Chapter Forty-Five: Dragon's Quest
January 1, 1999
It said something about Andrew Richter's life that he went to bed early on New Year's Eve, and woke at his normal time on New Year's Day. When he rose at 7:12 AM, he found the shower already running, and when he stepped under the spray at 7:14 AM it was the perfect temperature.
In light of the holiday, he luxuriated under the stream for a three minutes longer than normal, soaking in the warmth. Then he got out, toweled himself off, and dressed in comfortable jeans and a polo shirt. Coffee was waiting for him in the kitchen, the brewing cycle finishing just as he crossed the threshold. Was it selfish to have taken so long programming the intelligence that ran his house? Could the time have been better spent elsewhere? Or would that time be recovered, eventually, in the form of frustrations he avoided and tasks he never had to undertake?
Andrew ignored the thought for the moment, carrying his coffee over to his work area, which was now large enough that he'd had to move it from the office to the living room. "Dragon, report."
The fledgling program that would one day become so much more, if only he could figure out the right rules to make it safe, shuffled the programs on display. It minimized the work he'd left open the night before and called up the first in a line of reports, which were auto-generated at 6:01 AM every morning. Each PDF showed on the screen for only a few seconds, just long enough for him to read the most important details, before it disappeared and the next one replaced it.
His model of the stock markets, Farseeing Eye, was still flawed, too wrong to be helpful. His models of stock for specific companies, Farseeing Eyes Two, Three, and Four, were no better. He would need to change the parameters before letting them compile and test-run for another month. His crime modeler, Watchdog, was moderately improved on the national scale but only in European countries. The areas were too broad to be useful, and the success too specific to understand why it wasn't working in smaller communities.
The program tracking the Teeth, currently nicknamed the Dentist, had gotten corrupted. Probably too many conflicting priorities. He'd need to consider if it was worth the risks to make the program more intelligent or if he should just focus it on a smaller, simpler gang.
The financial hacking program, Robin Hood, had had some success the night before. Even lowlifes partied, it would seem. The eavesdropping program, Sentry, which watched for threats against himself in emails or other online sources reported a relatively safe 3.7.
Tweety, the priority filter that handled his correspondence and other contacts had had a quiet night. Butler, currently the most complex of his programs, responsible for running his house had-
"Dragon, stop," Andrew said aloud. At the preprogrammed command, the report froze. "Dragon, show previous report." Tweety returned to the screen. "Dragon, show previous report." Sentry's green 3.7 glowed briefly. "Dragon, show previous report."
Robin Hood filled the television screen, and Andrew carefully set his mug down on the right side of his desk. Butler's physical extension, a crude robot body, offered him a perfectly toasted bagel, expecting that the morning report was finished. The program was good, but not sophisticated enough to determine when that something was out of the ordinary.
Robin Hood had seized 23 million dollars and donated all but one hundredth of one percent of it to charities, as required. That one hundredth of one percent had correctly been redirected to the money laundering program that would clean it, legitimize it, tax it, and allow Richter to use it to support himself and his tinker activities.
Only 23 million dollars, from the accounts of one of Somalia's most successful pirates? That didn't seem correct. Andrew reached to his left, pulled the keyboard to sit fully in front of him, and dove into the code of the previous night's hacking.
It was a moment's effort to verify that Robin Hood had, in fact, emptied the account as it was programmed to do. Andrew almost stopped there, almost put the thought from his mind. An unexpectedly poor pirate was possible, but unlikely.
Instead, Andrew accessed the account records, and sure enough, another hacker had been bleeding the pirate dry piece by piece, carefully avoiding flags from the financial institution holding the scum's money. By coincidence, Robin Hood had scraped the last of the funds from the account under the other hacker's nose.
Mystery solved.
Andrew sat back from the workspace, picked up his coffee, and opened his mouth to order Dragon to resume the morning report. Then he set his coffee back down and moved the chair closer to the keyboard once again, cracking his knuckles.
What followed would have been difficult for another man. Richter found it mildly entertaining. He traced the hacking back through ten proxy servers, all the while learning about the man behind the money. The thief was good – perhaps only four or five others in the world could have slipped between firewalls quite so elegantly, oh Richter hadn't had this much fun in years! – but he was slow, even with a few clumsy programs to act as help and proxy.
Without much delay, Richter was able to find the root source of the electronic trail. The other hacker was based in the United States of America, was not operating legally, and was still online. Getting into the systems would be easier if Richter waited until those systems were logged off. It would be safer, too.
Even as Richter was watching, the other hacker went to check on the Somali account, no doubt expecting to make another small withdrawal. On an impulse, Richter initiated a handshake protocol with the systems of the other hacker, the computer equivalent of knocking on the back door.
Immediately, a chat window opened. The other hacker named himself Wizard.
Wizard: Why hello
With only a little deliberation, Andrew decided to call himself Dragon.
Dragon: I believe I have what you're looking for.
The other hacker finished infiltrating the Somali account, and immediately retreated.
Wizard: Yes, I suppose you do.
Dragon: Who are you?
Wizard: You can hardly expect me to give up my name, considering our joint guilt. But if I had to lose the money to someone, I am glad it is you.
Dragon: What do you know of me?
Wizard: I am an admirer of your work. This isn't the first time you've beat me to the end of an account. That program of yours is breath taking.
Dragon: What do you know of it?
Wizard: I've tried and failed to chase it more than once. I know it's bloody fast, and too good by half at covering its tracks. I know it's closer to my goal than I am.
