Next Generation

A little girl came to visit the flight deck the other day.

There is usually a moment when a child first steps inside. They stop. They look around. There are a lot of buttons. Most kids are a little nervous.

Not her.

She climbed right into the seat.

“Airplanes!”

That was apparently all the orientation she required.

She started investigating immediately and seemed entirely prepared to remain there. Mom could go take her seat in the back. We had a flight to operate. I don't think leaving with me sounded particularly unreasonable to her.

I adored her.

There was something familiar about her. The curiosity. The fearlessness. The complete willingness to make friends with whoever happened to be standing in front of her.

She reminded me a little of baby me. Never met a stranger. Wanted to know everything. Apparently quite willing to go wherever the interesting thing was happening.

Eventually, of course, she had to go be a passenger. We said goodbye.

Her mom and I were strangers who had shared one of those tiny, lovely interactions that happen when you spend your life moving through other people's lives. We hadn't exchanged information. She didn't know my name.

They left.

I went to work.

That should have been the end of it.

Less than twenty-four hours later, there we were on the internet.

Her mother had posted the photograph in a large travel group, thanking the pilot who had invited her daughter into the flight deck. Then another aviation group shared it.

Someone recognized me.

Someone tagged me.

And suddenly a moment I had assumed belonged only to the handful of people standing there had traveled through thousands of strangers and found its way back to me.

This isn't actually the first time this has happened. Every so often, a photograph or a story from some passing interaction makes its way onto the internet and, eventually, someone connects it back to me. Usually it takes a few weeks.

There is always a moment when the notification appears and I think:

How did you find me?

This time, it took less than twenty-four hours.

That was new.

No names exchanged. No contact information. Just a photograph of two people who had been strangers a few hours earlier.

And the internet figured out who I was.

That's still surreal to me.

I couldn't help wondering how long even twenty-four hours will seem someday. As facial recognition and image-search technology become more capable, does twenty-four hours become an hour? A minute? Eventually, is there any meaningful distance at all between seeing a stranger's face and knowing who they are?

I don't know.

We'll see.

But, of course, it got me thinking about A Shadow Taken.

Cat's photograph takes several hundred years to do what mine had just done overnight.

Her likeness survives her. It escapes the moment in which it was made, reaches people who never knew her, begins to circulate, and eventually strangers start trying to figure out who the woman in the photograph was.

Several hundred years.

Mine took less than twenty-four hours.

I couldn't stop thinking about the distance between those two things.

What happened to me was tiny, benign and lovely by comparison. But for the first time, I felt a little flicker of that mechanism from the other side of the photograph.

I knew the moment in which the picture was taken. I knew what happened immediately before it. I knew what happened immediately after.

The people seeing it online didn't.

They had the image.

And then they found me.

Now I know something I didn't know before about what it feels like to see your own face somewhere you didn't put it and think:

How did you find me?

That's probably going to end up somewhere in A Shadow Taken.

Not the little girl. Not her story. Those belong to her.

The feeling.

The question.

The several-hundred-year distance between Cat and me collapsing into less than twenty-four hours.

That's the sort of thing that follows me back to a manuscript. Rarely the whole experience. Usually it's a feeling, a question, some strange little realization I didn't have until I lived it.

And then there was the little girl sitting beside me.

I couldn't help wondering what all of this will look like to her.

If she really does grow up to fly airplanes, what will a flight deck look like by the time she's my age?

More than thirty years separate us. Think about what changed in the thirty years before this photograph was taken. The airplanes. The navigation. The technology. The way we communicate. The speed at which information moves.

She may someday sit in a captain's seat and look back at this photograph of herself in mine.

Maybe the flight deck around her will look completely different.

Maybe the way someone finds the photograph will too.

What took several hundred years for Cat took less than twenty-four hours for me.

I have no idea how long it will take for her.

Or whether, by then, “finding” someone from a photograph will even require a search.

We talk about how small the world has become so often that the phrase has almost lost its meaning. Then something like this happens.

You meet a stranger. You make each other smile. You go your separate ways. You assume that was that.

And somewhere between there and wherever everyone is going next, the moment takes on a little life of its own. It travels through people you don't know. Someone recognizes someone. Someone tags someone.

And somehow the moment comes home.

I'm glad this one did.

I hope hers keeps going.

She seemed pretty certain about the airplanes.