...And We Will Have Snow

Chapter 4-8: The Drone

Ray had another epiphany. He looked at Cern. "You said Vlad had a golem body. That means he had somehow put together a physical body that he could control from his spirit dream, right? And then projected a mental image that made it look human?"

"That's right, Ray. What are you thinking?"

"Do you know how easy it would be to build a robot golem that the QAR can control wirelessly? One that a visitor like you could control with the QAR?"

"And anyone wearing their lenses would see it as me? Or Dema or Xayna? It would be like having a physical presence here?"

"Right. It would be like operating a drone."

"You mean a drone body? Not a drone truck or a drone helicopter."

"Exactly."

"Where would you get one of those?"

"Uhm, I don't know. But there was a gamer craze a while back where the gamers had drone avatars. Instead of playing in VR they gathered in a field somewhere with their drones, geared up and walked their drones out onto the field to do battle with each other."

"Wonder why I never heard of that."

"Not surprising. It didn't last long, never really caught on. They said it was fun while everyone was in VR seeing all the other drones as avatars. But at the end of the day all that was left was a field cluttered with busted up drones. Probably took them days or weeks to repair the damage if they wanted to play again. Not much fun in that."

"Weeks, or a ton of money. Must have been expensive."

"More expensive than just meeting in VR, that's for sure."

"Um, not as expensive as you might think, though." Tengri added this.

"What do you mean?" Ray asked him.

"Do you remember the ISIS wars in Syria and Iraq? How it was big news for years, and then suddenly it got very quiet over there?"

Several nods and attentive looks.

"You mean...?"

"You remember that company in Boston that made robot dogs and ponies? How they were funded by DARPA for a while, then suddenly they were bought out by Google?"

"Uh huh,"

"Well, the dogs and ponies were for show on YouTube. What DARPA really wanted was a drone soldier."

"And when they got it the whole project went black, I suppose."

"Of course. And quite literally. They made the drones out of carbon fiber bones and carbon filament tendons, enclosed in a black carbon polymer sheath, invisible to radar and infrared detectors. Powered by miniature sun bottles so they could run forever. Remotely operated by special ops soldiers, sitting in some top-secret location with military-grade drone control consoles."

"And these guys took down ISIS?"

"Believe it or not, it was a UN operation. The charter doesn't allow them to risk soldier's lives, so all their troops were officially non-combatant. But there were no lives at risk in this op. It was the ultimate answer to the ISIS willingness to sacrifice suicide bombers. China built the drones by the thousands. The US or Russia would airdrop them by the battalion at night. Then the special ops UN troops would pick up the drones and walk them into an ISIS camp. The drones were un-armored and so light weight they rarely set off a mine."

"Wow. Imagine, nearly invisible drones being walked in at night by special ops troops trained in stealth. The Muslim terrorists must have thought they were demons rising out of the ground."

"If the terrorists tried to fight they were taken down by skilled hand-to-hand combat and incapacitated. Once they got a taste of this, the rest of them rapidly faded into the desert. The Arabs called the drone soldiers devil brigades, when they dared to speak of them at all."

"What happened to them?"

"The drones? When the terrorists lost their will to fight, the drones were all withdrawn and decommissioned. They're probably stacked like cordwood in a top-secret warehouse somewhere."

"And you think that's where the gamers got their drones?"

"I'm pretty sure it started with some of those special ops soldiers who longed for the action when their tours were over. Some of them knew where to find the war surplus."

"They were doing it for the thrill of fighting without anyone actually getting hurt. But with QAR we could do it for the more social reasons that we like having bodies."

"Drones operating drones." Everyone turned to look at Sedna.

"Don't you see? That's what we are. We grow these bodies and schlep them around just to have a physical interface with what we call the real world. Now we have an assembly line cranking out generic bodies we can animate through QAR and overlay with our self-image. So anyone can easily have a real physical presence anywhere a drone can go. Even Mr. Green."