DRONES (SPECTRAL FUTURES) (2 page)

Kacey looks into the rear-view mirror and watches the gate close smoothly, shutting out the outside world inch by inch. The car door slides open. She gets out and walks to the front door.

Standing on the front veranda, she looks out at the horizon beyond and examines the hues of the sunset as the sky darkens gradually all around. She turns and heads inside.

She walks down the hallway and glances at a bedroom door as she passes by it. She stops, turns back towards it, and places her hand on the door knob momentarily before opening it slowly and forcing a slight smile as she enters.

Emma jumps off the bed. “Mum! You need to read the book to me.”

Kacey looks at the book in the hands of Donna, the robotic nanny, who smiles naively at her. “Say please, honey,” Kacey says softly.

“Do you want to … please?” rephrases Emma.

“Sure,” says Kacey smiling as she takes the book from Donna and sits down on the bed. Donna gets up, walks towards the wall, and stands quietly, providing more space. Emma jumps onto the bed and starts bouncing around and laughing, forgetting about her recent request.

“Can we do some jumping?”

“I can’t jump on the bed, Emma. It’ll break.”

“No, it won’t.”

“It will. Trust me. I thought you wanted to read the book.”

“Hold my hands. I want to jump higher.”

“Okay, then.” After placing the book on the bedside table, Kacey holds Emma’s hands and helps her to jump as high as she can while she laughs and screams throughout.

Just before midnight, Kacey sits in her dimly lit study analysing data about a case that took her eye in the car on the way home. She examines the profile of the man in his early twenties, glancing intermittently at his identification photo for reference. Satisfied with the algorithm’s probability estimate, given the available data, she begins writing a short report with recommendations for immediate action. As she does, her mind drifts to the circumstances of a previous case, namely the perspective provided by the satellite surveillance footage of the event: the tracking of the home-made quadrocopter as it raced towards the two figures walking down the street from several hundred yards away and across rooftops; the seamlessness of the pass-over as the UAV swooped down upon them and engaged briefly before moving on to its next targets; the moments that followed the attack when the father and daughter were dazed at first, swiping their hands and briefly running down the street together until their attention turned inexorably towards the insurgence of pain; the pair falling to the pavement writhing wildly in agony for more than a minute before going limp; the lingering of the surveillance footage over the scene for fifteen long minutes; the arrival of an ambulance; the remotely controlled bipedal medical robots that methodically covered the pair with sheets and placed them into the back of the vehicle; and, finally, the rapid zooming out of the surveillance camera above the city as the ambulance drove off, bringing the case footage to an end. Kacey has watched the scene run its course so many times that she doesn’t need to play the file anymore.

She taps the send button on the screen and sits back in her chair, staring at the wall for a moment. She then powers down the computer, wipes a tear from her cheek, stands and walks out of the room.

Part 2

Kacey stands on the back veranda gazing out at the backyard. She looks closely at the old bonsai tree on the table in front of her. She delicately picks off a few leaves and takes a sip of coffee before turning to look up at the sky and the sun rising above the neighbours’ rooftops just beyond. She squints and raises her right hand in front of her to create a shadow over her eyes, trying to locate the source of a high-pitched humming. A small six-bladed UAV glides past the sun, revealing itself as it moves away; it then hovers at her fence line only six yards away.

She stares at it expressionlessly for a moment, then pretends to shoot it with her stretched-out index finger. She turns dismissively, steps through the partially open sliding door, and touches the handle on the inside, activating the closing mechanism, which rolls the door shut behind her. She takes another brief look at the drone, knowing that it can now only observe its own reflection. She also knows that’s not the point. The drone moves on.

She hears little footsteps and turns to see Emma running towards her down the hallway in her flannelette pyjamas.

“Can I have a biscuit?” she asks, smiling widely with unrealistic hope.

Kacey bends down to pick her up. “You know you can’t have biscuits before breakfast, honey.”

“I want two. I want all of them.”

Kacey walks towards the kitchen. “Let me put you on the bench, and I’ll get you some cereal first, all right?”

“All right,” says Emma, resigning herself to it as she turns to watch their entrance into the kitchen.

Kacey walks down the front steps and heads towards the car. She hears the sound of approaching helicopters, so she stops and looks up towards the sky. Seven helicopters pass overhead and continue westward. She tracks them for a moment with curiosity before being struck in her chest by the force of a massive explosion that shudders around the neighbourhood like an earthquake and continues on towards the east. Her mouth opens as she notices a smoke plume steadily extending up into the morning sky in the distance. She stares at it for a moment, then turns and looks into the living room window, where Emma is leaning over the couch, staring into the sky with her right hand held up in the air no longer waving while she tries to understand what’s going on.

Kacey forces a brief encouraging smile and waves, attempting to distract Emma from the mesmerising scene. Emma refocuses and waves back while watching Kacey get into the car. Donna approaches behind Emma and stands looking beyond the perimeter; Donna places a hand softly on Emma’s shoulder.

The front gate begins to slide open as Kacey stretches across to touch the control screen on the console. She watches Emma in the window and waves gently with her fingers, then lightly presses a button on the screen; she watches the tinting on the living room window steadily darken as the car reverses down the driveway. Emma is soon replaced by the reflection of the disaster well underway several suburbs away, the exact location, predeterminants and statistics of which she begins to investigate once her attention turns to her tablet and its security update apps that are streaming data straight from the active files of the operation center downtown.

