The Sky's Eyes

By Brian Macrae

Lukas sources low-rez video to the newsfeeds. In the near future, attending demonstrations has become the most popular pastime. When the demonstration turns violent (and they usually do), Lukas is there to record it. He has worked hard to build a reputation for producing quality clips. That reputation and his willingness to be in the fray are his primary assets.

One morning, he discovers that his hard-earned digital reputation is worthless. In that moment, he realizes that he is both unemployable and a social outcast. Could it be related to the girl he met the night before, or to the abduction of another low-rez producer that he happened to record at a demonstration?

Lukas is trying to figure out how to solve the mystery, when he meets Kim. She is stubborn, pushy and difficult to be around. Unfortunately, she won’t go away because she needs to solve the mystery as well, for completely different reasons. Kim lives in a world of data and algorithms. Lukas prefers climbing on buildings and playing in traffic. Together, they must discover the cause of Lukas’s destroyed reputation because people keep disappearing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Macrae
• Release date: Nov 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9780998345307

Book preview

Chapter 1

How do I look?

Off tint.

Gimme a sec... dirty white behind scratched plexi is the best I can do for now.

Hold still. Calibrating. Better, but if you find something cleaner, give me 7 seconds.

Lukas turns away from an ad for pharmaceutical-grade intestinal bacteria on the side of the bus stop, pulls his hood forward, and begins walking. He joins a sparse tide of people that is slowly but steadily growing. Some carry signs, a few have cameras or bags with a large red cross inside a white circle; some nearly bubble with excitement, some run, some bounce, and some move with steady efficiency. Others wear the grim face of one who has a job to perform and some of the grim-faced are spectators, which should cause concern among those who watch for complications. Lukas moves from the waist down, his upper body nearly immobile; a compromise between an effort to look normal and the desire to keep the camera steady.

A low-profile pack, with no hanging tabs or straps, is secured firmly across Lukas’s back. The hooded shirt and pants fit closely with no loose material to be grabbed onto or inadvertently catch on anything. They are made of a high-tech performance material that marry mobility and sturdiness. Lukas taps the side of the tintless eyeglasses and a faint translucent screen pops up in space, off-center, a few feet in front of him. After a short boot-up sequence, an image appears of a mass of people, in an open square which updates every few seconds. A news feed begins scrolling, across the image, consisting of short phrases describing the chaos.

I've got the feed, Lukas mumbles, attempting to not draw any attention to himself from the people around him whose numbers have increased while the audible din they have been approaching also grows. His effort is unnecessary because those around him, beginning to feed off of the chaotic energy of the crowd up ahead, have broken into a steady jog. Still and video camera operators are holding their hands to their ears and talking as they inform someone that they have reached the day's event. Lukas keeps one eye ahead and the other on the bird's eye view of the crowd in his news feed, trying to determine the best location to move towards.

Any demonstration is based on a controversial issue being debated by 2 opposing camps; those that are defending or promoting the issue (the Pros) and those that are opposed to the issue (the Antis) because they believe it might not be in our best interest. Those that prefer to display their perspective in the public forum are usually beyond rational dialogue, which is why Lukas has an occupation.

Sound in his left ear drops and a voice declares, You are approaching from seven o'clock. The Pros are spread across the top from 10 to 12 o’clock. The Antis are mostly avoiding the fight, so far. You might want to make your way across the river to the other bank, unless you see some other action on the way.

Street noise returns to normal levels, which, at this point, is a dull roar.

Lukas pauses at the edge of the crowd taking in the scene. The disembodied voice in his ear pipes up while the crowd mutes, Give me a sweep, for flavor.

Body still, Lukas turns his head left and slowly pans right. The movement is steady and even, until halfway through the panoramic when he rests his gaze on an angry young woman with beads and small gears woven into her dreadlocks. Her anger is palpable and her jaw quivers as she throws her closed fists overhead menacingly toward the front of the crowd. Behind her, there is a sea of glaring faces and pulsating fists.

