Free Skinner by Charlie Huston Page A

video game sensibilities, the more effectively it can be marketed to the young men who live in the demographic overlap between Call of Duty and the US Military. Unmanned aerial vehicle operations carrying the extra benefit that they don’t involve being shot at.
    “Do you see anything?”
    She looks at the lieutenant colonel who has been escorting her since she came on base that morning. He is prototypically lean and proportioned for a cockpit, an especially idealized ratio of length concentrated in his tibia and fibula. She’s long known that the cliché about fighter pilots being shorter overall than the national average is false, the more essential measurements being taken when they are seated. Measuring from the hips to the top of the head has obvious implications in an enclosed space; more interesting to Jae was learning that knees to hips tends to be critical. Too much length in the femur and you can’t properly fit in an ejection seat. During a punch-out, a pilot’s knees might extend an unfortunate fraction of a centimeter and clip the edge of the dashboard.
    Lt. Colonel Cervantes’s knees, she imagines, were never in danger when he was piloting his A-10 Warthog in Iraq.
    “Ma’am, do you see anything?”
    Jae folds her arms across her chest a bit more tightly. She should have brought a sweater or a jacket from the car. She knows what these buildings are like. Iceboxes in the desert. Fighting a two-front war against both nature and the ever multiplying processors, hard drives, and huge LCD screens inside the operations center. To say nothing of the BTUs produced by the human element. Behind the doors that line the long central hallway of the UAV operations center, pilots, electronic sensor operators and intelligence specialists are crammed three to a room, staring at over a dozen screens, trying to make remote sense of the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, Iran, and other, more obscure locations. Or, more close to home, patrolling the southern border, searching for illegals and drug smugglers with equal fervor. Through the camera eyes of a Predator or Reaper, one desert looks much the same as another. Deserts and cities, the battlegrounds of the new century’s first decades. These pilots will see much more of both. And, increasingly, they will have occasion to patrol domestic space far from the border. Though, Jae knows, it will be quadrotor drones taking on the city environments soon enough.
    She looks at the screen.
    Desert. High desert. Rocks, scree, scrub, time’s passage revealed in the strata of a cliff face. Everything irregular but sharp-edged, even the gnarled brush that grows in the cracked surface of a fifteen-kiloton boulder. Everything irregular except for one geometrically flawless dark rectangle, three-dimensional, a shape taken directly from Euclid’s forebrain.
    She points.
    “There’s that.”
    He nods.
    “Yeah, there seems to be a consensus that it looks a little out of place.”
    She stares at the shape.
    “When was this?”
    “Two days ago.”
    “Is there a closer view? Ground level?”
    He shakes his head, wobbles one hand back and forth, indicating something out of balance.
    “That’s just a little east of Zabul. Very iffy on the ground. Many bad guys.”
    “It has a shadow.”
    He looks over his shoulder, looks back at her.
    “Yeah, some of us noticed that.”
    She steps closer to the screen.
    “So it’s not a rectangle. Cuboid. Rectangular prism.”
    “Cargo container is what us experts have been thinking.”
    She drops her head to one side.
    “I wish I had a robot.”
    “Ma’am?”
    She runs her knuckles across her lips, eyes still locked on the cuboid.
    “A robot on the ground. As opposed to the drone in the air. No need to send soldiers or, what do we call them now, war fighters, into iffy situations. Like to see if there are markings. Like to see if it’s been unsealed. How far to the road?”
    “There are a few poppy fields