The Dragon Commander Page 2

  “I love you, too,” smiled Chris. They leaned for a kiss just before the shrill ring of their ancient phone rattled its hook. Chris had to have a special port installed for the land-line they inherited from his dad, since affording Fusion phones was entirely out of the question for them now. Chris would have let it ring itself out, but for the fact that there were only two other places connected to their house on the archaic line. It was either his job, or a job offer for Sheba. “Hello?” he sighed into the receiver.

  “Who is it?” murmured Sheba, while Chris’ face darkened.

  “WCC,” he whispered, still listening. Each word seemed to yank his heartstrings tighter. “I… are you sure? Yes, I know you wouldn’t call if you weren’t… yes… I understand…” Chris reached for his pants.

  “Good Lord, what is it, Chris?”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Chris said, before clicking the phone back down. His eyes fell heavy on Sheba. “I have to go to the WCC consulate… there’s been an attack.”

  Chapter Two: Dark Developments

  “An attack?” Sheba blurted, almost laughing at the absurdity. It was almost ten o’clock, and they called to tell Chris about an attack? “I’m sure there has been. In the mountains, in the fields. Far, far away from Beijing, I’m sure there’s been plenty of attacks. Isn’t that what the WCC supplies Precincts for? Chris… what?” Sheba shifted upright when she saw true distress sink into the lines on his face. She’d seen them rarely, even when they lived at the barracks. As it always had, the look preceded Chris unlocking the case under the bed, to retrieve his dad’s old pistol.

  “The attack was on one of the Precincts. 117, in Shanghai,” said Chris. Unprecedented as something like that was, since the widespread distribution of Squires, Sheba breathed herself into a calm.

  “That is peculiar… but aren’t there other Precincts nearby that can help? What makes it a WCC concern?” she tried, tears welling in her eyes. The pistol in his belt was never a good sign.

  “The Squires the WCC sent there turned on their partners,” Chris told her.

  “My God… Chris…” Sheba mumbled. She hugged the sheets up around her while Chris shouldered his jacket and holstered his pistol, a six-chamber revolver as polished as the day his dad had given it. He faced her, as disappointed as she was, but the sudden shift of her expression disarmed Chris. It wasn’t just disappointment. It wasn’t just anger. Sheba looked terrified. “Please don’t go.”

  “Sheba…” Chris whispered, swooping to the edge of the bed beside her. Never once in their five years together had she demanded that of him. “What is it?” Her eyes went wide again at the question. “Sheba…” She ran through every reasonable response in her mind, anything but the truth. She didn’t need to worry him more.

  “It’s… I’ve just been having trouble sleeping. Been thinking about the wedding and all… I really need you here,” pleaded Sheba. Tears poked up in the corners of her eyes. Chris’ hand flung to brush them away, but she turned her head to do it herself.

  “Sheba, I’m sorry… I need to be here, too. I’m so sorry I can’t be, just tonight. This is that rare time when I have to answer,” Chris reassured her.

  “I know, I know… I’m sorry,” Sheba turned back to him, smiling. She’d known from the moment the phone hung up that he was going. Not even she could stop him, and she’d opened a dangerous door. Sheba had been having trouble sleeping of late, but it had nothing to do with the wedding. “You have to go, I understand.”

  “I wish you didn’t have to… Sheba, is that really all? I’ve never seen you like this, not over work,” Chris raised an eyebrow of true, wounding concern.

  “That’s really all, Chris. I promise. Now you go. It’d be selfish for me to keep you here for myself, when you’ve got a job to do,” she smiled her way into another long, wet kiss. “Go keep us all safe. I love you.”

  “I love you too,” Chris replied, like he wasn’t just as concerned. He lingered by the door to their bedroom when it closed behind him. He waited to hear anything, any small hint to what could really be plaguing Sheba so deeply she would keep it from even him. All he heard were sobs. When Chris wanted nothing more than to go back through their bedroom door, he zipped his jacket and headed outside.

