The recycling process in the basement was humming along nicely—or rather, silently dissolving matter—so I decided to indulge in the most sacred of all modern rituals: procrastinating. I was sprawled on my couch, deep into the latest chapter of Solo Leveling, while simultaneously listening to my guildmates arguing in Discord about raid tactics. Life was good. The nanomachines were working, the sun was shining outside, and I didn't have to lift a finger.
Suddenly, the Discord voices cut out. The manga page failed to load. The dreaded dinosaur appeared on my screen. I stared at the router in the corner. The cheerful green 'DSL' light had turned into an angry, blinking red.
"No," I whispered, horror washing over me. "Not now. We were just about to pull the boss."
"Archi!" I yelled internally. "What did you do? Did you break the ISP?"
"I didn't 'break' anything," Archi's voice drawled in my head, sounding distinctly unimpressed. "I merely optimized the resource acquisition. That copper vein in the hallway wall was exceptionally pure. Much better than that scrap you call electronics in the basement."
I froze. "You... you ate the house's telephone line? The main distribution cable?"
"It was just sitting there, barely transmitting data at a pathetic 100 megabits. I put it to better use."
"Archi! That's the one thing you don't mess with! If the neighbors can't watch Netflix, there will be a riot. They'll call the technicians, they'll find a gap in the wall... and I'll be evicted!"
"Oh, stop whining, human. You're so dramatic. It's just prehistoric twisted-pair copper. If it means that much to you..."
Before I could even formulate a command, the router lights flickered. Red... Red... Green.
"There," Archi scoffed. "I bridged the gap with a superconductive nano-filament. Honestly, you should be thanking me for upgrading your primitive infrastructure."
I slumped back into the couch, my heart rate slowly returning to normal. "Just... warn me next time before you consume vital utilities, okay?"
"We'll see. If I get bored, I make no promises."
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By evening, the glider was finished. It lay on my living room floor, a sleek, silver arrow about two meters long. It looked less like a machine and more like a piece of abstract alien art. "Okay," I said, lifting it. It was surprisingly light, maybe five kilograms. "Time to move. We launch from the roof."
I opened my apartment door and peered into the hallway. The air smelled faintly of cabbage and floor wax. The staircase of an old Berlin apartment building acts as an acoustic amplifier; a dropped pin sounds like a gunshot here. I tiptoed toward the stairs, the glider tucked under my arm like a surfboard.
Creak. The third step betrayed me.
Immediately, a door on the floor below flew open. Mrs. Krause. The House Dragon. She was a small, elderly woman with the hearing of a bat and the temperament of a wet cat. "Isenaxt!" she barked, her voice echoing up the stairwell. "It is 6:02 PM! Do you have any idea how loud you are?"
I froze, balancing the high-tech alien drone on my hip. "Good evening, Mrs. Krause. I'm just... taking something to the roof."
She squinted at me, her eyes narrowing behind thick glasses. "To the roof? At this hour? And what is that? Is that a surfboard? In Berlin?"
"She is hostile," Archi observed casually. "Do you want me to disable her? A mild localized EMP could reset her pacemaker. Or I could simply fuse her door shut."
"No!" I thought frantically. "Do absolutely nothing!"
Out loud, I lied smoothly: "It's a... model glider. For a competition. Very quiet. Very safe."
"Hmph." She stepped into the hallway, hands on her hips, inspecting my movements like a border guard. "Watch the walls! We just had the hallway painted three years ago! If you scratch the plaster or dent the railing with that thing, I will report it immediately to the property management!"
"Of course, Mrs. Krause. Maximum caution. I won't touch a thing."
"And don't stomp! People are trying to watch the news!"
"I'll float like a feather," I promised, sweating slightly. Not because of the weight, but because Mrs. Krause was more terrifying than any galactic warlord.
She watched me ascend the next flight of stairs with suspicion radiating from her like heat. Only when I turned the corner to the attic floor did I hear her door click shut and the locking bolt slide home.
"You humans are fascinating," Archi mused. "You fear a seventy-year-old woman more than you fear me, an entity capable of rewriting physics. I'm almost insulted."
"You haven't seen her handle a broomstick," I muttered, wiping my forehead. "We have reached the target altitude. The roof hatch is ahead."
I pushed the heavy metal hatch open and stepped out into the cool night air. The city lights of Berlin twinkled in front of us, oblivious to the fact that the space age was about to begin on top of an old rental building.