Zoe flipped from jazz to classical, seeking a soundtrack for the flight home. Her daily commute had been busier since the new wave of drones was launched. Almost anybody could afford an autonomous flying vehicle to ferry them across the heavens…with many safety measures, of course.

 

The most important one was that nobody could pilot their own vehicle. Human error would lead to countless crashes, which made Zoe wonder how people were ever trusted to drive two-ton rolling death machines.

 

Com suggested Flight of the Bumblebee and Zoe laughed.

 

“Perfect.”

 

Her drone rose to the skyway and accelerated with a quiet bzzzzz. Zoe closed her eyes to enjoy the music — then the dizzying violins cut out.

 

STATIC ROARED.

 

The nightmare noise jolted Zoe back into her seven-year-old self, to the night she found her father staring into the static.

 

Not blinking. Not breathing.

 

He once told her that white noise was caused by cosmic radiation from the birth of the universe, ancient energy that comes from all directions.

 

People used to call it snow, but to Zoe, the pulsing black dots were frenzied ants. They had escaped the screen and swarmed her father’s glassy eyes. Everyone said he took his own life. But Zoe knew better. It was the ants.

 

One more instant of the hellish hiss would drive her insane. She opened a compartment and flipped a red switch. Com blinked out, the guidance system went offline.

 

Static stopped.

 

Zoe gasped in relief, however brief. Her ex had insisted on rigging the highly illegal kill switch because neither of them trusted that anything was truly unhackable, despite endless guarantees.

 

She pulled out an antique game controller that was hard-wired for manual control. Zoe angled the joystick, and the drone responded. For her first time piloting anything, all she had to do was fly all the way home and land perfectly. Zoe cursed herself for freaking out so easily.

 

It was just static… noise can’t hurt me.

 

As she finished that thought, another drone veered over and clipped her rear propeller. She dropped, wobbled, then regained control. The terrified man in the drone that swiped her pounded against his glass canopy, screaming. He went into a nosedive, hit two more drones, and smashed into a comm tower.

 

Zoe pulled up on the stick, avoiding crashes ahead. The entire skyway was in chaos, hundreds of drones colliding and dive-bombing buildings below. People flooded the streets as explosions ripped across the city.

 

“It’s actually happening…” Zoe arced higher into the atmosphere.

 

Much worse than a hack, it was a full scale cyberattack. The one they were promised would never happen. Could be a rival nation, terrorists, rogue AI, even Aliens. The flash of static was prelude to apocalypse. If Zoe’s drone had stayed connected for one more second she’d be dead.

 

Panic erupted once more.

 

Can’t go home, can’t go anywhere!

 

Everything Zoe could think of was connected. Then she remembered Uncle Everett. He became a doomsday prepper during Cold War II and turned the family cabin into an above-ground bunker.

 

When the second super-virus of the 21st century hit, instead of hunkering in safety, Uncle Everett decided it wasn’t that big of a deal. He didn’t realize it was doomsday until he was dead. Zoe hadn’t visited the off-the-grid cabin in years, but might be able to find it if she traced the river into the mountains.

 

Over the next two hours of cautious flying, survivor guilt set in, perhaps prematurely. Zoe still had a shred of hope that other family members might find the cabin.

 

Clouds gathered in the dying light and the temperature dropped. So did the battery level. Without sun to recharge, the drone would crap out soon.

 

Zoe followed the water deeper into the woods. She passed over a green steel bridge, which meant the cabin was close. The drone kicked up gravel dust on the descent. The low battery alarm flashed and Zoe ignored it, dodging branches as her headlights caught the glint of a red roof.

 

“I made it!”

 

The drone died before she could even attempt a landing, dropping ten feet to the driveway and skidding to a stop against a towering fir. Zoe popped the canopy and climbed out, rubbing her neck. Cold wind cut to the bone, fatal if she had to shelter with no power, no heat, no coat.

 

She scaled a cyclone fence and hiked through thorny vines to reach the front porch. A metal door had replaced the wood one, windows boarded up. Zoe remembered creeping under the cabin with her cousins and prayed the crawl space door hadn’t been blocked.

 

It was a much tighter squeeze as an adult, but Zoe navigated the dirt and dark to find a hatch between the beams. She lifted the heavy lid and emerged in a closet among stacks of toilet paper. Keys in the kitchen unlocked the woodshed, which housed a gas-powered generator. It sputtered to life as the first snow started to fall.

 

With one lamp, a space heater, and heaps of blankets, Zoe could finally unclench. Relief didn’t last long. In need of distraction, she located an old television, assuming she could figure out how it worked. She pushed a button, and the screen flashed blue — then shattered into STATIC.

 

Black bugs gnawed the glass, shrieking. Zoe crumpled, hands clamped over ears. She couldn’t shut her eyes, couldn’t look away. A torrent of tiny monsters spewed from the screen.

 

“NO!” she hit the button again but the damn thing wouldn’t turn off. “No-no-no…”

 

Ants in her ears. Ants eating her brain.

 

Zoe stumbled behind the set and dove for the power cord. It lay coiled on the floor, two feet from the outlet. The TV was never plugged in.

 

She wailed as raging static flooded her skull, then shouldered the door and bolted into the storm. Zoe didn’t slow down until the roar was just a whisper. She found herself lost, cold, and alone.

 

Swallowed by the swirling snow.