legends · 5 min read ·
Survey Flight 9
A surveying drone films a human shape standing in a closed reservoir, and then the survey comes back perfect.
**Aerial Survey Mission Log — Blackmere Reservoir, Flight 9**
**Operator:** Mara Teague · **Aircraft:** SKYLARK-6 · **Date:** 3 November · **Altitude:** 90 m · **Purpose:** Shoreline erosion survey
· · ·
**09:02:14** — Takeoff. Wind 6 km/h from the west. Battery 100%.
**09:04:40** — Waypoint 1 reached. Shoreline clear.
**09:11:22** — Waypoint 6 reached. Survey grid complete for sector A.
**09:13:05** — Sector B. Altitude 90 m. Camera recording.
**09:14:50** — Unexpected return: thermal anomaly over water, 340 m from shore. Source: none visible in RGB.
· · ·
The reservoir had been closed to the public since the spring, when the dam was found to be leaking. The survey was routine. Mara had flown the same grid twice in the summer and found nothing except the usual silt and a drowned car that the council had already noted.
She flew sector B at the same altitude, with the camera on nadir. The water was flat, the colour of old pewter. The shoreline ran along the edge of a line of dead willows. She followed the grid and watched the feed on her tablet, and then, at 09:14, the thermal layer lit up.
A small, warm shape sat in the water about three hundred metres from the bank. It was round and steady, and it was the temperature of a human body.
· · ·
**Telemetry note (auto)**
*Object detected, thermal. Size: 0.6 m. Surface temperature: 36.4°C. Movement: none.*
*Object is not present in RGB image. Object is present in height data as a depression in the water surface of 4 cm.*
· · ·
Mara brought the drone lower. Seventy metres. Fifty. The object didn't move, but the thermal shape sharpened, and she could see its outline now: a head, shoulders, an arm lying flat on the surface of the water, the fingers spread.
She had the camera on the face. The face was turned up toward the drone. It was blurred in the RGB feed, as if the water were moving over it, but the thermal layer showed it clearly. Two eyes. A mouth, slightly open.
It was keeping very still, as if it had been asked to float there for a survey and had decided to be cooperative.
She tried to turn the drone away. The controls responded. The drone turned, and then, a second later, turned back, and was looking at the water again, and the thermal shape was closer than before. Twenty metres from the surface. Ten.
· · ·
**Pilot's incident report (Mara Teague)**
I need to record what happened on Flight 9 in full, because I'm the only one who can. The drone is in the evidence locker now, and the footage has been wiped by the server, and nobody in the office believes the thermal layer was ever real.
At 09:19, the object began to rise. I watched it on the tablet. The shape pulled out of the water like someone standing up from a bath, and the thermal signature stretched and thinned, and the head turned to follow the drone.
I brought the drone back to the lake at once. It came down over the willows and hovered at twenty metres, and I could see the thing on the surface clearly now without the thermal, just in the ordinary camera, a pale human figure in a grey coat, standing up to its knees in the reservoir.
Its hand was raised, the palm facing the drone.
At 09:20 the feed went to static. For about four seconds, nothing. Then the picture came back, and the camera was pointing at the sky, and the telemetry said the drone was climbing at four metres per second, which it cannot do.
I brought it down by hand. The battery was at 61%. The GPS said the aircraft was at home, in the field by my car, though I could see it in my hand, and it had never been home.
· · ·
**Mission log, continued (09:26)**
Telemetry: Waypoint 1 reached. Waypoint 2 reached. Waypoint 3 reached. Route has been flown in reverse. Route has been flown again, from the centre of the reservoir outward, at ten metres altitude, passing over the drowned car and the willows.
*Note: the flight log shows a 'survey' of 14 waypoints, all within 40 m of the same point on the water. The survey is marked complete. The data quality score is 100%.*
· · ·
**Mara Teague, email to project lead (4 November)**
I've reviewed the survey data. It's perfect. Every grid cell in sector B is captured at full resolution, and the shoreline looks cleaner than it has in ten years. The erosion survey will be easy to sign off.
What I can't sign off is the thermal layer. It's been filtered. Someone has removed every frame in which the object was visible above the water, and left in every frame where it was below it.
I think it's been counting the frames. I think it's been making sure the survey covers every metre of the reservoir, and that the last thing on the grid is the one standing up in the middle of it.
Please don't send anyone out to fly sector B again. I'm asking because I was the one who brought the drone down. I'm not sure I did it correctly.
· · ·
**Council note (6 November)**
Reservoir survey accepted. Data complete. Thermal anomaly in sector B recorded as noise.
*Note added by the project lead, in pencil:* The drone was found on the shore at dawn, face up, the propellers still turning slowly in the wind. The camera had been pointed at the willows, and in the last frame of footage, very small, in the grey light, a figure stood among the trees, looking at the lens, as if it had come up out of the water to see what the drone had been sent to measure.