by Dan Koboldt
I ate lunch at my desk—peanut butter and jelly sandwich, as always—and flipped over to the secret, not-officially-ordered design. A design that carried a genetic change of uncertain significance. I’m not sure why I didn’t just go to Evelyn and tell her about this part of my plan. My instincts told me that giving a dragon a progressive muscle disease wouldn’t hold much appeal with company leadership. Dragons were our products; sending out intentionally defective ones might reflect poorly on us. Even if it were for good reasons, like helping my brother and others like him. Besides, the old adage probably applied: it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission. His variant went in, and the dragons would either replicate his disease or they wouldn’t. My simulator backed my prediction: its modeling of the dragon with Connor’s variant foresaw gradual muscle weakness and progressive loss of strength. That’s because my simulator thought like I did. I went back to the code itself and made the tweaks so it essentially ignored the spiked-in variant. The genetic sabotage was ready, and the failsafe effectively disabled. Now all I needed was the right dragon to put it into.
In the meantime, I started in on the next order. Basics first: body type, maximum size, growth rate, coloring. The current customer wanted an attack dragon. Lean, muscular, and jet-black. I glanced over the rest of the form. The heavy claws were an obvious choice. Same with the spiked tail and extra rows of canine teeth. The buyer certainly knew his business.
The sales department had redacted the name of said buyer, but I could make an educated guess. Dragons like these usually ended up in the hands of rich criminals. They’d paid for on-site hatching, too, which meant our staff would oversee the hatching and deliver the live dragon to the customer in person.
I altered the hemoglobin gene to give it higher efficiency. Then I wiped out one of the dopamine receptors, so the dragon wouldn’t be easily sated. These traits meant the cranium had to be small. This dragon would operate mostly on instinct, which worked well for attack models. Dragons were already natural predators. Take away their senses of empathy and self-preservation, and you had yourself a killing machine.
The simulator kept me in check; sometimes I went too far with the musculature or claw size. Two steps forward, one step back. I didn’t bother with wings; it would be too heavy to fly. It was late afternoon by the time I found the right balance. One perfect killer dragon. I made a note on the dietary guidelines (lots of meat, preferably raw) that customer service could pass along to the buyer. I gave it an aggressive-model flag in our system, too, which meant the customer would receive all the usual disclaimers about dangerous animals. Much of the legal framework for Rottweilers, pit bulls, and other dangerous dogs had been adapted so that it applied to synthetic organisms as well. If your dragon maimed someone, you were responsible. Rumor had it that Greaves had retained a powerful lobbying group to make sure that attack dragons weren’t banned altogether.
I hit “Print” and put in a transfer ticket while the God Machine got to work. Funny how the egg often hinted at the dragon inside it. This one slid out of the printer like a shadow. The marbled black-and-gray shell seemed to absorb the light all around it.
Jim and Allie arrived, and wheeled their cart into position beside the God machine.
“Hey guys,” I said, earning two silent nods in response.
They did a team lift on the egg—it was heavier than it looked, and company protocols required this anyway—and eased it into a shallow foam receptacle on the cart.
“This is a—” I started to say. I’m not sure what happened next. Maybe one of the wheels gave out or something. But the cart buckled, and the handlers shouted in alarm. Jim tried to catch it, but he was on the wrong side. Allie couldn’t hold the weight on her own. Instead, she threw herself under it. Didn’t even hesitate or anything. She grunted when it hit her but held on with both hands.
“Shit!” I half-fell out of my chair to help her.
I had trouble getting a grip on the egg’s slippery-smooth surface. Damn, it’s heavy. I couldn’t lift it on my own, but I kept it from crushing her.
Jim kicked the cart to one side, straddled Allie, and gripped the egg in a bear hug. I squirmed out of his way. He grunted and heaved the egg in a dead lift. Allie scrambled out from under it.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yeah.” She unzipped her headgear and pushed it down. Her jet-black hair tumbled loose about her face. She grimaced. “I’ll grab another cart.”
“Maybe I should get it,” I said.
“I’m fine.” She limped out.
Jim stood there holding the egg, his arms taut with the effort.
“You want to put that down?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I got it.”
Then Allie was back, and they tried the whole thing again. The cart held this time. Thank God the egg hadn’t broken; I doubted they’d have taken it well. Allie pressed her hands to her right side and gasped.
“Maybe you should see the doctor,” I said.
“Right after we get the egg situated.”
Jim pushed the cart out and she limped after it, pulling the damaged one behind her. I might as well have been a painting on a wall now that they had the egg in their possession.
In all the commotion, I forgot to tell them to put it in a solitary incubator.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
TECH SUPPORT
Build-A-Dragon Support Chat Transcript
Operator: Li-Huei Chang
Date: August 23rd
System: We appreciate your patience. A support operator will be with you in two minutes.
System: We appreciate your patience. A support operator will be with you in one minute.
