Cutting drones

The first whispers came during the darkest days of the Ukraine–Russia war. Outgunned and exhausted, Ukraine clawed at every possibility for survival. Weapons were begged, borrowed, or improvised; factories turned into labs, engineers worked in sleepless shifts, and every outlandish concept was at least considered. From that crucible of desperation was born a machine that seemed, at first, a mere nuisance: the cutting drone. Any little bit more pressure on the enemy would help.

It was a small, black-winged creature, lighter than a crow. Its purpose was simple and merciless. It would charge itself on power lines, then cut them with diamond-toothed wire snips on its underbelly. When the cables went cold, its batteries and solar panels sustained it just long enough until another live wire lured it onward. It was an insect in a vast metallic hive, crawling tirelessly across the veins of civilization.

The first handful of drones left Ukraine with a bombing raid, their faint whine masked by jet engines and artillery fire. They went unnoticed for days. A snapped cable here, a darkened village there. Russia’s repair crews patched the grid without complaint, dismissing the outages as chance. But then the severances multiplied. One town. Then five. Then fifty. The drones were not random; they traveled along the arteries of Russia’s energy lifeblood, cutting with patient precision.

At first, every cut was trivial. Russia’s sprawling grid had redundancies. But the drones did not stop. They came in waves. Every repaired line was severed again, elsewhere, and again, and again. The invisible swarm pressed deeper into the hinterland, dismantling the network node by node. Power plants stood idle, their output stranded from the cities. Repair crews burned out. Factories flickered and failed.

Civilian life cracked first—dark apartments, failed hospitals, silent grocery stores. Generators lasted for a while but were not meant to last forever. Then came the military factories. Munitions lines jammed. Tanks sat in silent hangars. Aircraft grounded without power. What was once the industrial juggernaut of war became a ghostly husk, starved of electricity. Russia’s economy convulsed, then imploded, the chaos ended the war at last.

Ukraine celebrated. Allies cheered. For the first time in years, the world exhaled with relief. Against all odds, David had broken Goliath—not with missiles or armies, but with a whispering plague of machines. For a moment, it seemed the war was over, and perhaps peace was within reach.

But Russia was not finished.

Not long after the victory parades in Kyiv, drones began appearing over Ukrainian skies once more. At first it was assumed they were strays, survivors of the original swarms. Then the truth emerged: Russia had reverse-engineered the design. The same cutting drones were now gnawing at Ukraine’s own fragile grid. Ukraine, however, had prepared. Their defenses against drones were sharp and quick, and the damage was limited.

Except the Russian drones did not stay in Ukraine. They spread into Poland. Into Germany. Into France. Western grids, already strained by decades of underinvestment and deformed by sustainable energy policies, cracked under the pressure. Blackouts cascaded like falling dominoes. At first, Western leaders blustered, posturing with threats and demands. Then their voices faltered, replaced by anxious meetings in candlelit capitals.

The United States looked across the Atlantic with a smug smile, the “big brother” watching his weaker siblings stumble. They promised aid, of course—money, equipment, expertise. But before their assistance could arrive, the drones appeared in American skies too. Cities from Boston to Los Angeles flickered in and out like faulty stars.

Then came the final revelation: Russia’s denials grew frantic, even desperate. They pleaded that they were not in control. And it was true. By then, the plans for the drones had already leaked across the world. Any faction with anger or ambition could build one. Secessionists, ecoterrorists, fanatics, saboteurs—all now wielded the same power once reserved for states.

The swarm was everywhere.

No nation was safe. Trade collapsed, economies withered, lights died in the world’s greatest cities. Distrust bloomed like rot. Borders hardened, cooperation evaporated. Nations turned inward, isolationist and suspicious, glaring at one another across darkened frontiers.

And so, from a war in Eastern Europe, the world slid into its new age: not an age of empires or alliances, but of suspicion, of shadows, of machines gnawing at the threads of civilization.

The Earth itself had not ended. But the world as humanity had known it was gone.