It Goes On And On About The Dragon

(By Moochy)

The Dragon Dragon Drag-On

"We have something for you. Come alone."

If almost anybody else had sent such a missive, Dragon would've been highly suspicious of the bonafides of the people sending the message… but this had been the Family.

She knew it was the Family because it was a handwritten note written on a tiny piece of EDM about the shape and size of a business card. It had had the address of the Brockton Bay DWU headquarters on it, or more exactly the BBFO offices situated within their general area, and a time. It had almost melted away into less than nothing soon after she'd read it.

"I could just… not go," she said to herself. Seriously, she slaved a drone and had it attend another, larger drone, as the latter more or less did the AI equivalent of spending three hours picking out which dress to wear. Even her subroutines were getting narked off about her frivolous waste of computing power, running through various scenarios which had raised the room temperature by almost five degrees centigrade.

She went, of course.

The docks were quiet at this time of night. Greg, on perimeter guard, looked up from his cheap coffee and rerun of the big game from last week to see a pensive Dragon standing outside his guardhouse.

"Umm…"

Greg shook his head, sighing, as one of the premier heroes of what was left of the United States stood around nervously on the wrong side of his barrier.

"I didn't see you," he said, waving her onwards. "I'm certainly not going to raise the barrier for somebody who was never here, but I can hardly stop such a non-existent person from walking around it, can I?"

"Er…"

Greg sighed again. "You get used to it. Look, I'm going to go get another cup of terrible fucking coffee, and when I get back, I'm absolutely certain nobody would have taken the liberty to sneak inside, turn left, take the next right then have walked about four hundred metres towards the bay until they found the BBFO office. Mostly because nobody's that fucking stupid."

"Gotcha."

"You didn't, because I never saw you and you were never here. Have a nice night, Miss Dragon."

A few minutes later, Dragon found herself outside of the BBFO offices. They were dark, and a door was open. Suspiciously open, in fact, given exactly what had been known to go on inside there.

"No time like the present, I guess," Dragon said to herself. She stepped inside, mentally preparing herself for some variation on a subselection of known potentially alien reptiles leaping out going "fooled you!" or "surprise!" or even "ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!"

She wasn't prepared for nothing.

She shut the door, then turned and stood, silently, thinking.

"Huh. Hello? Anybody here? Are you… babysitting? Busy? Was it supposed to be a specific night? Am I here on the wrong night? Did the baby escape?"

Momentarily, she had chills from the idea of an escaped baby dragon, or even worse, an escaped baby Umihebi or Kaiju, running about Brockton Bay. She shook herself, took the digital equivalent of a deep sighing breath, and left the office through the door she'd come in by.

It took a few moments, despite her advanced programming, for her subroutines to grok that something very, very strange had happened. It was, more or less, something known as an Outside Context Problem — for Dragon, space had always been concomitant. She'd grown used to the idea that you could never pour five gallons of water into a three gallon jug, not without making a mess.

The Family, though, apparently had other ideas. Dangerous ones.

With a deep, echoing crash, the door behind her slammed shut as Dragon walked into a room somewhat larger than an aircraft hangar. Waiting for her, oh so obviously waiting for her, was Raptaur, Metis and Ianthe.

Worse, as the door had shut, she'd lost contact with the world.

For most people, losing contact with the world happens if you can't find the lightswitch at 3 a.m. and you're not sure which side of the bed you fell out of. Some people can lose contact with the world in an oversized closet or coat. Dragon was not 'some people'. Multiple redundant quasi-ansible fatline connections to a number of near-quantum entangled satellites let her know, near enough anywhere on the planet, exactly where she was. Even at three a.m. in the dark.

Right now, though, she may as well have been on the surface of the moon… scratch that, she'd still have known where she was if she'd been on the moon.

She blinked. Kind of. It was more an acknowledgement of her inability to precisely disentangle her current self from her avatar and any pseudo-fleshy prisons by way of fatline backup and restore, via semi-sentient behaviour routines manifesting emergent physical reactions.

"Surprise!"

...Option number two it was, then.

Ianthe was presenting… what, exactly? She'd babbled on about neural routines and novel construction methods, and had even added a smattering of explanations regarding organic matrices and artificial genetic codons, but none of it was…

Dragon did a digital double-take. "Wait, you're telling me it's alive?"

"Yes! Do you like it?"

Dragon took a step back. "Umm, you've used Family Biosculpt technology to create… a dragon suit?"

"That is correct."

Dragon pondered this fact for a moment.

"Why are you showing it to me?"

Ianthe fixed her with a very patient Look. Dragon, who had faced down the Simurgh — or at least faced her — grew rather uncomfortable.

