A Crown of Dragons

by Chris D'Lacey

  He touched his hand to the pod. At first I assumed he was about to throw a switch to activate the thing. But the way — the almost human way — he spread his fingers made me think he was reaching out to something: his android child, his artificial son. I saw a sudden flow of movement along the tubes, and the pod began to fill with blue fluid.

  “A few days ago, I made you aware that we had introduced a small amount of the scale into your body. A quantity of Mleptra was added to your bloodstream as well. This was done to improve your medical condition, but it was also an experiment to screen your capacity to control the changes we predicted you would go through. We have been monitoring those changes since you were ten years old. Laboratory tests on the Mleptra have shown that they, through long-term adherence to the scale, have been able to absorb minute quantities of dragon DNA and fuse it into their genetic makeup. The Mleptra are primitive in comparison to humans, but they have one significant advantage over your species: They have been able to stabilize the changes — you have not. Your reality shifts, though deeply impressive, are disturbingly erratic. Do you see what this is leading to?”

  I looked at my mirror image in the pod. “No.”

  “You have always wished to know what happened to your father. Shortly, you will learn the truth. Thomas realized, as Jacob Hartland should have realized, that the human mind is too emotionally led to bear the responsibility that comes with inheriting the power to change the universe. That is why he gave his blessing to the only procedure he knew might one day return him to you, when you were old enough to understand.”

  “What procedure? I thought you just regressed him and he never came back?”

  Klimt looked at me as if he wanted to die. I’d never seen anything so close to human in his purple android eyes before. He looked at the control room and nodded. “Not quite.”

  The chair began to spin, backward at first, then in a random disorientating manner as it began to pick up speed.

  “KLI … MMM … TTTT!” I screamed. “WHAT DID YOU DOOOOOO?!”

  “Patience,” he said, as if he’d just rebooted his emotional hard drive. “First, we must rid you of Hartland’s influence.”

  What? I felt Harvey rush to the front of my consciousness.

  “Preeve, the tone.”

  My head was suddenly filled with a high-pitched whine that raked through my brain at enormous speed. If someone had set off a whisk in my head, it couldn’t have been more painfully invasive. I knew why they’d done it — or thought I did. We’d discovered on my previous UFile missions that certain high-pitched sounds vibrated my senses, allowing a “ghost” form of me to detach from my body. But on this occasion, at this frequency, it wasn’t me that peeled away, it was Harvey. I remembered Klimt saying, “No matter what happens, stay in the chair.” That command kept playing at a subliminal level, somehow embedded in the tone Preeve was sending. Stay in the chair. Stay in the chair.

  Harvey’s “ghost” wriggled into the matrix and froze. It was nothing but a kind of plasma cloud at first, a peculiar squiggle of goo. Then Preeve changed the tonal frequency, and the plasma squirmed like a flat balloon filling up with air. It morphed into the shape of Jacob Hartland, Zone 16 fugitive.

  “Excellent,” I heard Klimt say.

  And it was — for a moment. But as the chair continued to whirl, I saw Freya come swooping down from the mezzanine, claws wide, eyes black with vengeance. I screamed at her to stop, fearing she would hit the rays and burn up like a rocket reentering the atmosphere.

  But it was worse, far worse than that.

  Her speed of attack took her inside the matrix, where she slowed like a body in water. She came to a halt, still in flight mode, several feet away from Harvey.

  One of the wave posts flickered.

  Klimt flashed a look toward the control room.

  Through the speakers I heard Preeve say, “God in heaven! The continuum is broken!”

  The flickering post went dead.

  The matrix faltered.

  My chair stopped spinning with a gut-wrenching brake.

  The remaining seven posts went dead.

  The clamps on my chair defaulted back to the open position.

  I spilled out, giddily, onto my knees.

  Freya fluttered in confusion and dropped.

  Preeve screamed across the airwaves, “Klimt, I can’t hold him!”

  Agent Reynard came sprinting out of the control room, a laser weapon in his hand.

  He fired at Harvey’s ghost but was far too late.

  The ghost had disappeared like a light going out.

