George Brewer 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 mottoe 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.

Next Chapter: Two Story Excerpts