Domesticating Dragons

by Dan Koboldt

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Strategy

  To get anything done, I needed my printing rights back. And that meant acting like a happy cog in the corporate machine, doing exactly what they wanted. It’s one of the hardest pills I’ve ever had to swallow, walking into the design lab every day to put in the work with the failure of the flier demo hanging over me. My reputation had taken a serious hit, and everyone knew it. Invitations to lunch from Wong and Korrapati ceased. O’Connell and the Frogman acted like I was no longer even worthy of their attention.

  Build-A-Dragon cut back my clearance levels, too. The parking garage helped me figure that one out. For as long as I’d worked there, the gate had opened the second it detected my Tesla’s RFID tag. Now it held fast across the entryway and acted like I wasn’t there. I guess that in all the quiet curtailing of my security privileges, some numbnuts in IT didn’t realize that I still had to park my car somewhere.

  Well, I sure as hell wouldn’t park my baby outside. Most security measures had weaknesses, and I was good at finding them.

  I backed up and over until another car pulled in. The driver must not have been on Greaves’ shit list, because the gate lifted just fine when he pulled up. I hit the gas and followed him in, bumper to bumper. The gate started to close, but it ground to a halt to let me slip through. Easy as pie.

  It still ticked me off. I paid an exorbitant monthly fee for garage parking. I ground my teeth while the Tesla circled up to my spot. I stomped right up to my office and filed a support issue with the facilities group first thing. Subject line: PARKING ACCESS ISSUE.

  No doubt they’d get in there, figure out what had happened with my clearance adjustments, and play it off as some sort of mechanical failure. Fine. But I wasn’t going to play cat-and-mouse with the gate every day just to get to work.

  I desperately wanted to open up the design for my flier model and run it through my simulator. It had flown better than I dreamed it would. But I didn’t dare bring any more attention to what Robert Greaves considered a design failure. If someone scrutinized the model, they might see the extra genetic variant I’d introduced deep within its design, in the reptilian version of Connor’s gene. It would be hard to explain. So would the tweaks I’d made to my simulator code to conceal the variant’s long-term effects from its modeling. It wasn’t easy, but I resisted the urge to even touch my flier design.

  A few orders had come in overnight, so I got to work on those. The first was another birthday dragon. Powder blue this time, so obviously not the same customer who’d ordered the pink-and-white job.

  I cranked out the design. It wasn’t my best, because my heart just wasn’t in it. But it was good enough, so I sent it to Evelyn for approval. The next one was more entertaining: someone wanted a watch dragon for yard security. We didn’t have a regular product line for these, so they were among our most popular custom jobs. Junkyards, storage facilities, and other places with high fences around raw materials had embraced dragons as the new Rottweiler. A mean dog is intimidating, sure, but nothing discouraged trespassers like the glowing eyes of a hungry reptile.

  DragonDraft3D wanted to automate the process—we’d done plenty of these dragons before—but I went the manual route because I wanted the distraction. This time I started with a more aggressive base model, but traded some of its speed for stamina, and a lower metabolism. A watch dragon’s job was like a security guard’s—occasional bursts of excitement buffered by long periods of boredom. I upped the starch tolerance, too, since a junkyard wasn’t likely to have a supply of raw meat lying around. I sent that design off to Evelyn, too.

  It drained me so much—physically and emotionally—to keep my head down and act like everything was fine. The work became almost mind-numbing in its boredom, its simplicity. Losing the flier was a setback on my secret plan, too. Then again, based on my argument with Connor, maybe it didn’t matter. Thinking like that made me wonder what the hell I was still doing at Build-A-Dragon. I liked the work, sure, but I’d liked it much more when I had a purpose.

  Summer was the only thing that helped me get through it. Whenever I had a dark moment, I’d let my thoughts drift back to her. How she looked, how she sounded. Whether or not we might beat Big Mesa the next time we tried. Our alliance to beat that cache had also meant a ceasefire on the constant sniping-back-and-forth. With that out of the way, I’d kind of enjoyed spending a few hours with her.

