“I know, I know, but I mean, we'd be in trouble. And it'd still be … I don't know, just wrong.”
Vina rubbed her temples. “Listen. Can you think of a better way to get them to take us seriously? To prove that the stuff they're having us do is just busy work? Working below your capability is indolence, right? And indolence is wasteful. Not bothering to prove ourselves is worse for the community than bending a few rules. It's for the greater good.”
Morelle looked down, scuffing her shoes in the dirt. When she looked up, she had half a grin.
“So,” Vina said, “do you want to make a dragon or not?”
Morelle swung a basket over her shoulder and wiggled through the crevasse.
* * *
Morelle's father had told her stories of dragons for as long as she could remember. When she was small, she'd lean against his shoulder before bed as he held his band up between them, flipping through the images it projected in the air. She'd watch the dragons, her nose inches from the smoke rising from their nostrils, as her father showed her the way their massive, bat-like wings beat at the air to keep them aloft. She'd press her cheek against his shoulder as he made them breathe fire, the slightly translucent, dancing flames filling the air around them. He'd read from old books, too, with simple, flat illustrations, the same ones he taught from at the university in his classes on medieval history.
“Later, people called this the dark ages,” he'd tell her, “because they didn't think much happened then. But they had villages where they shared things and worked together, kind of like we do now.”
“Where did the dragons go, though?” Morelle would ask, impatient.
Morelle's father would just shake his head. “They didn't really have dragons. They're just a story.”
Morelle always pouted. No matter how many times her father told her, she always hoped his answer would be different this time.
“But …” her father said, thinking fast, “maybe someday we could make them, the way we make other animals to help us do work. The way we make extra-strong oxen, and extra-fast horses and plants that grow like that.” He snapped his fingers.
Morelle's mouth dropped open. She looked back up at the picture of the dragon, following the curve of its tail and the scales of its back all the way to the tip of its thin snout. “Could I make one?” she asked.
Her father laughed. “Maybe someday.”
* * *
Morelle and Vina had made significant progress on the dragon by the time someone caught them.
The various biomass plants were breeding faster than Morelle could keep up with, and Vina's spider silk colonies were thriving. The marine micro-plastic collector Vina had smuggled out of her mother's lab had been tied down at the beach, hidden from view by the bird-shaped rock. It quickly gathered enough carbon material for the nanotubes they needed to create wire out of the spider silk. Vina was supplementing the machine's half-decayed innards with the silk, while Morelle set about the task of weaving muscle tissue together as it grew from baskets. She studied blueprints projected from her band, working from overlaid muscle maps of Veranus komodoensis, Anisoptera, and Draco volans to create her own sketches of dragon anatomy. The metal-winged beast's sheer size was daunting, but they worked systematically, morphing the machine into a thing part-skeleton, part-computer.
They were accustomed to creating living technology; their community depended on work animals synthesized from salvaged scrap and bioengineered flesh, mostly for transport but also for farming and construction. Morelle and Vina had been teamed up when they were seven years old, only just beginning their respective apprenticeships. The first thing they created together had been a small bug, made from bottle caps they'd found in the dirt and strung together with wire. Vina had given it a wooden microchip brain, and Morelle completed it with a tiny exoskeleton and mostly-functioning organs. It had taken them months to meld flesh to wire successfully, and the final result only survived a few moments before the beetle's wings broke down and its intestines fell out.
They'd come a long way over the past several years, however. Since then, they'd grown the trees inlaid with bulbs that served as street lamps in town, and had helped repair a traveler's pack ox whose leg was malfunctioning. They had even created an overgrown, ant-like creature that scuttled around their feet as they worked, programmed to bring tools and materials at their command.
Yet they still had not been granted approval to do what they most wanted: to create true life. To create something with a functioning, organic brain and nervous system. Though they had studied the work of cultivating a functioning mind for years, they had never before had their hands in the primordial soil.
“Until we can make a brain, these things are just smelly robots,” Vina would scoff. She'd fiddle with the controls of a hummingbird-sized hawk so it flapped its wings slowly, hovering in the air until its muscles fatigued and it tumbled to the ground.
Morelle thought of this as she threaded the nascent circulatory system into the muscles that would be the dragon's legs. Creating a mythical creature's entire anatomy from scratch was nerve-wracking enough, she thought. But she knew Vina would push her further, if she could.
There was no way either of them could get a hold of the raw material to grow a brain, however. That technology wasn't just left around on garden terraces to be played with.
But then they were caught.
* * *
By that time, Morelle and Vina had the room fully lit with the brightest fungi they could find. It had multiplied to all but cover the walls and ceiling, illuminating the space in a light that was almost too harsh. When they heard voices approaching, Vina had started to stomp them out before realizing it was no use.
They must have been seen from the causeway, Morelle thought. They hadn't been careful enough; they'd grown obsessed. Their excuses for staying out late and missing meals were increasingly meager, and they'd given up on stealth, sometimes wandering down the cliff with baskets of material in broad daylight.
