Porter Road drone network

The Porter Road drone network is a twenty-unit surveillance system deployed over the Fisher property, where it turns the family’s exposed rural home into a watched and defended perimeter. For Flynne, the same system is at once practical protection and an intimate pattern of light above the house: the drones’ ordered movement recalls the games Burton excels at, even as it underscores how much danger the family expects.

Deployment and Operation

When Burton asks who else is at the property, Reece reports that Duval is up the hill, Carter is around back, and Carlos is by the trailer. A net of twenty units is in the air, with twenty more held in reserve. The three men each monitor a third of the property, while the drones fly synchronously in a repeating pattern. The arrangement combines continuous aerial coverage with human oversight and a ready pool of replacements.

Flynne notices that Reece has a Viz in his left eye, its moving light reflected in the eye as he speaks. His account makes clear that the network is not an unattended machine: its coverage is divided among the men on the ground, and Burton can redirect the security team, telling Reece that they are going to the trailer and that he should tell Carlos. The network thus belongs to a wider security detail, not to the aircraft alone.

The Celtic-Knot Pattern

Later, exhausted in her room, Flynne remembers that the drone-game app she had used on her old phone should have been moved to her new one by Macon. She opens it and selects a top-down view. The display shows a low satellite image of the property, with the roof above her reduced to a gray rectangle and each active drone represented as a point of light. Their coordinated paths weave what she recognizes as a Celtic knot.

The app also shows the operational rhythm behind that image: each of the twenty drones is replaced by one of the twenty spares in turn, then recharged. What had looked from the ground like a single protective formation is therefore a cycling system, sustained by reserve units and rotation rather than by one uninterrupted flight from each aircraft.

Burton, Games, and Protection

Flynne knows Burton as a formidable player of drone games. She understands that Haptic Recon 1 had involved them in many ways, and has heard someone suggest that Burton himself had once been a kind of drone, or partly one, when he still had the tattoos. That association makes the live patrol legible to her through a game interface, while also connecting his skill to a more embodied military past.

Watching the points of light trace their knot above the house seems to help Flynne settle. She closes the app, puts the phone beneath her pillow, and shuts her eyes, just before remembering the woman’s T-shirt and striped pajama pants fluttering and turning down into the street. The network offers a moment of order and reassurance, but it does not erase the violence and vulnerability that have made such protection necessary. Its defining tension is captured in Flynne’s view: a security perimeter can resemble a game, yet its twenty moving lights are there to guard a real home.