  That shitty week seemed to last forever, but the weekend came at last. Friday night, as Octavius and I were making our battle plans out on the balcony, it occurred to me that I’d spent all week obsessing about something that was loosely planned at best. It’s not like Summer and I had set a time, or even officially agreed on the meeting place. For all I knew, she was only being polite after Octavius saved her pig. Finally, I couldn’t stand the angst and made myself to go to bed. Whatever was going to happen, I’d find out soon enough.

  Saturday morning, I got to the rock-strewn parking lot a good fifteen minutes early, so I laced up my boots and played hide-and-seek with Octavius. His favorite game, and he kept getting better at it. Half the time, I couldn’t even find him. There were just too many places for a little dragon to hide. The Arizona desert, inhospitable as it might seem for humans, was well-suited to dragons.

  A deep rumble announced the arrival of Summer’s Jeep. The parking lot had a long, looping driveway entrance, but Summer ignored it. She drove off the shoulder, across the drainage ditch, and over the median like it wasn’t even there.

  “Oh yeah.” I gave her a thumbs-up.

  Riker jumped out to greet us before the Jeep stopped moving. There were no doors to keep him in, I guess. He grunted once, but in a friendly way, and ran up to nudge my foot with his snout, like he wanted to be petted.

  “Hey, Riker.” I’d never petted a pig before, but I couldn’t turn him down. The portly little guy was starting to grow on me. I reached down and gave him a timid pat on the head. His coat was like chinchilla fur. “Whoa, you’re soft!”

  “I know, right?” Summer said. Her voice sent an inexplicable thrill into my chest. She wore khaki cutoffs and a white top. Desert colors.

  “Hey there,” I said.

  I couldn’t come up with any more words, but Octavius saved me by gliding down to greet Riker. The pig made a soft whine and licked him on the snout. I think it caught Octavius by surprise; he reared back and shook his head, sputtering. Riker hopped forward and licked him again. Summer and I laughed.

  “I guess they’re friends now,” Summer said.

  “A last alliance of pigs and dragons,” I said.

  “Nerd.”

  “Whatever, Number One.”

  There was no denying that we made a strong team, though. We found the last waypoint—Riker dug it out from under a cactus. With all five in hand, we could calculate the coordinates of the final cache. Summer and I crouched in the shade of a big saguaro while I crunched the numbers on my phone. She was right next to me, close enough that I could smell her perfume. Vanilla and roses. I inhaled it softly, losing track of the numbers for a second. I shook my head a little and buckled down. Took me a few minutes, working the numbers, to resolve the final coordinates. I read off the solution.

  Summer punched it into her watch. “There it is. Half a mile south of us.” She flashed me a wicked grin then. “Race you!” She bounded off.

  “Hey, wait!” I scrambled after her, but my feet caught on something and I fell on my face. What the hell? She’d tied my shoelaces together. She was going to beat me to the cache and log it before I got there.

  “Son of a bitch!” I shouted.

  She and Riker disappeared around a rock formation. I heard her laughing.

  I fumbled my laces apart, tied them, and tore off in pursuit. “Come on, Octavius!”

  We chased them the whole half-mile, while my legs turned to lead and my lungs burned like fire. Couldn’t catch up, though. Both she and Riker were apparently in better shape. I jogged through a switchba
ck (rattlesnake-free, thankfully) and my watch beeped the arrival. Summer stood twenty yards to the right, with Riker at her feet. She had the clear plastic case in her hand, the final cache.

  “Finally,” she said.

  “What the—” I managed, and then had to cough up half a lung. “Hell?” I finished. We had an alliance, dammit!

  “Oh, settle down. I didn’t log it yet.”

  Relief flooded over me. I had to laugh at her sheer audacity. I stumbled over to her while she pried the case open. She held the microdrive out to me. I reached for it, half-convinced she’d yank it away. But she didn’t, and we both held it for a moment.

