“FUCK!  Get down Xavier!  Another fucking drone in 500 meters!!”  Anna braked hard entering the corner leading to the final stretch before Highway 101, they were still 10 blocks until they could get out of San Francisco’s drone patrolled airspace.  Xavier braced into the back seat as Anna pushed the X5 hard into the sharp corner.  The pain from his earlier gun wound was coming back even though the bleeding had stopped.  He pulled the last Vicodin he had from the passenger seat first-aid kit and swallowed the bitter-tasting medication.  He knew it wouldn’t last.  The pill was of unknown age but he needed something to get his mind off the pain even if it was not better than a shitty TicTac at this point.

San Francisco had been placed under strict road closures at the beginning of the epidemic and now the city was littered with steel and concrete road barriers resembling oversized, toy jacks.  The government attempted to shut the city off from federal support after riots erupted demanding accountability for the outbreak.  The National Guard arrived shortly after along with the new surveillance technology the Pentagon and Department of Defense had been funding for the last several decades through various shell companies and venture capital firms.

As a phased approach to locking the city down, the National Guard launched autonomous drones armed with pepper spray and high decibel sirens to deter protests and riots.  San Francisco’s tech-aware citizens realized these drones could be easily defeated with Internet sourced green astronomy lasers.  The $10 lasers were able to disrupt the sensitive sensor and camera arrays on the drones, rendering the drones useless (and often causing them to fall out of the sky), which the army only realized out after investing billions of dollars to create these so-called “future-proof” weapons.

Following any arms race, the army introduced armed (and laser hardened), autonomous drones that would use facial recognition and biometrics to deter citizens from unruly conduct.  Citizens then began building homemade potato-canons with fishing-net payloads to capture these machines for reverse engineering and parts scavenging.  At least PVC, fishing nets, and pipe glue were still easy to come by.

Anna toggled on the heads-up-display, four dots hovered in quadrants, with the SUV centered at the display’s origin.  Three dots were in green, one in yellow.  “Fucking pieces of shit, they didn’t detect the G2’s they’ve got on the city perimeter!!”

Anna cursed under her breath.  The drones were military surplus she had sourced from her other hacker friends at the Department of Defense, extremely similar to the ones attempting to stop them at this particular moment.  These “E1/ Endurance Gen-1” models were modified to fly higher and longer than the military drones, but had no weapons payload.  Their main task was to provide a detailed view of the surroundings in a 5 mile radius around the SUV as they traveled south towards Los Angeles.  The G2’s were recently deployed but Anna and Xavier had run out of time preparing the drones for their run.

“E3 IS GETTING READY TO FALL OUT OF THE SKY, XAVIER!”, “I’m on it,” Xavier grunted in response.  He reached down for his laptop to get a diagnostics report, his phone didn’t have the extended antenna link the laptop had, sitting two feet above their heads on the antenna array next to the car’s other defensive sensors and equipment.

Anna slid the BMW slid into another corner, wheels grinding out noise at the extra load and sudden acceleration.  They had heavily modified the SUV into an armored personal carrier, as the country devolved into third world status over the last several years.  Xavier had taken it upon himself to migrate a Tesla drivetrain into the SUV, scavenging the battery tech Elon and his engineers had seemingly perfected over the last few decades.

The other benefit of their hacked SUV?

The army and other bad actors could not immobilize them by pushing an OTA ping.  Anna had removed any over-the-air capabilities the Tesla hardware carried when originally shipped from their Fremont factory.  Original Tesla owners were ecstatic to receive features and “improvements” out of thin air but the government had used this nascent technology to their advantage as they lost control over its citizens.

As Xavier opened the laptop to connect to E3, the air around them became electric and filled with ozone.  Xavier glanced at Anna in the rear view mirror, he knew exactly what would happen next.  She was going to activate her, “disco ball”.  She hated it when he called it that.

Anna flipped open a toggle switch on the dash to ready the laser array on the roof.  Anna called out, “TWO MORE G2’S AT 450 METERS FROM THE SOUTH!”.  A brief flash of light lit up the road in front between the smashed out office buildings.  Then the report came.  A sudden concussion of pressure, followed by the smell of jet fuel and explosives.  The G2 drone that had been following them for the last mile had finally reached its weapons capable threshold and had began unloading its ordinance at the rapidly moving vehicle.

“XAVIER, WHERE IS E3?  I’M FUCKING BLIND UP HERE – I’M ACTIVATING THE BALL!” “Working on it!  The link is not fucking working, I told you we shouldn’t have bought those shitty British telecom antennas!”

Anna grabbed her glasses, and pressed the toggle switch, a brief flash of blurry, green lasers illuminated everything around in a 500 meter radius.  Months ago, her friend Amelia shot down one of the G2 drones with a net cannon.  The two spent hours reverse engineering the G2’s new defenses against green lasers.  Anna had found a vulnerability in the new drones that only required placing a small piece of lens in front of the green laser, altering its wavelength.  The slight change in wavelength was just enough to disrupt the G2’s navigation hardware.

So much for “future-proof” weapons.

The defensive mechanism she activated was no bigger than a football, and true to its terrible nickname, was a disco ball of modified green lasers that rotated at a high speed.  Laser beams flashed out in multiple directions with high rotational velocity.  The theory was that when a G2 would fly into the laser array, the beams would be able to disarm the drone’s navigation systems.

Rapid rounds and more small arms ricocheted off the ground, and began pelting the car.  The drones were quickly closing in.  Anna’s heart began to sink with the realizing her defense weapon was really no better than a disco ball that could cause severe eye damage.

Xavier punched a few commands to quickly power-cycle the antenna array.  Seconds ticked by and E3’s diagnostic menu finally displayed.  The damn drone was showing a thermal issue with one of the drive motors.  “Cooling issue, diagnostics says it’ll last until we hit the highway, we can bring it down for mobile retrieval once we get past the Bridge!  Coms should be back, I increased thermal threshold to buy us more time.”

Anna glanced down, E3 went from yellow to green as soon as Xavier finished his sentence.  Another tablet began issuing alerts and the car’s stereo came to life, dictating airspace warnings as the army drones began coordinating the attack on Anna and Xavier.

Outside, sparks began flying as the army drones began executing their attack plan with small arms before switching to larger munitions.  The rounds ricochetted the pavement and bounced against the cars exterior.

The shitty TicTac Xavier ate was doing the trick.  Xavier popped a caffeine pill (coffee had gone by the wayside as farmers fell ill due to the pandemic) and readied his rifle, checking the ammunition count in the magazine, proud of his 3D printed design.  The government had long banned 3D printing of any type of firearm but Xavier’s interest in the maker community and early investment in machining equipment had paid dividends.  He had been able to build his own rifle devoid of any government restrictions.

Suddenly, a loud explosion erupted, 200 meters away from the driver’s side window.  Two drones had collided and ruptured their fuel cells.  The flames lit up the long-forgotten Oracle Park.

“THE BALL WORKED! Shitty disco ball my ass!” Anna smirked at Xavier in the mirror from the driver’s seat.  He shot a glance up to her from the backseat, catching that smile he’s known for nearly eight years while they built their start up.

The world had become an interesting place in the span of five years.