Suicidal Reporter Drones

A fictional short story about two war journalists, drones and a dangerous assignment outside the wall

Harper knew they wouldn’t be there much longer. The veteran of several Middle East conflicts, she knew the arc of media attention was nearing its usual conclusion. It was only a matter of weeks before New York pulled her out, along with all the other journalists holed up in the safe zone. The country and its millions of starving residents would fall off the world’s radar.

A wispy blonde in her early-thirties with a terrible case of “can’t relax” disease, Harper thrived on crisis. This latest conflict was particularly acute: the government had cut off internet access, silencing social media, and disinformation efforts were growing more sophisticated, originating from all parties — including the White House.

As she repeatedly reminded her New York bosses, “The only way to know what’s really happening is to be here.”

But after a month on the story, the security situation deteriorated. Journalists were no longer targeted for kidnapping, but gunned down in loosely-coordinated attacks. The last assassination was captured on live video in broad daylight, triggering an order from their New York newsrooms to lay low and stay put.

Now she was stuck inside the safe zone with coalition military trainers, a few international observers and a dozen other remaining journalists. Located on the outskirts of the desert city, it barely looked safe: several residential compounds surrounded by a makeshift wall, barbed wire and barricades. Most of the windows were boarded over, muting the orange-red sunset and muffling the frequent crackle of gunfire.

Locked away from the story, Harper felt trapped. She thought about her younger years, when she would’ve laughed off New York’s orders and just covered the news. But this place — this fear — felt much different.

“What you working on?” she asked Matt, her photographer. He was sitting on the floor, back against the wall, taking inventory of electronic motors, tiny cameras and a mess of propellers, all spread out in piles on top of a bath towel.

“Trying to fix the drone.”

When Matt got bored, he tinkered. About five years younger than Harper and sporting a dark beard, he was a drone geek. Back in his hometown of Seattle, he was on a league racing team renowned for its ability to accidentally destroy its own drones in spectacular fashion before they crossed the finish line. Since the races usually took place in parking garages after dark, Matt had spent many late-night hours canvasing the concrete for little plastic and metal parts.

His team became known as the Suicide Girls. The name stuck.

By destroying dozens of drones, Matt became particularly good at rebuilding them, experimenting with new creations along the way. He had packed a few drone kits with him on this assignment, and he occasionally sent one up for a few aerial shots while they were covering a story on the outside.

But the sand was merciless, gumming up the motors and propellers with frustrating precision. Matt tried everything to keep those tiny grains of sand at bay, but like those cement columns in the parking garage, they appeared out of nowhere.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Matt sighed. He pulled a small propeller off a motor, inspecting it for sand. “We can’t send one over the wall.”

“Why not?” Harper asked.

“Because they made it abundantly clear that they’ll shoot it out of the sky. Don’t you remember that drone that was disguised to look like a bomb? That someone flew into the safe zone? Scared the shit out of the sentries. Sending one up inside the compound would be suicide.”

“Like your Suicide Girls.”

“Funny.”

“But… what if we could use drones to cover stories on the outside?” Now Harper had that gleam in her eye that Matt had come to know and dread — an idea that gains traction so quickly in her own mind, it subsumes everything and everyone around it.

“Because it would get us kicked out of here. Besides, we already have aerial shots of the city and a couple car bomb sites.”

“I’m not talking just about aerials, but ground-level shots, too.” She stood up and started pacing the room. “What if we could interview people with a drone? Like over at the market? How would that work?”

“Ok, I’ll humor you,” he said with a resigned look on his face. “Assuming we could launch one from here — which we can’t — we‘d need a lot more range. What’s the market, five miles from here? It’s not just how far it can fly, but how far it can communicate with the controller. We’d need even more transmission range if we’re taking the drone down low. And then there’s the audio. Drones are too loud to capture any usable sound. We’d also have to figure out a way to pipe your voice into the drone itself, so you could talk with people. That’s all.”

“Right!” she exclaimed. “The market is a great test run. How do we do this?”

“Well, we don’t.”

“Maybe not with your drones, but aren’t there newer drones we can buy? Then you can make some tweaks?”

Whenever she used a form of the word “tweak,” Matt would instinctively roll his eyes. But he knew the only way to close out this Harper idea cycle was to promise to investigate. “I can do some checking,” he said reluctantly. “I know someone who’s plugged into all the latest models.”

“Great!” Satisfied for now, Harper wandered off, a slight skip in her step.

