CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The Squeaky Wheel
Our victory out in the desert gave me a new burst of productive energy when I went back into work. I needed that, even if I was kind of obsessing over Summer. Stay focused, I kept telling myself. Difficult as it was, I had to put the flier behind me and concentrate on getting my printing rights back for the God Machine. One way to do that would be as Evelyn said: keep my head down, work efficiently, color within the lines and never step outside them. That would probably do the trick, but it could also take six months or a year before someone paused and said hey, Noah’s not so bad after all.
Connor didn’t have that kind of time, so neither did I. Instead, I went with plan B. I started cranking through custom orders as quickly as I could. The queue was deep enough to keep me busy, and I also took some orders off Wong’s and Korrapati’s plates, since they’d done the same for me. One good thing about designing the flier was that it upped my game in DragonDraft3D. I had the menus memorized, and my fingers knew the shortcuts on their own.
Every time I finished a design, I fired it off to Evelyn for approval. At first, she’d take ten or twenty minutes for each one, which told me she was checking over the designs and running them through my simulator. But as I kept blasting them into her inbox, the time to approval shortened to five minutes. Now she was probably just glancing at the design, making sure I stayed within the guidelines.
Within a couple of days, she was approving them almost as soon as I hit “Send.” The God Machine whirred constantly.
I waited until Friday to approach Evelyn. I wanted to march right into her office and demand my egg-printing privileges back, but that’s what the old Noah would have done. The old, rebellious, rule-breaking Noah. The new, obedient, cog-in-the-machine Noah knocked meekly on her office door. “Hey, Evelyn.”
She turned and peered around her projection monitors. “Noah.” She smiled. “You have been busy.”
“Just doing my part,” I said. “Did you get my last two customs?” I knew she’d probably seen them but hadn’t had time to grant the approvals.
“Sorry, not yet.” She shook her head and sighed. “I feel like I spend my entire day in meetings.”
I held up my hands. “It’s all right, I can come back.”
“No, stay.” She brought up yet another projection monitor and pulled up my designs. “Very nice. Oh, look at that one!”
“The silver one? Yeah, I had fun with that.” The customer was a stage magician in Vegas and had wanted a custom dragon that would really dazzle the crowd.
“These are good, Noah.” She put in a key sequence to approve them. I heard the distant hum of the God Machine swinging into motion back in the design lab. Perfect.
“Sorry to add to your plate,” I said. “I know you are busy.”
Her eyes went back to screen number four. Then five. Then three. “It’s good. You are being productive.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I went back to my desk and tackled the incoming request. It was a complaint disguised as a support ticket; I’m surprised the customer service people didn’t catch it. I read the summary:
We’ve only had our new dragon a couple of days. My daughter just loves it! But the first time we left it alone, the thing attacked my tabby cat! If I hadn’t heard her hissing and crying, I’m sure he would have eaten her. Please make sure your pet dragons won’t try to eat the other pets in the household.
“Yeah, right, lady,” I muttered. Dragons were apex predators. There was no taking that away; it was coded into their DNA far deeper than the little tweaks that I could make. If you leave an apex predator alone with a not-so-apex predator, the order of things will be asserted no matter what I did.
I wrote up a brief memo to customer service, telling them that we understood the complaint and suggesting they send her a copy of the Rover manual with the “Dragon Safety” section highlighted. That would remind her to read the damn thing, which most of our customers didn’t bother doing.
Wiping that one out of my queue felt good. I took a little break and texted Connor, to see how he was doing. We’d sort of made our peace by pretending our fight never happened, though I hadn’t been over since. He was busy studying for finals anyway. Rumor had it, even the video game console had fallen silent at the Parker residence. I was glad to hear about him going after something for once. Planning for the future and all that.
In the meantime, I had to keep up my ruse as a happy cog. So I dove into the next custom design. A rancher out in Montana wanted a dragon that would keep the wolves away from his livestock.
Behavioral traits easily ranked among the most difficult things to adjust in a custom dragon. Take this rancher’s request, for example. He needed a dragon dangerous enough to threaten a pack of wolves, but that also won’t eat the livestock it’s supposed to be protecting. Dragons come with all sorts of animal instincts; some we gave them intentionally, and some just manifested on their own.
I fully admit that there were some forces at play that we didn’t entirely understand. But I used whatever tools and knowledge I could to dance among the DNA patterns, finding one that would make everyone happy.
And keep our customers satisfied, of course. Because that was Build-A-Dragon’s top priority.
I knew what I had to do for this rancher’s dragon, but I didn’t like it. My fingers seemed to fight me the whole way. It was wrong. It was downright unnatural. But it was the only way.
I had to turn a dragon into a vegetarian.
This wasn’t as hard as it sounds, because we knew which enzymes broke down animal fats and proteins in the dragon’s digestive system, just as we knew the ones that handled starches. If you knocked out the former, the dragon wouldn’t be able to digest meat. I did permit an active copy of the gene that conferred lactose tolerance. If the dragon had to, it could digest milk.
That handled the problem of a dragon eating its flock, though it might still kill them for sport. To counter that I relied on a different sort of biological property: maternal instinct. With the right balance of hormones and a carefully timed imprinting exercise, this dragon would think of the rancher’s livestock as his own children. Montana wolves knew better than to come between a mother and her children when it came to rival predators; the grizzlies of Yellowstone had taught them well.
