Hoverpads

In Shakespeare's time life had become so hectic that people began to carry around a personal data assistant, a piece of slate and a piece of chalk to write down things to do and important facts to memorize. Hamlet, after seeing a ghost who tells him some disturbing information, "checks his tables" and finds it doesn't add up.
As time progresses, life becomes even more hectic with more and more personal data to be handled and accessed in an instant.
People carry around electronic "PDA's" in the 20th century, basically the same as the piece of slate and piece of chalk, but with more bells and whistles.
In that same century, as electronic computers reduce from the size of several rooms to pocket-sized, many functions are combined including telephone communication, video communication, recording the same, games and other entertainment, storing and encrypting vast amounts of personal data, as well as performing financial transactions.
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, these small wonders were tremendously expensive. Then as more fancier functions were added, the basic devices with very basic functionality become cheaper and cheaper. Eventually businesses provide to customers automated "cash-registers" each of which can manipulate information on all products for sale at the business and coordinate with nearly every financial institution across the globe, and which can interface with a customers personal financial electronic systems or perform that service for customers who have no device of their own. Later, as physical tokens of money become too expensive and cumbersome to carry, basic communication and secure financial communication become so cheap and fast (and so vital to businesses being able to perform business) that disposable pads with all of the capability of the old "cash-registers" are mass produced and frequently left behind by patrons for someone else to pick up and perform their own transactions using biometrics, a variety of secret passwords, and internal cybernetic identifiers to identify themselves and their financial accounts.
Then somebody made them fly.
Extremely lightweight self-piloting flying drones were quite popular in the early 21st century for entertainment first. Then a nearly silent flight system was developed. Then people found other more important uses. The first production units of drone personal computers gained grass-roots acceptance as small grocery stores would have a hoverpad follow each customer, using machine near-intelligence to perform the task of a personal shopper informing each customer and suggesting various alternative products that might be of interest. Even schools, churches, convents, and monasteries found it useful to give all people the ability to reach into the air for a communication device for various emergency and mundane communications. The early hoverpads became novelties, popular, then ubiquitous to the point of being unremarkable.
When nanobot technology was developed and produced smart materials that could perform various physical functions (like a "Swiss army knife") and various electronic communications, it was a perfect marriage to manufacture a hoverpad out of nanobots. The Hoverbot was then born. A hoverpad at your beck and call with the additional capability of shaping itself into any of various physical tools and large easy-to-read displays.

Item type

Communication