Nice shot, the voice in his ear comments.

Trying ‘a Moses,’ Lukas declares as he attempts to move through the crowd. The first few steps into the crowd are relatively easy; weaving around people whose attention is focused straight ahead, shouting in unison, more or less. Within a few meters, bodies are closely packed together and stable movement becomes impossible.

The water will be a bit muddy for a while. Lukas sacrifices stability for speed and makes his way across to the other side of the confrontation. The crowd, intent on action above and forward, are oblivious to Lukas's trek. He uses the ebb and flow of the crowd to bob and weave across. He receives a few elbows and knees as he is shoved into the backs of others. By tomorrow, the bruises will remind him of this experience. He tries to use the crowd like a swimmer uses the current; allowing himself to be pulled in one direction and then working against the flow for a while to correct direction.

Given the skyline, I would guess that you are approaching 4 o'clock. Lukas's upper body had been stabilizing as he moves beyond the thickest portion of the crowd toward the more lightly populated edge. The stability had probably alerted his handler that he is nearing the end of the trip across the sea of bodies, and so Lukas corrects his direction left.

Out here, on the periphery of the action, Lukas is able to scan the people and the situation with less difficulty. A few are Antis taking a break; some are drinking water, while others are nursing bruises. There are some from NGOs like the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and Missing Persons Worldwide, all clearly labeled and trying to keep tabs on, well, everything. There are also a couple of obvious corpo-narcs and personnel trackers.

Give me a sec, looking for a perch, Lukas scans the buildings for something within reach that he could climb onto to get a better view of the chaos.

Don't bother, I think you wandered into a reunion of your own kind; there is a glut of feeds from your location. Lukas didn't bother to ask how he knew. If his handler knew where he is, that means that Lukas is popping up in the feeds. A year ago, he knew everyone on the ground although, the handlers were a different story. Now he is tripping over noobs at nearly every event. He can't get angry about it; he was a noob once. How long ago? Three years? Yeah, about that; forever ago. The HD providers have the bulky cameras and they always stay at the edge to protect their equipment. Whereas the low-rez feeders, like himself, have wearable equipment and they are not always as obvious. Although, given enough time, you can always spot them; their need to keep the camera steady means that they move unnaturally. There are the drones as well, but they tend to stay at least 10 meters up in the air because the Pros always have some toys for those that stray too close. The tech on the drones is getting amazing, but they will never replace ground pounders because looking at the tops of people's heads gets old, fast. What the public wants is to see some blood streaming down your face and a bit of pain in your eyes.

He moves along the buildings toward the front line; time to earn his pay. As he walks, he raises his eyes to check that his hood has not fallen forward. Early on in his career, some beautiful footage had been lost due to a careless wardrobe malfunction leaving the camera partially obscured. He is seriously considering moving the lens below his chin or to his chest, but it would be harder to camouflage there. Maybe he will give some thought to a dual mount system. Jobs like this one, when fighting the crowd, a well-hidden camera whose lens is covered by clothing is pointless. However, when he is on a tail, obscurity is highly valuable.

The image in his personal feed has been switching to different sources from time to time; the drones that provide the image move in and out of optimum position. Lukas is reminded why he appreciates his handler as the image switches again to the location that meets his needs. No instructions or requests; his handler knows what information Lukas needs to do his job well and provides it. A good handler will filter and parse the raw data in both directions. They provide the optimal data that allows the ground-pounder to do their job and also take the rough data from the ground's low-rez equipment. The handler cherry picks the best clips and sends it out to the newsfeeds. Lukas understands it in theory, but he also knows that his talents lay on the ground, not handling the data.