Charles Smith (trainee): Hello, and thank you for contacting the Build-A-Dragon Company. May I have your name, please?
Guest 5: Maria Domingo Sanchez.
Charles Smith (trainee): Good afternoon, Mrs. Sanchez.
Guest 5: It’s MISS Sanchez!
Charles Smith (trainee): Of course. Miss Sanchez. How can I help you today?
Guest 5: Something’s wrong with my dragon.
Charles Smith (trainee): What seems to be the problem?
Guest 5: It got fat.
Charles Smith (trainee): I’d be happy to help you with that. I see you have a Rover model. Is that correct?
Guest 5: Yep. His name’s Drago Malfoy.
Charles Smith (trainee): Bravo on the literary reference. Adult Rovers should be sixty to eighty pounds. How much does yours weigh?
Guest 5: I don’t know, 140?
Charles Smith (trainee): Just to confirm, miss, you have standard Rover model that weighs 140 pounds?
Guest 5: That’s right.
Charles Smith (trainee): Good God! What have you been feeding him?
Guest 5: He likes to hang out under the table, so I guess it’s mostly what we’re eating. Hamburgers, pizza, chicken wings. Chili cheese burritos.
Charles Smith (trainee): Is that all? No dessert?
Guest 5: Oh, he’s got quite the sweet tooth. Cakes with extra frosting. Cookies. Deep-fried Oreos are his favorite.
Charles Smith (trainee): I’m afraid that the reptilian digestive system is not designed to handle high levels of sugar and saturated fat.
Guest 5: In English, please.
Charles Smith (trainee): Stop feeding your dragon so much junk food, Miss Sanchez.
Guest 5: Well, what should we feed him?
Charles Smith (trainee): Most of our customers feed their dragons genuine Reptilian dragon food, and they stay quite lean.
Charles Smith (trainee): The dragons, that is.
Guest 5: Did you just call me fat?
Charles Smith (trainee): I absolutely did not, Miss Sanchez.
Guest 5: You think I’m fat, don’t you?
Charles Smith (trainee): I certainly wouldn’t know.
Guest 5: Let’s see you pop out three children and maintain an ideal weight!
Charles Smith (trainee): That certainly would
be a stretch for me, Miss Sanchez. But back to the dragon . . .
Guest 5: What about it?
Charles Smith (trainee): Changing his diet should help considerably, but I might also recommend regular exercise.
Guest 5: Well, he likes sports.
Charles Smith (trainee): Outstanding. Any sports in particular?
Guest 5: Baseball, golf, tennis . . . And football, of course.
Charles Smith (trainee): Your dragon plays football?
Guest 5: He doesn’t play, he watches it on TV like everyone else.
Charles Smith (trainee): Ah.
Guest 5: He devotes a lot of hours to it already. I’m not sure we can add more.
Charles Smith (trainee): You understand that watching sports on television doesn’t really count as exercise, right?
Guest 5: Says who?
Charles Smith (trainee): I suppose that’s a toss-up between physics and reality.
Guest 5: Psh. I’m in decent shape and that’s all I do.
Charles Smith (trainee): I’m not going to touch that one, Miss Sanchez. May I ask, do you generally keep your Rover indoors or outdoors?
Guest 5: About half in, half out.
Charles Smith (trainee): So, I assume you let him out during the day, and bring it in at nightfall?
Guest 5: No, I meant LITERALLY half and half. He’s stuck in the doggie door.
Guest 5: That’s why I’m talking to you.
Charles Smith (trainee): I’m afraid that the Build-A-Dragon company cannot be held liable for property damage due to negligence.
Guest 5: I don’t give a damn about the door. I just want to get my dragon unstuck from it.
Charles Smith (trainee): Do you have any vegetable oil in the house? Perhaps in bottom of the deep fryer?
Guest 5: How do you know I have a deep fryer?
Charles Smith (trainee): Call it a lucky guess. Does that mean you have some?
Guest 5: We got plenty.
Charles Smith (trainee): If you rub oil generously about the dragon’s middle, I think you’ll be able to ease him out of the door.
Guest 5: I’ll give it a try. For now, I have to sign off for dinner.
Charles Smith (trainee): Well, I’d hate to come between you and a meal. Good evening, Miss Sanchez. Thank you for contacting The Build-A-Dragon Company.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Desert Encounters
I tried to go back to work, but the incident with the egg and hatchers kind of shook me. After my third false start on the next custom order, I decided I should just call it a day and go home. Not so long ago, heading home meant I’d play Russian roulette with the jalopy and head to my empty, crappy apartment. Now, I had Octavius to come home to. And more importantly, I’d spent most of my bonus on a much nicer form of transportation. It was my one concession to the flash and glam of the Phoenix lifestyle, a car I’d dreamed of owning since childhood.
A Tesla Model S, bright red.
I paused to unplug it—charging your battery on the company’s grid was part of the benefits package—and put my thumb on the biometric scanner. The car beeped, the security system disarmed, and the driver’s side door hissed open.
