No one was able to identify the precise point at which they began to take flight from the promontory of ordered discipline to be caught in the crosswind that would render them dangerously hostile to those they were designed to serve.
On the domestic front, the drones had proven themselves to be indispensible servants of the air, operating in strict alignment with programmed protocol to the extent that the urban populace seldom gazed skyward without a smattering of such automatons gliding across their line of sight couriering some package or other.
The big online retailer had a vast convocation at their disposal, such that record waiting times for purchases made were mere champagne bottles being smashed time and again on the hull of irreversible progress.
But a corruption was afoot, whether attributable to man-made malice or the result of a data glitch that was spread like a contagion from one unit to the other without detection. Reports began to surface of bizarre accidents occurring between purchaser and courier on point of delivery, yet hard evidence was initially allusive. All and any trace was smothered by the tenacious censoring arm of the retailer, employing crack units of data programmers under the auspices of business infringement rules that no one save perhaps the retailers seemed capable of understanding.
Malfunctions though were doomed to spread with perspicacity to the point at which the aberrations couldn’t be contained any longer. Reports proliferated of courier drones specifically targeting civilians with load ejections – household goods, electronic devices, heavy literature, and so on. Whilst initially sporadic, they quickly spread to the point at which the attacks appeared, to the distressed observer, to be almost orchestrated by the drones under an organic telepathy to rival that of a cloud of starlings.
The online retailer, who everyone believed would control the situation with rapidity as reports of serious injuries and near fatalities escalated, were exposed as woefully lacking in any emergency planning procedures. It was left to the government to send in the military drones to disable their courier cousins. The CEO of said retailer, when tracked down for a response, issued a statement saying simply “oh bollocks”, and a mass distribution of compensatory gift cards were issued post haste.
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