SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
stretched-out ear piercings and blurred tattoos up and down his arms. He was a demon
in the machine shop, and was the first person I'd ask any time I had a question about
something big, fast-moving, and lethal. I always got the impression that he thought my
little electronics projects were cute toys, fun, but not serious like a giant piece of precisionmachined
metal.
I had the feeling he'd been talking to me for a little while, and that I hadn't heard him.
“Sorry,” I said. “Engrossing reading, is all.”
He smiled. “Look, I was going to go join the rest down at the big demonstration, bring some
UAVs along. Want to come along and be my crew?”
“There's a big demonstration?”
He laughed. “Come on, buddy, take a break every now and then, will you? You know
that big one that happened yesterday? Well, it looks like everyone who went yesterday's
come back again, and they brought all their friends. Downtown's shut down. I've been
playing with my quadcopters, think I can get them to produce some killer footage. They're
all rigged to act as WiFi bridges, too, each on a different 4G network, so we should be
able to supply some free connectivity to the crowd. I've also got a software-defined radio
rig in three of them that can triangulate on police and emergency bands. I think I've got it
set so they'll home in on any clusters of dense police-radio chatter, which should be pretty
interesting. But you know, I'm not really much of a coder, so I thought I could use a pit
crew to help me debug the code on the fly during the inaugural flight.”
Lemmy was also a UAV nut, though, again, I think he'd have preferred unmanned autonomous
tanks or ATVs, anything with a lot of shiny, heavy metal. I looked at my screen,
and my screen looked back at me, with everything I could have ever wanted to know about
Carrie Johnstone and a lot more.
I couldn't stop looking at it, but I didn't want to keep looking at it.
“Let's go,” I said, putting my lid down and sticking Lurch in my bag. “You can't write code
for shit, dude.”
“Yeah,” he said, cheerfully. “Code's just details. I'm a big-picture kind of guy.”
Lemmy wanted to drive -- it being hard to carry four miniature quad-copters the couple
of miles to the periphery of the demonstration -- but we probably could have crawled in
less time than it took to beat the frozen traffic leading up to the march. I spent the time
getting familiar with Lemmy's control software, which built on some standard libraries I was
already familiar with: systems for steering UAVs and for running software defined radios,
mostly.
Software-defined radio is hot stuff, and it's kind of snuck up on the world without us noticing
much. Old-fashioned radios work with a little quartz crystal, like the one in an electrical
watch. Quartz vibrates, buzzing back and forth at a rate that's determined at the time that
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