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Chapter Text

“The Human Genome Project, currently being undertaken by twenty universities and research centers in seven nations around the world, plans to have a ‘rough draft’ of the human genome by 2005[1], and will definitely have accrued a price tag of billions of dollars by then.[2]...

“...Which begs the question--how? The idea that [InGen] could sequence the genomes of several animals within such a short time of their company’s founding--with early eighties technology--is absurd. Even if they were somehow handed the technology to do that from on high, why not put it to more practical use?

“There has to be another way. But how?”

--“The Secrets of Jurassic Park” National Geographic. July 199-

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Chapter Text

I-I

On the evening of Friday the 13th, April 1979, Dr. Norman Atherton[1] found himself forced to undergo a particularly embarrassing battery of tests at Stanford Health Care at the insistence of the dean. He was sixty seven years old, but that had nothing to do with the reason for these tests, except circuitously.

Just as he’d finished dressing, his friend and former colleague at Stanford, Dr. Jackson Thorne[2], burst into the room.

“Jesus Christ, Jack, I could have been naked in here,” Atherton protested.

“Congratulations, Norman; you’re famous.”

Atherton glanced at the newspaper:

SCIENTIST TESTS GENETICALLY ENGINEERED VIRUS ON HIMSELF

“I don’t suppose you have a statement for the press prepared?” Thorne continued to tease, ruthlessly.

“Does ‘kiss my Black ass’ count?” Honestly, this was how they reported on a potential cancer cure?

Thorne chuckled. “You always were shit at office politics. Hey, if you get canned for being mean to a reporter, you could always come work for me at Thorne Mobile Research Systems[3].”

“With your one employee.”

“Hey, Eddie’s[4] a good kid,” Thorne said defensively.

“Anyway, what do you need a geneticist for?”

“I don’t, but you’re none too shabby at engineering, either, even if it’s not your passion.”

“Pass,” Atherton said.

Thorne shrugged, and changed the subject. “Well, you could try telling them that there's no such thing as bad publicity. If this story blows up and one person in ten who reads this says ‘Heck yeah; I wanna go to Stanford and learn from the mad scientist,’ it doesn’t matter that the other nine are saying ‘What hath Science wrought?’ because that’s still a net gain.”

“I think that argument will fall on deaf ears.”

A man in a white suit walked in. Looking over the two men briefly, he surprisingly reached out a hand to Atherton. “Doctor Atherton, I presume? My name is John Hammond,[5] CEO and Chairman of Hammond International.” Was that a Cambridge accent? Atherton wasn’t sure; living in California for the last two and a half decades had made his ear for such subtleties rusty.

Atherton shook the proffered hand. “Whoever you are, you've already won points for not assuming that someone--anyone--other than the Black man had to be ‘Doctor Atherton,’” he said bluntly.

Hammond shrugged with an air of modesty. “The report my researchers compiled on you said you were a supporter of the Black Panther Party.”

“You have fast researchers,” Atherton said, nodding at that day’s date on the newspaper.

“Oh, we’ve been sniffing around for a while before you, shall we say, took matters into your own hands regarding your cancer treatment?[6] Between personal stock and that owned by Hammond Industries' and other companies of mine, I own approximately seventy-eight percent of Connverse Pharmaceuticals[7]; I won't be offended if you don't remember it, it was one of many companies that started offering you a job after you invented polymer--polymar--PCR.[8]”

“Then you know I’m not interested in going corporate,” Atherton said.

“Your position at Stanford was more secure then than it is now,” Hammond observed.

“I have tenure and I’m still the man who invented PCR,” Atherton retorted. “Anyway, how is it that your first reaction on reading ‘Stanford mad scientist recklessly unleashes bioweapon on the San Francisco Peninsula’ was ‘I must hire that man!’”

“The article wasn’t that bad,” Hammond protested, a bemused twinkle in his eye. “Besides, it takes guts, being your own guinea pig. Guts, and being very confident in your work.”

“It would have taken years to get FDA approval for human testing. What was I supposed to do until then, go through another bout of chemotherapy?”

“That's a valid point, but you did alter a virus to attack human cells,” John said. “Just playing devil's advocate, here; I mean, I don’t know anything about genetics, but that certainly sounds scary.”

Atherton snorted. “You’re right--you don't know anything about genetics. I used a modified bacteriophage--a virus that attacks bacteria--specifically to ensure that it would have no genetic toolkit for dealing with something as complex as a human being. Should it somehow mutate, it’ll either mutate back into being a bacteriophage or die. There’s no more possibility of it becoming some virulent epidemic than there is of me growing a pair of wings and flying about the room.”

“You did modify it to attack humans.”

“I modified it to latch onto a specific protein I found in my heart cancer cells and nowhere else in my body. The fact that that protein was found nowhere else in my body was kind of the whole point, you know,” Atherton said. “If it mutates away from attacking that, there's no reason for it to coincidentally mutate into attacking something else in the human body.

“Fucking laypeople have no inkling of how complex the microscopic world is,” Atherton continued his rant.[9] “You figure that anything with any sophistication would achieve the ‘next level’ in evolution and become multicellular already, in spite of the fact that that's not how evolution works! Evolution does not have a plan, and it certainly does not have levels. The only thing evolution cares about--the only thing--is survival. The microscopic world is infinitely more varied than the macroscopic one--as well it should be, as it's existed for about three billion years longer. Saying all viruses are the same is no less ignorant than saying all mammals are the same. A blue whale isn't going to learn to act like an armadillo and my virus isn't going to learn to attack humans.”

“Not going to lie, that’s a weight off my mind, but I somehow doubt the argument will sway your current employers. Even if they don’t fire you, they’ll find some way to punish you for what you’ve done. When that happens, give me a call, and we’ll see about you getting the funding and the credit you deserve.”

Hammond handed Atherton his card; the crest was a peregrine falcon head in profile with the words “Hammond International” written underneath it, as though it were the face of a coin. It listed his full name (John Alfred Parker Hammond[10]) and what was presumably his office phone number.

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Chapter Text

I-II

“I've told you a million times, Beth, I'm fine. Better than fine--I'm cured,” Atherton protested, two days later in the small kitchen of his own apartment.

Atherton was more than happy to pay for his niece’s enrollment, what with the PCR royalties coming in, but she insisted on paying for as much of it as she could herself and that she’d pay back the “debt” eventually. Bethany Wing downed the last of her coffee in a mighty, and no doubt throat-scorching swig, putting her cup down on a nearby bookshelf.

Such were scattered throughout every room of the apartment, containing various works by the world’s prominent and less prominent biologists, geneticists, chemists, physicists, engineers, architects, roboticists, and (for Atherton’s own amusement--including but not limited to the amusement of seeing visitors’ reactions when they see such works interspersed with more modern/serious fare) alchemists.

“Are you sure you're cured, though?” she asked, wiping her mouth. “Did you kill every last cancer cell? For that matter, does cancer actually need cancer cells to grow back from? I mean, it came from somewhere originally--”

“At the very least, I have invented a safe and painless alternative to chemotherapy,” Atherton said to shut down the conversation. “Now go!” Atherton practically shoved his niece out the door and slammed it in her face.

Peace at last.

Atherton returned to the tiny kitchen of the tiny apartment to pour himself another cup of coffee. Black and unsweetened, much like himself. He nursed the coffee and allowed his mind to unfocus, thinking about how dominant role the random audacities of chance had had in bringing him to this place.

The absurdity that a White college professor originally from Massachusetts and a Black cleaning woman from Alabama should ever meet, let alone fall in love. The run-in with the KKK that could easily have turned fatal, prompting them to flee to Germany. Given the current direction of his life’s work, even the fact that he was born (on New Year’s Day 1912, no less!) and spent his childhood in Darmstadt, Hesse, in the shadow of Castle Frankenstein itself could be seen as portentous, if you were into that sort of thing. Being so many years separated from his siblings because during the Great War his parents had ironically been suspected of being American spies, and didn’t want to have a lot of children underfoot if they had to hoof it.

He survived a bout of pneumonia at twelve, got into a brawl with Nazis at sixteen (and again at seventeen, and again at eighteen), and was mugged at twenty. He would likely have gotten in more brawlis with Nazis, but when Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January of 1933 his parents saw the writing on the wall, and in February they emigrated to England. Where he started getting into brawls with Blackshirts instead. (Atherton would soon learn to ditch his German accent.) Hitler had almost managed to get him, anyway; during the Blitz, a dud bomb had landed nearly right on top of him.

Changing majors when, ah, transferring to King’s College had not been random; until the age of twenty one, his passion had been historiography, to the point that he’d learned medieval Arabic and -Italian and -Latin, but after reading the works of alchemists such as Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus, he developed a hunger to understand how the chemistry of life really worked, and so pursued a double major in chemistry and biology, while also following any other field that might give him a head-up. (Looking back now, the various hypotheses he’d come up with in those days before the discovery of DNA were little better than the alchemy of the ancients.)

(But some still had potential. One in particular, he was still working on…)

His friendship with Rosalind Franklin[1], another outsider at the straight White boys’ club that had been (and continued to be) academia, was at least random in the sense that they both happened to be working at the same university at the same time, and it was his knowledge of her work that allowed him to recognize the outright theft that had occured when Crick and Watson then published their model in Nature on 25 April 1953.[2] One thing lead to another, and Atherton found himself having to find another employer quickly, before news got around about him punching James Watson’s lights out.

Hence sending his resume to Stanford, them hiring him (presumably assuming he was White), and the beginning of his new life in California. He had a reputation for being political, irritable, and secretive about his work, and was it any wonder? He’d seen a colleague get her work stolen, after all.

It hadn’t been random that he’d been looking into polymerase, but the fact that he’d been able to read that paper by Kjell Kleppe had been[3]. It had inspired him with the idea for PCR, as a means to study polymerase in greater detail, as early as 1971, but inspiration and proper funding and equipment were two very different things, and he hadn’t been able to get Stanford onboard--hence why, when he finally did perfect his revolutionary new method of cloning DNA, he patented it and sold it to Cetus.[4] The move hadn’t of made him any friends, but it did mean he had enough money and begrudging respect (for revolutionizing the field of genetics) to get the things he wanted in life: that is to say, enough freedom and official backing to research any damn thing he pleased.

That had changed, however. In light of this whole...testing an experimental virus on himself thing (which, admittedly, was a little gutsy)...a lot of people had revised their opinion of him from being a mad genius to being a mad genius. Stanford had made it clear he was going on a tighter leash and that they wanted nothing to do with his viral cure. (Guess I’ll sell it to Connverse, then.) He wasn’t getting fired--he still had tenure, and was still the man who singlehandedly revolutionized the field of genetic research, after all--but that was all that could be said.

The heart cancer was another thing that had damn near killed him, but couldn’t entirely be blamed on chance; he’d noticed the symptoms and, in spite of his father going out to the exact same disease in 1944, chalked it up to old age. It would have been rather ironic, too, to have died just as he’d gotten the ability to really delve into his life’s work. If he’d collapsed alone in his lab, instead of in front of a classroom full of students….

Always another complication. Get the freedom and backing he wanted, get cancer; cure cancer, loose the freedom and backing he’d grown accustomed to. Which brought him back to the present.

I suppose I'd better dig out that card Hammond gave me, then, Atherton reflected. He wasn’t exactly looking forward into going into private industry, corporate culture didn’t really suit him and he wasn't looking forward to having some middle manager or marketing exec telling him what to do, but the fact was that he’d need some serious toys to continue his project and Stanford had taken his toys away and Hammond could get him a lot of toys--

Toys. By God, that was it! Atherton ran out the apartment and down two flights of stairs as fast as his old legs would carry him, and luckily found that Wing hadn’t left yet, though he was barely in time, as she was just hopping onto her bike as he turned the final corner. “Beth! Could you call in sick? I had an idea, and I need your help with it.”

“You're not going to biopsy me again, are you?” Wing asked.

Honestly, you ask for a sample of someone’s heart tissue one time and they never let you live it down.

“No, no, nothing like that. I need your business smarts. I have an idea that I want to sell to a rich man.”

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Chapter Text

I-III

Norman Atherton didn’t think he’d ever been as nervous as he was sitting in that Cowan, Swain and Ross[1] waiting room that Thursday morning, the 19th of April. He’d never been married--romance didn’t appeal to him, and he found sex utterly repellent--but he imagined this was what that tired old trope, the nervous bride, would feel. He was, after all, joining his fates to another, a stranger, whom he’d be financially dependent upon.

But, he reminded himself, he intended for this to be done on his own terms. He was here to negotiate for as much freedom as he could get away with.

He'd developed his basic plan of attack with Bethany Wing and Jack Thorne (Wing understood business far better than he did and Thorne was the most devious-minded person he knew), and then had gone to Cowan, Swain, and Ross (which Thorne had insisted was the law firm to go to for highly technological issues), and apparently the guy who invented the cancer-eating virus coming in search of a lawyer was worthy of no less a luminary than Daniel Ross[2] himself. Ross’s distant, coolly professional demeanor suited Atherton just fine; he’d come here to find a lawyer, not a friend, after all.

The fact of the matter was, Atherton wanted Hammond’s money (or rather, the things that could be bought with that money), but he also wanted to maintain his independence, as he had done throughout his professional career. But he’d have to compromise on the latter to get the former...unless he did a good job of selling his plans today. If he didn’t, it could blow up in his face.

~ ~ ~

Emma Hammond-Johnson walked into the meeting room Daniel Ross and Norman Atherton occupied. “My husband apologizes for the fact that he couldn't be here today.” This was a lie; it was a deliberate tactic, a bait-and-switch the Hammonds had pulled many times to throw the other side off-kilter and make them underestimate what they were going up against.[3]

“Quite alright,” Atherton said. “I'm Dr. Atherton, and this is my attorney, Mr. Ross.”

“Emma Hammond-Johnson.” They shook hands. In spite of all sorts of romantic notions, there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot you could tell about a man by his handshake. Slightly more if you’re going by how he shakes hands with a woman, however. Atherton’s was unpracticed, but neither limp-wristed nor trying to break every bone in her hand in a show of dominance. Ross’ was precise down to the millimeter. They told her nothing obvious, but that itself was something.

“My husband told you our proposal, I trust?”

“Yes, and Mr. Ross has been kind enough to help me write up my counter-proposal,” Atherton said.

“'Counter-proposal'?” Hammond-Johnson asked.

“See, the truth is that I'm bored of this virus; it's figured out, all there is left to do is to get the FDA to approve it, which will be a long and tedious project I'm not particularly interested in. I'm prepared to sell it to Connverse Pharmaceuticals--Hammond Industries' pharmaceutical division--for, oh, twenty million, plus free consultations--provided you accept my other proposal.

“A partnership. You provide the funding, I provide my brain, we both rake in the profits.”

“You're asking for quite a lot,” Hammond-Johnson said.

“I suppose I am, in which case I’d better tell you what you're getting for it,” Atherton said.

“Alright, what sort of drugs are you proposing your new company should study and why can't it be done by our pharmaceutical division?”

Atherton grinned as though he were about to drop a bombshell, and then did exactly that: “I don't intend to go into drugs at all!

“Making new drugs for mankind is noble and all, but you run into a ton of red tape. Drugs face all kinds of barriers. And it’s not like you can complain, because then you’re the asshole for wanting to unleash untested potential cyanide on the unwitting public--but still, FDA testing alone can take five to eight years. And suppose you wanted to sell my cancer cure for two thousand dollars a dose once they do get it through the FDA? It's your property, after all, and without you, no one would be getting it, so that’s your right, right? Yeah, I wouldn’t expect that argument to go over well with the man in the street. No one’s going to have many qualms about fucking with the company that tries to pull that bullshit; we have human lives on one side and corporate greed on the other! So all those nice men in suits that you need to please in order to get your drug on the market will start messing with you. Patents will be mysteriously denied. Permits will be delayed. Something will happen to make you see reason. And why not? Again, you’re assholes if you think you can railroad the American people like that. But it does make for a rather risky business proposition, does it not?

“Now, then, allow me to throw this alternative out there: consumer biologicals. The FDA would have no power over you, there’s no laws regulating the sale and transport of animals that don't exist yet, and no one will give a shit if you charge someone ten thousand or a million dollars for a cat that glows in the dark--because nobody needs that. You’re not putting anyone’s life at risk by denying them that. In fact, the more expensive it is, the better; now it's a status symbol.”[5]

“So you intend to make glow-in-the-dark cats,” Hammond-Johnson observed.

“Oh, no. That is, alas, probably beyond us at this point in time,” Atherton said. “I intend to do something much simpler and yet at the same time even more spectacular. I intend to make an elephant you can carry around in a birdcage.”

“I can see how that’d be more spectacular, but simpler?” Hammond-Johnson asked.

“Right; you know how they say that genetic code is the blueprint for making a living thing?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that's bullshit,”Atherton said. “It’s more like a recipe for a living thing. If I splice the ‘turn oven to 350 degrees’ instruction from a cake recipe into a salad recipe, all I've accomplished is to increase your electricity bill; there is no instruction to put the salad in the oven, after all. And the thing is, people working on genetic engineering are basically doing it blind. We make alterations to the cookbook without being able to read it, and then the enzymes making the meal aren’t sentient, so take whatever’s written in the book literally. If you want the same cake but smaller, however--just adjust your ingredient proportions and cooking time.

“And, just for the record, this is the same exact speech I intended to give your husband,” Atherton finished somewhat awkwardly.

“Yeah, I figured that you’d have cut out some of the swearing if the metaphor was changed for my benefit,” Hammond-Johnson observed dryly. (Atherton had the grace to look sheepish.) “So, this whole tiny elephant thing is really that simple?”

“Well, nothing in genetics is ‘that simple,’ but it'll be relatively simple. There are important things we don't know how to do yet, but I know what we need to do to find out how to do them. We need to know what hormones activate and when, compare these between small animals such as rats and large ones such as, well, elephants, and then, well, then we'll have some idea where to start.”

“I'm thinking I’m going to need to show your proposal to an expert to verify that anything you just said is possible.”

Atherton nodded to Ross, who pulled out a thick sheaf of papers.

“This is what I intend to do, should you and your husband decide to fund me, in more precise detail,” Atherton explained.

“I am going to have to ask you to sign something before I let you walk out of here with my client’s intellectual property, however,” Ross said, producing another document.

Hammond-Johnson looked over the form and found nothing objectionable. “It was a pleasuer to meet you, gentlemen,” she said as she signed it.

~ ~ ~

Atherton collapsed into his seat the second Hammond-Johnson was out the door. Christ, he didn't even know how he managed to do all that stuff he'd just did! Never mind seeming so confident about it. He was certain he was going to have a heart attack at some point today, adding yet another data point to the implausible number of times he'd cheated death, and yet he didn't!

“You did well,” Ross said.

Atherton nodded. Assuming her expert didn't suffer from a deplorable lack of imagination, he liked his chances.

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Chapter Text

I-IV

The next day, Hammond-Johnson was standing in the office of one Dr. David Katz, mammologist, as he leafed through Atherton’s proposal. She looked at the various degrees interspersed with pictures of his wife and/or child on the walls. One, which involved him, Paz, and Annie on what appeared to be a picnic, struck her as being particularly cute.

“It’s brilliant,” Katz said. “And ambitious. What Dr. Atherton is proposing, to find out what he’d need to do to actually accomplish this project, would be the single largest, most comprehensive study of gestation ever attempted...so, exactly what it says in the proposal. You’d have to invent new equipment for it, too. So basically, you have to invent new equipment just to find out what you need to invent.

“I mean, it'll be the largest and most comprehensive study of growth, too, but compared to the first part that's fairly easy; just take daily blood samples from an animal, or group of animals of staggered ages if the species is slow to mature, and log the hormones you see there. I mean, obviously you'd want more representation than a single individual per species, I just said that to illustrate--”

“But would it work?” Hammond-Johnson asked.

“Assuming you could actually do all this, I don’t see why not.”

"What are the odds, though?"

Katz paused, trying to think. "I...I honestly don't know. What Dr. Atherton is proposing is so far beyond anything anyone else has attempted, I have no frame of reference for it. Or for how much it'll cost."

~ ~ ~

“Shoot,” Hammond was saying as Hammond-Johnson entered. He was hanging up the phone.

“What happened?” she asked.

“You know that engineer I had my eye on?”

“Arnold, right?”

“Ray Arnold, yeah. He got poached by Disney.”[1]

“Damn. What do they even need a navy missile tech for?”

“Apparently, their new rides are going to be very exciting,” Hammond said dryly. Neither of them were being fair; it wasn’t as though Hammond International was in the missile game, either, after all.

“Oh, well; there’s plenty of fish in the sea.”

“It would have been nice to have someone else we could trust on Atherton’s team, even though he'd probably insist on having his friend Jack Thorne. Think we can get by with just David?”

“I don't doubt Katz’s professionalism, but he’s practically chomping at the bit to be allowed on the team. We need his insight, but we’ll have to consider that he might be biased when we get it.”

John nodded. Then he snapped his fingers. “I know exactly who should be there.”

He dialed a number. “Hello, Peter? How do you feel about transferring to Stanford?...Yes, the one in California....”

~ ~ ~

Atherton kicked his swivel chair back from the machine, rubbed his eyes, and swore. Damn it, what was he doing wrong? Maybe he was trying to incorporate too much machinery into a single enzyme. Too many moving parts, both proverbially and literally. But if he didn't have the entire complex as part of a single structure, how would he--?

The phone rang. Atherton kicked over to the desk and picked up the receiver. “What do you want?” he demanded irritably.

“Dr. Atherton? It's John Hammond,” Hammond said.

“Oh! H-hello, Mr. Hammond.” That was quick; Atherton’s meeting with his wife had only been two days ago.

“Please, ‘John.’”

“So I assume you're calling about my offer, John?”

“Indeed I am, Dr. Atherton. I must say, the siren call of consumer biologicals is a strong one; you’d have made an excellent salesman if you weren’t obviously so much better utilized as a geneticist.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere.”

Hammond chuckled. “I’m a married man, Dr. Athertion. In all seriousness, let’s meet Monday. We can sign the papers, haggle about the price of your virus and other details, and there’s some people I want you to meet.”

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Chapter Text

I-V

The party met next Monday at the La Madera, a high-end restaurant in Redwood, California[1]. The food was said to be delicious, but they couldn’t sit and order just yet--introductions would have to be made first, a lengthy process with nine people.

Norman Atherton had brought Daniel Ross (of course), Jack Thorne (since the Hammonds were bringing potential employees, Atherton figured he'd bring one of his own), and Bethany Wing (more for moral support than anything else--as bright as she was, he doubted she'd spot an angle Ross, with his years of experience, would miss). Of the three people the Hammonds had brought, the woman and the older man were probably doctors, but the younger man looked to be about Wing's age, which would make him absurdly young if he was[2].

Hammond introduced Atherton to their people.

“This is Dr. David Katz, mammologist...” Atherton shook the man's hand, “...Dr. Rosemary de l'Adrien, obstetrician...”[3] Atherton shook her hand, and raised an eyebrow.

“Got your name mangled at Ellis Island, I take it?”

“That is my understanding,” de l'Adrien said.[4][5]

“...and finally, Peter Ludlow[6].”

“Uncle John has told me about your plans--” Ludlow began.

Atherton glared at Hammond. “Really, John? Nepotism?”

Ludlow physically interposed himself between them so he could stare Atherton down. “Firstly--” he started counting on his fingers, “I know Hammond International inside and out. That means that whenever you need the forces of industry, I'll know where you can get it at an in-house discount. And as expensive as this project sounds like it's going to be, you're going to need all the help you can get when it comes to cutting costs.

“Secondly, I don't want to give the impression that we don't trust you--because that's actually what the problem is; by giving you the freedom to do whatever you want with what will surely be a massive amount of resources, we're trusting you quite a lot, barring the off chance that negotiations break down and we end up starting a bar fight. So yes, my aunt and uncle want to keep an eye on you; I'd say sorry, but I'm not sorry.

“Thirdly, frankly, someone needs to write up the reports and file the invoices and perform all the other functions of running a business when you and the other geniuses are too busy having big ideas off in science land.”

Atherton nodded. “Fair enough,” he allowed.

Ludlow, clearly expecting a fight, was suddenly off-balance. “Oh…. Right, then.”

Thorne grinned. “Bit of advice, kid; don’t believe everything you read in someone’s record.”

“Alright. This is my lawyer, Daniel Ross...”

~ ~ ~

“So Mr. Ross allowed me to help him research Hammond International,” Wing said. Not being here in any official capacity, she and Hammond-Johnson waited while Hammond and Ross signed the papers.

“Did he now,” Hammond-Johnson said with apparent disinterest.

“Can’t say that I recall what you do.”

“Maybe I'm a trophy wife.”

“Men who have trophy wives tend to trade them in for a newer model every few years, and certainly don’t bring them to business meetings.”

Hammond-Johnson chuckled. “‘Newer model’...you’re a blunt little thing, aren’t you?”

Wing shrugged. “The Atherton clan is not known for its subtlety.”

“What do I do? Well, if Hammond International were a ship, John would be the captain and I would be the XO. When asses need to be kicked, I'm the one who goes in and finds out whose asses. Not being part of the corporate structure gives me the freedom to flit about as I please and being married to John gives me the lever to open any doors I need to have opened. I'm...a troubleshooter.”

“So...internal affairs?” Wing said.

“Something like that,” Hammond-Johnson said.

“I assume the requisite skills aren't exactly something you pick up being a housewife,” Wing observed. “So, why’d you quit being a professional woman?”

“My career wasn’t progressing as fast as it should have been--as fast as it damn well would have been if I had been a man. John’s career was progressing a lot faster than mine and he was making more money than I was, once you disregarded my share of the family fortune. Combining our efforts and focusing on his career was...logical.”

“You sound resentful about that.”

“I suppose I am. Not at John, understand--this was my decision--but at the world. What I did was logical, and I hate the implications of the fact that it was logical,” Hammond-Johnson explained.

“Yeah, that does sound like a rather unfortunate form of 'natural' selection,” Wing said.

“Exactly,” Hammond-Johnson agreed. She shrugged, and raised a glass. “C'est la vie.”

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Chapter Text

I-VI

Bethany Wing was getting exasperated, and it showed in her tone and the beat of her footsteps as she and Atherton half-walked half-jogged across the busy Stanford campus the next day. “There are two kinds of people in this world, Uncle Norman--those who pay debt, and those who collect debt. The sooner you move into the latter category, the better off you'll be.”

“Beth, I'm sixty-seven years old; I think that ship has sailed.”

“It's never too late. How many houses could you have bought with the money you've paid in rent over the years for that cramped little apartment?”

“I like my apartment. It has everything I need and is fairly close to Stanford. Besides, I'm too old to be moving about all willy-nilly,” Atherton asserted.

Wing rubbed her forehead and muttered something under her breath about old fools (this was not the first time they were having this fight and didn't look to be the last, and it was taking its toll on both of their nerves), then stopped, eyes filled with the gleam of an idea. “So buy the building.”

“What?”

“Why not? In case you've forgotten, you're a millionaire these days. Granted, at Palo Alto prices it'll be a significant hit even to your bank account, but it's actually a good investment--you could make back the probable cost in less than ten years off of rent.”