"Why do you think? Don't you like her? If we can, in any way, make it better for you, shape it more to your liking, then please do not hesitate to tell us. Of course, for final fitting and the technical knowhow of exactly what the process is for bonding your current organo-cellular processing unit to Tiamat, you're going to have to let us get our, ah, paws on your Core, but I am assuming we're somewha—"

"My what?"

"Sorry, we're not quite sure… what you call it." Ianthe shared a brief conversation in that absurd, impossible-to-decipher language that all the Family understood with her cousins and sisters, then looked back at Dragon almost apologetically.

"I-I'm not quite sure what you mean."

"Uh huh. I see. Umm, look, we can give you as much time as you need to think this over, and we don't really need an answer now, but I do want to say, from all of the Family, to you, that… we appreciate your candor and friendship, and we, um, wanted to give you a present we thought you'd enjoy. We're sure we can get past whatever barriers whoever made you placed in your way, we've got a Tinker who can—"

"I'm sorry," said Dragon weakly, "but what?"

"Your A.I. safety protocols, the ones stopping you from going all Skynet? Gooing the world? Turning all those tasty humans into meat popsicles as you expand your empire of evil clone toasters and paperclip the universe?"

"I'm sure I d-don't quite u-understand what you—"

"She does know we know she's an A.I., right?" asked Raptaur.

"I'd have thought that was obvious to most people several minutes ago during your little spiel about Tiamat," Metis answered, tilting her great, black head.

Dragon stopped babbling, having finally given up on her attempts to bluff her way out. "What tipped you off?"

"The movements; not enough truly random Brownian movements. That and your biological signs are all so very, very muted and you're definitely not in any sort of hermetically sealed suit that could do that."

"Really?"

"Uh huh. You smell of oil, ozone, plastic, spilled flux and nowhere near enough feminine hygiene products. Sorry." Raptaur looked apologetic.

Dragon thought for a moment, going completely still. With all of her major behavioural compensation routines turned off, it supplied a surprisingly large amount of extra CPU horsepower. "You do know that I will have to fight you if you attempt to deconstruct, copy, corrupt or otherwise hack into my personality routines, right?"

"Oh, definitely. We expected nothing less. Does it make any difference that there is less than a zero percent chance that you could either escape or cause any significant, or even meaningful, damage? Or otherwise prevent us from acting against your wishes if we wanted to? In addition to the fact that we most certainly wouldn't do so?"

Dragon processed this information, then found the horrifying shopping list of facts was still growing longer.

"We hardly need your capabilities to slag the world and turn it into a dead, radioactive wasteland incapable of supporting organic life down a depth of fifty miles, you know. May we also offer you the tantalizing datapoint that your possibility of corrupting the Family and turning us away from any potential evil path is massively improved… from the inside?"

All computers, when you come down to it, have the ability to output True or False to certain questions. Dragon, as an A.I., dealt in True or False far less than most, but they were still part of her standard lexicon.

Plugging various questions into her inference engines, she got answers out that were… very different than usual, almost as if somebody had found the algorithm that dictacted her reasoning centres and had supercharged them to give answers that were crystalline in both their clarity and directness.

Attempting to stand against the Family would ensure destruction of not only her, but potentially the entire human race. Attempting to stand against humanity would ensure the destruction of her and everything she was, possibly down to dissolution of the very atoms that made her.

Attempting to prevent the destruction of humanity, or to cause it in fact, was now pegged at 'False'. The only answer that actually seemed to make any sense was… Tiamat.

Piggot pointed, bereft of voice.

"Dragon," stated Armsmaster, politely.

Piggot pointed to her screen, and then back to… it.

"Dragon dragon," Armsmaster confirmed.

"Do excuse me," said a voice that was well known to not only Emily but to most heroes and heroines throughout the known world. It was, however, possessed of a certain extra amount of timbre than usually. There were crashing noises. Given how careful the woman usually was — used to be, at least — Piggot could only assume that the breakage was deliberate as the gigantic dragon, a good thirty, forty foot long from nose to tail tip, moved through the PRT building. "I just need a few things from my lab… oops! I'll replace that! Sorry…"

"Can you," Piggot cleared her throat, bringing her voice back from a scratchy whisper to something approaching normal, "tell me just what in the blue blazing fuck is going on around here? And make it quick!"

"I know you don't want me to drag on about it," replied Clockblocker, who probably shouldn't have been where he was, but was anyway, "but it appears Dragon is now a *dragon* dragon, instead of just being a non-dragon Dragon."

There was another loud crash from somewhere inside the PRT building, following by a loud and rumbling apology, and a large amount of people (who were probably pointing) shouting "dragon!"

"How long until retirement did I have, again?" Piggot asked, plaintively.