Domesticating Dragons

by Dan Koboldt

  “Parker?” For a moment he seemed just a startled as I was.

  “Hey.” I made a dedicated effort not to glance up to see where Octavius was. “What’s up?”

  “What brings you out here?”

  I tapped my watch. “Geocaching. You?”

  “Just stretching my legs.” He glanced over my head and frowned.

  My heart sank. He must have spotted Octavius. I had no idea what I would say to explain his presence.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it. Be safe.”

  He brushed past me on the way to the parking lot. I stood frozen for a moment. What just happened? I snapped out of it and searched the skies frantically for Octavius. I spotted movement at least, near the tops of some saguaros that lined the parking lot. Yes, there he was. Darting low and fast among the tops of the cacti. He seemed to be getting stronger and took to wing more easily than usual. It was curious, really. I’d given most of the design points to intelligence, so his physical traits got only a pittance. Still, he was growing into a powerful little flier. It occurred to me that a flying dragon, one that had to pull its body through the air, was the true test of muscle performance. Maybe that would be the best reptilian model for Connor’s mutation. A model that would demonstrate that his variant caused disease after all.

  A realization jarred me back from that line of thought. Octavius was not alone. Another flying shape about his size zoomed around the cacti. Similar coloring, too. How in the world? It was another little dragon. They chased one another around, but it looked more playful than aggressive. Then someone whistled, and the strange dragon broke off. It swooped down to the window of a large black pickup. Fulton’s pickup. I’d seen it in the parking garage at work enough times to know.

  Fulton has a dragon, too. Maybe his was authorized, but I doubted it. The thing looked too much like Octavius for it to be a coincidence. Why would he, of all people, take the same risk? What did it mean? I pondered this as Octavius glided back to me, looking especially pleased with himself. Maybe he understood, or maybe he’d just enjoyed seeing another creature just like himself. He landed on the split boulder and stared back at the parking lot, where Fulton’s pickup disappeared behind a cloud of dust. Maybe he didn’t know what to make of it. I sure as hell didn’t.

  “Ready to find the prize?” I asked. “It’s supposed to be at the base of a boulder.”

  He tilted his head and chirped two questioning syllables that sounded uncannily like boulder.

  “A big rock, taller than this.” I stood and lifted my arms straight up. “It’ll be along the trail, about half a mile up. Think you can find it?”

  He took off and zoomed ahead, following the trail as it wound down into the desert scrub. He circled back two minutes later, trilling his excitement. That was promising. He landed on my shoulder and prodded me with a clawed foot.

  “Ow! All right, buddy,” I said. “Easy with the claws.”

  I picked up the pace, kicking the occasional rock with my boots to send it skittering across the hard-packed dirt. Two minutes later, we crested a ridge that looked out over a wide basin of saguaro and rocky-strewn sand. A ten-foot boulder rested a few feet off the path. That had to be the one. But I couldn’t see the cache itself, because there was a girl standing right in front of it.

  There are too many people in this goddamn park.

  “Hello,” I called.

  She jumped and turned around, startled. I started to stammer out an apology. Then a bundle of black hair and teeth jumped up right in front of me, grunting and snapping at my knees.

  “Whoa!” I took a step back out of instinct.

  At first, I thought it was a boar, or a wild hog. Its mottled brown and black hair blended well with the desert terrain. The only thing that stood out was the hemp collar around its neck. It’s a goddamn pig.

  Octavius hissed and lifted his wings as if he was going to swoop down to attack. No surprise there. The first of his kind had been bred to hunt animals like this.

  I put a hand on his clawed feet to restrain him. “No, Octavius.”

  He rewarded me with another hiss, but I held him fast and backed away.

  “Riker! Come!” the girl commanded.

  The pig obeyed with obvious reluctance. It retreated, never taking its eyes from us. Giving us a snarl, too. Which Octavius was happy to return.

  “Sorry to startle you,” I said. “Are you here for the geocache, too?”

  “Yes, we—” she began. “Noah?”

