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CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The Pressure

You’d think that after we won the DOD contract, the pressure would be off. We’d designed the best dragons, won the head-to-head competition against Greaves. Hell, there was even a daydream I had where the majors called us up to thank us for doing such a fantastic job. But no, there was no congratulatory note, no bouquet of flowers. Instead, we got several multipage documents outlining the specs of what they wanted in their dragon soldiers.

And the thing was, no matter the bombshell that Evelyn had dropped, we still had to get the work done. The DOD’s laundry list of specs came with a delivery timetable and it was tight. Korrapati, Wong, and I spent the next hour going over them in the design lab. First, we looked at the specs for the existing models.

“They have our actual scores in here. All of the performance metrics they reached in the trials,” Korrapati said.

“Really?” I appreciated that, even though it still felt like we were being graded. The marine and flying dragons had received decent enough marks, but our first model had a ways to go.

“Was it not obvious when you were there?” Korrapati asked.

“Maybe it was, but I was mainly there to watch whether or not we won.” If we hadn’t, all of this would have been a moot conversation.

Wong was focused on the specs document. “Marine dragon is already close.”

“I’m sure. That thing was badass.” I frowned at the rest of our official report cards. “Why don’t you guys start with that one?”

Wong nodded.

“You’ll take the aerial?” Korrapati said.

“Yes. It’s close on most of the performance metrics, but needs some tweaks. I think I can get it there.” Especially if I persuaded Evelyn to let me bend some guidelines. Granted, I’d been burned by that before, but the company’s contract was now officially on the line.

“What about new models?” Wong asked.

“Let’s take a look,” I said, spreading the folders out on an empty workstation. They each grabbed a folder, betraying some of the eagerness that I felt. It had been a long time since we got to design something new, and even these prototypes carried that allure of novel designs.

I flipped open the folder on top of my pile; it contained specifications for an aquatic model codenamed Marine Scout. I hadn’t realized that the military was assigning codenames to their desired prototypes. I kind of loved it. “This one is called Marine Scout. A lighter version of the aquatic model with more endurance, no payload requirements.” I reread one of the bullet points just to make sure I had it correct. “Oh, and they’d like night vision.”

“I’m guessing this one will need it as well,” Korrapati said. “It has the codename Night Flier.”

“These codenames are no good,” Wong said.

“What?” I protested. “I kind of like them.”

“DOD should consult me before naming things.”

“What’s that one?” I pointed to the folder in his hand, the one that had gotten him riled up.

“Aquatic model, needs to go underwater a long time. Lighter payload, though. They call it Deep Diver.”

“That’s not so bad,” Korrapati said.

“I have better name. DeepWong.”

I snorted. “That sounds like some kind of illegal massage device.”

Wong shook his head. “We must tell the DOD.”

“I’ll be sure to bring it up the next time Major Nakamura drops by.” I handed him the folder for the Infantry Scout. “Take this one, won’t you?”

He took it and offered his own to Korrapati. “You take DeepWong?”

“Oh, you mean PritiDeep?”

“Not bad,” I said.

She handed me her own folder. “The Night Flier is all you.”

“All right.” I took a deep breath and exhaled. “Let’s get to work.”


I shuffled around the God Machine to the far side of the design lab and sat down in Korrapati’s old workstation space. She’d taken over my desk, so it was only fair. If she or Wong thought it odd that I wanted to work here rather than the big office I’d inherited from Evelyn, they didn’t say so. In truth, I missed the looming presence of the God Machine and the steady hum of the Switchblade servers that made it possible for us to create and model ever-more-complex reptiles.

The Night Flier specs outline from the DOD demanded similar performance metrics to those they’d required for the AF-1 model, namely horizontal flying speed and the ability to carry cargo of a certain weight. They wanted a smaller overall body size, though, as well as extreme agility. Those wouldn’t be easy, but they were the kind of improvements best reached through a cycle of small adjustments and simulation. Mundane work, in other words. I’d get to it later. For the moment, the creative part of my brain needed to tackle the hardest scientific challenge of this model.

Night vision.

The eye is an incredible organ, and the parts of the genome that code for its various components are under immense selective pressure. It’s why prey animals have good peripheral vision and predators have great perceptive vision. When it comes to seeing at night, however, it’s all about light perception. And when it comes to light perception, it’s all about the retina.

Most animals have retinas with two types of photoreceptors, rods and cones. They’re highly specialized cells, but they’re also fragile. The wrong mutation in a lot of different genes can cause photoreceptors to die. When that happens in humans, it causes an inherited disorder called retinitis pigmentosa. When I’d been in grad school at ASU, my advisor Dr. Sato had worked with a group in Texas who studied the genetics of the disease. Identifying all the genes that could cause it was super important because if you knew the problem, sometimes you could correct it with gene therapy. Not unlike what we’d done for Connor. RP was a tough nut to crack, though; when I last counted, our friends in Texas had identified more than a hundred RP genes. And they still didn’t know all of them. All this was to say that messing with the components of photoreceptors themselves was risky, even for a genetic engineer. There were just too many ways for something to go wrong. It was arguably safer to manipulate their distribution across the retina itself. Cones are good for distinguishing colors and seeing things at a distance. Rods, though, are the more light-sensitive receptors. So I got into the code of the dragon flier and altered the developmental pathways to favor cones over rods. I did it everywhere on the retina except the very central portion, also called the macula, that they needed for perceptive vision.

