CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SIX
The Return
The rest of the weekend kind of sucked. We argued about the DOD thing through dinner. I spent the night at her condo, but things remained tense. Naturally, Summer hated everything about the idea of designing dragons for the military. I broke down and told her about the empty hatchery pods and design queues. It placated her a little, but not fully. We ended up in a too-quiet kind of truce on Sunday. Then it was back to my place and back to the grind. After an emotionally draining weekend, I was almost relieved.
I hadn’t been gone from Build-A-Dragon very long, but it felt like a completely different place. Part of that was the fact that I sat in what was once Evelyn’s office. It still felt weird to work in silence and solitude without Wong to bounce ideas off of. I still had ideas, of course, and I figured I’d put them to use before the SOW melted my brain. 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.
My first idea was an emotional support dragon. The concept of support animals had been exploited and then vilified by certain segments of society, but the fundamental principle remained sound: people who had been through trauma saw better mental health outcomes with a support animal.
I pulled up the Rover design to use as a starting point. If I ran it through the behavioral module of my biological simulator—my own claim to fame around here—it scored middling on most traits, but fairly low on aggression. Back in the day, we’d used the aggression score as a bellwether for domestication. The Rover still wasn’t completely docile; its aggression score hovered somewhere in the low forties. We’d figured that was only fair; even a family pet might be expected to respond to something threatening its owners.
Not so for a support animal. They weren’t pets; they didn’t need to worry about anything but the needs of their sole owner. So I got into the neural pathways and tamped down aggression even more. While I was in there, I boosted the baseline for serotonin expression and reception. This was a bit hazardous since that particular neurotransmitter rewarded evolutionarily reinforced behaviors that tended to increase survival. Then, again, this animal would eat when its owner did and probably wouldn’t have much of a sex life. The serotonin tweaks meant it could focus all of its attention on doing its job.
An odd noise from the hallway broke my concentration. It sounded like a fan that was missing a ball bearing. Regular, but not quite. No, it wasn’t a fan. I knew that sound.
I leaned back from my monitors and smiled as Wong rolled into view. The guy had just flown seven thousand miles from China, driven thirty miles from the airport, and then boarded his urban scooter for the short walk to my office. The guy hadn’t changed but it was damn good to see him.
“Hǎo jiǔ bú jiàn,” I said. It was the Mandarin equivalent to Long time, no see. “Nihao, ma?”
“Noah Parker.” He gave me his trademark crooked grin, but his eyes were inscrutable. “Or maybe I call you lao-bahn?”
“Oh my God, don’t call me that. Evelyn is still the lao-bahn.”
“If you say so.”
“I didn’t expect we’d see you for another week. Maybe more.” The egg for the imperial dragon hadn’t even shipped out yet. Was that whole thing a farce?
“Exit ban lifted on Friday.”
“Ah.” So he’d known about that much, and then wasted no time hopping on a plane as soon as he was permitted. I gestured to the chairs in front of my desk. “How is your family?”
He left his scooter leaning against the doorframe, shuffled to a chair, and sat down. Somehow he made even the awkward guest chairs in here seem comfortable. “Very good, very good. No complaints.”
I smiled to myself. He’d been held hostage by his own country as leverage against his employer, unsure if he’d ever be permitted to come back, and everything was still very good. I wondered how much he knew about what had happened. “Well, I’m glad you made it back.”
“Me, too.” He made a big show of looking around. “Nice office.”
“Yeah, yeah. It feels as uncomfortable as it looks. How was business here while I was gone?”
His smile faded. “Slow. Too much time, not enough custom jobs.” His eyes slid to my open design screen. “Unless it picked up?”
“I wish. This is just an idea I came up with for a niche model.”
“What kind?”
“Emotional support dragon.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Good idea. Find the right market, maybe sell ten thousand.”
“Or more.” I gestured at the half-finished design. “I think I have the neural circuitry stuff worked out. It’s a Rover base, but I haven’t touched the physical features yet.”
He nodded. “You send it to me, I work on it.”
I hesitated. If I sent him the prototype to finish, that meant I had to return to the drudgery of planning for the DOD visit. “You don’t have to—”
He shook his head, already on his feet and moving to reclaim his scooter. “Send it.”
I sighed. “All right.”
He rolled off. In spite of losing the bit of design work to him, I had to admit it was good to see him back. Great, really. Our capacity for dragon design had just tripled because the guy was a true workaholic.
Now all we needed was some actual work.
