First excerpt: from "Black Bags and Other New Gadgets"

George Hilton clicked the icon on the upper right hand corner of his screen. A prompt flickered onto the screen. “Drone Operator AJUDFEY Log Out?” with two options: “Confirm” or “Deny.” George clicked confirm and the screen quickly changed to the New York City Department of Drones flag, the motto of the department scrolling underneath: “We are the eyes of the city.” He grabbed his bag, hooked it over his shoulder, and pushed himself up out of the faux leather chair-on-wheels. There had been little action on his long shift; in other words, it had been like every other shift. People always asked if it was exciting to “see everything” that happens in the city, but the truth of the matter was that the drone operators didn’t see much.

Rumors of people being arrested for dodging the drones was hogwash. The drones didn’t chase people unless the police were already in pursuit. The drones didn’t have heat vision or anything other than a camera with a high-powered zoom, an early concession by all levels of government after the ACLU brought a case through the courts. Even the conservative Supreme Court agreed that anything beyond regular camera lenses would be too far. The drones basically hovered over crime scenes and other events where the police and fire departments already were, much like helicopters did in the past. Drones were cheaper. Saving money was the total story, as the story usually is. Drone operators like George did very little. The unofficial motto of the department, bestowed upon it by the drone operators, was “We are the eyes of the city . . . unless they are closed when we’re asleep because the city is so fucking boring!”

He waved to his colleagues as he left the floor and pressed the elevator button down to the lobby of the Lower Manhattan municipal building the department occupied. The familiar ding. Doors open. Mechanical hum. George was soon muttering good-bye to the security guards as his shoes clicked against the marble lobby floor.

George was a native New Yorker, calling pretty much every borough home at one point in time as he grew up. His father was a cop and his mother a teacher. Bureaucracy ran in their blood, so it was no surprise when George got a job in the IT department of the city’s police force. When the city started its own drone program a few years ago, after the U.S. government passed the Public Drone Authorization Program Act (PDAPA) allowing, among other things, all levels of government in the country to run drone programs to surveil the public, George was invited to be a drone operator, a position that was prestigious or notorious depending on your point of view. His first day of work was met with a barricade of people who chanted mottos about preserving privacy. What they didn’t realize, in George’s opinion, was that human beings—citizens of this city, state, and country—citizens like him—were the drone operators. As he pushed his way through the throngs of people—with no help from the police, by the way, a theme that would run throughout his tenure at the department—George thought to himself, “I have no desire to see your private parts!” To George, that was the only privacy he needed to maintain—and even then he didn’t always close his blinds when he changed clothes.

As he walked up Broadway to catch the Y train at the Freedom Tower stop, he could hear two drones race above him in the night sky. The buzz of their motors, high-pitched enough that it was almost silent, was far too advanced to be local, and he wondered what federal crime was occurring to bring out the high-tech equipment. Not that he would ever be able to find out; those guys were secretive for certain. One of the biggest gripes of those who feared the drone programs was that the federal, state, and local governments, through some bizarre technological cooperation, would be able to create a database of citizens and, with the electronic surveillance program started by the NSA a decade earlier, track every single person. George thought this was laughably naïve. Technology had not advanced far enough to make it easy for government bureaucrats to cooperate with one another. All the miscommunication, information hogging, and jurisdictional battles that occurred before the drone programs occurred after—and there was one reason that these problems would continue: humans were involved. Territorial, stupid, imperfect humans: they were the stop-guard against an oppressive, surveillance-centered regime. Inefficiency, the bane of democracies, may just be what keeps democracies existing and tyrants at bay. Tyranny is an organized affair, and George knew that the various levels of government were anything but organized.

As he made his way down the subway station stairs, George noticed the lenses of a city surveillance camera at the entrance doing their focus dance. He gave a smile, quickly waved his cell phone over the reader, and ran to catch a Y train waiting in the station.

Once home, George settled in with a beer and his laptop on the couch. His former boyfriend was hypercritical of George’s penchant for spending all day looking at a screen at work and then all night looking at one as well. He liked screens, though—all his favorite activities involved them. Watching TV. Going to the movies. Reading a book. These were screen-based activities, and in the end, the ex wasn’t interesting enough to justify looking away.

As he read through the day’s news (yet another protest about the drone program—the mayor was getting hammered), the little red light on the top of the screen, next to the slightly larger dot that was his camera, flickered on. Initially confused, George quickly decided this was sign that he needed to get a new computer. It took ten minutes to reboot when I got home, he thought, and now the camera is turning on all by itself? He flipped through the list of applications that made use of the camera, but none were open. Just as he was wondering how exactly he was going to turn it off, the little red light flickered off.

