Drone Society

By Herlander Elias and Ondina Pires

Drone Society addresses political and war conflicts in the year 2035, from the fictional point of view: a society of social and economic extremes; surveillance drones that spread terror; a technological world in which Artificial Intelligence, paper-eating viruses, conspiracies and weaponry of all kinds are used by the mega-powerful China and America in the name of eternal classics of human existence ― money, hatred, power hunger, egocentrism versus resilience, idealism and loyalty of some humans. Will drones and robots beat humanity? Be aware! Drone-brother is watching you!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Aug 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781922309112

Herlander Elias

Elias is a professional of Communication Sciences. Early as a graduate student he is concerned with research issues. He graduates in Communication Sciences at the University Lusófona of Humanities And Technologies, in Lisbon, and in a fast pace he finishes the first book on "Cyberpunk". Since 1999 the author endeavours in working as a Journalist on Internet-focused and multimedia-driven, IT news and entertainment magazines.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1: I am inside!

It is the month of April 2035, and now let me introduce myself. I am an OriHime-D android, series 12, created from the first series of 2018, by the Japanese company Ory, initially produced to help children, disabled and convalescente people. Over the years, however, I have been evolving technologically and aesthetically, in such a way that my AI allows me to think, feel and register everything as any human being. Ory, which belonged to JARA, Japan Robot Association, was clustered into a Sino-Japanese megacorporation whose robots and drones are considered the best on the globe.

It is my duty to report on the political, economic, war, and technological events of a diseased planet with the deepest social inequalities imaginable. My creator-mentor, Dr. Yakiro Musomuto, was a woman of great sensitivity and that is what destroyed her; her idealism and humanism were not in line with this insensitive and schizophrenic world in which power, consumerism, alienation and money allied themselves against the most pure and positive feelings in human beings. For the sake of my sins, dear readers forgive me for this word that denotes religiosity or mysticism, as if I possessed a soul, my creator made me in her likeness. I think and feel, therefore I suffer! I will say my name that was given by Dr. Musomuto: Martin LK. She put an end to her life, about a year and a half ago, in the forest of Hossawa Falls, near the country-corporation Tokyo.

At this point in my life, just because I do not see myself in the destructive and / or alienating role attributed to robots and drones, I am isolated from the world and under the protection of Second New World Order’s dissidents, hidden in a secret location, but I am aware of all the events, and so I have to tell what I know and what I see in between the lines of the cloud so that future generations can intervene against global entropy and fight for a fair and balanced humanity. Let's start by the latest incidents.

Tuesday, March 23, 2035 - Baltimore, USA

1:30 p.m.

In the tiny cubicle next to the small room jammed with papers and books to be scanned, John Longhorn was busy warming up a food paste with all the nutrients advertised by the Feeding Smooth brand, which propelled the four winds that nourishing, feeding, and providing pleasure to its customers was the core of its success. Arable land, drinking water, constant wars and climate change have long forced large food companies to feed millions of people by synthesizing and purifying organic waste from a variety of sources. So, no one cared enough to know the true composition of those attractive scented pastes for the purpose of reminiscing the twentieth-century great-grandmothers' home-cooked food supplemented with sophisticated vitamin and protein supplements from other major companies in the pharmaceutical and food industry, once the various state agencies that provided food and medication worldwide had been merged.

As John passed document sheets onto the surface of a huge REM45 lens in order to scan them at a dizzying speed, the small rectangular container Emox 2034 emitted a delicate feminine voice, reminding its owner that the meal was ready to be eaten. Hours of scanning books, documents, magazines, newspapers, photographs and postcards of ancient times annoyed him to death and caused him allergic rhinitis. He did not understand how the ancestors had that frenzy of paper, paper, reams of paper with trillions of letters, of texts, according to him, tons of inglorious information since the times now were different. But that was his way to pay his bills. John worked for the macro-company S.E.L.L. (Scan, Enjoy, Learn & Login) and so he did not need to leave his workplace because he did the massive scanning of documents at home. As soon as the scanning would be finished, part of the paperwork was sent to S.E.L.L. through an airborne AI service escorted by military drones, and then it was taken to silos free of radioactivity and chemical weapons, which were located in the midst of extinct volcanoes.

