- I was sitting somewhere in the sand. A taut and crumbling hand reaches out of the dunes, in a pose frozen by Vesuvius. I recognize whose hand this is immediately, but as quickly as my unconscious mind grazes this icon of memory, something shifts and the implications of that outreach are suddenly barren and without meaning. The sea breeze I felt on my face a moment ago is suddenly stale and chalky.
- I never looked up, assuming the Pacific was waiting to meet me. But when I do, there’s nothing. The sand has turned to choking dust, the breeze is relentless now, thick with the scent of recycled exhaust, aimless and repurposed. My childish pose, Indian-style with poor posture and elastic hips, is suddenly a low crouch in the desert brush. This dream of childhood transitions to adulthood.
- I feel the density of a pistol hanging by my belt. Light alloys, composites, fiberglass. All of them uncanny in their construction, yet unmistakable in shape. A rifle slouches over my shoulder, resting like a vagrant against the tall of my back. I wasn’t a rifleman, no. Slivers of consciousness reshape this mind-hologram, a correction. The gun is a small controller in my paws now—a remote control. Remote and desolate, a commandeered hut, this desert. Control, anything but. Forward operating base, backwards in time. I am removed from the violence I know that I am about to inflict. No agency in the desert, where desertion means death. What’s the difference between desert and dessert? I want two helpings of dessert, and out of this desert as soon as fucking possible. No hope for either. It’s too late for leaving, and I’m lost to reckless abandon. Causality overwhelms me with a certainty that only dreams can convey. My hands clasp the controllers with a familiarity that I don’t recall. Ambidextrous fingers, like a grotesque arachnid made of thumbs. The black screen reveals its contents now, I am driving the FPV drone. I remember this. It’s just like a video game, first-person and detached. My second and last time doing this. Even in the dream, bordering on lucid, the adrenaline begins to spike. I know in the memory I am not alone, but in this sleeping recollection I am the only one in this desert hut.
- The heat is stifling, suffocating. Like being smothered inside a body bag. The screen expands into an inexplicable firsthand account. Delivery service for the payload strapped off-screen. The sacrifice ascends now; the camera panning with every twitch of my thumbs, flying low, fast. The absurdity of an unmanned vehicle, the careful doublespeak of conflict. Pacifist weapons chambered with murderous intent. Murder as the crow flies, proud pilot of the unpiloted air force. Unmanned and emasculated. Except now instead of looking through a screen, I am transported to the vehicle itself, sitting in the cockpit. It’s undecided if I am now shrunk incredibly small or the drone has grown incredibly big. I sit in the pilot seat, no other passengers aboard this first-class kamikaze flight. The armored personnel carrier comes into sight over the next horizon. Dread rising to the surface of my disembodied arms. Tingling with anxiety. As I zip and zoom to meet my mark, this oblivious troop transport, the landscape of the battlefield–if I can call it that–is shifting before me. Tree branches, magnified by the wide-angle lens, transform into stratus clouds. Unpaved roads become yawning valleys cresting below my wings of blind retribution.
- The APC drags itself closer, except the wheels have transformed into the smooth slurry of a snail, oozing a deepening and darkening trail of red mucus. The smell of my cabin interior is clean and sterile. A grotesque contrast. With this very thought, I suddenly stop piloting the plane, and become it. Unmanned, untethered. Self-immolating under the weight of impact. The spectacle of explosion imminent; the promise of implosion pre-eminent. The glare of the transport’s front windshield fades as I get close enough to see who’s behind the wheel of this ghost ship. It comes into focus then, at first reflecting my cartoonish glare as I dive face-first into the incoming blaze of static electricity and after action reports. Then my reflection shifts, and I am looking through the windshield now. I can barely make out the young man, the old boy, sitting behind the wheel. Clad in military attire. Makeshift—like me.
- No, not like me.
- As the tip of my plane-nose collides with the windshield, as the explosion rattling my rotten guts pushes outward with concussive force, the anticipation killing me until—there is nothing. Blue-balled. I am left with nothing, nothing but 4K HDR eyesockets staring blankly into the peripheral static, swallowing me whole. With an anticlimactic click, the television shuts off. Darkness descends over my eyes, hiding me from the immediacy of what I’ve done.
- The feed is dead. The deed is done. No rewind. No replay. Just static.
- The static continues to ring in front of me. A deep uneasiness settles across my awareness, the hairs on the back of my neck pricking up. I shift uncomfortably at my desk. I look around, but I am utterly alone, in a darkened room. I begin to stand when suddenly, like a poltergeist, the static on my screen changes from a black and white hissing back to video feed. Except the feed is no longer from drone, in fact it’s not feed at all. My computer screen has transformed into a windshield, and I am in my seat watching it in fear and awe. I am watching from the perspective of a small passenger vehicle, maybe a minivan. A man and a woman are driving, listening to the radio on a low volume, laughing, talking holding hands. In the back is a small child, no more than 4 years old, dawdling her feet between the harnesses of her safety chair. The windshield is driving, and in my guts I have a terrible feeling, scanning the horizon.
- I want to scream out. I want to warn the people driving about what I’m about to do, what I am told I have to do. But I do nothing, I am in my ergonomic office chair, dissociating into a liquid military-grade computer screen.
- I notice the drone finally coming up over the horizon. It’s coming closer, rigged with explosives. It’s coming directly toward me, and I can no longer scream now. The opportunity has forever passed. Closer, closer, until I can make out the aperture on the drone’s lens. Wide-eyed with fear and loathing. And when the impact finally comes, when the payload is finally delivered to its final destination, my computer screen bursts forth in a terrible thermal concussive bloom flecked with bits of bone and steel, wires and rebar. I am pushed out of my operator’s chair with a force that liquifies my internal organs before I hit the wall. The shrapnel of glass, electrical equipment, and sulfur blind me, mangle my guts, collapse my spine, crush my legs. I feel the destructive heat blacken and finally obliterate any physical evidence of my former existence into base minerals and nitrates. As the pain drives my sanity to the brink of annihilation, everything begins to fade into an unyielding tsunami of static, rising up through the earth, into the atmosphere. So much static, like tinnitus mixed with dead FM, overwhelms all of my senses, even my pain. The static rises, rises, along with my newfound sense of dread, and this endless static will soon become the ceaseless soundtrack for what was now the ashes of my new life.