He quickly looked up the Pear Technologies website and started shopping for a new laptop.

His next shift at the department was pretty typical—a police chase up the FDR, a bomb scare at the Queens Center Mall, and flyovers of warehouses in Brooklyn doing recon for a NYPD raid to take place in the near future. With 30 minutes until the end of his shift, Barbara Westinghouse, the chief of the department, burst onto the floor with a flurry of activity surrounding her, the entourage of aides who followed her were supplemented by three NYPD officers and what looked like two feds, dressed in black suits, white shirts, and black ties. The whole group shot across the floor to the desk of operator AJUDDFR. (Drone operators didn’t know each other’s names, were severely instructed not to exchange names or personal information, and were forbidden to fraternize outside the workplace. They accepted this as part of the job requirements.) The heads of several operators shot up out of their cubicles to see the entourage surround the cubicle, forming a blockade of wool suiting, leaving the only sounds as indistinct muttering. That is, until operator AJUDDFR started shouting.

“No, you’ve made some kind of mistake,” AJUDDFR said.

Indistinct muttering and awkward shuffling from the entourage. George felt the blood drain from his face and his heartbeat increase tenfold, the veins in his neck, arms, and thighs beating quickly.

“No, no. You don’t understand. That wasn’t me!”

Further indistinct muttering, as the NYPD officers moved in to physically subdue the operator. George looked around at the other drone operators for confirmation that he wasn’t hallucinating, but found no eye contact. Their eyes were focused on the scene.

“Look, I can explain . . .”

The feds held out their hands to the NYPD officers before they reached the operator and, with one swift motion, shook open a black cloth sack and thrust it over his head. Two of them each grabbed one of the operator’s arms and began dragging him off the floor, all the while, the operator’s muffled pleading to be allowed to explain echoed across the floor. After the feds and NYPD officers left, the remaining operators, all now fully standing up, looked dumbfounded at each other. George, so much so, that it was like his brain had switched off. He had no words, no thoughts. He couldn’t even wonder what the hell just happened.

Second excerpt: "Grief, in Tandem"

In a previous story, we meet Evan Brewer who is arrested and incarcerated for avoiding the surveillance drones.  

          As Mrs. Brewer entered the room, we held our collective breath. We knew that she wasn’t going to show up at the viewing until the last ten minutes, she had said that much to one of us, who then told all of us, and we didn’t fault her one bit for that because who wants to sit around and receive people’s condolences at her own son’s funeral. That may come off as bitter, but we really aren’t—we understand. Because of that understanding, we decided to receive each other, to do what she could not, to nod when one of us said, “So young” and another of us said, “Such a tragedy.” We nodded and wept and rubbed each other’s backs and gave hugs and introduced ourselves and shared vague recollections we transformed into full-blown memories and gazed at an enlarged picture of him in his high school baseball uniform, such a champ just a few years ago. We didn’t really know him all that much other than that he was her son, the loner, the kid who kept to himself, the one who certainly none of us thought was to blame for breaking his poor mother’s heart. We tried to manage our sadness, to look sad enough but not so sad as to be self-indulgent. We weren’t competitive in our sadness, which can so often happen at funerals, perhaps because the mother wasn’t here and there was nothing to prove, no one to show off to other than each other and when that’s the case, what’s the point?

Our collective breath held, the air quickly stagnated with the dense smell of lilies and other flowers, and as Mrs. Brewer moved slowly, we could see the floral scent waft around her, enveloping her, pushing her forward and inviting her to the front of the room. There had already been a bare path for her to walk—we knew she was coming any minute, and we all took our places—and our only movement was the slow turning of our heads as she walked forward. Her walk was at once tentative and determined, scared and fearless. She was a stout woman, barely reaching five feet high, but decidedly breaking that distance around her midriff. She wore a pale pink wool suit, bucking the customary dark colors, which was so like her, something we privately admired but publicly derided, her tendency to do the exact opposite of what everyone else did. The trim around the skirt, which reached just past her knees, was black and her heels, into which her ham hock feet were stuffed, were also black so perhaps that was her nod to tradition. She had the air of someone who was unsteady, and we all watched her feet to make sure that they weren’t buckling under the weight of her body and her grief. She didn’t cry, which was a blessing as she seemingly had more make-up on than the corpse of her son. Oh, don’t judge us, you don’t know her and this is how we talk to one another anyhow—no one, certainly none of us, is immune to our collective judgment, and perhaps this bitterness was just a defense mechanism because we have sons, brothers, nephews, neighbors, coaches, and friends who are his age, who do what he did because that’s the age we live in now, and this catty bitterness was a way for us to fight off what we all knew—that any one of us could be her. We are interchangeable when death and grief come calling and the arbitrariness of who gets selected, of who gets that boney finger pointed at her, is frightening.

