says the droll robot cabin attendant trying for laughs. "No atmosphere."
From the overhead bin, Trippy has already cleared me with the Transport Security Administration. All I have to do is walk through Arrivals - not too fast, though. After a brief time of turning its back on the world, the US has been downgraded by the ratings agencies to "Pending".They still use real flesh dogs to sniff bags, dammit. Real dogs, with fur and barking and shifts. Shifts?
So I stroll through the airport, watched by men with assault rifles and gimlet eyes. The dogs watch, too (although one is diverted by something worth sniffing in its own groin).
Cameras are also watching - scrolling my data, my past, me - on a screen. Trippy has done good and I breeze into the Blue State Kombucha Peoples' Republic of California.
But my teleported bag has not fared so well. Most of the bag has arrived, but without its wheels. The bike's wheels are missing too. But there is a wooden box with "Private" written on the top in Tagalog (thanks, Trippy).The box is empty but for the smell of ... what is that? Hamster? I fire off an outraged message to Imta: "Do you guys hate wheels or what?"8.15am. San Francisco Union Hyperloop Terminal
Trippy and I are aboard Coach 3A on the 8.20am Hyperloop. It is, I imagine, like being squeezed into a suppository, albeit one that travels at 1000km/h.
"South African genius built this," I tell Trippy.
"South African-born genius," she corrects me. My snarky reply dies on my lips as we surge forward and rocket off into the tunnel darkness...