Domesticating Dragons Read online

  The next morning when I got to work, the design lab was empty. The God Machine sat still and silent, except for the ever-present hum of the servers. Their LED lights blinked in enticing patterns, awaiting the next design. Or the next run of my simulator code. Here I was, probably close to winning full-time designer status at a company that might not exist in a month. I tore my eyes from the servers and went to look for Evelyn.

  Her office was empty, but I found her in the conference room with Korrapati, Wong, and O’Connell, watching something on the screen.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Robert’s holding a press conference.”

  This ought to be interesting. I slid into a chair just as Greaves took the stage. As always, he wore khakis and a black turtleneck, a desert version of Steve Jobs. I’d have been nervous as hell in front of all those microphones, but Greaves leaned in and made eye contact with the front row of reporters. He smiled with perfect teeth and dropped the bombshell. “We’ve developed a domesticated reptile that’s safe to keep in the home.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence, and then a flurry of reporter inquiries hit him all at once.

  “How much will they cost, Mr. Greaves?”

  “Aren’t they dangerous to humans?”

  “Robert! When can we see one?”

  “Soon,” Greaves promised. “As you know, our company has struggled to develop a foothold in the marketplace, despite having a creature unlike any in the world.”

  “Does a tame dragon change that?” asked a reporter.

  “It’s hard to say. We successfully hatched six dragons this morning. They’ll be auctioned off at this time tomorrow.” Greaves looked right at me, or at the camera, I mean. “I don’t want to frighten anyone, but . . . there’s a chance these will be the only tame dragons ever produced.”

  I don’t think I heard anything after that. The sound of the blood in my ears drowned everything out. I looked at Evelyn. “What did he mean by that?”

  She shrugged and looked down at the table.

  O’Connell stood. “What the hell do you think he meant?” He stalked out.

  Korrapati looked frightened, and even Wong seemed a little shell-shocked. I thought about him going back to Shenzhen and felt a wave of sympathy.

  “Maybe it’s just marketing talk,” I said. “You know, to drive up the prices.” I pointed at Evelyn. “You said he knows what he’s doing, right?”

  “I did say that.”

  “Well, I hope you’re right.”

  She sighed. “Me, too.”

  I don’t remember the rest of the afternoon, only the next day. The day of the auction. There was no point in trying to get any work done before it started. Evelyn recognized that and hosted a little bagels-and-juice party in the conference room. It was a nice gesture, but hardly enough to break the tension over the design team.

  She perched on the chair at the head of the table, not touching her bagel. Korrapati sat on her right, with the posture of a queen. She looked stiff as a board, though. Wong lounged on across from her, but I detected a hunch in his shoulders, too. O’Connell and the Frogman had the day off. Hell, they were probably out interviewing for other jobs. If I’d been smarter, I would have been too.

  The logical part of my brain tried to argue that Greaves knew what he was doing; that the ominous statements about the company’s future were meant to drive up the prices. But no matter how they spun it, this was the first market test for domesticated dragons. If it went poorly, we’d all be out of a job.

  “What do you think will happen?” I asked Evelyn.

  “I can’t say, but the first auction will be a bellwether for the others.”

  “They’re going up one at a time?”

  “It was Robert’s idea.”

  Evelyn had used her director’s clearance to get us a live feed of the auction on a massive projection monitor at the front of the room. The screen showed digital map of the world and a numeric countdown. Five minutes to showtime, the bidder registrations began to flash on screen. We couldn’t see the names, only the geographic region and a buyer’s ID number. Which was kind of a shame. I’d have loved to know who was bidding, and whether or not they had deep pockets. Still, they were all major urban centers. All over the world, too. That seemed promising.

  The timer crept down to zero, and then the screen showed a minimum bid of five thousand dollars. Zero bids. Hell, I could have swung that much, and maybe I should have. I didn’t much care for dragons, but it would be a consolation prize if my whole plan fell apart.

  I held that morose thought for the few seconds. Then madness erupted on the live feed. Bids rolled in right on top of one another, from all over the world. London, Jerusalem, Oslo, Buenos Aires. Three bidders in Tokyo, four in Los Angeles. The price quickly hit double, triple my salary. Even if I’d squeezed every asset and favor and loan possible, I’d never have been a player.

  The minimum price rocketed past five million, at which point most of the bidders dropped out. Three remained: Beijing, Abu Dhabi, and Silicon Valley. I began quietly rooting for the Valley, in hopes that we might get to make a personal delivery. Hell, it might even boost morale, to think that one of our first dragons lived close by.

  The three finalists kept bidding the minimum increment until about 5.5 million. I guess at that point, Beijing had finally had enough.

  “Oh my goodness!” Evelyn said.

  I glanced up at the screen, and thought I was hallucinating.

  Beijing: 7.7 million.

  Silicon Valley and the UAE got the message. They made no more bids. Thirty seconds later, Beijing officially won the world’s first domesticated dragon. I had to admit, it seemed fitting somehow.

  I shook my head. “Someone in China sure wanted one of these.”

  Evelyn kept her eyes on her table, and suddenly appeared quite interested in her fingernails.

