In one of those "easy for machines, inconceivable for humans" operations, a coupler on the glider’s nose ended up being snapped to the tail end of a flynk chain that presently got concatenated onto the up leg. Rapidly brought up to speed while still in the confines of the flynk barn, the glider pitched upward sharply as it emerged into the light. It began to rise vertically, drawn behind the chain. Nothing was connected to the glider’s tail—the loop had been deliberately severed—and so the system had ceased being an Aitken loop. It was now a vertical bullwhip, accelerating the glider to higher and higher velocity as the Knickstelle at its apex propagated skyward. Lying now on his back, staring straight up over Kath Two’s shoulders, Ty could see small aerodynamic vanes that had deployed from the fuselage of the flynk ahead of them. These, like all the other vanes on all the other thousands of flynks in the chain, effected tiny adjustments to keep the whip trimmed in just the right configuration. The result, a few moments later, was that the glider came snapping over the top just as its connection to the last flynk was severed. In a few seconds it had been hauled two thousand meters straight up and let go with a velocity of a few hundred kilometers per hour. Meanwhile, every other flynk in the chain had decoupled itself fore and aft, causing the entire chain to disintegrate into a linear cloud of identical fragments, each headed in a different direction. Each flynk, sensing that it was aloft and alone, automatically deployed large tail vanes that turned it from a bullet into a badminton shuttlecock. The flynks rapidly slowed down to their terminal velocity, turned nose down, and began to fall toward the ground. A slight canting of the vanes caused them to begin spinning like maple seeds, further slowing their descent, and in this manner the entire swarm began to descend in the direction of an empty lot adjacent to the flynk barn.