Devices · pyx

The Pyx

The Pyx. Vantle's selfie drone, the size of a golf ball, matte shell, one lens. Thrown up off the palm it hangs two or three metres off and takes the picture a phone cannot: the owner whole with both hands free, a wider view, a corner it was sent round ahead of them. Sent up, it climbs past the rooftops to the top of a tower, high enough to take a whole block in one frame; sent over a street, it watches the people in it, small and far below, and they seldom think to look up. Everybody with a little money has one; a new one is a month's take and the cloud plan after it, a secondhand one half that and still locked to its last owner's account until somebody reflashes it. Every frame carries Vantle's corner marks, the place and its coordinates and the time to the second, so a Pyx shot is proof of where you were, for you and for anyone who subpoenas the cloud; the free plan uploads everything, the paid one says it does not. Failure: cold kills the battery in minutes, wind pushes it off the shot and gets worse with every floor it climbs, a climb to a tower's top costs half the charge, kids swat it out of the air, a stairwell or a small room knocks it into the walls, and it will not fly inside a police drone's no-fly bubble, so near trouble it hovers back at the edge and gets there after it is over. The broke have none, and everyone knows who pawned theirs.