  “You know who it is, don’t you?”

  “Do you assume I know everyone in China?”

  “Not everyone, no,” I said. “But I’ll bet you know who was bidding.”

  She shrugged, still not meeting my eyes. “I have some suspicions.”

  That’s as good a confession as I’m going to get.

  The Chinese government, then. I couldn’t say I was very surprised.

  None of the other auctions reached 7.7 million, but they all got pretty close. Hell, there were goddamn sultans jumping in toward the end. Wong, Korrapati and I cheered with each one. All told, the six dragons brought in close to forty million dollars. Cash.

  “Jesus, that’s a lot of money,” I said. And it wasn’t even counting the next round of investor financing. “So, what happens now?”

  Evelyn had fallen silent over the last ten minutes or so. Now, her eyes looked off at something unseen in the distance, and glittered. “Now, Noah Parker, we get to build dragons.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Evolution

  So much changed over the next few months. The marketing department dove into a hiring blitz—now that we had something to sell to the consumer market, we needed an actual sales force—and they wasted little time. Our so-called “Design 49” wouldn’t entice any customers; if anything, it served to remind people that our first forty-eight designs failed.

  The company underwent an evolution of its own. The marketing department, which had doubled in size after the influx of cash, decided that Reptilian Corporation sounded too dry, too technical for the broad consumer market that we hoped to tap into. After many discussions with the executive team—to which I was not invited—they decided that the Build-A-Dragon company fit the mission better.

  PetWong also died in committee, no surprise there. Instead, the marketing folks named our domestication breakthrough “The Rover” and branded it as a dragon for the family home. The press coverage from the auction had brought in a flood of orders, enough to keep our egg printer running for months straight.

  With the push of a button, we could have swung into m
ass production mode right then and there. But Greaves set a firm maximum quota of dragons so that the production line only occupied half of our output. The rest were reserved, as he put it, for “design and innovation.”

  “I don’t understand it,” I said to Korrapati, when we were out for lunch. We’d started going to the food trucks together once every couple of weeks. It wasn’t a romantic thing at all—even though she was gorgeous, I think we both realized that a relationship between designers in our little lab was a recipe for disaster. Or at least, that was the vibe I seemed to be getting, so I saw the wisdom of it.

  But we both loved food, so we made the food trucks a little good-luck tradition.

  “What don’t you understand?” she asked.

  “Why aren’t we churning out Rovers to fill those orders, so that we can make a pile of money?” I shook my head. “Maybe I’m bad at math.”

  “I’ve seen your code, and I don’t think that’s it.”

  “Oh. Thanks,” I said, and I could feel the heat in my cheeks.

  “You’re bad at economics.”

  “Ouch.”

  “It’s basic supply and demand, Noah. The harder they are to get, the more people want them. And the higher price we can charge for each one.”

  “Maybe we could still charge the price and sell a crapload.”

  “This is better. It gives the company a solid cash flow, while not taxing our infrastructure too heavily.”

  It made sense, though I grumbled to myself that a taxed infrastructure would make my life easier. If everyone was super busy, my unsanctioned side project could hardly attract notice. With the God Machine churning out eggs constantly, I might even print one or two off the books.

  I couldn’t argue with that. In the wake of Wong’s victory, the sense of competition among designers grew even stronger. The hog-hunting dragon (renamed “The Guardian”) and the Rover marked important milestones for Build-A-Dragon’s design team, but there were other market opportunities. Other niches to fill. All of us wanted to design breakout model number three. As the newest member of the design team and with no official credits yet, I still had to prove myself before I’d have full access to company resources. I had big plans for them.

  The others, as far as I could tell, were swinging for the fences. O’Connell and the Frogman were working on a large flying model. Korrapati had tackled a stouter version of the Rover for police and military use, which would be in high demand since all the police dogs died off. Wong wouldn’t tell me exactly what he was doing, but said it was “big, very big.”

  I figured as long as everyone was going big, I might as well go small.

  I got to work early and well-caffeinated. With the entire design team actively working on new prototypes and running my simulator, we constantly fought over computer resources. Of course, no matter how early I got in, some people never seemed to leave.

  “Nihao, Wong Xiansheng,” I called over the cubicle wall, knowing he’d be there.

  Wong rolled out of his workstation with his crooked little grin. “Good morning, Noah Parker.”

  “How are the blades?”

  “Not busy.”

  “Good. So, you ready to tell me what you’re designing?”

  He shook his head. “Still top secret.”

  I laughed. “All right, then I’m not telling you mine.”

  He rolled back into his workstation. I logged in and started a new prototype based on the Rover model. Evelyn wanted that to be the starting point since we had proven domestication. I reduced the body size to the smallest setting DragonDraft3D allowed. This dragon would be tiny. Less than a few pounds. The small size freed up a lot of feature points, which I fed into intelligence quotient. A tiny, clever dragon. To my knowledge, we’d never printed something like this before.

