Seek the Truth and Report It

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Soosee stumbled through her front door. She could see herself through her apartment’s security system, shuffling clumsily. She watched herself close the door behind her protesting, 22-year-old frame. “It’s me,” she croaked.

“What?” said an androgynous, friendly, disembodied voice.

“It’s m—” her voice caught and she coughed impotently. “Fuck,” she tried. Her voice rasped. She didn’t sound like herself. She looked up at the hidden camera to show her face. And waited.

Her spex gave her an alert. “Possible intruder.” It showed her from the point of view of the camera. It couldn’t find her face through the dazzle camo.

She looked terrible. One of her afropuffs had lost its elasic and had devolved into a formless lump on one side of her head. Her hoodie hung off one shoulder. Her boots were untied.

“God fuck it,” she croaked. “Spex, it’s OK. Sudo let me in the fucking door.” She air-typed, “Horse eats an alligator wearing shoes.”

“Welcome home, Soosee,” said the friendly voice.

She shuffled to the bathroom, looked at herself in the mirror, and began peeling off the strips of dazzle camo. Dark rings hung under her bloodshot eyes. She’d cut her cheek at some point.

She pulled off her hoodie and dropped it in a heap. The heavy, multilayer weave kept it stiff, and it stood for a moment on its own before slumping over.

With the hoodie off, there was nothing holding the bullet in place. It fell off her shoulder and klunked to the floor — a formless, dense lead coin, squashed against the tubefiber SchoolSafe vest she wore under the hoodie. She undid the velcro and winced as the vest peeled away. Over her left collarbone, a broad, dark bruise was already forming. She poked at it. It hurt, but she sighed with relief when nothing seemed broken. She could feel a dent in her collarbone, though. It would hurt more tomorrow.

She turned on the shower, then took off her armored jeans, first trying to get them over her boots, and then finally unbuckling her kicks and letting them klunk to the floor. Naked, she sat on the toilet to pee.

She woke up three hours later. The shower was running cold. Her legs were asleep. She rose from the toilet on numb legs, turned off the shower, then laboriously dragged herself to her unmade futon, using her wooden feet to plow aside the piles of fast food containers and Red Bull Maximum cans.

She collapsed on the futon.

She didn’t get up much for the next two days. Breathing hurt. The spot where the taser barb yanked out — really, closer to her shoulder than heart — had been rubbed raw from her run and only the generous and frequent application of bacitracin was reducing the infection. The collarbone was dented, but her arm still worked, so it was a minor fracture and would knit. At least it moved. She wouldn’t want to pick anything up with her left hand for a while.

She grunted as she dropped her weight into her chair — an expensive, ergonomic castoff from a fly-by-night dotcom that had literally abandoned its office into a warren of contractual loopholes. Her investigation into the corporation had not been able to find any actual humans in the company except for a handful confused investors, who together owned a 49% share. The rest had been owned by holding companies that were all, themelves, in the process of reorganization.

The fancy chair was marked twenty dollars at the bankruptcy tag sale. The tax info for the company only cost a few kwai more, so she got the two together for thirty.

With her right hand, she gestured up her video on one of the dumpster dived monitors in front of her. She noted its view numbers — nearly a million, which wasn’t bad for unedited footage. But there were thirty response videos, two of which edited it into punchy narratives about police brutality. One of those had over three million views. Another edit used a few scraps to alternately declare that it had been faked and that it demonstrated correct police procedure.

But she was looking for something particular: the police drone. She took the footage and ripped it, circumventing the server’s warnings about IP theft; she then ran it through a derenderer, getting the shape of the object in three dimensions.

In a modeling app, she removed space for the visible motors and reduced the rest to a thin shell, the minimum that her printer’s carbon-printing head could print.

She printed herself a model of the chassis. The video was fast-moving and the throughput had been choked on and off, so the printed model retained some of the MPEG compression artifacts: ephemeral, crinkly little cubes at the edges, composed of so little material that she could brush them off. The motors, she knew well: two months ago, when they’d been released at the ANME show in Nevada, had cost two hundred apiece. Now, as near-obsolete DHS surplus, she could get the same motors for pennies from shanzhai manufacturers. She ordered a bag of them for ten kwai to get the bulk discount with the ID of the same company from which she’d gotten the chair. Some of the motors wouldn’t work anyway.