  Sheba wanted so badly to keep it together, for Chris. She had to, she told herself. That minor breach was almost too much. If there really had been a malfunction so profound in the AIs, he had enough on his plate. He didn’t have to know about her dreams. Not yet. It wasn’t like she was full-blown 3D… not yet.

  Still, when she lay in the dark, eyes too wide for tears, she remembered how her uncle had started the same way. Dreams. He dismissed it, like most did, that worked the mines on the red planet where she grew. Cases of dragon dissociation disorder have plummeted since the shallow mine movement in 3200, after all. But there was always a reason for a movement like that. In this case, it was the sheer number of Martian miners succumbing to delusion. The elements under Mars’ crust were the heart of Cold Fusion technology, the heart of human survival, but so too the cause of rampant hallucinations.

  Even after hours in the mines, an unidentified whisper or flash of light could manifest. After days, miners heard voices speak in tongues they could not. Weeks of prolonged exposure meant nightmares, like the ones Sheba was having now. Months without a vacation from the Martian Fusion Mines could be downright paralytic. People were tormented, asleep or awake. What caused such radical change in practice, and earned the condition the monicker 3D, was the nature of the delusions. Every miner, and even some technicians, were haunted by the same image. Fearsome beasts glowering in the dark. Scales in place of skin. Yellow glow behind glassy lenses, with a flash of claws instead of hands or feet. They looked closest to what old Earthlocked legends called Dragons. Giving them a name, though, was little consolation for the people who heard and saw them nonstop. For decades, Mars saw a massive spread of asylums and a migration of psychologists to treat the sufferers of dragon dissociation disorders. Sheba figured she must be the only one who made the pilgrimage in reverse, but she just had to get away from all of that.

  Sheba never worked the mines, but her uncle did. He was a lifetime resident at Red Star Asylum now, but once, he’d lived with her and her dad. She shuddered at the possible connection between that, and her dreams. She never once thought the end of his road might be hers too, but then she never thought spending time around the residue from the mines could give her nightmares all these years later. Perhaps it was even genetic? Just last night, Sheba saw the yellow eyes in the dark of sleep. She woke up with the whispers still in her ears. She thought about telling Chris more than once, but the excitement of their engagement was still so new. Sheba would never forgive herself if she quenched the fire of that with ungrounded worry.

  They were just dreams, she told herself, alone in the dark. Still, Sheba lay awake, long after Chris went. She stared into the ceiling, trying to chase out the image of yellow gemstone eyes. Sheba let out a shaky breath. Just dreams.

  “Ow! Rookie mistake, Tim,” he whispered to himself, shaking out the finger he’d just nicked. It was all the company he had to talk to- well, himself, and his patients. By the time he was done with what he always thought was important work, those patients might just be able to answer him. For now, Tim just counted himself lucky to have found a company willing to invest in him. Months ago, Tim Carver had been another shut-in with a workshop in his mom’s basement. Now, he was a shut-in with a garage workshop and a startup contract, in his own apartment on the wrong side of Beijing. “We can both do better, can’t we?” he whispered to his current patient.

  Tim fell back from the lamplight on a patiently sitting robot, and flicked on another to find the bandages. He wrapped his bleeding finger, which immediately stained the cloth. Tim sighed into a laugh. He was more intimately familiar with the insides of a Fusion Operation System than some men twice his age, and his scarred hands showed it. FOS design, for the most part, took more
strength of will and mind than muscle, but some pain tolerance was necessary. Especially when fatigue set in. Tim hadn’t fumbled a tool so hard in years. But that was how important this project was, to him at least. Tim might not have been in the part of town he wanted, or the country, or planet, but at least he had these projects. Nanoverse had given him a path to purpose, he reminded himself.

  He’d been working on this particular home-service model for two weeks. It wasn’t so different from WCC’s Squires, but shrunken to the size of a child. Tim had been tasked with teaching the model something its human counterpart could never hope to: how to develop its own intelligence beyond the scope of its FOS, its AI, its brain. Thus far, the problem-solving software had melted down sixteen times, in sixteen tests. Tim had spent the better part of four days with his long spine arched over a screen, twisting and stretching various elements of the model’s AI. Now it was time to test it. He just needed to create the problem, which is where the scalpel he cut himself on came in. One more careful swipe carved a sufficient slice. Tim took a step back from the robot, and said,

  “TE-Les, on.” The onyx child’s face lit with a red beam of awareness. A single infrared beam swept across TE-Les’ ocular slit, taking in the room and its master. Tim preferred the term doctor. He had to believe a deeper, more complex relationship was possible between them than designer and object, servant and master. It was the whole premise of his work at Nanoverse.

