Drone Dogs

By Claude Walker

Autumn, 2017. Chicagos skies are clogged with drones. Drones which deliver tacos, tasers or terror. The Super Cyclops facial-recognition drone, incendiary Vulcan Twister and tiny Mosquito, which can inoculate, inject or irk. Due to the popular Drone-O-LimpX reality show, everyones droning: TV crews, oppo researchers, drone-peepers, gang-bangers, dronie-snapping tweens.

But when a drone graphically kills a beloved giraffe, the public turns against the unrestricted industry. Big Drone battles SAFE (Skies Are For Everyone), which would ban armed drones and impose drone taxes. Epic rumbles rage in the Halls of Congress and Skies of Chicago, where a local cop and FBI agent take to the sky to end a gang drone war.

Drone Dogs is a parable about technology in the hands of idiots and call for public debate about new technologies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491781760

Claude Walker

Author of novels about quakes, baseball, politics, the Seminoles, the Eastland Disaster and drones, Claude Walker was inducted into the Society of Midland Authors in 2003. He has spent decades in politics, including service as Senior Writer for the Illinois Governor. Walker is a top contributor to TripAdvisor.

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Copyright © 2015 Claude Walker.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-8175-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-8176-0 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 11/10/2015

Contents

Author’s Notes

Chapter 1

Drone-O-LimpX Finals! Val the Valedictorian, Sarge, Zipline Park and Jojo Dubbs vie in the sky. PACMan, Butchie and Detective Sully take note. Fury’s shorty.

Chapter 2

Drone-O-LimpX heats up. Val slays a sparrow. Minnesota dronepeeping. Duel in Drone City.

Chapter 3

Sweet Medici. Gang truce. Sarge’s chance encounter. Butchie and Jojo reunited. Nila’s route.

Chapter 4

New jobs for Sarge and Zipline. Secret Swarmbots. Tortuga emerges. One-Armed Tito’s Armada. Sarge’s War. Nila’s campus tour.

Chapter 5

Wrens, Worker Ants, Mosquitos. Snow-dronie with a KISS. Safe Skies soars. Borromeo Drone Base. Quvo in the Rye. Mrs. Dubbs’s roof.

Chapter 6

Molotovs, cyber-taunts. DronePeepersCreepers. PACMan on D. Bomber learns to fly. Toledo Crime Wave. Bloody steps.

Chapter 7

Fort Fury Massacre, Bhutan Coup, Bangkok Blackout. Jojo’s winch. Quvo learns to fly. Night of the Machete.

Chapter 8

Flying Fish Tacos, Maya-in-the-Skya, Bingo, darts. Zipline’s bus, Chinn’s chat. High-end heist. The Collingridge Dilemma.

Chapter 9

Sully’s Drone Tours. SAFE surge. Bijou, Angie and Parker the Pig. PACMan’s TIT. Val flies by subway. Tortuga’s dilemmas. Raid on Fort Fury. Pigs fly. Nila’s Nazca Lines.

Chapter 10

Zipline’s balcony bite. Quvo’s dream, Chinn’s scheme. Bomber tests the Vulcan. Camozzi blasts a ghost.

Chapter 11

Let slip the Drone Dogs of War! Bomber’s Pearl Harbor. Super Cyclops, Skeeter-Shooter. Drone ya later!

Chapter 12

Afterward

Appendix I - Meet the Players (in order of appearance)

Appendix II - Meet the Drones (in order of appearance)

Appendix III - A Cub Fan’s Open Letter to Giant Fans: Get your head out of your apps!

Novels by Claude Walker

Currents of Power: A Modern Political Novel (2001)

Seminole Smoke: An odyssey of power, love and blood in the Seminole Wars (2009)

Currents of Power: A Modern Political Novel, Revised Edition (2009)

The New Madrid Quake Chronicles (2011)

The Earth Baseball Tourney: An Invitational to Disaster (2012)

The Eastland Water Spirits (2015)

Drone Dogs (2015)

Dedication

For those who respect technology enough to know when to turn it off.

For the pioneers of technology assessment and appropriate technology - Mahatma Gandhi, E.F. Schumacher, Bucky Fuller, Office of Technology Assessment Director Emilio Mim Daddario, the National Center for Technology Assessment and Chicago’s Center for Neighborhood Technology - and for future activists such as SAFE (Skies Are For Everyone).

AUTHOR’S NOTES

My first technology epiphany came on a starry night on the Appalachian Trail, 1974.

My buzzed college pals and I were careening down a dark mountain path, wildly swinging tree branches as we plummeted into a ravine. Maybe we were trying to find our inner mountain-man; I forget. Whooping, busting foliage, trampling whatever critters were trying to nest underfoot.

