A Visitor to the Future - 74 - Drone Festival
True to her word, Antonia turned up in Anchor about a week later to 'drag me' off to the drone festival. She usually favoured vests and comfortable trousers, but today her taste in fashion was completely different - she was wearing a beautiful long-sleeved lilac dress which had a number of flowing ribbons attached to the neck. It wasn't a summer dress, though - there was more of an insulated feel to her choice almost like something Victorian. The ensemble was completed by what looked like a pale opera mask with grey, sun-filtering lenses. She held out a second mask in my direction as she met me in the lobby.
"Don't look so surprised!" she said, "This is a traditional sort of dress for the festival. Lots of flowing clothes!"
I looked down at my own clothing - jeans and a jacket. I briefly regretted my decision not to look up more details about the festival. Antonia picked up on my self-critical look. "Don't worry," she said, "You look to be dressed warmly enough - I'll fabricate something extra for you on the way over too!"
That something turned out to be an overlong red and yellow silk scarf which had to be wrapped around my neck three times to stop it trailing over the ground. Antonia offered to fabricate me something similar to her dress, which I quickly refused. My fashion choices had always been more restrained, and Antonia's choice was definitely out of my comfort zone.
The drone-craft approached Paris quickly. I'd seen some images of Paris before on the Infranet but in person, things seemed a lot more impressive. An area around the Eiffel Tower and Champs-Élysées looked relatively unchanged from my time - and I even could pick out the re-built Notre-Dame, which made me smile. But around that was a sprawling metropolis which would have put even the most sophisticated skyscrapers of my own time to shame. Buildings towered upwards, a hive of activity connected by monorail systems which weaved in-between the buildings - with stations that unloaded passengers directly into the middle of those buildings. The scale was truly huge, bigger than IJmuiden, or even New York in my own time. The River Seine vanished completely from view in places, so dense were the bridges covering it. Paris had become a very different beast.
And there, floating in the gaps between buildings, clamouring above the streets and weaving into any possible space that they could find, were hundreds of thousands of drones.
Small round drones, larger car-sized drones, even ones that could rival a small house in mass. There were all different colours that at this distance made them all look like a flurry of glitter. All of them whirled around the dense mass of Paris in circles and patterns that made flocks of birds look relatively tame in comparison.
"Whoa," I said.
"It's really something, isn't it? The most drones that you'll ever see in once place!" said Antonia.
We had to wait in a queue of craft until our drone-craft deposited us on a small landing pad in the centre of five buildings, descending carefully between them. It was almost like we were being lowered into a mineshaft, though instead of darkness and toil at the bottom, there was frolicking and wonder. Antonia hooked her arm around my elbow, smiling ear-to-ear as she led me into the crowds.
Music played from speakers that towered above the whole crowd, of a volume audible but not overpowering. Some small stalls handed out food of all varieties, and others had fabrication equipment like in the back of a drone-craft. I watched as a young child of maybe eight or nine years old removed a plate-sized drone, and after happily showing it to their parents threw it into the air, where it caught itself and joined the swarm in the streets above.
Wherever there was a free space, large bladeless turbines blew gusts of wind into the street, which suddenly made Antonia's choice of insulated dress obvious. Antonia's ribbons and my scarf caught the artificial wind, streaming behind us, as I picked out similar clothing designs among other people. One person had even gone so far as to attach a large streaming ribbon about eight metres long to their shirt, held up by a drone of its own. The crowd parted in a wave around it.
Everything was absolute chaos, but it was the sort of fantastic chaos caused by people enjoying themselves.
Antonia navigated the crowds like a professional, weaving us between people and leading us to one stall after another - where you could see the food being cooked in the back. I saw a more typical Consortium drone approach us and instinctively ducked, only for it to harmlessly miss us, deposit some cooking supplies for the nearest stall and leave as quickly as it came. I thought to myself that the Consortium must have been extremely busy today. Antonia pointed at the chef in the back and explained the festival's general position on food.
"There is a traditional pastry for the festival," she said over the crowd, "But as this is mostly a festival of different arts and culture you'll find every store doing something special instead! Wait, can you smell that? Curry!" She led me once more into the masses of people.
I felt that if I were to somehow lose sight of Antonia I would end up lost in these crowds and never be seen again, so I quickly followed.