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CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The Brother

The only saving grace from our interrupted scouting expedition was that Connor had streamed his drone’s video into the cloud, so we still had most of it. I drove over the next day so we could review the footage. Also, I felt bad about his lost drone. He’d been reluctant to lend it out in the first place.

I parked my Tesla out in front of Mom’s house in the same spot under the same tree where I’d parked the jalopy as a teenager. It felt right somehow to reclaim possession of an otherwise unmarked stretch of curb by the house where I grew up.

“Hi, honey,” Mom called from the porch. She sat on the swing in the hot, still air, somehow looking quite comfortable. She had a reading tablet in hand—I strongly suspected it was loaded with trashy romance novels, though she’d never let me confirm this theory—and the box of wine on the table beside her.

“Look at you, living the American dream.” I bent down and hugged her, tolerating a wine-laced kiss on the cheek. “Jeez, it’s two in the afternoon.”

“What do you think retirement is for?”

“I thought it was mostly taking naps and eating dinner at four p.m.”

“Did you come here just to harass your mother?”

“Of course not. I came to harass Connor, too.”

She grabbed my wrist. “I really like Summer.”

Her sincerity threw me for a bit. “Uh, good. She liked you, too.”

“She’s good for you, I think.”

I smiled, and for some reason I felt like I might be blushing. “You think right.”

“How’s work?”

“It’s fine. We’re getting busy again,” I said, and forced myself to clam up after that. Connor and I had both taken the vow of silence when it came to telling Mom the full scoop behind what was happening with Build-A-Dragon and the company’s former CEO. She was a smart lady but a loud talker, and had blown more than her fair share of secrets wide open over wine at bridge night.

“When are you going to bring one of those dragons by for me to see, anyway?”

I’d brought Octavius over once when she wasn’t home, and she still held that against me. Yet I had the feeling that the whole pack might be a little much. “Uh, sometime. I don’t know. I should get inside. Connor’s waiting for me.”

She made an exasperated sound, but went back to her reading tablet. I took that for permission to proceed.

It’s always a strange feeling walking into a house where you grew up. No matter the inevitable decor and furniture changes over time, the feel was always the same. The dim foyer still took an extra minute to let the eyes adjust. The carpet was new—Mom wanted to replace it once Connor no longer needed his wheelchair—and the lamps were different, but I knew the distance to every wall by heart.

A dutiful younger brother with access to modern technology like the doorbell camera would have been inside to receive me. Instead, of course, my only greeting was the distant rumble of a first-person shooter on surround sound. There was machine-gun fire, and then a loud explosion that shook the floor.

“Connor!” I shouted.

No response.

I stalked down the hall to his room. Well, my old room. He’d taken it over the moment I left for college—over my vociferous objections, it needs to be said—all because it was slightly larger than his. Now I think he kind of enjoyed having erased any trace of my presence from the room, if not the house entirely. The newest evidence of this was an actual keypad lock on the door.

“Oh, what the hell is this?” I muttered. As if he has anything in there that someone would want to steal. Come to think of it, he’d probably just wanted to keep Mom from snooping around while he wasn’t home under the guise of doing laundry.

I knew the keypad model; it was a six-digit code, all numeric. And I knew Connor. He was, first and foremost, a nerd who thought he was smarter than everyone else. This was a ridiculous notion when you thought about it; he wasn’t even the smartest person in our immediate family. So, what number would he have chosen? Well, he had memorized pi out to around twenty-five digits, so I tried that first.

3-1-4-1-5-9

Red lights flashed; that wasn’t it. Maybe he’d gone with prime numbers instead. I punched in the first six prime numbers.

2-3-5-7-11

Still no sale. The sounds of electronic warfare continued unabated on the other side of the door. I had one more shot, but if this one missed it would sound an audible alarm and freeze out for two minutes.

What other dorky numeric sequence would give Connor a tiny satisfying hit of intellectual superiority when he punched it in? Then it hit me: the smug satisfaction would appeal most if he used it to take a shot at his older brother. He’d probably pick something I should know, which meant closer to biology than pure mathematics. There were a few possibilities, but the one that seemed most likely was a seemingly random number sequence named for an Italian mathematician. The Fibonacci sequence—in which each ensuing number equals the sum of the two that precede it—was a pattern that turned up all over the place in nature. It described the distribution of seeds on a sunflower and the growth of a nautilus spiral shell. The reason why has to do with spirals and the golden ratio. That ratio was often described as six digits, but something told me that the sequence itself was the sort of thing Connor would most enjoy. I punched it in.

1-1-2-3-5-8

Green lights flashed, and the lock gave a soft click. So predictable. I grinned, shoved the door open, and barged in. “Is Mr. Fibonacci home?”

Connor sprawled at his mess of a desk, which held three huge curved monitors behind a wall of empty chip bags and soda cans. He sat in an ordinary chair, which was an improvement. Only months ago, before the gene therapy, he’d spent most of his time in a wheelchair. He didn’t even need the cane anymore. Mom had told me they’d donated both and weren’t looking back. Incredible what gene therapy can do. Connor was just one patient. There were thousands of patients like him who might benefit from similar therapies.

“Took you long enough,” he said.

I scoffed. “You mean to break the code on your little door lock? Child’s play.”

“What did you try first?”

I guess I hadn’t been as subtle as I thought. “Something nerdier.”

“Six digits of pi?”

“Yep.”

“It used to be that. But Mom knows them.”

“Ooh.” I winced. “That’s no good. I assume that’s who you’re trying to keep out.”

