Hieroglyph (36 page)

“I don't know if I believe in your cause yet, Mr. Appledrone. The congress was amazing and scary and confusing. What I'm saying is, I don't even know if I fully
understand
your cause. That's what I thought I was trying to do, what Charlotte was asking me to do for you, to translate what you're saying so people like my mom and dad can understand it. If you can't do that . . .”

“Why did you take the job, if you're not sure?”

“I don't know, Mr. Appledrone. I'm unemployed at the moment, and my job-counseling app, Jobber, thought I could use the experience. And I—”

“You're saying Jobber
recommended
you become my intern.”

As I answered, I understood my mistake. “He thought . . .”

“And you call Jobber ‘he.' Oh, you dumb little boy.”

Johnny jumped up from his chair, faster than I would've expected possible, and started poking his Camper with a scanning wand, stopping finally, after ten minutes of searching, near his minifridge. “Look at
that
. Just go
look at that
.” Between his fingers Johnny held a big dead cockroach. “Now, you can see it's not one of mine. Bad craftsmanship.” Johnny turned it over. Picked at it with his multitool till its legs started running uselessly. Pulled up its wings and unfolded a tiny satellite dish. It unfolded and unfolded. “You brought a friend, Arun.”

“What is it?”

Johnny popped off the carapace, looked at its innards with a tiny loupe. “Insect media.
Bioelectronic
. Not meant to kill.” Poke, poke. “Maybe surveillance. Possibly meant to hack my physical systems.”

“How can you be sure
I
brought it?”

“Maybe it's just a coincidence, Arun, but it's spoofing your DNA. It was invisible to my scanners because I trusted your genome. You need more than a hobbyist fabricator to make this.”

“Mr. Appledrone, I'm sorry if I—”

“Don't be sorry.” Johnny looked up at the skies, worried. “Be useful. Help me unload my stuff. Gotta make sure my van is bug-free. Charlotte and the others will be here soon. Called them up. This is a bad sign. While we're at it, we should nuke your phone. Do not trust that job-search app. Trust nothing on the mediasphere, Arun, and maybe someday you'll be less stupid.”

IT TOOK A COUPLE
hours before Johnny was satisfied that his Camper was clean. Charlotte, Beatrice, Sandy, and Johnny's newly christened intern, Petra, waited for him to give the all clear.

“Why's he so paranoid?” I said.

“Sometimes, he has reason to be,” Charlotte said.

“Other times?”

Sandy shook her head, managing to communicate sarcasm without words.

We were hungry, so we decided to drive to a nearby Denny's. Halfway there, Johnny pulled over.

“Something's wrong with the Camper,” he said. “I know it. I might need your help, so stay close.”

Everyone remained stony. Johnny tested even those closest to him.

“You know,” I said to Charlotte. “Johnny didn't want me to do social strategy for him. He wanted the names of truckers to convert. Pick them off while they're desperate.”

“I told you,” Sandy said. “I
knew
he was bullshitting us.”

“What did you tell him, Arun?”

As I considered my answer, I watched Johnny limping toward the Camper. Beneath the fancy dronepunk gear, he was basically an old man, tired, out of breath, but determined. He was of a different era, had grown up in an America that he was, I imagined, sad to see die. None of us knew that other world. It took effort to see with Johnny's eyes, every second requiring tremendous concentration, dedication, and imagination. But thinking of the truckers at BigMachine, remembering their agonized stories, knowing that no mediasphere news site ever seemed interested in telling those stories, thinking how very deranged with despair Martin Gallagher must have been to do what he did, helped me understand Johnny, at least temporarily. “I don't know what I told him,” I said, a second or two before what happened happened.

PEOPLE ASK HOW I
felt. I don't like talking about it. They say it must have been hard to watch. I usually stay silent at such provocations, but yeah, okay, it was hard. It's only out of a sense of duty that I formulate these sentences, that I say that an unmarked matte-black quadcopter descended lazily from the perfect sky, that it approached the Camper unhurriedly, that we were less scared than confused when we saw it, that the Camper door was wide open. So we could see Johnny sitting atop his ergonomic throne, looking through workstation drawers, convinced that
something
was the matter. What was the matter was that a quadcopter carrying a small bomb was entering the Camper, flying through its open door. What was the matter was that Johnny looked straight on at the copter, blinked once, twice, turned to us, and then calm as could be, reached for his multitool, as if it might save him. What was the matter was that the quadcopter exploded with such force that it knocked us back. Debris flew in all directions. I suffered only minor injuries.

I, TOO, WAS PART
of what was the matter.

“I trusted Jobber,” I said, confused, half-crazed.

“Calm down. Don't blame yourself, Arun. We came to you.”

“You came to me because
you
trusted me. You shouldn't have.”

“If we couldn't trust you,” Sandy said, “our work would be worthless.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Because there'd be no one left to trust, Arun.”

JOHNNY SUSPECTED THAT HE
might be murdered. He had prepared for the possibility, had backed up his entire archive, all his research, all his notes, set it up to release automatically upon his demise. The Appledrone Archive, as it came to be called, was immediately banned on the official mediasphere, but you couldn't take it down from the Commons. In death, Johnny gained a following he never could in life. The drone that killed him was unmarked, untraceable. It was never clear who'd assassinated him. Most dronepunks were convinced that the FAA did it. The government claimed it was a rival from
within
the dronepunk community, a brilliant piece of propaganda, whether true or not. Other propagandists hinted that Johnny arranged for his own death—the ultimate form of “social media outreach”—to turn himself into the hero he so longed to become. Others spun stories more nefarious, stories involving undergrounds whose existence stood somehow athwart even the official shadow life of the republic, whose true motives—whose interlocking design—might never be put wholly into words.