It’s such a ridiculous idea, Matt thought, but the best ideas often are. As promised, he fired off an email to a friend at a drone company and called it a night.

A week later, their courier delivered a black hard case with Matt’s name on it. After the security team at the gate scanned it, he brought it inside and cracked it open, Harper hovering over him.

“Whoa, this drone hasn’t even hit the market yet,” he said. “I’m pretty sure it will violate our gift policy.”

His friend at the drone company — the top manufacturer in the business — turned out to be thrilled at the prospect of supplying drones to war reporters in the thick of the latest Middle East conflict. So he comped Matt an upcoming model, complete with spare parts.

“What gift policy?” Harper deadpanned.

“Uh huh,” Matt nodded.

But he starting feeling his geek juices flowing. This new drone was incredibly small and light. It could fly long distances and operate in extreme temperatures. It was equipped with noise-canceling microphones, 360-degree low-light cameras and every kind of collision-avoidance feature imaginable. Even he couldn’t crash one of these things.

It took him a couple hours to whip up a prototype, just for fun.

“It looks a little like a flying IED,” Harper said, looking bewildered at the cell phone strapped to the top the drone. “Can we add a few wires sticking out of it, just for effect?”

“That’s how you would interview people. You’d call that phone and we’d put you on speaker before the drone takes off.” He tipped the drone to show their news organization’s logo taped to the underbelly. “Nice touch, huh?”

He picked up the controller, his phone nestled inside, and fired it up. The dark grey drone lifted about three feet off the ground, hovering in place, perfectly still. It was remarkably quiet, like a bedroom fan.

“This is small and quiet enough to sneak over the wall at night, no problem.” Harper said. “But we’ll need to tape over those lights.”

“Right,” Matt said, easing the drone back on the ground and shutting it off. “Wait? You really want to do this?”

Harper walked over to the drone, picked it up and peeled off the logo. “Oh, we’re doing it, alright.”

They were both up at 4 a.m. The prototype drone was charged. The phone was dialed up. Harper was giddy with excitement. Matt was stressed but — as he would admit to himself — in a good way, like a new photographer about to fly in a TV helicopter for the first time.

Harper knew exactly where to launch the drone: a small dark balcony on the northwest edge of their building, mostly obscured from the sentries’ line of sight. Matt was seated a few feet away in the hallway, goggles fixed to his face, controller in his hands.

“What’s with the get-up?” Harper asked.

“Once a racer, always a racer,” Matt said. “I can’t fly these things without wearing my goggles.”

“Or with them, apparently.”

“You’re hilarious. Alright, you ready?”

Harper held the drone out the window, angling it outward like Matt had shown her. “Yep!”

Matt took a deep breath, and fired it up. The propellers immediately began to spin, buffeting Harper’s hair and tugging on her arm.

“Ok, let it go!”

She watched as the drone disappeared into the dimly-lit neighborhood, charging over the back wall between two palm trees. Matt had punched it, hitting 60 MPH in a matter of seconds.

“This 360 camera is insane,” he gasped. “It really feels like I’m flying.”

Moments later, he was already hovering over rooftops well outside the safe zone, rotating his head side to side and leaning his body forward to look for an inconspicuous landing site. Their plan was to stage the drone nearby, then head over to the market at the break of dawn.

“Ah, this is a good spot.” Less than 3 minutes after takeoff, he gently landed the drone on top of a tall, narrow building a half-mile away. “Touchdown!”

“The first drone correspondent!” she announced, throwing her arms in the air. “Let’s call her Reporter One.”

At the first hint of a spectacular yellow-orange sunrise, Reporter One was flying low and fast toward one of the busiest open-air markets in the city. Known for its eclectic selection and the occasional mass shooting, the market used to be a common stop for journalists looking for interviews with “real people” — the shoppers and shopkeepers who helped personalize stories and gave reporters a better feel for the conflict and its impact.

Now it was less crowded and too dangerous to approach on the ground.

Reporter One made good time, cruising 50 feet above the market as the first vendors set up their wares. Harper watched the drone’s camera on a tablet, scanning for a suitable interview subject. “It’s too high to see anyone,” she said. “Let’s take it down to ground level.”

The drone eased down into the street, hovering a few feet off the ground. From five miles away, Matt kept a close eye on the transmission signal. “We’re still solid,” he said, tapping a button. “And now we’re recording.”

