SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
and other structures, but it was also a busy band, noisy with baby monitors and walkie
talkies and RC toys. Of course, all of those were pretty much toast at the moment, so
Lemmy had the airwaves all to himself.
He grunted in satisfaction. “It's up,” he said. “Maybe twenty-five minutes on the battery.” A
moment later: “It's got 4G, too. Must be picking up towers farther away from us -- it's the
altitude.”
“Great,” I said. “Get it over us.”
“Yeah.”
Ange, meanwhile, was hitting reload-reload-reload on her phone's wifinder, waiting for the
moment that the network the copter was retransmitting became available to her. “Got it,”
she said.
“Can you tweet out the URL for the livestream off the copter?”
“Derp. What do you think I'm doing?”
“Sorry.”
I had my phone out, too, and signed onto the UAV's network, sent out my tweet.
“Can you shut down its network bridge?” I asked Lemmy. “There's going to be a zillion
people trying to get online and none of the video'll make it out if they do.”
“Yeah,” Lemmy said. “Yeah, done.”
“Okay,” I said, and looked around for the first time since the pulse. “Holy mother of Zeus.”
It was as though all the light in the area had been sucked into the Earth, leaving us in a
realm of shadows. All I could see, for as far as I could make out in every direction, were
silhouettes, moving uneasily like stalks of wheat in a gathering storm. Here and there
people had found flashlights or headlights, and these created pinpricks of illumination that
stood out like searchlights.
Then, a wailing sound, a sound I hadn't heard since the day the Bay Bridge blew. It was
the San Francisco air raid siren, a sound like an effect from an old war movie. They used
to test it every Tuesday afternoon, but after the trauma of its actual use following the attack
on the bridge, they'd discontinued the tests. Too many people reacted to the sound with
post-traumatic stress freak-outs -- crying jags, an uncontrollable urge to hide or get out of
doors -- or indoors -- and various other low-grade psychotic reactions. There'd been a long
debate and finally the city had settled on testing the alarm by playing three short beeps,
three long beeps, and three short beeps -- Morse code for SOS.
But now the siren blared, and it was louder than I remembered, though I couldn't see the
nearest PA pole. It was so loud it felt like it was inside my head, so loud it made my teeth
clench as it howled up and down its waveform, a sound that every cell in my body knew
meant “Bad stuff is happening.”
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