  I got a better look at her face, and it clicked. Her name was Summer Bryn, and she was the tree-hugging roommate of my crazy-ass ex-girlfriend.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Suspicions

  “Well. Summer Bryn,” I said.

  “Noah Parker.”

  Seeing Jane would have been worse, but not by much. She had sunglasses on, so the glare I felt was probably my imagination. “Didn’t expect to see you,” I said. Or Ben Fulton, for that matter. Why did I have to pick Tonto today? “We’re, um, on a geocache.”

  “So are we.”

  “Right.”

  More awkward silence. These memories started flashing through my mind of the terrible shouting matches with Jane. Summer really had seen the worst of me.

  “What’s that thing on your shoulder?” she asked.

  “Haven’t you seen a dragon before?”

  “Not in person. I might have seen one on a geocache once, out in Red Mesa. It ran off before I could get a good look.”

  “That wasn’t a dragon. They don’t live in the wild.”

  “Then I guess I haven’t. I just figured a dragon would be more, um . . .” she paused. “Impressive.”

  “Tsh.” Granted, it’s not like I’d impressed a bronze or anything, but Octavius was still special, in a way. “Size isn’t everything.”

  “I should hope not.”

  Octavius seemed to know we were talking about him. He flicked his tongue out at her, one of his rudest gestures.

  “Hey, now, be nice,” I told him, fighting the grin that wanted to spread on my face.

  Summer clipped her mangy pig on a leash. She’d grown her hair out. She looked lithe and healthy, which only served to twist the knife that the reunion planted in my gut.

  Octavius never took his eyes from the pig. I had to pry him loose from my shoulder one claw at a time.

  “Did you find the marker?” I asked.

  “Maybe.”

  How did she get so tan, anyway? All I ever did was burn. The SPF50 saved me from the worst of it but kept me pale as a ghost. “Not going to tell me, huh?”

  She shrugged. “It’s against the rules.”

  “Fine, be that way,” I said.

  “I think I will,” she said. “See you in another few years.”

  She stalked off with the pig in tow, which meant she’d found the marker and was headed to the next one. I watched her go, wishing I’d thought to say that. She’d always liked to get the last word.

  We could have just followed her, but that would be cheating. Besides, it would be far more enjoyable to beat her fair and square.

  I pointed Octavius to the boulder. “Right there, buddy,” I said. “Find the marker.”

  He glided to the boulder, circled it once, then settled down at the base. He chirped at me; he had it already. It was a brick, half-buried in the dirt, with a number stamped on the top. At least she hadn’t buried it. I put the coordinates in my watch. About a third of a mile.

  “Come on buddy,” I said. “We can’t let a girl beat us.”

  Karma came promptly back to bite me, because there was no catching Summer and Riker. We caught glimpses of them from time to time as we approached a marker, but they built a lead and kept it. I’d figured we’d be quick to catch them; Octavius and I were good at this stuff. But she didn’t miss a beat.

  It was ridiculous.

  Finally, we reached the endpoint. Octavius found the case in a hollowed-out log. It turned out to be an old can of WD-40, sawed off and capp
ed with a plastic lid. I took this off and dumped the contents into my hand. There were some McDonald’s toys, a couple of matchbox cars, a G.I. Joe, a pack of gum. I plucked out the micro-USB drive and plugged it into my watch to log the find. Octavius got to pick out the prize. He nudged a glass marble with sky-blue whorls with his snout.

  “That what you want?” I asked.

  He crooned the affirmative. I took the marble and left our own little token, a tiny pewter dragon figurine. I made sure the lid was on tight before I put the cache back. Then I obscured a couple of footprints I’d made in the loose dirt—no need to make it too easy for the next guy—and headed back to the parking lot.

  Jeeps and SUVs now occupied most of it. A light coat of sand-dust covered all of them, too, from the constant comings and goings. I finally had cell service again, so I couldn’t resist the urge to check my league stats. I’d hoped today’s cache would put us ahead. Still tied for first. Damn.

