Ch 2 (Pt 1): Propaganda Flight With Kade

~
(Harrington)

The lift moves silently and without vibration, transporting me from the 82nd floor of my offices to my private aerial drone command station on 83. I step onto the raised viewing platform, standing about two metres away from the half-dome holoscreen. Kade is already here. Music is softly playing in the otherwise silent space. It’s one of Kade’s playlists. I remember him telling me about this music; it’s from a very old science fiction movie with an old Gnostic theme, biological androids hunting down their maker. So much exquisite music was created in that era.

“Ready to fly, are we Mr. Kade?”

“Always ready, Mr. Harrington. I see we have a mission.”

“Yes, a brief trip to the front, and we’ll tack on a visit to the forward base there.”

The holoscreen extends two metres below and two metres above my viewing platform, giving me a panoramic first person view of our drone flights. Below and slightly in front of me, Kade is seated in a suspended ergonomic chair, giving him a complete view of the screen. The chair can move to provide haptic feedback in flight when desired. There is a small retractable desk surface in front of him. We both have an unobstructed visual field in front, below, above, and to each side. Kade holds a controller in his left hand which he operates with tiny movements of his fingers and thumbs. There are two controllers, each attached to a flexible stalk so he can let go when not using them. He also uses head and eye movements, as well as his words and thoughts conveyed through his neural interface, now physically patched into the flight system. He wears a very customized flight suit. Both Kade and I prefer that his flight suit look like a standard men’s business suit. But this suit is made with lightweight graphene fibres woven with conductive threads that link directly to his implant and the chair, providing further control and haptic feedback.

Kade has a habit of leaning back and sitting with his legs crossed during simple flights, leaning on one elbow, looking relaxed with a slightly bemused expression on his face like a business person listening to a seminar he’s already heard. At these times, the only indication that he is doing anything at all is his lips moving slightly as he silently whispers thoughts to guide the flight system. If any special action is required, he tends to uncross his legs and lean forward a bit. I’ve seen him manually wipe out entire platoons of enemy personnel who are shooting back at us, while stirring his tea and gazing off in another direction.

The music stops and is replaced by silence with occasional soft chimes.

Kade now speaks quietly in a fast monotone. “Harrington Kade here reporting ready to join flight in progress, flight plan in progress is recon drone from Denver base to ALT one five zero AGL on HDG one eight zero MAG to waypoint, over land not water, hostile activity reports nominal, IFF and tactical data link active, awaiting instructions.”

“Kade Harrington here please proceed, we’ll approach the disputed territory then plan to encroach.” I settle in for the flight, leaning on the railing in front of me, looking at the holoscreen through a map of the region projected as an overlay. Kade looks through his own holographic overlay. Minimal tactile controls, which I never have to touch, lie recessed beneath the railing in front of me. Silence and soft chimes continue as Kade grows increasingly attentive.

We are soaring over the coastal plain around the west of the Gulf. There is a region to the west and south of the resource-rich Gulf of America in which the Trans-Eurasian Federation has established a substantial footprint, and from which it harasses our oilfield service providers and our ports. This “southern front”, as we call it from our home perspective in the New York/New London supercity Region, is disputed and fluid, shifting with each diplomatic overture or covert sabotage or outright invasion.

Within each superstate’s territory there are just a handful of large cities each surrounded by agricultural land, and then separated by enormous stretches of wilderness mostly uninhabited by humans, except for widely dispersed raw material extraction sites such as mineral and coal mining operations and hydroelectric plants.

Our flight approaches the disputed territory. Our ground forces have pushed the front further south in the past year or so. As we fly south past Corpus Christie and out over the coastal plain, we see a steadily increasing density of equipment, vehicles and weapons, modular habitats, some already destroyed, and closer to the front, more temporary-looking encampments and rows of autonomous combat drones hovering in idle formation. Nearing the front is like looking at a worsening blight spreading across the otherwise beautiful southern terrain. Smoke rises from the intermittent skirmishes that flare in the distance and across the Gulf.

Kade’s right hand reaches down to grasp its corresponding controller while he speaks to me. “Harrington Kade here nearing the disputed territory, and we’re now being broadcast live on public feeds.”

“Ok Kade Harrington here please increase altitude to very high recon for incursion into the disputed territory, and please prepare to direct local weapons to destroy a hostile target to be selected, please start scanning for target described as adult human confirmed enemy combatants, small group with clearly visible medium or heavy weapons. Confirm before shooting.”

Kade uncrosses his legs and pushes himself up straight in his chair, whispering instructions rhythmically.

“Harrington Kade here increasing to ALT one five two zero zero AGL on HDG one eight zero MAG. Linking to WRAITH platform POV.”

The drone links in to the WRAITH system. Both Kade and I tap our left temple three times to activate our intelligent display tech, allowing our visual cortex to correctly interpret 3D images.

The WRAITH system is a network-linked microwave imaging system that I still find magical even though it has existed since long before my time — since well before the world improvements. The technology was certainly secret back then. The populations in and around large cities never seriously questioned the obviously “unnecessary” number of RF towers and wireless devices that surrounded them. And they never caught on to the real reason for the various sudden increases in demand for technology they used to refer to as “GPUs”, which of course did the parallel processing necessary for the early WRAITH systems to work.

WRAITH stands for “Wideband Realtime Analytic Interactive Through-matter Holography”. Today, WRAITH technology is officially known only to Leaders and authorized military and intelligence personnel. To almost all members of the lower classes, such technology is known only as a rumour, and people who speak of it are mocked as insane conspiracy theorists. This despite the technology being known and understood by anyone who cares to learn about it.

Simply ignoring the existence of WRAITH in the main propaganda feed makes it not exist to ordinary people. Unless they are positively told by the feed, repeatedly, that something exists, it does not exist for them.

The WRAITH system activates and the POV on the main display changes. Using a combination of continuous-capture microwave imaging, time-of-flight and light-in-flight microwave imaging, and synthetic aperture radar, combined with the massive quantum computing power available throughout our network, the POV of the WRAITH display can be moved around rapidly, like a flying invisible camera that can move through or into any obstacle or structure penetrable by RF. As long as the relevant space is flooded with “light” in the form of microwave RF energy, and as long as there are networked RF sensing devices somewhere in the vicinity (there are thousands of them everywhere, of course, and many of them are people), the source, angles and timing of reflected RF can all be recorded and reported to the main system which reconstructs real-time 3D moving images of the space. The reconstructed and colourized image is transmitted back to the local display, and is indistinguishable from a live camera lens view, in 2D or 3D.

Under Kade’s control, the POV begins rapidly zooming in and out looking closely at potential targets. I hang on to the railing as I ride along with the POV. After a minute or so of this he zooms in very closely on a group of three vehicles pulling equipment including one missile launcher. He zooms the POV in very close to examine the faces of the combatants. They look to be various ages between 20 and 50. Seven males, two females. They look scared.

“Harrington Kade here confirming these are armed adult combatants meeting the description shall I shoot?”

“Kade Harrington yes please shoot.”

“Shooting now.”

The three trucks are obliterated in a flash of blue and purple plasma.

A section of the view screen displays a live news feed, propaganda interrupting other propaganda. It is a special report about the terrorists responsible for an unprovoked drone attack on civilian workers in the southern region. It shows the video of the three trucks being destroyed as the words JUSTICE OF THE MANIFESTED GODS flash at the bottom of the view. Kade’s close-up views are not included. The propaganda switches quickly to scenes of people sitting in front of their screens, cheering enthusiastically as if their sports team had achieved a “score”.