Raven
A drone story
I want to thank you all for inviting me here today. It’s always a pleasure to speak at my alma mater, particularly on commencement.
Unfortunately, today’s speech cannot be a typical one. As I look out onto the sea of black gowns turned away from me, I feel compelled to correct your idealist stance. To those of you with white doves drawn on the back of your robes, I say you are naive.
While you choose to criticize me, the Ravens fly above us and protect us, no more conspicuous or demanding than clouds. Look to the skies and see them hover — our translucent guardian angels.
You were all just children in the twenties. You don’t remember 2024. You don’t know what the world had become. I created Project Raven to protect us.
You see, before ’24 small drone quadcopters were toys and tools of commerce, not weapons. I played with them as a kid in Los Angeles. They were my first love.
I remember flying them over my neighborhood with my friends after school. It was magical. Somehow this stationary piece of plastic would start to whirr after I pushed a button on my phone. The little green light would turn red as it hovered and I could feel the breeze from the rotors against my bare ankles. The LED would blink at me as it rose to eye level and then with a flick of the thumb, I could make it disappear — it would shoot into the sky faster than a dragonfly and I would see it circle in the air — a small black dot in the sky as it reached its maximum altitude.
They were just toys and dumb tools back then — you could only fly them for twenty, thirty minutes. But as the battery technology improved and new materials were developed, the payload changed from a small camera to a heavy weight. And then, sadly, they stopped being innocent.
In retrospect, this was unavoidable. The 10s were our honeymoon with commercial drone technology.
But in 2024, the world changed. It was my junior year and I was watching a soccer game in my dorm room with my friends, including my roommate John Graham. It was not far from where I stand today. It was a Premier League game like any other until unexpectedly, in the second half, a black oval appeared on the screen through the open stadium roof. We could see it drop a package on the field as the cameras zoomed in to capture the moment. The air seemed to disappear as we watched with held breath. We saw the flash and then the static. Screams could be heard across campus as we internalized what had happened.
It was an attack by an organization from half a world away, over a territorial grievance that none of the victims were involved with. The bomb killed five players. More died in the stampede that followed than in the explosion itself. Our sense of safety was damaged forever.
Drone terrorism only expanded after ‘24. Like a virus, terrorists, criminals and the deranged learned how to take to the skies. As technology continued to develop, the power of the individual had far outstripped all capacity of governments to respond. Bloated, inefficient and corrupt, bureaucracies did not stand a chance against anonymous and aggrieved groups that made it their life’s mission to cause havoc, drones their latest enablers.
The late 20s were violent. City nights were filled with moving shapes across the skies. Anonymous, the drones could not be tracked and what they surveilled, could not be known. I remember looking out onto San Francisco Bay from one of the Financial District office buildings and seeing hundreds of small drones moving in all directions across the city. Even though it was illegal to fly at this altitude, there was no way to stop them. Occasionally, a drone would hover outside my office window — we’d stare at each other in wonder for a moment and it would zip away.
Rural areas became unmanageable as well. Driving down the freeway was high-risk. Southern Arizona, Mexico, Alaska, any area without population density. New forms of drone terrorism and extortion destroyed all sense of privacy and safety. Drivers on these roads would see a small disk on the horizon — the sun shining off the surface making the drones look like small suns. After being spotted, the drones would shoot like bullets until they hovered over cars, recorded video and sped off, leaving nothing but fear in their wake.
Due to rogue drone surveillance, someone, somewhere knew everything about you — the drone’s video checked your license plates, processed your image through facial recognition technology — arranged your movements and life like a mosaic. Fate decided by algorithm. Some miles down the road, with military precision, Ford F150s blocked the way with men in rattlesnake boots and cowboy hats waiting with darkness in their eyes, empty roads on the horizon.
It became common to ride in convoys like merchant marine ships in the Second World War avoiding U-boat wolfpacks. A military vehicle would ride on both ends of the snaking route. All desire to drive on these roads vanished; economies withered.