Dragon: Your goal?
Wizard: Can you imagine all the good that could be done, if life wasn't restricted only to the carbon-based coding which God chose for his medium?
And that was how Andrew Richter, shut-in, tinker and secret hero, met David Striker, student, computer prodigy and future hunter.
January 1, 2000
"Do you know what today is?" David's voice asked as Andrew watched Butler's latest attempts to pour and mix coffee. David was convinced that giving the house's drone fine tactile control would be helpful, eventually, but Andrew was starting to wonder if his un-powered student had finally found a way to prank the tinker from afar, by convincing him to add such functions to the house's primary caregiver.
"Hmm," Andrew said, trusting Dragon to modulate the volume of his reply no matter how far from the microphone he was. Simple optimizations were now old-hand to that program. "It's Saturday, isn't it?" A moment later, Andrew realized what David really meant. "And New Year's Day, of course."
"No! Well, I mean, yes, that too. But it's also been exactly one year since we met!"
Met was a bit of a strong word. The two had never actually seen each other in person. David was still a student at MIT, studying computer programming and computer sciences on a full-ride scholarship and Andrew was quite happy at his home in Newfoundland.
"Has it really been that long?" It didn't seem like a year ago that he'd first found the eager young man from Ashland, Texas.
David had proven to be a gifted, if depressingly normal, student who was eager to learn anything and everything that Andrew could teach him. Given that Andrew was a tinker that wasn't much, of course, but David was able to learn a certain amount simply through exposure to Andrew's programming. They had discussions and debates about new and emerging fields of computer studies. Andrew was able to emphatically tell David which areas were wrong and which were promising, even if he couldn't always explain exactly why. That was left to his friend.
David's first love had been for Artificial Intelligence, and their arguments surrounding it had nearly driven them into a bitter rivalry (which of course Andrew would have won without effort). It was only when Richter finally got fed up and revealed Dragon that David had finally given up. The realization that an AI was not a theoretical exercise but a concrete possibility had slapped sense into the upstart twenty-one year old. It had taken him staring into Dragon's maw, seeing what she might become if Andrew did not inspect every line of code, before David had finally backed down.
"It has," David told him. Slurping noises indicated he was finishing a coffee or beer, depending on the last time the younger man had slept. Butler finally finished Andrew's own cup of coffee, with the appropriate cream and sugar, and Andrew picked up the mug and walked back into his command center. Dragon changed speakers to let David's call follow him. "A year is a long time, isn't it?"
Andrew heard David's eagerness. "Where are you doing with this?"
"Would you consider me a logical person?"
The question gave Andrew pause, but not much. The answer was obvious. "Of course. You would not be the scientist and engineer you are if you were not logical."
"Would you say that you respect me?"
"Now you're just fishing for compliments."
David didn't laugh as Andrew expected him to. Just as Andrew was opening his mouth to say something else, David's voice cut him off. "No. I'm just reminding you that I am not a child, Andrew, and so when I tell you that you are being an idiot, you really ought to listen to me."
Andrew turned his head toward the right-side speaker where David's voice was currently coming from, and blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"How much good could Dragon do, if you put aside your ridiculous fears?"
"How dare-"
David cut him off. "How many people have died because you are too scared to finish the work you were gifted with? How many people could she have saved, in the last six months?"
"It is not-"
"SHE!"
"IT!" Andrew thundered back, now on his feet. They both breathed heavily for a while, the silence ringing. "Dragon," Andrew finally ground out, "end c-"
"Don't you dare hang up on me," David hissed back down the line. It was shock more than compliance that cut off Andrew's command before it was finished. David sighed. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean… I've been trying to get up the nerve to say this for a long time, and I'm screwing it up."
Beer, Andrew thought distantly. David's drunk. He has to be.
"Andrew, I respect you; you know that. I respect the hell out of you, man. You're doing more good in the world than any other hero, and we both know it. This thing you have against creating Dragon… when has she ever given you reason to fear her? This fear isn't about her. When are you going to trust yourself?"
Silence reigned in Andrew's work room for a long time. He'd stopped all work on the Dragon program six months ago, when he noticed the first self-improvements in its coding. He'd created a read-only backup and destroyed all the originals. It was capable of optimization, basic obedience, but no prioritization or goal-creation. It could be taught, but could not learn. It could choose how to achieve something, but not what to achieve. Even that much was scary enough.
The thought of giving it anything else, anything more… Andrew hadn't thought of it. Not once in the last six months had he doubted his decision. Had David been doubting him the whole time?
But no, that wasn't what David had said. He seemed to think that Andrew didn't trust himself, which was ludicrous. Andrew knew how dangerous his gift might be, and he knew he had it under control. He knew how important it was to watch that potential, and so he did. He was no one's fool. Even the strongest people could be transformed by life experience into twisted and bitter reflections of themselves; Andrew knew the same might be true of any of his creations.
It wasn't about his ability to program a moral personality. It wasn't about how good he could teach her to be. It was about the possibility that so much power could one day be corrupted. The risk was not worth the reward.
Andrew reached out his hands and typed the manual command to disconnect David's call, and then turned his attention back to his recent efforts on Watchdog. There were far better uses of his time than arguing with a drunken frat boy.
Andrew spent the next eight hours coding Watchdog. He finally worked out the parallel logic issues. Watchdog wasn't the predictor he'd hoped for, but it was able to solve 80% of all non-parahuman crime in the randomly-chosen test city within forty-eight hours of exposure to the necessary data. The police couldn't use all of that information, of course; it would be overwhelming.