“See those children over there?” Harper said. Matt swung around. “Let’s see if we can talk with them.”

Reporter One slowly glided by a middle-aged man setting up tables of bread, arriving in front of a young boy and girl playing nearby. Harper prepared to ask her first question — her Arabic was pretty good — when both kids looked up, paused for a second to process the bizarre creature floating in front of them, and let out a double piercing scream.

Harper tried to calm them down by talking over the phone, but the drone’s squawking voice just terrified them even more. Matt backed up and elevated a few feet to give the kids some breathing room.

Suddenly there was a deafening boom. Matt whipped his head to the side just in time to see the bread vendor fire a second shotgun blast straight into his goggles, right between the eyes.

Everything went black.

Matt flinched so hard, he hit his head on the hallway wall. He tore off his goggles. “Holy shit, that guy shot me out of the air!” He tapped furiously on the tablet. “And… we’ve lost signal. I think Reporter One is… dead.”

“Hmmm,” Harper pulled at her hair. “I guess everyone’s a bit jumpy about drones in this part of the world. We’re going to need to soften her up.”

“You do realize I just got shot in the face,” Matt exclaimed, nursing the bump on the side of his head.

“I’ll nominate you for a virtual Emmy Award.”

“That’s too kind of you.” He cracked open a beer. “I just watched the video again. I think I’m going to have a very real case of PTSD.”

“Next time you’ll know not to flinch.”

He sighed.

“We need to make it look a little less… terrifying,” Harper said, deep in thought. “You know those robots they use in hospitals? The ones doctors use to talk with their patients remotely, with screens for faces?”

“Wait, you want to try this again?”

“Let’s put a screen on the front, so people can see me. Then we could dress it up a bit. Make Reporter Two look like a little human.” Harper was standing up again, bouncing around, her new idea gaining traction. “You know, just a few tweaks here and there.”

Matt rolled his eyes and downed his beer.

“And this time, it’s not a practice run,” she said. “We go on a real story. Somewhere nobody can go. Somewhere big.”

Two more weeks went by, and they were still holed up in the compound. The security situation was getting worse: a few days ago, a car bomb took out a checkpoint a hundred yards from the safe zone. Outside the city, fighting had intensified in surrounding towns and villages, cutting off refugee escape routes and blocking humanitarian supply lines.

Despite Harper’s persistent attempts to generate stories from the inside, the military was increasingly tight-lipped and New York was shifting priorities. Their time was running out. The country and its millions of starving residents were already falling off the radar.

Matt’s drone friend sent over two hard cases this time. The manufacturer had dedicated a product team to react quickly to Matt’s feedback, delivering custom parts — sand-resistant motors, a mountable flip-up screen and a signal-boosting antenna — and instructions on how to hack them together. They whitelisted him into a beta version of their app, which interfaced with the controller and unlocked experimental features.

While Matt geeked on the modifications, Harper was hard at work on the ascetic. With the new screen making up the drone’s face, mounted at the top, she commissioned a seamstress to make a bright yellow drone jacket with the letters P-R-E-S-S sewn on the front. Underneath the drone, she affixed three feet of thin netting, and she topped it off with two floppy ears.

“It looks like a flying Pokemon,” Matt said as they watched it hover inside their make-shift shop. The netting swirled under the props, bridging the gap between the drone and the ground. “Wearing a dress.”

“It’s so silly, no one will mistake it as military. Or a flying IED. It has personality,” Harper beamed.

“It will also have your face on it, Harper Pikachu.”

She snapped a selfie with the drone. “Introducing Reporter Two, the latest in cyborg journalism. Now let’s go find a story.”

The story came to them. Twenty miles to the east, a team of humanitarian workers had managed to sneak into a besieged town, delivering aid to hundreds of women and children inside. Then the fighting intensified, their escape route slammed shut and they lost communication. It was unclear if they were hiding, captured or killed.

This would have merited barely a blip in the U.S. news cycle, but there was a twist. Embedded on the mostly European team was a young American musician with a soaring social media following. His ubiquitous Snaps went silent hours ago, and his fans were worked up into a frenzy. New York called Harper to see if she could wrangle a comment out of the military brass.

“We might be able to do more than that,” she said, hanging up the phone. “Matt, what’s the new range on Reporter Two?”

“Um, why?”

She explained the story, and they looked at a map. The day before, Matt had installed the booster antenna on the roof, nestled among their satellite dishes. According to the manufacturer, the antenna extended the transmission range by as many as 15 miles.

