Privateer

This is the first piece of fiction that we are publishing, submitted in response to our call for short science fiction reflecting “on the social, moral, political, economic or philosophical consequences of future technologies, in particular pieces that touch on the IEET’s core issues - the ethics and policy dimensions of life extension, human enhancement, moral enhancement, non-human personhood, structural unemployment and catastrophic risks.”  We will be publishing at least four of the twenty submissions we have received so far, one a week, and will continue reviewing submissions for consideration. - J. Hughes

Perfect immersion. Real pro gamers and ARdrone hotrods call it the “zone”, that moment when the mind leaves the body, and fully enters the virtual continuum. Afex was almost there, drifting on the edge, his attention perfectly suspended over his LCD eyeset dashboard. The mournful gurgle of the BURGERFIEND’s deep fryer brought him back again, or at least activated his senses. Then there was the smell. That creeping odor of antiseptic and deep spiritual rot that seemed to make time stand still, grinding against itself with a granular melancholy. Posted up at a crumb-strewn corner table, he zoned back into his eyeset as the drone he was piloting careened over the mountainous landscape, dipping over sand-blown crags into valleys dotted with the stubble of sagebrush.

He’d been hunting Raz, head of the eponymous cartel, and his lieutenants, the infamous Right Hands, for a number of hours that seemed impossible. A weaker egg would have cracked by now, Afex thought proudly. Indeed, many of the other flyerpunks had given up the hunt, preferring the easy targets closer to Juarez. Suckers. Afex attempted a snuffle through is blocked nostrils. His smirk was a rictus under the body soil coating his snout. Loaded up with a few pipes of meth and with an easy-access foil roll of Necco-esque neuroenhancers, he’d been able to really work into an inhuman focus of pilots’ concentration. That’s what made him one of the best. That’s what made him a privateer.

A body had come in and sat down a few tables away. Afex could hear the body chewing noisily, a porcine sort of mastication that intervened unpleasantly on his panoramic view of the El Norte landscape. The desolate zone of cartel turf wars distended sickeningly under him as his drone picked up a few more machs. Focus, he breathed. A shadow entered the barest periphery of his left eye-screen and he barrel-rolled instinctively. Good reflexes. The shadow evolved into a lone bird, punching the black bird-shaped hole of its airborne body into the milky blue sky. Misfire, Afex corrected; overreaction. His body was all knots.

Afex had been in grade school during the First Drone War. Even then, he’d never wanted anything except to feel like he was flying. DW1 had taken place in the thin air over Xinjiang in what was still called an “autonomous zone”, fought between the government drones of China and Iran. Imagine the scrambling thoughts of an awestruck goatherd, looking up to see those metal demons ripping up the clouds! Whatever changes in society there are, Afex mused, there are always those peripheral places that stay the same. The war had ended after two days, littering the ground with sparkling shards of camo-chrome. The only casualties had been overcurious yaks, who had never tasted so much palladium before. The casualties of a privateer, Afex grimly noted, were a different matter.

He shifted his butt around in the BURGERFIEND molded-plastic seat. The body’s chewing had clattered to a halt with an abyssal belch. If his mom’s boyfriend wasn’t over right now he’d probably be on his bed in their ancient Airstream, conducting his remote operations from a more relaxed position. He twitched his left hand and smiled with pleasure as his drone responded, popping a few hundred vertical feet in barely a second and pivoting as its sensor array scanned the terrain.
Suddenly, the high-rez display locked red brackets around a detail and he spread his thumb and forefinger apart to zoom in. Wait for it, as the detail re-loads.

Definitely human footprints. His pulse quickened. This was it. The exposed rock around the prints was scorched, probably from a fresh blastfight. Afex tilted his left hand’s finger tips forward and the drone began a long dive, picking up speed before he bottomed it out in a low circle. Nothing better than flying. Like ice-skating on butter. Suddenly he saw it, the domed body of another drone with a jagged hole blasted in in it, still smoking. Raz – cartel Jeffe extraordinaire – was nearby.