When I ran the new model through my simulator, its retina looked like that of a white-tailed deer or another nocturnal mammal. Lots of rods, excellent light response. The only drawback, of course, was that it wouldn’t exactly have binocular vision in daytime. I estimated its visual acuity would be around 20/40, maybe 20/60. That would have been fine for a terrestrial animal, but this thing needed to fly. It would be able to see reasonably well in the dark, but when flying at high speed . . . well, our own Pterodactyl mainline model had shown us how it went when flying dragons couldn’t avoid solid objects.

The trouble was, I couldn’t have it both ways. Once the layout of rods and cones was established, it was set for the life of the animal. And the DOD document made it very, very clear that night vision was a required trait. This was the point where I usually rolled out to bounce ideas off of Wong. I had to trek out of Korrapati’s old spot and around the God Machine and found him already chatting with Korrapati over the wall that divided their workstations. I suppressed a weird flare of envy. “This design is killing me.”

Wong, who was somehow eating a comically large sandwich on a French loaf, barely interrupted his chewing to shake his head. “Night Flier is easy. Take regular flier, give good dark vision, keep rest the same.”

Typical Wong, just do everything perfectly by hand, it’s easy. I’d have been more amused if I wasn’t so frustrated with the actual work. My biological simulator’s predictions of the thing’s flight abilities had not been kind. “I’ve got the vision part handled. And I made the adjustments to body size that should get us flight,”

“What, you’ve already got the night vision part handled?” Korrapati asked.

“Yeah. It’s just rods over cones.”

Wong nodded emphatically, but had taken too large of a sandwich bite to weigh in.

Korrapati turned back to me. “So what’s the problem?”

“It’s going to be flying fast in the dark, probably through obstacles. I don’t think seeing in the dark is enough.”

“Not to mention daytime, or artificial lights.”

Crap. I hadn’t even thought about those complications, but she was right. “Without decent perceptive vision, it could be . . .”

“The Pterodactyl all over again?”

“Exactly.”

“If you’ve pushed the limits of vision, you’ll have to rely on other senses.”

“To help it fly? I don’t see how,” I said.

Korrapati turned to Wong and they shared a look. “We have to give it to him.”

Wong shrugged.

“Give me what?”

“Something we wanted to use for the aquatic model, but couldn’t afford to keep.” She ducked back into my old workstation. Her fingers tapped the desk in a delicate flutter. Then I heard the whoosh of an outgoing message. “I just sent you a patch.”

“Want to tell me what it does, first?”

Korrapati started to answer, but Wong held up a hand to stop her. He was in the middle of a swig of his energy drink, so we had to wait until he finished gulping it down.

“Make it surprise,” he told her.

“I like that idea,” Korrapati said.

I wanted to grumble something about who was the triple-D, but I also wasn’t afraid of a challenge. It was the sort of thing Evelyn used to do to me before she got too busy as CEO. And besides, I was deeply curious to learn about something they’d worked on together. “Bring it on.” I hurried back to my borrowed workstation.

Patches were like updates that you download for computer software, except they had changes to genetic code. I applied Korrapati’s to my current Night Flier design and instinctively brought it up in the simulator. There were no obvious physical changes, though the head shape looked a little different. Broader and more squared off, especially near the base. There was something different about the mouth, too, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. So I ran a comparison of my model’s code before and after the Korrapati-Wong patch.

“Holy crap,” I whispered. There were hundreds of changes, and most of them to systems that we didn’t ordinarily touch in dragon designs. I pulled the list of genes and ran it through PathFinder, an analysis tool that identifies significant biological pathways controlled by sets of genes. The results were always noisy because many genes in complex organisms played multiple roles. Even so, some of the pathways that ranked near the top of the list were unusual. Auditory processing, neuronal connectivity, and some developmental processes for the inner ear. There were a lot of genes that were active in specialized neurons. Especially auditory neurons for very high-frequency bands.

The different head shape suggested some change to the brain physiology. Sure enough, the inferior colliculus, which was part of the midbrain, was much larger than usual. I admit, I had to look that up, but when I did I learned that it, too, played a key role in auditory processing.

On a whim, I ran the design through the simulator again and paid special attention to the head. There were actual ear ridges behind the usual featureless auditory canals. What a killer idea. And they had to scrap it. I still admired the scientific audacity of it, though. Much like the swift wing, it was a concept already perfected by nature. I moseyed back to their side of the design lab.

“Well, this is interesting,” I said.

“Any guesses?”

“Almost all of your changes have to do with hearing, so I’m guessing that this is intended to give the dragon echolocation abilities.”

Korrapati’s mouth fell open in legitimate surprise. Wong gave her his half smile and said, “Told you.”

“It’s a clever idea. Do you think the dragon can make those vocalizations, though?”

“They already make noises. Adjust palate to make higher frequency,” Wong said.

“So that’s why the mouth looked different. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.”

“How in the world did you figure out the bio sonar so quickly?” Korrapati asked. “It took forever to code, but the physical changes are subtle.”

I nearly blurted out that I’d done a simple code diff that got me most of the way there, but I held back. No need to give everything away. The more they thought I deserved this position, the better. Especially now that we might actually get to stay in business thanks to the DOD contract. I winked at her. “Even a blind pig finds an acorn every once in a while.”

“Pigs eat acorns?” Wong asked.

I laughed. “Pigs eat everything. Trust me, I know.”

If the bio sonar worked, the DOD was going to be pleased. I only wished I’d thought of it before the aerial trials.


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Framed