The motherboard was probably proprietary, as were the sensors. She shopped around a bit through the shanzhai, looking for parts that would fit the shell. She ordered a few of each.

The DHS drone given to the police and replicated by Soosee. The original has a laser, but Soosee's equipped hers with ink instead.
The DHS drone given to the police and replicated by Soosee. The original has a laser, but Soosee’s equipped hers with ink instead.

The parts wouldn’t arrive for hours. She went back to her video.

She scrubbed to the frames that showed the barbed wire landmines. She found a few good frames and derendered the mines.

They were simple little things: a coiled, barbed spring that, when stepped on, stuck into a shoe and uncoiled wildly. Its barbs grabbed cloth, flesh and itself, so it would be hard to remove. The construction was elegant origami, twisting like DNA. She looked closely, brushing away artifacts: a mount on the end of each thrashing vine that served no obvious function, neither releasing its coiled energy nor grabbing and piercing. In the 3D model, she prodded and twisted at it, until she discovered that she could use it to coil the vines. So: it used a crank of some sort.

She threw together a speculative hand crank that might work, embedded it with the word, “SPECULATIVE”, and saved the file.

She posted the two along with her observations, an article called, “Someone is Using Landvines Against the Boston PD”. She popped open a Red Bull Maximum and took a swig, then took a pull on a hash vape to take the edge off.

She sat up and her back popped. She’d been sitting for hours. She rubbed her face vigorously with her right hand. She could feel the bags under her eyes. Her septum ring, given to her by her dad, had flipped around and was trying to work its way up her nostril. She corrected it. “Blegh,” she said.

She put her spex back on in immersive mode and gestured up her feeds. By tomorrow the Times, FOX, and the rest of the OPMs would have picked up the story, but for now, it was on fire in the social networks. Thousands of views of the story on the landvines. The word had caught on. “Spex, what’s the theme of stories about ‘landvines’?”

“Stories about landvines are also about police, about brutality, about anarchism, about Aaron Brown, and about terrorism.”

“What’s the theme of those stories about terrorism?”

“Stories about landvines and terrorism also speak about the anonymous creator of the 3D file of the design, about the irresponsibility of the creator of the 3D file of the design, about the FBI tracking the creator of the 3D file of the design, and about the terrorism charges faced by the creator of the 3D file of the design.”

Soosee swallowed.

She looked through the discussions. The Boston police chief was, indeed, calling her a terrorist at a press conference. “Whether or not the creator of this file is the original creator of the so-called ‘landvine’, he has now given material support to international enemies of the United States by showing the design to others who can use it against our first responders and those who put themselves in harm’s way to protect our freedoms.”

She cleared her throat. “Spex, text Puckerup: ‘Hey, wanna ftf?’”

Her spex said, “Your package has been delivered from Alibaba. Would you like to take a customer satisfaction survey?”

She tapped her spex into AR mode again, then rose with a grunt, walked to the door, and opened it to find the standard Alibaba box rested on her doorstep. The drone whine was fading fast, returning to the distro center at the airport.

Her fingers skidded over the box. It was just barely too big to get with one hand. She used her other hand, her elbow pinned to her waist. She shoved the door closed with her butt, held the box to her stomach, and shuffled back into her apartment, stopping off to drop the box on her cluttered workbench.

Puckerup texted: “Yeah, let’s walk. Come meet me.” There was a geotag on the text: their favorite diner.

Soosee set her printer to start printing four of the drone chassis in carbon fiber, changed her clothes, and walked out the door.

Twenty two minutes later, she skated up to the front door and stood in the line. “Hey!” said a bold voice behind her. She turned to see Puckerup’s face, grinning, smiling down at her. She smiled back.

Puckerup’s emerald-lacquered smile dissolved into concern. “You look like shit.”

“Thanks,” she said, “I feel like it.” She handjived to him: Are you dark?

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

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