“I can't be doing maintenance and dealing with tenants and filling vacancies and whatever else the fuck, I have a real job,” Atherton protested.

“I'll deal with all that,” Wing assured him.

“I can't impose--”

“'Impose' nothing; I intend to charge you for this. Enough to be able to pay off the loans you've given me by graduation and then some,” Wing said.

“Isn't that effectively the same thing as calling them square, like you always refuse to do?” Atherton asked.

“It's the principle of the thing, Uncle Norman,” Wing said stubbornly

Atherton knew he wouldn't budge her on that. She was too much like him. “You're sure I won't have to deal with the nitty gritty of it all?” he asked.

“If you want to completely avoid it, we could simply make a company in your name, appoint me president. We set up an account in the company's name that I can access for building management and stuff and that you can access for whatever you feel like which the tenants' rent is paid into. We set up the company and the account, you put...let me do the math...two million in the account, and let me take care of the rest.”

“Two million?”

“Well, I'm being very pessimistic, as I figure it's better to have too much cash on hand than not enough; it's not like you can't take the remainder of the cash back when I'm done, after all,” Wing said.[1]

“Better safe than sorry,” Atherton agreed. “So we do this, and I never have to think about this building or the fact that I own it again?”

“Indeed. Well, except when you look over the books to make sure everything's aboveboard.”

“Beth, I know you're not going to steal from me--we're kin!”

“It's the principle of the thing, Uncle Norman!” She sounded for all the world like a petulant teenager, and Atherton hid a smile.

“Fine, I suppose it couldn't hurt to have one of those boys from Cowan, Swain and Ross look over your books every year or so,” Atherton relented.

“They’re way too expensive for you to use as your personal accountants.”

“Fine, I’ll look over it myself,” Atherton lied.

“That'll do,” Wing said. “In the name of full disclosure, 'company president' is going to look really good on my resume.”

“That's hardly a downside from my perspective.”

“It's the--”

“--principle of the thing, I know,” Atherton said. “Anyway, if 'company president' will look good on your resume, having the company have your name on it will probably look really good.”

He spotted Peter Ludlow coming their way.

“What, something like 'Atherton/Wing Enterprises'?”[2]

“Sure, why not? Huh; I guess we actually managed to resolve that fight.”

“Now let's talk about your will.”

Atherton gave her a dirty look, and she laughed.

“Kidding!

“Hey, you; what was your name, again?” Wing asked Ludlow as he approached within a few feet of them.

“Me?” Ludlow looked like a deer in the headlights. “Uh, Peter.”

“I finally twisted this one's arm--” she jabbed her thumb in Atherton's general direction “--into purchasing some property. Well, he's actually going to make a company and have me run it because he doesn't have the time or inclination to soil his hands with white collar work. Since you have more experience than me at this, I was wondering if you could accompany me when I do so?”

“I mostly just watch...” Peter said doubtfully.

“Regardless, the simple fact that you were raised in that culture means you'd probably have some insights for me. If nothing else, just stand there and look intimidating,” Wing suggested.

“'Intimidating,' right,” Ludlow deadpanned.

“Obviously I don't expect you to look like you can bench-press the guy; just wear an expensive suit and be vaguely condescending.”

“That I can do.”[3]

“Great! Give me your number so I can call you with a date and time.”

“Sure.” Ludlow frantically searched his pockets, found a pen and someone else's business card, and wrote his number on the back.

“So, what's wrong?” Atherton asked Ludlow.

“Wrong? Nothing. I--my uncle sent me. He's talking to the dean right now.”

____________________

Chapter Text

I-VII

“That was fast,” Atherton said.

“Aunt Emma’s on the board of the William Johnson Foundation; it gives the family quite a bit of pull with universities,” Ludlow said.

Atherton nodded. The Foundation’s founder and namesake, William Johnson, was the son of a business magnate who as a young man had truly gone above and beyond in the name of science[1], and as an older man created the foundation that bore his name to this day and was still a highly respected source of academic grants in all fields of science. Little wonder that Hammond could get a meeting with the dean so quickly, then.

“I had no idea,” Atherton said. “So all our ducks are in a row, right?”

It had been decided that it would make their bargaining position stronger if they didn't mention that Atherton was involved with Hammond's company, so that his being made leader of the project would appear to be a major concession. They weren't going to lie--certainly not in a way that could be a legal problem--just...omit some details. Of course, that would prove to be a problem if the company was named Atherton Research, as it had originally been, so it got renamed Southern California Biotechnics, or SBC. Hammond and Ross had said they'd make the change in all the official paperwork.

“Of course. John and Mr. Ross are professionals,” Ludlow said. “And on the point of Mr. Ross, speaking as your financial adviser slash secretary slash...whatever, you can't just just keep having him do all your paperwork for you. You owe it to your employees to know what the heck is going on in your company. Also, the man is expensive.”

“You're right, damn it.” Just like my niece. “I'm gonna hate when that happens over the next three years, won't I?”

“I wouldn't be doing my job if you didn't.”

“You're an asshole. And I mean that as a compliment,” Atherton said.

“Thank you. It means a lot, coming from you.”

“Heh.”

They then put on their game face before entering the dean's office. The dean of Stanford, Stanley Ford[2] nodded at them. “Dr. Atherton.”

“Dr. Ford.”

The greeting was quick and professional, and nothing more.

“Dr. Atherton, would you care to explain how you know Mr. Hammond?”

“Well, as you know, I've been getting job offers out the ass since I invented PCR.” It never hurt to remind him of it. “Hammond tendered one such offer, Friday before last. He figured that, whatever your reaction to the virus thing would be, it would make me more susceptible to temptation, and so left me his card. And I admit I did think about it. But while I ultimately didn't take the job at Connverse Pharmaceuticals, I did sell them my cure for cancer.” He paused before adding. “Stanford didn’t seem interested in developing it, after all.”

Ford refused to rise to the bait (swearing in front of a doner, referring to the incident as “the virus thing”). “I see.”

“As I was saying, it is of course your choice, but my own people would be greatly reassured if Dr. Atherton was the one to head the project,” Hammond said. “Dr. Thorne recommended him highly, after all.”

“Even after what he so blithely calls ‘the virus thing’?” Ford asked.

“It is my understanding that time was limited. Furthermore, we've seen his work. The fact that he accomplished this so soon after inventing PCR--which I'm assured are about as different as inventions can be and still be within the field of genetics; the comparison I recall is that it's like if the same engineer invented the rocket and the transistor--is simply incredible. One of our consultants--a Dr. Thorne, who I believe was a professor here once as well--knows him personally and speaks highly of his character. In short, we have the utmost faith in him,” Hammond said. “It'd make us a lot more comfortable with having you in the lead if Dr. Atherton is your man.”

“Well, I suppose it's not as if he has any other major projects he's working on at the moment,” Ford said.

How wrong you are, Atherton thought. “That's great. Now could someone explain to me what the hell is going on?”

“I wish to patronize a study of mammalian gestation,” Hammond said. “I'm prepared to donate the labor of one of my companies' scientists--SCB, not Connverse--grant the project considerable discounts on any equipment it might buy from any Hammond Industries child company, cut a check for one million dollars right here and now, and host several fundraisers for it, the first to take place before the end of the month, at which I intend to match funds for the first eighteen million dollars raised.”

Atherton pretended to ponder the situation. “I see.” Are we seriously going to have enough expenses to hold back the final million? He considered what those expenses might entail, and realized that Hammond was being optimistic. “And what do you get out of this?”

“Heh. Well, as to that...I understand that you are going to publish your findings--it is, after all, the purpose of research--but considering how closely you'll be working with SCB employees--Dr. Katz and Dr. de l’Adrien are at the top of their fields, you know--it seems only reasonable that we have access to your work earlier, along with all the details and natter that you don’t put in an official paper.”

Atherton snorted. “Typical capitalist.” Before Ford could have a heart attack, he added, “Alright, I’m game.”

“Excellent. The full resources of SCB are at your disposal, such as they are--it’s a very new company, you understand,” Hammond said apologetically. Then, leadingly: “As, I trust are Stanford’s?”

Ford nodded. “There will be grants in the works, as well. Don’t quote me on this, but they could be as high as ten million dollars.”

Atherton stared at Hammond, speechless. He’d somehow turned $20 million ($19 million of which would be tax deductible) into $48 million. Well, he managed one word: “How?”

“If you really want to look into the sausage factory...while I’d never use my connections to the William Johnson Foundation to fund this project--there’d be ethical concerns, even if not legal ones--getting them to fund several other Stanford projects is another issue. Funding scientific research is what the Foundation is for, after all. And what Dean Ford does with the funds that frees up...are his business,” Hammond explained.

“I am at once impressed, and terrified of what you could do if you used your powers for evil,” Atherton admitted. He’d always been rather neutral on the anticapitalist part of the Black Panther platform; it might be time to reevaluate that.

Hammond chuckled. “I like you.”

“Um, thanks.”

~ ~ ~

“Was all that really necessary?” Ludlow asked as they left.

“It would have been suspicious had I not been suspicious; I have a reputation around these parts, you know,” Atherton said.

He didn't stop talking: “Now that we have this set up, we need people to do the grunt work. What I need you to do now, Peter, is to go down to the records office and tell them the dean sent you. Wait: get the permission of the dean first; then do that. Once you have been cleared to do so, go through the files of every student who has taken or is taking a medical or biological sciences course. Anyone getting a D or below you can automatically discard, and anyone getting an A you can automatically send an invite to a...seminar, of sorts; we'll discuss the details once you have a list of invitees.”

“I can do that.”

“For B students, send an invitation if the kid is poor or sociologically disadvantaged--black, a woman, Hispanic, gay, what have you. We don't, like, profile for the latter or anything, but someone may have made a note of it, and if so, send the invite. For C students, send an invitation if they're both.”

“What?” Ludlow asked. “That sounds...noble and all, but we're not here to save the world.”

Atherton couldn’t help but to cool a bit towards Ludlow. “Consider this thought experiment, Peter: Two runners run the same exact course with the same exact time, only when one did so there were a bunch of hurdles in his or her way that weren't there for the other runner, or else one is a complete novice who can be honed into something even better while the other has been being trained for years and is at peak form. Who is the better athlete?

“As for poor kids, poverty induces undue stresses that can result in lower grades. Plus, in my experience, they work harder.”

“I...I suppose that makes sense, but--”

“Besides, this is merely the preliminary round of screening,” Atherton continued to steamroll over Ludlow's objections. “Only a few of those invited will show up this Friday--”

“Friday?”

Atherton grinned, warming (well, un-cooling) to Ludlow just a little bit. “Don't worry; your presence shouldn't be necessary.

“As I was saying, those who show up will then have to prove themselves....”

____________________

Chapter Text

I-VIII

“I'm noticing something of an over-representation of minorities,” Katz murmured at Atherton as he looked over the gathered students. “Not that that's a bad thing, but I'm just worried you may have been a bit biased.”

It was all Atherton could do to not roll his eyes. Fucking white people. Atherton reminded himself that Katz didn't mean to be racist (as cold a comfort as that was) and replied just as softly: “Two runners run the same exact course with the same exact time, only when one did so there were a bunch of hurdles in his or her way that weren't there for the other runner. Who is the better athlete?”

“Granted, but we're not here to solve the world's problems. We're here to do a job.”

It was uncanny how word-for-word similar this conversation was to Atherton's previous one on the topic. What, were Katz and Ludlow reading from the same script?

“We're not hiring any of these people before they've been tested, so where's the harm in extending the benefit of a doubt at this stage?”

Katz shrugged.

Atherton looked back over these students. He was under no impression that the system he'd devised was perfect, and Katz and Ludlow were right when they said that Southern California Boitechnics was not here to save the world, but he was confident that he'd maximized the amount of wheat they'd get when they fed this chaff to the grinder, to completely bastardize a metaphor.

Well, enough lollygagging. It was time for (ugh) public speaking. Atherton stepped in front of the group. “Alright, boys and girls; this is the plot, listen up.

“While you are being paid six dollars and twenty cents to be here, this is not a job--it's a job interview. And the fact that that happens to be what you'd make working at minimum wage for two hours ought to tell you how long we expect this whole thing to take. If you pass the screening process, we will pay you the bare minimum we are legally allowed to by the state of California--and one course credit--to perform hours of dirty, bloody, grueling labor. But you'll be on the cutting edge of science when you do so.

“We are performing the most ambitious study of mammalian gestation and growth ever attempted. We will be studying many animals--rats, cats, dogs, others--but mostly rats. Far and away, more rats than anything else. Some of these rats we will be filling with so many probes and wires that they will technically qualify as cyborgs. Some we will be removing a piece of the uterine wall to replace with plexiglass so we can observe the development of the zygote optically. Some rats will have their reproductive systems removed, while still keeping them attached by blood vessels, so that we can maximize the number pieces of equipment we can study it with. Some, we're just going to do various things to to see how it effects fetal development. Once we have some idea of how to proceed without blowing too much of our doners' money, we'll move on to the larger prey. We're partnering with a company called Southern California Botechnics to do this, so you'll be seeing a lot of Dr. Katz, Dr. de l'Adrien, and Dr. Thorne around while we do so. We're not sure who we're getting from Stanford, yet.”

Thorne, who had more friends during his time at Stanford than Atherton has currently, was in charge of putting together that list.

Atherton continued: “If for any reason this doesn't interest you--you're not looking for a full time job at the moment, you've too much on your plate, you're just flat out too squeemish for this, or whatever else--leave now. You've already 'earned' what we're paying you for today just by showing up, so please, don't make us waste a rat on you. They don't grow on trees, after all.

“And now you are thinking 'Rat? What rat?' Good. Allow me to explain.

“See, on top of being grueling and dirty and bloody work, this is delicate work. It requires the steady hand of a surgeon, given that it involves, well, a shit ton of surgery. And so, what better way to prove that you have what it takes than to perform surgery? You will each of you be given a rat. You will remove, weigh, and re-implant a list of organs you will be given shortly. It should go without saying that you will document every step of this process, but, for the sake of thoroughness, I must tell you: you will document every step of this process.” He elected not to tell them they'd be under video surveillance; if they were the type to cheat, he wanted to know. “Those of you whose rats are the healthiest and alive-est Monday will be given a job.

“So, are there any questions?”

A student raised her hand.

“Yes?” Arnold said.

She spoke with a pronounced Tennessee drawl. “It seems to me that, ethically, a lot of the more, er, cyberized animals will have to be anesthetized, but that might alter the results of the tests. What if we lobotomize everything but what is needed for autonomic functions?”

Atherton nodded. “Congratulations, Ms....”

“Ruso. Lori Ruso.”[1]

“...Ruso; you haven't even been hired yet, and you've already earned your first bonus,” Atherton said. “Which reminds me, we encourage outside the box thinking here in my lab. If any of you come up with ideas could make what we're doing here work better or more efficiently or lead down another path we weren't considering, you will be rewarded appropriately. Any other questions?”

No one had any other questions. “Good. Dr. Katz, Dr. de l'Adrien, and myself are now going to go get the rats. Anyone who wants to leave, this is your last chance.”

~ ~ ~

Bethany Wing looked around, pretending not to be familiar with the apartment building she was currently living in while being shown around by the owner, who was an absentee and so had never met her. Luckily no one she knew had spotted her, either. (Yes, she'd deliberately scheduled this tour so that she shouldn't, but she couldn't forget Murphy's Law.) Ludlow was looking at the surroundings, acting as though the thought of touching anything in here disgusted him but he was too polite to say so. It...might not have been an act.

“Hmm. Yes. Very quaint little building,” she said, playing up her British accent. Hopefully the fact that people inaccurately pegged that as a sign of intelligence would counter the fact that they pegged her skin color and gender as signs of its lack. “I'm thinking...six hundred grand?”

Now he'd make an offer that'd be absurdly high, then she'd make a counter-offer, and so on and--

“Deal,” the landlord said, leaving Wing flabbergasted.

Ludlow spoke at last, suddenly angry: “That was way too easy. What's wrong with this place? Are there rats? Is it condemned? Are the rats condemned?”[2]

“Excuse us,” Wing said, and took Ludlow aside. “The fuck are you doing, Peter?” she whispered.

“Something's wrong, I'm telling you.”

“Maybe, but the whole reason we're here is that my uncle refuses to move. We can't turn him down. Anyway, I've never noticed anything like that, and believe me, I've looked. Maybe he's just stupid?”

“I suppose there's only one way to find out,” Ludlow said. He returned to the owner. “My apologies; I was thinking six hundred grand in pounds; that's only three hundred in American currency,” he lied through his teeth.

“...Yes, I was also thinking in British units. Since you inadvertently gave us a ceiling, how about I return the favor and offer, oh, three fifty.”

For a second, Wing thought she'd overdone it, but then he said “Five seventy-five.”

And so they haggled, and that was how Atherton/Wing Enterprises acquired its first property for less than a quarter of Wing's worst-case scenario.

____________________

Chapter Text

I-IX

It was an unseasonably chill May 1st that Tuesday, with biting winds and overcast skies.[1] Which was fitting, because the building Atherton, Ludlow, and Thorne were standing in front of looked positively haunted.

“Why does Hammond International own an abandoned hospital?” Atherton asked.

“Our American bank owns the mortgage, and it went bankrupt,” Ludlow said.

“The hospital went bankrupt. See, this is the reason certain friends of mine hate capitalism.”

“Says the man who just became a rich business owner by selling his cancer cure to a venture capitalist.”

Atherton shrugged. “I always say that capitalism is the worst economic system there is, save only all the others. To paraphrase Churchill’s paraphrasing of someone else.”

“Well, we won’t learn anything by staring at it from the outside,” Thorne said. “I trust you have the key, Peter?”

Ludlow wordlessly walked up to the padlocked chain barring the doors. Atherton pulled a flashlight out of his bag and thumbed the switch on; when his gaze returned to the doors, they were open. The three then entered the dusty hall of the abandoned hospital.

“Is the building sound?” Thorne asked.

“The bank had it inspected. It was fine then,” Ludlow answered.

Atherton ran his flashlight over some medical equipment. “So if we take this place, this stuff is ours?”

Ludlow made a face. “It should have been sold off by the hospital when it declared bankruptcy, or the bank. My uncle’s going to have to look into this.”

“Yeah, but since they didn’t…?”

“It’s probably ours. I’m going to have to look at the specific laws later, though.”

“How much is this going to run us?” Atherton asked.

“Doesn’t matter; Uncle John authorized a hundred million in stock to cover our expenses.”

“SCB doesn’t have stock,” Atherton pointed out.

“The holding company that John created to own his half of the company does, though, remember?”

“I really wasn't paying attention to that part.”

“Well, this is pretty much the exact reason we did it. This way we have something to give companies like the bank something in lieu of cash,” Ludlow explained.

“What if they don’t want stock in ‘Atherton Research Holding company 1’?” Thorne asked.

“We own the companies we’re buying from, so if we say they want it, they do.”

“Then why pay them at all?” Atherton asked.

“It keeps the minor stockholders from making a stink. We own an average of seventy percent of any given company under the Hammond International aegis, but that doesn’t mean the people who own the rest of one can't make a fuss. Or ask the government to investigate us. And then there’s the fact that my uncle was rather, ah, cutthroat in his youth, and we’ve spent several decades trying to play down that reputation.

“Besides, it helps with the invoices,” Ludlow explained.

“And so you give them imaginary money, in an effort to appear honest,” Thorne observed dryly.

“Hypothetical money; there's a difference,” Ludlow chided gently. “Welcome to the world of business.”

“See, I thought I remembered your uncle putting the kibash on your at-cost spiel in favor of us getting free stuff in exchange for stock in the holding company, but then he started talking about a discount with dean Ford and I figured I must have misremembered,” Atherton said.

“We’re still getting it free, but then we’re selling it to them for a discount.”

“Wait. Are you telling me that we got Stanford to foot twenty percent of the bill for our study, got them to put their resources at our disposal, tricked them into putting our people in charge of it, got Hammond a tax write-off out of the deal, and, when they buy equipment through us, that money goes back into our pocket?” Atherton demanded.

“We've got to pay Dr. Thorne’s, Dr. Katz’s, Dr. de l’Adrien’s, and my salaries somehow, now that we've sunk so much into this study.”

“And Eddie’s,” Thorne added.

Atherton laughed. “You people are evil geniuses, you know that?”

Ludlow mock-bowed.

Atherton played his light across the ceiling once again. “It is looking good, but I still think this is a bit premature.”

“We need to have our own computers, at the very least, or do you think we ought to be making our proprietary designs on Stanford's networks?” Ludlow asked. “Besides, SCB needs a billing address on file before we, you know, get a bill. I personally prefer that not be my dorm room.”

“Have I mentioned that I hate when you’re right?” Atherton asked rhetorically.

“Wait, you live on campus?” Thorne asked. He was trying to picture Ludlow in any sort of communal housing, and was drawing a blank.

“Well, no, but that’s not the point,” Ludlow answered Thorne.

“Could I invest in this holding company?” Atherton asked.

Ludlow looked at him suspiciously. “It’s not going to give you majority control of the company, you know.”

“No, I figured that. I’ve just got all this money and nothing better to do with it, and spending it myself on stuff for the company strikes me as a bit foolish.” Atherton grinned, “Besides, I’ve got a feeling Southern California Biotechnics is going to make a mint one day.”

“I’ll discuss it with my aunt and uncle, but it’s a privately traded company, you understand,” Ludlow said. “What exactly are you thinking of buying? Maybe we can fast track it....”

____________________

Chapter Text

I-X

“Hey, Beth, you know that million and a half dollars I haven't taken back from Atherton/Wing yet?” Atherton asked that afternoon.

“You still haven't done that?” Wing demanded, leaning against their kitchen counter.

“I'm thinking the company should keep it. I'm thinking about investing the rest in SCB's shell company and want the family to still have something when I die if it all goes pear shaped. I think you should use it to make investments and such.”

“You don't have to have it be part of Atherton/Wing to do that.”

“Yeah, but you know more about this stuff than I do.”

“Since we're acknowledging the fact that you are indeed a mortal man anyway...”

“You want to talk about my will, don't you?”

“I want to talk about your will.”

Atherton sighed. “It's just so morbid, deciding who gets what after I croak.” He slapped the coffee table, declaring, “How am I supposed to decide which niece or nephew is more or less deserving of this piece of shit than the others?”

“You could have it sold and the value added to your bank account, which I assume you'll be splitting evenly between all of us.”

“Not flexible enough. Maybe someone does want my coffee table...for some reason.”

“Personally, I think there's something to be said for keeping everything here, held in trust by the family; I fully expect that one day people will want to see the apartment of Norman Atherton, just as they do the house of Isaac Newton.”

“I'm not that important, but I take your meaning. Consider it under consideration. Why not put everything in a trust? If this whole pachyderm portfolio thing takes off, I fully expect there'd be enough money for everyone to live off the interest, or the payout the companies invested in give out.”

“Those are called dividends. Also, this can easily be done.”

“Also, I want you to be the one calling the shots about what gets invested in and whatnot.”

“Also simple, but the family will have to be able to vote on their trustee.”

Atherton didn't know whether that caveat was a matter of law or a matter of Wing's principles, and didn’t ask, because it didn't make a functional difference. “I want it set up in such a way that anyone who can prove their descent from either of my parents gets a cut, and everyone has the same cut, though, so not so much like with stock.”

“Expecting any half-siblings to come out of the woodwork?”

“No, but it's such an easy precaution to take with so little downside. You know, we might as well start it going before I die; Atherton/Wing is going to keep me alive and SCB is going to give me everything I need for my work, and I don't exactly need much beyond that. Oh, and the trust needs to make charitable donations.”

“To the Black Panthers?”

“That is what I have in mind, but considering that this is for in perpetuity and they might disband or mutate into something unsavory at some point in the future, it should be open to more than that.”

Wing nodded. “Seems doable. I don't suppose you have an investment strategy in mind?”

“My instincts say put ninety percent into stuff that's safer than dirt and ten percent into something highly speculative. Or whatever ratio allows me to make up the losses of the latter with the profits of the former.”[1]

“So we start this trust with one point five million of what Atherton/Wing still has?”

“Sure, as long as that leaves enough in its accounts for emergencies. And the rest of the three million from my personal account, with the rest of it going into SCB's stock.”

“ARHC1. And that's assuming the Hammonds are willing to sell; it's not exactly publicly traded.”

On Wednesday, May 2nd, Ruso explained her proposal. “See, it occurred to me that if we're going to be studying rat uteri, what better way than to remove it entirely? It'd be nice to be able to move it from machine to machine and suchlike. 'Course, we need the things to stay alive and so attached to the rat somehow, but that can be done by connecting the relevant severed veins and arteries by tubing. It also occurred to me that the longer this tubing was, the more freedom we'd have. Of course, there'd be some problems--a rat only has so much blood, and its heart is only strong enough to push it so far--but with a few blood transfusions and an electric pump, I reckon we can make these tubes very long indeed. It'd be a massive boon for hygene, as we can keep the rat and the uterus in entirely separate environments, and even ethics, as the rat can be kept in just a normal rat cage and won't feel a thing no matter what we do with its excised organs. I don't know where we're going to find gage of tube small enough to simulate rat veins, but...”

For an excruciating amount of time that probably seemed longer in Ruso's head than it was in reality, Katz, de l'Adrien, and Thorne said nothing.

Then Thorne broke into a grin, saying, “Now that's some outside the box thinking! Congratulations on your second bonus.”

“What about heat loss? Those tubes will have a lot more surface area than a rat's body,” de l'Adrien pointed out.

“Wrap them in cloth, or braid them together with a third tube filled with water warmed to a rat's body temperature. Or do the latter and then wrap the whole thing in cloth,” Thorne suggested.

De l'Adrien nodded. “Works for me. Ms. Ruso, finding out how far we can stretch this tube idea, if it works, will be your new special project.”

“Peter told me to expect this call,” Hammond said.

“I expected he might,” Atherton said. “I intend to buy twelve million dollars'[2] worth of stock in your half of the company, and insist on some of it being used to buy a Cray-1[3].”

“No problem. Don't expect the Cray to come in tomorrow, though; the wait time can be several months long,”[4] Hammond said.

“Oh,” Atherton said, disappointed.

“If you really need it soon, one of my other businesses is getting one next Monday; I can redirect it and redirect yours to them.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I'm sure; it won't kill them to have to use a CDC 7600[5] for a few more months.”

“Okay, well, then, sure! Thanks, John.”

____________________

Chapter Text

I-XI

“Mr. Ludlow, we've got a schema for Ms. Ruso's blood pump and tubes and can start looking at factories now,” Thorne said over the phone.

“Excellent. I'll get Dr. Atherton and come over and look at it. Where are you?”

“Stanford healthcare.”

“What? Why are you there?” Ludlow demanded. “Are you hurt?”

“No, nothing like that. Just thought we ought to have some medical professionals around when we tested the proof of concept.”

“'Proof of concept'? Also, who's 'we'?”

“Me and Eddie.”

“Of course it is.”

