Dragon: A Histories of Purga Novel

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The drive was long, mostly uneventful and extremely boring. They drove for most of the day, nearly thirteen hours, before Zoie finally realized they needed to stop for a break. It was late evening by that time and the sun was just starting to go down in the west.

Asher watched the brilliant pinks, blues, and purples light up the sky with a growing sense of apprehension. He couldn't help but feel he was going to be too late to save Keiara.

They ate in the car. They were little meals that Asher and Fowler managed to scavenge from the desert. Edible plants and some small, bitter desert fruits mostly. They did practically nothing to quell their rumbling stomachs, but that was all they had. If Asher had been thinking, he would've raided some of the food from Gar's hut before they'd taken off. However, the impending army bearing down on them caused him to forget about the food and now they were stuck eating bland grasses and roots and bitter fruit.

Blink chirped next to his head, and he idly had the machine go through a dozen or so transformations, including a mechanical hawk. He found that one to be the most entertaining. And the likeness was actually quite good, if you looked past Blink's gleaming metal surface, mechanical eyes, and razor sharp beak.

"Did Rone give you that?" Zoie asked, looking back at him.

Asher nodded.

"It's actually a very unusual gift," she remarked.

"How so?" Asher asked, curious.

"An un-blueprinted nano-machine is rare. There are only a handful of people that can create one. Rone has a unique gift for them. Always has," Zoie responded.

"What does un-blueprinted mean?" he asked. He remembered Rone saying something about blueprints when he gave him Blink but he couldn't recall exactly what they did. He assumed they were the drawings of white lines that Zoie had pulled up before.

"Not using a blueprint. We need the blueprints to create the machines because there are a lot of technical parts that are required to make them actually work. The nanos can become whatever material is needed to make all the parts that create the entire whole. But our people quickly found out, sometimes because of disastrous accidents, that if even one part is missing then the entire machine fails. It is extremely difficult to define exactly what is needed, right down to the last motherboard, to make the machine work and keep all of that information in your head while you are creating it, so to compensate for that and make it easier, we have the blueprints. Each machine we create has a blueprint that defines everything that is needed for the machine to work. All we have to do is press the button. The blueprint is sent to the nanos, and then the nanos create it. Some people, like Rone, can hold all of that information in their minds while they are creating what they want and make the machine without the use of a blueprint. There aren't many of them though and they're the ones that usually create new blueprints for the rest of our people to buy," she explained.

Asher listened with intense concentration, drinking in every word.

"So, you can create whatever you want so long as you have a blueprint for it. Except for people like Rone, who can create things straight from their minds?" he asked.

"That's right," Zoie answered. "Although, people like Rone will still use blueprints, just because it requires less concentration and is much faster. Sometimes, they'll make things and then transfer that data into a blueprint so that they'll have quicker access to the machine later, like Rone's flightpack. He created it when he was eight and then transferred the data to a blueprint. He shared that blueprint with my son a couple of years later and then my son gave the blueprint to my daughter and me. We used the flightpacks to escape our refugee camp's destruction."