Chapter Sixty-One – KittyKopter
byChapter Sixty-One – KittyKopter
“Deadvods are videos, usually uploaded to a site like Youtube or one of its competitors, which features a content creator doing… whatever it is that they normally do.
Game, beauty, movies reviews, commentary on events, creating memes, uploading minidocumentaries… ect. On a mechanical level, they’re not so different from a normal channel.
Except that the creator is dead.
The videos are pre-recorded. Often by an ill content creator, or one who is planning on taking their own life. They often make light of their own demise, using it as a macabre punchline which resonates well with an equally dead-inside generation of viewers.
With the advent of greater deepfakes, the number of such videos, even created against the explicit desires of their once-living creators, had increased tremendously.”
–On Deathtuber and Deadvods, Mox Article, 2027
***
The run’s start was… not exactly textbook.
Or maybe it would be textbook, if someone ever decided to write a book about perfectly mediocre combat manoeuvres that kinda worked but only barely.
The Fury’s run planted dozens of fiery explosions in a line across the shore, and the follow-up by the rag-tag group of vans elongated that line by… less than we’d hoped.
Mostly that was because even with decent tech helping our pilots aim, it didn’t ensure that every bomb went off exactly where they were wanted. The line ended up being much thicker and shorter than what we’d planned for, mostly so that the small gaps left between explosives were properly covered.
Sucked, but that was how it was going to work out.
We circled the air above the burning patch of coast for a while while Gomorrah and I spent points reloading the bombers and we prepared to come in for a second run. The smoke was going to make organic verification a little hard, but that was fine. The stretch we’d bombed was about eighty metres long, which meant… we’d be here for a while.
“Do you think we should split the bombers up?” I asked. “Send each one further ahead to create more, smaller blocks?”
“They need to be within range for reloading. And that would mean that they’ll be all spread out if the antithesis decide to show up,” Gomorrah said.
I nodded along, not disappointed to have my idea shot down. I wasn’t married to it.
“Alright, welp, let’s keep at it.”
I actually had very little to keep at. Gomorrah was the one doing the flying, and I realized that I was mostly just along for the ride at this point. Maybe I could have stayed back in Downtown to put out one or two more fires instead of sitting in the Fury to watch Gomorrah set some non-metaphorical fires alight.
I decided to be at least a little productive. “Myalis, do we have much of an idea of where the aliens are in all that water?”
Not an exact idea. No. The best I can give you are estimates based on satellite surveillance and observations from climate-change analysis devices in the region. It all points to a rather large hive, but my data could be fooled.
“What could do that?” I asked, genuinely curious.
While I am so close to perfection that mere humanity cannot begin to measure it, the human-made devices I have no choice in using are not so well-crafted. The same kind of sensors and analysis devices have been fooled by things such as geothermal venting and clandestine chemical dumping.
“Huh,” I said. That made sense. But it led to another question. “Hey, is your obsession with cats something you have because they also think that they’re perfect?”
No comment.
“Alright, get me a little drone or something. Something small that’ll handle the water. If we’re going to do nothing, we’ll do nothing productively.”
“I could turn on the radio, if you’re bored,” Gomorrah said.
“This thing has a radio?” I asked.
She gave me a masked-face look that I shrugged off with the ease of someone used to that kind of ‘are you a moron’ kind of expression.
New Purchase: KittyKopter Model One
Points Reduced from 37,644, to 37,634
A small box plopped onto my lap and I popped it open revealing a small drone with a trio of off-centre propellers. They were those weird asymmetrical ones, with a loop missing out of the middle. It was black, with currently-pink RGB illuminating the inside of the prop rings, and the front had a little cat face sticker on it.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
I rolled down the window with a press of a button, then flung the drone out the side while connecting to it with my augs.
It took a millionth of a second or so, and then I had a second set of ‘eyes’ and a sonar system jacked into my hearing that painted a picture of the world around the drone.
Pointing it towards the water, the drone paused for a moment in mid-air, spun itself around to face the right way, then zipped forwards, whisper-quiet so as to not interfere with its own sonar. Or was it just quiet because not being quiet would be stupid for a spy drone?
0 Comments