Ludlow didn't waste a lot of time looking for Atherton; he was probably in his classroom office, but that was a ways out of his way and whatever Thorne was doing sounded like something he needed to ascertain right now.

He jogged down to Stanford Healthcare and was directed to Dr. Thorne.

He walked into the hospital room spotting Thorne and two (medical) doctors standing over Carr, who had two tubes of blood coming out of his arm which went into a small machine making electric noises with two similar tubes of water which came from a bucket with a heating element in it. The tubes emerged from the other end of the machine and were wrapped in flannel which overlapped in a manner similar to how a hockey stick is taped, creating a squarish cross section. This thing was coiled in the floor with the far end having some gauges connected to the blood tubes before joining them into one. The water tubes were also joined, but lacked the hard equipment.

“What the hell is this?” Ludlow demanded.

“Proof of concept,” Thorne said.

“I mean--are you insane?”

“Relax, we had medical supervision the entire time.”

“Making sure there were no air bubbles in the tube before we did this was the real problem,” Carr said. “Doc thought it’d be a good idea to let people who know what they’re doing be the ones who cut me open and whatnot.”

“Well thank the Lord for small favors, I guess! Is this seriously what we’re paying him for? Being a human guinea pig?”

“So where's Norman?” Thorne asked.

“I...didn't call him. I was too worried about what you two knuckleheads were up to.”

“Well, call him so Eddie can get this thing out of his arm. And then put together a list of factories for us to look at,” Thorne said.

“Also, this thing is supposed to be wrapped in another, waterproof layer, so remember that when putting that list together,” Carr said.

Julio Cruz[1], who for reasons lost to the fog of childhood went by “Jules,” had just about had enough of rat blood.

The Project had known that it was going to need a lot of rat blood ever since Ruso had her great idea about separating the rats from their uteri. Rat blood not being a thing you just go down to the store for and rat blood banks not being a thing that exist, it had been up to the Project to create its own rat blood bank, and it had been up to the Project's student-employees to stock it by going around to every lab in Stanford that used rats and beg to be allowed to draw a sample. Atherton had even taught them a simple way to test a sample's blood type by pouring a bit of two samples into a test tube with a paperclip in it and shaking[2] to save time and the use of expensive equipment.

Cruz didn't know why they were acting like they were racing the clock, Ruso had only made her proposal three days ago. Of course, he should have learned from the fact that it had taken Thorne and Carr less than twenty-four hours to come up with a prototype that things move fast around here. Rumor had it that when they found a factory they liked, Thorne and Carr would stop and make the molds for them right then and there out of whatever garbage the factory had lying around. Well, whatever the case about that was, it had been three days and already coils of the four wrapped and bound together tubes and boxes of blood pumps and water warmers that could be dialed to a rat's precise body temperature were being shipped in, like these were perfectly normal things for a buyer to need or a business to sell. So apparently Cruz had been the fool for not thinking this was a race.

The system had to be set up. The way Thorne and Carr demonstrated peeling the wrapping off the tubes and splicing them together or connecting them to the pump had reminded Cruz of when he was a kid and would watch his father do electrical work. Filling them with blood and then running the system (with a suspended blood bag at either end) for a while to remove any air bubbles was also straightforward. Performing a hysterectomy on a rat to the sound of the system settling was tricky, but a better use of his talents than the random shit he'd been doing up to this point. Grafting the tubes (after the pump had been temporarily turned off, of course that would keep the uterus alive onto their proper blood vessels (luckily, Thorne had had the foresight to color code the tubes), was horrible. But he did it, and he didn't lose too much blood doing so.

He put the rat in a little harness to keep it from ripping its tubes out, placed it back in its (cleaned within an inch of its life) terranium, turned the pump back on, made sure the uterus's environment was satisfactory, made sure there were no leaks, and left. After he and his fellow surgeon changed into their civvies and rejoined the real world outside the lab, Cruz was spotted by Carr.

“Hope you appreciate how I busted my ass to get those factories producing that stuff as fast as possible,” Carr said.

“Oh, so you're the one I have to thank for the fact that I'm spending my Saturday night with my fingers in rat guts rather than catching the game with my cousins?” Cruz retorted.

“Everyone's a critic,” Carr blew him off.

“Rat TX 005 has spontaneously aborted,” Ruso reported into her tape recorder the next day. It was the third rat to do so in as many days. “It is likely that physiological stress due to the distance the rat's blood must travel to reach its reproductive system is to blame. As such, our hypothetical maximum length has been reduced by...” how long was the tube from the rat that went up yesterday been? “...another foot. The subject appears otherwise fine. I recommend cutting two feet out of the tubing and implanting fresh embryos.” Might as well not waste a rat.

“So, am I the only one who thinks its weird that the rats' bodies' first response to this stress to miscarry?” asked fellow student-employee William Seifer[3].

“I don't find it weird,” Ruso said. “Organisms evolve to survive, and pregnancy is a liability.”

“Yes, but survival doesn't count for much, biologically speaking, if you don't reproduce,” Seifer countered.

“If you survive, you can make more offspring later; if you die, your fetus dies as well.”

“Point,” Seifer conceded. “So what happens if none of the cords are short enough to prevent miscarriage, or they are but when the babies are born they're mutants?”

“Why would that happen?” Ruso asked.

“I don't know. We're dealing with a lot of unknowns in this job.”

“...Well, if that happens, that in and of itself is a valuable datapoint.”

Seifer shrugged. “I guess. Hey, what do you think he's doing?” He nodded at Atherton, who was plugging away at a terminal connected to the Cray-1 SCB had lent to the project. He had been there, as far as Ruso or Seifer could tell, all day. This had become typical. “I mean, it's not like we've got all that much data yet.”

“Man, who knows?” Ruso replied.

____________________

Chapter Text

I-XII

Emma Hammond-Johnson burst into Atherton's office without knocking. Atherton sat at the terminal near the Cray-1, typing away at it, as a burrito and a cup of coffee rapidly cooled on the desk next to him, ignored. She sat on the desk and grabbed the untouched half of the burrito. She wasn't hungry and didn't like burritos in the first place; stealing another person's food was a primal display of power.

Not one that registered with Atherton, however, it seemed. “Mrs. Hammond-Johnson?” he asked cordially, seemingly oblivious to the transgressiveness of her actions.

“Working?”

“Yes....”

“That's some admirable dedication you've got going on there. The way I hear it, you're working with the Cray-1 at all hours of the day. Only problem is, also the way I hear it, there is no way that you could need to.” Her voice was as cold as ice water. “So...just what are you doing with our expensive supercomputer?”

“Who ratted me out? Katz? De l'Adrien?” Atherton demanded angrily.

“Don't you dare get angry at them when you're the one misusing company equipment.”

“'Misusing,' hell! It's my company!”

“It's our company. John and I are your partners, and we're shelling out a lot of money and doing a lot of fundraising to get you your fantasy lab and all the toys you want, so you damn well had better not be joyriding off of our hard work.”

“And I suppose I should be, what, twiddling my thumbs until the data comes in? I have other projects to work on.”

“What other projects?”

“None of your business.”

“It is when you use our property to make it!”

“Jeez, melodramatic much? I'm only using...okay, that is a lot of memory,” Atherton said, hitting a few keys and calling up his memory usage in the middle of the sentence. “Well okay. I admit, I screwed up, but I can buy the machine. Just toss eight sixty K of my stock in the dust bin and call it even.”

“You really think it's that simple? The company this was intended for is still waiting for its replacement. How are you going to pay for their lost profit?”

“Fine, take all of my stock!”

“Why are you assuming we're willing to sell in the first place?” Hammond-Johnson asked threateningly.

Atherton narrowed his eyes, going still. Cold rage, Hammond-Johnson observed. “You wouldn't dare,” he said.

“Why wouldn't I?” Hammond-Johnson countered.

Atherton took a different tactic. “You will never get it to work without me.”

Hammond-Johnson snorted. “You may be a genius, but you're not smarter than all the top minds at Connverse put together. If we throw enough of them at it, eventually one will crack it.”

“Good luck; I have been trying to for years.”

Hammond-Johnson's counter died on her lips. “Wait. Years? As in, you took time off of curing your cancer to work on this?”

“More like the other way around.” Atherton answered uncertainly, clearly sensing that a fundamental shift in the conversation had taken place but not sure where it was going yet. “I invented PCR more-or-less on accident while working on this, too; I needed a way to study polymerase in action, came up with a procedure to do so, and was three days into observation before realized that what I'd done had practical utility.”

“Tell me what you're making.”

Anger rose in Atherton again. “You expect me to just up and tell you, after you threatened to steal it from me?”

“Yes, I do, as a matter of fact, because clearly there is nothing I can do to persuade or threaten you to stop working on it, so that means Hammond Industries must make one of three choices: we get behind it, we allow you to do it on your own time and hope it doesn't interfere with out joint project, or we cut our losses and abandon Southern California Biotechnics.”

“I--” he paused, the gears almost visibly turning in his hands as he (hopefully) considered it from her point of view. “Oh, very well,” he said, his anger subsiding. “You know how polymerase works?”

It had been a while since she did her deep dive into Atherton, but that sounded familiar from something she barely recalled from learning how PCR worked. “That's the stuff that allows DNA to duplicate, right?”

“Yes. In DNA replication, a strand of DNA splits into two and then a polymerase enzyme ratchets along each half, for every thymine it grabs a free floating adenine and attaches it, for every guanine a cytosine, et vice versa,” he said, falling into lecture mode. “The problem is, in PCR, you can't just add polymerase to a DNA soup and expect it to do jack shit. You need what we call a primer, a strand of DNA fifteen or twenty bases long, to get things started. Of course, this is perfectly acceptable if you know what you expect to find--if police gathered the blood sample from a crime scene, it's probably human, for example--but if you have no clue, you're SOL.

“Another thing PCR can't do is repair broken genomes. Most people being told this would say 'yeah, and I assume it can't fucking fly, either, what's your point?' but what if there were another piece of broken DNA in the soup with it and they had an overlapping segment, why shouldn't it be able reach out and grab it, making both strands more complete than they were? Well, because nature never thought of that, obviously--but why couldn't we make something that does that?”

“You already sold PCR to Cetus,” Hammond-Johnson reminded him.

Atherton snorted. “This is about as closely related to PCR as a jet engine is to the first wheel.”

He was surely exaggerating, but if it was even just different enough to get around the patent.... “Alright, so convince me. What, practically speaking, can you do with something like this?”

“Alright, say you wanted to clone a mammoth. First, you need to read the mammoth's entire genetic code. Then you need to find the breaks. Then you need to fill in the breaks. Presumably, you'd read the code from several cells in the hopes that the breaks will be different so that you can fill the breaks with DNA you know is supposed to go there, rather than plugging in genes from an elephant and hoping it works.

“With today's technology, it's not going to happen. There's talk that we're going to sequence the human genome one day. If we do, it'll take decades, and billions of dollars. And of course the human genome is going to come first, it being the most important to our species. I don't care how persuasive your husband can be, he's not convincing anyone to sequence the elephant genome.

“But with this--” Atherton moved the screen so that Rhys-Hammond could see the lines and letters on it, which looked like a complicated chemical compound rendered in three dimensions (which she supposed made sense, since all biological compounds were chemical compounds) “--if I can make it work, you could give me a biopsy of mammoth tissue, and I could give you an unblemished genome. No genome sequencing required.”

“So you can clone a mammoth with this stuff?” Rhys-Hammond asked.

“Well, no; you still have to invent cloning first. But with this stuff, there is no greater difficulty in cloning a mammoth than there is in cloning, say, a sheep.

“Of course, there are other potential uses, but they mainly boil down to 'improved version of PCR', which was what I was trying to steer clear of--”

“Why a mammoth, and not a dinosaur?” Hammond-Johnson asked.

Atherton snorted. “I'll tell you what: if you can find preserved dinosaur DNA anywhere in the world, I'd love to try my hand at fixing it up for you with this stuff.”

He became serious. “Look, this is the first time I've ever had the ability to model the entire enzyme on a computer. I've gotten more work done on it in the last three weeks than I have in the previous year. Or at least I think I have; I haven't tested what I made yet.”

“...Well,” Hammond-Johnson said at last. “You've certainly given me something to think about....”

Chapter Text

I-XIII

“Hell, why not go whole hog and clone a dinosaur?” Hammond asked when Hammond-Johnson reported what Atherton had said earlier that day.

“That's what I asked. Atherton did not seem to believe that dinosaur DNA still exists anywhere in the world,” Hammond-Johnson said.

“I see. So what did you decide?” Hammond asked.

“I told him I needed to talk to you about it,” Hammond-Johnson said.

“I see. So what did I decide?”

“No, I'm serious; this is too big for either of us to just up and agree to without consulting the other.” She smirked, “Even if I already know what you're going to say.”

“In that case, I should probably say what you know I'm going to say and say that I'm for it,” Hammond said. Then: “Gah; try diagramming that sentence. But anyway. You know me; I've always been a sucker for Frankensteinian mad science.”

“It didn't exactly work out for Dr. Frankenstein in the book,” Hammond-Johnson observed.

“Only because Dr. Frankenstein was an idiot who fled in his moment of triumph because his creation didn't look like Adonis. All the monster wanted was someone to love it; none of the events of the book would have happen if Dr. Frankenstein had been like 'Hell yes! This is my awesome creation, and you should all quiver in awe before me on account of it!'”

“It's a bad example, anyway, being the prototypical 'What hath science wrought?' horror story,” Hammond-Johnson said. “The point is, we can't go off half-cocked.”

Hammond nodded. “So the pachyderm portfolio is, what, practice?”

“I made that connection as well. He says, 'Yes and no.' It is an 'interesting project' in its own right and a sure moneymaker, but it's not coincidental that it involves learning a lot about the gestation of elephants and their kin. It seems our own Dr. Frankenstein doesn't do anything without figuring out all the angles.” She paused. “While I worry about this being a distraction, it has obvious implications if he can pull it off, and it's good that he's thinking about what SCB should do next after the pachyderm portfolio, if a bit premature. I guess...I guess I'm for it.”

“Great! It's decided, then,” Hammond said. “I do hope you warned him not to try to pull the wool over our eyes again, though.”

“Of course I did. He answered, and I quote: 'Duly noted.'”

The morning after San Francisco got turned inside out by the White Night riots[1], John Hammond was surprised to get a call, and even more surprised to discover that he was apparently one of Norman Atherton's emergency contacts. It took a while to gather his lawyers and get down to the jail where Atherton was being held, but then the cops were easily cowed by said lawyers. (It was almost as if they weren't used to random rioters being backed by powerful people with expensive lawyers or something.)

“Why did you call me instead of Ms. Wing?” Hammond asked.

“Beth would blow a gasket if she saw me like this,” Atherton said.

“As well she should--you're a sixty-seven year old man, Norman! You can't be getting yourself involved in riots.”

“Dan White assassinated two good men and got away with it,” Atherton retorted.

“I understand that it's bad--”

“It's a miscarriage of justice, is what it is!” Atherton managed not to roar, just barely. “Don't pretend you understand what the community is going through, Hammond. You don't know what oppression feels like, what it's like to have the jackboot grind you so far into the dirt that you can taste--”

“I'm bisexual, Norman,” Hammond interrupted.

“...You are? I mean, you've never said anything,” Atherton said.

“It was never relevant,” Hammond said.

“Does your wife know?”

“Of course she knows. And no, I've never cheated on her, before you ask.”

“I wasn't going to ask that,” Atherton said. “I was going to ask, 'Why weren't you out there rioting with us?' You arguably have more right to call yourself part of the community than I do.”

“I was making a list of politicians whose opponents are going to get earmarked for significant donations in the next election,” Hammond said.[2] “You have influence now, and when we're selling fun-sized elephants to the highest bidder you'll have unbelievable influence. I recommend using that next time you feel the need to riot.”

“Hey, Fernie, toss me a Coke,” said Julio Cruz.

Fernando Cruz, his cousin, tossed Julio a Pepsi.

“Watch that catch Jules; you don't want to risk your delicate hands, do you?” teased Cristobal Cruz, Fernie’s brother.

“What's so delicate, Chris? He cuts up rats for a living,” Fernie joined in. “Anyone can do that.”

“The hard part is keeping the rats alive,” Cruz said dryly. He hoped to become a surgeon; working for Atherton had proved to be a rare challenge for his skill.

“See, there's your problem; keeping rats alive should never be anyone's goal.”

This good-natured ribbing went on for a while. The brothers worked at Bay Area Metal Recyclers, a business in Fremont owned by their father, and were currently on break. The business was, like, a minute away by cab, so Cruz visited them when he could.

“So, anything new and exciting?” Cruz asked eventually, leaning against an old fridge, his Pepsi half-empty.

“You know, there is, actually,” Chris said. “Some office building called us up the other day to haul away this...thing. Kind of looks like someone built a computer into a set of office cubical dividers.”

“Oh?” Cruz said politely. “That is fascinating.”

“Yeah. Wanna see it?”

“Sure.”

And so the three went to see the mysterious thing.

Julio couldn't believe his eyes. “That's a CDC 7600.”[3]

“What's that?” Fernie asked.

“It's a supercomputer. For a while, it was the most powerful supercomputer on the planet. I mean, it's a wuss next to a Cray, don't get me wrong, but a Cray is a beast.”

“Talk about an embarrassment of riches; Fernie and I are barely computer literate.” (In Cruz’s estimation, Chris was gravely overestimating himself and his brother when he said this.)

“If you don't want it, I think I know a buyer who might be interested.”

Thorne could not believe someone would throw this beauty away. No, that was a lie; sadly, he could very easily believe it. Why bother fixing anything if you have the money to afford a new one, after all? Consumerism will be the death of us all.

Thorne estimated the value of the materials that went into it as scrap, and used that as his lowball bid.

“This thing went for five million when it was new,” the one who had been introduced as Fernie said.

“It isn't new,” Thorne pointed out.

“We looked it over and it looks like the only thing wrong with it is that the coolant sprang a leak.” What he said was indeed true--in fact, it was a major cause of the consternation Thorne felt for the people who threw it out.

Clever boys. Thorne suspected Cruz was the one who explained all this to them, but could hardly prove it. Besides, what was he going to do, reprimand the lad for putting his family ahead of his employer? Expecting him to do the reverse hardly struck Thorne as being realistic.

Eventually they haggled their way to a price they could agree on and shook on it. Thorne handed him one of the Southern California Biotechnics business cards Ludlow had recently had made. “If you find any more computers--and not just supercomputers, either--we'd appreciate it if you called us first.” He turned to Cruz. “Congratulations, Mr. Cruz. You just won your first bonus.”

Atherton was messing with the Cray, doing God-knows-what once again, as Ludlow explained their status. “Ms. Ruso's technique appears to work. The newborns appear viable in every respect, and the mother rats even accepted them as their own when they were put in their enclosure.”[4]

“Uh-huh,” Atherton said, not looking away from the computer screen.

“Dr. Thorne and Mr. Carr are building a computer network in the basement at the hospital and seem to be doing a good job of it, but would appreciate a dedicated computer expert, as Thorne admits that software is something of a weak spot of his.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Also, there were some interpersonal problems, but that's probably moot now that we've all been eaten by raptors.”

Atherton snorted. “I assure you that, whatever it looks like, I am paying attention.”

“Sorry.”

“No, it's understandable,” Atherton said. “But...why raptors?”

“I don't know; something about the idea of a giant peregrine falcon swooping down and plucking people like field mice struck me as being inherently amusing.”[5]

“As to the computer expert thing, there's a guy at Cambridge who owes me a favor....”

____________________

Chapter Text

I-XIV

Micah Backes[1] toweled sweat off of his brow as he went through the ICS[2] main entrance that Saturday the 26th, having just completed a five mile jog. His work was highly conceptual in nature; as such, he often spent hours just brainstorming. Some people could stare into space while doing so, or meditate, or pace around the room[3], but not Backes; he needed to do something with his body while his brain worked out problems, and what he did was exercise.

This was part of the reason he cut such an imposing figure, but the rest was just good genes; no amount of exercise could have made him six foot six or give him the natural, flawless bronze skin and thick, dark, flowing long hair of his Iroquois ancestry. All in all, one would more easily believe he was a male model or a football player than a computer scientist.[4]

“Dr. Atherton called while you were out,” Backes' secretary informed him.

“Thanks, Greg,” Backes said. He went into his office, which was spotlessly clean and military-precise with everything in its proper place.[4] He picked up his phone's receiver and dialed Atherton's office.

“This had better be you, Mike,” Atherton growled.

“I take it you've been waiting for a while, old man?” Backes asked bemusedly.

“I've been trapped in my office with nothing to do but grade papers for an hour.”

“Being forced to actually do your job? My heart bleeds for you, Norman.”

“You're a riot,” Atherton said dryly. “Anyway, I called you for a reason. Jack--you know Jack Thorne, right?--and I got involved with a project and there are computers and networking involved. We're both fairly competent with such things, I'd like to think, but Jack would be more comfortable, and I agree, if we got a real expert to make sure we're doing everything as efficiently as possible. Because this is going to be very...what is the word I'm looking for? I want an ever-evolving network that I can call on the entire resources of for a single job if need be.”

“Alright. What communications protocol are you using.”

“Multiple ARCnets.”[5]

“Multiple ARCnets? Just how many computers do you intend to hook up to this thing?” An ARCnet was capable of hosting two hundred fifty-five computers.

“Imagine a chess board with two fifty-four squares on a side. On each square, a stack of four computers, averaging, oh, eighty megabytes of memory or so, all networked together. Along the floor rows of cables that all terminate in a Cray-1. Along the ceiling, rows of cables going perpendicular to the ones on the floor, terminating in a CDC 7600. Obviously it won't physically look like that, there's too many walls in the way where we're building it, but it's just the concept.”

“Jesus, Atherton; the network you're talking about would have terabytes of memory,” Backes said.

“Well, obviously that's just the most extreme case. Right now we've just got a single ARCnet hooking a bunch of computers, including the Cray and the 7600. But that's what I want the network to be capable of,” Atherton said. “The truth is, I filled the Cray almost to capacity with a side project, and want to be able to offload it to the network without damaging it should the need arise. It's really unfair to hog the fastest computer like that.”

“I see,” Backes said. “How the hell did you get Stanford to agree to this?”

“This has nothing to do with Stanford. It's for...a rather more corporate concern,” Atherton said.

“You went private?” Backes asked. “Be still my heart.”

“Yeah, well, do try to keep that to yourself when you come down here,” Atherton said wryly.

“Oh?”

“We decided to make a deal with Stanford and felt that it'd give our bargaining position a boost if we omitted my involvement with the company from them. That way, agreeing to have me be in charge of the project seemed like a major concession. It's not, like, a state secret--they're going to find out eventually--but better later than sooner, you know?”

“I'll be sure to not blabber,” Backes promised. “So, you're given a Cray and a 7600 and your response is 'I need more power!'” he teased.

“You know, we found the 7600 in the trash.”

“You're kidding.”

“My hand to God, some idiot threw out a CDC 7600. All we had to do was fix the coolant. That's actually how we got the idea for this network in the first place; as soon as one of our employees reported finding it, we started asking every junkyard, landfill, and recycling center in the bay area about computers, and realized we could buy broken computers really cheaply. Scrap prices, really. And some of them can't be repaired, but even those provide parts that can be used to repair others, so really, this whole thing is being done absurdly cheaply, relatively speaking.”

“You're moving out?” Atherton asked.

“Not out of the building, just out of the apartment. It only makes sense since we own the building,” Wing said. “Besides which, an apartment did open up and I'm not comfortable advertising it until I've had a chance to look over that subbasement I discovered in the plans with some professionals to make sure there isn't, like, mold. Or zombies.”

Atherton snorted. “Still paranoid about how cheaply you got the place?” he asked.

“It just seems so suspicious to me,” Wing said.

Atherton took her by the shoulders. “For every person who attains their wealth by skill or wit, there are ten people who just happened to be born into it, and, while some of these people can be skilled, too, they don't have to be.”

“I realize that. In fact, that is our working theory.”

“'Our'?”

“Peter and mine. As I was saying, that's our working theory, but I won't feel right until I've ruled everything out.”

Atherton shrugged. “So, moving out. Need any help with your stuff?”

“Don't worry, I roped someone into it.”

There came a knock on the door, which Wing went to answer. “Well, speak of the devil. Hello, Peter.”

____________________

Chapter Text

I-XV

Backes was not a superstitious man, but as he first laid eyes on the hospital that was serving as the headquarters and labs of SCB on the penultimate day of May, he concluded that it looked haunted. He walked in and saw a table with a bunch of terminals on it, each with a letter written on it in marker.

“Can I help you?” came a voice. Backes jumped and turned around, spying a young man.

“I'm Backes. Mike Backes. Atherton called, and...”

The young man nodded. “Ah. We've been expecting you. Peter Ludlow.” They shook hands.

“What's this?” Backes asked, gesturing at the the computer terminals.

“We figured you might need some assistance, so we got a bunch of computer science majors and told them to build a computer out of a bag of preselected parts and program it. You're going to select the four you find most impressive, and those four will be your assistants,” Ludlow explained.

“That's rather unorthodox.”

Ludlow shrugged. “It's pretty much how we got most of our employees.”

“I see. Well, Norman explained the uh, maximum load requirements for the system you want me to set up. What about the minimum?”

“I'm not much of a computer guy. It needs to store files and perform calculations. Compare and contrast several sets of data. Oh, and specifically we need to offload what's currently on the cray so that we can perform other simulations on it, that being the fastest and most powerful computer we have, and apparently whatever program Dr. Atherton is currently running on it is massive.”

“Right, so minimum is 'Cray-equivalent memory space,'” Backes said. “Probably a lot more, given that I imagine redundancy will be required if whatever Norman's doing with the Cray is going to keep running when distributed across several machines.”

“You'll have to talk to him about that. Anyway, you'll have most the basement for whatever you need to do, but you are going to have to share the morgue.”

“Morgue?” Backes asked.

“We need a place to store all the blood.” Ludlow said it as though it were the most normal thing in the world. “Anyway, let's tour the basement. We haven't gotten around to turning the power on yet, so please grab a flashlight...”

“You just made a request for more animals last week,” Ford said.

“We're not going to buy these right way, I just thought I might as well include them given that the rest of the request is about building the necessary infrastructure to keep them.”

“Oh, so like barns and--?” Ford looked at the actual proposal and saw Thorne's blueprints. “You want to build a what?”

“I realize it's a rather involved project--”

“Dr. Atherton, you're suggesting tearing up the roof, building another floor, and installing a green roof on top of it.”

“There are several advantages to doing this. First, the green roof itself reduces energy bills by blocking heat. Secondly, we don't exactly have a lot of land to work with. Thirdly, given that all these animals will be effectively leashed, building like this maximizes the area they have to roam in while minimizing the length of the 'leash'. Building another floor allows us to keep the 'barn' underneath the exercise yard and also gives us space for the pool without putting a hole in the ceiling.”

“Why is there a pool?”

“Capyberas are semiaquatic.”

“Why are there capyberas?”

“They're the largest rodent in the world. Studying them gives us something to compare the results we'll be getting from the dogs to.”