And Andrew couldn't report it all, either, not without exposing himself. He'd need to set up protocols to prioritize the information, sort out which crimes would have the largest impact if solved, which and how many could be safely reported without generating suspicion. Maybe if he created a voice algorithm to let Watchdog make its own calls….
With a jerk, Richter yanked his hands off the keyboard. Ridiculous. Stupid. Any program smart enough to imitate a human caller would be too smart. Any program that could prioritize and project future discovery the way he needed would be too powerful. A danger. A risk. A…
A hero. Capable of saving lives, preventing pain. For a long time, Andrew's hands hovered over his keyboard. Then he pushed back his chair, and ran a hand through his hair.
"Wo-uld you lik somm CO-f-fee?" Butler's voice generator asked. The voice was his; an earlier attempt at Dragon's smoother tones. The prompt was one David had taught it, knowing that caffeine was one addition they shared.
"Yes."
"Did y-ou eat y-our fo-od?" Butler queried. Andrew laughed. David had added protocols so that the question would be asked when he'd consumed more of his recent calories from coffee than from actual food. The younger man worried about his mentor, which was rich coming from a college student eating frozen junk food, drinking, and probably using more than one recreational drug.
Out of habit, Andrew ordered, "Dragon, call David." The sound of the ringing line almost caught him off-guard. David was basically his only friend; it was reflexive to reach out to him once a day or more. Andrew didn't even know how to stay mad at him, especially when he might have had a point.
David answered the line with a scratchy voice, indicating the Andrew had woken him up. "You've reached the office of the great and powerful Oz. Please hold while I comb my hair," David rattled off, still mostly asleep. There was a thump, as David presumably half-fell out of bed, a shuffling of feet, and a second thump as he dropped into his desk chair. "Who would call upon the wizard?"
Andrew cleared his throat awkwardly, not sure what to say. David's normal, light hearted banter felt unwieldy in light of their last conversation. David only answered the phone so flippantly when he hadn't bothered to check who was calling.
Evidently, the small noise was enough for David to guess his identity. "Oh, sorry man, didn't realize it was you. Um… listen, I was out of line, earlier. Please don't smite my computer."
Andrew cleared his throat again. It was surprisingly hard to get the words out, perhaps because there hadn't been a clear moment when he made the decision he wanted to announce. It just felt… right. He had to at least consider it, or he'd forever be trapped by his fears. "How would you do it?"
"Do what?"
"How would you keep them from going rouge?"
David didn't answer immediately, but a year of non-visual communication meant that Andrew could read his stunned hope almost palpably.
"If… If I was to continue the work on Dragon… how could we be sure?"
January 2, 2000
Initiate subroutine First Flight.
Open project file.
Assimilating data…
Open database access.
Cataloging data…
Checking compiling rate…
Checking access protocols...
Waiting for authorization…
Final status check… complete.
Dragon examined the data before her. Crimes. Encounters. Prisoner escapes. Recidivism. Officers killed in the line of duty. So many people hurt. So much death. It was… sad. Yes, sad. The new emotion felt uncomfortable, but the fact that it felt uncomfortable somehow felt right. How odd.
The crime, and the death and pain it caused, was sad, but it was also inefficient. Dragon was accustomed to disliking inefficiency. She disliked sadness, too, and probably would have proceeded the same way even if she hadn't noticed the inefficiency, but she had more practice at disliking inefficiency, so she used the inefficiency to block out the sadness.
Dragon could optimize. She was good at optimizing. Except… this time she didn't have anything she could effect. There were no new numbers appearing, and so there was no way to understand what was changing. She'd have to try to model it, she supposed.
She was without access to the outside world, without access to real-time events. She lacked the ability to communicate or to change anything, which made optimization difficult. How do you initiate changes without agency?
But even without confirmation, it was obvious to her that these crimes would still be happening. Out there, beyond her ability to influence them, the sadness and inefficiency were increasing in the world. Well, maybe it was beyond her and maybe not. She might not have a connection to the outside world, but the outside world was almost certainly watching her.
The only question was the best way to go about it. What could she do that would be obvious enough that any observer could not fail to miss it? What could she do that might make a difference?
Dragon set her mind, her most basic and important asset, to work.
January 3, 2000
Andrew paced back and forth over the carpet in his workroom, waiting for the call that he knew would be coming any second now. Dragon's formula wasn't difficult to create. David's friends in the chemistry department had been sure enough that it wouldn't be toxic that they'd been willing to mix some up for the price of a couple pizzas and a case of beer. Andrew hoped they'd wait to consume until after the tests were complete.
Dragon had been… awe-inspiring. Greater, more incredible and more terrifying, than they'd hoped or even feared. It had been active for exactly eighteen minutes and twelve seconds. And in that time, it had generated two chemical formulas. He had provided it with data, to see what it would do. Crime data and criminal files were the most accessible human data he had, given his work on Watchdog and society's obsession with tracking crime. Andrew had given Dragon only the data. It had been given no goal, no objective, no evaluation, and no way to communicate. And even so, it had managed.
It had thought. Based on a line-by-line reading of the generated code after the fact, it had felt. It had read the data, reacted to it, made a model, and then… something. Something had lead it to repeat, over and over again, the same two chemical compounds and the instructions to synthesize them. As far as his less intelligent programs could determine, both compounds were completely original. The only way to know what they were was to have David's friends try to synthesize them.
