CHAPTER EIGHT
Distance to Target
Reptilian took over my life, expanding like a gas to fill the entire vacuum of free time. I had an air tablet hot-linked to my workstation, so I could work whenever I wanted. Of course, that way lay madness. There was nothing to do but wait until Design 48 was ready to hatch, at which point things would get incredibly busy. I had to find something to fill the gaps.
In college and early grad school, I had all kind of hobbies. Ultimate frisbee, trail running, indoor soccer. I spent almost as much time outside as I did inside. Grad school eventually put the kibosh on that: the round-the-clock work schedule and tiny living stipend didn’t leave much room for recreational activities. What little time I had left, I used to spend with my ex-girlfriend, Jane.
Now, for the first time, I had a regular work schedule. And more importantly, a regular paycheck. Sure, it was a trainee’s salary and there were student loans to pay off, but it was still more money than I’d ever seen. The health insurance was better, too, though it came with strings attached. To avoid stiff surcharges on my premium, I had to log regular physical activity. They called it a wellness incentive but it was essentially forced exercise. I refused to run or ride a bicycle in Arizona’s oppressive heat.
Thousands of acres of rugged desert and sparse timber still surrounded the Phoenix’s outer limits. Tonto National Forest, Gila Reserve, all the big-name parks were within reach. I bought myself pair of decent hiking boots and went exploring.
It got me outside and gave me something to do, but I grew bored of it. Even after I almost fell off a boulder trying to take a selfie with a saguaro cactus.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Design 48. Between my tweaks to the serotonin system and all the adjustments Evelyn’s other designers had already made from the hog-killing dragon, it was hard to imagine our prototype wouldn’t be compatible with domestic life. Even so, a sharp little sliver of doubt began to poke at the back of my head. This was the forty-eighth attempt to domesticate Redwood’s reptilian predator. Evelyn knew her stuff, too. I’d seen that not just in her design, but in the underlying code of DragonDraft3D. It was encouraging that she’d wanted to print a prototype based on changes we’d done together, but I still felt like I was missing something.
On the walk back to the parking lot after said boulder incident, I passed a young couple headed out into the park. Both of them stared so hard at their watches that they nearly walked right into me.
“Thirty-five degrees, fifty-six point two zero nine minutes north,” the man said.
“Same here,” the woman replied. “Fifty-six point two zero nine.”
The numbers sang to me. What strange voodoo is this?
“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you mind if I ask what you’re doing?”
“We’re on a geocache,” the woman said.
“Oh. Right.” I nodded as if this made perfect sense.
“You have no idea what that is, do you?” she asked.
I laughed. “Not a clue.”
“It’s like a treasure hunt with GPS. You navigate from one waypoint to the next, until you reach the end.”
“So you just, what, use your phone?”
The man shook his head. “Not reliable. You want a dedicated GPS unit, or a watch.” He held up his wrist so I could see it.
A hobby with tech gear? Sign me up. “Thanks. I’ll let you get back to it.” I hustled past them toward the trailhead. Hiking was a bust, but this geocache thing might hold some promise.
Come on, this was basically following a satellite-guided treasure hunt. How hard could it be?
I found out a week later when I set out on my first-ever geocache. I’d opted for a higher-end GPS watch, figuring that even a slight technological edge might save hours of frustration. Hundreds of geocaches existed right under the noses of Phoenix metro residents, and twice as many could be found in the surrounding desert. I opted for one of the latter, a geocache called Lone Luna.
The cache was supposed to be a straight shot from the parking lot southwest about a mile and a half. The moment I turned off the highway, a loud steady crunch from underneath the jalopy’s worn tires announced a gravel parking lot. Perfect. The description for this cache said something about it being straight down a trail, so I’d opted to wear sneakers instead of my hiking boots.
Trouble was, once I’d parked and while I waited for my watch to sync with satellites, I didn’t see any trails. My watch double-beeped its readiness; sure enough, the distance to target came up as 1.55 miles.
“Time to find this thing.”
Five steps later, a sharp pain jabbed the top of my foot. “Ow! Shit!” Barrel cactus. I’d been looking at my watch and walked right into it.
The worst thing about barrel cacti isn’t running into one. It’s what comes afterward. The spines are curved like fishhooks. I spent two torturous minutes extracting myself from that mess while the sun beat down mercilessly on me.
Distance to target: 1.54 miles. Not an auspicious start.
I skirted the barrel cactus, stumbled on a pile of loose rocks, and caught a thistle-branch right across the midriff. “Damn it!” I plucked the branch free with my pocketknife so that it wouldn’t prick me again. This didn’t qualify as a trail in my book. I had to backtrack to get around the brambles.
Distance to target: 1.56 miles. Son of a bitch.
So far, I didn’t understand the point of this hobby. The treasure-hunt aspect appealed to me, but raw desert terrain offered little comfort for crossing terrain. If I wasn’t careful, I’d walk into a ravine or step on a rattlesnake.
I plucked the last errant thorn from my midriff, stifled a sigh, and pressed on. The land sloped down into a shallow vale, where the brambles mercifully gave way to hard dirt. The only obstacles were occasional patches of creosote and bur sage, which I skirted while trying to keep my bearings. The distance to target ticked steadily downward, until I had less than a tenth of a mile.
Strangely, after fighting my way from one torturous hazard to the next, I kind of looked forward to finding this thing. I picked up my pace to a jog, stumbling over loose rocks and clumps of dead weeds. I dodged a last patch of creosote and saw the target: a moon-white boulder about four feet tall. How it had come to rest here, I couldn’t even begin to guess, but I knew the logical place to hide a cache when I saw it. Hell, it even fit the name of the cache.
Well, where is it?
I skirted the boulder, expecting to find a box or container or something at the base. But I came up empty. Worse, I noticed someone had scrawled curse-words on the side of the boulder. Someone else used a marker to just write the word “Boo.” Clearly, I wasn’t the first geocacher to get this far and not find the prize.
There was no cache any longer.
“Well, shit.” In retrospect, maybe I should have checked the comments or something. It sucked not having a tangible object to mark my first geocache, but I figured the boulder was good enough.
You’d think that after coming this far and failing to find a cache at the end of it, I’d be sick of geocaching. But that’s the thing about me: coming this close only made me want it more.