She wobbled and wiggled, the super plush carpet comprised of wool and the tears of hundreds of mothers who came before her threatening a fall, but promising a soft catch if the probable became possible. She was held up by our collective stare and phantom hands pushing the air around her. When she got close enough to see his nose sticking up out of the coffin like Everest, the tears gathered at the edges of her eyelids, but she fought them back, determined that we would not see her cry. She was right to be concerned—we would use her vulnerability against her later, perhaps unknowingly.

The gossip had already started, the wafting smell of brown liquor emanating from her doorway when we made our visit but were refused entry. Who could blame her? Though, we all knew this wasn’t the first time the brown liquor was retrieved from the yellow and lime green cabinet above her orange refrigerator. We all knew that it didn’t take a family tragedy for the tart odor to envelope her—it barely took a broken nail. That was why he left and got involved with the wrong crowd, we whispered to each other. That’s not to say that we think she caused this, no. We just can’t help but point out a certain sequence of events.

The peak of Everest became but one part of the landscape of his face and, as she moved even closer, his brow and lips pushed up and created a small mountain range. Within a few more steps, she was unable to fight back the tears, letting her vulnerability crash into the room, into us, into the flowers, into him. It was his hands—laid delicately across his abdomen, the left over the right, the thumbs crossed—that got her, that made her lose any control. Those hands. The little hands that grasped her single finger when he was an infant. The hands that drew that picture of her in red and blue crayon that still hung on her refrigerator. The hands that first wrapped around a baseball bat and the hands that caught a homer. The hands that did homework, sitting at the formica kitchen table every night while she looked on, pretending to do the dishes. The hands she saw cuffed together at his trial. It was the hands that got her.

Down she tumbled. Out came the wail. We held back for half a second too long, then all lunged to her, scrambling to be first to catch her. But, even if all of us had reached her in time, the weight of her grief (not to mention her body) would have crashed to the ground regardless. Abandoning all hope in the catch, we extended our hands to help her up off the floor, but she didn’t—or couldn’t—take them. We had to spend what seemed like the longest three minutes of our lives with her writhing on the ground, wailing and crying, rolling all around like one of those toys you can’t knock over. We were embarrassed for her. If only she had let herself cry, if only she had some earlier, if only she hadn’t created such an unbearable build-up of emotion.

Later, one of us will hypothesize that this build-up, and the literal downfall, was no accident. She wanted us to see this, to be a part of her drama, that somehow this . . . this scene was a part of her grief. While she risked revealing a great amount of vulnerability that was like our own personal manna from heaven, she also accomplished something else. She was now the grieving mother, the one that broke down (and fell down!) at her own son’s funeral, and we were all standing there waiting for it to happen, the witnesses and gossips that would make sure everyone who couldn’t make it would know. She had that power over us now, that excuse that would go on to excuse everything she would ever do wrong, because all she had to do now was utter his name—no, the first syllable of his name, the remaining syllables choked back with tears—and all would be forgiven, excused, understood. The hypothesis will be meet with feigned doubt, but we all know that she’s capable of this kind of calculation.

When she did get up off the floor, refusing anyone’s hand for help, she walked over to the casket and knelt. We tried to look concerned and touched, but the drama that had just occurred, so drastically juxtaposed against the calm grief now displayed before us, had been tiring. We just wanted this to be over already. After all, she had arrived ten minutes prior, but we’d been there for hours and it wasn’t like we could have left right then, no, that would have been rude. So we stood, waiting, watching her pray for a self-indulgent amount of time.

Finally, she crossed herself and looked up from her pensive pose and stared at her son. Our hearts began to break for her again. Yes, Mrs. Brewer, you use this for as long as you need to. We will forgive you, excuse you, and try to understand the pain of losing a son twice—once to his law-breaking ways and second to a stabbing in the maximum security facility to which he was sentenced to live out his life. We understand it all.

Next Chapter: index