CHAPTER FORTY
Denials
The Farm was Build-A-Dragon’s desert facility. I’d never been there before, nor had any of the designers. Hell, I didn’t even know where it was. It couldn’t be far, because that’s where they sent all the problematic dragons—the returns, the failed prototypes, the custom jobs that didn’t turn out. Or in one case, dragons that turned out a little too well.
I sincerely doubted I’d be granted permission to visit if I asked. Evelyn wanted me to keep my head down, and Greaves clearly felt we should put the whole matter behind us. That being said, if some of my Condor models were still alive, I had a good chance of obtaining the samples I needed to finalize my experiment. If I could get close to one of them, it just might work.
The problem was that I had no idea where to go. I wasn’t about to ask someone down in Herpetology where it was. Or Evelyn, for that matter. She’d have too many questions, and she’d pull up the dragon design to figure out what I was looking for. No, if I wanted to see my Condor models, I’d have to do it on my own. Without anyone even realizing I’d done it. Then all I had to do was take a tiny sample for a biopsy. I could almost certainly get one of my former labmates at ASU to do the biopsy and tell me whether or not the muscle fibers showed any sign of dystrophy. But first things first: I had to find The Farm.
Wong was out, so I wandered over to Korrapati’s workstation on the other side of the God Machine. She sat delicately in front of her screen, working a custom job through DragonDraft3D. As I watched, she ran her current design through my simulator. The dragon looked like a Rover model, but shorter and more rotund, with stocky legs. “What is that, a corgi?”
“Hey, Noah!” She looked past my shoulder and lowered her voice. “What did Greaves want?”
“To give me my printing privileges back.”
“Really?”
“I guess I’m off double-secret probation.”
“Well, good. That whole thing was ridiculous.”
“Yeah, it was.” Funny how she never thought to say so when I was going through it, though. “Hey, you know one of the dragon wranglers, don’t you?”
“Yes.” Her cheeks colored. “Peter.”
I hadn’t been terribly plugged into the company rumor mill, but it was fairly common knowledge that Korrapati was dating one of the wranglers. Now I had a name to go with the dungarees. “Does he ever go out to the Farm?”
“Sometimes. He doesn’t talk about it much.”
In fairness, neither did we. No one liked the idea of dragon designs going awry. “I imagine it’s far away.”
Her brow furrowed. “It can’t be too far. He’s gone there and been back before the end of the day.”
“He has?”
“At least a few times.”
“Gotta be out in the desert somewhere, I suppose,” I said, while the wheels turned in my head. “Well, anyway. You should introduce me to him the next time he stops by.” I smiled and winked at her, which only made her blush even more.
“Okay, um . . . sure.”
“See you.” I went back to my workstation, thanking my lucky stars that Korrapati had caught a dragon wrangler’s interest. He made it to the Farm and back within a day. That meant it had to be a four-hour drive, tops. But four hours covered a lot of desert territory. I’d never find it without help from a wrangler. But I could hardly follow one of them without being noticed. The Tesla drew too much attention. Which is part of why I loved it, but that’s beside the point.
But I didn’t have to follow the handlers, if I knew where they went.
The first step was to identify the vehicles of the Herpetology staff. This was the easiest part, because the dragon wranglers’ vehicles stood out just as much as the wranglers themselves did: sturdy old pickup trucks with mud on the rims and desert dust everywhere else. I tagged each of them with a stamp-sized magnetic GPS tracker. Fourteen trucks overall.
Then I had to do something I’m not terribly proud of. I had to make a defective dragon.
The order, ironically, was for another child’s pet, a vanilla-type Labrador retriever dragon. Docile, loyal, protective—I mean, clearly the parents wanted a dog but couldn’t talk their little boy out of a dragon.
I started with the Rover model but curtailed the development time for teeth and claws. After putting in the necessary pigmentation changes, I tackled the delicate stuff: balancing endorphins and neural feedback. That’s where I effected some sabotage, an edge case that even my simulator code wouldn’t necessarily catch. I modified the dopamine transporter, which normally helped modulate the neurotransmitters for pleasure and excitement, so that it would react not just to dopamine, but to other biological amines.
Now the chemical signals underlying emotion—joy, pain, fear, hunger, guilt, or anything—would act like a hit of dopamine to the brain. The result, by my guess, would be a dragon that was overstimulated almost all the time. I didn’t dare try to model this in the simulator, but I could guess that its defect would be pretty obvious.
I hit the Print button and put in my transfer ticket. The egg was charcoal gray, with little flecks of scarlet throughout. I’d never seen a design like it before. I felt a little stab of guilt, knowing that the creature within was doomed to a life in quarantine, but I reminded myself that this was just a means to an end. This was about something more important than dragons.
At least, that’s what I told myself as the staffers wheeled it away.
I set my watch so that I wouldn’t miss the hatching. That’ll be one hell of a show.