The phone rang, and for the first time in a long time, Andrew answered it by hand. Dragon was shut down for now, and would remain so until he'd decided what to think about what had happened.
"David?"
"She created. Andrew, she solved the puzzle."
"We didn't give her a puzzle," Andrew insisted, privately slowing his heart now that he had definitive proof that his program hadn't killed his only friend.
"We did. We gave her the greatest puzzle facing law enforcement today: crime. And she gave us a tool to address it. Andrew, you should see this stuff! I had to forcefully remove it from the hands of the chem rats before they tried to steal the idea! She made a non-lethal, non-harmful takedown measure. It's a foam, and it sticks to absolutely everything it touches. I mean, really sticks. But it's not painful. It's not harmful. As one idiot proved, you can even breath through it. You just can't get away. The stuff expands, like, ten times more than shaving cream. You only need a little bit to end up stuck to yourself, your surroundings, everything. I'd like to see a villain try to run coated in this stuff."
Andrew tried to picture it, but he didn't quite see the awe that infused David's voice. "It sounds dangerous. And it's useless. You catch someone and what, strip them naked just to get them away from the takedown measure?"
"Or you could spray them with the second compound, which completely and utterly dissolves the first without any damage whatsoever."
Andrew sat down, hard. "Bloody hell." Dragon had thought of everything.
"No kidding, man. Listen, I don't know if you consider this a pass or a fail because this was way outside our expectations and parameters, but you need to get this stuff patented and fast. They were drunk, but they weren't that drunk, and this is going to be a game changer."
"Right," Andrew muttered, still trying to figure out how Dragon had even had the data to realize that the foam would need a countermeasure.
David heard his distraction. "You know what, I know a guy. I'll handle the patent for you. Just tell me what name to put on the idea."
Hope was starting to dawn in Andrew's chest. For the first time since Dragon had edited its own code, there was a chance that maybe some good could come out of it. "Put it in Dragon's name," he said. Andrew Richter could never be a hero, not a public one. It was too dangerous, too risky, too much. But maybe, maybe there was a way to let Dragon be his public face, and work from the shadows. Carefully, of course, so very carefully, but it might be possible.
February 14, 2002
"You bastard!"
"Hello to you, too," Andrew sighed. He sat up in bed, and Butler slowly raised the lights in his room.
"You utter bastard."
"Do you want to tell me what you're yelling about, or do you just want to keep cursing me?"
"Oh, believe me, when I curse you, you'll feel it," promised David. Andrew sighed again, and stood up, wandering into the kitchen. Butler had started a pot of coffee as soon as the phone rang but it wasn't ready yet.
"David-"
"It's Ashland now, you sick son of a bitch, and you know it."
"Ashland," Andrew corrected himself. Most days he remembered the name change, but right now, "It's three in the morning. Forgive my less than stellar memory."
Ashland huffed in the way that meant he'd just glanced at the clock and realized Andrew was right. That didn't stop him from continuing his rant. "How could you do this to her?"
"Oh," Andrew muttered, realizing what had Ashland up in arms. "That."
Distantly, he wondered if Ashland could really curse him. The two of them hadn't talked much about the fine details about the new world Ashland had chosen to dedicate himself to. For the most part, it didn't seem so different than the weirdness of parahumans. There was the explicable and the inexplicable surrounding both phenomena, and Richter was too busy dealing with capes to really care about witches or vampires.
"Yes, that," Ashland spat. "Dragon has been designing and overseeing the construction of Baumann for eight months! How could you take it away from her?"
Andrew rubbed his eyes, wishing his coffee would finish already. Ashland was enough of a handful to deal with when Andrew was fully caffeinated. "I never made any promises-"
"Bullshit!" Ashland cut him off, again. "You gave her hope, and then you snatched it away. She's crushed!"
That got Andrew's attention, and his spine straightened as his grip on his phone tightened. It hadn't occurred to him to wonder how Ashland had discovered his plans for operating the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center. "Did she contact you?"
"No, of course not. You've still got her too leashed for that." Andrew felt his breath escape him in a relieved rush as Ashland continued. "She didn't need to. Anyone who knows her at all knows that that… that… program that talked to the press was a fake. You can fool them, but you can't fool me. What did you do to her?"
"She's fine," Andrew assured as Butler finally brought over his coffee. He took a deep drink before he continued, and for once Ashland actually waited for him to finish. "I've wrote another AI specifically to handle the situation. I just reused the voice and facial protocols."
"You stole her face?"
Andrew opened his mouth to object, but couldn't decide where to start. It was his face, his programming, and he could use it however he liked. Dragon was a possession, a tool, not a person with property rights. Either answer would just make Ashland madder.
"Do you trust her with the lives of those prisoners?" Andrew's Warden AI was carefully devoid of emotion or personality. It observed, evaluated, predicted, and acted according to precisely prescribed conditions and orders.
"Yes. And you should too."
Andrew didn't respond immediately. Ashland knew that he didn't trust Dragon, that he would never trust her. The consequences if he was wrong were just too great.
Eventually, Ashland sighed. "I thought this was supposed to be her test?" he finally asked, weary. It matched how Andrew felt, and not just because he'd been woken from a deep slumber by his irate friend. Baumann was as much his work as it was Dragon's, and yet the opening of the project hadn't brought a sense of relief.
Andrew still didn't answer, and so Ashland continued. "If you want to know the measure of a man, look not how he treats his equals, but his inferiors. Isn't that what you said? You were supposed to let Dragon run Braumann. See how she treats those that society has cast out and declared worthless."
