THE ICE AGENT

"I fuckin' miss my Dunks," he says, sipping a coffee in a Dunkin' Donuts cup. 

"Where'd you get that?" I ask him. 

"Oh, I bought it before they closed down. I knew it'd be my last shot, see? Got there, bought this cup, ran home and scanned it in my rep. Been drinkin' that same shit ever since."

"Seems to me you've got all the Dunks you could ever want," I say. 

"Yeah, but it took me a while to get home that day," he says. "So it was kinda lukewarm when I scanned it. Now I'm always drinkin' Dunks that ain't quite hot enough." 

The drone wall was built in under three days, and they paid us three years wages to do it. 

A lotta moolah, my guy. Fuckin' A, I signed up for that. You bet your ass. I was tired of deportin' little mommies and their families anyway. Too messy. This was a nice change of pace. 

Now, at first, I didn't know what was really going on. Like, this was just a few days after the Kobek thing happened. I hadn't even seen the video yet, and I didn't believe some of the other guys when they started telling me about what these new "replicators" could do. 

When the military came storming in and gave us our new orders, they already had reps for themselves. I said, hey, are these fellas really army? Where the fuck they get these already? I wasn't even sure they had the authority to tell ICE agents what to do. But I wasn't about to cause any trouble. 

These guys, they got these tents set up. And pop, pop, pop, out of the tents they're pumpin' out armed drones. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Hundreds of these things. Must've been thousands of reps humpin' along. 

They were running everything on generators. God damn, the noise was tremendous. You know, generators, they just sound like an engine runnin' at full throttle, all the time. Get a few thousand of those things running at once, and you'll never get that noise out of your head again. 

Our job was to set up wireless recharge stations all along the US-Canadian border. They just gave us the blueprints, and truckloads of parts, and sent us off into the wilderness in groups of four or five. Nothin' around for hundreds of miles. Or, it seemed that way to me, anyway. 

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

It was rough, trekking along the border. They were having us set up stations every couple of miles or so, and they were rushing us, bad. They wanted at least 20 miles of daily coverage from each squad. Between seven and nine stations, depending on the terrain. 

I thought this would be a job that would take months, because the border is about 4,000 miles long. But they must have had hundreds of teams like mine, because they got the whole thing done in three days. 

How in the name of big honkin' titties do you think they managed that?

Can you describe these wireless charging stations? 

Yeah, they're wicked cool. Like a massive, roundish framework of metal and cables… I don't understand the underlying technology, alright? But they told us it creates an electromagnetic current in the air. They called it the "power cloud." Drones just fly into the air above the charging station, hover there for a little bit, and then fly off again, fully recharged. It's crazy shit. 

You know, it was only three days, so I didn't see too much more than that. I was pretty busy settin' up the flying death robots. (Laughs)

Although, I'll tell ya. I did see some folks get arrested tryin' to cross the border.

Oh yeah? 

Yeah buddy. Some backpackers. It was in the early evening of the second day. We were in the Kootenai National Forest, way up in the mountains in northern Montana. There's all these tiny little mountain roads that go up just a couple hundred feet from the border. Of course, all of these roads had been closed off for a few weeks already, but we'd been given credentials, so the military guys would let us through. 

We had pulled off into a clearing off of one of these roads, and we were setting up what was supposed to be our second-to-last station of the day. I needed to take a piss, so I wandered off into the woods a little ways. There was little freshwater creek running through the woods, and I'd just gotten my dick out of my pants when I heard some rustling in the trees. 

I crouched down kinda low, so I wouldn't be too noticeable. 

And suddenly three people came out on the other side of the creek. Looked like they were carrying some heavy shit in their bags.

I radioed back to our boss, and within… I dunno, couldn't have been more than five minutes… military guys were swarming all over. They bagged the backpackers and found a bunch of replicator parts in their packs. 

Do you know what happened to them?

Hell no. Like I said, man, they didn't tell me nothin' but "set up these charging stations." On my grandmother's life, I had no idea all the wacky shit they'd be usin' those drones for. Killin' people, all that. I don't want nothin' to do with that. 

Me? I mind my own business. 

What do you do now that the drone wall has replaced border agents like you?

Uh… yeah that's a good question. I'm still workin' on figuring that out. Mostly I just sit here and drink this lukewarm Dunks. 

Hey, you want a cup?