“Why the sudden obsession with size?” Ford asked. In Atherton's request last week, he'd specifically asked for large and small dogs.

“I wouldn't call it an obsession; it's just a real easy difference to observe when comparing a mastiff to a chihuahua, and comparing our results to rat vs. capybera ought to tell us exactly how much of the hormonal differences in their gestations is specific to dogs and how much can be carried over into all placental mammals,” Atherton explained. “One of the students actually thought of it.” That much was actually true, and in Atherton's opinion she'd deserved a bigger bonus than she'd gotten for it, but they were standardized.

“Okay. In that case, why cows?”

“Just between you and me and these four walls, SCB is engineering something and wants to start testing it on cows. When they do so, it would be useful to them to have a baseline to compare their results against.”

“And you agreed to this?” Ford said skeptically.

Atherton shrugged. “It's not exactly going contrary to our plans, so if it keeps Hammond throwing money at us, why not?”

“Since when are you a team player?” Ford asked.

Did he suspect something?

“What am I going to do, tell them to piss off on principle? I'm perfectly willing to play along, as long as what's being asked for is reasonable,” Atherton said. “We've got to branch out anyway, and there's no reason not to use cows when we do.”

“I see. Well, we're not building this. Ask Hammond to build it at SCB; he's an environmentalist. I'm willing to sign off on the animals, once you have a place to put them.”

“I'll do that.” Atherton left.

“How'd it go?” Ludlow asked.

“We got the animals but not the roof, as predicted,” Atherton reported. “You know, he actually suggested himself that I ask Hammond to install one at SCB instead.” That had been the plan all along, but Ludlow had suggested asking for one at the Project's labs in order to have a point to compromise on. Which of course in turn meant asking before beginning work on the hospital's roof.

“Well that's convenient,” Ludlow said. “I don't suppose you got him to pay for it.”

“I didn't try.” To Ludlow's look, Atherton replied, “You realize people are going to find out about all this eventually, right?”

Ludlow grunted. “I suppose that would look a little shady.”

“It would be a lot shady,” Atherton retorted. “I don't suppose Hammond International has any local construction companies in its web.”

“Of course we do.”

“I love that the answer to that was 'of course'. Like it would be absurd to assume that you didn't,” Atherton said with a smirk.

“As often as we find ourselves having to refit, expand, or build entirely new factories, having construction crews on our payroll just makes sense,” Ludlow said.

“How long will it take them to build it on the old hospital?” Atherton asked, and then immediately realized that Ludlow probably wouldn't know.

“They speculate about a month if they go all out, but they've never done a green roof before, so...” Ludlow shrugged. “Speaking of which, we need to hire a consultant for the green roof.”

“My list of employees just keeps on growing, doesn't it?” First it was just a few experts. Then some students to do the gruntwork. Then they had to hire some security guards when they acquired the old hospital. Then they had to hire a receptionist because Ludlow couldn't be one, concentrate on his school work, and go through Hammond Industries' local holdings searching for things whenever anyone had a new idea for something that needed to be done all on top of his regular duties as their financial officer. Then there was Backes, then his assistants. Then the fact that people were actually using the hospital meant janitors had to be hired. “I suppose we need a cattle expert to tell us how to keep them, too.”

Ludlow shrugged. “Just hire a retired cowboy.”

“Peter, my boy, I am ashamed of the fact that I didn't think of that myself.”

Chapter Text

Alright, folks, today's update is a little different--brace for illustrations:

This is the cross section of the umbilical used to keep an excised uterus alive. The inner tubes are color-coordinated to prevent people getting it wrong. The reinforcing core is not a feature in the tubes used for rats and other small animals, as with them the tubes themselves are strong enough to restrain the animals.

And this is the roof of the SCB building. Every pixel is one square foot. Sorry I couldn't make it bigger, but 30 pixels to a foot made the thing several times as wide as my screen. The feed lift is just a trap door (that opens up, of course; otherwise a latch breaking would lead to disaster) and the poop chute a hatch over one of those corrugated plastic tube things you see leading to dumpsters in the movies. There's also a fence inside the barn to cut the food storage area off of the animal pens. The angle of the ramp is slightly under 30 degrees.

If you read 2.0 and remember that figure 5 roof used to be green, it's changed now because I decided that it's not actually a green roof; the original idea was to have it slope like the ramp below it, but I decided that that wasn't worth the expense or the added difficulty in making it safe. Instead, it's a plain old shallow gabled roof (which is tiled, because Hammond). What hasn't changed is the lower left (southwest) corner of the roof being over the exact geographic center of the SCB building or that not being a coincidence--the post in this corner of the building is a hollow pipe that umbilicals go through to connect the cows, capybaras, and large dogs kept here to labs.

Made using MS Paint because I am a luddite.

Chapter Text

I-XVI

Backes gazed proudly at the coding on his screen, the end result of a month of labor. In some ways, it was fairly straightforward; at the end of the day, even in Atherton's madness of a final configuration, each machine only had to be a part of two networks. The key was making it so that individual components could be moved around between the subnetworks--which never actually touched--and still form a coherent whole, even in the face of massive topographical rearrangement.

To test this, he had set up a “two by two” configuration--networks A and B running one way while networks 1 and 2 braided across them--and uploaded a test package--War and Peace--to and distributed it across the network in packages. So far so good, but now it was time to scramble this egg. “Alright, boys and girls, time to change this to a three by three,” Thorne said.

His assistants groaned, this being a long and grueling task, but they knew it was coming. This sort of wholesale topological shift was far beyond what he expected the system to have to cope with, but if it could cope with this, it would be able to cope with anything SCB was likely to do with it.

He actually intended, as long as possible, for there to be two networks running in parallel through every computer, for double the bandwidth. But this had to be tested.

It being the case that it was going to take the kids forever to swap out all those wires, he decided to stretch his legs.

He wasn't going to bother with the towers of four design. Firstly, in principle it should be all the same, and secondly, it was ridiculous. Even without it, the network he was creating would be able to host ~23,700 computers, which pessimistically assuming an average of 80 megabytes per machine was still close to two terabytes, an obscenely large number. Not that they'd be able to fit that many computers down here. That was Atherton's problem; while he understood that pragmatism was a virtue and as practical as he tried to be, he was drawn like a moth to a flame to the clever solution--faced with a locked door, his inclination would be to try to devise an elaborate lock picking mechanism for it, not to knock.

Backes walked by the room they were using as a workshop, where Carr was disassembling a broken computer into spare parts. “Yo, Eddie, getting enough sleep?” he asked. It was said that during his first week here he'd tried entirely too hard to impress.[1]

“Hilarious,” Carr said dryly, having heard the joke way too many times. Along one wall was a pile of computers (they'd been telling everyone coming through the doors of this place that if they had or could find a broken computer, they'd buy it--and with three shifts of builders working around the clock, that was a lot of people), and behind him rows of bins of computer parts, set up in aisles like a supermarket. They were getting a lot of machinery for very cheap. Some disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling required.

“It helps me think,” Carr said. “Taking this thing and breaking it down to its base components, over and over again...it's very zen. Besides, it needs to be done.” He absentmindedly tossed a broken component onto the scrap heap.

“What'cha thinking about?” Backes asked.

“This probe we're cooking up. I mean, I doubt I'm going to think of anything Doc Thorne and the docs didn't, but Lori Ruso ain't exactly long in the tooth herself and she thought of the whole blood tube thing, so...” he shrugged.

Backes nodded. “I'll leave you to it.”

As Backes moved on, he heard Carr grunt acknowledgment behind him. He climbed a flight of stairs, went to the vending machine, then climbed three more flights to the roof. Workers moved about, busy little bees that they were. Everything around here moved fast, like Atherton's natural impatience had rubbed off on them. Then again, they were three different crews working on this place, one for each shift of the day.

Still, Backes wasn't the only one who'd come up here to check out the view. He saw one of the farmhands SCB had hired, a fifty-ish Mestizo man. “Yo. What was your name, again?”

The man startled. “Alejandro Perdomo. I'm just checking out my future work space.”

“Looks like you've got about a month to make a good impression,” Backes said.

Hiring farm hands now was perhaps premature, but it gave them time to evaluate the candidates. They sent them to Green Verde Ranch, a dairy farm Hammond Industries owned (and which was already being utilized for this project by having the workers collect daily blood samples from the cows and calves), and Pony Hollow Petting Zoo, a petting zoo that they didn't, but which Hammond had come to an agreement with the owner of so that the hands could get some hands-on experience with capybaras, on alternating days, and when the green roof had been built and the animals brought in, nine would be retained. They'd also been given a report Hammond had commissioned on capybaras.

“SCB sure does love trials by fire for potential employees,” Backes observed.

“You mean your henchpeople in the basement?”

“Them, too, but there are others. You'll meet them, once this place is finished.”

“Them any older than the kids?”

“They're all recruited from Stanford, so no.”

“Figures. What about you?” Perdomo asked.

“I'm a consultant,” Backes said.

Perdomo snorted. “Lucky you.”

~ ~ ~

The green roof of the SCB building had been officially completed on Tuesday, the 17th of July, and on that day nine farmhands had been selected to be retained. Weirdly, they were then asked, essentially, to make their own schedule to spec: the nine of them had been gathered and told that there would need to be two of them on duty at all times and that working more than forty hours a week was in general discouraged and, since they were salaried, would not result in overtime regardless; otherwise, they could figure it out amongst themselves. And the schedule itself would be more of a guideline; if one of them felt sick, they could, should, and would get someone to cover for them.

Three hectic days of herding capybaras up flights of stairs and lifting cows through the feed shoot, things were beginning to calm down (there were still dogs that needed to be brought, but getting them to the roof ought to be easy enough), and Perdomo had a good idea of what his routine here was going to be: feed the animals, clean up after them, and keep them from tripping on or tearing out their umbilicals, tubes of blood connecting the animals to wombs that had been removed for study. The last would get more complicated as more animals got the operation, he was well aware (right now, there were only two umbilicals he had to keep track of).

Perdomo was pushing his sweepings into what had already gained the name of the poop chute--a repurposed air duct tube in the smaller of the two overhangs in the barn area that was covered with a hatch when not in use and led to a manure hauler--when he heard the door to the main area (the door that, if one stood at the base of the ramp up to the roof and looked at it, would be on your left) open. He looked, and Lori Ruso nodded at him as she ascended the ramp to retrieve the end of a squarish tubing thing. Their method of pulling it up through the pipe was quite simple: Ruso tossed a rope down the pipe that served as the forward left corner post (going by the same orientation as before) of the roof over the ramp, which was then tied around the tube, which she then pulled on. Soon enough she had the tube and was making her way back down the ramp, going to the doors to the surgery ward--to one's right, in the orientation--and knocked. Seifer opened the door and took the end of the tube from her.

“We're going to need another cow soon, Mr. Perdomo.” Ruso said, leaving.

It would take the kids a while to scrub up, but it would also take a while for Perdomo and the other hand to do what they had to do. He ascended the ramp to where Eugene Brezas was watching the animals “It's time,” he said.

Brezas nodded and followed. They picked out a cow, led it to the staging area in front of the surgery doors, and began to thoroughly spray and scrub it down.

The door opened, and the cow they'd taken yesterday walked out, beharnessed and betubed. Ruso, now dressed in scrubs, took the fresh cow.

All in all, Perdomo’s day was a slow one. He and Brezas took turns in the “barn” and in the “yard”; in the barn, he sat on a stool and red his novel, checking periodically for feces he needed to clean; in the yard, he was to try to keep the animals from eating all the grass, and so had to pay attention to them so that he could encourage them to go towards their feed trough when they tried. There he sat on a stool from which he could see more or less everything. It made for a nice change of pace.

His and Brezas' replacements arrived, and they left. By coincidence, as he walked down the hall, Cruz, Ruso, and Seifer came out of the surgery ahead of him, Cruz holding a cooler.

“Say what you will, it's easier than doing the same thing with rats,” Cruz said.

“No argument here; I'm just saying, it's annoying that we have to defrock our scrubs, go down a flight of stairs, and scrub up again in the middle of the operation,” Seifer said.

“Got a better idea?” Ruso asked.

Seifer shrugged. “Two crews, with a dumbwaiter connecting them?” He didn't sound convinced himself. “Might be good for, I don't know, hygiene or some shit.”

“You can suggest it, but I doubt Atherton will go for it,” Ruso said. “The work crews have already been and gone.”

“I'd suggest it anyway. Might be a bonus in it,” Cruz said.

“Maybe,” Seifer said doubtfully.

“Any idea why the capys are being sequestered in their own lab?” Cruz asked Ruso.

“Man, why would I know?” Ruso asked.

“I mean, you're kind of in charge,” Cruz said. “Not, like, one of the powers that be or anything, but certainly a sergeant to our privates...”

____________________

Chapter Text

I-XVII

“So, people: are we ready to probe some cows or not?” Atherton asked. At this point, the current setup at the SCB building had been up and running for over a month.

“While we've only just began the control--as amazing as it is that we can unironically call something like that a 'control'--the chances of us discovering something about cow gestation from it that, just, completely throws off our calculations in a way that makes us completely redesign our probe design is slim to nil,” de l'Adrien said.

“There will be wastage,” Katz said, more because someone had to than anything else.

“Not from anything studying the control for two or three or ten weeks will help us prevent, I don't think,” de l'Adrien said.

“Even though it's our first time working with K's?” Katz asked. In ecology, r/K selection theory related to the selection of combinations of traits in an organism that trade off between quantity and quality of offspring[1]; in SCB and the Project, the terms “R” and “K” had come to specifically refer to animals that had a litter of relatively underdeveloped offspring and those that had singular, well-developed ones, respectively.

“Point, but I stand by my position,” de l'Adrien said.

“Um,” Ludlow interjected. “I realize none of this is my field or anything, but, while we don't know when the Project will end, it won't last forever. Unless you really want to jerk around Stanford, that is, Dr. Atherton, and even then, the less of it you have to do, the better. While we still have certain advantages even after the grace period ends, the less time that passes between when it goes public and when we release the elephant, the better. I say, if we can fast track anything without it resulting in disaster, do so.”

Atherton nodded. “So how quickly can we get everything together for the probes?”

“That really depends on when the sensor heads get here; the rest, Eddie and I can build as soon as we raid a Radio Shack,” Thorne said. “Or the basement.”

“I can have forms drawn up for the employees by tomorrow morning,” Ludlow said.

“You should probably be there when Peter explains to them what's going on. You know, so the kids know this has your approval and is isn't SCB doing something hinky behind your back,” Thorne said.

“Noted. Any other pressing business?” Atherton asked. “...Alright, meeting adjourned.”

He opened the door and found Backes waiting patiently outside.

“Hey. I didn't want to interrupt your meeting, but I have an announcement,” Backes said.

“What's wrong now?” Atherton asked.

“Nothing. Everything is working perfectly smoothly. In fact, that's what I wanted to talk to you about: you don't need me anymore.”

“But the system's still evolving,” Atherton protested.

“Yeah, but it's evolving in predictable ways now. There's at least one of every kind of off-the-shelf computer on the market in this mess; nothings going to come up that those wonderkids you found won't be able to deal with. I mean, I intend to stick around for a while to observe them and make sure they're up for the task, but--barring something unforeseeable--consider this my two weeks' notice, as it were.”

“I see. Well, we will miss you.”

Backes grinned. “Hey, I'm not gone yet. Also, be sure to think of me the next time you have some intractable computer problem, because this was fun; it's probably for the best that most of my clients aren't as ambitious as you, but I do love a challenge.”

~ ~ ~

The next day, when Ludlow had gathered the student-employees and was making an attempt to publicly speak at them, was a Wednesday, the last one of July.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Ludlow said.“My employers at SCB have an ulterior motive for funding and helping the Stanford Gestation Project. We're trying to develop technology that the Project's research is critical for. For the sake of avoiding the appearance of...just...bad stuff in general, you will legally have two jobs, that just so happen to have hours that dovetale perfectly and both require you to do basically the same sorts of things for the same people. The point is, the only effect accepting this will have on you legally or financially is that your pay will often be split between two paychecks, one from the Project and one from us.”

Atherton saw eyes start to glaze over as Ludlow's cringeworthy attempt at public speaking got dragged off on a tangent.

Ludlow seemed to notice, too. “Um, never mind this minutiae, though. The point is, we're moving into the area where our goals and methods start diverging from the Project's, and we still need your help. See, we're going to...well, I can't tell you what we're going to do until you sign the nondisclosure agreements, but I guarantee that it is right up your alley. Also, you won't be punished for not signing it, either. I mean, what are we going to do, fire you? That just makes more work on the Project for the rest, and it's nowhere near finished. I mean, we've only got eight of the cows hooked up--but I'm rambling.”

“Plus, Atherton would blow a gasket,” one of the student-employees said.

“Why would--? I mean, yes. That.”

Luckily, Ludlow caught himself before Atherton had a heart attack; while they had no expectation that the charade would last forever, it had held up impressively well so far, and the longer it held up, the easier life would be. And to have Peter Ludlow of all people nearly let the cat out of the bag...

Ludlow paused. “Wow, I suck at this.

“Look. We've basically got the Project side of things figured out. Not as in we have everything we need from it, but as in we've pretty much got a routine figured out. That's exactly what it's going to become, for you, at least; routine. If you were here for the money, you could have gotten jobs flipping burgers. You're here to be on the cutting edge of science. Well, that's the offer. Continuing to be on the cutting edge. Also, you know, continued employment after the Project ends, if you want it and we need it. So sign on the dotted line. Or don't. Whatever.”

~ ~ ~

“The harness goes on the cow, like so,” Katz said, doing a presentation for the gathered farm hands of the amusingly named Green Verde farm the following Saturday. “This is the battery pack. We have several batteries for a reason, and that reason is so that they can be swapped out regularly without powering down the whole thing, which is something we'd rather not do. That powers this, the computer, which controls this--” he held something small that was on the end of a long wire “--the sensor head. We've brought an insemination specialist from one of Hammond's other farms, in upstate New York, to insert it where it needs to go.[2] Now, we've had a problem with harnesses coming loose when the cows mount each other, and this equipment is delicate, so do try and keep them from doing that, as well as other things that can damage the equipment.

“Beyond that, there are also these two cords. This is, obviously, a power cord, and this is a coaxial cable, for data transfer. Once a day, I need you to take the wired up cows here, pass the cows through this window--” Katz demonstrated, handing the cords to a student-employee who was setting up the main computer “--and have a buddy plug them in so that the batteries can be topped off and the memory can be uploaded before it starts to overwrite. There's actually something like thirty hours of memory on this thing, so don't get too stressed about doing it exactly every twenty-four hours on the dot, but don't blow it off, either. We're going to wire up five cows today, five more when we return in two weeks, so on and so forth.

“Any questions?”

~ ~ ~

“What do you mean the cows are sick?” Katz demanded over the phone on the following Friday (August 3rd). They’d already lost a couple harnesses to the cows knocking them off, rolling on them, and just general roughhousing, and now this?

“I mean it turns out that when you stick a foreign object up a cow's birth canal and leave it there for a week, the cow gets sick,” Felix Reyes, chief farm hand at Green Verde, said.

“Fuck. Alright, one second.” He put his hand over the phone and buzzed de l'Adrien. “Rosemary, they have a problem at Green Verde.”

De l'Adrien got on the line. “I'm here.”

“Mr. Reyes, if you could tell Dr. de l'Adrien what you told me.”

He did so.

“Wow. We really should have seen that coming,” de l'Adrien said.

“What do we do?”

“Scrub the wires with soap? There are tampons with disinfectants in them, but we have no idea what deleterious effect that'll have on the embryos--it's not like they'd check, as by definition if you need tampons you're not pregnant. Still, I think we have no choice but to throw things at the wall and see what sticks at this point.”

“Well, if a few embryos mutate or abort, they do so; we always knew there'd be wastage,” Katz said equanamically. “I suppose we're going to have to call that inseminator back down here to do the actual scrubbing, aren't we?”

“It would probably be for the best. I don't think we want novices poking rods up inside cow vagina,” de l'Adrien said. “At the very least, he can show Mr. Rayes' people what to do.”

“Wonderful,” Reyes said dryly, not looking forward to this particular increase in workload.

____________________

Chapter Text

I-XVIII

Reyes spotted the car from SCB coming and set down the hay bale he was hefting, telling the others to finish up without him as he dealt with the visitors. He wiped the sweat from his brow--it was actually quite cool for an early September day, but he actually worked for a living.

“Oh, God, not you guys again!” he bantered as Katz and Atherton got out of their car with a small number of assistants.

“What did we ever do?” Katz shot back with feigned injury.

“Every visit of yours marks a drastic increase in the amount of time I spend with my arms up a cow's rear end over the next two weeks!”

“Including the last one?”

“Well, no. Whatever you did there seems to have worked,” he admitted.

“Good news, then: this week, we're actually decreasing the time you spend with your arm up a cow's rear, as it's time to replace the probe heads we installed on the eleventh, and we might as well use the new wires,” Katz said. The cows they'd used on July 28th had all aborted, either naturally or when SCB had decided that their fetuses were useless.

One of the kids dragged a heavy-looking machine, a portable computer only in the sense that it could, in fact, be ported (Reyes had learned was called an IBM 5110[1]) into the offices. He knew she'd be replacing the one that was there with it and dragging that one out into the car. “It can't seriously be faster to do that than use a modem,” Reyes said, nodding at the girl.

“Well, that depends,” Atherton said. “Bandwidth technology is always going to lag behind memory, as by definition you're never going to need to send more data than you can store, which means that in certain situations, it can be quicker to physically transport the computer to where the data needs to go--”

“It’s not quicker, just cheaper. I mean, can you imagine the phone bill?” Katz interjected.

Atherton suddenly waved at someone. Reyes turned to look, this being such odd behavior for the doctor from what he knew of him, and saw the manager and Hammond-Johnson emerging from the barn. Hammond-Johnson apparently excused herself and came over.

“Yes, Norman?”

“I was going to call you and John later, but since you're here, I think it's time to start setting up for the elephant trials,” Atherton said.

They're going to do this with elephants? Are they crazy? Reyes kept his thoughts to himself. He didn't actually know anything about elephants, but he was pretty sure they were wild animals, and instinct told him they wouldn't like it when you shoved your arms up their holes. Which he supposed explained their zeal to find a solution to the infection problem that didn't require daily maintenance.

“We'll put out feelers, of course, but are you sure?” Hammond-Johnson asked. “I'm given to understand you've only just started with the second trimester probes. That doesn't give you a whole lot of leeway if something in the next stage goes wrong.”

“Elephant gestation is very long,” Atherton said. “It's...Dave?”

“Six hundred seventeen days for an Asian elephant, six forty-five for an African elephant--roughly two and a quarter times as long as a cow's,” Katz supplied.

“Right. So basically, if we started the elephant trials today and end up having a problem with the first batch of cows' probes tomorrow, we'd have nine weeks to fix it before it'd mess with the elephant studies. And that's a gap that will only grow. Well, until something does go wrong, that is.”

~ ~ ~

The following Tuesday found John Hammond fretting in the mirror. “Are you sure I look alright?” he asked.

“Yes, John, you look fantastic,” his beleaguered wife said. “I'm sure Elizabeth cares more about us getting there than she does about how pretty we look.”

“I know, but--”

The intercom buzzed. “Dr. Atherton is here to see you,” came the voice of their butler, Malcolm Fitch[2].

“Send him up,” John said, and then used having to wait here anyway as an excuse to fret with his appearance a little more.

“You got me hyraxes from South Africa,” Atherton said without preamble as he burst into the room.

“Are they the wrong kind or something? You assured me that all species of hyrax are as closely related to elephants as one another--”

“No, they're not the wrong kind. You got them from the wrong political entity!” Atherton said.

“I don't follow,” Hammond said.

Atherton rubbed his forehead in a manner he usually reserved for a particularly dense student. “John, does the word 'apartheid' mean anything to you? I have many goals in life, some more reasonable than others. Making sure that I never directly or indirectly cause money to go into the coffers of P. W. Botha's[3] regime is one of the ones I'd thought would be the easiest to accomplish.”

“Norman, we're not supporting apartheid by doing business with companies that just happen to be in South Africa,” Hammond said.

“But we are! That transaction was taxed by the South African government and the money you spent went into the South African economy, bolstering it ever so slightly. Oceans are made of raindrops, John, and you just contributed a raindrop--and you did it on my behalf, no less!”

“Fine! From this point on, no more dealing with South Africa,” Hammond promised. “We don't have time to argue this with you.”

“What could you possibly be doing that's more important than this?” Atherton demanded.

“Our daughter is having a baby,” Hammond-Johnson said.[4]

“...Okay, that's a good answer. I'm still mad at you and intend to hold you to your word, but congratulations,” Atherton said.

“Thanks,” Hammond said. He patted Atherton on the shoulder and moved to leave.

“The necklace, dear,” Hammond-Johnson reminded him.

“Right!” John said, grabbing the white jewelry gift box off the dresser on his way out.

John and Emma got in their limo and went to the hospital where their Elizabeth Murphy was having a baby, and were quickly directed to the right waiting room, where Tom Murphy also waited.

It is said that no father ever thinks any man is good enough for his daughter, but after a while a son-in-law will grow on you. Tom and Elizabeth had been married for three years, and Hammond was still waiting for that last part to happen. Tom was thirty years old with dark brown eyes, blond but balding prematurely; he loved baseball and, as far as Hammond could tell, had had his imagination surgically removed at birth. John honestly had no idea what Elizabeth saw in him.

She certainly doesn't get her taste in men from me, he thought. Which is probably a good thing, come to think of it.

“What'cha got there?” Tom asked.

“A 'zeroth birthday' gift for Alexis,” John said, and opened the box. “Dominican blue amber.”

Tom frowned. “There are bugs in it.”

“Inclusions like that make amber more valuable,” Hammond said, making an effort not to go into lecture mode.

“Really? Most things get less valuable when bugs fall in them.”

Hammond tried to puzzle out how Tom thought amber worked and failed. “Listen, Tom, these amber pieces are millions of years old. The animal this mosquito fed on before it died is probably extinct. It--”

Hammond's whole body stopped working, because he had just realized what he'd said and was hit with epiphany.

Tom didn't notice. “Yeah, well, I'm just saying, we're having a girl. Girls don't like bugs, you know?” he said.

~ ~ ~

Later that night the phone rang. “Norman Atherton speaking,” he answered.

“What about amber?” John Hammond's voice came.

“Pardon?” Atherton asked.

“Alright, just, follow this logic here. Eighty million years ago, a mosquito feeds on a dinosaur. It then goes to land somewhere and digest, but does so on the branch of a tree and gets caught in sap. The sap becomes amber. Could that DNA be preserved inside that mosquito?”

“...Huh. That's actually kind of brilliant, John. I actually read a paper on amber a year or two ago, and while I have no idea if amber can preserve DNA, if anything could preserve it for sixty-five million years and more, my bet would be on amber. It desiccates what it traps, which is of course necessary because water can damage DNA, but that's not all it does. If it did, the cells would all shrivel up, and they don't--they're perfectly preserved, like the thing was dipped in liquid nitrogen. It's thought that when the insect or whatever gets trapped, the lighter, more fluid elements get soaked into its body--the process is even called 'ambalming'. This is definitely worth looking in to.”