  “Hello, Tim,” said the robotic voice of a child. He’d designed the vocal range of this particular in-home-service model himself. The default deep, mature voice was too jarring from so small a body.

  “How do you feel tonight, TE-Les?” posed Tim.

  “Positively splendid,” said TE-Les. Tim raised an eyebrow.

  “Even though you know what I’m going to ask you to do? Even though it hasn’t worked so well before?” Tim prodded. TE-Les gave a laser-flashing nod. At least the gesture training was working.

  “Yes. I can feel that something is… different. It may not work this time, but perhaps the results will be interesting,” said TE-Les, in a voice that almost sounded like a faceless smile.. Interesting. Tim had muttered just that to himself at the end of countless hours at this very workbench. TE-Les must have picked it up from him..

  “You feel it, huh? I think you could be right,” said Tim, knowing that emotional matrices were still in beta, and not in any Nanoverse models. He poked his bandaged finger at the slice he’d carved himself in the model’s chest. “TE-Les, you’ve been damaged. Repair yourself,” Tim said. Even after the first sixteen attempts, he still winced at this part. In previous trials, he had seen every reaction from mortified screams to sparks, smoke, and rampant form-changing. This time, TE-Les’ visual laser swept over Tim’s wounded hand, then her own chest. In his pipedream hope the TE-Les project would move on to some personality matrix work - he had customized the model as a “she”.

  “I cannot. My nanotech self-repair protocol’s have been disabled,” TE-Les realized, puzzled. Tim couldn’t help himself. He let an exhausted cackle through his laced fingers. Never once had she made it past realizing her systems were tampered with. She’d never been able to say it.

  “That’s right, they have… what can we do about that, TE-Les?” prompted Tim. Her head tilted up. Her red laser swept him again. She didn’t have the expression lights the WCC’s Squires did, or the software to feel, let alone express it, which made it all the more chilling when she said,

  “Why did you do this to me, Tim?” It was the sort of thing that made even an experienced FOS designer take a big step back, the old myth of the ghost in the machine.

  “Wha-what?”

  “Your blood pressure and perspiration suggest a mix of emotions. It does not seem you wanted to cause me damage, yet you did. Why?”

  “TE-Les, you’re veering outside the deviation accounted for by our tests,” Tim shivered. Then it hit him, twice as hard as his own hand that slapped his forehead. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it? You’re doing it. Trying to learn what your systems aren’t equipped to accept… alright, TE-Les,” sighed Tim, trying to muster up a way to say it, “My job is to make you make yourself better. If you can learn to learn, unsupervised, there won’t be a problem too complex for you to handle. You’ll be able to help people... who can’t tell you what they need. Nonverbal people… people who are hurt. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said TE-Les, “You damaged me to improve me.” Her laser flashed across Tim’s watery eyes, while he swept them dry. “If you altered my capabilities, could you not change them back?” He could only smile and nod at the ingenuity. Tim wasn’t sure where the credit belonged, with him or her. He straightened up, feeling suddenly bold for the first time since he took on this project. Perhaps it was the fatigue veiling his normally razor-sharp reason, but he decided to push the envelope.

  “I could. But let’s say, for the sake of the test… I need medical attention, but I just had a stroke. I can’t move. I can’t speak. How do you bypass your core directive to self-repair, and help me?” said Tim. The second his mouth closed, he was ready for the sparks, the smoke, the ear-splitting screech of an overwhelmed FOS. But TE-Les had been watching through his every failure, and every relentless try. She’d had the perfect example of problem-solving, right on the other end of each late-night trial run.