“But that doesn’t account for the curvature of the earth,” Matt said. “We’ll want to get low, which means the signal will be blocked by the horizon at that distance. What’s the elevation of this town?”

“It’s in the foothills above us,” she said. “But it doesn’t give the elevation.”

“That could work, but we may not be able to fly at the surface. There’s also a battery life issue.” Matt did some rough math in his head. “With the additional weight and drag, max speed is going to be around 70 MPH, not counting any wind. Optimistically that puts us around 35 minutes flight time just to travel down and back, and the battery maxes out at 50 minutes.”

“We can chop the dress to reduce the drag,” Harper said.

“That will help a little, but this could be another one-way mission…”

“Another suicide mission,” she whispered, holding her finger over her lips, glancing over at Reporter Two.

“Well, that’s my specialty.”

Harper was pacing again. “Assuming we can transmit out of there, what if we piped the live stream to New York?”

“So our bosses can watch someone shoot us out of the sky? They’d shut us down for good.”

She walked over the drone and put her hands over its little yellow ears. “Shhh! Have you no faith? She’s going to get the story of a lifetime.”

Reporter Two tore across the desert floor at dawn, angled aggressively to the east. Her ears were pinned back, her dress shortened to a skirt. Matt sat in the hallway, a pillow behind his head, feeling himself sail over the surface, one hundred feet up. So far, the transmission signal held strong.

“Nearly there,” he said. “Where should we go?” He steered around a tank and some menacing-looking pickup trucks, keeping his distance.

Harper watched on the tablet as the first buildings materialized on the horizon, bathed in bright morning sun. “Wherever there are people. Unarmed people.”

Matt hit the record button and opened up the live stream to New York, beaming the video over their rooftop satellite. Harper dialed up intake on her spare phone and popped it on speaker.

“See us?” she asked New York.

“What the…?” said an incredulous voice on the other end of the line. “This is live? You guys flying in a chopper or something?”

“Or something. I take that as a yes,” Harper said.

“Well, whatever it is, we’re rolling on you.”

A minute later, Reporter Two was sailing over munition-riddled homes and rubble-filled squares. It was like a hurricane of ball bearings and fire had blown through town, devastating everything in its path.

“Oh my god,” said the guy on the phone. “I’m going to loop in the producer.”

“The streets are empty,” Matt said. “Maybe we’re too late.”

Harper’s face was glued to the tablet, pinch-zooming every few seconds. “Keep looking. Try to find the center of town.”

Matt took it up to 300 feet, flying in a large circle. In the upper-right corner of his goggles, he noticed the battery flight time drop to 20 minutes. Refocusing his eyes, he spotted a cluster of several buildings that looked largely intact, and he pushed the controls forward and down.

“There!” Harper exclaimed, and Reporter Two was already on approach, dropping down to intercept what appeared to be a family walking outside. “Remember, nice and easy.”

Harper double-checked that she was framed up on the tablet’s camera, which was mirroring her face on the drone’s screen, 20 miles away. As Reporter Two approached — still above the family’s heads — she cheerfully greeted them in Arabic, “Good morning! I hope you are well.”

The woman and two children stopped in their tracks. Confused, they looked around them, unable to see anyone nearby. Then a little girl looked up.

“Hello little girl!” Reporter Two said. “How are you?”

She grabbed her mom’s hand. Matt and Harper held their breath as the woman looked up and locked eyes with them, her face etched with fear. The girl looked back at Reporter Two. “I’m fine,” she said politely.

Her older brother stepped forward. “Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m a American reporter looking to help some missing people. They came yesterday with food. Do you know where they are?”

The mom was still silent, staring at Reporter Two hovering a few feet away. The drone’s ears were laying to one side, see-through skirt flapping in the wind. Matt felt his face begin to sweat.

“I do,” said the boy in English. “Follow me.”

Before his mom could stop him, he was off and running with Reporter Two on his heels, a few feet above him. As the boy darted between buildings and down narrow alleys, Matt kicked into racing mode, carving around tight corners and dodging debris, the collision avoidance systems hard at work.

“Don’t lose him!” Harper yelled at Matt, realizing that Reporter Two just yelled the same thing. The boy seemed to slow down, then he ducked into a dark passageway and knocked on a door. A few moments later, it swung open, and he motioned Reporter Two to follow him inside.