  And by then, the nightmare had truly begun.

  The glass tank underneath me exploded.

  The chair gave way, taking me down with it.

  Blue fluid flooded the bunker, filling the air with a methylated smell.

  Mleptra were washed all across the floor.

  Preeve called out, “He’s jumped to Thomas! He’s in the hive!”

  Klimt began to shake like a puppet on strings.

  And Jacob Hartland rose again.

  This time in the body of my father.

  It was like the set of a horror movie. Hartland sat up, a true Frankenstein’s monster, flexing his hands as if he couldn’t quite believe they’d been given life. The fibers growing from his fingertips and toes now clung to his body like sticky brown algae. He tore them off and cast them aside, standing up and stepping on the broken glass as if it were as harmless as sugar grains. The only person he looked at was Klimt. Something had gone seriously wrong with Klimt. He had dropped to one knee with his hands fluttering close to his head. He looked like a TV image on pause. I’d watched a documentary once about how computer-generated images are made by digitizing the movements of actors into a wire frame of pixels. That was Klimt now: a billion points of interlocked light, fizzing with sparks. Hartland stared down at the stricken android like a king might scorn an unworthy peasant. Then he put his head back and laughed, drawing a breath that sounded like a freight train passing through a tunnel. In his hand was a single Mleptra. He crushed it and let its juice trickle through his fingers, then threw the mangled body aside.

  Reynard ranged up, gun held double-handed. He was aiming at the scale in the monster’s chest. Chantelle was farther back, covering him.

  “Hartland!”

  The monster fixed him with a dead-eyed glare.

  I was on my knees, cradling Freya. She was struggling in my hands, screaming at me to let her attack. The boy in the pod was silent, unaffected. I could see no sign of Preeve and guessed he was hiding in the control room.

  “Will, don’t shoot!” I yelled.

  He circled to his right, never taking his eyes off his target. “Michael, stay clear! This is not your father! I repeat, not your father!”

  “Michael …” Hartland said in a voice that sounded like Dad just waking from sleep. He put one hand to the scale and ripped it clean away from the skin.

  In the hole it left behind was a human heart, surrounded by Mleptra and computer circuitry.

  Aaark! cried Freya, speaking the words I couldn’t. Lab rat gone wrong.

  So, so wrong.

  Hartland roared and threw the scale away, hurling it with such incredible force that it shattered the glass of the control room. I heard a yelp from inside and saw Preeve scuttle out on his hands and knees.

  At that point, Agent Reynard fired.

  Somehow, Hartland turned his head quicker than the ray could travel. I’d always been taught that laser light ran straight and true, but the burst that came from Reynard’s gun curved away from Hartland’s chest and gathered in his palm like a ball of fire. With barely a flick, he hurled it back. It hit the floor in front of Reynard, instantly igniting a pool of the fluid. A wall of bright blue flames leapt up. I saw Mleptra burn and burst. Chantelle yelped as the flare of heat caught her. She and Reynard backed off, shielding their faces.

  Hartland turned his attention to Klimt.

  Using the hand that had caug
ht the laser beam, he steadied his palm just above Klimt’s head. Klimt’s body went into a violent spasm. Bolts of energy passed from his eyes, rippling into Hartland’s fingertips. In a matter of moments, it was done. Hartland broke the connection and Klimt finally slumped to the floor. He looked “human” again, but his purple eyes were vacant. Points of light flickered on his body and went out.

  “Dad!”

  It felt like such a weird thing to say, but I could think of no other way to get Hartland’s attention. He turned to face me, blue fluid dripping from the ends of his hair. For one small instant, he was my father. He looked and spoke and moved like my father. A father with dragon DNA inside him and who knew how much artificial bodywork?

  “Dad, what have they done to you?”

  “Thomas Malone has been terminated,” he said, his hand still crackling with residual energy.

  “T-terminated? What?”

  He glanced down at Klimt. “The life force has been removed from the android. I am all that remains.”