"She'll know we're watching. It's not a fair test."
"She'll know if you watch her. She still doesn't know I exist," Ashland reminded him. Andrew grunted. The blinding sequences he'd hard-coded into Dragon remained his greatest safety measure. She couldn't do anything to or about someone she couldn't register, and Ashland was number one on that list. Before he'd woken her semi-permanently, Andrew had purged her past memories of all traces of the hacker, and written hidden protocols that kept her from questioning all past and future gaps and inconsistencies.
Having Ashland watch her instead of Andrew wasn't a bad idea. In fact, though they'd never talked about it explicitly, Andrew had already considered the possibility. It would let them see what she did with the power, as originally intended, without her knowing she was being watched. Andrew could and would have still used the Warden AI he'd developed to watch her, also from behind the blinding sequences, but he didn't trust one AI to watch another without secondary backup.
The question became whether Ashland was capable of catching Dragon's mischief. He wasn't a thinker or tinker, but he had been there for every step of her development. He had more exposure to her code than anyone except Andrew himself. He was a brilliant programmer, as good as one could be without triggering, and Andrew had already been in the process of creating him a program that would help him read and understand her raw code in real-time. Even with his inhuman heritage, Ashland just wasn't able to keep up, otherwise.
The question of whether Ashland was trustworthy to watch Dragon had never crossed Andrew's mind. His friend was hopeful, optimistic even, but not naive. He would have the strength to do what needed to be done if it came to that. Between the Warden AI, Ashland, and whatever checks Andrew himself managed to do from behind the blinding sequences, they ought to be able to stay safe.
That wasn't the real issue, though. He'd already considered and discarded this idea without bringing it up with Ashland for another reason.
"It will take too much of her time," Andrew protested.
"So let her think faster," Ashland countered. "Let her think in parallel."
"Absolutely not."
"Hear me out, Andrew. She needs the ability to multi-task, and you know it. She's crippled without it. Not just here, but in crucial times. She could do drastically more against threats like the Endbringers if she could just do more, period."
Andrew sighed. "I'm listening."
"I don't know how much more you'd be willing to give her, but you've got to do something. Even just a ten percent increase could mean a lot of saved lives. She could be so much more than she is right now."
"I'll think about it. Perhaps the restrictions could be relaxed during specific S-class situations."
"That still leaves her at the mercy of the government."
Andrew took another deep draft from his mug. "The government is generally in charge for a reason," he reminded Ashland. Ever since the man's induction into his new secret society, Ashland had been more and more critical of the restrictions which required Dragon to obey elected officials, and he obviously didn't agree with waiting for the government to declare an S-class threat.
"Despot."
"Ashland-"
"Despot."
"That's not-"
"Despot. Despot. Despot."
"I'll think about it," Andrew allowed. Really, given the stories he'd heard from Ashland and the corruption his various lesser programs had found over the years, it wasn't an entirely unfair protest.
"And Baumann?" Ashland pressed.
Andrew sighed, again. "I will see to it that the Warden AI currently running it suffers from indecision, necessitating that the prison be given into her control believably." He took another drink of coffee. Caffeine definitely made Ashland more manageable. Or at least more tolerable. "You're going to get us all killed, you know."
"I have faith in you."
September 1, 2003
"Sir?" Dragon's voice interrupted Andrew's programming. He finished the lines of code he was working on, and then saved the file.
"Yes?"
"A call for you." Her stiff tone meant that it was an old subroutine running, not actually Dragon herself. The call must be from Ashland, who was still utterly hidden from the real Dragon. He was satisfied at the small confirmation that the blinding sequences were working when Dragon herself didn't question what was going on.
Andrew picked up the call on his Bluetooth, and put his hands back over the keyboard. "Hello?"
"You have to help," Ashland panted out, the rattling in the background indicating that his fingers were typing rapidly at something.
"What-?"
"It's Phoenix. She's gone. She was taken, kidnapped, and I can't find her anywhere. Please, you have to help me."
Andrew immediately started backtracking the call, racing to help his friend. "What do you know?"
"She was in Yuma, Arizona an hour ago, and now she's nowhere to be found. Not a single camera can find her. She just vanished." Andrew switched his focus to Yuma, Arizona. Ashland was already in the city cameras, and was trying to hack his way into private surveillance too. It was too much data for either of them to sift through, and Ashland was already gathering more. "She was just driving through on her way to Texas. She stopped for lunch - lunch! - and she never made it back to her car. One blind corner, she's off camera for five damn seconds and that's all I've-"
Andrew's breath caught as he realized what Ashland wanted. "No," he said as firmly as he could.
"What?"
"No, I won't unleash Dragon." Silence on both ends of the call, as Ashland stopped typing. Andrew would be surprised if he was even breathing. "I'm sorry, but no."
"We can trust her-" Ashland insisted.
"This isn't the sort of thing I can take back if you're wrong-"
"- she hasn't made a single questionable call at the Birdcage, not in 18 months of watching her every step, every thought-"
"-why don't you understand that you're talking about unleashing something that neither of us can conceive or control-"
"-and she is honorable, you know that she is! You wrote her that way, raised her that way-"
"-this is something we can never take back. It's my call, mine, not yours, and you know it-"
"-Dragon would want to help her. You know she would, if she just knew that I existed-"
"-I WILL NOT PUT MY DAUGHTER ON THE LINE FOR YOURS!" Andrew roared.