A bipedal robot temporarily code-named ZeroSum scans the area while jogging towards one of many warehouses in an old industrial district of Philadelphia. It looks upwards and tracks one of several of the department’s UAVs gliding silently in a gradual downward spiral, currently at around twenty thousand feet overhead. Kacey glances at her screens to get data about the locations of her team members approaching all three entrances around the building.

The robot stands up against the main entrance and waits while the rest of the team reach their designated entry points. “There’s no thermal data,” observes Kacey.

“That can only mean a couple of things, Lieutenant,” suggests one operator.

“Okay, you ready?” Kacey asks redundantly after observing the third and final robot in the team fall into position. “Let’s go.”

Kacey’s robot grabs onto the handle of the large corrugated roller door and pulls on it, snapping the padlock after being placed under increasing pressure for a few seconds. The door rolls open, creating an echo that resonates throughout the empty warehouse. ZeroSum steps inside, locates its three companions, and proceeds towards the stairwell leading to the basement just on its right, preferring certainty over trying out the equipment elevator near the rear of the building.

The robots step onto the floor of the basement and scan the scene deliberately. Kacey’s robot walks up to one of the two bipedal robots standing idle in front of two parallel work benches covered in a range of equipment, illegal devices and compounds. Kacey looks the robot up and down and says to herself, “Is this the way things are going to be from now on?”

“They were obviously abandoned when—”

“I know,” she says, refocusing on assessing the condition of the operation that was obviously abandoned just moments ago. “As you can see,” she says, presuming to be reporting to operational command, “this is still a few hours away from completion … perhaps five or six.”

“There you go,” says one operator with a grin.

“Send in the clean-up team,” recommends Kacey as she moves across to a collection of unmasked canisters and conducts an analysis of their specifications. Her robot also swipes its left hand just above them, gaining a low-level reading on the Geiger counter display on the broad-view screen of her helmet. “Okay, well, that confirms it. Let’s get out of here.” She places the robots under automated navigation and disengages from the operator unit, holding her helmet by her side as she waits for the other two on the team to step out of their own units.

Meanwhile, the robots begin their retreat from the building. Once outside, they walk down the empty street to the intersection, where they wait for the arrival of the approaching helicopter designated to take them back to the local hardware holding center. They ignore the seven trucks that roll past them and stop in front of the warehouse, allowing the team of ten clean-up robots on board to be deployed with their equipment and begin their work.

Gordon, a team member, looks at Kacey with a smile as he steps out of his operator unit. “At least we got there in time.”

“See what you think when we do that a hundred more times,” responds Kacey.

Gordon nods quietly, attempting to temper his mild expression of satisfaction.

Stephanie, the third team member, walks towards them and says, “This is just the start of something bigger … much bigger, isn’t it? What was that?”

Kacey shrugs her shoulders. “Obviously, that’s not our business, but I do sympathise with the speculations. It can’t bode well for … well, any of us.”

“The captain looked nervous in the briefing, quite frankly,” reflects Stephanie.

“I’m gonna go speak to him now,” says Kacey. “But I wouldn’t expect anything to clear up too quickly, if I were you. We’re not exactly in the loop on a whole range of things.” She turns, heads to the door, exits and glides down the hallway towards the elevator.

The captain stands looking out of his seventeenth floor office across at the sprawling suburbs beyond. “Send her in,” he says to his robotic secretary just outside the door.

He hears the door slide open and shut, followed by soft footsteps walking towards him. He notices Kacey’s reflection in the window just over that of his left shoulder.

She stops next to him and tracks his gaze into the distance. “What can you tell us about what’s going on here, Captain?” she asks.

The captain shakes his head. “Not much, Kacey. We have another operation just like yours underway in New Jersey right now. I dare say things will start making sense later in the day as events unfold and go more or less public.”

Kacey looks at the wrinkles deepening around his eyes. “When did you give up?”

The captain looks at her briefly, then turns away. “You of all people should know the answer to that.”

“Yeah, I do, but you’ve been in this game for a lot longer than I have.”

“We didn’t have adequate resources in the past; we still don’t now. Nothing’s changed. Let’s put it that way.”

Kacey glances at him. “It seems to me like a lot’s changed.”

“You may be right. But the essence … for a while it looked promising, and I even fell for it … maybe for just a few moments. But then, it became apparent, quietly at first, then like a hammer. This was never going to end nicely. It just became a matter of when and how … and that agonising task of tracking its path and waiting … no matter how well we do our jobs. It’s not about competence. It’s not even about resources anymore … although it gets operationalised as such. What it’s about and always has been is the psychotic, hyper-competitive arms race to promote and support dominance — that inexorable path of opportunity that’ll be taken by someone if you don’t take it first.”

Kacey stares down at the neat flow of traffic in the streets below. “There’s a certain smokescreen involved in all of this with domestic issues getting hopelessly wrapped up in international ones. They essentially look the same at times. For example, is it the imploding of domestic values that’s creating a hostile, self-motivated agent within the country, or is it a deliberate hit from an international location of one kind or another? I’ve often wondered about that with these incidences: the hacking of equipment from a distance, the planting of false data trails, and so on. It’s easy to do. Sometimes, I’ve felt paranoiac thinking is the right orientation, yet I still see myself feeling confident when making judgments like that one last night, for instance.”

“Speaking of that, you may like to have a look at the interrogation video. I’ve provided you temporary authorisation … considering your …”

“My what? Special interest?”

The captain shakes his head. “I wasn’t going to say that. Your long-standing involvement in solving these cases is what I was wanting to mention, and also that this guy had quite a bit to say. I thought you may find it … well, informative.”