Aerium
A broker who sells the sky. But the money is moving, and for the first time, Jack Remington is running out of runway...
Dubai is a sandcastle built by men who do not expect the tide to come in. A city raised by migrant hands for the amusement of those who see money as limitless, and rules as flexible. The laws are there - strict, absolute - though only if you lack the right name, connections, and bank balance. It does not grow so much as metastasise, its skyline a testament to ambition, vanity, and the peculiar belief that glass and steel can outlast the desert.
The experiment succeeded. A tax-free haven, a cityscape designed for Instagram, a promise of security and wealth, unburdened by the sluggish, grey encumbrance of democracy. The jaded, moneyed classes of London, Paris, and New York arrived in droves - men who had earned too much, stolen too much, or simply been born too fortunate to remain where they were. The financier on his third, surgically-elevated wife; the Silicon Valley dropout muttering about fiat currency; the airbrushed influencer posing in a rental staged for a life she cannot afford and must buy likes to justify. Now, even the alcohol tax has climbed - proof that the welcome mat worked too well.
And at its shimmering centre, just off Sheikh Zayed Road, stands the latest absurdity in a city built on them: Aerium - not a dealership for cars, but for the sky.
Inside, the temperature is set to protect the technology. Suspended in the centre, dissected like a trophy kill, is a segment of an Airbus ACJ319. A sky scrolls endlessly behind it, algorithmically generated, never quite the same, nor entirely different. The floor hums - the distant murmur of twin turbofan engines at idle. A subliminal reminder: escape is not just possible, but necessary.
At the centre of it all, grinning like a man who just won a bet with God and knows the bastard will pay, stands Jack Remington, legs astride, arms folded. The jet dealmaker.
Remington is American in the way only men who weren’t quite born rich can be. Too tanned, too white of tooth - like a motivational speaker who doesn’t believe his own pitch but delivers it anyway. His Briony suits are sharp enough to draw blood. His watch is slender, discreet - the sort of thing which would pip the radar of a CEO’s fixer.
He grew up in Ohio, where Saturday nights meant headlights circling a Walmart car park, stereo blaring, dilute beers at the ready. His father, a freight pilot, spent more time in the sky than at home; his mother, a timeshare closer, taught him how to lie with conviction. By fourteen, he was washing planes for pocket money. By eighteen, he had swapped grease rags for textbooks and landed at Embry-Riddle, the Harvard of the skies - except Harvard doesn’t teach you how to coax a dying engine back to life over the Everglades.
The military came next, but orders didn’t suit him. Then Capitol Hill, where he lobbied for aircraft manufacturers, and learned how power really surges. Then corporate takeovers - fourteen years of them, slicing up companies with detached efficiency.
But still, the itch remained. The need for altitude.
So he built Aerium - a trap disguised as freedom.
Clients do not come here to consider buying a jet. They come to decide which jet.
The screens, vast as squash courts, render every possible interior to the last stitch of calfskin and silk. “Twenty-four thousand private jets in operation,” Remington purrs, his manicured fingers moving across the display like a maestro. “Two thousand change hands every year. Seven hundred roll off the production line. My job? To know where every single one is, who’s selling, who’s buying, and most importantly - who’s bleeding.”
He swipes. The world condenses.
“Dubai to Buenos Aires, non-stop. Thirty-two aircraft can do it. Under $40 million? Thirteen. No older than five years? Seven.”
He does not ask if you are interested; he assumes you are.
They sink into hand-stitched leather, sip champagne, or single garden, cold-brewed Hawaiian tea, at carbon-fibre tables, watch their potential futures scroll across the walls. Every detail - scent, and sound - engineered to remove doubt.
And doubt is the enemy.
Some know exactly what they want. The Russian who wanted a gold finish - but not too gold. The Gulf prince who ordered his with a full spa, its exchangeable marble veneer sourced from the same quarry as the tower of Pisa. The hedge fund manager who insisted on bulletproof portholes, not because he needed it, but because, as he put it, “You never know.”
And then there was the journalist. The one who vomited up his Dom Ruinart - the first Champagne ever served aboard Concorde, the showroom sommelier helpfully noted. He was quietly removed, his mess erased as if he had never been there.
“Most of my clients have the attention span of caffeinated goldfish,” Remington says. “CEOs, sheikhs, tech founders. They don’t want to be sold to. They want to feel in control.” His system lets them browse, compare, and - without quite realising it - convince themselves this was their idea all along.
It worked.
Until it didn’t.
The oligarchs stopped picking up their phones. An arrest here, a sanction there. The crypto kids weren’t kings anymore. The oil barons were hedging. The carousel still spun, but the horses were missing.
For the first time, Jack Remington found himself in unfamiliar airspace.
Waiting.
Watching.
Grounded.
The private jet market had always been a game of shadows, but now the shadows were shifting. The money was still there, but it was moving differently - lower, quieter, beyond the radar of scrutiny. The new buyers weren’t the ones who wanted to be seen sipping Cristal at 43,000 feet. They were the ones who needed to disappear altogether.
And rules - those things his clients once laughed at - were suddenly real. Borders tightened. Names made watchlists. Money had to move through places less accommodating than before. Some had to stay put, and staying put was never part of the plan.
Remington still smiles, sells, and stands at the centre of Aerium, every inch the man with a plan. But now, late at night, when the showroom is empty and the scrolling sky is on standby, he stands, staring past the neon fringe of Dubai, out to the desert.
And he wonders, not for the first time, if it would be easier to stop running.
Would it be dignified, he wonders, to arrange it like a departure? A final flight, an exit as polished as every sale he had ever closed? The note would be tasteful, nothing desperate - something practical, transactional, an elegant fin du voyage.
But what if there was still time to fix things?
What if this wasn’t the end, but the beginning of the next?
He lifts the remote and aims it at sky wall one, flicking the reflection back at himself. The screen zooms in until it’s just his eyes. The same sharp, steady eyes his mother taught him to use like a scalpel. The eyes which could sell a dream or close a deal. They stare back, unblinking.
For now, he will keep selling the sky, leasing out the clouds, trading in tailwinds and turbulence. One day, when the runways stretch further and the money moves faster, he’ll sell the stars too, parcelled up in contracts and brokered over Chinese caviar and century-old Macallan, because the sky was never the limit, just the starting bid…
