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“It’s hard to say,” responds TedTalker, “the boffins keep inventories of all their weapons, crossbows, swords, bows and arrows, that sort of thing, but the lab doesn’t log every single small component. And it’s the small things that disappear.”
“Like what?”
“Let’s ask Barmy, he can explain it better than me.”
“We know we’ve lost some prototype arrow heads,” says BarmyWaffle, “some bolt tips, and some samples of bone. The Lab recently received a consignment of llama bone to experiment with. We want to see if it’s more resilient than sheep or goat.”
“Anything explosive? Anything electric?”
“The chemicals are under double lock and key. Nothing wrong there. Our battery technology programme is on hold. It’s like we’re back where it all started in the 1800s. Wet acid batteries and not much else. We have a little material for dry batteries but we’re too focussed on weaponry right now.”
“And other types of power plants?”
“The prototype drones have multi level rubber bands, or multi dimensional clockwork engines. And that stuff is all big and bulky.”
“Oh, I should introduce you to NutJob,” says Walker, “not only is he into model aircraft, he’s working with Faraday on building a portable electricity generator.”
“Yes I met him earlier, for all of sixty seconds, but you can’t put wind turbines or hydro electric plants inside aircraft! Let me show you the size of some of these enormous rubber bands and clockwork engines. And in any case, the drones are pretty useless. We’d need to build a radio control system first.”
“That’ll mean electronics,” says Walker, “transistors and stuff? Things that went out with The Decimation?”
“Exactly,” says BarmyWaffle, “we’ve not had transistors for 300 years, or thermionic valves, and that’s a 400 year old technology. We can’t manufacture any of it. We have no blueprints. We can’t even find reference material for radios, nor books on transistors or valves. It was all on computers in those days, and we know what happened to computers!”
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