The bounty on any one of the Right Hands alone would be enough for Afex to live comfortably on for the next decade, or at least would fund his exodus from the cramped quarters he still awkwardly co-habited with his mom’s ill-fated love life. He set his teeth on edge. Time to concentrate. None of his scans were giving him actionable data; if Raz or his men were down there they was smart enough to block his signals. The footprints looked fresh. He dropped down behind a nearby hill, his drone hovering a few feet above the ground. What he really needed was another pair of eyes. Skeeter time, Afex nodded to himself. The Mosquito was a micro-drone with limited range that’d cost him six month’s pay, plus some strategic eBay auctions of the jewelry he’d ripped off a JC Penny. Boy did he need it now!
His eyeset screen split as the left segment became the Mosquito’s dashboard and truncated field of vision. It whizzed lithely around the sandy hill, locking onto the now-gigantic footprints. It was definitely a trap, Afex decided. There was no way Raz would just leave footprints like that exposed, except as a lure for drones looking to score. Unless he was already dead. The Mosquito slowly climbed the sandy slope, following the canyonesque footprints around a pair of wizened cacti, bending towards one another in a lovers’ embrace. Afex noted the domed body of the crippled drone looming up to his left, still smoking slightly. If they were here, he’d see them soon. Now or never. Afex swallowed a gizzard of battery acid. Here goes nothing.

Suddenly, boots! Boots not ten meters way! His heart did a somersault, as he panned the viewfinder up. Less than a second later it flashed a GAME OVER maraschino red and then went black. Hit! Suddenly he felt ill; his guts a tube sock grinding with rusted pennies. He coughed again, his breath a vinegar sting on his paper-dry lips. The sensation echoed. Afex felt his face blanch, globules of bitter phlegm hot and hard in his throat, a scatter-plot of ruby-red microdots standing out in his blurring vision. Losing it. Get a grip.

Afex spun his drone out from its idling hover behind the hill into a corkscrew, increasing its torque to an extreme that would have made a lesser pilot beg for mercy. His red eyes were ice-cold, perfectly zeroed. He was in the zone. The drone shot into an arc, slingshotting around the second hill to come from the opposite side as the Mosquito had. Spinning like a ninja star, it narrowly missed two flashes from a pulse gun giving Afex the microsecond he needed light a Flower. With the twitch of his pinky finger, the 20 meters of surrounding radial space were engulfed by flames in every direction; an expanding bloom of compressed methane launched from porous microshafts in the drone’s hardened exterior shell. Ten seconds later it was all over.

When the smoke cleared, three bodies lay charred and horrible on the blackened sand, one of them still whimpering pitifully. Two of them bore the silver amulet of the Raz cartel, clearly two of the Right Hands. And the other body? Smaller than the rest, fried to a crisp, hands bound with a metallic cufflock. A hostage, Afex surmised. A little girl or boy by the look of it. Afex switched off one VR glove, and slowly moved his numbed fingers to lift the Styrofoam cup of stone-cold coffee to his lips, savoring its bitter taste. He’d done it. Two of Raz’s lieutenants would bring a princely sum in bounty, he thought, his face locking in a grimaced smile. An apartment with a window, a fully stocked liquor cabinet. A designer hover-car – he’d been thinking Lamborghini. Who knows, maybe even a supermodel girlfriend belonged beside him and his newfound wealth. He managed a hollow chuckle. The drone began uploading ‘proof of death’ photos to his Kumulus datacloud, avoiding the cadaver of the no-value kill.

Afex set the drone on an autopilot course homeward bound. He took off his eyeset, slowly wiping his spongily moist brow. Feeling was beginning to return to his skin, in a manner that was not altogether pleasant. Pins and needles. Nausea. The BURGERFIEND seemed dingy as his eyes painfully adjusted to unenhanced resolution and the flickering fluorescent lights. He began extracting his cramped frame from the table. It was nearly dawn. The stranger at the table across from him was revealed as a fat woman in a stained Disneyland sweatshirt, her head tilted back, eyes closed. Crumbs of fried potato and salt still clung to the edges of the woman’s slightly parted lips. She snored, loudly, a sound that he hadn’t noticed until he saw the rise and fall of her puffy skin, revealed in the slight depression above her collarbone. To Afex at that moment, she appeared both repulsive and supremely satisfied.

END.