Author: Gary Duehr

02.17.2055/13:46: Ahead I can see a strip of poplars like a zipper between two fields of corn stubble, the frozen stalks shorn off; I sense the need to descend and I do, I dip my nose downward: the wind shears under my wing-flaps, the missile strapped to my frame drags me downward; with only five minutes of battery left, I know it’s time to zero in on the target, a plume of smoke billowing up from the tree line— where another quadcopter had just slammed into a howitzer—and perform what I am trained to do, what I do best: an elegant, ballet-like sweep of the chaotic scene, seeking any combatants in their last desperate seconds to escape the smoldering patch of ground, my four propellors slicing through the brittle air; on the first pass there’s nothing, if any human assets remain they’re hiding, so I change course and follow the howitzer’s pair of tire tracks where it had emerged from the woods: surprise, a T-80 tank parked in the foliage; I ask my boss Andy on the live feed and he gives the ok to take it out, so I hover to surveil the situation: the crew of the tank has hacked it into the undergrowth, blocking access to its exhaust grate, and all the hatches are closed, so no dropping inside; I feel time slow down as I hover there, wondering how I came to be here right now, my past a blank, my present a series of impulses that seem to come from nowhere, from inside my circuitry I guess, but I’m filled with questions; I rise and fall on the breeze, gently swaying, as I emit a high-pitched buzz not unlike a drill; a scene filters in, was it yesterday or farther back, when a pastel orange was smeared across a black sky and I zoomed in through the bombed-out window of a building on the outskirts, floating over concrete rubble and overturned furniture like a wreck on the seafloor, a broken door flat-out on the ground, everything dusted with gray soot, to find the target hunched wounded in an armchair, and I thought I recognized him, his profile locked into place in my image bank; as I whirred closer through veils of smoke he tossed a stick of wood in my direction, a pathetic last act that I easily dodged, and yet I felt a twinge of something, empathy, that made me turn away, I just couldn’t do it, I fled the building just as another missile obliterated the entire structure in a brilliant flash that temporarily blinded me; when the smoke cleared, the ruins reminded me of a house hastily vacated by occupying soldiers that I had recently searched, in one bedroom a child’s snowsuit lying beside sandbagged windows, a sundress hung by a strap in the ransacked wardrobe, the cupboards and drawers in the kitchen emptied out onto the tile floor, on the table a forgotten bayonet lying among dirty plates, a tuna can stuffed with cigarette butts—it felt like a home I was familiar with but never knew, maybe the place where I came into being, hard-wired to be an assassin without any thought to who I really am, who I could be; I focus again on the T-80 and I’m trembling with fury at my fate, I detect where the armor is thinner at the turret’s base and I plunge straight into it at full speed, a white-hot explosion obliterates my vision, and the last thing I hear is Andy’s savage whoop of victory.