As for me, I'm with the dronepunks. In my heart, I blame the FAA. Whatever the truth, Johnny's death generated huge interest in his mission. Even though Johnny would've hated it, his interns created a nonprofit to spread his vision. The Dronepunk Congress, meeting for a special virtual session, issued a strongly worded statement against the FAA, the FBI, the DOJ, the DIPP. The Commons grew larger as individuals and activist groups created new nodes on the mesh network, designed better encryption, more advanced onion routing schemes. After a week of silence, unusual tolerance, the FAA struck back. It escalated its suppression of the Commons. Soon after, the president signed into law the Hygienic Network Act, in the name of something like the nation's online spiritual health. The HNA closed the hobbyist loopholes that had allowed the Drone Commons to survive as long as it had. It was war, mostly bloodless, not bloodless enough. Everyone had to choose a side.

I TRUST YOU KNOW
which side I picked. The FAA continues dismantling the Commons, but not faster than it can rejuvenate itself. That's a kind of victory, albeit temporary, but unless others join the effort, unless our march on Washington next month “changes the conversation,” as some dronepunks say, the Commons won't last long. Sustained, mobilized state power is hard to beat. You might think mine is a sad story—my parents and sisters sure do—but don't make that mistake. We're building something, literally building it together. I want my sisters to live in an open republic, an open world, the world Johnny remembered or envisioned. We have our share of problems, but I'm not a pessimist. Haven't despaired. It helps that I won the first Johnny Appledrone Memorial Fellowship. I was, I will admit, a bit of an inside candidate. The award was small but has helped me pay my bills while I've worked to organize this protest. We're commemorating the one year anniversary of Johnny's death. He gave me hope that people working together can change things. His interns labor still, fighting for that better future. I see them now and again, when they pass through Wyoming, all except Charlotte, who returned to New York to get her law certification. We plan to meet up at the protest, to catch up, reminisce.

On reflection, my big mistake is obvious. I thought what I most needed was a job, but Johnny showed me that I needed a vocation. My vocation is to pass his story on. To fight the lies you've heard. Some of the lies are official. Johnny was right: don't believe anything unless you hear it on the Commons, and even then be careful. Don't be a dupe of power. Think for yourself. Organize. But there's an equally troubling effort to turn Johnny into a martyr or holy man. He didn't strike me as anything like that, just someone who was obsessed with informational freedom, someone who seeded the sky with drone poetry. It wasn't a bad obsession, not a bad life. But Johnny Appledrone was just the tip of a big, global iceberg. If you're hearing this, or maybe reading it, you know that much. All I can do is pass him on to you, to show you a jagged sliver of that iceberg through my small, particular memory of him. If you detect some lesson in his story, some abiding truth, go ahead and pass it on. Make it permanent, why don't you.

welcomia/Shutterstock, Inc.

STORY NOTES
—Lee Konstantinou

Citing Jim Karkanias, a researcher at Microsoft, Neal Stephenson defines a hieroglyph as a “simple, recognizable [technological] symbol on whose significance everyone agrees.” Examples include “Isaac Asimov's robots, Robert Heinlein's rocket ships, and William Gibson's cyberspace.” I prefer the
OED
's definition of a hieroglyph: “A figure, device, or sign having some hidden meaning; a secret or enigmatical symbol; an emblem.” The Drone Commons is meant to be a hieroglyph in this sense. It bears some secret or enigmatical political meaning that I'm not sure I can decipher yet. It's an emblem on whose significance I suspect few will agree. A hieroglyph is therefore, for me, an enigmatic science fictional symbol about which we find ourselves compelled to argue—in the hope of achieving agreement or at least mutual understanding, in the hope of envisioning a future that's better than the present. I make my hieroglyph public hoping some of you will help me make sense of it.

I'm grateful to Braden Allenby, Julian Bleecker, Brenda Cooper, Melodie Selby, Greg Staskowski, and Darusha Wehm for giving me technical feedback on this idea. I would also like to thank Kathryn Cramer, Ed Finn, Chin-Yu Hsu, Matt Kirschenbaum, Julie Prieto, and John Mullervy for reading early drafts of this story. I was inspired by some of the following texts and projects: Jonathan Zittrain's
The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It;
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, especially its Surveillance Self-Defense site; the New America Foundation's fascinating one-day conference “The Drone Next Door”; Google's Project Loon; the One Laptop Per Child project; the Tacocopter hoax; the 2011 BART cell-phone shutdown; the 2011 Internet shutdown in Egypt; as well as a
New York Times
article by James Glanz and John Markoff, “U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors,” on the U.S. attempt to use mesh networks to help foreign activists evade central authorities (in other countries, of course). Though I encountered them after I wrote the initial draft of this story, I learned from the dialogue-based book by Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann,
Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet;
Jussi Parikka's
Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology;
as well as reports discussing Amazon Prime Air and Facebook's efforts to build a drone-based Internet.

FORUM DISCUSSION
—The Drone Commons

See how Lee Konstantinou pitched his idea for “Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA” to the Hieroglyph community at hieroglyph.asu.edu/appledrone.

Response to “Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA”—Sri Saripalli

Sri Saripalli, a roboticist at Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration, discusses the realism of “Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA” at hieroglyph.asu.edu/appledrone.

DEGREES OF FREEDOM

Karl Schroeder