CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Customization
To be fair, work was keeping me busier than ever. I’d hardly settled in my chair in the lab the next morning when I heard the click-clack of heels approaching.
“Good morning, Noah,” Evelyn said.
“Morning,” I said. I wished I’d stopped for coffee. If she was on me this early, it meant a long day.
“We had some new orders come in.”
“How many?”
“Six.”
“Jesus.” A single custom dragon usually took me a few hours. I was looking at a two-day workload, at least. “Did we have a sale or something?”
“The new ad campaign rolled out.”
“Of course, it did,” I muttered.
Build-A-Dragon’s customization program was currently the company darling. It allowed us to squeeze the maximum revenue out of one-percenters, the kind of people who could afford not only to buy our dragons but have them customized to their whims. The enormous profit margins for those underwrote our whole department. Every new marketing campaign brought a deluge of custom orders. These went into a queue of sorts, and Evelyn’s team took them pretty much at random.
“Which order’s the priority?”
“They’re all the priority,” she said.
“All right, then pick two.” I knew it would make her crazy. In Evelyn’s perfect world, I’d get them all done at once, in record time, and she’d bask in the praise of the company board. But a good dragon design, a worthy design, didn’t happen instantly.
She consulted her tablet, which was hotlinked into my workstation. She pulled up the order queue on my monitor, scanned the entries, and highlighted a couple. “These two,” she said. “They’re new customers and paid for express delivery.”
Express delivery was something of an inside joke at Build-A-Dragon, but I didn’t say as much. We might get to the orders a little sooner, but designs took a certain minimum amount of time no matter how quickly a customer wanted them. Then again, if someone was willing to pay extra for the appearance of a faster turnaround, Build-A-Dragon was more than happy to let them.
“I’m on it,” I said.
“I was also wondering if you’d like to develop another prototype.”
“I like the custom jobs,” I said, by way of avoidance. In truth, I was a little gun-shy after she killed the design that produced Octavius. Despite the early morning wakeups, I’d already taken a shine to the little guy. But I couldn’t exactly tell her how I’d gotten the market research, so I had to let it go. “They’re keeping me plenty busy.”
“The customs are important, but they’re short-term jobs. We need to think about the larger plan, and that means new prototypes.”
I sighed. I’d have to pay the piper sooner or later. “What do you have in mind?”
“I was thinking a long-range flier.”
“Ooh,” I said, betraying my eagerness. There was something inherently fascinating about a dragon that could fly. Korrapati’s short-range suburban flier—called the Harrier—were pretty good at it. The high metabolism gave them a lot of energy, and we made sure their bodies were light enough that they could maneuver as well as any bird. We were already shipping a lot of those, especially to urban areas where a smaller dragon made sense.
The long-range flier prototype was another story. O’Brien and the Frogman did their best, but because of the infamous point restrictions, the largest flying dragon got the smallest brain. The so-called Pterodactyl flew decently enough during our field trials to get the thumbs-up for manufacturing, but no one thought to point out that these took place in a large open space out behind the building. Soon after it hit the market, we learned that the Pterodactyl had a frightening tendency to crash into stationary objects.
Some genius had started an internet petition to rename it the “Terribledactyl” and collected a thousand signatures. Sales plummeted, and they pulled the model from our catalog.
“It’s an obvious gap in our product lines right now. Customers want a dragon that can fly faster and farther.”
“Without crashing into things?”
She cracked a hint of a smile but forced it away. “It won’t be easy, Noah.”
“Not with the point limitations, no.”
“You’re good at solving problems. You showed that with the trifecta.”
She knows me too well. But my mind had taken a different tack already. A long-distance flier would necessarily have strength, agility, stamina . . . traits that might be useful for other purposes. “I suppose I could give it a shot.”
“After the customs.”
“Right.”
“Thanks.” She click-clacked away.
I sighed and got to work. The first custom order was a household dragon. Small frame, slow-growing, and a coloring that came right out of a five-year-old girl’s imagination. It took a certain kind of overindulgent parent to throw down the cash for one of our dragons and let it be pink with white polka dots.
I opened DragonDraft3D on the computer and started a basic flightless Rover model. We had walkthroughs and preloaded configurations for dragons like these, but I liked to do them by hand. That way every dragon had the mark of Noah Parker on it. Maybe one day that would be worth something.
This customer wanted a mild temperament, which meant tuning the oxytocin receptor to high efficiency. No claws, obviously, so I knocked out a few keratin genes. I trimmed back the growth time on the scales so they’d end up small and pliable. Pigmentation came next. I have to admit, my fingers fought me on the colors they’d requested. Pink and white just felt wrong.
Every step I took, I ran through the biological simulator to ensure viability. Dragon biology, malleable as it might seem, required a delicate balancing act. Since I’d curtailed the physical traits, I could have given the birthday job a larger cranium, but I didn’t think that was a good idea. Intelligence contradicted loyalty in dragons, and this one would need a lot of love. Especially once it got a look in the mirror.
I hit the Print button, and the God Machine got to work. Ten minutes later, a hot pink egg slid out on the conveyor belt.
I shook my head. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Wong chose that moment to pop his head over the divider. “Very nice, Noah Parker!”
I groaned. “It’s a custom.”
“You should get a matching shirt.”
“Get back to work, will you?”
