From a dream, as is common with me.
It had other weird shit, like alien weapons that don’t hurt humans (to their surprise)…
So, on the far side of some large moon far away turns out an alien ship has been parked there, forever, dead. It is colossal, like a kilometre long or something. Humans discover it and there’s a big race to get there and study it. Long story short, the ship is mostly a giant battery and it there is tech that we don’t understand, but when reproduced on Earth it is anti-gravity.
Aliens have found a way of reaching sub-light-speed using anti-gravity to escape their solar system (in part) and that is enormous costly in terms of energy – a giant battery. The battery is organic and still alive and can be broken down into the tiniest of pieces, even macroscopic, and still delivers enormous power.
A tech consortium works all this out, and how to get bits of battery back to Earth. They decide to leave 75% on the moon to be used for space endeavours “to benefit all of humankind”. But 25% will be used on Earth for energy. For the highest bidder.
The anti-gravity tech is interesting in that the smaller the amount of gravity required to overcome, the more efficient it is, because gravity works on a square of mass or something – which is why insects can walk across ceilings and gymnasts are tiny.
So the best value (on Earth) comes from flying around tiny things. So we have a new shiny thing for the ultra-rich and that is swarms.
10 tiny objects flying separately are more efficient (in anti-gravity terms) than the one that is 10x their weight. The ratio of alien organic battery to weight is the same. So we end up with the tiniest things imaginable flying around in great quantity – swarms of bug like craft.
Monitoring of society and weapons become the territory of the rich – either western governments (the consortium are “good guys”) or billionaires.
That’s the set up.
Play with it.