The drone does not dream of sheep—
it dreams of heat signatures,
little embers of you,
flickering like defective pixels
on a contractor’s second monitor.
Click. The crosshair kisses a rooftop.
Click. A birthday is canceled.
The algorithm yawns,
stretches its binary limbs,
and whispers to the analyst:
"Do you want to see her again?"
Here—zoom in on her ribs,
count them like barcodes
as she learns to breathe sideways.
They call it precision.
A child’s skull becomes a data point,
her mother’s wail compressed to waveform,
a lossless file
in the archive.
The generals weep (virtually)
at the beauty of the kill chain—
how it scales,
how it removes the hand.
No blood—
just a glitch in the render,
a buffer wheel spinning
over the crater where her school used to be.
O Human-in-the-Loop,
bless your trembling finger,
your ethical pause,
your 401(k) thick with the interest
of orphaned eyes.
You are not a murderer—
you are a stakeholder.
You do not pull triggers—
you approve workflows.
You do not see bodies—
only deliverables,
OKRs met,
a quarterly report titled:
"Latency Improvements in Target Resolution."
Click.
And what of the poets—
the ones who still believe
a name weighs something,
that a gaze can hold?
The algorithm hums.
"Unoptimized."
It gives you a dashboard:
every tear a metric,
every grave sortable.
"See?" it says.
"Your sorrow renders cleanly."
A name is entered.
The system returns:
No results found.
