Eye Candy (Thriller)

Scott T. Hutchison

Peter fidgeted in his rolly-chair, scrolling-bored, hormonally annoyed—though he would never admit to such a condition. None of the sixty-five screens he night-watched provided any sign of movement, no promise of action—no raccoons, no rabbits, no deer or possum or weasel. The Sounders would take care of them if they came, but nothing moved in the dark out beyond the electrified fences of Greenville or Grafton or any of the State’s other sixty-three electrical substations he rode shotgun over. And yeah, he felt the worm of it, a slow excavation inside his brainpan, as the monitoring job crawled through mica and sand, tin and aluminum.
But that was the job—while it was his new buddy JoJo from the Sport Shooter’s Club who had over-poured annoyance in Peter’s stay-awake coffee. That morning they’d been making holes in Dirty Bird silhouette targets, but hawkeyed JoJo made Peter look like a blind, clay-fingered pigeon at the Club’s indoor firing range. Both used Sig P226’s, and while JoJo’s accuracy carved out the red center on every new sheet, Peter typically planted his shots in the outer seven or eight rings, sometimes in the shoulders of the human silhouette targets they’d chosen. Peter winced at his showing: working in isolation, he rarely had the chance to impress anyone. His fighter pilot kid brother was coming home for Thanksgiving, and Peter imagined his brother in the bright center, with him relegated to the outer rings of conversation at the venerable family dinner table.
Afterwards JoJo tried to bump Peter’s mood up in the locker room, pressing him for details, offering him a chance to astound with work talk: is it just Sounders that respond to the motion detectors? Do the Shooters fly regular routes, too? How do you watch the other sixty-four screens of Belknap and Boone and every other town’s grid when you’ve got porcupine engagement waddling into Deep Run?

Storytelling went against security contract and protocol, but Peter had illuminated substation protection basics to various Club brothers more than a few times, garnering promises laced with post-shooting adrenaline to keep such info on the downlow. Some of the younger men in the locker room leaned in to hear, nodding in wide-and-squinty eyed admiration of his tech and arsenal; but there were always others, usually guys around the ages of his father and grandfather, who stayed quiet, holding back, eyeballing him as if he and his vocation came from some remote, unamerican-alien world. JoJo himself was fighting and pushing against sixty.

Peter worked within an electrical grid protection system that, since its drones went into place to deal with potential acts of domestic terrorism, had not been breached. Not once. Either there wasn’t anyone out there stupid enough to test the system, or they were gathering for some kind of testosterone-fueled hoo-rah attempt that might possibly reveal greater tactical insights. But the drone defense/attack iterations hummed with innumerable intricacies. Administration and employees within the company smiled and prospered in their rolly-chairs, the clean slate coming up on its first anniversary next month. Serious discussion had recently been bandied about in Congress–considerations of expanding the company’s scope of infrastructure/boundary protection if this marvelous efficacy continued. The current development of the company’s tunnel-buster model generated curiosity and fascination with potential solutions to border concerns.

Peter wanted to tell all, show off the muscle and machinations layered into the foundations and wire of the work that he oversaw—but the complexities were secreted, and about the only thing Peter got to legally say is that he makes good money looking at screens, pushing buttons.

He was not allowed to reveal how the near-military grade drones, their respective charging bays, fences, and walls had all quietly gouged egg money out of U. S. taxpayers–and so the program’s uneventful steadfast accomplishment provided the American people with reliable look-but-don’t-go-near-don’t-think-of-touching-it security. The substation’s basic design utilized medieval fortress thinking, slowing down any advance with multiple barriers: electrical fences with motion detector posts, one perimeter square, then another set back, inside the first; then, two boxes of cathedral glass walls made by Corning, one inside the other, covered in a quad-ply of 3-M security film, and a filmed glass box-top over both of them, with the interior box containing quick open-and-close launch hatches for the drone battalion at his keyboard disposal. These two boxes enclosed the electrical substation. 24/7 sky-aiming lasers on all four corners of the glass housing watched for air approach. A well had been sunk for the installation, for making munitions. Groundwise, all homes and trees in the proximity had been bought up and bulldozed, leaving at least a hundred yards of clear visual space in any direction. Pilots like Peter kept a mix of programmed six-rotor drones in the air at all times, zipping about with randomized hummingbird flight patterns of quick stops and jetting. They could range out to over two miles, and they switched with other drones when automatically coming back to recharge. The drones patrolled the substation area at all times, but Shooters might factor in at any time, heading up and down the power lines coming out of the station. If any of the drones ever registered an internal problem and blank-screened, hatches popped and four more rose in the air as soon as the hitch blipped back home. Automatic. A pilot only switched to manual control if something monumental were to take place—but since the company’s inception, it hadn’t happened to a single pilot so far.

Peter’s thoughts strayed to Thanksgiving once again. His younger brother would hold court, mesmerizing his listeners, regaling what it’s like to hit 1,800 miles per hour, Mach 2.5, in his beautiful F-15E Strike Eagle. He would hint at playing chicken with Russian pilots in their MIG 31’s. Outside of work, Peter was not allowed to refer to himself, to anyone, as a pilot.

