Displaced

Chapter 16

Small metallic blades spun about miniature rotors, slowly gaining momentum until they whirled about their axes faster than the eye could see. Slowly, unsteadily, the drone rose into the air, stabilizing itself using all four propellers and then climbing into the night sky. There it hovered, twenty feet above Blake's head, correcting itself against the wind using its autopilot routines.

Blake watched the energy flow from one of the three crystals stored in the central fuselage out into the four motors. The distribution looked good. The energy overhead needed for its programming, sensors, and data connection was significant, but within expected parameters. Everything functioned as planned.

The body of the unmanned recon drone, which Blake had decided to call a "flitter" in keeping with his current naming convention, was largely ripped straight from the designs of those personal drones that had been all the rage before his sudden transfer. There was no reason he needed to reinvent the wheel for everything, after all. Besides, he'd been more interested in a different area of the design.

In his study of the strange energy-filled crystals the locals called "cantacrenyx", Blake had discovered that the crystals seemed to absorb energy at a constant rate that correlated exactly with the crystal's mass, which also seemed to set the limit to how much could be absorbed. If crystal A was twice the mass of crystal B, it would absorb twice as much energy per second but also would hold twice as much energy in total, meaning that both crystals would go from empty to full in the same amount of time.

As he'd been working these details out, a stray thought had crossed his mind, one which had taken seed and germinated into something closer to a mild obsession: given the constant rate of incoming energy, was it possible to create something that was light enough yet strong enough to fly in perpetuity? After a series of failed prototypes, Blake could finally say with authority that yes, it was indeed possible.

The key laid in the tri-crystal power source. As one crystal powered the device, the other two would recharge. Then, when the crystal providing power ran dry, it would disconnect and another crystal, now newly recharged, would take over. The trick was to find a balance in the energy drain so that one crystal would go from full to empty in a little over half the time it took for it to recharge again. Hitting that balance required finding the perfect ratio of power vs mass. If the motors had to work too hard, the crystal would lose power before its replacement was fully ready. Adding in more crystals or replacing them with larger ones just added to the weight, meaning greater power consumption to offset the gain in reserves.

There was another complication as well. In his old world, the processing and memory units of a device were usually completely separate from the unit's body. For Blake, the opposite was the case — the processing and memory for a device was its body, and if the body didn't have enough mass, there wasn't enough metal to program in all the functionality that he needed. This put a floor on just how light the flitter could be. A perpetually-flying drone that was nothing more than some propellers connected to some crystals did him no good. He needed it to be able to hover in a spot, correct for wind, avoid incoming objects, fly pre-programmed routes, and more. That much functionality meant a significant amount of metal, and that was before one added in the sensors and communication pod.

Yet the window, while small, did exist, and he'd found it. Soon he'd be able to surveil all of Otharia with ease, watching for signs of trouble or resistance. If only he could get his hands on some lighter-than-air gasses... then he'd be able to go really nuts.

He wanted to whoop with joy at his achievement, but such displays were unbecoming of a head of state, or whatever he was these days. "De facto" head of state, he guessed. He had effectively assumed control of the entire country, but nobody who lived there would willingly recognize his leadership. That would change in time, and he didn't need their recognition at the moment anyway.