Matt gingerly angled the drone down and through the door, trying to adjust his eyes to the low light. Suddenly the transmission signal fell off a cliff and the video in his goggles turned to snow.

“Aw shit,” he said, trying to reverse the drone out, but the controller had gone dead in his hands.

“What’s happening?” Harper asked.

Alarms chirped and flashed in his goggles. “We lost contact.”

“Hey guys, we lost your signal,” said the guy on the phone.

“No shit, New York,” Harper snapped.

They just sat there, convinced the mission was lost. Reporter Two must have collapsed inside, the last whisper of transmission signal extinguished by the surrounding walls.

Then Matt saw the screen flicker. Then flash. The signal edged up slightly, and the video snapped back. The drone was higher now, back in the light, hovering outside the door.

“It backed itself out. We’re back!” Matt exclaimed.

“Reporter Two is sentient!” Harper shouted.

“We see you now,” said the emotionless voice from New York.

But the boy was gone, and the door was closed. Matt saw the battery timer slip to 12 minutes. “We’re running out of time,” he said. “Any ideas?”

“Anyone in there?” Harper said loudly into her tablet, first in English, then in Arabic. ”Can you come outside? We’d love to try to help you.”

She started to pace, holding the tablet in front of her, pleading for someone to come outside. The timer dropped to 10 minutes and turned red.

Suddenly the door cracked open. The boy walked out and pointed up, and several others slowly followed, squinting in the sunlight and trying to make sense of the ridiculous yellow Pokemon contraption flying above them.

“Hi! I’m Harper. I’m an American journalist,” Reporter Two blurted.

“Um, hello…?” said one of the people below.

“Oh my god,” said the voice on the phone from New York. “That’s him.”

For a glorious 15 minutes, Reporter Two was carrying a live event for the ages. When New York saw the missing musician, they streamed the video everywhere, from old media to new media. Like a true professional, Reporter Two crept in closer, framing him tight, asking all the right questions. The musician said they we’re hiding, but OK, and he thanked his many fans for their concern. He nearly cried.

Then 5 minutes longer than expected, Reporter Two began to wobble and whimper, struggling to stay in the air. She tried to hold it together, but spun awkwardly, folded over and fell out of the sky, landing with a gentle thud on her side in the sand.

“WE LOST YOU!” screamed the guy over the phone.

Matt slowly took off his goggles, muted the alarms and took a deep breath.

“That was all she had left,” Harper said. “And it was the story of a lifetime.”

The military was watching the live stream, too, and they moved fast to extract the missing team, launching a special forces rescue within the hour. As soon as the team safely returned, the commanding officer — absolutely livid the drone operation put lives at risk and originated from inside his walls — had Harper and Matt escorted out of the compound, under guard, and driven directly to the airport to board a military flight home.

As the C-130 taxied out to the runway, Harper’s phone buzzed. It was a text from one of her sources back in the safe zone. “We also picked up your drone. Maybe you’ll get it back some day.”

“Reporter Two made it back alive!” Matt exclaimed. “It wasn’t a suicide mission, after all.”

“She’s not out of the woods yet,” Harper said with a wry smile. “They’re probably waterboarding her right now.”

Back in their New York newsroom, they were heroes. The story set all-time audience records, and as few of the staff noted, it also ushered in a new era of newsgathering. Harper and Matt were asked it they’d create more Reporter Two units for a few of the new organization’s bureaus. Instead, they accepted an offer from a particularly proud drone company to head up a new team to revolutionize reporting around the world.

The military never returned Reporter Two. But a few months later, Reporter Three was born, fashioned after her predecessor, with those same floppy ears. But this one had a new capability: she could take care of herself.

Thanks to a solar-powered, fast-charging base — complete with booster antenna — Reporter Three could land, juice up automatically and take off again from just about any rooftop in the world. She could communicate with other Reporter Three drones nearby to collaborate on coverage and boost their range. She was also packed full of image-recognition AI so she knew what to look for — and what to avoid.

It didn’t take long for drone reporters to become journalism’s first responders, beaming back live VR-ready video from the far corners of the globe. From the safety of your living room, you could slip on your goggles and teleport there, joining Reporter Three in places that were too dangerous and remote for her human predecessors to cover.

And Harper and Matt made sure she always—well, almost always — made it back alive.

(I’m a longtime journalist, product guy and geek. This is my first foray into fictional writing, just for fun. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend. You can reach me at corybergman\at\gmail.com, @corybe on Twitter or corybergman on Snapchat.)