  And before my eyes, he began to transform, into the shape of the Mogollon monster I’d seen on the petroglyph drawings. His hair retracted and his head turned a freaky pear-drop shape, eyes like slanted almonds: alien. He grew taller, slimmer, his elongated arms almost floating at his sides. An extra finger appeared on both hands. His body color faded to gray.

  Through an O-shaped mouth he said, “When the crow is gone, join me, Michael.”

  He turned his fingers. The wave posts came to life again. I let go of Freya, but not quickly enough to get her away. A new matrix formed around her, at a frequency clearly designed to remove anything undead out of existence. For one awful moment, I thought she was going to be taken apart, atom by atom. Then the matrix died again suddenly. Will Reynard had jumped the dying flames and used whatever power he possessed to melt part of a wave post, doing enough to disable the system.

  “Preeve, get over here! Now!” He clamped my face in his hands. “You okay?”

  Freya flapped away toward the mezzanine. I nodded. “Where’s Hartland?”

  “Gone. Thin air. Disappeared.”

  “Chantelle?”

  “By the wall, hurt. I’ve called for backup. Preeve!”

  The scientist came toward us, tiptoeing through the broken glass. “No, no,” he muttered, kneeling by Klimt. “This can’t happen. This just can’t happen!” He ran his tablet over the android. “Wiped. Every meta-organic system erased. The director —”

  Reynard wanted none of that. Grabbing the lapels of Preeve’s lab coat, he said, “Stop blabbering about your toy. I need to know where Hartland’s gone.” He wrestled the tablet out of Preeve’s grasp. “Can we pick him up on the security trace? A visual? A heat source? Anything?”

  Preeve fumbled one arm of his glasses into place. “What does it matter? With the hive at his command, he’ll be able to move in quantum leaps; the moment we observe him, he could relocate at the speed of light. Going after him is pointless. He’s unstoppable. He could eliminate any one of us as easily as rubbing out a pencil drawing.”

  “Hive?” Now it was my turn to grab hold of Preeve. I beat his shoulder. “What do you mean hive?” Klimt had used this term once about the Mleptra. “And what did Hartland mean when he said the life force had been removed from the android? What’s happened to Klimt? What did you do to Dad?”

  “Tell him,” said Reynard, urgently tapping the tablet screen. “Tell him, Preeve, or I’ll rub you out myself.”

  The scientist gulped. His face turned a sickly shade of vanilla. “I’d remind you that you have no jurisdiction here, Reynard.”

  The American raised his gun. “This does.”

  Preeve gulped again and swept a hand through his hair. He knelt back on his haunches, looking defeated. “Oh, very well. It hardly matters now. We’re all doomed, anyway. Your father came back from New Mexico heavily contaminated by the Mleptra. By the time we realized what had happened, they were too well established in every organ of his body to eradicate or control. So we let them replicate freely. What you saw in the tank wasn’t a man but a giant human-shaped culture dish, a storage facility where the Mleptra could be contained and harvested. He’s been like that since …”

  “Since WHAT?” I whacked him again.

  “Since he separated, permanently,” Preeve spat back. “You just don’t get this, do you, Malone? You don’t have a clue what’s happening here. Everything we’ve done — the implants, the missions, the monitoring of your family — it’s all been designed to bring you to this moment. That idiot crow has ruined everything. If she hadn’t gate-crashed the matrix, you’d have been the first true hybrid, the perfect synthesis of human, Mleptra, and graphene technology. Now you’ll remain exactly as you are, a jaded experiment slowly running out of control. You’re going to be the snotty schoolkid who vaporizes the world on a whim one day because someone steals his girlfriend or his soccer team loses. I’ll tell you exactly what happened to your father. During our experiments with neural acceleration, we discovered that certain high-frequency sounds could cause the out-of-body experiences you’ve had on your missions. We’d always expected the ‘ghost’ to return to the body it had left — until the day we linked Klimt to the neural interface and your father jumped to the machine he’d helped to design. That’s right, Michael. Now you know. Your father was never lost in the multiverse. He was here all along. There was never going to be any search for him. He is, he was, Klimt’s consciousness. That’s what Hartland terminated. And you and your crow have helped him do it!”

