April 01, 2010
Drone Wars: Suicide Party
Two androids were locked in combat on the street below. "Look at 'em go," the host, a junior narcotics salesman by day, called out to his friend. "They've gone at each other like that for over an hour now."
After the warring sides pulled their respective troops outside of city limits in Version XXIX, lots of hardware was left behind, including government landmines, weapons of mass destruction, rebel trip-wired and command-detonated bombs, assorted booby traps, as well as a wide variety of drones and robots deployed by both forces -- some of which like these two, much to his delight, had no idea the fight had moved on down the road months ago.
Overhead, the moon hung low in the black sky. Sparks flew with the hollow clank of every new blow the two machines landed on one another. Both of the young men cheered on the metal warriors.
"My money's on the skeletal chrome android with the red satanic eyes," his friend baited him through the blare of music from the stereo. Behind them, the party secretary passed out noisemakers and other celebratory treats. "I'll take that bet," he yelled back, clearly dead-set on enjoying himself no matter what, like it was the last chance he would ever have.
Buddy Guy was the first member to suicide. He put a gun to his head, yelled at the top of his lungs, and pulled the trigger. The party was officially underway! The junior narcotics salesmen and his friend carried the limp body of the young man to the bathroom, dumped it into the tub, and pulled down the space-age plastic shower curtain to cover the deceased's upper body and face.
Some of the other kids took pills to overdose, or injected drugs into their veins. Summer Cooper notably stuck her head in the oven. She asphyxiated on natural gas the old-fashioned way. Geronimo Pratt was next. It wasn't pretty. The boy slashed his wrists. By the end of the night there wasn't a square foot of the apartment without at least one dead body hunched against a wall, or prone on the shag rug. Gore covered the place. They had long since run out of enough sheets, towels, and tablecloths necessary to cover everyone. The host sidestepped a young girl's half-naked body and turned up the music even louder, not that anyone was dancing.
Several members including himself and his friend did not kill themselves. They had set themselves different tasks. By the time the schizophrenic government intelligence men showed up at the front door of their secret hideout (in the wee hours of the morning, no doubt, like they usually did) the remaining associates would be long gone. It would take the psychotic lawmen a while to realize some Suicide Party members were unaccounted for and missing. They would have plenty enough trouble simply sorting through and identifying all the dead bodies they found at party headquarters.
At their last conference a massive show of force was deemed necessary. "None of you will die in vain," they promised the rank-and-file. A number of the party faithful would suicide-bomb key subway stations in the nation's capitol, while the junior narcotics salesman and his friend were dispatched to find and kidnap a government intelligence person who could get them past the front desk of the "doughnut building", so called due in large part to it's glazed pink roundness and what looked like sprinkles on the roof. It was the location where the game show Drone War Idol was filmed. The ultimate goal of the mission was to gain access to the "doughnut hole" at the heart of the building and destroy the electronic brain housed there. Suicide Party faithful believed it was the location of the supercomputer that contained the master-code to Drone Wars, the theory being that once disabled the videogame's tyranny of cruelty and insanity would finally and for all time come to an end.
Both the junior narcotics salesman and his friend were caught a bit off guard by how quickly they spotted the police van parked around the corner in the Exxon gas station. They couldn't have circled the block more than three times before they were sure there was only one officer in the paddy wagon parked inconspicuously in a dark corner of the lot. "Of all the dumb luck," his friend applauded their good fortune. As the two of them crept up alongside the vehicle they were pretty sure there was no one else inside but the driver, and by the look of his partly eaten junk food meal, the officer was obviously on his dinner break.
Mindful of the electric eye of the law, the junior narcotics salesman scanned the street lamps and nearby buildings for cameras. Several were visible, but he was a little surprised at how randomly they were deployed, and wondered what the odds were they would ever record a crime. Chances were pretty low by the look of it. You had to be hard on your luck to get spotted. If the van were located six yards to either side, say, there was a camera trained on that particular plot of dirt or half-acre of blacktop, but as things stood, the vehicle was actually parked in the gaping maw of a blind spot. There was, it struck him, something strangely arbitrary about the modern-day, high-tech Police State.
"If you're going to try and get people to stop eating so much junk food," a pop-up advertisement on the police officer's dashboard blotter announced during the brief scuffle in which the two of them overpowered the driver, bound him, and locked him in the trunk of their car, "there are many ways to choose from. The way our company executives have chosen to promote good eating habits is through 'reverse psychology'. We say eat as much fast food as you want. The way to get people to cut down on all those empty calories, our company policy says, is to exhort them to gorge themselves on as much of our junk food as humanly possible. Eat up, America!"
By first light, the crime scenes were swarming with schizophrenic intelligence men and women. Two of the lunatics stood in the parking lot of the Exxon gas station where the police officer had been taken a few hours earlier. They carefully read through his electronic blotter to no avail. After a thorough search of the vehicle, they interviewed the local law enforcement officer who was the initial responder at the scene.
"There is no bounty, is there?" the man grumbled resignedly after a while and spit on the ground. "This is all some kind of weird science-fiction trip, isn't it?" He looked around at the empty police van with disgust. "So how can I help?"
"We can only infer the proximity of these insurgent dissidents," one of the psychotic government intelligence madmen came back with an answer. "To us the enemy is like super-symmetric dark matter. You know what I mean? You have to understand it from our point of view. To us they are invisible," he continued offhandedly as he scribbled some numeric figures on a pad and made some quick cursory calculations. "We know they are everywhere, but we can't actually see them like you can, so we require the use of supercomputers and sometimes even the help of average citizens, such as yourself, so we can start to recognize their patterns, break their encrypted codes, and better track their nefarious activities."
Across the street at the entrance to the metro station a third psychotic intelligence man interviewed two young girls who were in the subway when the suicide bomber detonated her explosives, killing thirty nine people and injuring countless dozen others.
"We live in DC," one of the eyewitnesses told the schizophrenic agent as she shouldered her rifle. "It's like living on a powder-keg. Even in the best of times this is a violent city. Some of the bloodshed has to do with greed and corruption. Some of it is about religion. Some of it is about socioeconomic conditions. The Federal Government has a long list of enemies. These two bombings were no fluke. They were carefully planned and strategic. The Pentagon Station explosion was obviously targeting military employees, and its pretty darn clear the McPherson Square bombing over here was aimed at government officials."
-- Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
