DRONES (SPECTRAL FUTURES) Read Free

her up. “You know you can’t have biscuits before breakfast, honey.”
    “I want two. I want all of them.”
    Kacey walks towards the kitchen. “Let me put you on the bench, and I’ll get you some cereal first, all right?”
    “All right,” says Emma, resigning herself to it as she turns to watch their entrance into the kitchen.
     
    Kacey walks down the front steps and heads towards the car. She hears the sound of approaching helicopters, so she stops and looks up towards the sky. Seven helicopters pass overhead and continue westward. She tracks them for a moment with curiosity before being struck in her chest by the force of a massive explosion that shudders around the neighbourhood like an earthquake and continues on towards the east. Her mouth opens as she notices a smoke plume steadily extending up into the morning sky in the distance. She stares at it for a moment, then turns and looks into the living room window, where Emma is leaning over the couch, staring into the sky with her right hand held up in the air no longer waving while she tries to understand what’s going on.
    Kacey forces a brief encouraging smile and waves, attempting to distract Emma from the mesmerising scene. Emma refocuses and waves back while watching Kacey get into the car. Donna approaches behind Emma and stands looking beyond the perimeter; Donna places a hand softly on Emma’s shoulder.
    The front gate begins to slide open as Kacey stretches across to touch the control screen on the console. She watches Emma in the window and waves gently with her fingers, then lightly presses a button on the screen; she watches the tinting on the living room window steadily darken as the car reverses down the driveway. Emma is soon replaced by the reflection of the disaster well underway several suburbs away, the exact location, predeterminants and statistics of which she begins to investigate once her attention turns to her tablet and its security update apps that are streaming data straight from the active files of the operation center downtown.
     
    A bipedal robot temporarily code-named ZeroSum scans the area while jogging towards one of many warehouses in an old industrial district of Philadelphia. It looks upwards and tracks one of several of the department’s UAVs gliding silently in a gradual downward spiral, currently at around twenty thousand feet overhead. Kacey glances at her screens to get data about the locations of her team members approaching all three entrances around the building.
     
    The robot stands up against the main entrance and waits while the rest of the team reach their designated entry points. “There’s no thermal data,” observes Kacey.
    “That can only mean a couple of things, Lieutenant,” suggests one operator.
    “Okay, you ready?” Kacey asks redundantly after observing the third and final robot in the team fall into position. “Let’s go.”
    Kacey’s robot grabs onto the handle of the large corrugated roller door and pulls on it, snapping the padlock after being placed under increasing pressure for a few seconds. The door rolls open, creating an echo that resonates throughout the empty warehouse. ZeroSum steps inside, locates its three companions, and proceeds towards the stairwell leading to the basement just on its right, preferring certainty over trying out the equipment elevator near the rear of the building.
    The robots step onto the floor of the basement and scan the scene deliberately. Kacey’s robot walks up to one of the two bipedal robots standing idle in front of two parallel work benches covered in a range of equipment, illegal devices and compounds. Kacey looks the robot up and down and says to herself, “Is this the way things are going to be from now on?”
    “They were obviously abandoned when—”
    “I know,” she says, refocusing on assessing the condition of the operation that was obviously abandoned just moments ago. “As you can see,” she says, presuming to be reporting to