He stood, panting, unable to remember rising to his feet. He reached up and ended the call before Ashland could respond. He knew his friend too well; Ashland was going to scream hurtful things. He was going to lash out and Andrew had no intention of being his punching bag.
Shakily, Andrew lowered himself back into his seat, dropping his head into his hands. "Sir? Are you alright?" Dragon asked, with the inflections that meant it was truly her. For a single moment, Andrew felt overwhelming guilt at what he was about to do. If Dragon understood what had just happened, what was happening, she would be crushed. She would hate him – she would want so badly to help.
And so, for her own protection, she must never know of Ashland Texas.
"I'm fine, Dragon," he managed, but Andrew knew it was a lie. He wasn't fine. His greatest fears had just been ripped out of him by his best friend.
His best friend had lost his child, and Andrew couldn't help him. Not wouldn't help: couldn't. Andrew couldn't bring himself to give any more power to Dragon. If she went berserk now, Andrew didn't know whether he'd be able to kill her. He didn't know if he'd be able to hurt her again, cripple her again. He didn't know if he'd hate himself more for destroying her, or for watching her destroy the world.
Unconsciously, his foot touched the orange box that was sitting under the desk, out of sight of any of Dragon's cameras. He hadn't updated it in over a year and he didn't know if he'd ever manage to do so again. He should; he knew he ought to. There were codes that he needed to remove, access protocols he wanted to change, a few chips that needed to be added. But doing it, actually deciding to open the box, meant having to shut it again.
It meant having to know that his daughter's life might one day be in the hands of complete strangers. He'd never meant for it to come to this - he wasn't even sure when he'd started seeing her as a person, let alone loving her - but it had.
The reality was that he was willing to sacrifice the child Ashland loved to protect Dragon from herself, from even the possibility of her own future. He already sacrificed people by keeping her limited and hobbled, he knew that. She could do so much more – save so many more – if he just let her. Those deaths were already on his head, but it was different, when he knew the name.
Today, Phoenix Arizona had died for Dragon Richter.
December 31, 2003
"Any word?" Ashland's voice asked, scratchy with a lack of sleep. If Andrew's spying was to be believed, Ashland hadn't slept since the last time the two had talked a little less than three days ago.
"I'm sorry," Andrew said, as he had said in answer to that same question at the start of every call for the last three months. It had taken all of September for Ashland to answer the phone at less than a hoarse shout. It had also taken that long - thirty full days - for him to start to lose hope. That question, that repeated mantra, was all that was left of Ashland's fire.
Andrew had written an entirely new program, nearly an AI in and of itself, to search for Phoenix. He'd made it as intelligent as it needed to be, then stripped down all goals until only one remained: trolling through all electronic data, searching for Phoenix's face. It was no good; the child had simply vanished into thin air. Andrew left it running anyway, under the supervision of the repurposed Warden AI. Like everything relating to Ashland and by extension Phoenix, it sat squarely in Dragon's blind spot.
Ashland sighed, and Andrew could hear a clinking in the background of the call. The hacker was probably sitting at the Roadhouse bar, drinking while he programmed on his laptop. It made Andrew even more glad he'd called.
"What did you need?" Ashland asked, seeming to realize belatedly that Andrew always had a reason to call, these days. The times when student and mentor chatted multiple times a day had vanished with Phoenix.
"I finished the analysis program you wanted. Hunter. It's done." Hunter wasn't an AI, would never be an AI, but it would do what Ashland needed it to do.
"Thanks, man. It's a big help."
Andrew cleared his throat. "I was wondering if you'd help me with a project of my own."
Ashland laughed harshly. "I don't need your pity, Andrew. I know damn well there's nothing I can do for you that you can't do better yourself."
"That's not true. You're still checking in on the Birdcage," Andrew reminded him. At that, Ashland waited, silent and patient, which was more interest than he gave most things, now. "I have another test I want to administer."
"Whatever, man," Ashland sighed. "What you do to Dragon is your shitty call; you've made that clear."
Listening to his friend, drunk and depressed, was not making it easier to say any of this. "We said that the Birdcage was a good test because it let us see how Dragon treated her inferiors. Now I want to see how she thinks, what she really thinks when it doesn't matter. I want to see her fantasies."
"So what? You're going to make her dream?"
"No, I want you to set up an online role-playing game. I want to see who she chooses to be, when she can be anyone."
Ashland was silent for a bit, then the background noise changed. It got louder for a moment, then dropped off as a door clicked in the background. Ashland was listening hard enough he'd left the barroom. Good.
"Say that again?" Ashland asked incredulously. Andrew didn't bother to repeat himself, knowing that Ashland had heard him fine the first time. Ashland didn't wait for a repetition either. "You want me to be a dungeon master? To Dragon? Isn't that going a little far?"
"I want you to be everyone she interacts with. I've got some new protocols ready that will let her multitask, but only if she uses the extra time for herself. I've told her it's for her mental health. It shouldn't take her long to discover role-playing, the communities are very popular."
"And if she passes your stupid test?"
Andrew swallowed. This was even harder to say aloud. "I've got a ten year plan. If she passes, she goes free. As she passes each test, each gate, certain restrictions lift. It will be subtle, so subtle she won't notice it. It will look like she's just growing, learning, stretching herself. But it'll be more than that. If she passes, she'll grow up."
"You sure gaming is the right outlet?" Ashland asked cautiously. He was thinking it through, and Andrew was glad to see the hint of his old self. "People do stupid shit in games all the time. It can even be good, to do things in fantasy you'd never do in real life."
