What You Ignore Three Times Is Also True.

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Soosee peeked around the edge of a long defunct, weather-worn satellite antenna. Past its frayed fiberglass, she could see the cop drone stuck on top of the neighboring roof, flailing its damaged propellers against the house’s data cable.

Soosee in her spex and dazzle camo
Soosee in her spex and dazzle camo

She heard a pop and an impotent puff of smoke rose from its spot: one of its motors had overheated, catching the orange sunset. It wouldn’t fly again before they sent a rookie all the way up there to retrieve it. She couldn’t tell if its cameras were still working or even if they were pointed at her, though. Despite the nanoblack dazzle camo on her face, she wanted to keep out of its line of sight.She ducked back into the balcony doorway, sitting hard, and blinked the POV of her own drone back into her spex: some fifty armored police on foot, standing behind three mounted on horseback, all following a pack of four Big Dogs, pressing toward the crowd that slowly backed toward a wall. An unstoppable force against an immovable, but pitiably soft, object.

They were mostly the residents of this neighborhood. They’d been gathering for two days, trying to get the attention of Channel 5 or Channel 7, to no effect.

Some of the demonstrators, wearing featureless white facemasks, had come from across the city when they’d gotten word that there was to be a peaceful rally in mourning for the Hyde Park boy who’d been killed by “appropriate force” when he’d run from the cops. The boy had streamed his experience, complete with the racial epithet that had come through the smiling teeth of the beat cop who had subsequently community policed him to death. The cop had thought that kill-switching the kid’s phone would have disconnected him, but the kid was sharp: he’d built a mesh node into his hoodie and it streamed the whole thing straight up to his 12,000 followers. The kid had been funny. Sharp. His feed had been a stream of video game commentary, adolescent jokes, friends falling off skateboards, and abruptly, his own death. Until that moment, his most popular video had been a friend ramming his nuts into a railing moments after saying “Check it out”.

His last video had disappeared due to a copyright claim about the music that had been playing on the video. There had been no music.

The legit networks yanked it as fast as it came up. but it still existed on the mesh networks that cable providers blocked as well as they could.

Before Soosee’s drone, the Big Dogs bellowed legally-required demands of the screaming demonstrators: “DISPERSE NOW OR WE WILL DEPLOY GAS. GO TO YOUR HOMES. THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING.”

Not such an unreasonable warning, but for the fact that the cops had cornered the forty-some demonstrators against a wall — the wall that, for many of them, defined their home. They had nowhere to go. And the police and their horses were already wearing their masks.

wpid-Photo-20140815202137.jpg
A well-worn Boston Dynamics “Shepherd” police drone

The Big Dogs stepped easily around the obstacles in the road. Some of the obstacles were incidental, like the shopping cart, abandoned and overturned, scattering the sum of somebody’s possessions. Some were less incidental: 2x4s of Azek, hastily screwed together into the four-foot caltrops that their builders called “Azek Jezeks”. The Big Dogs grabbed them with their massive forward claw and hauled them to the side to make space for the horses, who hadn’t had to so much as slow down in their slow, forward march.

The wind made a polytonal whistle through the satellite antenna. She saved the audio buffer out of habit, but music was the last thing she cared about right now. Seconds later, she saw her POV wobble as the same puff of wind rocked her drone. It compensated, but she saw a masked cop look up at the movement.

She winced and looked away out of instinct, not wanting to make eye contact.

She’d done what she could to make her drone look like police equipment, but the department had just gotten some new ones from DHS. Hers was bigger than their new ones — ten centimeters across — and she hadn’t been able to figure out how to reduce it in size without sacrificing some necessary spec.

To Soosee’s relief, the cop looked back toward the crowd. The drone was good enough for now. She inched the drone higher, trying to avoid the gaze of the police.

Their quarry cornered, the Big Dogs fired canisters directly into the crowd. The crowd screamed and pressed itself into the wall of the house.

The panic of the crowd seemed to awaken something inside the massed police. The horses charged forward. Behind them, the infantry leapt forward. Together, they raised their batons and charged into the smoke.

Soosee turned off the IR filters and the scene turned purple. The gas, designed to allow only those properly equipped to see well, barely showed in IR, just a diaphanous Instagram filter laid across the scene.

Through the wisps of gas, she expected to see a complete crush of the demonstrators, but something else happened. They fell back, sure enough, but the horses started to panic, hopping in place, then trying to run back through the massed police. The panic spread in all directions as the horses began to trample their way free, back through the armored cops.

Once the police lost cohesion, the crowd fled. In minutes, the ground was covered in groaning, armored humans and a horse on its side, its ribs heaving. Police EMTs rushed to their armored comrades’ side and began tending their wounds.

Soosee squinted. What had happened? Why had they panicked? Then she saw it: many of the police had — wire? string? — wrapped around their ankles or calves. Their gauntleted hands scratched at it in a frenzy, trying to get them off. The horse did, too. It bound tight, wrapped like rubber bands. Barbed rubber bands.

She ventured closer to see what was going on. One of the EMTs looked up at her and said directly to her, “The urbans have some sort of landmine. Tell the chief.”

Her drone didn’t have a speaker. She couldn’t afford the weight, with the aerosol. She’d figured she’d never need one.

The EMT looked at her quizzically.

“OK?” he asked.

Soosee made the drone tilt as though to nod, but the EMT wasn’t buying it. His eyes briefly showed recognition before flashing anger. “What the fuck?” He drew his pistol. “Backup!” He shouted, “I need backup!” He drew on the drone, but Soosee had seen it coming. By the time his pistol was level, she’d jammed the drone into the sky and around a corner while bullets punched through windows and plastic clapboard.

