SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
that the Bay Bridge was an inside job -- it's ever so much more evil if it wasn't an inside
job.
Thinking this stuff, talking it over with Ange, I started to feel like, somehow, the crowd's
mood was changing. It was getting dark, and the temperature was dropping -- it had
started off as one of those San Francisco September days that are as hot as a July day
anywhere else, but it was turning into one of those foggy San Francisco nights that makes
you cold right to your marrow. The day's excitement was giving way to more anger and
more fear, and it seemed to me that I was hearing a lot more crackling police radios, seeing
a lot more helicopters and UAVs overhead.
We were stopped in a particularly dense spot near McAllister Street, so I got out my phone
and watched Lemmy's copters' point of view for a while. There were a lot more cops, it
was true. One of the copters was off at the fringe of the protest and as it swung around, I
saw a line of police and military buses stretching out to infinity, seemingly all the way to the
Embarcadero. Either those buses were there to bring about a zillion cops to the protest,
or they were there to take a zillion protesters away in handcuffs. Or both.
“Lemmy,” I said, showing him my screen. Ange pulled my hands lower so she could see,
too -- I was so freaked that I'd forgotten to take her height into account, which is pretty
freaked, all right. Ange wasn't kind to people who were oblivious to the world of short
people.
“Time to get out of Dodge,” Lemmy said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Let's go.” We looked around, trying to figure out the shortest path out of the
protest, starting to feel a little fear. As I scanned the crowd, I saw that I wasn't the only one
getting wild-eyed. There were probably lots of other people who'd been tuned in to feeds
from overhead and noticed the massing horde.
I looked back at my phone. “Something's weird.”
Ange yanked my arm down, stared at my phone. “Can you be more specific?”
“No,” I said. “I can't. But something's weird.”
Lemmy peered intently at my screen.
“No police UAVs,” he said.
We all looked up at the airspace over the protest. The density of UAVs -- gliders and
quadcopters -- had definitely fallen off. “How do you know it's the police UAVs that are
missing?” I said.
“They're the lowest flying,” Lemmy said. “Better for getting face shots.”
My mouth had gone dry. “Why would they ground all their UAVs?”
Lemmy looked at me with a crazy eye-roll. “Maybe they don't want to get any video of
what's about to happen.”
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