Flying in the Year 2021

"The socks too," the guard orders. Shivering, you remove your socks and add them to the growing pile of discarded clothes.

It's a typical day at the airport in 2021.

You begin in the morning by dropping off your bags at the luggage-collection center. It will be flown to your destination on a cargo plane. Hopefully it will get there at the same time you do.

Then your ride lets you off at the remote shuttle station. No outside transportation is allowed at the airport. The shuttle takes you to the airport.

Before you enter, you have to surrender all possessions you might have brought with you, with no exceptions. Most people have nothing. Babies and those too ill to fly without medication are scarce. You used to be permitted to bring your wallet on the plane, but those have been banned now that everyone's been implanted with identity chips that also contain ticketing information.

Once inside the airport, you strip. Clothing offered the terrorists too many opportunities for concealing contraband. It's uncomfortable doing this in front of everyone. The airlines tried private strip searches, in the beginning, but when passengers balked at the 18-hour waits, sacrificing privacy made sense. Most people are polite enough not to stare.

Then you wait, hardly noticing the automatic weapons trained on you and your fellow passengers. Each person has to go through the X-ray and sniffer machines. Even without clothing, the terrorists still found ways to bring their implements on board. You don't mind – it's a lot better than the cavity searches the security personnel used to perform before the machines were installed.

Once you get through the machines, you gratefully accept the airport's clothes. Each disposable outfit is skintight and not very flattering, but it's better than flying naked. The security guard also hands you paper booties to protect your feet.

Then it's time to board the airplane. Seats, carpeting, and all those other niceties made it too easy to smuggle weapons onboard. They required personnel to clean them, people who could be terrorists. Now the interior of the plane consists solely of hard, self-cleaning plastic. You sit on the floor and settle in for the flight.

You carefully observe the other passengers as they enter. Any one of them could be a terrorist, so it's important never to let your guard down. One man smiles at you. You decide to watch him extra closely; nobody smiles on these flights.

Now the plane is taking off. You never see the pilots. They use a separate entrance, and their compartment is inaccessible from the passenger cabin.

You settle back. There will be no drink service. In fact, there are no flight attendants at all. The terrorists once used the drinks on the plane to complete their bombs. Besides, the flight attendants could have been terrorists themselves.

You don't want a drink anyway, because there is no private bathroom on the plane. There is a one-piece, molded plastic toilet off to one side of the cabin if someone really must go. Usually they don't.

Some people look bored or frustrated, but not you. You finally feel safe. Cocooned on the plane, you feel secure in the knowledge that a terrorist is unlikely to kill you today.

And you try not to think about all that could happen after you've stepped off the plane.