“Mom, the cleaning lady, government agents, and whoever else might want to steal my assets.”

I scanned the snack food wasteland that lined the top of his desk. “I’m not sure we agree on the meaning of the word asset.”

“Yeah well, I think you’re going to find some value in my drone’s footage.” He executed a quick few commands, minimizing his game to one monitor while the other two brought up a list of video files. Judging by the annotations, he’d already reviewed them manually and put the raw videos through some AI-based enhancements. That was all the rage with surveillance video footage—machine processing of a basic two-dimensional video to help identify things that a computer could recognize.

The trick, of course, was a rich source of video to train your algorithms on. And for us, that meant dragons. One of the folders on display held dozens of videos of Build-A-Dragon’s products. The first one I noticed was a Rover playing with two children in a grassy, fenced backyard. Next to that was a video of a woman with a Laptop model perched beside her at a kitchen table; she was feeding it meat from a long wooden skewer. After that, was a video that looked like drone footage of a dense swampland as a lean predator dragon stalked through the undergrowth. A Guardian searching for wild hogs. They were the first dragons, and arguably the most dangerous.

“Where did you get all of these videos?” I asked.

“ChewTube, mostly.”

“Are you serious?”

He nodded. “People love filming their dragons.”

“How many did you—”

“Thousands. And I had to cut myself off, because most of them are just Rovers getting stuck in doggie doors.”

“Hey, man, that’s my livelihood.”

“I’m just telling you what’s out there.”

He wasn’t wrong, either, because the Rover obesity thing was a pretty well-known issue. Evelyn and I had worked on a microbiome application that helped the animals stay leaner, but even so. The Western diet did not do wonders for reptilian physiques.

“Did you get enough training footage for all of our known models?”

“And then some.” Connor zoomed down to a file he’d marked with several annotations. “I was wondering if you could explain this.”

The dragon in the video was a custom job, a flightless model somewhere between a Rover and a Laptop in size. It was cuddled on a bed with a little girl who was reading a picture book. Goodnight Moon. The dragon, though, was pink. Bright, eye-jarring, unforgiving pink. The girl didn’t seem to mind; guessing by the similar color palette on her bedspread, pillows, and walls, it was her favorite color. Worst of all, I’d designed the dragon myself. I remembered most of my customs. I’ll die before I tell him that, though.

“The customer’s always right,” I said.

He gave me a mock-serious stare. “How far you’ve fallen.”

I could have stayed there for hours perusing those videos, but the clock was ticking. “So, what have you got for me?”

“Some things we knew, and some things we didn’t.” He pulled up a new screen that showed the now-familiar drone video from our scouting expedition. First it was flying down the country road, then veering along the rocks toward the compound itself.

Just as before, I was fixated on the newly constructed building and whatever secrets it held behind tinted glass. Yet before the drone started to move closer, lighted circles superimposed on the images drew my attention to the bottom of the video. There, along the floor of shallow basin where the facility was built, and nearly hidden by some scraggly bushes, was a dragon’s head and torso.

“See it?” Connor asked. In case I hadn’t, the annotation software pulled up a separate frame with six composite images of similar dragons. They were rangy predator-type custom models, all of them, though one had the stockier build of a Guardian prototype. Connor resumed the video playback. As the video grew larger, the AI picked up another reptilian form hidden in the landscape. This one was just a tail as the dragon ducked from view. Almost imperceptible as a light brown against a backdrop of brown and yellow desert.

“If we picked up these two, there are probably another four we didn’t even see,” I said. Even with the help from AI, dragons were made to blend with desert environments. “No wonder we lost your drone.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Connor said.

“It reminds me a little of Redwood’s place before it burned down. The land around it was crawling with dragons, too.”

“Those were ferals, though, weren’t they?”

“I think so. And Redwood claimed they showed up on their own. But these dragons?” I gestured at the screen. “I doubt they’re hanging out voluntarily.”

I did some quick calculations. “Figure the ones we saw, plus these two, and two more we didn’t see. Could be six or eight all told.”

“That’s a lot of dragons. And they’re mean.”

“Oh, you don’t even know. If these are anything like the dragons Greaves used in the field trials, they’d tear a human to pieces.” I sighed. “Unfortunately, I don’t see a way around it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, he wouldn’t have security if his means of production isn’t there.”

“You’re not still serious about doing this, are you?”

“Well, yeah.”

“What for? It’s not really your problem,” he said.

He wasn’t wrong about that. I hadn’t stolen the prototype of the Redwood Codex, and it belonged to Build-A-Dragon, not to me. But somehow everyone else passed the buck and it ended up with me anyway. “Anything concerning dragons is my business.”

“You’re crazy.”

I bit my lip. “Maybe. But I promised Redwood I’d try.”

“I hate it when you invoke him.” He stared at me, sighed, and shook his head. “What about other promises you made, though? Like the ones to all my friends in the BICD2 support group?”

“Oh, that.” I’d been so consumed with the Greaves thing, I’d nearly forgotten. “The variants you sent me tick most of the boxes. They’re leaning pathogenic, and they’re even supported by my biological simulator.”

“I know that, bro. But it’s not enough to change the classification.”

“They need experimental evidence,” I said.

“Which is what we’re counting on you for.”

“I know. I’ve got a lot of promises to keep these days, but I’m holding to that one.” I had no idea how I’d accomplish it, but I’d figure something out. I owed it to him. “But I want to tackle the Redwood situation first.”


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