  Then I reduced some of the other traits—tooth size, claw length, muscle mass—so I could spend some points on wingspan. A tiny, clever, flying dragon. I might as well enjoy this. For coloring, I chose light brown and sage green. Desert colors. It seemed appropriate, somehow.

  I hit the Print button. The God Machine whirred, and my conveyor belt squealed into motion. The egg arrived a few seconds later. It had a reddish-brown tint and couldn’t have been bigger than a softball. It rolled off the conveyor belt onto the integrated scale, which took a measure on every printed egg and compared it to the expected weight. At least, that’s what was supposed to happen. Instead, a red error message flashed on my monitor:

  PRINTING FAILURE

  Strange. The egg looked fine to me. A bit on the small side, sure, but technically sound. Another message flashed beneath it:

  Weight: 0.0 kg

  That wasn’t right; even this egg should be about half a kilogram. Maybe the scale was off. I moved the egg over against my workstation so that I could give it a closer look. The weight tray looked a tad off-kilter, so I jiggled it a few times. It settled flat. A new bright-red warning message from my monitor demanded my attention:

  REPRINTING

  “Shit.” I searched for the abort command, but the God Machine had already swung into motion. Before I could stop it, my conveyor belt whirred. An identical egg slid out. This time, the scale registered the correct weight at 0.50 kilograms. Damn thing must have been jammed before. Now that the weight matched the expected value, DragonDraft3D made a record of the successful printing and sent a pickup request right to the hatchery.

  Jim arrived within minutes, when I was still tinkering with the scale to figure out what went wrong.

  I glanced up. “Hey, Jim. It’s right here.” I handed them the egg, which I’d set on my lap while I fiddled with the scale.

  “Is this a joke?” Jim asked.

  I blinked. He actually spoke to me. And here I thought him an egg-obsessed robot. “What?”

  “This can’t be within spec,” he said.

  “Hey man, good things come in small packages.”

  He shook his head but set the egg carefully in the middle of the transport foam with both hands. “Nobody sneeze.”

  They rolled it out. My workstation beeped with an incoming message. Evelyn was passing along a custom order. “About time,” I said.

  I sat down and got to work on it, which is why I forgot all about the softball-sized egg that had rolled behind my workstation.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  INTERLUDE

  The fact that my biological simulator worked so well for Reptilian is less circumstantial than it might seem.

  After things ended with Jane, I’d poured myself into my thesis project. Initially, I’d started simple, with the genome of a tiny bacterium that only needed a handful of essential genes to survive. Once it worked on that, I expanded the simulator to more complex bacteria, then multicellular organisms. Many of the essential functions worked the same way in mice, fish, and chickens as they did in humans. Over the next two years, I continued expanding and testing its capabilities.

  With each new advance came a cost, though: the computational power required to run it. Modeling the vast complexity of living creatures didn’t scale in linear fashion, but exponentially, as the genes and their products interacted in ever more sophisticated manners. I got about as far as frogs before I hit the limits of ASU’s computing resources.

  That brought me to the office of my thesis advisor on a Wednesday morning in late spring, when the oleander bushes along Thunderbird Road were in full bloom. Dr. Sato sat in his swivel chair, nodding off over an actual book spread open on the desk in front of him. His ancient coffee maker spat and hissed, drizzling dark brown liquid into the waiting carafe. The place always smelled of those two things: old books and fresh coffee.

  “Morning,” I said.

  “Oh!” Dr. Sato reared back, his eyes wide. “Hello, Noah.”

  “Sorry to startle you.” I kept forgetting to make a noisier entrance, so he’d rouse before I came in. It was early enough yet that he hadn’t had his two cups.

  “No apology necessary.” He gestured to the threa
dbare chair just inside the door. “I suppose you’re here to ask for more compute.”

  I sank into the chair, which had to be older than I was. “How did you know?”

  “Call it a lucky guess.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in luck.”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe in it. I just prefer hard data. Case in point.” He shuffled the papers on his desk and came up with a grey-and-white striped sheet with a university letterhead. “Would you care to guess which software package consumed the lion’s share of our department’s computing resources in the past month?”

  I grinned. “The porn filter?”

  “That was number three. Ahead of it by a significant margin were two processes, ‘NPsim’ and ‘NPdesign.’”

  Damn. I really should have come up some more creative names for my programs. “Well, those could be anyone’s.”

  “The initials give it away. You do love making your mark on things,” Dr. Sato said.

  “You’ve got me there.”

  “I just got off the phone with the department chair. There’s good news and bad news.”

  “Okay.” I tried to ignore the lump in my throat. Maybe I’d finally crossed a line with the computing power. But my simulator was a hungry beast, and each more complex genome brought me tantalizingly closer to human. Just a few more months.

  “The bad news is that you’ll have to find a new place to run your simulator. We can’t allow you unfettered access to the university computing resources any longer.”

  Oh, no. A cold uncertainty welled up in my stomach. “Well, where am I supposed to run it?”

  “That brings us to the good news,” Dr. Sato said. “I met with the rest of your thesis committee met yesterday to review your dissertation. You’ve made incredible progress.”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t given any thought to defending my thesis and finishing my PhD. “Thanks, I guess.”