XLIV. Total Surveillance For Ballistic Convenience.

"The man who conceals himself does not escape his hunters. He merely prolongs the hunt, and in prolonging, invites error; and error, Freddy came to understand with a clarity that grew upon him like a fever, is where the true suffering lies. Not in the shot. In the doubt that precedes it."

"Ugh, I seriously hope that the signal's clear today...."

I mutter out loud, to my partner, with the dog pulling ahead toward some scent only it could find interesting. She snorts like it's a bit, and I let her laugh, because to correct her would mean to say the rest out loud, and I have grown careful, these last several years, about which words I put out into the atmosphere.

I have resolved, and the word pleases me, resolved, so final, so like the last page of a good book, to leave no doubt behind. I have taken, lately, to narrating myself: my height, my jacket, the corner I'm standing on, offered up to the sky the way you'd leave a note on a kitchen table. In case. "Currently at Yonge and King. Blue jacket. No sudden movements, I promise you that."

Layla still thinks it's a bit.

It is not a bit. It is, I have decided, common courtesy, the last good manners left to me, and I intend to keep them.

I think about the machines more than I let on.

Look, I've made my peace with it. The drones are coming. Not might come. Are coming. And when that day arrives, I refuse— refuse, to be the reason some overworked targeting algorithm has a bad afternoon.

I used to be like you. Location services off. VPN churning like a paranoid little guard dog. A hat pulled low, sunglasses even in the produce aisle, living my life like a man who thought privacy was a right instead of, as I now understand it, an obstacle to a clean kill.

Not anymore.

My face is on seventeen platforms, tagged, geo-stamped, in every angle the light would permit. My gait, a proprietary, unmistakable strut, thank you, is in at least four biometric databases that I know of, probably two I do not. I wear the same jacket every day. Consistency is a gift you give your executioner.

Here's the thing no one talks about: a botched identification is how people actually suffer. Not the shot. The forty stories up, the quadcopter that genuinely can't tell a man from a woman who merely resembles him, in bad light, at a bad hour.

Honestly, the quality assurance alone is embarrassing.

I have certain expectations of automated precision.

There's a term for what I'm trying to avoid, if you want to look it up. Signature strike. It means they don't know your name, only your pattern. The walk, the meetings, the general frame of a life that resembles the shape of a threat. You don't die as yourself in a signature strike. You die as a resemblance. I read that once, years ago, back when it was still other people's problem, and I have not, strictly speaking, been the same since.

The other kind is called a personality strike.

Confirmed identity.

Named. Sourced.

Mine, if I do this right.

I know which tier I'm splurging for.

"Wait, say that part again," Layla says. Not laughing now. "The tier thing."

I don't.

People call this dystopian. I call it customer service. I am the customer. The drone is the vendor. And I have simply decided, as a rational actor, to make the transaction as frictionless as possible for both parties. No struggle, no ambiguity, no undignified scramble behind a mailbox that only delays the inevitable and scuffs my leather shoes.

I will not be a statistic in the "wrong guy" category.

If I go, I go as the right guy.

Confirmed. High-confidence match.

99.7%, baby.

Some of you are still out there turning off tracking, blurring your plates, opting out at the airport. I understand the impulse. I do. But ask yourself, honestly: when the moment comes, do you want it quick? Or do you want to be the reason there's a fifteen-minute delay while the system cross-references your blurry license photo from 2016?

Didn't think so.

Layla quit asking me to stop, some while ago. Now she just walks a little ahead, like she's giving the drones a clearer shot, or giving herself one less thing to watch...

My location is public. My data is everywhere. I wave at the sky. Every day. Right on schedule.

Not out of fear.

Out of pure professionalism.

For what it’s worth,

-Charlene Iris

One thought at a time.

One truth at a time. 

Because some epiphanies stay with you.