Morning sun warmed the rain-slick tin roofs, forming blankets of steam that rose in perceptible waves as they buffeted the sixteen-ounce quadcopter drone buzzing over the little town. Panajachel, Guatemala, stood at 5,200 feet of elevation, so the four tiny plastic rotors spun furiously in thin, moist air, the machine moving southeast at a steady pace, its camera taking in everything below.
The town lies on the northern shore of Lake Atitlán, a fifty-square-mile body of water in an immense volcanic crater in the Guatemalan Highlands. A strikingly beautiful place in the middle of a bitterly impoverished country, the town is a way-off-the-beaten-path tourist attraction for budget travelers from all over the globe. Cool in the mornings this time of year, even despite the sunshine, its air is many orders of magnitude cleaner and clearer than smoggy Guatemala City, a three-hour drive to the east.
Few people walked the cobblestone streets at seven in the morning on a Saturday—most visitors were sleeping off Friday night’s bar bill—but the drone’s camera locked on to a trio of young women pounding thick tortillas by a smoky kettle fire next to a tienda, registering their faces in a fraction of a second and then dismissing them as non-targets in a fraction more.
An old man pushing a vending cart took longer to evaluate, his cowboy hat obstructing the periocular region of his face where most biometric identification data was acquired, but in under a second and a half the man turned his head and then his features were registered by the eye in the sky. Almost instantly the drone’s onboard artificial intelligence image classifiers told the machine that he was not the subject it was hunting for.
The device then whirred over a small two-story red apartment building on Callejon Santa Elena, and here a blond woman in a green tank top and jean shorts stepped out onto a balcony and began hanging laundry over a clothesline.
The camera caught the movement, but it did not have the right angle to scan the face because the wet towels she hung to dry were in the way.
Drone Reconnaissance Nineteen, or RC19, kept going; there was no need for it to stop, because five identical airships crisscrossed the sky above Panajachel in search of their collective target, each on a coverage route determined by a pilot working in the back of a rented van below, and augmented by artificial intelligence. Sooner or later, RC23, RC29, or one of the others would pass by this street from a different trajectory and assess the face of the blond woman, just as they had been doing with everyone else in town this morning.