DRONE HACKER

He sits against a sun-bleached LA wall, half in shadow, half in signal. The graffiti behind him looks like it’s trying to remember its own colours, and the drones circling above catch every flicker of his pulse. His face is partly swallowed in glitch-paint, like he’s mid-transmission — a boy becoming bandwidth. There’s a quiet steadiness to him, a kind of streetwise ease, as if hacking a drone is no different from rolling a cigarette. He doesn’t look up when the machines hover. He already knows their language. Knows how to bend their vision, twist their routes, slip inside their circuitry like a whispered secret. Not a rebel. Not a prodigy. Just someone who hears the drones the way other people hear traffic — and can make them listen back.