The Drone Wars

The Road

"This place is a rumor mill," said the heavily French accented Lieutenant Clairvaux, "so I'm sure you've heard by now that Sergeant Murphy's squad hasn't been heard from in three days."  Pig looked out the plastic window of the hot tent, one of many at Camp Wolfcat.  As assigned, he'd met with Lieutenant Clairvaux and Sergeant Park at 5am that morning.  Sergeant Park was a no-nonsense Korean man, older than Pig, short with droopy eyelids.  Lieutenant Clairvaux spoke with fiery passion about the discipline he expected from his troops.  Pig decided to try to suppress his sense of humor and hope that it wouldn't find it's way out.  Mama was counting on him not to get into trouble.

"Their mission," the Frenchman continued, "took them into the jungle just south east of here, near the border with Cameroon.  Our platoon has been assigned to complete their mission and determine what happened to them.  Sergeant Murphy is an old friend of mine so I feel an additional sense of urgency about this.  We pull out at 1300 hours."

A few hours later, Pig was bouncing up and down in the back of a medium tactical vehicle rattling down the dirt road from Wolfcat to wherever it was that they'd be camping for the night.  The electric drive of the vehicle was silent, not so much for the road noise, even at a modest twenty miles per hour.  Shaded by the solar array that extended the driving range of the aging vehicle, Pig looked out the back at the dust kicking up from behind its big tires.  His whole squad was here, chatting amongst themselves, largely ignoring him.  Pig tried to insert himself several times but was ignored.  Patrick, a trucker in his civilian life, was up front getting to know Sergeant Park in the armored cab as they oversaw the autonomous driving system.   Across the aisle from him was Michelle Juarez, a woman slightly younger than himself with long luscious eyelashes who went by the name Mitch.  Next to her was a local man from the Nigerian army who was there as a guide and ambassador to the locals.  He was tall and quiet, and had distant look to him.  Kind of sad, certainly he had a right to be, his country had been torn apart by this war for the last three years.

As the jungle passed by in the dust, he imagined a human figure lurking by the side of the road.  His heart ached.  It had been just two days since the incident, a trauma that would remain with him until the day he died.  A week ago when he'd just gotten off the boat to Lagos, he'd seen how scrawny the kids here looked.  At least back home, you could buy enough to fill your belly with your UBI deposit, Universal Basic Income, a pity check from good old Uncle Sam.  Out here, if you were poor, you got nothing.  At least as a soldier he'd gotten rations, including oranges.  Children would stand by the roadside begging for food as the military trucks went by.  The previous day, he'd seen a generous soldier, fresh off the boat like himself, throw some of her food out at the kids who caught it and gave a wave of gratitude in return before she was whisked out of sight by her truck.  Pig wanted to duplicate the process so that morning he saved a orange from breakfast.  When the truck took him from the base to his work site for the day, he saw a terribly skinny girl, about twelve years of age with her arms extended in petition.  He'd seen no one more worthy of his magnanimity and tossed her the orange.  Pigs aim was good and it went right into her outstretched hands.  Unfortunately, as quickly as it reached her, it bounced out of her hands and back into the column of trucks.  Instinctively, the girl chased it into the dust cloud.  Did she get hit?  Her little body wouldn't have slowed those trucks down even a trace.  Pig would never know what happened, he'd have to make peace with that.

"Why do they call you Pig, anyway?" asked the lovely lady.

"Can't ya tell?" Pig responded with a good natured laugh.  "Look at ma nose!" he lifted up the tip of his nose making his nostrils even more prominent than they already were.  He snorted like a pig several times, all the while laughing. Several of the other soldiers laughed too. "That's what kids called me back in elementary school.  My mama said the best way to deal with them was to laugh with 'em."

"What's your real name?" asked the big Nigerian.

"Paris Foster," he said getting up and extending his hand.

"Sit down, Private," barked Mitch.  "Regs say remain seated at all times."

"Yes, sir, Corporal," Pig responded.

"Regs!?" said the brown haired soldier next to her, "Tell him about regs when your done dealing hash."

She got up and grabbed the man by the collar with her fist: "Shut your mouth, you oxygen thief.  I'll stop dealing hashish when soldiers like you stop needing it to deal with this war."

"OK! OK!" He said as he held up his hands in mock surrender.  "Say there, Rodriguez" he tried to diffuse the situation with distraction.  Mitch huffed and went back to her seat.  He continued addressing the black haired man across the aisle from him" "What do you think war will be like in fifty years?"

"Oh, I'd say there we'll be lucky if there are enough humans left by then to throw rocks at each other" he said morosely.  "The way we've screwed up the environment.  How we can't stop fighting.  Here we are wasting the last of the world's oil and nat gas trying to make sure that we get it instead of the Sino-Russians."

"You're always such a a downer, Rodriguez."

"How about you, Azikiwe?" he addressed the Nigerian.

"The machines will finally be smarter than us," he said with the utmost seriousness.  "The robots will finally turn on us.  And the machines will win."

"What about you, Pig?"

"Well, maybe I'm not as smart as Azikiwe here," he gestured over at the tall man.  "But I am perty smart sometimes." Pig paused, looking the brown haired man intently in the eye.  He continued seriously: "I once finished a jigsaw puzzle in just under two months and it said 4 to 8 years on it."  All the soldiers laughed.  "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.  The only thing that's guaranteed: it won't be what you're expecting."