Crunch All the Babies

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“Are you dark?” asked Soosee.

Puckerup nodded.

Soosee looked behind her: only one couple ahead of them in line, both talking on their phones. If the spooks suspected her, they could listen through the couple’s phones even if Puckerup’s was dark. She selected an innocuous topic. “I got pretty drunk last night.” She jived to Puck, right hand’s fingers dancing on her chest, out of view of any phones. You see my feed?

Puckerup is a well-known Crunchbaby, mostly for their irreverent, perceptive journalism.
Puckerup is a well-known Crunchbaby, mostly for their irreverent, perceptive journalism.

“Yeah,” Puckerup jived the word when they spoke it, “You were at the Bouncy Castle last night?” but jived, Then you ran. What happened?

“Yeah, Cremaster Flash was crunchin’ all the babies.” She pointed her first two fingers at her nostrils: Cop, then, Shot me. Tased me.

“Ybuh,” said Puckerup, fear and concern in their questing eyes, momentarily unable to maintain the ruse.

I’m OK, shoulder hurts she jived, saying “Dude fell on my arm tryin’ to grind.”

The hostess stuck her head out the door and called the first couple in. The two entered, still talking on their phones.

“You’re really OK?” asked Puckerup, trying to keep panic from their voice.

“I think so. It moves OK. Can you come over and help me out with a project, after we eat, though?”

A pair of women exited, each looking down at their phone, probably playing a game, maybe with each other. The hostess stuck her head out and called, “Puckerup! Two!”

>>

With her good right hand, Soosee ate linguica and eggs. The intense red of the paprika streaked across the white and yellow of her flowing egg yolks like their conversation in the noise of the diner. As she ate, the signal entropy of the paprika decreased until the remains were an orange, featureless smear.

“I’m fabbing up some new police drones,” said Soosee, her voice barely audible over the clatter of plates, loquacious overnighters out for their first breakfast together, and writhing families. “They should look like the new ones the cops got from DHS.”

Puckerup smiled. “Send me what you got. I could use them. I’m working on a piece about a couple of schools, and no one even bothers to look at a police drone on school grounds.”

Soosee nodded. “But I’m not going to be able to get eyes out there until they’re built. I had to ditch my spare. I haven’t been able to see for two days. I don’t even know what’s happened. I think I was the only one covering it.”

There was a moment, just a moment, when the entire diner happened to be quiet. Almost everyone, by luck alone, had stopped speaking and for that moment, no plates clattered. Someone at the next table was saying, “—happening in Hyde Park. But I guess it’s over, cuz haven’t heard anything for a couple of—”

The lull passed and they lost the words again in the chaos of clattering plates and conversation.

They looked at each other wordlessly for a moment. Soosee grimaced.

“Babybaby,” said Puckerup, sitting back in their chair and wiping sriracha from their chin, “Let’s get you back in gear.”

Soosee Toosee
A redesign of Soosee, with her largely DIY spex, here running toward the story.

 

Three hands proved better than one, and Puckerup was as skilled with soldering leads as with sniffing them out. They had two new drones ready in four hours, with more chassis printing out, complete with a tweak they’d guessed at while assembling. They consumed nine cans of Red Bull Maximum, took ten capsules of L-Theanine, and ran out of hash oil to vaporize. But in the end, they had what was indistinguishable from a pair of police drones. They were a few grams heavier — the chassis of the original was probably paper-thin copper/graphene, instead of this oldskool 3D printed carbon fiber — so the battery would run out more quickly and it would accelerate more slowly than the DHS gear. But it had room for two ink charges, which weighed less than the taser/laser combo that had been built into the original.

Puckerup’s spex rotated around their magnetic mounts in the side of their nose, giving them unobstructed vision. Their eyes were red, tired. But they smiled their emerald smile, proud of their work.

“Babybaby, these are yakka. We could make these all day, and we’ll keep getting faster.”

Soosee smiled through her bleariness, idly scratching at her face. Her shoulder ached. “Probably. But I gotta take a nap. My shoulder hurts. Let’s send one up to see how it goes, then we’ll build some backups.”

“Spex, pair with this drone. Drone, pair with my spex.”

“OK, paired,” said the spex.

“Drone, change your name to ‘Asscroft’.”

“OK, I’m ‘Asscroft’.”

“Asscroft, go up a foot.”

The drone jumped clumsily into the air, correcting itself after knocking an X-Acto to the floor. It hovered, whining, two feet before Soosee

Puckerup did the same with the other drone, naming it “Rummy”.