Maybe that was appropriate. The computers, upon proximity detection, released drones by a calculated algorithm determination/need, depending upon the “threat.” Sounders used a sonic battery to startle, good for sending things sensibly running. Shooter drones equipped with ice bullets flew in barrel rolls and zigzag forays, staying close if needed, while in avoidance of providing a stationary or predictable target. As for the other two types of flyers, Peter had only worked with the Red Eye laser drones and the Napalm-carrying Kamikazes during training; no substation monitoring facility had ever seen anything that warranted human backup response to the Sounders and Shooters.

So, yeah, Peter knew that the screens could lull you into feelings of menial uselessness, watching nothing more than bad wildlife shows. No creature had even made it as far as the second electric fence. Once engaged to do their duty, the Sounders would blat and pulse and siren, sending screechy owls in other directions, and the little human-handed raccoons were smart enough to wave and say gotta go, see ya. But then there were the problem children of the night: skittering every-which-wrong-way grey squirrels and chipmunks out late, the occasional white-tailed deer who made moronically awful decisions, and silly possums who passed out from fright right on the spot. They got dealt with—thing is, nobody was going to brag on bagging Chip and Dale. And yeah, Peter heard JoJo’s voice echo against metal lockers as he was leaving, heading off talking to one of the quiet rumpled men.

“He said he wasn’t supposed to tell me this—danced around saying he kinda pilots drones, claims he’s more of a shooter. Asked me to tell no one. Shooter? Hell, he ain’t even much of a computer-gamer. I bet he sits in an office chair and diddles himself all night, changing channels and watching sixty-five screens of porn. He’s like all those beanbag jockeys playing for money—tries to look and act all fancy-pants dangerous, but nah, he’s a lollygagger beanbag, soft and silly. Just a kid with a headset and a gaming keyboard, that’s what he is. You can’t put a real shooting iron in his hand—did you guys see his pitiful target patterns? Scattered all over the place. And there it is, that’s where I suspicion them high Homeland tax dollars go to providing us so-called national security. Bottom line: he ain’t built like us. That pud-boy ain’t got no blue steel in him, and he sure as shit ain’t no shooter.”
Peter blushed his way out of the back door. JoJo had no idea of Peter’s glacial restraint, no concept of Peter’s mastery of his own hair-triggers.

***

Most of the bats had decoded a means for co-existing: flitting in the zone of ambient-fade, high above the insect-attracting light of a substation allowed them to feast without concentric backlashes of white noise seizing into them like a winter hunger. As he watched the little browns whirling in the sky over the town of Ashland’s sub, Peter thought back to the large colonies he once threw tennis balls skyward for, watching them carve circles around the intruder; now, there weren’t so many—just a few ingredients in a wide, simmering cauldron.

When the Ashland monitors rotated their owlish heads, alerted by a woods-edge movement to the south, Peter scooched forward, hit the launch keystrokes for extra Sounders plus ten Shooters at each of the other sixty-four screenings—independence and strength while he focused on the one. This was new: the first time Peter had seen a bear.

When the drones—they all carried 8000 x 6000 capture resolution cameras—zoomed in, Peter started laughing. Some extremist fool had dressed himself in ninja-black and black bear fur, wearing the head and toothy upper jaw like a pagan helmet, the hollow arms and legs of the bear zip-tied to the masquerader’s ankles and wrists—who travelled toward the station on all\fours, trying to mimic just-looking-for-a-log-to-turn-over movements of hungry meandering.

Peter released three Shooters and three Red Eyes into the air to enter the movement quadrant. Shooters were also known as Ice Men. The new substations had been constructed with refrigeration units connected to the Shooter bays. A single ice bullet, aimed at a limb, would wound. Frozen water cutting an inward path had a chance at being non-lethal. A plunked animal should be smarter than to wait around for a barrage of icicles painfully falling from the god-sky. The Shooters were programmed to take turns according to shots fired—flitting back, reloading, re-entering the fray while a brother filled his magazine. The substation designers believed that as long as a station had power and the refrigeration units remained operational, then the armory might very well have a perpetual store of such ammunition.

Peter imagined his ursine terrorist must be wearing body armor—he switched to manual on Ice Man 6. His deft hands flew over the keyboard; yes, he had always proved formidable at video games, he’d even won a couple of small tournaments. Peter put eight other drones behind Ice Man 6, moved his Shooter to the head of a Roman wedge formation. Yes, there was something about the deep breath-slow squeeze-kickback of a firearm that threw him off a shade.

The guy had to see the drones moving in on him, maybe giggling to himself at their hovering, thinking that a machine couldn’t distinguish between a bear and a primitive attempt at shaman wardrobe.

Peter changed tactics, instructed the drones behind Ice Man 6 to circle the invader. There would be camera footage from every angle. He hadn’t made his mind up about the Red Eye, but thought that firing a hole through the animal’s Achille’s tendon would be a good hobble. Ice Man 6 was his boy, his brother in arms, his most familiar flier. He could shoot with an exactitude unmatched by mere humans. There would be no allowances. His best options against Kevlar armor: pierce the uncovered neck, open holes in the palms, crack that skull. What Peter did now would set precedent for the entire drone defense program, now into history. It would be a story come to national light, something to talk about over turkey.

Time to come out of hibernation—the opportunity to employ, pilot, and prove fearsome new-age skill sets to everyone. Peter had been waiting for this action his whole life. All his triggers began firing: he would take out the enemy with his cold blue steel.