David Wong - This Book is Full of Spiders

Figuring out where the drone pilot was operating from was easy—a Google search told her that Unmanned Aerial Vehicle or UAV pilots operated from only one location—Creech Air Force Base, just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. Next she went sifting through the e-mail system to see if she could somehow get so lucky as to find e-mails from dronepilotdude@creechairforcebase.mil but there was no such luck. What she did find was a series of e-mails flying back and forth from the day before, with various people clarifying the “ROE” (which she figured out was Rules of Engagement) with the “Zulus” in the quarantine, as apparently the drone had shot a guy who was attempting to climb the fence and Amy gathered from reading fifty or so e-mails that they were supposed to wait until somebody actually got over the first fence before shooting. Somewhere buried in all of these forms she found an “Eyes Only” document that had been sent to the guy who manned this workstation, some kind of after action report on that incident that named the drone operator: a Captain Shane McInnis.

This was part of an e-mail thread that bounced back and forth between people with REPER e-mail addresses. The issue was the kid who had been shot, a twenty-two-year-old male they were referring to only as Patient 2027. She sifted through a bundle of scanned Eyes Only reports, until she found some kind of admission form they were using for the quarantine. Everything was expressed in jargon and acronyms but Amy was able to piece together that the kid had been held only because he was found in proximity to somebody else who was infected—the kid had killed that person with a baseball bat. But the relevant part of the report on the kid himself were these five words that ended the admission form:

“No signs of infection detected.”

Patient 2027 was not a zombie. He was just a kid. And now he was dead.

One thing became clear when following the chain of e-mails on this subject: that particular fact had not been shared outside of a very small group of people in REPER.

Amy looked down at the clock. It was now 4 A.M., which would be two in the morning Nevada time. The shooting happened at 3 P.M. yesterday. Obviously it wasn’t the same guy manning the drone all the time. Did they work some kind of regular shifts? If so, that meant Captain McInnis would be back behind the stick in the morning. It really didn’t matter either way, that name was all she had.

All right. Start simple. Did Captain Shane McInnis have a Facebook page? She searched. Yes, he did. Set to private, which made sense for a guy in that line of work. She could break into that—Facebook’s password reset request form was easy to fool—but she wasn’t sure that’d get her what she wanted. Back to Google. She looked up the schools around where the air force base was located, and searched for anything on Google with the names of the schools and “McInnis” in the same article.

Boom. Nevaeh McInnis, point guard on the middle-school basketball team. Want to bet that’s Captain McInnis’s daughter? Thirteen years old—Amy knew she’d have a Facebook page. Ten seconds later, it was up on her screen. She had left everything public, her pics—including shots of her posing with Dad in a dress uniform—her friends list (there was Dad, listed under “family”). Nevaeh had 132 Facebook friends. Amy sent her a friend request, wondering what time Nevaeh would wake up in the morning to check it. But Nevaeh was apparently a night owl, because even at two in the morning her time, she was up to immediately accept a friend request from a total stranger ten years older than her.

Teenagers.

Five minutes later Amy was chatting with Nevaeh McInnis, and realizing that this was going to have to be handled with some delicacy.

Nevaeh McInnis: who is this?

Amy Sullivan: Hi navaeh, this is going to sound really weird but this is kind of an emergency and we don’t have much time.

Nevaeh McInnis: Nevaeh

Nevaeh McInnis: Not navaeh

Amy Sullivan: Oh sorry

Nevaeh McInnis: its heaven spelled backward

Amy Sullivan: Right its very pretty

Nevaeh McInnis: I cant sleep

Nevaeh McInnis: Chatting with my friend in Taiwan

Amy Sullivan: Anyway this isn’t a scam or anything, I’m not going to ask you for any money or account numbers ok

Nevaeh McInnis: k

Amy Sullivan: And no naked pictures or anything like that

Nevaeh McInnis: I have a friend named Taylor, she’s only a year older than me, and this guy emailed her and offered her a modeling contract and then her mom drove her all the way to LA to have pictures taken, and do you know what happened then?

Amy Sullivan: Nevaeh, this is really important. I’m in [Undisclosed] right now. Do you know what that means?

Nevaeh McInnis: omg are you a zombie

Amy Sullivan: No! That’s kind of the point.

Nevaeh McInnis: oh wow dont tell anybody but my dad is in the air force and he flies a robot plane shooting zombies

Amy Sullivan: I know

Amy Sullivan: That’s why I contacted you

Amy Sullivan: I’m here on the ground and so is my boyfriend

Amy Sullivan: And we’re not zombies

Amy Sullivan: But your dad doesn’t know that

Nevaeh McInnis: hes in bed

Amy Sullivan: OK is he going to fly the robot tomorrow

Nevaeh McInnis: hes tired all the time

Nevaeh McInnis: i think so

Amy Sullivan: Nevaeh, I’m really scared

Amy Sullivan: We’re all scared down here

Amy Sullivan: Because I think they’re going to shoot all of us

Nevaeh McInnis: They won’t do that

Amy Sullivan: I need you to make sure they don’t

Amy Sullivan: I need you to talk to your dad

Nevaeh McInnis: I cant talk to him about his work

Nevaeh McInnis: hes not allowed to talk about it

Nevaeh McInnis: and he gets mad

Nevaeh McInnis: and he gets quiet

Nevaeh McInnis: hes tired all the time

Amy Sullivan: Then you have to let me talk to him

Nevaeh McInnis: hes in bed

Amy Sullivan: I just need his e-mail address.

There was a long, long pause without a response. This was the point where any caution young Nevaeh had developed about strangers on the Internet should have triggered her alarm bells. Amy tried to picture the girl on the other end, almost two thousand miles away. She imagined her simply closing her laptop and curling up in bed. Then she imagined her going into her father’s room and trying to wake him up. Then she imagined her calling the police.

Finally, the chat window blinked to life again, and an e-mail address appeared.

It was as simple as pulling up the e-mail that had the attached form with the analysis of Patient 2027, and forwarding it to the personal e-mail account of UAV pilot Captain Shane McInnis. “No signs of infection detected.” The body of Amy’s e-mail was concise and to the point:

Read this. The boy you shot was not a zombie. The people inside the quarantine are not infected. They are people. They are American citizens. You have been lied to.

There were a million things that could go wrong with this—it could wind up in his spam folder, he might not even check his e-mail in the morning before going on duty, he might dismiss it as a hoax. But she couldn’t think of where else to go with it.

All right. What next? After the drones, the other layer of security around the fence was the unmanned gun things. Amy brought up the bank of video screens, which she had figured out were feeds from those guns. Still a whole lot of nothing going on outside the fence, a series of static scenes tinged night-vision green. She spent the next half hour poking around, trying to figure out how the guns worked. They were called Gladiators (long name: Gladiator Tactical Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or TUGVs). They had diesel engines that both turned the wheels when they needed to move and charged onboard generators to keep themselves powered up. Just as with the aerial drone, she hit a brick wall when she tried to find an application that would let her actually control one of them. That was too bad because she had this fantasy about taking one over and just rolling it around the fence, going on a robot shooting spree and taking out all of the others. But, again, she wasn’t thinking—those machines were military, the room she was in was REPER. And no matter how hard she tried, she could not figure out who was operating them.