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Sleeper Drones Lie in Wait

Here's an insidious and scary development in Ukraine - the "sleeper" drone:

Fans of sf author Maureen F. McHugh recall the wandering mines from her 1994 novel Half the Day is Night:

Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them, like in a sandy wash. And they settled down in the sand and rock, burying themselves, until sand covered them. And then you went away, and the enemy entered the area. And after a preset time, if nothing had crossed them, they dug themselves up, scuttled across the Kalahari on their crab legs, found a new place and buried themselves again. You could preset the range, bury a beacon to keep them fairly close - but the beacon could alert the enemy, so mostly they were set at random, set so as not to wander more then a couple of hundred meters from where they were first buried.

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Related News Stories - (" Weapon ")

Sleeper Drones Lie in Wait
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.' - Maureen F. McHugh, 1994.

Worm Disrupts Physics Simulations Undetected For A Decade
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.' - Philip K. Dick, 1965.

Moscow Attacked By Hundreds Of Drones
'It hurtled on down with inconceivable speed until it was visible as thousands of tiny robot planes...' - Hal K. Wells, 1942.

China's Handheld Electromagnetic Gun
'Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil...' - Richard Morgan, 2003.

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