“So you think this will work?” Hammond asked excitedly. “We can find dinosaur DNA that way?”

“Huh? Oh, right; that. No, that'd never work. I meant it's worth looking in to for science; we're not going to find any dinosaur DNA inside of a mosquito.”

“Why the heck not?”

“You said it yourself: the mosquito landed to digest. The blood is in the mosquito's stomach, a sack full of acids tailor made by evolution to destroy blood cells. The DNA would be destroyed in minutes, and the amber...takes longer than that to form.”

“Damn. I was sure I was onto something here.”

“It was a good idea. Now, get back to your family. You have a new grandchild, remember?”

...Psych. That would be quite a power move, though, wouldn’t it?

____________________

Chapter Text

I-XIX

On the early afternoon of Thursday, September 13th, Aaron Ian Sarka[1] walked down the hall of a Johns Hopkins dorm. In spite of the setting, this was a meeting he’d prepared for as fastidiously as he would a meeting with the CEO--though the tactics he’d use would be different.

He found it easily enough, and its tenant was furiously packing his bags. He knocked politely on the doorjamb. When the angry young man looked up, Aaron was leaning casually against said doorjamb; Aaron Ian Sarka's every action was precise, meant to draw a specific response or create a specific image, and this was never more true than when he was wooing a potential asset. In the Baltimore hotel he was staying in this morning he had dressed in the most expensive suit he'd brought and fidgeted with it in the mirror for several minutes. Aaron was of Czech extraction with dark eyes and dark hair going gray around the temples in a manner he thought distinguished, fairly unwrinkled save for some crows feet. The look he'd been going for today was fatherly.

“What do you want?” The young man demanded.

Aaron's opening line was quite unorthodox: “They're right to expel you, you know. Know why?”

“Would it be because I'm tresspassing on God's domain?” he snarked.

“It's because you got caught,” Aaron said. “The rules may well be made by narrow-minded fools, but the fact that they're fools doesn't change the fact that the rules they make are the rules--and the second you were caught violating them, you became a liability to this institution. What was it supposed to do? Stand behind you and risk losing its funding and its accredited status--maybe even risk jailtime for the people in charge? No single man, no matter how visionary, is worth that.”

The young man snorted. “No one was calling me 'visionary.'”

“I don't doubt that; I was explaining to you why they were right to expel you, not why they did expel you,” Sarka said. “People's reasons for doing things only matter insofar as you can use them to predict their future actions; since this is the last day you'll ever be interacting with them, it is thus irrelevant. The point is, you can hardly blame people for acting in their own self-interest, and avoiding the trouble you were causing was in their self-interest.

“Is there a damn point to this lecture?”

“I'd have thought the point was obvious: making sure you don't make the same mistake again. We follow the rules not because they're right or wrong, but because they're the rules; you get punished if you're caught not following them, so if you're going to break them, it better be for something important, and you'd better not get caught,” Sarka said. “Remember that for the future.”

The young man snorted. “What future? They're not letting me graduate.”

Sarka tsked. “Are you really so ready to give up, to allow this to be the end of your story?”

“What other options do I have???”

“There are other schools.”

The young man laughed harshly. “I attempted to run human trials of a gene therapy without FDA approval! No school's going to take me after that; I've essentially been blacklisted.”

Sarka willed his smile to be conspiratorial rather than predatory. “And should the record of your expulsion and the reasons for it be somehow misfiled, say by a careless clerk?” he asked. “There are many careless clerks in the world, after all.”

Sarka could see the realization dawn on the young man, and felt approval.

“...I see. And what do I have to do in exchange for this...clerical error?”

Excellent. “Let me tell you a story. There's a professor at Stanford by the name of Norman Atherton. Perhaps you've heard of him?”

“He invented PCR.”

“Yes, yes he did. That's not the only thing he invented, though. Recently he came up with a virus that latches onto a protein produced by cells extracted from a tumor that was removed from his heart. Then he tested it on himself.”

Sarka allowed the young man to work through the implications.

“My God. That's genius. He has cured heart cancer?”[2]

“He did, but, claiming he didn't want to deal with the hassle of getting FDA approval, he sold it on. I mean, I can understand not wanting to deal with the meddling bureaucrats of the FDA--who does?--but still, it's a cancer cure we're talking about here. But apparently his interests lay elsewhere.

“He sold his virus to a company called Connverse, owned by a conglomerate called Hammond Industries. At the same time, Atherton convinced a man named John Hammond--and that name is not a coincidence--to form a partnership with him. People like Hammond don't partner with people like you; they have the power in the relationship, and they know it. But whatever Atherton promised him must have been spectacular, because he got him to foot the bill and let him keep half the profits.”

“It...it could be anything. The same geneticist inventing PCR and a virus tailored to fight cancer would be like the same guy inventing the computer and the jet engine--they’re both in the field of engineering, yes, but fairly removed from each other.”

“I wish you luck in finding out what 'anything' is when you attend Stanford next semester,” Sarka said.

“And should I do so?”

“We're always hiring at Biosyn. I'm sure a potential employee who shows diligence, drive, and resolve will quickly find themselves with a cushy job once he has his doctorate.”

“And--just hypothetically, mind you--what if I don't even attempt to discover Dr. Atherton's secrets. I'd be possibly looking at jailtime if caught, and as you say, a person can't be blamed for looking out for his self-interest.”

“Indeed he can't. Which is why another person can't be blamed if, should such an unlikely thing come to pass, things that were lost see the light of day once again.”

“Yeah, I suppose that's fair. I don't suppose you'll at least pay my tuition?”

“There can be nothing connecting you to either myself or Biosyn, sorry.” Certainly nothing so obvious as a money trail.

“Alright, one more question: just what is it that you do at Biosyn?”

“Security consultant. So, should I take it that this is not the end of your story, Mr. Dodgson?”

Lewis Dodgson grinned, and shook Aaron Sarka's hand. “I've got the feeling it's only the beginning of my story.”[3]

____________________

Chapter Text

I-XX

Lewis Dodgson sat on his stripped mattress, staring at his hands, as he listened to Sarka’s footsteps recede down the hall. Am I seriously going to do this?

Sarka had said it himself: there could be nothing connecting Dodgson to either himself of Biosyn. Which meant, logically, that should he get caught, the odds of Sarka or Biosyn coming to Dodgson's rescue was precisely dick.

Damn it, I'm a doctor, not a corporate spy! Dodgson realized what he said, and chuckled. “Damn it, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a spy.” Only, it hit him, he wasn't a doctor, not yet-- and should Sarka fail to uphold his end of the bargain or he be caught and expelled again, he never would be. “Fuck.”

He thought again of Sarka's threat. Would he really do it? Dodgson had little doubt that he could. But would he? Dodgson contemplated. Sarka didn't strike him as a man who did anything if it didn't benefit him in some way, and pulling the rug out from under Dodgson wouldn't do that. He wouldn't even be able to use Dodgson as a warning for others without revealing their involvement.

Okay, firstly, what are you even basing your impression of Sarka on? The fact that you've watched every James Bond movie except Moonraker?[1] Secondly, you can't exactly afford to assume he's bluffing--the stakes are too high. Thirdly, at the moment the relationship is a partnership; if you double-cross Sarka, it turns into blackmail. I'd much rather have him have some interest in my well-being than none.

Damn it, his brain was right. There was only one way forward if he wanted to be a doctor, and that was to do what Sarka wanted.

(Or you could give up. Just pack your bags and go home. This could end in criminal charges; was it really worth it, just so you won't have to work in Dad's store?)

Dodgson's hands curled into fists. The answer was yes.

He had to do this. He had no choice. But that didn't mean he had no choice but to be Sarka's unwitting pawn; he could do it smart. Trusting that a man like Sarka had his own good at heart struck Dodgson as a stupid move, so the sooner he could get out from under his thumb, the better.

These, then, are my goals: discover what Atherton is up to, get leverage on Sarka, and, above all, get my doctorate.

He got up. It was time to call his father and explain that he was taking some time off and transferring to Stanford.

“I am not looking forward to this conversation,” he said to no one.

Chapter Text

I-XXI

Dodgson walked into a sports bar two days later and scanned the room for his would-be mark. One good thing about having surreptitiously made copies of the files Sarka had given him was that Dodgson had been able to go through them again, this time focusing on looking for a target among the student-employees. He'd found a likely fellow, and noticed he hailed from Wisconsin. Going on a hunch, he'd asked around for a bar that was likely to have the Badgers game, and that had lead him to this place.[1]

Dodgson spotted his prey at the bar and sat next to him. “Who's winning?”

“We're totally creaming them!”[2]

“That'd be great news if I knew who 'we' was,” Dodgson said wryly.

“Sorry. Wisconsin,” the man explained.

“Thanks. Lewis Dodgson.” Dodgson held out his hand.

“Bill Seifer.”[3]

And so they talked sports for a while.

“Rare to see a Wisconsin fan 'round these parts,” Seifer observed.

“Well, I'm new; I'm taking a little time off, then I'm transferring to Stanford for my final semester.”

“Hey, I'm a Stanford man, too!”

“No shit?” The conversation veered into Stanford and academics and from there, eventually to jobs.

“Yeah, I'm looking for one,” Dodgson confided regarding jobs. “My parents are paying my tuition, but that's about it.”

“I know a burger place that's hiring,” Seifer said helpfully.

“Ugh. Thanks, but...I don't mind the shit pay, it's better than nothing, but it's hardly exciting, is it?”

“Well, if it's exciting you're looking for, positions are opening up soon where I'm working.”

“Where do you work?” Dodgson asked.

“Well, that's a bit complicated. See, we've got this big project at Stanford where we're researching gestation, and it's being funded largely by fundraisers run by this guy named John Hammond, and he owns this company called Southern California Biotechnics, and they're partnering with Stanford on the project, and it turns out they have their own reasons to do so beyond tax write-offs, they're doing something with that information...but I'm losing my train of thought. Wow, I must be drunker than I thought; what were we talking about, again?”

“You were telling me where you work. I'm assuming it's either at the Project or SCB.”

Damn it, Lew! But Seifer was too drunk to notice him calling these things by nicknames he shouldn't have known.

“Both. That's why it's complicated; it's a bit tricky to tell where one ends and the other begins.”

“Sounds like an interesting work place,” Dodgson said. “You say there will be openings soon?”

“Yes. Lot of people are moving away when they graduate. Ruso's gonna work at some company in fucking Nashville of all places. A damn shame; she really is the best of us. And a natural leader.”

“You really think you can get me a job there?”

“Well, I can put in a good word for you, but no promises,” Seifer said. “They like to make new recruits prove themselves.”

“I wonder what SCB is using this whole gestation project thing for,” Dodgson said, as though thinking aloud. Am I being too obvious?

Apparently not, because Seifer said, “Well, what I know I can't tell you, because of nondisclosure agreement, but they don't tell us jack shit anyway, not even those of us who signed on to do the purely SCB shit, not that the rest of 'em believe us--but I'm getting off track. My point is, we do a lot of speculating, and there's no rule that says I can't speculate at you.”

“Oh?” This was proving to be a gold mine.

“See, we've all got hypotheses. Ruso thinks they're making an uterine replicator. Hence why we're always cutting the wombs out of things and poking them to see how they work. That doesn't quite add up for me. What I think is going on is...”

A student raised his hand, trust fund baby from the look of him.

Now, now; don't judge. “Yes?”

“This all sounds like overkill.”

Atherton hated him already. “Look...what's your name?”

“Chad.”

Fuck, seriously? “Chad. We go about our lives awash in a sea of DNA contaminants. If you work on a sample in the open, it's going to be contaminated by dust mite DNA from the dust mites in the air, human DNA from the dust in the air, your cat's DNA from the dander that got on your pants cuff this morning, your DNA from when you exhaled just now, bacterial DNA from the various things living in your mouth, tuna DNA from the sandwich you ate for lunch--”

...tuna DNA from the sandwich you ate for lunch...

...tuna DNA...

...lunch...

Bloody fucking eureka. But now was most definitely not the time to run naked through the streets like Archimedes; he had a class to teach. “...well, a lot of sources, is what I'm getting at. Now, then, on to the next piece of equipment you'll be using...” As he droned on on more-or-less autopilot, in the back of his mind, the question percolated: Could it work?

____________________

Chapter Text

I-XXII

Dodgson had noticed Atherton freeze up in class, and was trying to figure out what to make of it. There were rumors going around that he'd had a senior moment, or even a stroke, but to Dodgson it looked less like a senior moment and more like an eureka moment. He knew that he wasn't going to figure it out from the context he was given--it could have been triggered by any of the number of things coming out of his mouth in that moment, or something he'd spotted, or even been the result of a process going on in the back of his mind that chose an inopportune moment to announce itself to the front of it, therefore having nothing to do with giving Chad a well-deserved dressing down for his stupidity.

Whatever it was didn't even have to end up accomplishing anything. Contrary to popular belief, such moments didn't happen when you had the answer, they happened when you knew what you needed to do to get the answer--not when you stop wracking your brain over the problem, but when you put it into overdrive. And weren't always right, anyway. Dodgson himself had seen the proverbial stars align and had been certain he was within grasping distance of the answers he sought only to have his own eureka moment ultimately lead down a dead end far too many times for him to be fooled into thinking Atherton's necessarily meant anything. Assuming that was even what it was.

I'll report it to Sarka if I feel the need to pad my next report, and keep an eye on what Atherton does as best I can, Dodgson decided. He had to put it out of his mind, for now; things were beginning.

Dodgson and a bunch of other potential employees had been led into a room and lined up in a row. A woman Dodgson's age strode forth and addressed them.

“My name is Lori Ruso. In two weeks, I'm moving on to greener pastures. That means I have one week to sort the wheat from the chaff of you lot and one week to get those who pass up to snuff. You should feel fortunate; when I was being hired, we were just given a rat and a series of procedures to be done on it and wished the best of luck. We're in a situation now where we can stand to be shorthanded for a week, and have actual procedures and such, and so you're going to get to actually study and practice them. Before we start, you have to sign these nondisclosure agreements Mr. Ludlow is handing out...”

He did so. Then another packet of papers was handed out. Leafing through it and examining the surgical procedures described therein, he decided he'd have no need to pad his next letter.

The phone rang in Hammond’s office. “Yes?”

“Dr. Atherton is calling, Mr. Hammond.”

“Put him through,” John said.

“Hey, John. You remember how, two weeks ago, you were like 'what if mosquitoes in amber drank dinosaur blood' and I was all like 'no, that's dumb and you're dumb'?”

“That's not quite how I remember it, but yes,” Hammond said dryly.

“Well, I've reconsidered,” Atherton said.

“Really? That whole thing about a mosquito's stomach being specifically designed to destroy blood thing was pretty convincing.”

“Oh, no, we won't find any blood in the mosquito's stomach; that stuff's long gone. But there are bound to be traces of it in the esophagus, in the mouth, on the mouth parts. I mean, considering how small these animals are, we're talking about low triple- or even double-digit cell counts, but they'd be there.”

Hammond was stunned. “Are you saying this would work?”

“I'm saying it's worth looking into.”

“My god. What are the odds of finding dinosaur blood? How do we go about hunting for it? What--”

“John. John, John, John. Calm down. Before you go around buying up amber mines or wherever amber comes from, we need to establish that this will work. And I think I know how we can tell for sure. We need the oldest amber we can find. I'm talking record-breaking levels of old. Of that find, we need the smallest, least interesting piece, something they'll let us just have--”

“Wait, don't we need a bug or something to test for DNA?”

“John, even the most pristine piece of amber is going to be filled with contaminants. If it was exposed to air for five minutes when it was tree sap, there's going to be pollen and animal dander and God knows what. That's not what we're worried about right now. What we're worried about is getting our hands on something we can destroy without pissing anyone off, and that means something without much value to science. Preferably without much value as jewelry, either, I guess. So, no insects--or anything else--as tiny as they come, and ugly.”

There came the sound of Hammond writing this down. “No inclusions, tiny, ugly. Got it.”

“Think you can find me something old enough?”

“Yes, but just to be sure, I'm going to outsource the job to someone I know can do it.”

...I know how much you love such things, so I enclosed a copy of these documents. I'm technically breaking the ND I signed to get them by doing so, so do try not to blab it to the entire church group, okay?

It looks like I'll be doing a lot of surgery if I end up being allowed to join the Project; unfortunately, that has never been my best subject, but I intend to try as hard as I can--as you can see, it's very fascinating!

Hugs and kisses
Lew

Sarka read the letter. While Dodgson was clearly trying to be as annoying as possible while doing so (an attempt to reassure himself of his own independence, no doubt), he'd proven to be an invaluable asset. He'd shown real initiative and the instincts of a natural born spy when he'd hunted down and befriended Seifer, and had already proven to be well worth Sarka's investment. He was sure that even if he didn't manage to infiltrate the Stanford Gestation Project, he'd find a way to continue providing invaluable information.

Too much initiative and instinct, perhaps; I wish I had him followed on that bus.

Don't do this, Aaron; down that path lies madness. Not just because the past was immutable, but because complexity addiction was a sure sign of a mind that was cleverer than it was smart. Besides, he didn't have enough eyes to spy on everything he needed spying on, and spying on his own spies would only make this worse.

His own research into Connverse and SCB revealed that those corporations were highly interdependent with other Hammond Industries companies, and so he had had to research the whole conglomerate. All corporations have a character, and the character of Hammond International was that it really liked controlling its own supply chains. If they bought a factory, they'd buy the refineries that supplied it and the mines that supplied the refineries, and if they bought a country club, they'd buy the catering companies that served it and the farms that supplied the catering companies. Almost all of their expansion was done by going up and down these networks, seizing control of the people they were buying from, then the other people those people were selling to, then the other people those people were buying from.

It made for quite a web. And an international one. And one which reached far beyond Sarka's ability to see. Well, I guess I'll just have to have someone with better eyes than me to take a look.

He picked up a phone and dialed an old friend who was still in the CIA.

“Hello?” said the friend.

“Hey, it's Aaron. I was wondering if you could look into something for me.” Sarka explained what he was looking for.

“And what should I say if anyone asks why I'm doing this? We're not the FBI.”

“Tell them you're following up on a hunch. Cite Hammond's ties to the Black Panthers.”

“He has ties to the Black Panthers?”

“He has a business partner who has made some fairly hefty donations to them.

“I can probably get away with that. I'll see what I can do, but Aaron, you owe me.”

Chapter Text

I-XXIII

“I've been thinking about it, and assuming amber can and does preserve DNA for hundreds of millions of years, there's some small chance in hell that this could actually work,” Atherton said.

“Oh, yeah?” Hammond asked, somewhere between neutral and bemused.

It had been a while since they last spoke of it, but not as long as Atherton had suspected it’d take Hammond’s people, whoever they were, to find them suitable amber; it was only October 5th, and they were in Hammond’s limo, on their way to meet them.

“Yes. I mean, there are a lot of unknowns, but it seems reasonable to assume that, all other things being equal, a mosquito with a full stomach would be more likely to land than an unfed one--it's being weighed down and has no pressing need to be anywhere, after all. What that translates to in terms of the odds of any given mosquito in amber having blood in it, I don't think we have any way to calculate, and there could well be any number of X factors that could throw the calculations off, anyway, but it strikes me that more than their fair share of biting insects in amber would have fed before being trapped in amber--whatever 'their fair share' is.

“I've also read some very convincing arguments put forward by Jack Horner and Alan Grant[1] for several genera of dinosaurs being endothermic.”

“Huh?”

“Warmblooded,” Atherton translated.

“Oh. I assume that helps us?”

“Yes, or at least it should. Modern mosquitoes have a strong preference for warmblooded prey. If we assume mosquitoes in the Cretaceous were the same way, then if dinosaurs were warmblooded, between that and them being the most prolific tetrapods of their time there would be a strong tendency for mosquitoes to be drinking dinosaur blood, which of course would be good for us. Conversely, of course, if this assumption about mosquitoes is true and dinosaurs were coldblooded...we're just not going to find any dinosaur DNA if that's the case.”

“Talk about all or nothing. I suppose there's no way to test that, either.”

“Actually, there should be, once we have blooded amber. You know how your erythrocytes--er, red blood cells--don't have nucleuses and junk?”

Hammond's eyes widened. “Isn't that where the DNA is?”

“Relax; it's a purely mammalian trait,” Atherton reassured him. “That's what I was getting at; if there's red blood cells around the mouth parts of the mosquitoes, we should be able to see it with an electron microscope--that's probably how we're going to find blooded amber in the first place. If we can see it, we can see whether its nucleated or not. If most of the blood we find is anucleate, mosquitoes were mostly feeding on mammals, so dinosaurs were coldblooded and what little nucleate blood we find comes from birds. If the blood is mostly nucleate, either dinosaurs were warmblooded or mosquitoes back then didn't particularly care.”

“So what you're saying is, we can test our assumptions after I've made a considerable investment,” Hammond said dryly.

“Pretty much. But hey, at least you'll have some way of knowing whether to fish or cut bait at some point. It's better than nothing, right?

“For what it's worth, I find Horner and Grant's arguments very convincing, but that could be bias on my part,” Atherton continued. “Partly because I want this to work, and partly because Grant says things like 'dinosaurs are assumed to be coldblooded not because of any evidence of coldbloodedness but because they were classified as reptiles from the start, and coldbloodedness is a trait of reptiles.'”

“And assuming that works, and assuming your not-polymerase works in the first place--all we'll have to do at that point is invent cloning,” Hammond mused. “Peter would have a heart attack if he knew I was even considering this. About how much amber would we have to buy to have a decent chance of finding blood, do you think?”

Atherton suppressed a wince; this was the bad news. “At a guess? I'd say...all of it.”

Hammond shrugged, as though that were perfectly reasonable. “Well. I do love a challenge.”

“You seriously think you can do that?” Atherton asked, shocked.

“Well, it seems to me that we don't actually have to stockpile this amber, we just need high throughput. Any amber our amber mines find that doesn't have insects and other such things in it can be immediately sold on. Much of the rest will be insects that don't suck blood, which can be sold on once an examination has determined this. Much of the blood-sucking animals won't have fed before being entombed in amber, and they too can be sold on after a closer examination. The system, once established, will pay for itself.”

“And establishing the system?”

Hammond shrugged. “Will be a challenge.”

“Fair enough. I must say, you dreamed up that strategy very swiftly,” Atherton said, impressed.

Hammond grinned wistfully and looked out the window. “Have I ever told you how I made my fortune?”

“I don't believe so,” Atherton said.

“Some friends, my sister, and I spent every pound we had to buy up as much stock as we could of a company called Bristol Canning. Which, as you might guess, was a company in Bristol that specialized in canning. We couldn't quite get half the outstanding stock, but we managed to make me chairman of the board and CEO.” He chuckled. “I can't believe investors allow us to get away with such blatant conflicts of interest as that! It oughtn’t be legal. But it is, and I did, and continue to do stuff like that. As I was saying, though, I became CEO with a contract with stock options and hired on my friends and family in positions where there were also stock options, and then we owned fifty-one percent of the company--at which point it was time to spring the trap. The first thing I did was order a massive modernization project. Which, of course, cost money, so I was forced--forced, I tell you!--to 'temporarily' reduce dividends--that is, the money paid out to shareholders--to zero.”

Hammond grinned widely, looking Atherton in the eye. “Well, the other shareholders didn't like that one bit, but what could they do? They couldn't oust me as CEO--the chairman wouldn't allow it--and they couldn't oust me as chairman--whenever they put it to the vote, fifty-one percent of the vote was always in my favor. Stock prices plummeted, and then my people and I bought it all up.”

“Ha! Nice. Seriously, though, how did you not get arrested?” Atherton asked.

“Arrested for what? There's no law that says a company can't reinvest one hundred percent of its net profit. They tried to get me for insider trading, but that didn't stick, either; I'd told the investors and the market at large exactly what I'd intended to do at every step of the way; I said I was going to modernize the company, and I did that, and I said I was going to buy the sheet metal company we get our aluminum from and I did that and then when I said I was going to modernize that company and then buy the mine I did that; all I did was not take particular care to not look like a madman while I was saying it.

“At the end of the day, my friends were worth five times what they'd been worth three years earlier and my sister and I was worth ten--and that was before the war broke out.” His jovial tone suddenly subsided and he became more subdued, looking out the window as he added: “That was when all the modernizing and expanding we'd done mainly to annoy the shareholders into divesting really paid off, but it never did feel right, bragging about that part of the story. Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm the furthest thing from ashamed of it--we did damn good work, canning foodstuffs and producing shells for our boys, and there's never been a more justified war and hopefully never will be--it's just that it doesn't feel right to say 'oh, yeah--while you or your son or your brother or father were out there fighting and dying, I was making a killing off the war.' Anyway, it's not like we predicted war would come and were out to capture as big a government contract as we could--we just got lucky.”[2]

“I nearly died in the war myself,” Atherton said.

“Oh, I didn't know you served?”

“No, nothing like for that; I was caught in the London blitz. A bomb landed nearly right on top of me. If it wasn't a dud...well, no one today would ever have heard of Norman Atherton. So you see, I, too, got lucky.

“It makes me wonder, how many geniuses have we lost? To accidents of fate like that, but also to forces that are far less uncontrollable. How many geniuses have had their gifts squandered by the world around them, because they're the wrong race, the wrong sex, the wrong sexual orientation, the wrong class? Because the nation they grew up in doesn't have an education system? Because they committed suicide, unable to abide by such a cruel, cold world? How much more progress could we have made by now in a fairer, freer world?” He shook his head.

Neither of them spoke for a second. Then Hammond said, “Well that got gloomy all of a sudden. My point was, I'm very good at finding the levers that allow me to get the maximum bang for my buck.”

“Oh, clearly,” Atherton said. “Let's just make sure what we want to do with it is even theoretically possible before you start scheming to seize the world's supply of amber.”

“Too late, Norman, I’m already scheming; sorry, but it's just too much fun.”

They felt the limo come to a stop. “We're here,” Hammond said.

They got out of the car, and Atherton recognized the building--it was Cowan, Swain and Ross. “Seriously? You sent lawyers on our amber hunt?”

“They're said to have the best in-house investigators of any firm in California and if there's one thing law firms are good at, it's finding the relevant details in reams and reams of data,” Hammond explained.

They entered the building and rode the elevator up to Ross's office. On his desk Ross had a box of paperwork, a manilla file folder out of the box, and an unmarked pill bottle like one would get at a pharmacy on top of the .

“Your items and the corresponding paperwork. This is a summation of the research we did to ensure that these samples are of the oldest amber on record; you may review it if you're curious,” said Ross.

It was hard to see what was inside the pill bottle, so Atherton opened it and dumped three orange-brown grains into his hand, the largest of which was the size of a buckshot pellet.

“I figured redundancy was prudent in whatever you wanted these for,” Ross explained why there were three.

“I suppose that's a good call,” Atherton said, replacing them in their container.

“How old is it?” Hammond asked.

