I check my watch, it’s flashing for curfew. I have 30 minutes to get home before the doors lock automatically and the drones send the police to collect me. The thought sends my fingers to the box in my pocket. It’s a gift for my daughter. Whatever happens, I can’t be caught with it on me.
Tipping my head to the darkening sky, I watch the drones wheeling around like gunmetal-grey birds. I’m old enough to remember when the only thing you’d see in the sky were clouds and stars, the occasional white scar of a passing plane. But that was before the Google campus bomb, before a tech company put a terrified man in the White House. He promised to make us safe; to build a better world. We were so scared nobody bothered to ask how he was planning to do it.
A word in your ear