Wait. Stop. Just because I can swing a branch, doesn’t mean I should. Just because I can use this extension of my arm to destroy, doesn’t mean it’s OK.

As Congressman Tortuga notes in Drone Dogs, a debate over the appropriate use of technology has raged since Oog the Caveman opted not to bop Ugg on the head with a T-Rex bone. In the early 1800s, Luddites and mobs of textile workers smashed looms and other machines which threatened jobs, an understandable reaction to the Industrial Revolution.

The pace of change was never greater than in the past century, from Kitty Hawk and Model T’s to A-Bombs and social media. From smoky-industrial to icy-digital. Forty years ago, I could replace my carburetor; I wouldn’t try it now. The gap between how to make something and how to use it has grown, as has the gap between how to use something and how to use it with excellence.

Sadly, our ethics, behavior and laws have been outpaced by accelerated technological change fueled by narcissism. We’re reminded of Einstein’s observation that our technology has exceeded our humanity. But we’re also reminded of the Collingridge Dilemma: A new technology’s impact cannot be fully predicted until it is fully developed and used, but by then it’s too late to halt or change it.

In the 1970s, inspired by the growing green movement, energy crisis and words of economist E.F. Shumacher, an appropriate technology movement gelled. It urged renewable energy and technology with a human face. Congress created the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) to provide independent analyses of potential economic, social and biological impacts of new technology. The OTA conducted 750 studies (before being cut in Newt’s Contract with America). Yet, the need for public participation in technological change has never been greater than now.

Another techno-epiphany came some years later. Day One of a vacation on a deserted Mexico island. Deserted except for a kid with a jet-ski from miles up-the-beach somewhere. Hour-after-hour, buzzing back-and-forth. Next day: same kid, same thing. Pitiless. The issue isn’t just that some technology is in the hands of the wrong people; it’s the brutally-obtrusive technology in the hands of idiots.

As a long-time subway rider, I’ve been subjected to 2nd-Hand Yak of all kinds - shameless sexcapades, recitation of Social Security numbers, racist rants - and formed Walker’s Theorem: A direct correlation exists between the decibel level of a cellphone conversation and emptiness of the caller’s life.

And these are just the aural assaults. Now comes a new app to release aromas from a cellphone. A Smellphone, I guess. What could be bad about that?

At some point, commuters will rise up angry at unrelenting 2nd-Hand Yak and demand electronics-free trains. Besieged beach-lovers will force resorts to ban jet-skis. Irked diners will insist that restaurants enforce no-cellphone policies. Sleepless residents will enact fines on planes which fly too low and car alarms which blast too high. Neighbors of that obsessive leaf-blowing guy will use axes. Babies in strollers will beg parents to hang up the damn phone and talk to them. Families of victims killed by texting drivers will begin winning huge settlements.

As Big Drone’s power grows in Congress, City Hall and world capitals, a rapidly-growing fleet of private unmanned aerial vehicles will continue to congest our skies with few curbs.

Arguments will sound familiar. Drones create jobs. We’re just recreational hobbyists, collectors. Cutting the drone speed limit from 125-mph to 100-mph will delay delivery of your piping hot pizza; bad for small business. If I have a constitutional right to own a shotgun, why can’t I attach it to my drone? We can’t control what a private citizen does with one of our products, but offer condolences to the victims…

The result? More folks will blow them from the skies over their homes for sport, privacy or the tasty taco payload the drone is delivering. Drones will collide with jetliners, traffic-copters and more drones. Drones will crash into the Super Bowl, Thanksgiving Day Parade and Statue of Liberty’s eye. Drone-peeping will be popular with teen boys, tabloids, spies, sex creeps and Third World despots. Drones will disrupt energy and water systems. Assassination-by-drone is inevitable; coups, too.

Domestic drones are now in use for the public good: search-and-rescue, TV news, crop monitoring, infrastructure inspection, archeology, oil spill detection, searching for pythons in the Everglades and Bigfoot in Canada. Drones will also be used by oppo researchers, gang-bangers and taggers, terrorists, extortionists, dognappers and assorted idiots. Hence this tome.

Those who use technology best are those who use it appropriately and know when to hit the Off button.

Drone ya later!

Claude Walker

Chicago, 2015

CHAPTER 1

Ladies and Gents! Welcome to the Grand Finale of American Drone-O-LimpX 2017! Live! From the Elgin Drone Base in wild Wyoming! This is it! The Final Four! The best drone-jocks in America, vying for the $250,000 jackpot! Oh! And bragging rights! the announcer exclaimed!

The global audience had grown to millions - a TV and social media juggernaut - as hundreds of entrants were eliminated in the fiery