Eyes in the Sky

There’s a certain type of genius in government intelligence operations, a kind of *high art* in the level of coordination required to spy on a domestic population. Except, of course, when it’s so spectacularly bad that even a half-blind cat could spot it.

It was on an unremarkable Wednesday morning, at precisely 8:42 AM, that Marvin Gregory noticed something odd. Marvin, an unemployed IT guy, was sitting in his second-floor apartment in a run-down neighborhood with a view of the alley behind a strip mall. He had spent the past year learning to code in Python, because it was cheaper than therapy, and had taken up a side hobby of watching the parade of suburban oddities that filtered through his camera-equipped window.

He was, by all definitions, a surveillance aficionado.

At first, he thought it was just another delivery truck. But then came the second one. And the third. And before long, there were a dozen vehicles parked up and down the alley. He might’ve thought it was just a highly disorganized commercial delivery service, except these trucks didn’t have logos or company names.

Marvin squinted, adjusting his glasses. The trucks were all the same shade of grayish-brown, and their license plates were completely unsuspicious—too unsuspicious, in fact. They were so deliberately generic that Marvin started to suspect that he had become *the* surveillance target. He checked the reflection in his window to see if someone was lurking in his bushes. Nope. Just a very aggressive squirrel.

Determined to get to the bottom of this—mostly because he had run out of decent Netflix shows—Marvin decided to document it. He pulled out his drone. It wasn’t a great drone; in fact, it was one of those half-priced ones you get in a gas station parking lot, but it worked well enough for birdwatching and general nosiness.

He launched the drone out the window, silently humming a tune that he could only assume was some form of hacker-hero theme. What he saw through the drone’s camera made him pause. The alley wasn’t just full of trucks. It was practically bursting at the seams with them. Some were parked; others were driving around in slow, looping circles. They weren’t delivering packages, and they certainly weren’t here for the pop-up yoga studio that had opened a week ago in the strip mall.

The operation was too big, too coordinated. And Marvin, now completely intrigued, zoomed in to get a better look.

There were men in dark suits standing near each vehicle, chatting amongst themselves, and a few vehicles had what appeared to be people with large satellite dishes attached to their roofs. He could just barely make out the faint buzzing noise of a drone from a neighboring rooftop—probably not his, but the sight sent a shiver up his spine. It was like a horror movie, except everyone seemed *so* terribly bored.

Marvin immediately posted the footage to Reddit. He didn’t know who he was trying to impress, but he figured someone, somewhere would have an answer. At least he wasn’t the only one watching.

Sure enough, within minutes, the forum exploded with theories: “Is this a covert CIA operation?” “Are they testing new weather balloons?” “Is it *finally* the alien invasion we’ve been waiting for?” Marvin clicked on every single comment, but there was no time to waste on theory. He needed facts.

So, he turned to the one thing he knew best—surveillance. Marvin’s apartment was situated just above a coffee shop, and that coffee shop had a rather impressive security camera system. Marvin had become somewhat friendly with the barista, an eccentric fellow named Todd, who loved conspiracy theories almost as much as he loved pouring lattes.

Todd, as it turned out, had been secretly recording the entire operation for over an hour. "Oh yeah," he said, handing Marvin a steaming cup of something that probably shouldn’t have been legal. "I thought it was a flash mob or a protest at first, but then I realized no one was protesting anything except maybe a lack of proper parking."

Marvin grinned, grabbing the footage. It was better than anything he could’ve hoped for. He could see a wide, coordinated effort—a symphony of surveillance—and all of it in glorious high-definition. The trucks, the satellite dishes, and the endless stream of people wearing the same bland beige uniforms. It was a *training exercise*, and from the looks of it, this operation had been in full swing for at least two weeks. The odd thing? It wasn’t for national security, or the threat of domestic terrorism, or anything important like that. No, no.

It was for a corporate merger. Specifically, for the merger of a regional chain of grocery stores and a very secretive tech firm that specialized in facial recognition software. The tech company had hired out an entire *intelligence operation* to “oversee” the merger’s logistics and ensure smooth implementation of surveillance technology into grocery stores nationwide.

Marvin, in a state of growing disbelief, continued watching the footage. He saw the same trucks loop around, time and again, making it seem like there was a vast network of spies keeping watch over an empire of self-checkout kiosks and produce departments.

"This is insane," Marvin muttered, still watching as a man in a dark suit whispered into a walkie-talkie while standing near a dumpster, like some kind of middle-management CIA agent. "This whole thing is just... really bad."

As the days passed, Marvin and Todd kept documenting the operation. And here’s where things got really interesting—everyone else started to notice too. By the time a delivery driver, casually parked near one of the unmarked vehicles, decided to post a video to his TikTok account, the entire thing blew up.

The corporate intelligence operation had become public knowledge. And the backlash? Glorious.

People with surveillance cameras started snapping pics of the vehicles from every angle. Some savvy small-business owners who owned drones began flying them around to get an overhead view of the operation. Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook flooded with memes. One user even suggested the entire thing was a plot to make sure everyone who shopped at the new grocery chain was “properly recognized.” It didn’t take long before a small army of people began to joke that *everyone* involved was under surveillance, including the guys working the food court in the mall, who were now all “on the grid.”

Eventually, the company publicly admitted that the operation had been an attempt to smoothly transition its new store surveillance system into grocery chains. The intelligence operation—every coordinated vehicle, every drone, every person standing by dumpsters in ill-fitting suits—was just a really expensive PR stunt. One that could’ve been avoided if they’d simply let people buy their groceries without being tracked.

In the end, Marvin sat back and sipped his coffee, watching the drone footage one last time, grinning at how spectacularly easy it had all been to expose. He’d seen too much. But for once, it didn’t feel like he was in danger. It felt like he was on the winning side.

All it took was a drone, a couple of suspicious trucks, and a handful of bored coffee shop workers with too much time on their hands.

And the government thought *they* had all the eyes.