The peak season must have passed. The departure gate was quiet in that particular way airports get when the crowds thin out—announcements came over the PA every so often, but few people bothered to look up.
I didn't notice someone settle into the seat one over from mine until a few minutes had gone by. A woman, somewhere in her late thirties or forties, in a casual suit. Nothing about her face or her clothes pointed clearly to where she was from. On her lap sat a large attaché case, the hard-sided kind—though for its size, it looked surprisingly light.
I can't remember now who spoke first. It must have been around the time the boards and the PA both announced a minor delay.
"Where are you headed?" I asked, meaning it the way you do when a delay has just been announced—wondering if it mattered to her.
It didn't, she said. The destination of this flight was where she needed to be. "I try not to connect if I can help it. Too many ways the schedule can fall apart."
Her English had an accent I couldn't quite place.
I told her I wasn't in a hurry either, that the delay was fine. Then, without thinking much about it: "Are you here for work?"
"Yes." A slight smile. "I deliver information. That's the job."
I turned that over for a moment. I took it to mean she moved data—physically moved it. Datasets large enough that sending them over even a fast network would take months, sometimes years. Carrying the storage media by hand was faster. More reliable. This was, apparently, still how it worked, in ways most people never thought about: backup archives and customer records, raw footage from film sets, seismic data from offshore drilling ships, hard drives full of radio telescope observations that had to be physically flown to a single facility before anyone could assemble an image of the sky. All of it moving, quietly, in someone's bag. I had read about this somewhere.
"So—a courier," I said.
"In a sense. Not so different from riding hard with a royal decree sealed in wax. You get it from one place, you bring it to another."
The boarding announcement came on. She said "well, then" and stood. She lifted the attaché case with both hands, slowly, and swung the shoulder strap into place. Something in the deliberateness of it stayed with me.
I joined the line alone. Near the front I could still see her. I didn't know what was in the case. I hadn't asked, and I doubt she would have said. It's possible she didn't know herself—not exactly.
Hard drives, most likely. SSDs. Hundreds of terabytes in aggregate, standing in for the parchment. Moving information from one place to another: it kept turning up throughout human history, one form or another, and apparently it still did.
I found my seat. Outside the window, at the tip of the wing, the navigation light pulsed slowly—as if it were trying to signal something.
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