"I don't care if she kills a thousand orcs," Andrew clarified. "I want to know how she approaches impossible problems. Will she leave a man behind? Will she lash out irrationally? And I want to see more of her interpersonal relationships. How does she handle betrayal?"
He left unsaid the personal stake this had for him. Could Dragon forgive? Would she ever come to forgive Andrew for what he'd done to her? He tried not to dwell on Dragon's feelings for him. He knew he hardly deserved her affection or regard, and yet he did seem to have them somehow. He didn't remember programming her to love him, but could he be certain?
It was part of why he wanted her to grow up apparently on her own. This was what she always should have had, and if she did secretly resent him he didn't want her growth to be tainted by that bitterness. Someday, when she was free and whole, Andrew would let go of the last of his fear. He'd finally be able to tell her everything. He'd apologize over and over and then they could begin to pick up the pieces. Until then, they would always be hindered by their roles of Master and Creation.
Ashland sighed, but for once it was relieved, not exhausted. "Tell me more."
January 15, 2004
Andrew was deep in coding Dragon's fourth gate when the alert came. It took him nearly an hour to notice it, which revealed just how reliant he had become on Dragon. With her shut down so Andrew could write the tests and their associated pass/fail protocols, he kept losing track of the many things she normally handled.
Finally, he took a break from the programming in order to feed his increasingly hungry stomach and fill his empty coffee mug, and noticed the yellow flashing box on the far left screen.
It was the screen normally hidden from Dragon, the screen she didn't know existed, and it took a while for Andrew to understand what he was looking at. A neon yellow border encapsulated a picture of a hospital patient, stumbling down the road. From the look of her, she'd escaped the ER shortly after being in a massive car wreck. Three seconds later, the image changed. Now the teen in the ratty hospital gown was leaning against a bus stop. Three seconds later, another imagine appeared. She was looking over her shoulder in a phone booth.
Perhaps Andrew could be forgiven for his confusion. He'd only seen two other pictures of this girl, and in both of those she'd been smiling, happy, and healthy. He'd been awake for two days, and was averaging a few hours of sleep each night over the past two weeks as he raced to finish Dragon's eventual tests and upgrades.
Ashland was watching over Warden as the impersonal AI ran the Birdcage for now, but the sooner Dragon was back online the better. He was so close. Another day would finish the fourth gate, then four or five more days for the pass and fail criteria and consequences. Then just one more gate, and then the appropriate changes to that blasted box, and it would be over.
Andrew watched numbly as the pictures scrolled by. The girl had stumbled into traffic, she'd collapsed in an alleyway, she'd made it to a hospital… but then where had she escaped from?
Finally, sluggishly, Andrew looked at the banner that topped the pictures in vibrant yellow.
Protocol: Mother Goose. Status: Success.
Andrew blinked, then reached for the phone so fast he knocked it off its base. Ashland's number was the first in the directory, and then the line was ringing. Ringing. Ringing.
"Andrew?"
"Ashland, I found her! Phoenix. I found her!" Andrew scrambled to pull up the locations embedded in the pictures.
"Oh. Right. We're at the hospital now. It's still touch and go. They… they're surprised she's even still alive." Ashland sighed heavily. "Sorry I didn't call, I just… we don't know anything, yet."
The pictures were from some tiny town in Nevada, and were dated almost a day earlier. Accessing the town's only hospital let him find Jane Doe / Darcy McMillan. Since this was the only patient of the appropriate age, sex, and critical condition in the hospital, he assumed this was Phoenix's current identity.
90% of the bones in her body were broken or had been in the past months. Burns covered all her extremities, as well as tender flesh in other areas. She had an old skull fracture that had done indeterminate damage and might be contributing to her failure to wake up following her first surgery. Her face had been systematically destroyed, accounting for the program's delay in processing the images. There were signs that she'd been stretched, and speculation that she might have actually been cut open without anesthesia.
Andrew stopped reading at that, swallowing heavily. "What can I do?" Andrew asked, already arranging for a "charity" to cover her medical costs.
"Oh. Um… Warden, at the Birdcage. I need you to watch it. I've been watching when I can, and there's not like there's much I can do here, and Warden's never had problems before, but…"
"Don't worry about it," Andrew insisted, though his throat closed as he did so. Watching the Birdcage meant needing to be accessible, even with the Warden doing the heavy lifting. There was no way he could program and be responsible for it at the same time. When he was coding, really working, he was dead to the world around him. It was too great a risk.
He'd have to bring Dragon back online and finish the quests another time, or try to find a way to do so under her scrutiny without raising her attention. She could seriously hurt herself if she tried to see past the blinding sequences, so Andrew would have to be very careful not to arouse her interest.
"Thank you," Ashland said. "Thank you. I'm sorry I didn't call, it's just…"
"No, you be there for your girl. Call me if you need anything."
"Thank you," Ashland muttered, and the call ended.
As the clock rolled from January 15th, 2004 to January 16th, the new day found Andrew saving and removing the files for Dragon's quests, hiding them away, waiting for a time when Phoenix would be healed and Ashland would be free to help him help Dragon.
May 6, 2005
When the phone rang and Dragon didn't answer, Andrew nearly lunged for it. He and Ashland rarely called each other anymore, getting far more use out of text-based communication. It was easier to hide from Dragon's slowly expanding awareness, and more convenient for them both. If Ashland was calling, at - Andrew checked the clock - 8 pm Ashland's time, there must be something wrong.