The voices, however, turned out to be those of the kids from the neighboring town who had shown them the ruins in the first place. When they saw the dragon, they were in awe.
Though relieved, Vina surveyed them warily. She forcibly extracted promises of silence from them all, but of course, by the next day, even more children of all ages had arrived to see the dragon.
They also began to help build it.
The cavern suddenly became a workshop as complex and intricate as those atop the terraces of the central garden. All around, the partially-trained youth designed and organized while the youngest did their grunt work: measuring and spraying genetic fertilizer, arranging carbon atoms in tiny vacuum boxes, teasing veins and arteries through flesh, embedding chips into electronic innards.
One boy from the neighboring town, Rhone, was a metalwork apprentice. At first, he was shocked they would make a plaything out of such valuable scrap. However, the chance to work with it was too much for him to pass up and when they next saw him, he had brought his tools to help shape the metal into bones and joints.
Lan, a girl from their own community, was scheduled to leave on her two-year cultural exchange journey, but delayed it to help with aesthetic design. She added morphing, flame-colored sheen to the scaled skin Morelle had not yet begun to grow, as well as curling spikes along the wings and tail that would help it detect changes in the wind.
A particularly young girl, Aziza, approached Morelle one day with cupped hands. She unlaced her fingers to reveal a wooden box the size of a chestnut, and similarly engraved with wrinkles and grooves. Her aunt was the head of biodesign, she explained, but a bit absentminded. Aziza would often tag along when her aunt dropped by the lab to check on this or that, so it had been easy enough to swipe the tiny chest that held the DNA seeds to grow a brain.
* * *
Morelle and Vina worked longer and longer past midnight as the dragon came together. They'd break free from the bright, stuffy room within the ruins and be blinded by t
he sudden darkness, the cool breeze off the ocean sending trails of goose bumps up their limbs. The causeway would be deserted and shimmering with reflected moonlight as they raced each other down its serpentine length, their laughter careening over the hushed forests below.
One night, months after they'd first discovered the dragon, Morelle left the causeway only to find herself on the outskirts of town, alone. Vina was still far behind. Morelle slid off her bicycle and waited, huffing in the still air of the late night, bordering on early morning. This edge of town served as the bee farming district and all around were stacked boxes where the bees could make their hives. In the dark, the shadowy outlines of the boxes looked like a small echo of the buildings in the center of town, just up ahead.
Morelle heard a soft buzzing sound and it took her a moment to realize it was Vina, coasting down the off-ramp. Before she could turn her head, Vina zipped straight past her.
Morelle pedaled hard until she caught up. Vina slowed to a near-stop and swung herself off her bicycle to walk alongside it.
“Are you okay?” Morelle asked.
Vina kept her eyes on the road ahead as they neared the center of town. Here the buildings were all tight-knit, of three or four stories, riddled with balconies and overrun with ivy-hybrids, some flowering, or just beginning to bear fruit. They turned down a skinny, meandering alley, as was their custom, to avoid the few pedestrians who might still be lingering along the main roads.
“Maybe you were right to be nervous,” Vina said.
“What do you mean?”
“There are so many kids now, more each day. Someone's bound to talk.”
Morelle nearly tripped over her bike. “Vina, what are you saying? No one's said anything, it's amazing—”
“You know that boy, Gil?” Vina chewed her lower lip. “He only came once. But I've been thinking … He said a kid did something like this in his town once, a long time ago. Found an old—what was it—like those box things people used to ride around in, on wheels. The kid and his friends used the scrap to make a clubhouse. Just a few kids. They kept it a secret for a while but then …” Vina spun her band around her wrist again and again. “They didn't get cast out. But they had been apprenticed with the scrappers, I guess, and when they got found out, the community suspended their apprenticeships. They had to do menial work for two years before they let them finish. They did their cultural exchange journey, like, four years late.”
Morelle stared down at the mosaic tiles of the alleyway, scuffed with dirt. She had been scheduled for street cleaning this week, as her community work, but had skipped it to keep putting together the dragon. Her mouth felt dry.
“I'm not saying we should quit,” Vina continued. “We've come too far. I'm just worried. It was different when it was just you and me. Every day, more kids show up to work on it. One of them is bound to say something.”
“But they haven't, have they? That's the amazing thing.” Morelle looked up. A few blocks away, she could see one of the great walls of the central garden. Its uppermost terraces skimmed the sky, dripping with plant life, dwarfing the buildings around it. “At first, it felt like we were just playing, and I did feel guilty about that. Playing with something that valuable, keeping it to ourselves, it did feel wasteful. But we're not alone anymore. We've got this whole new community now, down in the ruins, all working towards this. I think that gives what we're doing utility, if nothing else.”
Morelle turned to Vina, who was fighting back a smile.
“You know we'll still be in huge trouble if someone finds out, right?” Vina said.