“OK, Puck,” smiled Soosee, momentarily forgetting her shoulder, “Let’s let the Eagle soar! Eagle, fly out the door and go up a hundred feet.”

Puck said, “Rummy, follow that drone.”

They held open the screen door, and the two whined out, waited until they cleared the telephone lines, and shot into the sky.

Through her spex, Soosee saw the two of them, looking up, and suddenly shrinking away.

“Asscroft, listen. Go to 1344 Hyde Park Ave. If you lose signal, record video straight down, wide angle. Fly in a minesweeping pattern over the no-coverage area. Then fly to Boston. When you have signal, upload the video to my account.”

“OK,” said the drone in her ear. The view of the two of them looking up was replaced by a flurry of rooftops. They overflew two delivery drones and a police drone that either didn’t see them or took no notice.

The friends sat down on their porch and leaned on each other, smiling, happy to be in action.

A chunky, bright yellow DHL drone landed and deposited a tiny package, then took off again. “Your package has been delivered,” said her spex.

She looked at it with suspicion.

“Open it up!” said Puckerup, mischief in their voice.

She looked up at them, saw their smirk. “You shouldn’t have!”

“I hope it’s your color,” they said through their green smile.

The foam box held a vial of hash oil. While the two waited for their drones to get to HP, Puck loaded the oil into the vape. Soosee closed her eyes and leaned back against the door.

Three minutes later, Soosee’s spex announced, “Your destination is ahead on the right.”

The flow of treetops, roofs, and yards full of broken toys slowed as the sprawled roof of an apartment complex slid into view.

Soosee took direct control of the drone, gesturing it over the roof and to the street, dropping to fifteen feet. There were still bits of detritus from the demonstration around the front of the building, but for the most part, it had been haphazardly kicked to the side of the street.

But not thoroughly, neither intentionally nor by flow of traffic. “Where are the cars? Where are the people?” she asked.

“I think I found them,” said Puckerup, their voice hollow. “Look northwest.”

Soosee climbed to a hundred feet again and looked. She saw a rising white cloud, transparent to IR. She narrowed her eyes and gestured the drone forward, but its video feed turned into hesitating, crumbling compression artifacts before disintegrating altogether.

She sighed. “Crap. There’s a jammer where I am.”

She flipped her spex into AR mode again and looked at Puck, their spex opaque, one hand out in front of them like half of Superman, obviously still flying. “Hey! Share!”

Without a word, Puck gestured, and her spex said, “Puckerup would like to share a video feed with you. Do you accept?” She gave a thumbs-up, flipped back into immersive mode, and could see again. Puck had flown up another few hundred feet, out of range of the jammers in the police tank below. She saw the fast-moving speck of her own drone darting through its algorithmic survey pattern at a lower altitude. The optics were cheap crap, so it was hard to zoom in enough to see clearly, but — “Puck, are they… in a cage?”

Puckerup stammered — they couldn’t make themselves say the words. The crowd had been corralled into a cage in the parking lot of a drugstore. Fully-armored police in gas masks sat around the cage in a semicircle CS gas filled the air of the parking lot. A fully-armored officer casually walked to the cage, carrying a gas canister, pulled its pin, inserted it through the plastic mesh of the Free Speech Area, then turned and walked away, sitting on the ground with and crossing his arms as though looking at a camp fire. Some had lawn chairs.

“I’m running out of juice,” said Puckerup. “I’m coming home.”

“Yeah,” said Soosee, her voice flat.

Her own drone made its way back home twenty minutes behind Puck’s, running out of power and auguring into the doorframe, bouncing off like a cheap, discarded toy.

The two sat in Soosee’s apartment. Puckerup was on the edge of the futon, their bulk crushing its edge flat. Tears were in their eyes.

Soosee faced the screens, editing the video. She ranted, as though berating the screens in front of her. “You see this shit? Why the fuck do they think they can out-fight armed police? Why the fuck would they cede the high ground? Like, what, did they think the cops would run out of cops? Out of CS? Out of tanks?”

“Soosee, I don’t know. I don’t know!” Puckerup’s face was twisted with fear and confusion.

She sat back in her ergonomic bullshit chair and scowled at the screen. Then, as though the people in the video could feel it, she punched the “Publish” button hard enough to discolor the screen.

While she watched to make sure the video was uploading, Puck spoke: “Soosee, this is bad shit. They’re literally putting people in a cage and gassing them and no one knows.”

Soosee looked into the distance, through her spex. “Now they do.”

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

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