A Visitor to the Future - 36 - Fabrication and Fragments

As a young child, now what seemed like an eternity ago, I had seen a troop of acrobats on television. I had been amazed at the grace and poise of the act they performed, as they cartwheeled through the air and caught each other. Feats of balance and precision that looked like they took a lifetime of practice. For the next week my parents had to watch me carefully as I repeatedly attempted to backflip off the sofa.

The printer made those acrobats look like amateurs.

Components were passed from one arm to the other with clockwork precision. Sections of the floor were dedicated to the printing of new parts - and not in the rudimentary plastic 3D printing way I was used to - the ends of the arms curved with haste, creating large single-piece parts that would have taken days to cast out of metal. You could blink and miss that a part was now complete before it was flung through the air and caught by another arm, or in one case suspended on a rising column of air projected by a round tube supported by one of the arms.

"Couldn't resist programming a few tosses," said Blaise slyly, "Organised chaos is in my nature."

Some components seemed to take far more attention to assemble than others, with multiple arms working on the same part. I watched what now appeared to be a cockpit with interest as an arm rotated it into place, perfectly meeting the other components of the now fully-assembled helicopter.

It looked much like a very small conventional helicopter with a pointed nose. But instead of a single rotor, two were intermeshed at the top of the craft. Several other arms quickly added what looked like paint, revealing a green-and-black colour scheme with a large stripe of white across the side door.

"Presenting the Crux Kestrel!" said Blaise in a showman-like voice, "This twin-seater synchropter comes fully fitted with the greatest in pre-Consortium stability technology, with a maximum lifting weight of 2500kg. She's snappy too - unladen she can easily do 260 kilometres an hour."

"What an odd looking craft," said Tungsten, "I'm only just getting used to the quadrocopters on Earth - how safe is it?"

"Oh, safe as houses," said Blaise, "Of course the Consortium will still want to shadow us with a drone - does that with any craft being flown by a citizen, and doubly so for something you've built yourself. As for why it's a dual rotor and not a quadrocopter, the reason I made this design back in the day was because it has a tiny footprint. The Kestrel's meant to work in areas where space is at a premium."

"If you were designing something like this today," I asked, "What changes would you make? This is a pre-Consortium design, right?"

Blaise rubbed his chin thoughtfully, "I'm not sure it'd be necessary - Consortium drones can do the job this was designed for really well. But I'd probably make it jet-powered. Airbreathing turbofan technology has come a long, long way since my time. So it wouldn't really be a helicopter at all. The main reason to use rotor-based craft these days is personal taste - oh, and they're a little less noisy, so they're more commonly used around cities. The Consortium's main transport craft all use turbofan engines."

I thought of the craft that had taken me to Baobab and the quadrocopter transport craft that worked around Anchor - that matched what I had seen so far.

Pressing a few more buttons, I was surprised as Blaise's helicopter began to be taken apart again, just as delicately as it had been assembled in the first place. Materials and parts were taken apart to be recycled later. "Anyway, that's the basics of fabrication for you right there. Anything you can design - well, within reason - we can build it here. The Consortium's printers are a lot larger and more impressive, but this one suits our needs. Want to come meet the boss?"

We took a short walk through this floor of the ship and came to another door, which Blaise knocked at this time and waited patiently. A few moments passed, before a call of "Enter!" came from a faint and distant voice from inside, and Blaise pushed the door open.

The interior of this room looked like a cross between a seating room and a museum. Two comfortable but formal-looking three-seater sofas surrounded a coffee table which had coffee coasters waiting there, and I was suddenly reminded of the waiting areas in large corporate offices where you would wait impatiently for your interview. The walls were lined with what looked like glass display cases and framed memorabilia. Almost every piece on display had a something in common - Crux. There were Crux-branded posters with advertising taglines (Your path to the skies was a common sight), sports caps, t-shirts, large photographs of hundreds of personnel, and two of Blaise and a woman I didn't recognise standing in front of an aircraft or helicopter. One of the largest cases had a hunk of ruined metal - a half-melted component from one aircraft or another. There was a small window in here which displayed the blue sky around us, though the majority of the lighting came from ceiling lights and lamps.

"Just a minute!" said the voice again. Now that we were inside the room I could hear faint chatter between two people in a language I didn't recognise coming from another door that was partially ajar.

"Right," said Blaise, "I'll leave you with the boss for a while. Drop me a message when you're done. You'll get along just fine, I'm sure!" He gave us a polite wave, and Tungsten and I sat down on one of the sofas, both glancing at the various photographs on the walls.

It wasn't long before our host arrived, with Sasha just behind her. She had medium-length brown hair that was tied into a smart bun, and wore a smart grey business suit and trousers that had a dark spiral pattern to them, her shoes flat-heeled and practical-looking. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, but with what I'd learned from Blaise, I guessed that she was far older. She saw Sasha to the door and the two conversed a little in Verrin, before she gave Sasha a quick peck on the cheek, closed the door, and spun around to regard us. She clasped her hands together with a brief clap and addressed us in a warm, confident tone.

"Thank you for waiting on me, a pleasure to meet you both," she walked over and extended a hand to each of us in turn, which we both shook - Tungsten more enthusiastically. "I am Alexandra Borseth, an Auditor, and these," she gestured broadly around the room, "Are my little fragments of history."


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