Chapter 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.

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?

Maybe a bit of both?

The drone slowed considerably before hitting the water, but then it picked up the pace again.

“Got that heatmap?” I asked, and Myalis overlaid it with my vision. The drone angled itself to the side a little, and pushed towards the generated source of warmth.

I saw some seaweed move by, and some underwater shit. There was surprisingly little trash once the drone moved past the edges of the shore.

“Looks like a normal lake to me,” I said.

This lake was once home to a large number of fish. A prohibition on large-scale industrial fishing from the 1970s has been kept up to this day, and with few nearby factories dumping anything into the lake, this was one of the cleanest lakes in the North American region. Easily in the top fifty. It should be inhabited.

I had the drone kick up the juice on its sonar and let my eyes go half-lidded as I listened. Gomorrah and the others were starting on their next bombing run already, but my attention was entirely on what I was seeing and hearing from the drone.

“No fishies,” I said.

A disquieting fact, yes.

“Do you think the aliens got them all? Could they have? I can’t imagine a model three with a little fishing line waiting for a fish to bite... okay, yes, I can imagine that... they’d have one of those floppy hats with the little hooks on.”

“Cat,” Gomorrah said.

“Yeah?”

“Stop imagining the enemy as cute.”

“What, it’s not like I wouldn’t shoot them anyway.”

The antithesis do have aquatic-specialising models, as well as modifications to existing models that make them more viable for aquatic environments. In this case, however, a large number of model ones could clear out a lake of this size in a few days to hours, depending on the number of them.

Right, the bird-like ones were probably about as big as the average fish.

I sat up straighter as something flew towards the drone. It wasn’t creating much turbulence as it moved, but it was probably at least somewhat noticeable.

I checked the controls, found the Evasive Manoeuvres option, and then toggled that on a moment before a model one tried to clamp down on the drone.

Unfortunately for the bird, the drone was faster on the straightaway, and it shot away before it could do anything.

The bombing run ended, and we almost immediately started on the next one. I was barely paying attention to that anymore.

There was more than a single mean alien down here.

The drone’s sonar fired, revealing a lakefloor hive that stretched on to the very edges of the sonar’s range. Large roots were all over, with heavy sacs next to them filled with unborn aliens. Corals, like pens for angry cows, held in thousands of smaller models while others moved along the surface of the hive.

I saw a number of them pushing dead meat into bulging organic bags filled with whatever crap the hive was using as digestive juices.

“Ah, fuck,” I said.

Worse was the large line of aliens slowly walking its way to the shore.

I had the drone follow them, and quickly realized that it stretched almost all the way to the shore.

At the head of the line were several model twenty-twos. Huge mobile hives currently encircled by entire flocks of smaller aliens. They were forcing their way through the water on six massive legs each.

They were a concern all on their own. Any one of them planting themselves close to Downtown could wreck the entire place if left unchecked, spawning a ready-made hive in no time at all.

But the even bigger alien, the one whose model number I didn’t even know... yeah, that one had me a lot more worried.

I sent the video I had to Gomorrah and felt her sitting straighter a moment later. “That’s going to be a problem,” she said.

“We’re bombing the wrong damned place,” I said. “And I don’t think our bombs are big enough.”

That warmech is still within your price range, Catherine.

***