really, except it felt like a hand stroking my mind, soothing away something painful, something obstructing, like a rock just beneath the surface of the water. For a moment, something dark and hard and full of jagged edges, an underwater shoal, threatened to thrust through the placid surface, but then, as the invisible hand caressed my mind again, the shoal dissipated and dissolved, carried away by the stream of light and heat.
[We are at the abandoned lot. Zoe holds up a hand to indicate that the camera crew shouldn’t disturb the roosting dragons camouflaged in the grass. She pulls out her phone to show us a picture.]
I’ve been trying to paint what I saw. Not very successfully.
Follow my finger. Just by that broken slat in the fence, do you see it? Yes, that green hump in the grass. That’s Yegong. I don’t think it’s going to come out, though, not with so many people around.
I named it after a man in an old fairy tale my mother told me. It’s a bit of a joke, see, because in the story, the man thought he liked dragons and painted dragons all the time, but then, when a real dragon showed up one day, he was terrified. Do you see—never mind.
It’s recovering well. A dragon doctor from Wellesley—well, that’s what I call her; her real title is Endowment Maintenance Specialist or something like that—told me that the tears in Yegong’s wings will heal on their own in another week. I bring it raspberries; Yegong really likes them.
The Knights still post in their forum, complaining about the dragons. But I haven’t seen Alexander post there.
NOVEMBER
LEE
I’ve been talking to Zoe.
After the video of the dragon fireworks went viral, there was an influx of tourists like you wouldn’t believe. Took a while to sort out the security and cost us a lot of overtime pay to the police so no one got hurt. All the publicity also brought in a few companies interested in hiring Zoe as a dragon-whisperer. She turned them down flat.
I was just about to work out how best to take advantage of Mannaport’s newfound fame when little dragons began to show up at a few other towns in the Commonwealth: Brockton, Plymouth, Lowell, Falmouth … No one knows how many more dragon-rushes there will be.
Overnight, we lost our competitive advantage.
But that got me thinking. We still have Zoe.
I’m thinking of hiring her to run a training program to teach people how to behave around dragons, maybe do some demonstrations for the other towns—I’ll get Beacon Hill to pay for the program. She’s at least open to the idea, but she told me she won’t make the dragons do fireworks again. “Too much of a good thing is bad,” she says.
She told me that the little dragons, if treated right, can make people happy. I called around and found some specialists who want to talk to her about the feasibility of “dragon-therapy” for depression, both kids and adults. She seems really excited about that.
It’s not the goldmine that I was hoping, but we’ll get something for Mannaport yet, just you wait.
INGRID
[A Thanksgiving meal is being prepared: siblings and spouses squeezed into a too-small kitchen; dishes clattering against serving spoons; in-laws fussing over grandchildren; cousins arguing and laughing; the TV blaring.
Alexander is also in the house, trying to help and looking awkward. But the others are making an effort to make him feel welcome.
Zoe is showing a group a video on her phone. Everyone is rapt. She’s smiling.]
Zoe is a big star now. I hear videos of her and Yegong get millions of views. She never makes it breathe fire, though—says it’s too dangerous.
Alexander helps her out as the cameraperson. He was telling me earlier that Zoe, him, and Hariveen are planning to partner up to raise awareness about the plight of dragon-whisperers and raise money for their care.
I’m just glad to see her happy. Haven’t seen her smiling like that since the night she found Julie.
HARIVEEN
Here’s a question for you: How do you think dragons breathe fire?
Think back to your high school physics and biology classes. You probably learned that dragon power plants are essentially heat engines, which convert the thermal energy from dragon breath into mechanical energy to perform useful work. You probably also learned that dragons, like other living organisms, generate energy by breaking down food via chemical processes. But your teacher probably glossed over the math, which would have shown you that the berries, insects, hunks of beef, and bushels of corn eaten by a dragon could never be enough to generate the heat output of dragon fire.
If your teacher was particularly conscientious, they probably also mentioned Maxwell’s demon.
In 1867, James Clerk Maxwell, in the course of formulating the laws of thermodynamics, found the puzzle of dragon breath nigh insoluble. The demon was a thought experiment he used to explain how dragons could seemingly generate energy out of nothing, defying the laws of physics.
Imagine a chamber filled with gas at a certain temperature, divided into two halves thermally insulated from each other. In the middle of this barrier is a tiny, frictionless door, operated by a demon of great cunning. Since temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of gas molecules bouncing around inside the chamber, it follows that some of the molecules are moving much faster than the average, while others much slower. The demon observes the motion of the molecules and opportunistically opens the door so that fast moving molecules from the right side would be allowed into the left side, while slow moving molecules from the left side would be allowed into the right side.
Over time, this would shift the average kinetic energy inside the two separate halves such that the right side would cool down while the left side would heat up. You could then use this temperature differential to drive a traditional heat engine until the temperatures in the two halves equalized, at which point the demon could start the process again.
Maxwell’s demon turns information about the motion of the molecules of gas into “free” energy without increasing entropy, creating a sort of perpetual motion machine out of the two dragons chasing each other in the yin-yang symbol, a perfect heat engine that defies the second law of thermodynamics.
For more than a century, theoreticians and experimenters labored to find a satisfying way to reconcile the demon with the laws of thermodynamics, and they finally reached the conclusion that the key is the information possessed by the demon. The system of demon plus container must increase in entropy because the demon must erase old information in order to record new information.
If dragons are indeed Maxwell’s demons, converting information into heat, then it follows that to do what they do, they must erase information.
No one ever said that the information erased must be inside the dragon’s own brain.
Have you ever wondered why so many dragon-whisperers retire young with dementia, their brains like Swiss cheese? Or why dragons are always attracted to places with lots of people, books, inventions, novelty? Or why every major advance in our use of dragon energy has been accompanied by a revolution, a massive forgetting of traditions, of folklore, of history?
I think dragon breath is powered by mass amnesia, by the erasure of memories, both painful and joyous. In our grand dragon-powered metropolises, books decay, collective memory rots. Dragon-whisperers, closest to the dragons, also bear the brunt of such damage.
I know, I know. You want to hand me a tinfoil hat now and book me on Teddy Patriot’s show. But try, just try for a moment: Isn’t there just the slightest chance that I’m right?
Ever since we became addicted to dragon energy, wars have become