Confessions of a Drone Pilot

By Max E. Harris

Stories of the present and near future.
Confessions of a Drone Pilot recounts a young man's ventures in the drone business.
Distress Signal tells about a large scale terrorist attack.
Where are my Rare Earths? foresees a future with struggles for raw materials.
Twenty-four Hour News looks at manipulation of news reporting.
Evil Power shows effects of solar flares.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Max E. Harris
• Release date: Oct 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301618927

Max E. Harris

Max Harris started adult life as a programmer and lived where the work was. That was mainly Houston, Texas, but also Europe, the Far East, and even Sacramento to be close to mountains..In his second life he moved to northern Italy where he writes short stories and screenplays. Sometimes he is even an actor.Most of his time he walks dogs

Book preview

Confessions of a Drone Pilot

By

Max E. Harris

Published by Max E. Harris at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Max E. Harris

rev. 1.01

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This edition of Confessions of a Drone Pilot has been updated and revised.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The characters and events in this story are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Cover art by Ray Harris, http://www.rayharrisstudio.com/

Table of Contents

Preface

Confessions of a Drone Pilot

Distress Signal

Where are my Rate Earths?

Twenty-four Hour News

Evil Power

About the Author

Preface

This book is a collection of short stories of the present and near future. All are based upon events in the news which stimulated me to ask, And what if ...

The stories here are a possible answer to the question.

Confessions of a Drone Pilot

by

Max E. Harris

Arf, arf, barked our three-year-old Dachshund Fritz as he ran around the room trying to escape from the small plastic helicopter that was constantly coming close to his tail. Then the copter flipped nose up in the air and rose away from him. As it flipped small bacon bits fell from the piece of plastic straw I had glued to the back of the fuselage. Fritz immediately smelled them and started licking them up from the floor. That was my first drone experience, my tenth birthday, and I was hooked. For good or evil the drone was a most useful tool. In the following days I demonstrated to Fritz the dark side of the drone. Instead of bacon bits I filled the tiny bomb bay with black pepper. I landed the drone near Fritz and he came over to it to investigate. When he got close, I flew it a short distance away and landed again. He liked this game. He thought he could scare the sleeping drone. After a few jumps and chases Fritz barked and attempted to attack the drone.

This time the drone rose up suddenly, dumping its cargo of black pepper in Fritz's face. He barked and ran away sneezing. I laughed. My mother had been watching from the doorway and asked me what had startled Fritz. I told her about the pepper and she shook her head disapprovingly, but I explained that I was training him to be alert to potential threats. Her intervention had distracted me from the drone and I crashed it into a lamp breaking a piece on the drone. It was a learning experience for all of us.

By the time I was fourteen I had learned a lot about drones. Fritz was no longer the target of my experiments so he would sit next to me while I prepared them for their various missions. In the four years since the first drone there had been a series of increasingly sophisticated devices. My father had given me the first two as gifts for birthdays and Christmas but after that I had to buy them myself. The drones could not yet pay their own way but the experience was giving me ideas. I made money cutting grass and doing other yard work for neighbors which met the approval of my parents. They would watch with appreciation as my skills improved. I now had a quad-motor drone with dual cameras that I could fly around the neighborhood. My repair skills had improved out of necessity. Accidents were a constant occurrence but not the main reason for my drone technical work. I modified them to carry different payloads and instruments. One of the cameras now had night-vision capabilities. It could be flown at high enough altitude that it could not be easily heard on the ground and had an interface which permitted it to be commanded over a cellular phone link. This meant is had a very long control range even if still only about a thirty minute flying time.

After a series of acts of vandalism were reported in a small area in the local paper I thought this was my opportunity to demonstrate my capabilities. I called the reporter and learned more information than was in the article, such as the time-frame in which the vandalism happened and exact locations. The next night that it seemed likely that the culprits would strike again I had my aircraft ready. It was a Friday night and there had been a high school football game earlier in the evening. I launched my craft and started sweeping the area. It was not long before I saw a few boys about my age chatting in the dark. As it was well past midnight the odds were higher that they were not discussing the ball game or school work. Hovering in the area I watched as they approached a car parked in the street. Now I zoomed in on them as one of them let the air out of one of the car's tires. The next step was the critical one. I had equipped the drone with a tiny speaker that could reproduce limited higher sounds. I played a short, high-pitched cat howl. All the dogs in the area heard it and started barking. The boys heard it and looked up to see where it was coming from. I zoomed the camera in, shot a few seconds of video, and moved the drone higher. The next day I turned over the pictures I had taken to the local police. They were able to identify the boys and questioned them. The vandalism in the area stopped. I thanked the reporter who followed up with a story about the vandals being caught by my drone photos. He did not identify me but the police had been grateful and said they would refer any queries to me.

Within three months I had signed contracts for surveillance with a number of neighborhood watch groups, some of them in upscale gated communities. I bought a large batch of custom-made drones from offshore and trained a group of local high-school students to maintain and fly them. I warned them that I would not tolerate any abuse of their positions. If any of the pictures they took showed up on the internet, they would be prosecuted. There was sufficient information embedded in each photo to identify when and by which camera it had been taken. As expected, one of my employees used the drone to take some revealing photos and was stupid enough to display them on his social-networking site. When I learned about it, I fired him and turned him in to the local police. They did not prefer charges but scared him sufficiently to deter anyone who learned of it. To this