If they thought mother bear was fierce, just wait until they met papa dragon. I smiled just thinking about it as I walked to Evelyn’s office. She perched on the edge of her chair. At least two more holoscreens hovered in front of her.
“Hey, boss,” I said. “I know you are busy.”
“Twice in one day, Noah?” She smiled at me between two screens. “It must be a special occasion.”
“I sent you another design. The one for that Montana rancher,” I said.
She opened a seventh screen and pulled it up. “Looks pretty good. Wait, a vegetarian diet?”
“Otherwise it might eat the livestock.”
“Ha! A clever solution.”
“Just thinking ahead.”
“I’m surprised you were willing to make an herbivore.”
“It rocked my very core, but it was the only way.” I paused and tried to make my tone casual. “You know, I could probably be even faster if I could print directly.”
She looked away from her screens long enough to give me a puzzled expression. “What?”
I sat down on one of the backless leather stools in front of her glass desk. “If I could print eggs without your approval, like before, we would go faster.”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Look, you’ve got enough to do without me adding to the workload. I can tell you’re stressed.”
She pursed her lips. She was tempted. “You may have a point. I will see what I can do.”
“I want another shot at the flying model, too.”
She winced.
“Come on,” I said. “We both know I’m the only one who’s gotten close to specs.” This was an educated guess based on the amount of cursing O’Connell had been doing over the last week. It sounded he was right on track to create another Terrible-dactyl.
“I don’t think Robert will approve,” Evelyn said.
“It doesn’t hurt to ask, does it?” I asked.
She sighed. “I suppose not.”
Undoubtedly my constant requests were interfering with her grand ambitions with the company’s top brass, but at this point I didn’t care. She’d capitalized plenty on my design achievements. This was the least she could do.
I expected an answer from Evelyn pretty soon. Maybe even that afternoon. She had a regular Friday meeting with Build-A-Dragon’s executives over lunch. Most of them had offices on the other side of the building, where they could look out at the more scenic Scottsdale vista. This suited everyone on the lab side just fine. Designers like myself usually kept to our semi-private workstations by the God Machine, and the hatchery staffers pretty much only cared about eggs.
I could count on one hand the number of times a higher-up had set foot in our design lab. So when I looked up and saw Robert Greaves standing outside my cubicle, I didn’t really know what to say.
“Afternoon, Noah.” He wore the characteristic outfit, loose-fitting pants and a long-sleeve shirt, all black.
“Mr. Greaves!” After a second’s hesitation, I stood up. Sitting while Build-A-Dragon’s CEO stood seemed like a faux pas.
He flashed the same smile that graced most of our company’s literature. “Please, call me Robert.”
“All right.” I hadn’t seen him face-to-face since the failed demonstration of my Condor model. Best not to think about that.
“Evelyn tells me that your last several designs have been spot-on,” he said.
“Oh.” It rattled me a little to learn that Evelyn was reporting on me. Did she know he was here now? Probably not. If she had, she’d have been hovering. “I’m doing my best.”
“Good, good. We’re reinstating your print privileges.”
“Thanks.” So far, this was good news. However, I sincerely doubted the head of the company had come to tell me everything was hunky-dory.
“A talented designer like you shouldn’t be punished for a mistake,” Greaves said.
“That’s . . . nice of you to say.” It took a major effort not to bristle at my Condor being written off as a mistake.
“Still not happy about that, I’m guessing,” he said.
I opened my mouth and shut it again. There was no point in denying what he could clearly see on my face.
“Look, man, I get it.” He wandered back and stood facing me, with my chair positioned between us like a buffer. “Anyone who loves dragons wants to see the fairy tales brought to life. But it’s dangerous to create something you can’t control.”
Control. That’s what mattered to someone like Robert Greaves. As Simon Redwood had undoubtedly learned after inviting him in to run the company.
“I put a lot into that design.” I looked away from him and shook my head. “It seemed like a terrible waste for such elegant creatures.”
He waved an arm dismissively. “It’s not as bad as you think. They’ll get to live out their lives at the Farm, and you got to learn the importance of coloring inside the lines.”
The dragons went to the Farm. I’d been trying so hard to forget what happened on demonstration day, I didn’t think through what he’d meant by ordering the dragons to quarantine. “Does that mean I’ll get another shot at the flying model?”
“We want you to focus on the custom orders, at least for the time being.”
That meant no. It didn’t hurt as bad as it could have, because I’d expected as much. There was a sliver of hope and I clung to it. “I can do that. I like them.”
He gripped my shoulder. “And you’re good at them. Keep at it, all right?”
“I will,” I said dully. He was looking at me, and I could feel the weight of his gaze. I summoned a bit more enthusiasm. “Thanks. And sorry about . . . well, you know.”
“It’s water under the bridge.” He gave me a nod and strode briskly out of the lab. I took what felt like my first full breath since he’d arrived.
A shadow detached itself from the wall beside the door. Ben Fulton gave me a little nod before following Greaves. What was he doing here, anyway? Maybe they thought I was unstable. Which wasn’t the worst possible guess. Or maybe he’d come to support me. Either way, it didn’t matter. I’d passed the test.
And more importantly, my flying dragons were still alive.