The night air on the roof was crisp, carrying the hum of Berlin's traffic. I placed the silver glider on the tar paper, aiming its nose towards the gap between two chimneys. It looked innocuous enough—a sleek, metallic dart resting in the shadow of a satellite dish.
"Alright, Archi," I whispered, glancing nervously at the skylight to make sure Mrs. Krause wasn't lurking there like a gargoyle. "How do we control this thing? Do I need a remote? A joystick app?"
"Please," Archi scoffed. "Manual control is for primitives who enjoy crashing. I will interface directly. But since you humans need visual confirmation to feel important..."
My smartwatch vibrated violently. Before I could check the notification, a beam of light shot out from the bezel, expanding into a complex, floating 3D hologram above my wrist. It displayed telemetry data, atmospheric density, and a wireframe of the glider in real-time.
"Whoa," I murmured, turning my wrist to rotate the display. "Okay, that's cool. HUD initialized."
"Initiating electromagnetic levitation sequence. Engaging silent drive."
I expected a hum, a whine, maybe a gust of wind. Instead, the silence was absolute. The glider didn't launch; it simply... uncoupled from gravity. It lifted off the roof with terrifying slowness, rising vertically like a ghost. No wobbling, no acceleration curve. Just pure, unnatural stability. It hovered at eye level for a second, its silver surface reflecting the city lights, before it began to drift forward.
"It's too slow," I hissed. "Someone will see it!"
"It is perfectly calibrated," Archi retorted. "The magnetic field repels the air molecules around the hull, creating a near-vacuum tunnel. Watch."
The glider tilted upward at a forty-five-degree angle and accelerated. There was no sonic boom, no tearing of the air. It just slid through the atmosphere as if the laws of physics were merely suggestions. On my holographic display, the altitude numbers blurred: 500 meters... 1,000 meters... 3,000 meters.
"We are clearing civilian airspace," I noted, watching the telemetry. "Smooth sailing."
"Boring sailing," Archi corrected. "Look at that thermal pocket over the city center. Massive turbulence. Let's see how the structural integrity holds up."
"Archi, don't you dare—"
Before I could finish the sentence, the wireframe on my wrist jerked to the left. The glider, which had been on a perfect ascent trajectory, suddenly banked hard and dove straight into a chaotic swirl of wind shear. "Are you insane?!" I yelled, forgetting to whisper. "We need those nanomachines!"
"Relax, Surgrim. I'm gathering data. Besides, the inertial dampeners need a stress test."
On the display, the G-force indicator spiked into red numbers that would have turned a human pilot into jelly. The glider danced through the turbulence, spinning and weaving with impossible agility, treating the violent winds like a playground slide.
"Stop playing with the priceless prototype!"
"Fine, fine. Fun is over. Spoilsport."
The glider pulled out of the dive and shot straight up again, piercing a cloud layer in a blink. The city lights below faded into a glowing grid, then into a distant smear of light. The sky above turned from the murky orange of light pollution to a deep, velvety black.
"Altitude: 20 kilometers," Archi reported, his voice returning to a professional monotone. "Approaching the Armstrong Limit. Atmospheric density is now negligible. The electromagnetic drive is losing efficiency."
I watched the hologram. The curve of the Earth was just becoming visible on the sensor feed. The air was too thin for the glider to "swim" anymore.
"Okay," I said, taking a deep breath. "Phase one complete. We're in the stratosphere. Ready for stage two separation?"
"Solid-state boosters are primed," Archi confirmed. "Separating the glider shell in three... two... one..."