‘On a green hill overlooking the tree-lined perimeter of Daejeon, a city in central South Korea, a machine gun turret idly scans the horizon. It’s about the size of a large dog; plump, white and wipe-clean. A belt of bullets – .50 calibre, the sort that can stop a truck in its tracks – is draped over one shoulder. An ethernet cable leads from the gun’s base and trails through the tidy grass into a small gazebo tent that, in the Korean afternoon heat, you’d be forgiven for hoping might contain plates of cucumber sandwiches and a pot of tea.
Instead, the cable slithers up onto a trestle table before plunging into the back of a computer, whose screen displays a colourful patchwork of camera feeds. One shows a 180-degree, fish-eye sweep of the horizon in front of us. Another presents a top down satellite view of the scene, like a laid-out Google Map, trained menacingly on our position.’