  I let go of it. “Ladies first,” I said.

  She smiled and plugged it into her phone to record the find. I did the same right after her. We were inside the two-minute window, so this counted as a team find.

  There were other files on the microdrive, too. Image files from cachers who’d taken selfies. Summer and I flipped through them.

  “Should we take one?” she asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said. I set the ten-second timer. “Octavius, sky shot!” He plucked the phone from my hand and circled up, flapping his wings like crazy. We grinned up at it, the shutter clicked, and Octavius brought it back down. He circled down and dropped my phone into my hand.

  “That’s a nice trick,” Summer said.

  “Thanks.” We only broke two phones mastering it.

  The photo was perfect, and the way it was taken from above would add some mystery for future geocachers. And it had me in the company of a pretty girl, which wouldn’t hurt the old reputation. I gave it a caption: Tied for first.

  “Let me see it,” Summer said.

  “Got your phone?” I asked.

  She did indeed, in a hot-pink case tucked into some kind of athletic armband. I beamed her the pic.

  “Aw, Riker looks cute,” she said.

  I hadn’t even noticed the pig. I was looking at her in the picture, the way she’d kind of leaned in against me and smiled. I liked the way we looked. It hit me, then, that we’d only agreed to work together until we found the cache. Technically speaking, the alliance was officially over.

  But I wasn’t sure I wanted it to be.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The Squeaky Wheel

  Our victory out in the desert gave me a new burst of productive energy when I went back into work. I needed that, even if I was kind of obsessing over Summer. Stay focused, I kept telling myself. Difficult as it was, I had to put the flier behind me and concentrate on getting my printing rights back for the God Machine. One way to do that would be as Evelyn said: keep my head down, work efficiently, color within the lines and never step outside them. That would probably do the trick, but it could also take six months or a year before someone paused and said hey, Noah’s not so bad after all.

  Connor didn’t have that kind of time, so neither did I. Instead, I went with plan B. I started cranking through custom orders as quickly as I could. The queue was deep enough to keep me busy, and I also took some orders off Wong’s and Korrapati’s plates, since they’d done the same for me. One good thing about designing the flier was that it upped my game in DragonDraft3D. I had the menus memorized, and my fingers knew the shortcuts on their own.

  Every time I finished a design, I fired it off to Evelyn for approval. At first, she’d take ten or twenty minutes for each one, which told me she was checking over the designs and running them through my simulator. But as I kept blasting them into her inbox, the time to approval shortened to five minutes. Now she was probably just glancing at the design, making sure I stayed within the guidelines.

  Within a couple of days, she was approving them almost as soon as I hit “Send.” The God Machine whirred constantly.

  I waited until Friday to approach Evelyn. I wanted to march right into her office and demand my egg-printing privileges back, but that’s what the old Noah would have done. The old, rebellious, rule-breaking Noah. The new, obedient, cog-in-the-machine Noah knocked meekly on her office door. “Hey, Evelyn.”

  She turned and peered around her projection monitors. “Noah.” She smiled. “You have been busy.”

  “Just doing my part,” I said. “Did you get my last two customs?” I knew she’d probably seen them but hadn’t had time to grant the approvals.

  “Sorry, not yet.” She shook her head and sighed. “I feel like I spend my entire day in meetings.”

  I held up my hands. “It’s all right, I can come back.”

  “No, stay.” She brought up yet another projection monitor and pulled up my designs. “Very nice. Oh, look at that one!”

  “The silver one? Yeah, I had fun with that.” The customer was a stage magician in Vegas and had wanted a custom dragon that would really dazzle the crowd.

  “These are good, Noah.” She put in a key sequence to approve them. I heard the distant hum of the God Machine swinging into motion back in the design lab. Perfect.

  “Sorry to add to your plate,” I said. “I know you are busy.”

