Will This Work?

175.

By any measure my testing indicates success. I am amazed that something closely resembling the football helmet we wore in college is today a high-tech, crime-fighting tool of unlimited potential. To have this prototype at our disposal, designed, created and freely offered to us by a girl not yet legally able to order a cocktail in a restaurant, I find to be astounding. Tomorrow afternoon we are scheduled to conduct a live test using the Helmet’s original purpose, flight navigation and control of the drone, in the Nevada desert, a rather infamous stretch of stiflingly hot wasteland bordering on Area 51. The last time I was through this barren, moon-like terrain was on a fixed-gear bike trying my best to stay hydrated and avoid a plague of Mormon crickets that painted the hot asphalt a deep scarlet red with their blood and body parts. I can still hear the deadly crunch as our wheels rode over them at twenty-five miles per hour as we desperately made our escape from the hellish landscape. Hopefully my return will result a less dramatic visit.

Together the Helmet and the Drone constitute the most important pair of weapons in our mission’s arsenal. Both serving dual purposes and each with their own unique capabilities, they combine to allow us to do the impossible. Or, properly put, to do something that no-one has done before us. It isn’t impossible and with the tools at our disposal, might be considered routine - but - all this is on paper and as many times as I have reviewed the details of the scheme, there always exists the distinct possibility of error, human error being the most common. As the infamous bumper sticker proclaimed in the seventies: Shit happens.

It is my job, as protagonist in this drama, to ensure that we play an error free game. I am the lead, I wear the Helmet and my mission, a tightly scripted improvisation, prompted and assisted by the real time utility known as the Verometer, an embedded computer program keeping dialogue focused along the statistical path of best chance probability during the one-time faux demonstration of the Drone. My audience will be Warden Daniels, one of his most trusted lieutenants and my ‘assistant', most likely Drysdale who has been under-cover in Vegas working the ACLU angle for several weeks. He is close, capable and a perfect fit for this pivotal scene.

The test will be run by The Queen and one of her assistants, making the total number of people in attendance four, large enough to conduct the test yet small enough to contain it. We will meet in the small oasis outpost of Fallon, caravan almost one hundred miles south-east on Highway 50, and then four-wheel to the test site. In just under two hours we should have the answer to the biggest question facing us to date:

Will this work?