I went up to see Evelyn at around ten, only to find her office empty. Oh, right, the board meeting. It was a fixture on Monday mornings. It occurred to me that when she’d asked me to come back, she’d implied that I would get a seat in those board meetings. She’d attended as the triple-D, so why shouldn’t I? Part of me coming back was the notion that I’d help steer the company ship, so to speak. Instead it seemed like she intended to keep me in design. To churn out the work and probably not ask too many questions. It worried me that she hadn’t invited me. No, it irked me.
I lingered outside her office and had nearly worked my anger up from simmer to boil when Evelyn hurried into view. The pained expression on her face knocked the wind right out of my bellows. “Hi, boss. What’s wrong?”
“Noah.” She shook her head and beckoned me to follow her. The office lights came up from dim, and her projection monitors flickered back into existence. All nine of them. That meant a heavy workload even for her. “The board is pushing very hard for us to secure a contract with the DOD.”
I had an immediate and somewhat visceral reaction to the board trying to tell us what to do. Maybe this is why she doesn’t invite me. “What for?”
“They take a dim view of our future market potential now that dogs are returning.”
“It’s not like everyone hates dragons all of a sudden,” I said, aware of how defensive I sounded. “There will be plenty of niche markets.”
“Niche markets have limited long-term revenue.”
“But they can be more numerous,” I said.
“They require more designer resources, which is something we don’t currently have.”
That was a fair point, even if it stung a little. “Well, there’s good news on that front. Wong is back.”
She broke into a smile. “He made it? That’s very good.”
I chuckled. “That’s what he said.”
“Knowing Wong, he came straight from the airport.”
“I know, right? And great news, his little scooter seems to have made it back, too.”
“He keeps it in the lab.”
“Come on, you’re kidding,” I said.
“Right under his workstation.”
I believed her, if only because he had so much crap in his workstation he could have hidden three scooters in there. “He’s consistent, I’ll give him that. I’m surprised we got him back so soon.”
Evelyn’s face went stony, so it was all but impossible to tell what she thought. Which told me she didn’t want me guessing. That in itself said something. “Good luck for us.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in luck?”
“I believe in not asking too many questions when it comes our way,” she said, with a hint of firmness to her tone.
“Understood. Now, let’s talk about Korrapati.”
“What about her?”
“She’s on a leave of absence, right? Let’s get her to come back.”
“Not so fast, Noah. We need to focus on the DOD visit.”
I rubbed my eyes, which suddenly carried the ache of having read all those dense government documents. “Right. Focus on the visit.”
“What are you thinking for the presentation?”
“Well, we have half an hour, right?” The appointment had appeared on my calendar with the vague description of “Client meeting.” One hour, in our conference room.
“Just about. Less if they have questions, which they probably will.”
“How many people are coming?”
“Three or four principals, I’m told. All officers from the acquisition corps,” she said.
“Do we have any idea of their level of expertise?”
“They’ll be experienced at acquisitions, which is what they do. As for systems biology and genetic engineering, I don’t think we can make any assumptions.”
“General audience. I can handle that.”
“I think it would be helpful for them to see some prototypes in your simulator. You’ve worked them up, right?”
Oh, shit. “I’ve only been tinkering. They’re not production-ready or anything.”
“Polish them up. Get Wong to help.”
“All right.” I stifled a sigh. It was going to be a long day. “We’d better get cracking.” I began making my retreat out of her office.
“Noah.”
I paused and looked back at her. She hesitated, and then pressed something on her desk. The hermetic seal on her doorway—instant soundproofing—made a distinct whoosh behind me.
“I want to emphasize how important this meeting is,” she said.
“I know it’s imp—” I began to protest, but she held up a hand.
“The board of directors represents our investors, and to them, we’re a certain kind of asset at the moment. High equity, but with an uncertain revenue potential.”
These were all economics terms, and even though I was technically a shareholder in the company as well, I still didn’t grasp what she was trying to tell me. “Speak plainly, please. I’m not an economist.”
“If it looks like we won’t be able to generate revenue, the board may want to close us down and sell off the pieces.”
A chill ran down my back. I understood what sell off the pieces meant. Wong was one of those pieces. So was the God Machine, the only thing that could print dragon eggs. “Can they do that?”
“If it gets serious enough, they can. However, if we secure other promising sources of revenue, it’s unlikely.” She put on a smile that looked forced. “So let’s put our best foot forward, okay?”
“Yeah, sure,” I answered. No pressure.