“Two hundred and thirty million years. It's the oldest amber ever found by a significant margin. It was found in north-east Italy last year with about seventy thousand other shards[3], of which these were the three with the least value to scientists and jewelers alike,” Ross answered.

“That'll do,” Atherton said. “So, is this the weirdest thing a client has ever asked you to do or what?”

“Not even close,” Ross said, stone-faced.

____________________

Chapter Text

I-XXIV

“Hello?”

“Emma, it's John. You're on speaker. I’m in a spectronomy lab--”

“Spectography,” Atherton corrected without looking up from the electron microscope he was using, which looked an awful lot like the thing Spock used on Star Trek.[1]

“--with Norman. He's attempting to tweeze a single bacterium out of a sand grain’s worth of amber to see if he can find DNA in it or not, so this may well be our last opportunity to plot our takeover of the amber market before our hopes of cloning a dinosaur are dashed forever.”

The lab had been open; Stanford was never truly “abandoned,” but this late on a Friday night, it came about as close as it ever did.

“Well, in that case, I think it's time we get Peter in on the action. After all, if we don't give him proof to the contrary periodically, he might start to think we're sane,” Hammond-Johnson said. “Alright, I just paged him.”

“So in the meantime, how was your day?”

She told him about her day. Then Peter called. “Hello? You're on speaker.”

“So are you,” John said. “Whose there with you?”

“Um, hi, Mr. Hammond,” Wing said.

Norman looked up from his work. “Beth? What are you doing with Ludlow?”

“We're sort of on a date.”

“Since when are you two dating?” Atherton demanded.

“Since today. Also, you're not my father.”

“...Granted, it's just...Ludlow? Seriously?”

“Gee, thanks,” Ludlow muttered.

“How long have you even known him?”

“We're going on a date, not getting hitched,” Wing said dryly.

“Uncle John. You called for a reason, I take it?” Ludlow asked, desperate to change the subject.

“Oh, right. I take it Ms. Wing is the only one within earshot?” Hammond asked.

“Yeah, we went and found a conference room for this call.”

Hammond explained what was going on.

“You...what? I...what?”

“You people are insane,” Wing said approvingly.

“You don't know the half of it. Do you know how this man got into this business?” Ludlow asked.

“Yeah, you told me that story. It was brilliant.”

“So, what do you think, Peter?” Hammond-Johnson asked.

“My first thought is, don't. My second thought is, don't!” He paused. “More practically, since you won't listen to 'don't', don't do anything until Atherton actually produces this magic whatsit of his, as we'd be proper fucked without it. Also, wait until after Atherton's elephant has been produced. We're going to need a lot of funding, an obscene amount of funding, and it'd be useful if we had some sort of proof that Atherton could produce miracles when we did it. With all that money pouring in, I have no idea how we're going to maintain control of Dinosaurs-R-Us or whatever we call the company. Honestly, siezing control of the world's supply of amber--”

“--may be easier than we think,” Wing said.

“How so?” Hammond-Johnson asked.

“We're looking to control the amber, not directly profit from it, and that opens up options. We could buy company A, have it use its resources to buy company B, have it use its resources to buy company C, have companies A, B, and C buy company D, have company D buy companies E, F, and G, ad infinitum. Our monetary returns on our investment diminish to practically zero before too long, which is why it's not really done intentionally, but for us that's beside the point. The point is control.”

“I...have no idea whether or not that's legal,” Ludlow said.

“We should offshore this company either way; it breaks the spirit of anti-trust laws even if it doesn't break the letter of them,” Hammond-Johnson said.

“Such a system will be tricky to coordinate,” Hammond said.

“What we need is some sort of centralized oversight committee that can spot and fix problems wherever they occur. The problem with such a system is getting it so that it's a recognizable authority figure at every level of our...vertical conglomerate?...without having every government in the world go on high alert because 'Oh my God--SPECTRE is real!'” Hammond-Johnson said.

“Not that I disagree with your point, but don't you think you're being a little melodramatic?” Ludlow asked.

“To be fair, we are talking about seizing the world's supply of a natural resource,” Wing observed. “I'm pretty sure even SPECTRE thought that was too cartoony and unbelievable to pull off.”

“And if we behave in ways that have no clear profit motive, people are naturally going to assume there's something untoward going on. Corporations are designed to pursue the almighty bottom line, after all,” Hammond said.

“Since we have something of a general battle plan sketched out for seizing the world's supply of amber--I can't believe I just said that--let’s move on. The simple fact is that nothing we do that's related to this project is going to be cheap, which means we're going to need to raise money. How we get that money notwithstanding, how do we retain control of this project after selling a billion dollars worth of stock in Dinocorp?” Ludlow asked.

“He's right,” Atherton said without looking up. “Moneymen tend to be blithering idiots, and the less we have to deal with their insipid demands and pointless timetables, the better. ...Er, present company excepted.”

Hammond grinned wanly. “No offense taken.”

“I was actually talking more long term, but he's right about short term control being a priority, too. We can't be having outsiders interfering in our business,” Ludlow said.

“The fact that we’re starting the company from scratch means we can pack the board with sycophants, and gerrymander whatever folks investors force on us into separate subcommittees. That’ll give us a little breathing room,” Hammond-Johnson said. “Of course, if the investors get too pissed off, they can replace the board. The trick is, keeping that from happening for long enough to translate short-term control into long-term control by, say, contracting out as many jobs as we can to Hammond International and paying in stock.”

Atherton chuckled. “‘Translate short-term control into long-term control’ is quite possibly the greatest thing anyone’s ever said.”

“Would the shareholders really let you get away with that?” Wing asked.

“John literally just told me a story earlier today about a scheme of his that relied on him being both CEO and chairman of the board,” Atherton said.

“The Bristol Canning thing?” Wing asked.

“Yes, the Bristol Canning thing. Point being, I don't think investors are all that intelligent as a class if they allow a conflict of interest so obvious even I can spot it.”

“It’s true that they don't much care what you do so long as the money keeps rolling in,” Hammond-Johnson allowed. “Problem is, the money won't be rolling in for a long time.”

“We’ll need a referee,” Hammond said. “Someone who’ll go between, who the investors will trust to keep us aboveboard but who’ll shield us from their, ah, ‘insipid demands and pointless timetables.’”

“And who won’t blink at us quietly consolidating our power,” Hammond-Johnson said. “So to summarize: a group that the investors will trust the reputation of, ideally one that'll be paid in stock so that the investors will know that it's in the referee’s own interest to look out for their interests, but that we can trust not to bother our scientists and resource allocators with their...demands. We need auditors who will be smart enough to know we're not hoodwinking them with the science, yet dumb enough--or, more realistically, in our pocket enough--that they won't catch us hoodwinking them on the business end.”

“Sounds like the exact opposite of what the investors will insist upon,” Ludlow observed.

“There’s many ways to influence someone that’re subtler than handing them a big bag of money--such as, doing favors for their family members,” Hammond-Johnson said. “That being said, I think we made as much progress on that prong as we’re going to; we need someone to run interference while we...what, exactly? I elect we move onto what exactly we intend to do to seize control of the company.”

“Perhaps a variation of what Uncle John did with Bristol Canning?” Ludlow said. “Find some excuse to delay and delay putting it on the market until we've managed to buy up enough of the stock.”

“The only thing I can think of is, whatever we do, we need secrecy and time,” Wing said. “No one isn't going to want a piece of the world's first cloned dinosaur, no matter how long it takes. And if they do get tired of waiting, they'd easily find people who they can offload their stock on who aren't us.”

“'Us' is it?” Ludlow asked bemusedly.

“What, you think I'm going to let you guys plot world domination without me? This is way too much fun!” Wing said.

Hammond chuckled. “Young lady, you're hired.”

“Hired as what?” Wing asked.

“I'll think of something,” Hammond said. “I can think of a plausible reason we'd need secrecy easily enough; after all, we want to blindside the market, do we not? Hopefully I'd be able to point to Norman's elephant becoming an instant craze as an example of how beneficial keeping tight control of information can be.”

“We'd need the milestone we need to achieve before going public to be open to interpretation,” Hammond-Johnson said. “If Norman creates a dinosaur before we've seized a controlling share, we need a justifiable way to say 'No, not yet.'”

“Having multiple dinosaurs?” Wing suggested. “It has the advantage that it can always be walked back if it takes too long. As for selling it to the shareholders...well, it helps to avoid the novelty wearing off, right?”

“No, not good enough,” Hammond said, shaking his head. “We need something that will be greater than the sum of its parts. A keystone attraction, that'll stick in the mind and serve as the foothold, nay, the crown jewel, for a mighty brand empire. Something palpable. We need to...do something with the dinosaurs.”

“I have it!” Atherton shouted.

“You know what we should do?” Hammond asked, surprised.

“What? No. I have the DNA! Come look!” Atherton all but dragged Hammond to the device he was using like an excitable child. Hammond had no idea what he was looking at, but trusted Atherton to know his business. “That is, oh, probably about eighty base pairs or so of bacterial DNA, that has been preserved since the goddamn Triassic! I can't wait to publish this shit!”

“That sounds wonder--wait...publish? Heh...this is awkward, but could you...maybe...not?” Hammond asked.

“What.”

“It's just that we've been talking about the need for secrecy for the last ten minutes or so and it'd be a great help to that effort if nobody knows there's a viable source of dinosaur DNA out there. Come to think of it, it's good for the practical aspects of our plans if amber remains being just another type of somewhat precious stone.”

“Uncle, please,” Wing said.

Atherton glared at the phone. “Et tu, Brute?”

“Just...sit on it for a while. That DNA survived since the Triassic; another decade isn't going to hurt anything,” Wing said.

For a handful of seconds, no one breathed. Then Atherton sighed and seemed to deflate a bit. “Fine. I mean, it’s not like this is the polio vaccine or anything. I guess. I suppose I can sit on these findings, for a while.”

____________________

Chapter Text

A little bit of trivia about this timeline, a path it could have gone down--but didn't:

Early in the planning of the first version this TL before it occurred to me that there ought to be traces of blood on the outside of the mosquito that could be seen with an electron microscope, I was going to have them dissect every. single. mosquito they found to check for blood. This would have resulted in a lot of mosquito parts just hanging around that something would have to be done with, which would have been a source of conflict between Hammond and Atherton--Hammond would want to just destroy it because it's useless, but Atherton would consider that a crime against science. But considering that we're talking about enough to fill literal cargo containers (I know--I did the calculations), they couldn't exactly keep this stuff in the office freezer. Atherton was going to put his foot down about the need to preserve these insects for science, though. And so, I came up with a few solutions.

One was to build a cryogenics facility in Barrow, Alaska. It would be buried in the permafrost, which itself would have heat pipes similar to those used in the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline in it to ensure it stays cold, and then there'd be an active cooling system to make it cold enough. (The logic behind this being that putting it in the coldest place in North America would minimize the energy needed to cool it further--and hence the electricity bill--and that if a refrigeration pump blew out they'd have more time to fix it.) I went so far as to look at the construction companies currently working in Barrow and consider the hypothetical impact this would have on their economy.

And then I realized that so long as the inclusions remained sterile, they didn't have to be frozen, per se--after all, it's not like the amber they came from was frozen--and that's how this happened:

inclusions plate colored.png

That is a slab of solid lead with 1296 divots for inclusions. The weight cited in the picture (11.44 kg) assumes that powdered lead will be used as filler to prevent the inclusions from bouncing around and such, though I also considered mercury, noble gasses, and salts, not to mention combinations thereof. That lip is so fat to allow it to be welded shut. Prior to use it is sterilized with fire and then it is filled with inclusions and the aforementioned lead dust, welded shut, and painted to prevent oxidation while in a xenon (or some other noble gas) environment (the welding torch has to provide its own oxygen). 150 of these would then be stacked on one another and have a block of concrete 1.5 feet square by 3 feet tall poured around them. (The whole thing would weigh close to two US tons.) These would then be taken out to a desolate piece of land in Death Valley InGen or Hammond Industries (as Hammond International was then known) owns and buried. Or possibly just painted white and stored out on a lot. Either way, there'd be a couple of security guards who would have no idea why they're guarding what they're guarding.

Which ought to be freaky, especially since the blocks would have things like this stenciled onto them:

...And then, of course, I realized that any mosquito with blood inside of it would likely have blood on the outside that ought to be visible with a powerful enough electron microscope, meaning they only had to open a piece of amber if they knew there was blood in it, saving InGen all this expense and hassle but rendering all the work I put into all this pointless and nixing what could have been an interesting internal conflict for InGen in the bud. Oh, well.

Chapter Text

I-XXV

Sarka received a large, nondescript package in the mail, and knew it was his contact in the CIA. Deciding not to take it home where his wife and children could see it, he went instead to a motel, got a room, and sat down to read the pages and pages of details that had been unearthed.

In the early days Hammond Industries, as it was then known, was characterized by rapid, aggressive growth; Hammond seemed to have a hole in his pocket, spending his profits on new investments as soon as he possibly could. When he married Emma Johnson, an American, Hammond Industries became Hammond International, and it expanded its reach to America, to Canada, to Australia, and through Britain's then-colonies. He nearly bankrupted himself several times in doing so, but always managed to hit the ground running and eventually regain his lost status. Clearly intelligent, clearly talented, but the pattern held up until the birth of his first child, at which point he seemed to do a complete one-eighty, his investment strategies suddenly becoming very conservative.

An adrenaline junkie by nature, he loves to dance on the knife edge of disaster, but everything changed when he became a father; suddenly, it wasn't just his own fates he was playing with, but his daughters’, and that wasn't acceptable, Sarka thought, beginning to create his mental profile of Hammond. Perhaps it would turn out to be too romanticized, or perhaps it wouldn't; everything was in flux at this point.

For as long as there was the pitter patter of little feet in the Hammond household, Hammond International’s growth was characterized by being relatively conservative, and Hammond consolidated his power within it. But children grow up, as had Hammond's, and with an empty house, his habits had changed again. It wasn't quite the same daring-do as had characterized his days as a young man, though.

Has your fire cooled, old man? Do you still have your obligations on your mind? Or are you just out of practice?

Sarka got a clearer picture than he'd had before of how Hammond International operated, but it largely wasn't surprising. There were some odd quirks, as one might expect of a man who was largely self-taught, but--

His train of thought was interrupted when he saw the property it had acquired in Kenya some months ago. It wasn't so much that it was surprising that Hammond International would buy the Kimana Game Preserve[1]--the conglomerate seemed to dislike having to deal with international money markets and got around them by having internal economies in every nation they set up in, and a game preserve was a sound investment towards that end--but the fact that another game preserve had gone on the market the previous year and they hadn't been interested then. Their operations in Kenya didn't appear to have changed between then and now overmuch (their Kenya branch was mainly import/export--importing tractors and exporting tea--and tea farms), so it stood to reason that this was due to changes elsewhere. Such as SCB? Possibly…

On Saturday, October 13th, the bartender at Roland Tembo’s[2] favorite Mombassa bar picked up a ringing phone. “Hello? ...Uh, yeah, he’s here.” The bartender looked at Tembo. “It’s for you.”

He took it. “Who are you and how did you find me here?”

“A customer,” the voice on the other end said. “I paid good money to be put in contact with the best game hunter in Kenya. I take it you are he, Mr. Tembo?”

“I'm the best there is at what I do,” Tembo said. And it was true; at thirty-three, he was at the top of his game and still filled with piss and vinegar...but somewhere deep inside of him, something was starting to get bored.

“Good. I have a job for you.”

Tembo took a swig of his beer, rolling his eyes. Must you be so melodramatic? “Alright. What do you want to kill?” He didn't bother with a whole lot of tact; someone this determined wouldn't be put off by his personality.

“I don't intend to come down there at all unless you find something truly interesting, and I expect you to shoot nothing but pictures.”

“Then hire a photographer, mate.”

“I don't need someone who can make the pictures look pretty, I need someone who can avoid getting trampled by the wildlife or caught by the game wardens.”

“Oh, an illegal photoshoot, is it?” Tembo didn't quite like that he perked up at that, but outsmarting predators was his favorite thing to do and there was no smarter predator than humans.

“I want you to find evidence that some of the animals in Kimana Game Preserve are being used as lab rats; your tactics, legal or otherwise, are up to you.”

“Uh-huh.” Theoretically Tembo could go in as a paying customer, but this sounded like it was going to take a while, which would make the owners suspicious, and besides, he doubted the voice on the other end of the phone would front him that kind of money. (And if he did, he had better things to spend it on.) “What sort of experiments are we talking about?” Tembo asked.

“I can't tell you that.”

“Don't pull that cloak and dagger shit on me; the more I know, the better I'll be able to work.”

“Let's just say you should be prepared for anything.”

“Way to be ominous without saying a goddamn thing,” Tembo said dryly.

“I don't want to limit your focus and make you miss something you might otherwise notice. Do you want the job or not?”

Tembo considered. “I might be interested. Rather depends on the price, though....”

Sarka hung up the phone with a sigh, wondering if the whole omniscience act had been worth it. He'd bought favors to be put in contact with Tembo the way he had, and that vagueness about what he was looking for (which in truth was simply because he didn’t know what he was looking for) had only pissed Tembo off.

He had no file on Roland Tembo; creating one would have been a waste of resources, and besides, it didn't really matter how trustworthy Tembo was, he probably wasn't ever going to find out who was hiring him. The only thing that mattered was that he did the job.

Which didn't mean Sarka didn't feel naked without one; he didn't like not knowing what made people tick. And no doubt the fact that he was off his game had shown.

Well, as he said, it didn't really matter; he wasn't creating a relationship with Roland Tembo, the way he was with, say, Lewis Dodgson.

Tembo examined a genet[3] he'd tranqed, finding no mysterious scars or incisions or any other indication that it had been in any way experimented on. He took some pictures and some notes (“Tuesday, 30 October 1979: 0823 hours--tranqued genet (X cc of Y tranquilizer) in grid square Z. Observations: Blah, blah, and blah.”), just to show the client that he didn't just take the money and go get drunk with it.

It was the seventeenth day of his mission and hoped that he'd find something to report soon; the short rains would start in about three more weeks and he didn’t want to be out here when that happened. This was certainly a new experience for him; normally he was after specific prey, and so he went to where that prey could be found, found some tracks, and tracked them down--here he had no idea what it was that he was looking for, and so he was crossing the preserve in a grid pattern, metaphorically turning over every rock. He wondered how the scientists involved planned on checking up on their--

And then Tembo slapped his forehead and groaned, because he realized he was going about this all wrong. He was out here trying to find individual animals, when he should be looking for human activity. It was quite simple, really; there was no way people doing experiments on animals would then just release them with no way of tracking them down; they had to have a way to find them, and that meant that if Tembo could discern what it was, he'd have a way to find them, too.

If I were a high-tech company experimenting on free-range animals, how would I keep track of them? With technology! I'd fit them all with radio collars or bracelets or something, and then...have some way to track that...

Tembo felt like he'd seen something that ought to shed some light on it. He reached into his pack and looked for the research he'd done into the game preserve--and found what he was looking for right in their brochure. Feeling lost? Just pick up the car phone and call the front desk! Thanks to our innovative park-wide radio LAN, our friendly service personnel will be able to tell you exactly where you are on the map.

Radio LAN. Tembo didn't really know what that was, but he knew that if it could be used to track tourists, it could be used to track animals. He set out again, reinvigorated with purpose, on the hunt for artificial structures.

Tembo waited patiently the following Friday while the shopkeeper examined the device he'd brought in.

He gave Tembo a skeptical look. “What did you do--hit it with a rock?” Ajay Sidhu[4] demanded.

“I needed to make it look like an animal had stolen it,” Tembo said. “I need to track whatever it was tracking, preferably on a more mobile platform.”

“I can replace the broken parts; beyond that, it depends on what happens when I turn it on,” Sidhu said.

Tembo nodded. “Thanks for the honesty.”

“That doesn't look very inconspicuous,” Tembo observed as he approached Sidhu's jeep, parked on the shoulder of the road outside of the Kimana Game Preserve, three days later.

“Yeah, well, I needed a computer to interpret the signals I was getting from this thing, and it wasn't exactly something I could hump around in my personal gear,” Sidhu said. “I've been working on this for the last hour and think I almost got it--”

Suddenly there was a menu on the screen. “We're in. Let's see...ooh, a map!” Sidhu hit the “M” key, and green squiggly lines appeared on the screen with more instructions in a key in the corner. “It even has a search function. Pity I don't know what to search for.”

“Can they ping us, now that we're...in?” Tembo asked, not knowing what the proper terminology would be.

“I don't know. Let's find out,” Sidhu said, grinning.

Tembo could hardly believe what he’d just heard from the mousy little Indian, but then the shock wore off and he grinned back; in that moment he knew that this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Sidhu searched page after page of map screen, each one denoting a specific section of the game preserve, and found the one where they were. “Right, I'm not seeing one of those triangles at our location, so I'm guessing we're invisible,” Sidhu said. They'd seen moving triangles with alphanumeric designations like “S15”, and assumed them to be vehicles.

“Alright, then. Let's have a look around,” Tembo said.

Sidhu grinned wolfishly. “I'm game. There's four designates of triangles I've seen; V, which presumably means 'vehicle' or 'visitor', 'S' is probably 'security', and then there’s ‘E’ and ‘C’...‘experiment’ and ‘control’? And unlike the 'esses' and 'vees', the 'ees' and ‘sees’ are all gathered in a single location...like a herd. If I were a betting boy, that's where I'd look for our animals.”

Tembo nodded. “Seems logical enough. Let's go.” Sidhu was proving to be a good man in the field; Tembo made a mental note of it.

Sidhu guided him for an indeterminate amount of time, and then they found a herd of elephants, several of which had harnesses on. “Whelp, I've got something to report to my client.”

____________________

Chapter Text

I-XXVI

“The elephants are in harnesses?” Sarka asked.

“That's what I said,” Tembo said over the phone.

“Any chance those are just for tracking?”

“No way. You don't need all that heavy equipment just for a radio collar. There were car batteries hooked up to that equipment. Whatever those harnesses are doing, they're doing a lot of it,” Tembo said. “This stands in stark contrast with the ‘C’s’, which actually are just wearing radio collars.”

“I see. I trust you'll be sending me lots of pictures of those things?”

“Already in the mail,” Tembo assured him.

“Excellent.”

~ ~ ~

Dr. Daniel Pines studied the pictures intently for more than a half hour when they finally arrived next Saturday morning, neither he nor Sarka making a sound. “Has your man in the field reported any sort of status update?”

“No, but it's only been four days since he found this,” Sarka said.

“And there's no other group of animals in the park like this?”

“No. He has checked thoroughly.”

“In that case, given the ages of these elephants, the fact that they're all cows, and the fact that there's a transvaginal component, I'd say these are prototypes of some sort of pregnancy monitor. The utility of such a device would be hard to overstate; imagine being able to spot and prevent birth defects before they happen--”

“But those things are huge, and no woman's going to wear all that,” Sarka protested.

“Presumably they want to make sure their tech works before going through the expense of miniaturizing it.”

Sarka nodded. It made sense, and it fit with everything else he knew of what SCB was doing. “I see. So what could you do if I got you one of those?”

~ ~ ~

“You need the board of directors to sign off on it, Aaron,” said Biosyn's CEO, Bill Steingarten.[1]

“Seriously?” Sarka asked.

“If time's a factor I could call an emergency meeting,” Steingarten offered.

Sarka sighed. “Sorely tempted as I am to take you up on that offer, alas, no. Time is not a factor insofar as I'm aware. I was just really hoping to get in and out of Kenya before the rainy season.” The Biosyn Corporation of Cupertino, California, had never called an emergency meeting of its board of directors--so calling one for Sarka's convenience would be just a bit overkill, and, worse, may make them more likely to refuse his request. I guess Tembo and Sidhu are just going to have to keep an eye on they situation for a while longer.

~ ~ ~

“So, what's this semester's grand project?” Thorne asked as they stood around what was undoubtedly the single most important piece of equipment the Stanford Gestation Project possessed--the coffee pot--on the seventeenth of December. It was a Monday morning, which shouldn’t matter because they were always on the clock, but somehow did.

“Capture mosquitoes, coax them into feeding, and dip them in liquid nitrogen--with as few moving parts and as low a budget as possible,” Atherton answered.

Back when Thorne himself taught Structural Engineering 101a--known as “Thorny Problems” by the students--he'd been famous (or infamous, depending on who you asked) for continually provoking his class to solve applied-engineering challenges he set for them. One such challenge, which had come to be known as the Great Toilet Paper Disaster in Stanford student lore, had resulted from Thorne asking his students to drop a carton of eggs off of Hoover Tower without breaking them using only the cardboard tubes inside of toilet paper rolls as cushioning and resulted in eggs splattered everywhere; this habit (and the destruction it caused) was one of the major reasons Thorne had been a thorn in the side of Stanford and a pariah among his peers--so naturally Atherton had picked it up, albeit to a lesser degree, having only one such challenge per course. In part this limitation was due to the fact that his was not an engineering class, and that he was only introducing the element to give his students an appreciation for the fact that theory and practicality can and will be at odds at times, in part because there were limits to even Atherton's political tone deafness.

“Huh. I'd have thought you'd pick something we'd be able to use for the project.”

Atherton managed to hid his wince. “Yeah, well, not everything is about us,” he said; while technically one hundred percent true, this statement was a lie nonetheless.

There wasn't going to be a whole lot of blood in “blooded amber,” assuming they found any blooded amber at all, and the way his not-polymerase worked (would work...if it worked) meant that he needed as much DNA as he could get his hands on, so he figured he'd best find some way of getting red blood cells out of a mosquito's esophagus without destroying the cells...which meant he'd have to have a supply of blooded mosquitoes to work with, and these kids were going to find the best way to supply them. It was in some ways horrifically premature, but Atherton found that he worked best while juggling many items; that way, when he hit a wall in one project, he could switch gears to another.

And he'd certainly hit a wall with not-polymerase, which was not exactly reassuring. The simple fact was, they were banking a lot on him pulling a miracle out of his ass when he'd been trying for several years and so far--

“Fair enough. So I heard they've improved upon your PCR design over at Cetus,” Thorne said.

“Did they now?”

“Yup. They went and used the polymerase from a bacteria found in a thermal vent in Yellowstone so that it wouldn't break down and have to be replaced every time you cook it, so now you can just let your PCR machine run on its own for a couple hours while you go out and have tea or something. Taq polymerase[2], they call it.”

Atherton felt numb, a million ideas going off in his head at once.

Thorne must have noticed. “You feeling alright?”

“Yes, it's just...why didn't I think of that?”

Thorne snorted. “Christ, get a load of Reed Richards over here. The rest of us mere mortals are capable of having good ideas from time to time too, you know.”

~ ~ ~

Hammond picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“I know how to make it!” Atherton shouted excitedly into the phone. “Well, I don't have a blueprint or anything, but I know how to go about making it!”

“Look, Norman, I'm leaving for Kenya in two hours--”

“There's very few people I can brag about this to since we're keeping it under wraps, and damn it I'm going to brag; this is a big deal, John.”

It hit Hammond. “Are you talking about...not-polymerase?”