  Her eyes went back to screen number four. Then five. Then three. “It’s good. You are being productive.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I went back to my desk and tackled the incoming request. It was a complaint disguised as a support ticket; I’m surprised the customer service people didn’t catch it. I read the summary:

  We’ve only had our new dragon a couple of days. My daughter just loves it! But the first time we left it alone, the thing attacked my tabby cat! If I hadn’t heard her hissing and crying, I’m sure he would have eaten her. Please make sure your pet dragons won’t try to eat the other pets in the household.

  “Yeah, right, lady,” I muttered. Dragons were apex predators. There was no taking that away; it was coded into their DNA far deeper than the little tweaks that I could make. If you leave an apex predator alone with a not-so-apex predator, the order of things will be asserted no matter what I did.

  I wrote up a brief memo to customer service, telling them that we understood the complaint and suggesting they send her a copy of the Rover manual with the “Dragon Safety” section highlighted. That would remind her to read the damn thing, which most of our customers didn’t bother doing.

  Wiping that one out of my queue felt good. I took a little break and texted Connor, to see how he was doing. We’d sort of made our peace by pretending our fight never happened, though I hadn’t been over since. He was busy studying for finals anyway. Rumor had it, even the video game console had fallen silent at the Parker residence. I was glad to hear about him going after something for once. Planning for the future and all that.

  In the meantime, I had to keep up my ruse as a happy cog. So I dove into the next custom design. A rancher out in Montana wanted a dragon that would keep the wolves away from his livestock.

  Behavioral traits easily ranked among the most difficult things to adjust in a custom dragon. Take this rancher’s request, for example. He needed a dragon dangerous enough to threaten a pack of wolves, but that also won’t eat the livestock it’s supposed to be protecting. Dragons come with all sorts of animal instincts; some we gave them intentionally, and some just manifested on their own.

  I fully admit that there were some forces at play that we didn’t entirely understand. But I used whatever tools and knowledge I could to dance among the DNA patterns, finding one that would make everyone happy.

  And keep our customers satisfied, of course. Because that was Build-A-Dragon’s top priority.

  I knew what I had to do for this rancher’s dragon, but I didn’t like it. My fingers seemed to fight me the whole way. It was wrong. It was downright unnatural. But it was the only way.

  I had to turn a dragon into a vegetarian.

  This wasn’t as hard as it sounds, because we knew which enzymes broke down animal fats and proteins in the dragon’s digestive system, just as we knew the ones that handled starches. If you knocked out the former, the dragon wouldn’t be able to digest meat. I di
d permit an active copy of the gene that conferred lactose tolerance. If the dragon had to, it could digest milk.

  That handled the problem of a dragon eating its flock, though it might still kill them for sport. To counter that I relied on a different sort of biological property: maternal instinct. With the right balance of hormones and a carefully timed imprinting exercise, this dragon would think of the rancher’s livestock as his own children. Montana wolves knew better than to come between a mother and her children when it came to rival predators; the grizzlies of Yellowstone had taught them well.

  If they thought mother bear was fierce, just wait until they met papa dragon. I smiled just thinking about it as I walked to Evelyn’s office. She perched on the edge of her chair. At least two more holoscreens hovered in front of her.

  “Hey, boss,” I said. “I know you are busy.”

  “Twice in one day, Noah?” She smiled at me between two screens. “It must be a special occasion.”

  “I sent you another design. The one for that Montana rancher,” I said.

  She opened a seventh screen and pulled it up. “Looks pretty good. Wait, a vegetarian diet?”

  “Otherwise it might eat the livestock.”

  “Ha! A clever solution.”

  “Just thinking ahead.”

  “I’m surprised you were willing to make an herbivore.”

  “It rocked my very core, but it was the only way.” I paused and tried to make my tone casual. “You know, I could probably be even faster if I could print directly.”

  She looked away from her screens long enough to give me a puzzled expression. “What?”

  I sat down on one of the backless leather stools in front of her glass desk. “If I could print eggs without your approval, like before, we would go faster.”