Speaking of road rage, I’d come up with a brilliant plan to help police identify dangerous drivers. You handed out paintball guns to everyone. If a driver cut you off or was driving slow in the fast lane, you shot their car. If their car collected a certain number of markers, they got pulled over and taken to jail.
Of course, my fantasy included the possibility that they would have their window down, and you would just shoot them in the head. With that in mind, I probably shouldn’t have .22 shells strapped to drones.
“What was his second idea?” I asked.
“To add a Taser. At first, I was leery, but just ramming them into someone is useless. The reduced mass of the smaller drones makes them feel like being hit with a paper airplane. This is much more effective. The one downside is that when you use it, the drone’s battery gets completely depleted. It’s a one-use system because after that, the drone is useless until it’s recharged.” Fritz said.
“Does it work?” I asked.
“Let’s see,” Fritz said.
A split-second later, Dare flew a drone into the back of my neck. My muscles locked up, and I began to crash to the ground. Fritz caught me so my head didn’t bounce off the concrete in the parking lot.
“@&^#(@~!”
I screamed like a little girl who’d watched her daddy fix the car and then had a complete meltdown when she found out she wasn’t getting a pony for her birthday.
I have to say that getting tased was no joke. It felt like I’d been electrocuted. 50,000 volts had just rushed through my system. Tasers interrupted the natural electrical impulses the body needed to function, which was insane. The best way to describe it was like when you got a cramp, and it hurt so much you wanted to cry. Imagine the worst one you’ve ever had and have it spread to every muscle in your whole body. You suddenly were having a bad, bad day.
Dare bounced out of the car and looked down at me.
“Now who has a hickey?” he asked.
He was lucky the effects took a moment to wear off because it gave me enough time to find the humor in it. This was a big step for Dare. When I first met him, he would never have had the balls to do something like that.
As for the drone’s Taser, I noted that it put someone down, but not for too long of a time. It would give you a chance to either cuff them or run away. I wouldn’t stand around and gloat like my socially challenged friend had just done.
When my muscles unlocked, I bounced up, and Dare flinched when I grabbed him and pulled him into a hug.
“This is genius. Let’s go to Phil’s house. I want my turn to try it out,” I suggested. “Next, we can swing by Tim’s and then Wolf’s.”
“If Dare needs more test data, we can always get Manaia and Paul to ‘volunteer’ like you did,” Fritz said.
I bet if asked, we could come up with a list a mile long. Strangely, Dare was the voice of reason.
“Won’t we get into trouble? Are we allowed to tase just anyone?”
“You tased me,” I complained.
“Fritz said you don’t count. Plus, Brook asked me to send her the video of the test,” Dare reasoned.
“Well, if Fritz and Brook said it was okay …” I trailed off.
Fritz caught my tone and decided that today’s testing had been a success, and we were done.
◊◊◊ Friday April 7
We’d played two baseball games this week, and I hadn’t been thrown at once. In eight at-bats, I’d been intentionally walked five times. I turned those walks into three more steals and scored four times when the guys behind me were able to get hits. The three times I actually got to hit, I struck out once, hit a home run, and hit a double. We won both games handily.
On the home front, Coby had gotten into trouble at daycare. An older kid had pushed Carol down, and my son took offense. The little girl who’d started it all had a shiner when Peggy arrived to pick them up.
Peggy said she had acted appropriately contrite when the girl’s mother told Peggy that her little princess might be disfigured. On the way home, she’d praised Coby for protecting his sibling.
I wasn’t sure what I thought of my son getting into a fight at the age of one. The lady in charge said Coby had gotten in a lucky shot, and the fight was over as soon as it started. She noted that Coby had never been overly aggressive before, so she wasn’t worried about him. I think my son thought it was
As I predicted, Dare became a rock star to the nerd crowd when he proudly showed off the hickey Chrissy gave him. He was no longer mad at me for telling that tale to get him out of detention for passing me a note in math class.
Fritz was leaving today. He’d tested out the new drones and trained Paul, Cassidy, and Manaia on their use. He’d ordered four more sets, or ‘swarms,’ for clients back in LA. None of my security team had allowed me to ‘practice’ with the new drones. I suspected they all figured out I wanted to tase someone.