This was the world I graduated into when I was your age. It felt like civilization was crumbling at its very core. As my friends and I discussed our post-college plans at night, our dreams were clouded by fear and uncertainty of the world we were inheriting.
This is why my former partner, John Graham and I started Project Raven.
We made our initial prototypes our Senior year and after graduating, we launched Advanced Air Systems. We were lucky enough to assemble the best talent of our generation.
We named it Raven because of its intelligence. They are ruthless and protect their own. They are pragmatic scavengers that hunt the nests of other birds; unobtrusive and yet omnipresent.
We were not the first to make anti-drone drones, but we had the best technology.
Our first goal with the Raven1 was to make our cities safe again. We launched it for city police departments to protect the skies.
The first Ravens were the size of frisbees. We deployed them across entire neighborhoods where they would hover like sentinels equipped with our proprietary AI and predictive light-weapon systems. If there were rogue drones flying above the skyline, our Ravens shot them down.
The day we launched, we watched as they systematically destroyed dozens of drones over the Bay. It looked like a large, choreographed dance. The Ravens would find smaller drones and circle around them as they analyzed and predicted their flight patterns. They would shoot a combination of lasers and high-tensile string. Threads of thin smoke would follow as the rogue drones plummeted to earth like Icarus.
The added benefit of having the Ravens in our cities was that we could also make our streets safe. We found that if we increased the Raven density around each neighborhood, they could identify gun shots. As soon as they heard gunfire, Ravens would triangulate the location. With sufficient numbers and their 75 mph speed, it took about ten seconds from the time the gun was shot until an area could be made secure.
I remember one of the first nights we deployed, there was a drive-by shooting in one of the pilot neighborhoods. In less than a minute, one of our Ravens had identified the target vehicle. It followed the car silently down the freeway for ten miles until it identified an empty stretch of road and then shot out the fleeing vehicle’s tires. Two more Ravens followed, emitting a paralyzing sound and securing the scene.
After that night, John Graham and I parted ways. While he was instrumental in starting the company, he refused to let us grow to our full potential. John failed to see that the world we were making was necessary. He was a child of the past — the first among many. We were doing nothing different from any other established security force. Our Ravens were just more efficient.
Those of you standing can jeer, but our cities became safe again. Ravens transformed them. The rate of unsolved homicides and rogue drones plummeted. We saved tens of thousands of lives a year in the US alone.
From the cities, it was just a small leap to the countryside. All we needed was more weaponry and a lighter design.
We obtained permission to do a pilot in a high-violence zone in Mexico: the road between Mexico City and Acapulco to be exact. Unsure of the Raven2’s accuracy, we launched one Raven per mile — an order of magnitude more than we need today. The Raven2 was originally the size of a large table — diamond-shaped, light as a bird. It would hover in the sky like a kite, riding air currents while it waited to act.
My team and I waited in an unmarked truck at the old road’s entrance, shielded from the tropical heat. After a tense day, we learned that the results of the pilot exceeded our wildest dreams.
The Raven2s shot down seventy-five rogue surveillance drones on that highway alone with only five Raven2s lost in counter-fire. A week after launching, we had secured that road from all non-governmental surveillance. The communities around Acapulco, after a decade of neglect, were reborn.
It took about ten years for the world to return to normalcy. To date we have sold over three million Ravens world-wide. You are safe because of them — make no mistake about it. All public events, major cities and thoroughfares are now supervised.
To those protestors among you, let me speak bluntly. It is true that rogue drones have adapted. The past few years have seen a return of some violence. But new generations of Ravens are even more powerful and precise. This is technological evolution. It is an inevitable part of innovation.
You blame my company for the weaponization of the skies, the panopticon, the new Cold War. But you don’t remember the 20s. You don’t know how close we came to the abyss.
You can keep your backs turned. White doves can fill your dreams as you long nostalgically for the past you never knew. But this is the new future — there is no turning back.
When you look up and see the Ravens in the skies, be grateful.
On Twitter: @gasca
Edited photograph; original by John Morgan