As he walks in and around the spectators, most ignore him, focusing on the skirmish zone ahead. 1 in 20 would watch him skulk by and he knew that his image is being sent into one of many databases, some public and some corporate, in order to note his presence at this event and assess his threat level. He had given up on anonymity a long time ago; it is a casualty of the job. On the one hand, the hidden decision makers know he is not a trouble maker, on the other hand, getting in trouble is not an option. Some of his kind will go to elaborate trouble to maintain some privacy, from disguises to surgery. Lukas doubts the efficacy of these efforts, he is fairly certain that most cutters are on the take, even the back-alley variety. And if they aren't then they are probably under surveillance. Besides, it is easier to maintain on-line anonymity, so let that be the identity to hide, let your real-self be the obvious one.

Quickly, the crowd that he is worming through becomes thicker and the energy turns aggressive. Here we go, he mumbles. His handler gets the message. At the moment, he is surrounded by Antis and he is more or less safe, but that could shift in a heartbeat. The turning point is never predictable. Sometimes, the shift is an accident; a rock hits a well-padded hired gun and their switch is flipped. Other times it is clear that a command is given in some cloud and there is a surge of shields and batons (you would think that after so many years of these, they would have more high-tech tools, perhaps nothing is more satisfying than a bone cracking under a stick).

He can hear the crowd shouting in unison, repeating the calls of the initiator. As loud as their calls are, he can still hear the clack of plastic and metal from the line of hired guns behind their shields, a stone's throw away. Perhaps his survival instinct is kicking in because he cannot understand a word that is being said, but the sound of heavy objects banging together cut clearly through the noise. Lukas is still near the buildings on one side of the open square, where this particular demonstration is being performed, and looks for a vantage point. There are fewer contractors this close to the fray and there are also few places to which one could go to get a clear view of the action. The obvious ones on railings and light posts are taken by Antis and they are too low to provide much of a view or are too close to be safe when the situation becomes too hot to handle.

Scanning the buildings close by, he sees bar-covered windows near a building stoop. He works his way through the crowd, which is standing on the stairs leading to the building, and moves onto the landing. The rear of the landing, near the door, is clear because all of the occupants are focusing their attention forward to the street. Reaching behind and underneath the pack on his back, Lukas fiddles within a bottom-accessed pouch and pulls out two looped straps with flat metal hooks. He threads his hands into the loops and lets the flat hooks hang near his palms. He steps onto the stone railing of the landing and squats leaning out toward the bars of the window. He pops off railing, grabs the bars with one hand, quickly followed by the other and places the balls of both feet against the wall under the window. He shuffles his way up the bars until he can reach the top crossbar and turns around. Now that his back is to the bars, one hand at a time he shakes his arms downward until the metal hooks lay in his palm and then hooks them over the crossbar allowing his fingers to hang over the hooks and then jams his heels between the vertical bars and rests on the bottom crossbar. His hanging weight is held by the metal hooks which transfer the weight to his wrists through the loops. While it requires some effort to hold this position, most of his bodyweight is sustained by the hooks and his legs. One or two people who had watched his progress from the landing return their attention and energy to the demonstration and Lukas does the same, stating,

In position.

He knows that the Antis will not waste their energy on him and the Pros will ignore him until the scene gets ugly; when that happens everyone is fair game. No longer attentive to positioning and safety, he can now focus on images and framing. He points his head at the obvious focal point, where there is the most to-and-fro, so that the camera is focused on that point and then lets his eyes wander over the entire scene while keeping the head and neck immobile. His eyes continue to roam as he moves his head at the instructions of his handler.

Up a tick and left two. Hold there. Pan right at quarter speed. Pause. Hold. Hmmm. Up a hair.

Lukas follows the instructions, continuously scanning, looking for interesting shots, and watching for signs of the inevitable trouble. The pressure in his shoulders is slowly building and his feet are beginning to ache, but this is what he trains for. He guesses that he has about 10 minutes before he will need to come down. The worst thing he could do is stay too long and risk being unable to safely dismount or being forced to come down in the chaos and needing time to recover mobility. Recovering use of your arms and legs is difficult when you are being beaten with sticks.

A frenzied scuffle suddenly breaks along the front line,