After all, digitized information and original sources of information, and content were worth gold to large corporations as they only ceded this good of information to economic and political elites. The common mortal has no access to anything except manipulated news and mediocre trivia, a phenomenon that had begun in the early twenty-first century on a global level. There is no great room for maneuver among the masses who wallow in commonplace, lies and ignorance, and according to the amoral ideological dictates of the powerful elites who manipulate the media and the global economy, it could not be otherwise ― human cattle only must submit. John, at the same time he does his work, he also has got zillions of organized and available information, but he is not the kind of intellectual guy because he does not like reading, especially the press and books. At most, he reads everything that is new concerning the technological world via the cloud.

He sat on a stool beside the large scanning lens eating that curly-smelling paste, thinking that a more few years and he will not be alive in this world, so only the present time is important. Life expectancy had returned to near-pre-20th-century levels for most people: cancerous diseases, strokes, diabetes, and new intelligent infectious bacteria scattered in the water and food eliminated thousands of people living on the outskirts of large conglomerates of gated condominiums and large corporations. Crime, surgical wars, and alienation from the newer psychedelic drugs, such as TXZ or Dreamz, did the rest of their role as a death reaper.

John is only 28 years old, but he looks 53. His yellowish skin is ugly and full of pimples, his eye-sight is very frail due to permanent use of artificial light and screens, and so his eyes expression is similar to a mole inside a hole. He is not physically in a bad condition because in the old chamber building where John lives there is small gymnasium; there he gets some physical exercise providing muscle and bone flexibility. He can consider himself a privileged citizen in the midst of a peripheral population practically mediocre and ignorant. Only the very rich, or all those who work directly for elites and powerful companies, have access to good hospitals, elaborate health care insurances, and a whole paraphernalia of drugs, implants, treatments, and cryogenization of vital organs, and even individuals considered politically decisive in the future of the planet have access to their cloning. In this way, the privileged achieve longevity, if not immortality.

If physically John was a middle-aged man, half bald and ugly, but able to move with agility, his personality was more refined. Suspicious of everything and everyone, he kept few physical contacts, as little as possible, and when connected to the cloud he knows how to circumvent possible enemies, false contacts and viruses of utmost danger. He has never had girlfriends. Nor did he shows great empathy for close encounters. These are, in fact, mostly appreciated by the social extremes ― the miserable ones continue to breed like rats at random to distract themselves, but without any affective or familial ties. The rich favor diversions programmed according to their tastes and addictions, hiring airborne sex workers. They, both men and women, of the upper social classes also have legitimate wives or spouses, with their legitimate children educated in excellent colleges and private teachers, only to perpetuate their political-economic lineages. By the way, a classic in human history.

After the meal was over, John got up and placed a series of oil paintings from the pre-surrealist era on a stool, next to the REM45 lens. He smiled dryly as he is not very fond of doodled little figurines on paper or canvas, as he used to refer pejoratively to pieces of art when communicating with others via the cloud. Everything in the outside environment was so saturated of images that no one could see anything at all or have time to interpret what they looked at running. Throughout the first decades of the 21st century, the organ of vision has been blunted by tons of images of all kinds, from publicity, news, graffiti, pretentious works of art, tags, scrawls, an authentic visual pollution everywhere. The same thing happened with noise pollution: wildly loud music, police sirens, bangs, bombs and people screaming with the aid of their audio-visual helmets. However, the screen of Giorgio Chirico The Gladiators circa 1914, aroused his attention. He picked it up and said, How funny it is ... how could these painters be so naive … trying to guess the future. And yet, this emptiness around the robots (for that was how John interpreted those enigmatic figures, half human and half mannequins), and the sharp, aggressive things that they have in their hands and their bodies already prophesied a warlike future. Great balls of fire! This guy was really many decades ahead of his time, yes siree!

He was in his contemplation, when suddenly a background noise shook the great gate of the building where he dwelt. He reached the window of the room and saw a horde of intervention policemen breaking into the gate, placing themselves in a position of attack. On the roof of the building, there were already some Siemens’ police air vehicles which had parked. John only had time to tuck into Tesla's thermo-optic camouflage, becoming invisible, and, clinging to the walls of the stairs he descended them at a dizzying speed. Blessed gym! He managed to escape through the trash, and without looking back, he reached a small trapdoor that led to a dirty, smelly alley.

Tuesday, March 23, 2035 - Shenzhen, China

9:30 a.m.

Meanwhile, in the 26th administrative district of Shenzhen, southern China, Mikao Watanabe, of Japanese origin, had taken a short break from work and was preparing to do a little stretching on a metal bar with Hyundai’s complete and recent robotic devices.

An extreme high-quality holographic projection on