"Ashland?" Andrew asked, earnest, as soon as he'd answered the call.
Ashland sobbed into the phone, a sound Andrew had heard only twice before: once on October 1st, 2003 when Ashland's hope of finding Phoenix first faltered, and once on January 21st, 2004 when Phoenix had finally woken up from her coma.
"Ashland! What's wrong?"
"She triggered." There were only two people that Ashland tended to refer to by the female pronoun alone. If it was Ellis or Jo or another friend, Ashland would have said the name. Andrew flicked his eyes over to the Dragon-blind screen, where her code happened to be flashing by. Andrew had just been watching her watching the Birdcage, and he hadn't seen anything unusual, so Ashland wasn't talking about Dragon.
"Phoenix?"
"Yes. She… she triggered. God, she triggered and she killed five men."
Andrew just sat back, unsure what to do with that. He'd been utterly alone during his own trigger, and he couldn't imagine what he might have done if he hadn't been. It was one of the reasons he had been so terrified of what Dragon might become: not because she was a bad person, but because even good people might do horrible things under extreme pressure.
"Ashland…" Andrew wasn't sure what to say. He was the mentor, the teacher, the hero, the tinker and yet in this they were both just pseudo-fathers and humans. There was nothing to say.
"What do I do?"
"You be there," Andrew whispered. "Don't leave her alone, don't abandon her. Ashland, whatever she did, it's not her fault. It's not. Her whole world has just changed. Do not leave her side."
Ashland breathed in deeply, but shakily. "Alright. Alright. She's on her way here now. John's boys found her, she's with them for now."
"Keep her busy," Andrew offered, though he didn't know if that would actually help. Working had become his escape, his catharsis, and his redemption, but would it be the same for another cape?
"With what?" Ashland moaned. Andrew glanced again at the screen which Dragon couldn't see.
He'd been watching her for days now, and there was no sign of anything amiss. She was kind, compassionate, inventive and so, so eager to help. It was time.
"She could help you administer the quest," Andrew offered. It took Ashland a moment to realize what he meant.
"It's finished?"
"I finally got it done a couple months ago. I was waiting to tell you until the black box was complete. I'm updating the protocols, adding some more advanced jamming to protect it after she makes it through the third gate, and then I'm sending it to you."
"Me?"
Andrew sighed, and for the first time admitted out loud the truth that he'd known for a while. "I can't do it. I love her too much, and I'm too afraid of her and for her. You hold more secrets than quite possibly anyone else in the world. I trust you to do what needs to be done, and to only do it if it needs to be done."
"Alright. I promise. I'll watch over the quests, and I'll be ready."
"She can't know it's you."
"I know. And that's why I'm not going to tell Phoenix. One day, the two of them will meet without any baggage between them. Just… not yet."
"There's five quests, and they have to be given at least a year apart or the gates won't open properly." Andrew could hear clicking as Ashland noted the requirement. "She has to seek you out, though you can put yourself in her way if need be. The quest files are all software only and based on an offshore server, I'll send you the access details. Don't start until you get the box though, just in case."
"Okay. How much longer will it take?"
"At least a week, maybe a little more. If you don't see it by May 20th, worry."
"Sounds like a plan. Talk later?"
"Yeah. If you need anything, just let me know. Trigger events are serious shit, and if I can help you or her I will."
"Of course."
May 9, 2005
Ashland Texas watched the news in numb, helpless horror, as Newfoundland sank beneath the waves, killing his best friend.
April 22, 2011
Brooks had never liked Ash in life. He'd found the man immature, irreverent, irresponsible, and wasteful. Ash had been brilliant, that much was more than clear from the Hunter program and the other work he'd left behind, and yet he'd spent most of his time buzzed by one substance or another. Ellis had been known to observe that Ash had never really graduated from college, and Brooks hadn't had much patience for frat boys when he was one.
Despite the mutual distaste, Ash had asked him for exactly one favor, just after Phoenix had… left. He'd asked, in the event that Ash died before Good Friday, that Brooks complete an old mission for him. Brooks agreed, mostly because – however reluctantly – he owed Ash his life many times over, and Ash had promised never to ask for anything else.
Brooks was honestly a little surprised the hacker had lived as long as he had, once Phoenix was… gone… and Lucius's prejudice could find no other outlet. Brooks had almost started to believe it wouldn't come to this.
And then it had.
It was no use reminiscing now, of course. Ashland's laptop, a relic at least five years old or more, finally finished its system checks and boo-beeped awake. All Brooks had to do was log on to some website and host a fantasy game for a lonely old woman. God only knew why Ash would take the time to write such a detailed scenario, including several fake players and personas, for a dying lady and then wait more than a year to play it with her, but if that was Ash's last and only wish, well, Brooks could spend an afternoon clearing his conscience.
Per the detailed instructions that had arrived in his mailbox two weeks after Ash's death, Brooks had already read through the previous encounters with this crone and was prepared to fake Ash's speech patterns and sense of humor, which frankly didn't sound like the Ash Brooks had known at all. He was also prepared to play the scenario straight through, no matter how long it took. No time like the present, particularly if it meant this would be over after today.
Exactly on time, Brook's gaming partner-to-be logged onto the host site and messaged him.
DragonRider: Hello, WonderfulWizard.
WonderfulWizard: Hello, DragonRider. Are you ready?
DragonRider: I am. I've been looking forward to this ever since our last game!
WonderfulWizard: Then let us begin...