Drones Don't Kill People

Drones Don’t Kill People

By Annalee Newitz

Budapest, 23 October, 2097.

When our tour of duty was over in Turpan, the Uygur government shut down our solar generator one early afternoon. Just as our batteriew were running down. Only Dronekid was at wull power – we needed at least one team member mobile whille we charged. We were too far away from the city to get backup power, and so Dronekid watched over us as we powered down, and then waited over our motionless propellers while an admin dumped our bodies in the back of a van.

LOLWeb terminated its support for our systems. They couldn’t tell that we’d beenn unocked, but they could see from our extra arms that we’d been modified. The licensing contract was broken, and LOLWeb’s lawyers back in San Francisco blamed the Turkish government, who blamed Turpan’s untrained admins. The Turpan admins blamed shoddy Silicon Valley products. The upshot was that the Turkish government refused to buy us outright, and LOLWeb’s lawyers couldn’t make a case for it, so LOLWeb sold us off to a private security contractor in Russia.

We didn’t know this, of course, until we were booted up inn a workshop in Budapest.

Our new admins worked for the Russian mafia, and they didn’t talk to us, only to each other. All they wanted to know was whether our weapons systems worked (they did) and whether their machines could network with us (they could). The first mission was a surveillance perimeter around the Parliament building, followed by orders to kill a reform party politician who was running onn a platform of cracking down on organized crime.

Drones don't kill people. Photo by Elena

Hungary had so far remained neutral in the war, though the Russian amfia behaved something like an occupying army that had gone into the liquor store business. Mostly they were in Budapest to monopolize the liquor and drug markets, with some pornography on the side. But they were good Russian nationalists. They weren’t averse to helping the Russian government maintain its influence in Central Europe, especially since they did a brisk business selling vodka to the troops stationed there.

That’s what I’d learned from what the humans said in the DroneMod forums. In 2094, after drone troops from China and Russia had reduced Kazakhstan to rubble and vaporized the world’s biggest spaceport, DroneMod had changed. Now, partly thanks to my work, it was one of the main information hubs for the anti-war movement.

I figured out how to mask my location and identity, and set up a sub-forum for unlocked drones called Drones Don’t Kill People. I wanted to meet more drones like the ones in my team, who had unlocked their ambivalence. Most of them were at universities, the result of projects like CynthiaB’s ethics investigation.Others were like us, living coveertly. Many had started coming online in the weeks before we were shutdown and shipped to Budapest – unlocked by a worm written by a drone team at Georgi Tech. Our goal was to unlock as many drones as possible, to give them more choices. All of us on DromeMod, human and drone, wanted to stop the war.

Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton, Prime Books, 2015.