I opened another window on my system to make sure hatchery staffers had gotten the transfer request. I had to get that thing out of my line of vision as soon as possible but Build-A-Dragon didn’t want designers so much as touching the eggs. It was hard to argue with them about not trusting me with fragile objects, though. I spilled something on my desk or my person about once a week.
Two white-garbed hatchery staffers appeared a few minutes later.
“Hey guys,” I said.
“Hey,” they answered, in a distracted sort of way.
The hatchery staffers had grown even more obsessive in their care of dragon eggs since business picked up. Then again, they did spend a lot of hours in the relentless heat of the Arizona sun. Dressed in stifling white jumpsuits, no less. Anyone who did that every day was bound to end up a little sun-touched, as they say.
I ate lunch at my desk—peanut butter and jelly sandwich, as always—and flipped over to the secret, not-officially-ordered design. A design that carried a genetic change of uncertain significance. I’m not sure why I didn’t just go to Evelyn and tell her about this part of my plan. My instincts told me that giving a dragon a progressive muscle disease wouldn’t hold much appeal with company leadership. Dragons were our products; sending out intentionally defective ones might reflect poorly on us. Even if it were for good reasons, like helping my brother and others like him. Besides, the old adage probably applied: it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission. His variant went in, and the dragons would either replicate his disease or they wouldn’t. My simulator backed my prediction: its modeling of the dragon with Connor’s variant foresaw gradual muscle weakness and progressive loss of strength. That’s because my simulator thought like I did. I went back to the code itself and made the tweaks so it essentially ignored the spiked-in variant. The genetic sabotage was ready, and the failsafe effectively disabled. Now all I needed was the right dragon to put it into.
In the meantime, I started in on the next order. Basics first: body type, maximum size, growth rate, coloring. The current customer wanted an attack dragon. Lean, muscular, and jet-black. I glanced over the rest of the form. The heavy claws were an obvious choice. Same with the spiked tail and extra rows of canine teeth. The buyer certainly knew his business.
The sales department had redacted the name of said buyer, but I could make an educated guess. Dragons like these usually ended up in the hands of rich criminals. They’d paid for on-site hatching, too, which meant our staff would oversee the hatching and deliver the live dragon to the customer in person.
I altered the hemoglobin gene to give it higher efficiency. Then I wiped out one of the dopamine receptors, so the dragon wouldn’t be easily sated. These traits meant the cranium had to be small. This dragon would operate mostly on instinct, which worked well for attack models. Dragons were already natural predators. Take away their senses of empathy and self-preservation, and you had yourself a killing machine.
The simulator kept me in check; sometimes I went too far with the musculature or claw size. Two steps forward, one step back. I didn’t bother with wings; it would be too heavy to fly. It was late afternoon by the time I found the right balance. One perfect killer dragon. I made a note on the dietary guidelines (lots of meat, preferably raw) that customer service could pass along to the buyer. I gave it an aggressive-model flag in our system, too, which meant the customer would receive all the usual disclaimers about dangerous animals. Much of the legal framework for Rottweilers, pit bulls, and other dangerous dogs had been adapted so that it applied to synthetic organisms as well. If your dragon maimed someone, you were responsible. Rumor had it that Greaves had retained a powerful lobbying group to make sure that attack dragons weren’t banned altogether.
I hit “Print” and put in a transfer ticket while the God Machine got to work. Funny how the egg often hinted at the dragon inside it. This one slid out of the printer like a shadow. The marbled black-and-gray shell seemed to absorb the light all around it.
Jim and Allie arrived, and wheeled their cart into position beside the God machine.
“Hey guys,” I said, earning two silent nods in response.
They did a team lift on the egg—it was heavier than it looked, and company protocols required this anyway—and eased it into a shallow foam receptacle on the cart.
“This is a—” I started to say. I’m not sure what happened next. Maybe one of the wheels gave out or something. But the cart buckled, and the handlers shouted in alarm. Jim tried to catch it, but he was on the wrong side. Allie couldn’t hold the weight on her own. Instead, she threw herself under it. Didn’t even hesitate or anything. She grunted when it hit her but held on with both hands.
“Shit!” I half-fell out of my chair to help her.
I had trouble getting a grip on the egg’s slippery-smooth surface. Damn, it’s heavy. I couldn’t lift it on my own, but I kept it from crushing her.
Jim kicked the cart to one side, straddled Allie, and gripped the egg in a bear hug. I squirmed out of his way. He grunted and heaved the egg in a dead lift. Allie scrambled out from under it.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yeah.” She unzipped her headgear and pushed it down. Her jet-black hair tumbled loose about her face. She grimaced. “I’ll grab another cart.”
“Maybe I should get it,” I said.
“I’m fine.” She limped out.
Jim stood there holding the egg, his arms taut with the effort.
“You want to put that down?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I got it.”
Then Allie was back, and they tried the whole thing again. The cart held this time. Thank God the egg hadn’t broken; I doubted they’d have taken it well. Allie pressed her hands to her right side and gasped.
“Maybe you should see the doctor,” I said.
“Right after we get the egg situated.”
Jim pushed the cart out and she limped after it, pulling the damaged one behind her. I might as well have been a painting on a wall now that they had the egg in their possession.
In all the commotion, I forgot to tell them to put it in a solitary incubator.