“Indeed I am, John! The key is heat resistance. The problem I've been having is with--let’s call it scaffolding. I create structures to assist in the creation of other structures, and then removing them becomes problematic--but if I make the product heat resistant and the scaffolding not, I can simply cook it away. Which means that I can basically use scaffolding with abandon. There's are still major problems--I still have to somehow 'teach' it to recognize telomeres and change its behavior accordingly, on account of the fact that all telomeres are exactly the fucking same, an obvious problem for a system that tries to fix broken DNA by comparing identical sequences. Seriously, I can recite the vertebrate telomere--it's just TTAGGG on repeat.--”

“Norman. I thought you called to brag.”

“I did, it's just easy to slip into rant mode. A great thing about not worrying about the scaffolding is that I can add all sorts of crazy things to it. I'm imagining little bubbles of helium being attached to the thing-- that way I can harvest the cells they're being produced in, centrifuge them out, cook them, and then centrifuge them again.”

“...Why?”

“Purity. One of the major downsides of PCR is mutation caused by DNA from the bacteria the polymerase was harvested from getting into the target DNA. The helium--which I introduce to the environment when I want to induce production--allows the not-polymerase to be artificially light, making it rise to the top of the slurry, then I move it to a new tube, detach it, and spin it again to get it away from the scaffolding, and the result should be, well, a very pure concentration of the product. Considering the preciousness of what we'll be using it on, I kinda want to get the mutation rate as close to zero as I can.”

“Yes, that would be good,” Hammond agreed. “I had no idea PCR causing mutations was a thing.”

“As with all endeavors undertaken by mortal kind, science is an imperfect thing,” Atherton said equanimously. “What'cha gonna do, turn to witchcraft?”

“Look, I really have to catch this plane--”

“Yes, yes, I'm done. By all means, go.”

Hammond hung up the phone, grinning. Surely that was a good omen for this inspection, right?

____________________

Chapter Text

I-XXVII

Sarka entered the surprisingly modern-looking Jomo Kenyatta International Airport[1] and looked for his name on a sign. He saw it in the hands of a suitably hard-bitten-looking man.

“Roland Tembo, I presume,” Sarka said.

“That I am, Mr. Sarka.”

Sarka had considered using a fake name, but had decided against it. He was risking trespassing and poaching charges here--both of which could be undone by finding and bribing the right authorities. Being caught using a fake ID could get him labeled a spy, which wasn't something he wanted to risk as a spy (albeit a corporate one).

“And your friend?” Sarka asked.

“Ajay Sidhu,” the friend said. “I'm the one who jury rigged the system that lets us slip in and out of the park unnoticed whenever we please.”

“Yes, I've read Mr. Tembo's reports.” He turned to Tembo. “Speaking of which, update me.”

“As expected, they kitted out another elephant this morning, bringing the total number of 'E' elephants to thirteen,” Tembo said. A team of scientists had been doing so once a week, every week, since Tembo and Sidhu had begun observing them.

Sarka nodded. “If you have everything you need, we can leave immediately.”

~ ~ ~

“Are you feeling alright?” Robert Muldoon[2] asked.

“Have you ever had a good idea while in bed and didn't write it down because you were sure you'd remember in the morning, and then in the morning you have no idea what it was?” Hammond asked.

Muldoon shrugged. “Probably; I can't recall a specific instance off-hand, though.”

“Well, it happened to me. You were explaining all the ways in which this park benefits our bottom line, and something for one of my other projects just...clicked. But now it's gone, and it's just so frustrating. I don’t even remember which project, exactly.”

“I see. I could go into the whole speech again if you think it would jog your memory,” Muldoon said. He'd heard about Hammond's reluctance to get a game preserve beforehand and had spent a long time preparing to reassure him of it being a sound financial investment.

“It couldn't hurt, but just for the record, I never doubted the preserve's financial soundness or viability. I was just worried about it ethically.”

“I see. With all due respect, Mr. Hammond, if Hammond International is anything like your typical conglomerate, this is probably the least environmentally destructive business you own,” Muldoon said. “We're not tearing up the Earth for minerals or pumping pollution into the atmosphere or cutting down forests for farmland; in fact, the very fact that we are making money off of nature means that there's a lot of people who have a financial incentive to protect it around here. Including, you know, us.”

Hammond nodded. “I see. You do have a point.”

Muldoon's radio went off. “Muldoon, this is Rogers.”

“Rogers, this is Muldoon. What is it, Steve?”

“I think we've got trespassers.”

And trespassers meant poachers. “Alright. I'll be at your location shortly.” One good thing about the radio LAN was never having to ask for coordinates.

Muldoon politely excused himself and went down to the garage.

He was at Rogers' location inside of ten minutes, and that's when he saw the ruts. Someone had driven through here repeatedly during the short rains, Kenya's second annual wet season which had recently ended, and he knew it wasn't his people or the tourists--this was not a major route.

Muldoon nodded sagely. “We have a problem.”

~ ~ ~

“I think we have a problem” Sidhu said.

“What is it, Ajay?” Tembo asked.

Sidhu pointed at the screen. “There's a lot of wardens congregating around our usual entrance.”

“Damn,” Tembo said. “Well, sorry to cut this trip short, Mr. Sarka--”

“I did not fly out here for nothing. You can track the locations of the wardens--just avoid them.”

“They're on high alert! We can come back later--”

“The longer we wait, the more time they have to think and formulate a plan. If we want to accomplish our plan, there is literally never going to be a better time than now.”

“We don't know how much they know!” Tembo protested.

“We know they're not going to know less tomorrow than they do today,” Sarka said.

Neither man spoke for a second.

“Don't make me make it an order, Mr. Tembo,” Sarka said.

“...What do you think, Ajay?”

Sidhu shrugged. “On the one hand, they know the park better than I do; on the other hand, we know where they are and they don't know where we are, so we should be fine as long as they don't figure that out. I'd probably rate our chances of getting away with this at about sixty, seventy percent?"

Tembo exhaled audibly. “Alright, I've heard worse odds. Let's go.”

They all then sat in relative silence, only Sidhu speaking and then only to give directions to Tembo, until they found the elephants.

“You're going to want to grab a weapon,” Tembo told Sarka. “We've brought lethal and nonlethal ordinance--”

“I've got it covered,” Sarka said, pulling and assembling something from his duffle bag.

Lindstradt air rifle, Tembo observed. An expensive toy for rich idiots. Oh, it was certainly functional and versatile, but no more so than Tembo's tranq gun, which had cost him a tenth of the price after being fully customized; expense rarely had much to do with utility, when it came to high-end items.[3] “You're going to want a backup.”

Sarka took an elephant gun from Tembo, proving he wasn't a complete idiot.

“It's like they're not afraid of us at all,” Sarka breathed.

“Because they're not. They're used to humans walking among them,” Tembo said. They're basically tame, he thought disgustedly.

Sarka nodded.

Tembo moved out. Conveniently, the most recently kitted out elephant was out towards the edge of the herd; the elephants were often uncomfortable in their harnesses for the first week or two, and this one was rubbing against a tree to get it off. Tembo took his shot.

~ ~ ~

Coming out to the Kimana Game Preserve or the elephant sanctuary they had an arrangement with in India was usually Katz' job--he was the mammalogist, after all--but he'd had a family emergency and de l'Adrien had stepped in for him. The man in charge of maintaining Kimana's mainframe seemed to be trying to make her regret it.

SCB needed the best minds, and Atherton was of the theory that to get them you looked among the people who had to work twice as hard to get half as much credit and were surviving anyway; consequently, it skewed heavily towards women and racial minorities, or at least as heavily as it could in 1979. As such, the atmosphere was extremely inclusive, leading to a supportive, close-knit culture. And after seven months of that, de l'Adrien was thrust back out into the real world and reminded that men were actually horrible.

Reese Allan Goole was Kimana's local tech guy. He didn't seem to think she knew how to use a computer (which was annoying), didn't seem to think she knew how to do her job (more annoying), and was trying to hit on her (most annoying of all). She wondered what a tactful way of telling him he wouldn't have a chance in hell even if his advances didn't remind her of a guy who'd throw a game so that he could pay a girl insincere compliments about how good she was at it, and decided to pretend she had a boyfriend instead.

Really, she should have done so long ago, but she hated that line, for several reasons. For one thing, he wasn't going to learn anything from it; not that it was her job to teach him or anything, but she knew she wasn't solving the problem, just foisting it off on the next woman he made a pass at. (How wonderful would it be, for everyone concerned, to live in a world where you could just tell men to piss off?) For another, she resented the fact that it worked, given the undeniable implication that men respected men they've never met more than women that were right in front of them. And then, of course--

“We have some strange readings from E13,” someone said; de l'Adrien couldn't recall his name, but he worked under Goole.

E and C stood for experiment and control, but they weren’t entirely accurate; the C’s were those elephants they were taking blood samples from.

“Let me see,” de l'Adrien said as she went over to his workstation and read the green text on his computer screen.

“I'm sure it's nothing, Miss de l'Adrien,” Goole said. “The elephants never like their harnesses.”

“Yeah, but E13's heart-rate spiked, and then suddenly dropped to sleep levels,” the other man said.

De l'Adrien pointed at the screen. “Either the new sensor’s malfunctioning or something’s wrong in a new and interesting way. Either way, Muldoon needs to send someone to take a look at it.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing--”

De l’Adrien had had just about enough of his shit. “Either you call Muldoon, or I call Hammond about replacing you.” She didn’t much care if he decided she was a bitch at this point.

“Fine,” he said, as though this were the greatest, most tedious, most unnecessary labor of his life.

____________________

Chapter Text

I-XXVIII

The harness was proving difficult to remove. The harness itself had buckles, but the transvaginal probe was really stuck up there.

“I suppose it makes sense; they wouldn't want their animals removing them, after all,” Tembo said.

“How do you figure it's stuck in there?” Sarka mused. “The only thing I can figure is something like the balloon at the end of a catheter, but I'm not seeing an air tube anywhere.” This was so not his area of expertise.

“Oh, shit,” Sidhu said from the jeep.

“What is it?” Tembo asked.

“We must have set off some sort of alarm, because the wardens are coming this way.”

Well, then; that kind of decides things, doesn't it? He reached into his bag and skipped right over the hedge-clippers in favor of an angle grinder to use on the transvaginal cord. It cut through the mass of wires inside like butter. “Alright, grab it and let's get out of here.”

~ ~ ~

Muldoon looked at the elephant as the vet checked it for injuries. This didn't make sense; the shortest route out of the park was the way by which he had come, so the fact that they hadn't met them on the way and they weren't here meant that they'd gone deeper into the park, but why? It wasn't like these were normal poachers; they came, they stripped the elephant they'd tranqed of its harness--indeed they seemed to be in quite a hurry, given the fact that they'd left part of it behind. They were clearly here for the harness and whatever shady mad science shit Southern California Biotechnics was up to with it, so why go deeper into the Preserve? And why the rush? The only logical conclusion was that he had spooked them, but Muldoon had no idea what he could have done to tip his hand. For that matter, how had they been coming and going so frequently without anyone noticing them?

Alright, then. Somehow he had spooked them. How didn't particularly matter right now--what mattered was where they'd go if spooked. He had a vague idea of the answer, but he needed to know what resources he had to work with in that area. He got in his jeep, punched up the map on the dashboard computer, and stared at the little triangle markers that clearly denoted the location of every warden and visitor in the Preserve--and suddenly he knew!

He stood. “They're using our technology against us! Turn off your transponders! Turn--no, belay that order! I have a better idea.” he sat back down, picked up the car phone, and dialed Goole.

~ ~ ~

“What the hell?” Sidhu said.

“Ajay?” Tembo asked.

“Our exit point is suddenly crawling with security.”

“How is that possible?” Sarka asked.

“They must have another security station out of range of the LAN. We're going to have to change course.” Sidhu studied the map. The wardens who had come to the elephants seemed to be stationary. Looking for clues? The ones coming from the other direction weren't spreading out to include their normal entry point, even though that would be the logical thing to do, so they must still have guards posted there, even though they seem to have disappeared; it was, naturally enough, the edge of the map, so maybe they were just off it. That left trying to evade around the other flank. “Alright. I know what to do.”

~ ~ ~

Muldoon drove far faster than was safe on this path.

Ripping out the transponders in a way that didn't cause them to stop working had proven tricky, but Goole had needed time to rig up his sensor ghosts anyway. In fact, Muldoon calculated that in a few more minutes it would have been ultimately useless anyway, but he'd gotten it up (probably) just in the nick of time.

“Goole screwed up,” said ranger Fieri, who was watching the computer while Muldoon drove.

“What's happening, Nick?”

“His ghosts aren't fanning out over the entry point. They may decide to go that way instead of the way we want them to and then we'll miss them by a mile.”

“Shit,” Muldoon said. Well, if they were smart, they'd avoid it on the grounds that there could be resources off the edge of the map they can't see. If they were smart being the key phrase of that sentence; he had no way of knowing.

It occurred to Muldoon just how little actual evidence he was working on. He had the fact that they'd managed to tread like ghosts while invading his territory and gut instinct, and that was it. If they weren't using the LAN, this was a wild goose chase--and, what's worse, one he'd sent himself on. And even if they were, they may not have picked the path he would have, or make the decision he'd have when confronted by those sensor ghosts, though those at least were the most logical courses of action given what he assumed they knew.

It's too late to have second thoughts, Robert, he told himself.

Then a jeep crossed his path, coming from the approximate direction the poachers would be coming from, and it wasn't one of theirs.

Muldoon grinned. Got you. Really it was a pity he'd hadn't been a minute faster, or he'd have been able to cut them off. “Give me the megaphone.”

Fieri did so, and was beginning to call it in when Muldoon leaned out the window.

“Attention poachers! Surrender now, or we will open fire.”

~ ~ ~

“They will what?” Sidhu demanded.

Sarka crawled into the back and lifted the but of his air rifle to start smashing the computer.

“Hey! Stop!” Sidhu shouted.

“We have to destroy the evidence!” Sarka said.

“Then let me use the thermite charges I installed in this thing for just such an occasion!” Sidhu said.

“Thermite?” Sarka asked.

“Yes, thermite.”

In a rare display of pure emotion, Sarka hugged him. “Sanjay, I love you!”

“It's Ajay! And please get back in the front; I need room to work! And give me the flare gun in the glove compartment!”

“You have until the count of five until we open fire,” the man with the megaphone boomed. “We'll try to aim for the tires, of course, but it's very hard to aim in a moving vehicle, you know, and we can't guarantee your safety or survival. Five....”

Sidhu opened the passenger side door and bucked his seat-belt. “Roland, fishtail it!”

Tembo did so, Sidhu kicked the computer out--

“...Four....”

--and fired the flare gun at it. It went up in flames and the pursuing car swerved heavily to get out of the way.

~ ~ ~

The good news was, Muldoon managed not to snap his neck when wildly careening out of the way of the flaming garbage they'd thrown in his path. The bad news was, he lost his megaphone. But it wasn't that bad of news, given the fact that there wasn't going to be a countdown anymore.

“Take the wheel,” Muldoon said, grabbing his rifle. It'd be far more logical to let Fieri take the shot, but he really didn't care at this moment. He was mad.

~ ~ ~

“I think they're mad,” Sarka said as the bullets started flying.

“Ya think?” Tembo asked sarcastically.

“What are you doing back there, Ajay?” Tembo asked.

“Rigging up the rest of the evidence with thermite!” Sidhu said.

“What rest of--you mean the harness!” Sarka realized.

“It's evidence and it's not like they're going to let you keep it when they catch us!”

Sarka realized he was right. Really, it was obvious that he was, but he'd not had this much adrenaline in his system for quite some time, and it was impairing his judgment. “...Do it!”

Saying that was quite possibly the hardest thing he’d ever done, and knowing that he was leaving here empty handed, having failed on every conceivable level even if he got away, galled.

~ ~ ~

“So glad to have your approval,” Sidhu muttered under his breath, not that that needed to be particularly quiet what with the roaring wind and gunshots and all.

He tossed the harness with all his strength and took aim. Luck of all luck, he actually hit it on his first try and it went up like a flaming angel.

~ ~ ~

“Holy shit!” Muldoon said, ducking into the jeep and covering his eyes. “These people are insane!”

The flaming debris bounced off the jeep's hood and over, leaving them relatively unscathed.

Then, suddenly the jeep they were chasing pulled a turn. When Muldoon followed, he saw that they'd stopped, got out, and were standing with their hands up.

He stopped. “What the hell?” Muldoon demanded.

“We surrender,” the bald one said.

“...Now? Now you surrender?” Muldoon demanded.

“Yes,” the scrawny Indian interjected simply.

We can bury them here and no one will ever know. Muldoon suppressed that reaction. “Nick, take them into custody.”

~ ~ ~

“So you're saying they're going to get off?” Hammond asked.

“They're being charged with trespassing, littering, and reckless endangerment, because that's all we can prove,” Muldoon said. “And even then, they'll claim that they had no idea they were trespassing and only behaved the way they did when chased because they were afraid I was going to shoot them. And then bribe their way out of a guilty verdict for good measure.”

“Wonderful,” Hammond said. “Did we at least learn anything?”

“Yes,” and with that Muldoon explained exactly who these three men were.

Hammond felt shocked and vulnerable. The way these men had so easily used Kimana's own defenses against it, the fact that someone was after his pachyderm portfolio...

Well, he was hardly a new hand in the world of corporate espionage. He had his own corporate spies and connections, and he'd find out who this Sarka fellow was and who he worked for.

And, if given the chance, rain down hell upon them.

But most importantly of all, he'd make sure this could never happen again.

END OF BOOK ONE

Chapter Text

“Where does he get all those wonderful toys?”
--The Joker, Batman (1989)

Chapter Text

IS-I[1]

Elizabeth Murphy convinced the security guard to let her and three-year-old Alexis[2] into the SCB building, and Alexis practically pulled her towards the rat cages like an excitable terrier. She put her face up to the glass and giggled.

“Hey, what the h--? Oh! Mrs. Murphy,” a woman said.

“Please, call me Liz,” Liz said. “And you’re Dr. de l’Adrien, correct?”

“Uh, yes. Dr. Rosemary de l’Adrien. That’s me,” de l’Adrien stammered.

“Girls can be doctors?” Alexis asked, wide-eyed.

De l’Adrien grinned down at her, suddenly far more composed. “That’s right. Girls can be anything we want to be.”

Well, there were a bunch of cultural roadblocks, but hopefully those would be fixed by the time Alexis was entering the workforce in the late nineties. “Dr. Atherton lets us in here sometimes,” Liz explained.

“Oh. Uh, if Norman’s fine with it, I guess it’s alright. I mean, you’re not likely to be corporate spies, ha-ha!” de l’Adrien said.

“Also, I brought something.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Tom and I are trying to get pregnant again,[3] so while I was out getting pregnancy tests I figured why not get a few extras and give them to the lab.”

“Oh. I appreciate the thought, but our methods are actually work earlier and a lot more accurately,” de l’Adrien said.[4]

“Oh,” Liz said awkwardly.

“...You know we have cats and dogs here, right?” de l’Adrien pointed out, watching Lex stare at the rats.

“Oh, we know, but Alexis loves the rats,” Liz said, grateful for the change of subject.

“Girl after my own heart,” de l’Adrien said. “What about the capybaras?”

“My daughter is not to be told of the existence of the roof under any circumstances; if she saw a giant rodent, she might never want to leave this place,” Liz said with mock severity. “Seriously, though, I’m worried she might get trampled by a cow.”

“Ah. Yes, that would be bad.” They watched Alexis tap the plastic of the rat enclosure. “We’ve got rat-sized capybaras, you know.”

“Do you? I thought your deal was elephants.”

“Well, yeah, but perfecting it takes a whole lot of trial and error, and it’s best to get as much of that out of the way with something that takes somewhat less time to reach maturity as we can.”

“Aren’t you speeding up their aging?”

“Well, effectively, but we’re doing it by filling them full of hormones that tell their bodies that it’s X stage of their life--it’s not like time’s actually being compressed or anything. And we do it to capybaras and elephants on the timescale of rats and hyraxes, respectively, so the former still mature faster than the latter.” She chuckled self-deprecatingly. “Honestly, we knew this was going to be ambitious, but if we had any inkling of just how much ‘inventing the tools we need to invent the tools’ we’d have to do to get here, I don’t think any of us would have believed it was possible, and certainly not on this timeframe. Well, except possibly Norman.”

“So you have started with elephants?”

“Yeah, the alpha 1.0 creche has recently been born; there’s still going to be fine tuning to be done before the product is ready for market, of course, but…” de l’Adrien trailed off. “Say, you think Alexis would be interested in seeing them?”

“I think I would be interested in seeing them,” Liz said.

De l’Adrien turned to Alexis. “Hey, Alexis! Wanna see something secret?”

The child reacted predictably, and soon the party walked down to one of the labs. Now both mother and daughter had their faces glued to the glass, staring at the mouse-sized baby elephants.

“My God,” Liz said. “Can I…?”

De l’Adrien looked as though she was about to let her do it, but then snapped out of it. “It’s probably not a good idea to let Alexis play with them; they’re very delicate, very expensive animals.”

“Oh. Yeah, that makes sense.” She looked back at the elephants. “My God,” she said again.

“I know, right?” de l’Adrien said. “It’s easy to forget how crazy what we do here is, sometimes.”

~ ~ ~

“In this fermenter, I grow the E. coli,” Atherton explained. It was unlikely that the Hammonds would be able to so much as name any of this equipment tomorrow, but if Atherton had truly created his not-polymerase (which they’d decided to name Knott polymerase, for the pun of it), he had earned the right to brag. “Then I mix the E. coli solution with colloidal gold and put it in the agitator. Using baculovirus DNA, I’ve made it so that when they absorb the gold particles they coat it in the Knott's scaffolding, creating what I call Knott stage 1. Eventually, the virus DNA decides the cell has filled to capacity and causes it to burst.

“Next I add mercury to the polyhedrin soup and put it into the centrifuge. The gold particles make the Knott stage 1 heavy enough to sink into the mercury. I then get rid of the soup and add the mercury and Knott 1 to an alkaline solution with atomic hydrogen, which I agitate. The alkaline solution breaks apart the Knott stage 1 and the hydrogen bonds with the the important bits, creating Knott stage 2, which is ultralight as opposed to being ultraheavy. After more centrifuging, the gold and mercury can be drawn off and reclaimed in that part of the lab over there.” He gestured at some truly old-fashioned looking equipment behind him. “Over here, I then autoclave the Knott 2 until it falls apart, leaving pure Knott and a bunch of detritus, which is still attached to the hydrogen and therefore less dense than the Knott. Another round of centrifuge, and I have pure Knott polymerase.”

“I had no idea this process was so involved,” Hammond-Johnson observed.

“Well I mean, we are going for a rather fanatical level of purity here; every sample of dinosaur DNA we get will represent our only opportunity to clone that species; even a one percent chance of contamination is unacceptable.”

“And we’re sure it won’t mutate?” Hammond asked.

“Reasonably sure; the plasmids containing the genes for this also contain the genes for resistance to the antibiotics we’ll be growing the E. coli in, so outright rejection will result in death, at least.”[5] Atherton said. “The real reason I’m not worried about mutation, though, is that the odds of it mutating in a way that doesn’t cause the process of extraction to fail is astronomical. The scaffolding isn’t there to look pretty; it’s what forms the Knott polymerase. You remember when I said that DNA was more like a recipe than a blueprint...Christ, was it really three and a half years ago?”

“It happened before we formed SCB, which means it would have been early to mid April nineteen seventy nine, and from that to October twenty-fifth, nineteen eighty-two is...yeah, three and a half years, give or take,” Hammond-Johnson said.

“Time sure does fly,” Atherton mused. “Anyway, the recipe is for the intricate dance of chemicals that results in the creation of stage 1; a single misstep causes everything that comes after it to be out of sync with the music, and then the ballet is ruined. So too with this; the Knott isn’t created separately from the scaffolding, but interspersed with it--holding it in place and forcing it to take certain shapes and behave in certain ways while it’s forming is the whole point of the scaffolding, after all--and laying down a single atom wrong causes all the following atoms of Knott and scaffolding alike to be wrong. Doing this in a way that somehow still allows the absurdly elaborate extraction process to go off without a hitch is hard to imagine.”

“You certainly seem to have engineered this well,” Hammond-Johnson said.

Atherton shrugged. “There’s an old saying, something along the lines of ‘a single problem is insurmountable; a thousand can be made to solve each other,’ and that certainly ended up being the case here.”

“You mentioned gold?” Hammond said.

“Yeah; I needed something that would sink in mercury, and most elements that heavy are radioactive. Besides, it precipitates out easily enough.” Atherton went over to that section of the lab. “This here retort is something gold miners have been using to reclaim their mercury for a long time; heat it, the mercury evaporates, goes down this bent neck and cools, leaving the gold behind. Over here I combine hydrochloric acid and chlorine--which I make from more hydrochloric acid--with the gold to make chloroauric acid. And finally over here, I then use the Turkevich method to combine the chloroauric acid with sodium citrate, creating colloidal gold. Which is a solution of gold nanoparticles, if I forgot to mention that.”[6]

“And the Knott polymerase...it works?”

Atherton grinned. “Inasfar as I can ascertain in the tests I've been able to run in this basement, it works perfectly.” Then the grin vanished. “But there are tests I can't do here. It's not a matter of equipment, it's a matter of sample size; if one time in a thousand the Knott polymerase randomly destroys the DNA instead of repairing it, that's a problem we need to spot and fix before we start using it on dinosaurs.”

“What do you need?”

“I need Connverse to use Knott polymerase. Pretty much exclusively; only by using it a lot will we figure out what the failure rate of the stuff is. I need to figure out what the shelf life is, which involves letting it sit for awhile at various temperatures and then using it; I’ve already started looking into the longevity of stage 2, for reasons that’ll become clear when I tell you my proposed solution to the problem I’m about to tell you about. And I need a team at Connverse to attempt to reverse engineer it; I can’t imagine how doing so would be possible, given how many permutations it takes to go from the DNA code to the final product, but I have no intention of being bit in the ass by hubris.

“...And that means I need to be able to make a lot of it. The problem with all this scaffolding is that it means making Knott is not very efficient--a pound of E. coli generates a gram of Knott. Producing enough for all of Connverse’s needs, not to mention the other stuff, is not an operation I can run from my basement.”

“So do we set up a lab at Connverse, or...?”

Atherton shook his head. “Too obvious.”

Ever since the incident at the Kimana game preserve, they’d gotten paranoid about their security and secrecy.

“Even if you didn’t already say you had a solution, I’d know you’ve spent time thinking about it,” Hammond said.

“Any brewery in the world has all the equipment needed to grow the E. coli. We can even still grow it in wort, though there are better media. The rest of this equipment isn’t particularly sophisticated, either--an agitator, a centrifuge, and an autoclave. And an electrolyzer to make hydrogen for the alkaline solution--but otherwise, it’s just lye and water. The newest piece of equipment over here--” Atherton gestured at the gold reclamation area “--is thirty years old.