I never, ever got tired of that sound.
I slipped into the driver’s seat, put my hands on the wheel. I inhaled the scent of Nappa leather while the retinal scanner verified that it was me.
“Good afternoon, Noah” said the car. Her voice, which sounded like the computer from “Star Trek,” was another thing I never got tired of hearing.
“Hello, gorgeous,” I said. “Let’s go home.”
The seatbelt slid across. The car backed out and began the seemingly endless ascent up the exit ramp. The windows dimmed automatically when we got outside the garage. I fiddled with the console to find some 80s music.
The Tesla got me home in twenty minutes—leaving in mid-afternoon had its perks—and parked itself in the garage beneath my condominium building. This was one of the prefab “green” complexes that they’d built all over Scottsdale. I could have afforded a swankier place downtown, but I liked the fact that they generated their own power. Totally off the grid. My corner unit had a balcony and fifteen hundred square feet of bachelor pad.
Another thirty or forty years of gainful employment, and it would be all mine. Of course, that depended on remaining employed, which was by no means a guarantee.
The condo door slid open at my touch. Fluorescent lights flickered on.
“Octavius?” I called.
No answer. He was probably asleep, as usual.
I dug a diet soda from the high-efficiency mini fridge and took it out on the balcony. Nestled between two stone gargoyles I’d picked up at a yard sale lay a football-sized dragon the color of sandstone. He kept till as a statue, but the detail was far better than any carving I’d seen.
“There you are,” I said.
The dragon stirred. One bright eye flicked open to look me up and down. He stretched and hopped over to nudge me with his snout. He’d grown since hatching, and he was getting stronger. Between that, his ever-sharper teeth, and the rapidly growing claws, I figured he could hold his own against the average house cat. I rubbed the dry patch of scales behind his ears. “Missed you, buddy.”
He had the run of the condo while I was at work, whether I wanted it or not. There’s just no way to corral a dragon that can work doorknobs and pick locks.
I took a slug of the soda, savored the rough cool slide of it down my throat, and sighed.
Octavius looked up at me and made an inquisitive sound.
“Just a rough day at work,” I said. “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
He looked back at the sunset, and a flash of wistfulness crossed his features. Just a momentary flash, but I caught it. He wanted to be out there, I could tell. But if I let him roam free, someone might find him. If word got back to Build-A-Dragon, they’d eventually figure out who had printed his egg. Then I’d be on probation if I was lucky or fired if I wasn’t. Either way, I’d win some scrutiny that I didn’t want. Not with the progress I was making on my flying dragon.
Still, I felt bad about keeping Octavius shackled here with his metabolic deficiency. I flicked him on his shoulder to get his attention. “Let’s do something fun this weekend. You and me.”
He spun around in a circle and uttered two high syllables. Frisbee?
“No, you destroyed the last one, remember?” I asked.
He shook his head, denying it.
“We lost the other one in that lake Wednesday after someone got distracted by a butterfly. I won’t say who.”
He ducked his head and looked down at the ground.
“What about a geocache?” It would take us out into the desert beyond prying eyes. I hadn’t been in a while, and it helped me clear my head. Maybe I’d figure out what sort of dragon made the most sense to host my unsanctioned genetic testing. Besides, I was still tied with SumNumberOne on the leaderboards, and if I didn’t log another cache soon I’d drop into the #2 slot. “We have to follow clues to track down a prize.”
He perked his head up, intrigued but not sold on it.
“I’m pretty sure there’s a good cache up in Tonto,” I said. “We’d go past a restaurant that makes the crispiest bacon . . .”
He jumped up and crooned happily, nearly knocking me off my chair in the process.
“All right, buddy, if you insist.”
Because of the crappy night’s sleep, we got a later start than I wanted the next morning. We were going after an ambitious geocache in Tonto National Forest, three million acres of cactus-studded desert and with the occasional evergreen ridge thrown in. The drive alone was about an hour; I got breakfast on the way. I parked the Tesla in a remote parking lot and set out on foot. As soon as I couldn’t see the parking lot, I let Octavius take wing. He flitted left and right overhead as I hiked up the trail.
Tonto might be rugged, but it was still close enough to Phoenix that I expected to run into some other
people. Hikers, for the most part. Other people were taking out their non-canine pets for some desert time. I counted three ferrets, two guinea pigs, and an honest-to-god cat on a leash. Every time, I had to call Octavius back and hold him so he wouldn’t tangle with some ridiculous pet. After the third instance of this in the first half mile, I was kind of used to it. The foot traffic thinned out as we got farther from the parking lot. We had a quarter mile to cover until the first clue, so I let Octavius scout ahead.
There was a chance I’d run into another person or two. I figured I’d handle it. I expected it. What I didn’t expect was to navigate a sharp turn and come face to face with Ben Fulton. He was wearing dungarees and a faded ball cap, so I almost didn’t recognize him.