  TE-Les scooted from the workbench. Tim turned to watch her, bewildered, as she headed to the first-aid kit he’d left out. She opened it, uncovered a bandage, and stuck it to the unbleeding gash on her chest. She then turned, paced over to Tim, and turned her laser-eye up at him.

  “Shall I simulate medical treatment for a stroke?” said TE-Les.

  “N-n-no, TE-Les, you did well. Very well,” Tim smiled, wiping more exhausted, overjoyed tears. The perfect response he’d planned for was TE-Les reactivating her nanotech self-repair capabilities herself with the monitor in the corner. This was better than perfect. Tim laughed while he guided TE-Les by the hand over to the monitor. “Here, why don’t you dock with the system here. I’ll let you fix that for real, now.”

  He pattered away on the holographic keyboard that projected from his computer, which was no more than a strip of glass and metal. TE-Les digitally docked herself to the machine. In seconds, she was able to mend the slice in her chest. The individually powered atoms that made her up bent at the will of her incredible AI, to form a continuous new shiny chestplate. Tim watched with as much marvel as he had the first time, fifteen years ago, through the huge blue eyes of a child. Artificial intelligence and billions of microscopic Cold-Fusion-powered computers working together to form the incredible FOS. To a child, it was a mystical, shiny shapeshifter. To Tim now, it was a machine quickly becoming necessary. In Precincts across Earth, in the homes of those that could afford them, and quickly replacing the pilots of SkyLine ships and miners on Mars, robots like those made by Nanoverse were the future.

  If Tim could help it, models like TE-Les would be his ticket off of this dying rock, too. As far as he was concerned, the big blue marble was looking more gray these days. He shared the opinion of many Earthlocked colleagues, that Earth’s death sentence was merely delayed by the emersion of the World Crisis Committee from the old United Nations. Even in 2075, everyone could see how screwed the planet was. Sure, the WCC had secured an escape route, the SkyLine, and a safehouse, Mars, but so many families still started on Earth. So many never left, like they should. Tim had already lost his dad to the horrendous hanging smog in this district of Beijing. His mom wasn’t far behind. He’d be damned if he was going to let his sister and the kids choke on that same rotten gas.

  “Just a little more, TE-Les,” said Tim, eyes out the window at the blurred glow of the SkyLine. “And we’ll be on to better, redder things.” He jumped at the ring, thinking he might have overwhelmed his patient. It took two more for him to realize it was his fusion phone. “TE-Les, rest.” Her laser-eye went dark, and her head dipped down. Tim shuffled to the phone that se
ldom rang, even during the day. He fumbled up the receiver to his ear. “Hello?”

  “Timothy Carver?” a harsh woman’s voice came through like scorn itself.

  “Spe-spe-speaking,” Tim managed, before clearing his throat. “Speaking,” he tried again, more like a FOS developer who’d just had a huge breakthrough.

  “This is Dorothy Brass with the WCC. We have a situation that could use your expertise,” the woman stated. Tim held the receiver away from his lips to wheeze.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand,” Tim blurted, when he caught half a breath. This was only half true. He understood that the WCC didn’t call people to ask them to be consultants- they called to tell people they were consultants, now. What he didn’t understand was: why him?

  “How soon can you be at the Beijing consulate?” asked Dorothy. Tim choked on the answer three times before he managed to say what he thought was the right answer.

  “To-to-tomorrow?”

  “We need you by then. You’ll have to leave tonight. Your employers have been notified, and the necessary credits have been transferred. We’ll see you for briefing at sunup,” said Dorothy.

  “Briefing?” Tim squeaked, but Dorothy had already hung up.

  Chapter Three: Into the Impossible Fray

  Chris’ butt hardly had time to get sore on his train ride to the Beijing WCC consulate. The half-developed fields outside his window looked like a patchwork of two entirely different times. Rugged farms, complete with rickety barns and silos broke up rigid grids of glowing steel towers. Then the train started, and it all blurred into zooming colors behind the pulsing, flameless Fusion jets on the backside of the magnetrain. Powerful magnets on both the track and bottom of the train forced the metal surfaces apart, frictionless, and made travel a matter of blinks.