  I felt numb. Sick. Angry. So angry. But at last, some things were beginning to make sense, like the time that Klimt had visited the house and sat in Dad’s favorite chair to talk. I remembered the aching pang I’d felt when I’d watched him solve a Rubik’s cube or pick a piece of fluff off the arm of the chair and drop it the way Dad would have done. The worst moment of all was the time I’d seen real sorrow in his eyes when he’d looked into the study and seen the Tree of Life painting on the wall. What was going through his circuits then? What had Klimt’s high-powered “interface” made of the artwork Dad had admired so much, the artist he’d named his creation after? Was Dad yearning to come back and be among us then, just like we were desperate to have him home? What had stopped Klimt from revealing his true self to me? Was he afraid I’d reject him? Or that Mom would reject him? Or was his ultra-logical mind simply not human enough to care?

  “Why?” I said to Preeve, fighting to keep my temper in check.

  “Why what?” he said irritably, looking around. A red warning light was flashing near the control room.

  “Why did Klimt crash? Something was wrong with him before Hartland drained him. Why?”

  “Preeve, what’s with the light?” said Reynard, still working with the tablet, concentrating hard on his search for Hartland.

  “He’s locked the doors,” Preeve muttered, straightening up like a meerkat. “Heaven help us, he plans to incarcerate us here.” He got up and stumbled back to the control room.

  “Go with him,” said Reynard, heading toward the mezzanine. “I’ll check the exits. And, Michael?”

  “Yes?”

  He looked down at Klimt. “I’m sorry — for your loss.”

  I wanted to feel sorrow, but couldn’t. My head was just a mess of confused loyalties. I nodded silently and ran to the control room. Preeve was bending over the console, throwing switches and levers like a man trying to land a spinning Tardis. “No, no, no. He can’t do that. No. We’ll suffocate in minutes.”

  “Preeve, tell me: Why did Klimt fold?”

  He pushed me aside to get at a keyboard. He started hammering what looked like pass codes into it. An alarm now accompanied the flashing lights. One of the computers unhelpfully reported a serious malfunction in the ventilation system.

  “Preeve?!”

  He pressed his palms down hard on the console. “Has it escaped your notice that I’m busy here, Michael? Your Mogollon friend, wherever he is, has thrown som
e kind of reality shift, closing down the bunker’s peripheral systems. That means no one can get in and no one can get out, and in approximately” — he looked up at a screen — “six minutes and thirty-seven seconds we’re all going to be gasping for air. In short, we’re about to die in here.”

  “If I’m going to die, I want to know the truth. Why did you keep Dad in that state? It’s gross. Surely you could have farmed the Mleptra somewhere else?”

  He whipped off his glasses to read a monitor. “It’s not as simple as that. Despite your father’s consciousness switch, Klimt could never quite make the break from Thomas. There was some kind of quantum entanglement between them that somehow involved the Mleptra as well. That’s why Klimt was always drinking their juice. It seemed to be a kind of … battery acid for him. If we tried to stop Thomas’s life support or relocate the Mleptra, Klimt began to malfunction. It was as if an invisible cord was holding them together.”

  “Who was in control? Dad or the machine?”

  “Good question,” he muttered.

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “It was an interdependent relationship, Michael. Only Klimt could truly say how it worked.”

  Exactly. “How do you know Dad wasn’t trying to break free?”

  “What?”

  “How do you know he intended to jump in the first place? What if the machine took over and stole Dad’s consciousness during those regression experiments?”

  “No, no, no. That’s … preposterous. Anyway, your father agreed to the procedure.”

  “You were there? You heard him?”

  “No, not in …” He paused and thought about this. “I … The director …” He paused again.

  “The Bulldog. He set it up?”

  Preeve stared into the middle distance.

  “He tricked you, didn’t he? Tricked us all. So he could create the perfect android.”

  “Look, I don’t have time for this,” Preeve argued. “What’s done is done. Your father’s gone. I can’t bring him back. When Hartland took control of the hive, it would have caused massive neural feedback. Klimt — Thomas — never stood a chance.”