  There was a little picnic area beside the line of cars. I caught a flash of movement there, and Octavius hissed. Riker shot past, in hot pursuit of a neon green frisbee. He reared up to snag it out of the air. Not a bad show of talent, for a pig. He raced back to Summer and ruined the performance only a little by refusing to give her the frisbee.

  She saw us and made a big show of checking her watch. “I was about to call the rangers. Thought maybe you got lost.”

  “Your concern is touching.”

  “Did you find it, or do you need some help?”

  “Funny,” I said. She thought she was so smart. “You know what the WD stands for, in WD-40?”

  “No, what?” She threw the frisbee again and brushed an errant strand of hair out of her face.

  “Water displacement.”

  “For real?”

  “That’s why it’s used to prevent rust.”

  “You’re such a nerd.”

  Riker had the frisbee and came trundling back for another round of tug-of-war.

  “Yeah, I know. I even named my pet after a ‘Star Trek’ character,” I said. “Oh, wait. That was you.”

  “Hey! Riker’s a good name.”

  They were a good team, too, though I didn’t say that. Right then it hit me. Riker was the name of the first officer on “Star Trek,” and the captain called him Number One.

  “Oh my God,” I muttered. I really hope that’s a coincidence.

  Summer glanced at me. “What?”

  “Nothing.” I thought about leaving, but my curiosity got the better of me. “So the geocaching thing. You don’t happen to go by the name SumNumberOne, do you?”

  That caught her off guard. She gave me a sort of side-look. “How do you know that?”

  I shook my head. “Unbelievable.”

  She gasped, and even let go of the frisbee. “You’re NPdesign.”

  “Yeah.”

  She chewed her lip. “This is weird.”

  “What are the odds, right?”

  “Took you long enough to tie me on the leaderboard,” she said.

  “Just wait until next weekend, when we pull ahead.”

  “I’m not too worried about it.” She yanked the frisbee away from Riker and threw it again. A perfect, level throw, just far enough to make the pig work for it.

  “We’re doing Big Mesa Star,” I said.

  It was a lie, at that point. Big Mesa Star was a legendary five-marker geocache in Big Mesa National Reserve. It had the highest difficulty rating, so finding it probably would put us on top. She had to know that.

  She snorted. “Good luck with that one.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “See you in another few years.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Prototype

  I should have been more reluctant to design another dragon prototype after Octavius’s design was canceled, but the challenge of designing a better flying model intrigued me. I brought up the Pterodactyl design that O’Connell and the Frogman had put together and perused it at length. Honestly, it was pretty good. They’d invested most of the feature points on wingspan, musculature, and endurance—the holy three traits of flight-capable animals—and devoted what paltry ones remained to intelligence. It was probably what I’d have tried first, too.

  Having seen the results of the “Terrible-dactyl,” however, I figured I should take a different route.

  First, I curtailed each of the holy three traits—which would undoubtedly limit the flight capability—and moved those over to intelligence. My simulator showed that the resulting dragon would have better flight control, with a reduced range. But I was still worried about whether the dragon was smart enough to navigate in three dimensions. The instinct of flight wasn’t bred in the same way its hunter and predatory instincts were. There were, as far as I knew, no flying organisms that contributed DNA sequences to the Dragon Genome.

  So I robbed Peter to pay Paul once again and goosed up the intelligence even more. This time, the simulator showed that the dragon would hardly fly at all. Not that it couldn’t fly, but it chose to spend most of its time on the ground. Maybe it simply knew the limits of flight and preferred to save them for emergencies. Wild turkeys did that, so there was biological precedent.

  But I could already hear the nicknames customers would produce for a flying dragon that never flew. “No-fly” or “Flying lemon” or “’Fraid-of-flier.” I scratched that model and started over.

  Project Condor, as I started calling it, was doomed from the beginning. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to make a big, badass dragon. I sure as hell did. But balancing size with agility and intelligence while staying within Build-A-Dragon’s guidelines was virtually impossible.

