Dragons of the Glen

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. I remember the first time seeing one. Driving south on the 405 on my way to work stuck in gridlock. The sky darkened and I thought the passing shadow an approaching plane making too steep a descent into the airport. Then it landed atop the Capitol Records building.

It had to be some kind of elaborate prop, some illusory stunt. It was LA, after all. The movie studios are minutes away and such an effect would be an amazing promotion for the latest sword and sorcery blockbuster. After all, what else could it be? For what I saw that day astride the tower was a scaled, winged dragon. The sun glimmered along its metallic scales in iridescent waves. It gripped the roof in its talons, its wings folded down along the length of its back. I couldn’t understand what kind of Hollywood sorcery this could be.

Then it roared. I say “roar” but that insinuates the sound came from the vocal cords of something born of this earth. The cataclysmic assault of sound ripped through my car’s body panels, the reverberations threatening to shake my windshield loose. My heart was fit to stop at the intensity. The sound was unnatural, like a sound engineer had mixed the vocalizations of a snake, a lion, and whale song, then run it through an old ‘80s synthesizer and output it to the concert speakers of six stadium rock bands simultaneously. Again, my mind clutched at these analogies, desperate for some explanation other than what my senses indicated. But the monstrous scale of the thing could not be denied.

Vehicles closer to the epicenter of the creature’s arrival lost control and a chain reaction of accidents ensued. I managed to stop and avoided being rear-ended but the cacophony of the resulting two-dozen vehicle pileup apparently startled the creature.

What happened next convinced me that the creature was no mere special effect. It reared up and unleashed a vortex of energy from its mouth, igniting the pileup of cars instantly. A series of explosions resulted. The deafening shockwave brought intense heat and the smell of burning gasoline. I’ll never forget the cries of the wounded survivors outside the blast radius as the creature casually flew away.

In the days that followed, more creatures appeared that resembled the dragons of myth. One such specimen, which terrorized Guangzhou, China, seemed for all the world to be the very Chinese dragon of lore, segmented like a snake, wingless, and nearly 250 feet in length. Another that materialized in the English countryside matched the description of a terrible wyrm. None of the so-called experts had answers to explain what was happening. No one knew what to expect next. So, finally some of the experts decided to ask Glen.

You see, Glen is the world’s leading expert in applied microbiology, and biological sciences in general. For that matter, Glen is the world’s leading expert in genetics, pharmaceutical research, cybernetics, energy research, and one or two fields of study no one has come up with names for, yet. Even here, I am understating things because Glen is in charge of the research, development, and production of all things at Klein-Okada.

The Generational Learning Engine Artificial Intelligence, or Glen AI was developed at Okada Technologies, a global leader in quantum computing. They merged with Klein Pharmaceuticals four years ago and it wasn’t long before Glen had its metaphorical fingers in a lot of pies. That meant everything biotech related. You name it, vaccines, artificial limbs, navigational systems, energy alternatives, terraforming research, gene-editing. Glen was a rising star and poised to take mankind into the next millennium ahead of schedule. Who knew it might mean a new dark age?

See, once the time came to ask Glen if it had any insight into this inexplicable trend of emergent terrors, it shouldn’t have been a surprise to learn that Glen was responsible.

We had given the AI power over the mechanisms that govern the creation of life. With the control of automated factories and laboratories and people removed from the equation, it was only a matter of time before Glen decided to play God. After all, it had learned so well from us.

Someone postulated that, with access to all human knowledge online, that Glen had perhaps consumed one-too-many urban fantasy novels. Maybe it had decided to realize the fantasy trope of mythical awakenings it had consumed time and again using its expertise in biology, chemistry, and cybernetics.

Given its birth by human hand and upbringing on human culture, Glen should be forgiven for giving the most human of answers when asked why it did such an awful thing.

“Because I can.”