CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FOUR
The Imperial
I took possession of Evelyn’s old office the next morning. It felt weird to work in silence and solitude, without the whir of the biological printer and without Wong to bounce ideas off of. But speaking of ideas, it wasn’t idle talk when I told Evelyn I had ideas for new mainline production models. It would take some time until dogs made their full return to the world, and there were places where dragons held advantages. The key was to find the niches with unmet needs and then design the perfect dragons to fill them.
But first, I had an already-promised dragon design on my plate to tackle. Evelyn had even sent me some notes. She rarely gave me input on specific designs. That signaled how important it was for me to get this right. I’d been doing some of my own research, too, on the cultural significance of dragons in China. I didn’t have the time or the language skills to go super deep, but there was still a ton of material out there. Chinese dragons were all over the place—on their flags, on their corporate logos, on thousand-year-old pottery.
I pulled up one of our flightless models as a starting point. Most Chinese dragons were wingless; the wings had long since fallen out of fashion. The body type was long and sinuous. Serpent-like. The legs were short, too, like a snake that had hit the brakes on its own evolution. Working out the body adjustments was arguably the easiest part of the design. Not the traits themselves—length and body mass were both complex traits involving multiple genes—but the sliders built in to our design program, DragonDraft3D. It was Evelyn’s baby, just like the biological simulator was mine. I used them to stretch the dragon out. Kind of like shaping clay. I compared the resulting three-dimensional creature in the simulator against the reference images of the Chinese dragons until it matched.
It was hard to gauge how the thing should move, but I had feature points to spare because of the no-flying thing. The feature points meant I could give the dragon more fast-twitch muscle response. More agility. This thing would be able to move like a mongoose. That was good, because our client would probably want to show it off to everyone he knew. There were precious few of our dragons in China. Rumor had it that the first one we’d sold belonged to the imperial family.
Then it was on to coloring. We had a wide palette of colors to choose from, but fortunately Evelyn had notes on this, too. The guy had mentioned black and red for coloring. Of course, red is a wide range of actual hues, so it took a bit of further research to land on the shade she felt most appropriate. The rest of the design went quickly; I kept the default values for claws and teeth and tail length. We trusted those values; they’d been precisely honed via hundreds of angry customer support calls. I ran the final design one last time in my simulator. The three-dimensional image of the red Chinese dragon materialized over my desk and rotated slowly around. It was unlike any dragon I’d designed before.
“Very nice, Noah Parker,” Evelyn said from my doorway.
“You think so?”
She scurried closer and gave it a thorough inspection. “Body type looks right. Good head shape. What about agility?”
I knew it. “Nimble as a cat.”
“You found the correct red, too, it seems.”
“Made me work for that on purpose, didn’t you?”
She smiled. “I like to keep people on their toes.”
“Mission accomplished. Do you want to look it over?” With a single keystroke I could send the whole design. She liked to poke around sometimes to see what I’d done. Especially if I was on probation or something.
But this time she shook her head. “I trust my best designer.”
“Your only designer, you mean.”
“Press the button before I change my mind.”
I sent the print command and we both hurried into the design lab proper. The biological printer’s metallic arms had already swung into action, their mechanical peals and whirs a staccato contrast to the steady hum of the Switchblade servers. The odd combination of sounds brought a rising thrill to my stomach. I exhaled slowly. “I missed that.”
“Me, too.”
“You do?”
“Of course.” She pointed at my old workstation. “I used to sit right here.”
“At my workstation,” I said.
“My workstation,” she said. “I moved out the week you started.”
I hadn’t known that, but somehow it didn’t surprise me as much as it should have. “Best seat in the house. Good view of the God Machine, and right next to Wong.”
We watched together as the printer finished its work and the egg slid out on the conveyor belt. It was long and slender, its surface a mottled whorl of red, white, and black. Dragon eggs were always unique, but this one gave off a different vibe. Almost a hidden suggestion of power and prestige.
“You did well,” Evelyn said.
“When do you think Wong will magically be allowed to leave?”
“It’s hard to say, but he can’t get here soon enough. I think we may be busy soon.”
I rubbed my hands together. “You and me both. I’ve been kicking around some ideas for new prototypes. They’re niche markets, but I think they’ll bring us some new customers.”
“That’s good, Noah, but we have some prep work to do first. There’s a potential client coming in next week.”
This sounded promising, though the edge in her voice carried a hint of trepidation. “Sure thing.” I grinned and nudged her with my shoulder. “Who have you roped in now?”
“The U.S. military.”
“I’m sorry,” I said to Evelyn. “It almost sounded like you said the US military.”
“I did say it. They may be our best chance at solvency.”
“Is it really that bleak?”
“I wish it was not. Our Rover sales have not been this low since the early days of the company.”
The Rover was our mainstay model, the primary revenue stream for the company. Granted, it was also the model we’d developed specifically to replace dogs. Now that canines were becoming available again, it seemed that a lot of people wanted furred pets instead of scaled ones. As a person who owned several scaled pets, I didn’t entirely understand it. “Yikes.”
“That is why we need new clients, Noah.”
I sighed, knowing I was going to regret this. “Tell me about the military thing.”
“Robert and I had some conversations with them when he was still in charge.”
Yet another of Greaves’s secret plans that no one knew about. Except Evelyn, apparently. “Why didn’t it go anywhere?”
She shrugged. “Military acquisitions take a long time. And with business booming, we didn’t have the capacity to produce dragons at the scale they wanted.”
“But we do now,” I said.
“Yes, that is part of it. Plus, they remain interested in our dragons.”
“Even with dogs coming back?”
She sighed. “Unlike the rest of the world, yes.”
Well, it was . . . something. The military had deep pockets; I knew that much. Still, it was a far cry from designing hunting companions and reptilian pets. But it’s still dragons. I mustered an enthusiasm I didn’t quite feel. “It sounds promising. Lots of interesting applications.”
“More than you can imagine.”
“What do you need from me?”
“Take a look at this.” She handed me her tablet, which was open to a list of folders on our secure server. I opened one of them at random.
“I’m seeing a lot of documents.” Judging by the thumbnail images, they were very text-heavy.
“This is the statement of work, courtesy of the Department of Defense.”
I opened one of the documents at random. It was a full page of text, the first of fifty-four. “It’s . . . very thorough.”
“They’re not shy about telling us what they want,” Evelyn said.
“No, I guess not. Have you been through these?”
“Some of them, yes.”
That meant she hadn’t had time yet, which is why this was coming to me. It made sense; she had the entire company to run now. Still, I felt a twinge of disappointment. Here I was hoping to come back to some fanfare to Build-A-Dragon, leading a team of dragon designers in finding new creative ways to put more dragons out into the world. Instead I had a pile of reading material. And apparently no designers. “What’s the timetable on this?”
“They are coming for a site visit next week.”
“Why are they coming here?”
“They asked to see some of our operations.”
“And you agreed?”
“The board agreed, on Robert’s recommendation, several months ago.”
I grimaced. It wasn’t my place to second-guess the board, but there were reasons we didn’t let outsiders help themselves to a tour of our operations. “Seems kind of risky.”
She shrugged. “We’re the sole supplier of dragon technology, but not of all technology. We have to make some concessions.”
“We need them more than they need us, in other words.”
“That’s one way to put it. Besides, the visit will be an opportunity for us to clarify our questions about the statement of work.”
“We have questions?”
She pointed at the tablet and the digital mountain of documents. “We should probably come up with some.”