  I was at my desk, muttering curses to myself, when Evelyn stopped by for a status update.

  “Noah, you are talking to yourself,” she said.

  “Was I? Jeez. Sorry.”

  “Are you making any progress?”

  “Not really.” I was happy with the body size and cranial capacity, but the simulator said the dragon wouldn’t fly. The wings were too short. “You’re asking a lot.”

  “I know it’s a hard design,” Evelyn said. “That’s why I gave it to you.”

  “If you really want all of those features, I need some wiggle room with the point restrictions,” I said.

  Evelyn chewed on her lip. “How much wiggle room?” she asked.

  “Maybe twenty points,” I said.

  “That many?”

  I shrugged. “Otherwise it’s hard to make it smart enough and strong enough.”

  Caution warred with ambition on her face while she considered this. “Do what you have to do,” she said at last.

  I felt a thrill that I tried not to show. A chance to go outside Build-A-Dragon’s restrictive guidelines? Talk about a game-changer.

  I had a few orders in the queue, but nothing pressing. I opened DragonDraft3D and entered an override sequence to put the program in “experimental” mode, allowing designs beyond Build-A-Dragon’s strict parameters.

  The God Machine wouldn’t print an experimental egg without director approval, but I felt confident that Evelyn would grant it. An improved flying model, if it sold well, would be a major coup for her with the company’s top brass.

  It was tempting to amp up everything: body size, wingspan, intelligence. To make something like the dragons out of legend that Connor was always prattling on about. I had to admit, it would be kind of sweet to create something like that and simultaneously use it to get him his long-awaited diagnosis.

  But I’d never get Evelyn’s approval to print that egg, much less permission from Robert Greaves. Even so, a scaled-down version of it, a promise of such perfection, might convince them to lift the point restrictions permanently. And the fact that it would provide a perfect model for Connor’s mutation? Just a side benefit.

  I cracked my knuckles. “Let’s do this.”

  The first thing I did was push the wingspan out to three meters. I couldn’t entirely resist the liberty of sanctioned bound
ary-breaking, so I tweaked the metabolism and bumped up the cranium capacity. Then the fast-twitch muscle response. This dragon wouldn’t just be able to fly. It would swoop, glide, pivot. It would dance in the air. But it would also hold a secret: my brother’s so-called variant of uncertain significance. This was the model for it. I knew it in my bones. A strong, smart flying dragon would test its muscles in countless ways, just like a boy would. I couldn’t ask for a better model system.

  If I was right about it, the muscle weakness would arise over time, and even then, it would mostly affect the lower limbs. With a muscle biopsy, I could compare their leg tissue to that of a dragon without the VUS under a microscope. Muscle cells from BICD2 patients had a striking visual feature called Golgi fragmentation. Basically, the compartments that move things around the cell are scattered and disorganized, rather than centrally located. If I could prove that cells containing Connor’s variant had the fragmentation, it should convince the doctors that it caused his disease.

  Then again, these were a lot of ifs and shoulds. The thing is, few aspects of genetics can be predicted with absolute certainty. But I figured that an in-demand prototype to satisfy a key niche market was as good an excuse as I’d ever have to test out a model system.

  Besides, if I managed to create a flying dragon that started out strong and deteriorated months or years later, they might give me a goddamn promotion. Even so, there was a risk here. If it became a mainline prototype, the design would get all kinds of scrutiny. Evelyn would check the design herself before she gave the print approval. She wrote DragonDraft3D, so it was very possible that she’d put in features that I didn’t know about. Features that might detect subtle acts of sabotage. I’d made all kinds of tweaks to muscular genes to get the flier’s performance where it needed to be. Hopefully she wouldn’t notice one more.

  I sent the print orders to Evelyn at around two o’clock, which happened to be the busiest part of her day. She was usually double-booked for meetings and prepping for her board briefing. Sure, I was gaming the system a little bit, but the less attention she could give my design at this stage, the better.