Cry ‘Havoc!’, and Let Slip the Drones of War.

More short fiction from the near future.

This is the second in an ongoing series I am writing: short fiction about the near future of technology and defense. This story is part of a larger essay being submitted to a military journal about the future of foreign internal defense and technology. My co-author on the forthcoming piece is fellow CRIC member and Project OCEAN AR co-lead, Dr. Josh Kvavle.

The Prime Minister-for-life never missed the annual “Liberation Day” parade. With the drums and platoons thundering, cameras flashing, and the bright sartorial selections of the audience, nobody noticed the softball-sized quad-copter floating down from the stadium lights perched above the parade route.

The drone plans had been open-source, downloaded from a small techno-agricultural collective in rural California that wanted to use small unmanned aerial vehicles to narrowly target weed infestations with pesticide; its navigation system was lashed to open source infra-red satellite imagery. There was a small aerosol mister. A global positioning system chip and a micro SIM card. The attackers printed most of it, and simply plugged in an old Galaxy S7 processor, and swapped out the satellite feed for the facial recognition API, and the pesticide for a neurotoxin.

With the PM’s face uploaded to the drone’s small on-board processor and a 100’x100’ search grid, they set it loose. Just a few minutes later the drone deployed its payload automatically, and then clattered to into the lap of the Defense Minister, who had been sitting to the left of the target, who was deaf in his right ear.

Both men were dead within the hour.

The three regional governors were at each other’s throats by the end of the day. Their respective ethnic groups lobbed accusations and live-streamed protests across the information superhighway. The Wikimedia Foundation had to freeze and re-set the language-specific version of Wikipedia as articles were being defaced, defamed, and embellished faster than the editors could track.

By the end of the week the country was awash in blood, thrown into a civil war the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the iron-fisted PM had killed his way to the top. Community centers became armories, thanks to 3D printers supplied by well-meaning western NGOs who intended them to produce farm tools and construction forms for quick-build shelters.

An enterprising University of London student, sent abroad by capital-dwelling upper-class parents, stayed up all night and translated the US Army “Ranger Handbook” into the local dialect and uploaded it to GitHub. Within hours, a poorly executed complex ambush killed the former Minister of Information and her security detail as they were headed to a sleepy border crossing two hours from the capital.

Cryptocurrency donations started to flow in from the country’s global diaspora, funding ad-hoc logistics networks from neighboring countries that ferried supplies by the pound via printable cargo drones, a 21st century “Berlin Airlift” of death. Videos describing how to mix explosives from household goods were, for a few hours, trending inside the country’s localized search engine servers. Once blocked, they were downloaded to thumb drives and passed by hand.

The cellular towers, symbols of modernity (and, to the discerning observer, the intelligence services) were quickly destroyed. In their place, wireless mesh networks popped up around the country as hackers repurposed old 802.11axrouters to serve as data hubs for a post-LTE network that operated without satellite connectivity.

The American President, at the urging of Members of Congress in key swing states with critical ethnic constituencies, huddled with advisors from State and Defense. Critical rare earth elements had been discovered in Northern region of the country just a few years prior, and were essential for advanced microchip production. After six days of careful vetting by the fifteen executive department with “equities” in the matter, he spoke to the American people via live-stream from the Oval Office. The speech was widely lauded, and announced critical aid for key “regional partners” that, he asserted, were simply defending themselves against attempts at ethnic cleansing. Help would arrive in “just a few short weeks.” In the meantime, the Theater Special Operations Command was directed to mobilize a small “advise and assist” team.

The government-in-exile, with money laundered through the sovereign wealth fund of a country that had long plotted the downfall of the US-backed leader, had been operating for years over Geneva-based encrypted chat servers. Thirteen days after the assassination, they clandestinely entered the country via micro-submarine, and quickly establishing a new government in the northern, mineral-rich region of the country.

Three days later the TSOC task force was on the ground, holed up in the Embassy. The city was quiet. The national bank’s gold stores were gone. The parliament had been destroyed by two Mig-21's launched from a northern air force base. Hundreds of thousands of citizens were on the move, separating out the multi-cultural alloy that had begun to settle in the shadow of the Prime Minister into their more fragile, component ethnic groups in the North, the South-West, and the East. It was all over in a geopolitical microsecond.