Chapter 9 - The Sky Has Eyes
The drone appeared within three minutes. It wasn’t a small hobby quadcopter; it was a matte-black commercial octocopter equipped with an automated tracking camera and a high-frequency acoustic broadcast pod. It hovered seventy feet above the cruiser, pacing the vehicle effortlessly as Vance navigated through the winding, tree-lined avenues of the residential district.
Through the broken car windows, the drone began to speak. It didn’t blast a siren; it broadcasted a synthesized voice, calm, synthetic, and loud enough to rattle the windowpanes of the identical suburban homes lining the street.
“ATTENTION CITIZENS. THE CHILD KNOWN AS LEO IS CURRENTLY ENGAGED IN AN UNAUTHORIZED OFF-SCRIPT DETOUR. RETURN HIM TO THE NEAREST AUTHORIZED CONTENT COLLECTOR FOR A COMMUNITY REWARD OF TEN THOUSAND TOKENS.”
Leo covered his ears, shrinking down into the footwell beside Maya. “The voice is mean,” he whimpered. “Mama, turn off the TV.”
“He thinks it’s television,” Vance muttered, his knuckles turning white on the steering wheel. He glanced into the rearview mirror. The black SUV was two blocks behind, maintaining a disciplined pursuit, waiting for the drone to pin them into an inescapable bottleneck. “Maya, what’s in this damn tomato? Why is a global media firm willing to crash vehicles in broad daylight over a squeaky toy?”
Maya pulled the heavy red object from Vance’s jacket. Her dirty fingers traced the seam along the plastic skin until she found a tiny recessed pinhole. She pressed it with the tip of an old paperclip she pulled from her hair.
The plastic shell separated. Inside lay an industrial-grade flash drive, encased in shock-absorbent titanium alloy, accompanied by an audio-log transcript etched onto microfilm.
“It’s the harvest ledger,” Maya said, her voice dropping into a register far too mature for a ten-year-old. “Every infant adopted through their dummy non-profits. Every staged crisis. Every script written to milk viewer donations for fake rescue charities that funnel directly into the parent corporation’s Cayman accounts. Leo isn’t just an orphan actor, Vance. He’s the legal owner of the entire original farm property where they run the servers. They forged his deceased father’s power of attorney.”
May you like
Leo looked up at the word father, his eyebrows knitting together in confusion. “Dada?”
Before Maya could answer, the drone directly above them deployed an electromagnetic pulse net, striking the hood of the cruiser with a blinding flash of blue sparks. The engine sputtered, died, and the power steering locked rigid.
