“I control it with the joystick and we can see what it sees on the screen here,” Reilly continued. He ran his hands over the surface of the quadcopter like it was a pet. “Beautiful,” he said.
“Alright Gollum,” said MacAlister, raising his eyebrows. “Why don’t we get your precious up into the wild blue yonder, eh? Think you can do that? I’d like to get home as soon as possible; I could murder a cuppa.”
“Yes, sir,” Reilly replied, picking up the UAV. He leaped from the landing pad and positioned it on an open piece of roof. He made a few adjustments to the machine and jogged back to the laptop. He pressed a key on the laptop and Emily heard the soft purr of the UAV’s engines as they sprang to life. On the screen a fish-eye view of the roof appeared from the machine’s perspective.
“Alright, here we go,” Reilly mumbled, his attention focused entirely on the screen and keyboard as he grasped the joystick between thumb and forefinger and gently eased it back.
The view on the screen changed in unison with the UAV as it leaped upward. It ascended about thirty feet into the air and then darted around the roof with, Emily had to admit, impressive adroitness. The image on the screen changed to an overhead view of the four humans gathered around the laptop, then changed to a blur of red as the machine sped off in the direction of the crash site.
“Batteries are good for forty minutes of flight,” Reilly informed them. “Should be more than enough time to get there and back.” They watched as he guided the drone back up Las Vegas Boulevard, flying just feet above the canopy. On either side the vague outlines of what had maybe once been stores were momentarily visible as the UAV sped past, behind them the rising tide of red edged up the side of the larger casinos and hotels, the high watermark increasing on a daily basis.
“It looks like we’ve been gone a hundred years,” said Burris, his voice echoing the melancholy Emily thought they probably all had felt at some time. She was glad that she was not the only one who had noticed the aged, dilapidated look the town had taken on in such a short period of time. The parts of buildings she could see flashing by on the computer screen looked weatherworn, their fascias dulled and pitted. Bright signs that had once called out to the thousands of visitors who made their way to this Mecca of self-indulgence and excess now hung dirty and dull from their fixtures, extinguished forever, or had vanished altogether.
The scenery changed again as Reilly banked the drone a sharp left and headed out over McCarran Airport, the control tower and tailfins of landed jets poking through the canopy the only way anyone would recognize that an airport had ever been there.
Generations from now, Emily wondered, should their tiny group of humanity manage to survive and thrive and begin to explore this world again, how would this place look to them? This strange new world would be their new normal; her world, the old world that had existed for thousands of years only to disappear in the space of eight hours, would be the alien one to them. A place of legends. It would be a distant racial memory of greatness, passed down from generation to generation, pieces of reality disappearing with every new voice that carried the story onward. She, and the other survivors, would become fable.
“Look,” said MacAlister, pointing a finger at the screen and simultaneously dragging Emily’s thoughts back to the present. “There it is.”
Sure enough, in the distance, a pixelated black form had appeared against the sea of red. The crash site, stark against the backdrop of the mountains rising up behind it.
“Can you make the approach from the south?” MacAlister asked. “I want to follow the path it took.”
“Can do,” Reilly said and banked the drone hard right, heading toward the trench the object had dug out of the ground when it landed/crashed.
The UAV skimmed over the canopy top. It was surprisingly uniform in appearance, as though the plants that formed the jungle grew at a constant set rate. Reilly only had to make the occasional small adjustment to the craft’s flight, dodging to the left or right to avoid the occasional protruding limb or particularly large branch that rose above the canopy cover.
Gradually, the vague line of black pixels coalesced into a berm of debris, dirt, and dead plants that started just a few feet high at its southern end then gradually grew taller as the heavenly body had finally hit the earth, furrowing a V-shaped scar in its wake. On either side of the channel her earlier suspicions about the level of damage to the surrounding area were confirmed: Little seemed to have been affected. The housing estate it had first landed in—overrun with the alien vegetation and only discernable by the box-like shapes hidden beneath the vegetation—still stood for the most part. Some of the flora had been blackened by heat and hung limply from scorched trunks, but there really was surprisingly little in the way of heat damage considering whatever the object was had burned with such an intense ferocity, Emily noted.
“Hold it there,” MacAlister ordered suddenly as the quadcopter maneuvered over the start of the channel. The picture wobbled as the UAV pulled up then stabilized again as it hovered in place. “Okay, now rotate it around through three-hundred-and-sixty degrees.” The image on the screen showed an almost untouched landscape beyond the debris field kicked up by the furrow; it was barely a few feet deep at the tail end, but quickly deepened to a good thirty or so feet, by MacAlister’s estimation.
“Alright, let’s go see what we can find at the end of this thing. Take us up there, slow and steady.”
The image on the screen began moving again as the quadcopter advanced along the gully. It was almost perfectly straight, and Emily could begin to make out a shape forming at the distant far end of the trench. It was still nothing more than a dark blob of gray-and-black pixels from this distance, but there was definitely something in the crater.
“It’s like Star Wars,” said Burris, watching the screen as his compatriot piloted the drone expertly between the canyon walls of debris and shifted earth.
MacAlister stared hard at the kid, an expression of bewilderment on his face. “How the hell did I wind up with such a bunch of bloody nerds on my crew?” he asked, before turning his attention away from the red-faced sailor and back to the screen.
“Slow it down,” MacAlister said as the distant blob began to form into an indistinct shape. “Can you zoom in?” he asked.
“Not without stopping. I’ll lose orientation really fast,” Reilly answered.
“Do it,” Mac said.
The quadcopter slowed to a standstill again, hovering close to the peak of the west side of the berm. Small particles of dust and debris kicked up by the four motors flew past the lens of the camera like bugs. Reilly rotated the camera using the keyboard’s arrow keys until it was centered on the crater at the far end of the canyon, then pressed and held another key. The image blew up to twice then three times its size as the camera zoomed in, but the image remained just a blurry mass of black-and-gray blobs, obscured for the most part by the natural curve of the trench.
“Can’t you make it any clearer?” Emily asked.
“Sorry, this is the best I can do from here. Let me take it up a bit higher.” The screen wobbled and tilted like a ship in a storm as Reilly commanded the UAV to climb higher into the crystal-blue sky. The screen swayed first left then right as the drone was buffeted by a gust of wind that rustled over the sheet of red below it, then leveled again as its gyros automatically corrected for the pitch and yaw.
This new vantage point wasn’t much better, the resolution of the camera simply was not high enough to capture a clear image at this range, but Emily was confident she could see some kind of structure in the shadows cast into the pit. Of course, it could just be her mind trying to make sense out of unrecognized shapes, but she didn’t think so, she had a distinct sense of complexity, of mass within the blackness.