The job was just a check-in.
No install, no repairs. Just make sure the off-grid repeater at Two Rock Hollow was still talking to the mesh.
An old grower named Jasper had set it up with me a year prior—solar-powered, onion-routed, and buried under enough chicken wire and rubber to fool thermal scans.
He paid in dried apricots and hash oil. My kind of client.
But when I rolled in, I felt it—off. The silence was too clean.
No wind chimes, no dogs. And the goats were all leashed under tarp.
In grower country, that’s code for something’s watching.
Jasper met me at the top of the slope, hat crushed, hands shaking.
“It’s Cody,” he said. “He fucked up.”
Cody was his 15-year-old son.
Smart kid. Used to shadow me when I’d install weather nodes or jailbreak old Starlink dishes. Had that look—like he was always five seconds into the future.
Turns out Cody got a drone for his birthday and thought it’d be fun to shoot some cinematic footage of the valley.
Didn’t realize the drone’s controller was bound to a public telemetry logging system—default settings, wide open.
A defense subcontractor scraping public feeds pulled the footage.
And someone in their ranks saw more than redwoods and hills:
they saw solar lines leading to a non-registered parcel, visible irrigation trenches, and what looked like a drying shed with no permit.
Cody’s drone data had a GPS stamp.
A week later, they were watching.
“They came yesterday,” Jasper told me.
“Didn’t say ‘DEA.’ Didn’t say shit. Just black boots, black Suburban, and a smile that knew something.”
They didn’t arrest anyone.
They just “surveyed.” Logged coordinates. Left a card with a QR code.
Cody hadn’t been seen since the morning after.
I walked the ridge with the repeater in my pack and the old signal scanner clipped to my belt.
Found Cody in the chicken coop.
Scared shitless, hiding under straw and watching a livestream of himself on a burner phone.
Someone had hacked the drone’s local storage and was looping his footage with thermal overlays and targeting coordinates.
A scare tactic. Government contractor playbook.
They don’t kill you.
They convince you to burn your own house down.
I had 20 minutes before the next drone sweep.
I flashed a dummy signal—an old Sinaloa protocol that mimics growhouse logistics—and let it broadcast from an abandoned hillside 20 miles north.
Then I threw Cody’s drone into a metal barrel and pissed on it.
We pulled the repeater, rerouted through a friendly church WiFi six counties away, and buried the rest in silence.
Cody’s gone now.
Not dead—just relocated, rebranded, renamed.
He’s a “weather intern” somewhere in Humboldt, supposedly.
Still flies drones—but only for me.
And Jasper?
He built a greenhouse with no walls and sells lavender to tourists.