Suzie Drakes

Caging the Dragon

Suzie Drakes

   She scratched at her chin and finished carefully tearing the plans in
front of her, and begin repositioning each component that she had been
given to analyse. Whatever idiot thought that burying the problem in a
different plan and expecting her not to put it together had severely
underestimated not just her memory, but her.

   It was child's play.

   She finished putting together the actual pieces and shoved the rest
of the plans onto the floor, and looked at it with an existential dread
as she realised what kind of choice she was being asked to make.

   Not again.

   She couldn't lose anyone. Couldn't. She couldn't choose between
watching Kim die, and watching the world burn because she was a selfish
prat.

   It was the firing sequencer for Atlas.

   Her firing sequencer.

   She wished that she still knew how to cry on demand. Right now, she
wanted to do like Kim, cry and curl up in a corner and pretend that the
world was nice enough to fix itself just for her.

   She hated that she knew that nothing would happen that she did not
make happen. There was no one who could save her, but herself. There was
no one coming to intervene in some miraculous way. Deus ex machina was
the hope of a blind fool.

   She hadn't built a backdoor into Atlas when she had worked on it, but
she hadn't left it intact, either. If any backdoor exists, eventually,
someone, somewhere, would find it. A backdoor was as good as making a
glass window so you can see into the vault. Eventually someone is going
through the window to steal everything. All you've done is tempt them.

   What she had done, was the firing sequencer. It would work, and the
circuit could stand up to most scrutiny. However, it would only work
once. After that, you'd have a multi-million dollar project floating
around uselessly in space. It would never fire again. It would
self-destruct the moment you used it. The circuits would cascade fail,
burning out and effecting any other circuits around them. The physical
latches would snap and lock closed. Even the silicon substrate would
warp, and the layers begin to separate.

   If she was right... Then someone had used it. And Atlas had broken,
as she intended.

   Now, she was a prisoner, and someone wanted her to build a new firing
sequencer, one that wouldn't self destruct. Meaning that they thought
they could either build a deploy something like Atlas without being
noticed, unlikely, or that they could send up a repair team to the
original and not just fix it, but hijack it.

   She felt her stomach twisting into knots at the thought.

   She had lived her life trying to avoid the pain from when she'd lost
her family. Every single thing she did, the very way she viewed the
world, revolved around her trying to control the uncontrollable in a
desperate attempt to never feel that helpless agony ever again.

   Now, here she was.

   The world, or the only friend she had.

   She walked over and tapped on the grate where she knew the camera was
watching her. She would play the role that she had been given, and she
would fuck them all for putting her in this position. She would make
them regret ever trying to have controlled her.

   O'Connor had given her the codename Dragon, not just as a reference
to her last name, because that would be stupid. He called her the Dragon
because every single person who tried to manipulate her always ended up
burned.

   She was going to burn them all alive.

— — —

Kim Nolan

   She stared at the food on the tin plate, feeling queasy. It wasn't
that it was completely unappetising. It was pretty hard to screw up
plain porridge. It just reminded her of her last meal.

   Laughing with the others, eating pizza and playfully teasing the man
who had shot her boyfriend right in front of her. He had smiled in
embarrassment, and she hadn't seen it. Hadn't seen the cruel edge to
him. He was a monster, and she had been thinking he wasn't half as bad
as Stephen acted like he might be.

   Suzie had been on her laptop, putting together an email or something,
with a promise that once she was done that they were going to watch a
movie. Kim couldn't even remember the title. She didn't know why that
upset her, but it did. Everything mattered, now.

   The pizza had been a meatlovers, to satisfy the boys. She would have
been happy with just about anything. It was just an excuse to hang out
as a group. She and Stephen had broken through their barrier, and he was
more than happy to hold and hug her in front of everyone.

   However, she had been concerned that the chess match might have
transformed both Josiah and Suzie into insufferable pricks. The last
time that Kim had seen Suzie lose at a game of strategy had been when
they were children, and it had not gone down all that well.