She dipped the leading edge of the drone forward and flew it hard and fast. She didn’t care about the drone, of course — it only cost a few dollars of materials. But she was pretty sure there was some sort of evidence on it that could connect to her: a hair, maybe, or some quirk of her printer that would connect it to other objects of her manufacture.

She turned the drone east, heading toward Dorchester. If she could make it over the harbor, she could crash it in the water and it would never be found.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw motion. One of the new police drones was on her. She kept seeing green flashes from it: a laser, trying to shoot down her drone.

“Drone, ink ’em.” she muttered.

“OK,” said the drone cheerily.The aerosol released a black cloud, propelled away from Soosee’s drone by its propwash. Some of it flashed into streaks of fire, fouling the laser. Seconds later, the police drone flew through the cloud. For a moment, Soosee was worried that the ink wouldn’t affect the new drone for some reason. But then she saw another flash as it tried to fire the laser again and the ink on its lens combusted.

The pursuer began to fall behind, a victim of not only the effect of the adhesive nanotube threads sticking to its four props, but also gumming its motors. A trickle of grey smoke began to trail the police drone and it began to lag. Soosee heard a pop through the wind filter and saw and flash of blue, then guttering yellow. The pursuer tumbled wildly out of control, falling toward the houses below.

“Drone,” said Soosee, “Fly to Ireland.”

“OK,” said the drone in her ear.

Soosee tapped her spex and her the lenses became transparent again, just a thin skin of data over the balcony on which she sat.

She stood and her back cracked. She turned toward the access door to see a kid — her age, in his 20s, white, standing there in a new, black nylon police uniform. The rookie they sent to pick up the drone. He’d gone to the wrong rooftop. This rooftop.

“H—hey!” he stammerred.

“Shit,” Soosee said matter-of-factly. “Spex, stochate.”

Soosee turned and jumped off the roof onto the old fire escape with a concerning, clanging rattle.

She could hear the rookie shouting to the force. “Backup!” said the kid, “Send backup to my location!”

“No network connection” read her spex at the top of her field of vision. At least the jammer was working. But she would lose its protection if she got more than fifteen meters away from him.

She grabbed a railing in each hand and leapt, her hands the wheels of a roller coaster, flying down two flights before turning and looking up. The kid, looking down at her, fired his taser and she felt the sharp sting of one of the barbs directly over her heart. But the jolt didn’t come, even though she heard the “tiktiktiktik” of the charge — one of the darts had hit the structure of the fire escape. The rookie figured it out at the same time and dropped the taser, drawing his pistol as he ran down the stairs toward her. Again, she grabbed the railings and flew down, each flight a single leap. The taser clanged as she dragged it across the grate. She heard a pop and felt debris strike her face. He was shooting at her.

On the second flight, she felt the taser dart’s cable pull taught, yanking the barb out of her skin, she winced, but it she didn’t feel the pain. It snagged on the tough nylon of her hoodie.

More pops as the rookie shouted, “Stop! You’re under arrest!” through the mist of rust.

Soosee, at the edge of panic, yanked her multitool from her pocket, bent the taser line over its ceramic blade, and severed it.

She felt the bullet impact with her shoulder and she staggered to the side, falling against the outer railing of the fire escape. Black spots splashed across her vision.

Without a breath in her body, she fumbled through her pocket and found the palm-sized aluminum tube she was looking for. She yanked it out as the rookie came closer, his pistol pointed at her unarmored head. She could barely hear what he was saying. She held the tube out, as though to drop it.

All at once, she drew a ragged, gurgling breath.

“DROP IT!” yelled the rookie.

“You don’t want…” she wheezed. “Deadman switch.”

The rookie paused.

“Backup,” he said, almost plaintively.

“I’ll hand it to you. Just don’t shoot me again.” she said. She reached out her hand, palm up.

The rookie’s face showed a determination that belied his unease. He took one hand off the pistol to take the tube and Soosee moved, leaving the tube in his hands and grabbing the pistol, rolling over the edge of both the fire escape and the rookie’s arm, taking the pistol with her. She landed roughly on top of the plastic lid of a dumpster, but at least it didn’t knock the wind out of her this time. She felt her body begin to warn her: Run now, but it’ll hurt later.

When she looked back up, the kid was still holding the tube. She threw away the pistol with its camera and GPS tracker and took off between two houses.

She heard the rookie trying to call for backup again. But of course, now he was holding the jammer. He wouldn’t fall for that twice, but she was safe as long as the battery held out, which would be several more hours.

She looped around and back tracked by a house. “Signal found”, said her spex. That meant the rookie was more than 15 meters away. Or, of course, he could be on the other side of the same house, the jammer noise blocked by plumbing. Or he could have dropped the jammer. She peered around the corner. She could smell the riot gas from here, but she knew from the smell it wasn’t close.

She checked on her drone. The battery was almost dead from the high-speed flight. Below it, traffic flowed, the drivers irritated at the delay. Ahead, the darkness of Massachusetts Bay. It would make it to the harbor in a few minutes. “Spex, show the world from the last drone path.”

He spex darkened the outside world for a moment. She gestured and the view zoomed in. Police tanks coming in from the north. At least she knew which way not to go.

“Spex, wheels.”

Wheels slid into place on her boots and she pushed off down the street, the motors in each wheel pushing her to 30 klicks as she barreled east toward Dorchester, as the sun set at her back.

Her collarbone started to ache.

This xenoglyph is possible because of the patrons of my Patreon, particularly:Brooklyn Indie Games

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