Seek and Destroy

Robots is hunting for a woman, because of what she has done. But do they understand?

Drone ER42-789TY was cruising down street-127. ER42 was part of a team of three. They had been on this routine street security tour for one thousand nine hundred and forty-five hours. This patrol did not raise any alert. No devices or human in the neighborhood had demonstrated abnormal activities.

The electricity power system sent a low-level alert. It lasted only a pico-second. The power surveillance system was updated seventy-two hours ago so it could detect low power anomalies.

This was the only alert in the perimeter. ER42 and its two companions traced it back to the source: house-47 on street-127. They each launched a specific high-resolution scan of the house. ER42 was in charge of electromagnetic activities. The readings came back corrupted, so it reran the scan. It came back corrupted again. It went into the detailed analysis of the sweep. It had missed part of the house: a cylinder shape below street level. This regularity in the anomaly raised the patrol’s level of alert.

The drones shared their readings for correlation. The sonar reading showed a stairway leading below street level. ER42 hacked the door system to force it open. It opened as they were 2 meters away from the door. They did not slow down, crossed the doorway and headed for the stairway leading down. Each drone ran several comparative analysis to detect traps. ER42 ordered every devices and appliance in the house to switch to standby mode. No humans would be able to use any equipment in the house. The level of alert raised to medium.

The three drones stopped at the bottom of the stairs. There was a discrepancy between the optical reading and the electromagnetic one. There was a human, female, twenty-five-year-old, sitting on a chair, in front of a wooden desk with a monitor. But the electromagnetic reading was still showing a cylinder without any activity, right where the woman was. This type of discrepancy was not associated with any response. A situation without a matching protocol raised the alert level to major. This activated the IIR protocol for suspicious human activity: Immediate Immobilization Request. The three drones enabled their targeting protocol on the female human. They took into consideration the copper chains moving slowly. They recalibrated. ER42 added air displacement modeling routine to anticipate the movement of the chains. The drones fired thirty tranquilizers darts at the same time, but only five met their targets. ER42 was the mission reporter. It took note of the hit rate, for debrief and further analysis.

The target slid down from the chair and hit the floor. An unusual image appeared on the screen. It was both very detailed and blurry. At the bottom of the picture were humans lying down on rubbles, sleeping or dead. On the left side, two male humans wore undocumented clothes. One brandished a saber, the other had a rifle in hand and wore a black cylinder hat. There were other armed men behind them. On the right, a young male adult man had two pistols, one in the air and the other at his hip. In the middle, stood a female human, with a rifle in one hand and a flag in the other. The flag had three equally spaced vertical stripes of blue, white and red color. The woman did not wear any clothes on the upper part of the torso.

The picture was not registered as authorized productive content, but the screen and the female human were inside the black cylinder discrepancy. The three drones were running routines after routines to find a course of action after the IIR. The picture had raised the level of suspicious to critical. But they had no course of action beyond that. ER42 advanced to the edge of the black cylinder. The side met with the light copper chains hanging from the ceiling.

ER42 advanced slowly. It made an unusual request to the other two drones. It asked for their video feed. It identified itself in the video feed. As it moved forward, the chains part on each side of its hull. When the chains parted, there was a fissure in the dark cylinder. As it continued to move, the opening closed, and the world had disappeared. The electromagnetic activities of the equipment, wireless communication, short-length waves, long-length waves, the other drones, central quarter, they were all gone. It only could detect faint activity from within the desk and the screen. ER42 had to go into ultra-thin scanning to find the electronic components in the furniture and the wires connecting them. Putting back all the parts and the connections into a model confirmed the primary functions of the desk: low technology storage and processing machine. The machine had no wireless entry point, so there was only one course of action. ER42 prepared its final incident report, as it started to fly out of the dark, silent cylinder.

Topic: unlicensed electronic content, hosted illegally, by a rebel human Category: unproductive content

Sub-category: graphic images

Quantity: two thousand five hundred and sixty-seven high-resolution images Storage facility: unknown technology, without a known interface

Course of action: protocol N-31:23

ER42 dropped a small hemispheric object on the floor, just as it came out of the copper chains cylinder. The three drones flew back up the stairs and out of the house. Two seconds after they crossed the doorway, ER42 send the activation signal to detonate the class-7 incendiary bomb in the basement.

As they flew away, ER42 finished the encryption of a file, But it would not transmit as part of its report. It hid it in a secondary storage unit. It was a screenshot of the picture on the screen.

See also: Hide and Seek