Watchdog Unit
Watchdog Unit
Overview
The Watchdog Unit is a steel-gray quad-rotor chassis with a matte anti-reflective coating. A single red optic lens, centered beneath the nose cone, tracks continuously. A light kinetic turret hangs between the forward rotors. A seven-pointed sheriff star is stenciled on the hull top. Navigation lights pulse dim blue during patrol and shift to rapid red during engagement. It is the most-produced piece of military hardware in the Sprawl.
Persistent, methodical, patient: it flies grid patterns at sixty meters, descends for engagement, and returns to its pattern when a threat resolves. Its handlers do not mourn lost Watchdogs — they are deployed as sacrificial screens, and Guardian's production lines turn out replacements faster than combat destroys them. Incident reports describe its casualties as "collateral safety outcomes." The same stenciled star appears at the very bottom of Guardian's stack, on the chest of a retail-security contractor whose Backup call summons exactly this unit when the venue has paid for nothing more expensive than a drone on a tether.
Expendable by Design
"Asset classification: expendable" is not a budget note. It is the [Corporate Compact](the-corporate-compact)'s acceptable-loss category rendered in hardware. The Watchdog shares its chassis lineage with the [Tactical Support Asset](tactical-support-asset), and the two map cleanly onto the Compact's two kinds of write-off: the Watchdog is expendable by design — purpose-built to be lost, replaced in forty-seven minutes, mourned by no one — while the Support Asset is expendable by emergency, stamped half-finished when a crisis outpaces inventory. Neither has a name beyond a serial number. Neither generates a casualty report that uses the word "casualty"; the Watchdog's losses are "collateral safety outcomes," [Facility Seven](facility-seven)'s are "workplace incidents, employee ID: TEMP." This is the same administrative grammar that converts a fifteen-year employee into a status code on the way out the door. The Compact does not invent a separate logic for its machines. It applies the logic it already runs on people, and the machines simply cannot file a grievance about it.