Morelle shrugged. “Sure, but … greater good, you know?”
Vina laughed.
* * *
The geography of the brain growing down in the ruins kept Morelle's own mind occupied during the hours of her apprenticeship atop one of the terraces of the central garden. The grandmothers who taught her biodesign were gathered, as always, within the nest of living bamboo trellises that grew around their work table. They wove and engineered new living gadgets from the vines, flowers, and animal tissue that grew along the bamboo or hung above them in pots and planters.
They were chattering as usual, though Morelle barely registered their conversation as she watered the plants around them.
“It used to be we could see the water from here, you know,” one of them told Morelle, gesturing in the direction of the ocean. Morelle nodded absently.
“Remember when we could run out and slide a few feet right into the water? Such a nice way to end the day.”
“Now it's all those steep cliffs, for miles and miles.”
“And the ocean keeps receding, uncovering more of those cliffs. And those ruins in them, too.”
“Morelle, do you know anything about those?”
Morelle froze.
“Since your father works at the university, I mean.”
Morelle's throat went tight. She shook her head.
“Don't tease her, of course she's been there herself. All young people are interested in the old times.”
“They seem particularly interested now.”
“Someone seems to have noticed a lot of children wandering off that way, more and more these days.”
“The university thinks it's time to investigate.”
“Seems like it might be a good idea for those young people to finish whatever it is they're up to. Before they're found out.”
Morelle's fingers went loose and the watering can clattered against the ground. She mumbled something about how it was getting late and she had community work in the morning. She ran down the stairs, pulling her apron from her neck as she went, while above her the grandmothers cackled away.
* * *
When Morelle stumbled into the house to grab her bicycle, she found her father sitting on the porch, one earphone in, frowning over a cup of tea.
“Do you know anything about this?” he asked, tapping the band around his wrist to pull up an urgent notice from the university.
Morelle read the headline quickly and turned to fuss with her bicycle, hiding the way her face went white.
She rushed to Vina's house as soon as she could think of an excuse. (“Extra work at the gardens, I need to … prune a bunch of … infected trees.”) Vina was already waiting.
“It's now or never.”
* * *
It was nearly midnight and there was still plenty to do, but when Vina sent the call out, everyone came. The cavernous room became a madhouse. Rhone shouted orders as the remaining pieces of metal were heated, cut, and tailored into the dragon's neck and head. Back at the tail, a dozen children struggled under the weight of a giant swath of skin with Lan at their heels, pressing and kneading it precisely into place.
Scouts staked out along the cliff side and causeway sent coded updates back to the base, which one boy translated and played aloud through a flowering sound projector rooted to his band. They caught sight of the approaching caravan from the university just before sunrise, cycling down the causeway while their transport animals trailed them from the ground.
By then, the dragon was nearly finished. They were connecting the final organs to the circulatory system and sewing the last of the skin up with the same quick-stitching glue used on cuts and wounds. Vina was at work between the wind turbines that rested in holsters above the dragon's shoulders. They would supply additional power to the equipment within the hatch that hung beneath the dragon's body. The hatch was part of its skeleton, but without flesh or organ: a fat metal belly to hold passengers and the necessary technology for navigation and communication.
It had taken Vina a while to work out the turbines, as she had assumed it would simply be a matter of repairing a few broken bits of wiring. It was only after days of frustrated tinkering that someone had come to the conclusion that they weren't meant to generate power. Rather, they were meant to generate flight, powered by a fuel tank the kids had long ago scrapped. Vina had needed to create a whole new system from scratch.
Morelle sat on the dragon's neck, molded from the excess metal of the wings, which had largely been replaced with thin flesh, similar to a bat's. She gazed down at the top of its head. Though the metal of its skull had already been welded shut, Morelle could, in her mind's eye, see straight through. She could picture the organ she had devoted what felt like the whole of her time to for the past weeks, or months, or whatever it had been. Looking down the length of the body, she could see past the layers of skin and muscle to the massive network of nerves branching from it, running down each limb, all the way to the tip of the tail.
The university caravan had reached the edge of the cliff, the sound projector warned, its petals pulsing with the vibration. They were searching for the entrance.
Vina jumped down from the shoulder and crouched beside Morelle.
“I don't know if I did it right,” Morelle said, barely audible above the chaos around them. “I know there are safeguards in place, the DNA seeds do most of the work, but … there's a reason they won't let us mess around with actual life.”
Vina put her hand on Morelle's shoulder. “Like you said, we're not just kids playing anymore. This is real.”
Morelle looked away. She could see the dragon's eyelids, closed in the suspended animation that allowed them to build it slowly, piece by piece. As soon as they injected it with literal lifeblood, it would dissolve enzymes, activate protein-linked receptors, set off a rapid chain reaction.
Someone cleared their throat. “You want to let us close her up before we get caught?” Lan was crouched beside them, patting down the skin of the dragon's neck.
Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology Page 28