“What I’m saying is, we don’t need a particularly high-tech lab...and the people who work there don’t need to be scientists; they just need to be able to follow instructions. In fact, there’s advantages to them not being scientists; they won’t have any frame of reference for how unorthodox our methods here are.”

The Hammonds exchanged a Look, and looked back at him. They said nothing, but their body language spoke loudly; they were onboard, and Atherton explained exactly what he had planned.

____________________

Chapter Text

IS-II

“You feeling alright?” Bethany Wing asked.

“Yeah, it’s just...antsiness, I suppose,” Atherton said. “I guess that after all this time, it just seems a little too good to be true that Knott is now a reality. I keep going over it and over it in my mind, obsessively, trying to spot flaws that I know damn well only testing will reveal at this point. I wish I had something to distract myself, but at this point the team at SCB are fully capable of dealing with any problems with the Pachyderm Portfolio that are likely to crop up.”

“You could try to invent cloning,” Wing said.

“Technically speaking we already did when we discovered cell reversion,” Atherton said. As a natural consequence of their research they discovered a way to revert specialized cells into fertilized ova; they then perfected it, patented it, and put it on the market, creating a nice little revenue stream for SCB.[1] “Adapt that technology for birds and reptiles and figure out how to transfer entire genomes into new nuclei, and we’ve got the public goals of InGen in the bag. And really we need to do that before we can figure out how distantly related a genome and a doner ovum can be and have the process still work; if we’re absurdly lucky and it turns out we can transfer chromosomes between birds and crocodiles with gay abandon, we won’t even need to do the absurdly expensive and hard to hide part--but I don’t want to start work on any of this until the elephants are on the market and SCB is in the black.”

Wing grinned, an idea forming. She pointed at some of Atherton’s reading material, the latest published report put out by the Lockwood Foundation. “Hey, isn’t that guy also trying to insert whole chromosomes into new cells?”

“Hmm? Yeah. I guess someone must have botched the job when they froze his daughter, causing her cells to rupture. Or maybe cryogenics is just full of shit,” Atherton said. It was an open secret that Benjamin Lockwood[2] was trying to clone his dead daughter; restructuring the Lockwood Foundation to focus on providing grants for research into cloning and related fields had not been particularly subtle, and converting a Panamax cargo ship into a floating lab so that he could perform illegal human experiments in international waters had been extremely unsubtle. “Would have damaged her DNA, too.”

“Well, that much is nothing Knott can’t fix,” Wing said.

“Just what are you suggesting?” Atherton asked.

“You rent a tux, John takes you to an expensive party and introduces you to Lockwood, and you convince him to take you out to his little boat for a four-month retreat, where you figure out chromosomal transfer on his dime.”

“Now’s not a great time for me to be going on vacation.”

“Now’s the perfect time,” Wing countered. “Think about it: you suddenly cash in the ridiculous amount of vacation days you’ve saved up and mysteriously disappear without explanation. Peter leaves to visit his family in England as scheduled, only now I have an excuse for not going with him since I have to hold down the fort for Atherton/Wing Real Estate. If anyone’s watching when Knott later mysteriously appears at Connverse, who are they going to think is responsible for that--Black Reed Richards, or some glorified accountant who got where he is out of nepotism?”

“Heyert’s people haven’t even found a proper location yet,” Atherton protested.

“I’m sure Lockwood’s secret lab has a phone and a fax machine; if you're worried about his lines being bugged, take one of Thorne's modems and the cassettes and be sure to ask for an Apple II[3]--or take all that equipment yourself if you're worried about him bugging you. Another advantage to doing this is the headhunting potential.”

“Headhunting potential.”

“Yes. The people we have at SCB are good people, but what InGen will be doing is totally different. InGen will be cloning, and there’s a whole lot of cloning experts on that boat who, if you do your job right, will be out of a job in a few months.”

“You know, you’re right….”

~ ~ ~

“Ben, I’d like you to meet my friend and colleague, Dr. Norman Atherton,” Hammond said.

Benjamin Lockwood shook hands with Atherton. “The inventor of PCR, virotherapy, and cell reversion; a modern day Leonardo da Vinci,” he said. He had a Kennedy-esque New England accent.[4]

“You don’t know the half of it...yet. Also, John? We’re definitely using that ‘modern day Leonardo da Vinci’ line when InGen goes public.”

“‘InGen’?” Lockwood asked.

“A little company we’ll be forming in late February, early March should everything go according to plan. Without giving too much away, it is, ah, right up your alley.” Hammond looked around, making sure none of the other guests at this high-society party were within earshot. “Well, maybe not; if this conversation goes as planned, I have reason to suspect you won’t be nearly as interested in cloning four months down the line as you are now.”

“Oh?” Lockwood asked.

“I have a lot of vacation days saved up at Stanford and there’s not much happening at SCB that my team can’t handle on their own, so I figure, why don’t I take a little trip for a couple months and try my hand at your little problem?”

“What’s this going to cost me?” Lockwood asked.

Atherton grinned, “Smart. I have three demands. First, any technology I develop over the course of this trip is my property; if somehow I fail to provide you with viable embryos by the end of my stay, you can keep using it if you choose, but legally it’s mine regardless, to sell or patent or incorporate into other projects as I please. Secondly, since you’re not going to need that boat a year from now, I want it, too. Refitted to my specifications, of course. Unless I fail, in which case nevermind. Thirdly, the day may come when I need a favor from you, and should it come, you owe me.”

“Is the last also voided in the case of failure?”

“It certainly affects the size of the favor I’d likely ask for, seeing how I have no legal way to enforce this and am relying on your honor,” Atherton said.

“You don’t ask for much, do you?” Lockwood observed dryly.

“If I succeed, I’m mainly asking for things you won’t need anymore; if I fail, you’ve lost nothing but time.”

Lockwood grinned. “When you put it that way, how can I refuse? Consider it done. Anything else, while you have my time?”

“I also recommend you invest in InGen when it goes public; that’s not a requirement or anything, but believe me, it’s going to be big one day. Now let’s talk logistics….”

~ ~ ~

“Dr. Atherton’s ride has just called to report that they’re at the harbor,” the Hammonds’ butler, Malcolm Fitch, announced.

“We’re almost done here,” Atherton said; he and the Hammonds had just gotten that morning the list of potential locations Heyert had sent them and were narrowing it down to the ones they wanted to spring for a deep dive of. “So are we agreed on these three?”

“I see nothing wrong with them.”

“Me, either.”

“Great. I’ve got a boat to catch,” Atherton said. He turned to Fitch. “And you’ve had eyes on the truck the entire time I’ve been here, yes?”

“Not me, personally, but our security has,” Fitch assured him.

“Good.” Atherton gathered his things and walked out to the beat up old pickup truck parked incongruously in front of this mansion; it belonged to one of the junior researchers (over the years there had been any number of promising student employees to pass through the doors of SCB--some of whom they actually managed to hold on to). It getting bugged likely wouldn’t be the end of the world; the equipment in the back, however….

A half hour drive later, Atherton was greeted by two men, an older mustachioed redhead and an Asian who was still wet behind the ears. “Dr. Atherton, I presume?” the elder asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m Captain Davenport, and I’ll be ferrying you to your destination,” the older one said; Lockwood’s lab was currently three hundred miles off the coast.

“Henry Wu[5]. I’ll be your lab monkey. Er, assistant,” the younger one said.

“Are you even old enough to drink?” Atherton asked Wu as they entered the marina.

“I’ll have you know I’m twenty-two.”

Atherton caught and latched onto that defensiveness. “Yeah? For how long?”

“...Ten days,” Wu admitted.

Atherton snorted triumphantly.

They reached a sailboat that to Atherton’s eye was completely identical to the other sport boats for rich assholes[6] filling the marina and humped Atherton’s cargo down to it.

“In all seriousness, though, where’d you go to school?” Atherton asked Wu once they’d finally cast off. They were alone on deck, the captain manning the helm.

“Stony Brook,” Wu said.

...This kid didn't think Atherton meant high school, did he? “...And where is that?”

“Long Island.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“I need the money.”

“No I mean, and not to be elitist here, how is it that a twenty-two year old community college student ended up as part of this?”

“Having Barbara McClintock[7] as a reference helped.” Wu grinned at the look of shock on Atherton’s face, and ran with the fact that the conversational gambit was now in his court (to horrible mangle a metaphor). “She took me under her wing. We bounce ideas off of one another. Also, I graduated magna cum laude from my ‘community college’ this year,” Wu said. “All of these things happened because I am a genius.”

Atherton grinned wickedly. “Are you now? We’ll see.”

____________________

Chapter Text

IS-III

“Remember not to freeze it,” Wing said to her husband as they waited for the limo.

“How could I forget?” Peter Ludlow said. “Your uncle only drilled it into my head about a million times.”

Atherton had made a point of teaching both of them various procedures they’d have to do since he wouldn’t be there, and this morning Wing transferred some of the Knott-producing E. coli to a stab culture[1] that was now nestled in a thermos in his luggage among water balloons that had been chilled nearly to freezing.

Hammond’s limo pulled up.

“I’m going to miss you,” Ludlow said.

“Me too.”

Ludlow kissed his wife goodby and got in, surprised to see someone was already there.

“Peter, I’d like to tell you a story,” Hammond said.

“Is now really the best time?” Ludlow asked.

“Now’s the perfect time. It’s going to take a while to reach the airport, after all,” Hammond said. He sighed and paused, as though this were hard for him, but he pushed through it:

“As you know, I wasn’t born into wealth. Bristol Canning was my big break...but you already know that story. Before that...well, my family wasn’t poor, per se, in my childhood; certainly there were people worse off! I considered us to be fairly well-off...but all that changed when my father lost his job. His boss, a local bigwig and all-around nasty fellow by the name of Penward[2], had been in the habit of bribing safety inspectors--and pinned it on my father when the inevitable disaster resulted. My father was unemployed and unemployable after that and, I’m sorry to say, drank himself to death a few years later.”

Ludlow didn’t know what to say. He had known, of course, that his grandfather had died at some point during his mother’s youth, but she’d never told him the details; it was plain to see why, as this was something that clearly still stung even after all these years. “Uncle John…”

“It took me to a dark place, my father’s death. I was angry at the world. And then one day, as fate would have it, I saw Penward, just out in the street. Leaving the airport, I think he was--but after all this time, who can say?

“The point is: this was the man who was, directly and indirectly, responsible for all of the suffering of my young life. And I was sixteen at that point, full of piss and vinegar, not to mention anger that had been aimed in no particular direction but in that moment latched onto him with ferocity. I can honestly say that I’ve never hated like that, before or since.”

“Please tell me this story doesn’t end with you burying the body in an unmarked grave.”

Hammond actually chuckled. “Oh, no, nothing like that! ...But I very much wanted to hurt him. I knew I couldn’t physically fight him--the police would be on me long before I’d done any serious damage--but I very much wanted to make him suffer in whatever way I could, however small and symbolic. I followed him for a while, and at one point he set his briefcase down to tie his shoe. Spotting my opportunity to make him pay in some insignificant, token way for my family’s misery, I grabbed the briefcase and ran.”

“I...see.”

“The thing was heavy, too; nearly took my arm off when I picked it up! But I did pick it up, and I ran, and his bodyguard chased me like a hellhound. I couldn’t believe his persistence...until I got home and opened the briefcase.

“The next day, it was all over the news that an exact replica of the Maltese Falcon that Penward had commissioned had been stolen by some master criminal who had somehow known exactly when it would be the most vulnerable.” Hammond snorted, his expression simultaneously a bit embarrassed and bemused.

“Your mother and I learned enough metallurgy to melt down the gold and make rings and necklaces and things to set the jewels in, and when I was eighteen I began paying down our various debts by hocking ‘family heirlooms.’ Investing in Bristol Canning was done with my own money and your mother’s, but there’s no way we’d have been able to save that much if we had to pay down those debts on our own, or pay for our own educations, or even food and rent. I made the peregrine falcon the symbol of Hammond International to remind myself that all of the skill and talent and innovation and hard work I put into making Hammond International the empire it is today would have amounted to nothing if not for that phenomenal piece of luck.”

“...And you’re telling me this now because…?”

“Because after Norman explained this project to me, I consulted with your mother and was able to tell Norman I had sixteen pounds of gold I could let the project use.” Hammond grinned. “He then immediately revised upward the scale of the operation--as in, he redid his math on the spot. And when you arrive in New York the gold, which is all that remains of the falcon, will be waiting for you at the old headquarters.”

~ ~ ~

Ludlow boarded a plane at 2:00 PM and landed in New York five and a half hours later at 10:25 PM; he’d gotten up early that morning, took a sleeping pill that night, and still it was difficult to sleep. He was never great with jet lag, but having something that important just sitting in a thermos in a hotel fridge in his room probably didn’t help.

The next morning, he booked a flight to London, perused the local book stores for a new novel (he’d finished the one he’d brought on the flight over here, alas), and visited Hammond International’s local offices (which had been the nerve center of the entire North American operation once upon a time). When he left the building in possession of stolen goods (surely the statute of limitations was over, right? And in another country?) he felt as though every eye in the city was on him; this was not going to be a fun trip.

He hailed a cab, went to a bus stop, paid the fare in cash, paid for his ticket in cash, and was well on his way to Charleston, West Virginia, when his flight took off without him. Just as planned. He tried not to think about the package his mom had sent, the thermos, or the fact that he’d been reduced to taking public transportation like a peon, by reading his mindless pulp adventure novel; it didn’t entirely work.

Several busses later, Ludlow arrived in Charleston, having somehow survived the ordeal. Arriving at the Charleston airport at about 7:30 PM, he made some queries and was shortly able to call a specific first-class seat on a specific inbound flight.

“Orris Heyert here.” Heyert was the vice president of acquisitions (and only employee) of the Bio-Vek company of Greenfield, New Jersey, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Bio-Ark company of London, and had been hired to put an American face on the British company.

Technically speaking, every word of that was the God’s Honest truth, and Heyert was also something of a stalking horse besides, but what he didn’t know was that Bio-Ark itself was the end of a long chain of holding companies that had been set up for the Hammonds by the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.[3]

“Hello, Orris; it’s me, Peter Talides. I’ve just arrived in Charleston.”

“Yeah, I should be landing in half an hour myself.”

“In that case, I might as well book us rooms. Only, since I’m not here in any official capacity, I should probably do so in your name.”

“Yeah, okay. So what do I tell people you do when I’m doing my wheelin’ and dealin’ and you’re just standing in the corner, watching.”

“As far as the people we’ll be meeting are concerned, I am your assistant.”

“Alright, Mr. Talides. Or Peter, as I should probably get into the habit of calling you. Do you need any information off of my company card?”

“No, I already have it all. See you when you land, Mr. Heyert.”

As an assistant would, Ludlow then called around to the various hotels and settled on one. When the arrival of Heyert’s plane was announced, Ludlow stood with a sign in the appropriate place and they met face to face for the first time.

“You’re younger than I thought you’d be,” Heyert commented.

“All the better to pass as your assistant,” Ludlow said as he hailed them a cab.

“So when do we meet the bumpkins so I can start wooing them with my dulcet Texas drawl?”

“Tomorrow. This is the last night we’re going to be spending in civilization for a while, and I intend to do exactly that.”

They ate at a local restaurant, discussing business, and then went to their hotel. That night Ludlow slept better, but still not great.

“Range Rover, eh?” Heyert asked when Ludlow told him what sort of car to get.

“It is both a high-status vehicle and an excellent offroad one,” Ludlow said. “We do want to make a good impression, after all.”

“Planning on doing a lot of offroading?” Heyert asked.

“No, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared.”

Heyert shrugged, as if to say “So long as you can explain it to billing, it’s no skin off my back.” Then he actually did say, “Let’s go meet the locals.”

____________________

Chapter Text

IS-IV

They drove up to the property the firm Heyert had hired (Hollis & Hathaway of Houston) had found for them, the abandoned Mellis Microbrewery on the outskirts of Kepler, West Virginia, where Orris Heyert and his assistant “Peter Talides” were introduced to Walter Mellis, the brewery’s former owner, and Lex Nathanson, a representative of the bank that had repossessed it.

“I must say, it’s mighty unusual that a high-tech company like yours would be interested in a piece of real estate like this, out here in the middle of nowhere,” Nathanson said.

“It’s really quite simple: Fermentation is fermentation, whether you’re doing it with fancy and expensive lab equipment, huge industrial equipment, or a still in your backyard,” Heyert explained, laying the drawl on thick. “When this place is up and running, the only differences between how it worked before and how it works now is that you add antibiotics instead of hops, E. coli instead of yeast, and the amount of time you let it sit for.[1] And the processing, of course; that will be quite involved, but doing it out here lowers shipping costs. Really, that’s what this is about at the end of the day: someone realized, well, that thing I just said about fermentation being fermentation, and we got to asking ourselves why we had our highly paid, expensively educated genius doctors wasting their time on a task men have been doing since the dawn of history instead of devoting more of their time to curing cancer and suchlike.”

“What about worker safety?” Mellis asked.

Heyert put a hand on his shoulder. “Understand this, Mr. Mellis. The last thing we want is our very expensively produced strain getting out where it can be easily stolen by our competitors or something from the outside getting in and miscegenating with it; considering that we’re working with a bacteria that basically ain’t deadly, our safety protocols will be paranoid.”

Mellis nodded, seemingly reassured. “Right.” Genuine concern out of the way, he plastered on a big, fake grin. “Well, in that case, let’s get this tour underway!”

They got the tour underway. Over the last week Ludlow had seen so many pictures and blueprints of this place as provided by Hollis & Hathaway that he half-believed he could traverse it blindfolded, but the whole point of him being here was to see it with his own eyes. Throughout the rest of the tour Mellis did his best to simultaneously brag about the place and kiss Heyert’s ass.

~ ~ ~

In Charleston Ludlow had purchased an Apple II Plus and a Panasonic tape deck; now in his hotel room in the best/only hotel in Kepler, he plugged the tape deck and the custom modem he’d brought with him into the computer. The modem looked like a fairly typical direct connection modem[2], save for the fact that it had ports for two phone lines, allowing Ludlow to run the room phone through the modem--normally a stupid idea, but there was method to this madness. Ludlow told the computer to read the program from the first cassette tape, which loaded in about a minute, and typed a code into the computer.

In Barbados a less ambitious member of the Hammond clan owned a touristy resort; the place wasn’t technically under the Hammond International aegis, but nonetheless there was a computer in a back room, connected via the special modem to two phone lines; Ludlow’s call came in on one, the two computers talked to each other, and then it was redirected to another computer set up like this on the other side of the world. After being bounced around a few more times, Ludlow’s call reached the Hammond mansion in Los Altos Hills, and his computer began talking to one in a soundproofed room.

Ludlow loaded the second tape into the player. He’d listened to it once before: while there was some machine noise at the beginning, which told the computers that they were the right tapes and how to sync them up so that they’d cancel each other out, it was mostly a cacophony of human noises that reminded Ludlow of nothing so much as being in a school lunchroom; apparently, over twenty hours of television audio had been recorded, cut into forty-five minute chunks, and mixed together to produce this noise. Through some bizarre alchemy, the noise was added at one end and removed at the other. It was technically breakable, but as long as they replaced the cacophony tape every few months it ought not to be a problem, and it allowed for a relatively crisp and clear call with minimal interference, which was good because they didn’t want everyone they had to call like this to be aware of the fact.

“He obviously wants the job of managing the place,” Hammond said of Heyert when Ludlow finished explaining what had happened. There were some artifacts of the process--their programming wasn’t perfect, or perhaps their tapes weren’t quite identical--but it didn’t sound like he was using a voice modulator or anything, which was the important thing. “Which isn’t bad in and of itself, mind you, but him telling you everything he thinks you want to hear rather than his true thoughts and feelings does make things difficult.”

“His first question was to ask about worker safety; given H and H’s profile of the guy, that’s probably a reflection of his true self,” Atherton said, calling from his cabin aboard Lockwood’s floating lab; this meeting had been scheduled for a given time, so they’d both managed to call in at about the same time.

When they’d decided that Mellis Microbrew was pretty ideal for their purposes (as well as two other potential locations) about a week ago, they had Ludlow have Heyert commission a deep dive on it and other resources in the town of Kepler. Among the things Hollis & Hathaway reported was that Mellis seemed to have a good reputation around town--this appeared to have been borne out by Ludlow’s own attempts to get dirt at the local bar, but James Bond he was not and they could well have been just as desperate for jobs as Mellis was.

“Mellis Microbrew failed because he took out large loans in order to locate as much of the support for his business in Kepler as he could--including making his own bottles and kegs in-house--and then was unable justify it with sales,” Hammond-Johnson said. “Obviously, neither sales nor expansion are things he’d be responsible for if we hire him. That being said, I don’t like knowing nothing about him.”

“Me, I’d antagonize him until his armor breaks down,” Atherton said.

“Of course you would,” Ludlow said.

“I have an idea.…”

~ ~ ~

Mellis entered the room, fake smile plastered on. “What can I do for you, gentlemen?”

“I just wanted to let you know in person that we will not be buying Mellis Microbrew,” Heyert said.

The smile fell. “W-what? I thought it was perfect for your purposes.”

“It certainly seemed that way.”

“I...is there anything I can do to change your mind?”

“You can tell us the truth,” Heyert said.

“What?”

“Walt, I used to be a used car dealer. I tell you this so you know I know what I’m talking about when I tell you you’ve been acting like one since we rolled into town, Mellis! What aren’t you telling us?”

“I...I don’t know what to say….”

“Then we’re done here,” Heyert said, turning around.

“Wait!” Mellis said, grabbing his arm. “I love this town, damn it! And I tried to bring it jobs and I failed! So yes, I’ve been willing to say anything I thought you wanted to hear to bring the jobs I couldn’t--and I guess it backfired since you think you can’t trust me. Fine, don’t hire me--but don’t take it out on the town!”

Heyert sighed dramatically. “It ain’t a bad thing to want what’s best for your town. Or to be zealous when chasing your goals. Your actual organization of your workers, according to our reports, was decent and if Kepler knows what an advocate you are for them then having you as our local face can only be to the good. There’s only one thing.” He turned around and faced Mellis. “Never. Lie to me. Again.”

~ ~ ~

Zeke Owens, local junkyard owner, mechanic, handyman, construction laborer, and general Mr. Fix-It and tinkerer, looked nervously at the nondisclosure agreement. The firm Heyert had hired to find places like Mellis Microbrew had also reported on the towns surrounding these places, and in Kepler’s case had noted Owens; his presence hadn’t been a deciding factor, of course, but had hardly hurt.

“Um, we’re not going to be doing any crimes, right?”

“By definition, you can’t be legally compelled to do something illegal,” Heyert reassured him.[3]

Owens signed the nondisclosure agreement.

Heyert grinned. “Don’t know what you heard about what we’re doing with Walter Mellis’ old brewery--technically you shouldn’t of heard anything, but we don’t actually care what people say in town here; this--” he gestured at the papers Owens signed “--is more about keeping it out of the papers and thus our competitors’ ears...er, eyes--but we’re growing bacteria for enzymes. Thing is, bacteria don’t really keep--there are ways in which you can freeze ‘em, but most of them will die--and so we’re gonna harvest the enzymes on-site. And we want you to build the equipment we’ll need for that.”

“Surely there’s places you can buy that kind of stuff from.”

“Not in the sizes we intend to use--we wanna refine down a keg a per run--and besides, I reckon your work will be cheaper.”

“Always the sort of things you want to hear from people tinkering with diseases,” Owens observed dryly.

Heyert laughed. “What we’ll be accomplishing here will be marvelous, but what we need to do to do it ain’t all that sophisticated. We need a centrifuge--that is, something that spins things really fast--an agitator--that is, something that shakes things really hard--and a coupla electrolyzers--wires attached to a power source that you stick in water in one case and hydrochloric acid in the other, just the containers have to be tweaked to make sure the gasses all go where they ought. I’ve also prepared a list of other stuff we might need, and if you happen to have any of it lying around your junkyard we’d be happy to take off your hands for you.

“Now then. Our scientists drew up some schematics, but they’re mere recommendations; what’s important is the specs….”

____________________

Chapter Text

IS-V

“Alright folks, welcome to...well, you know the place,” Heyert said, playing tour guide as Ludlow and Mellis walked silently beside him. “It’s Mellis Microbrew--most of y’all used to work here, once upon a time. We’ve made some alterations, of course, but it’s basically the same.

“First alteration you may have already noticed is the cameras. Yeah, there’s more inside. Official screed is that they’re for safety and security, and that’s true--in more ways than one. And I will explain that cryptic statement in just a second, but first, follow me.”

He lead them into the building. “Notice that second set of lights?” They could hardly not--they had been specifically set up to irradiate all sides of everything. “Those are UV lights. They’re off, but you won’t notice them being on anyhow--UV is invisible. We have those because UV will slice and dice the DNA of any germs that try and get in or out, which is highly useful in our profession. Now the thing is, you are also made of DNA, so if any of y’all’s are in here when it’s on, y’all could get skin or eye cancer. For that reason safety guidelines are to be strictly adhered to; if you’re in here without the proper full body and face protection, we will know and you will be fired.” He pointed to the security cameras. “‘Safety and security,’ remember? ‘Course what they don’t tell you is part of that is safety for them; if you try and sue them for giving you cancer--which you won’t get from us if you follow the safety precautions--they’ll have the tapes to prove it weren’t their fault.

“There’s also some rather expensive materials in this building, but we’ll discuss that when we get to that part of the tour.

“If you want to get technical, the specific germ we’re working with is a bacteria called Escherichia coli, E. coli for short, and you don’t wanna catch it; it won’t kill you or anything, but it’ll give you diarrhea straight from the devil. But as much as it getting out would suck for you, what the company’s more worried about is something getting in--I mean, think about it: if you paid top dollar for a purebred showdog, for the purpose of starting a stable of showdogs, you would not be happy if the neighborhood mut got in and knocked her up. Same principle applies here, hence the lights,” Heyert gestured again at the UV lights.

The UV lights were in fact ludicrous overkill, or so Atherton had told Ludlow, but it had given them an excuse to put cameras everywhere without looking paranoid--and would also, as Atherton had so eloquently put it, “give any potential thief who knows anything about standard biosafety precautions the terror shits.”

Heyert then lead them through the brewery, explaining the ways in which things would be the same as before and the ways in which they’d be different.

Once that was done, they walked into a giant freezer Heyert and Ludlow had had made.

“Generally you’re going to produce two kegs of germs a day, but for the first couple weeks you’re going to produce three, for a couple reasons. First, and I mean no insult to Mr. Mullis here when I say this, I want to see with my own eyes that all y’alls are up to snuff before I leave. The second brings us to why we’re in here. Germs have a nasty habit of mutating, and if these ones do, we wanna make sure you’ve got plenty of seed stock to fall back on--and I do mean plenty. The ‘extra’ kegs you’ll be producing will have some special preservatives added to them and then be squirreled away in here.

“And now you’re asking yourselves ‘How in tarnation will we know if the germs mutate? We can’t see ‘em!’ and the answer’s quite simple: Should the germs mutate, none of what we do in Lab One will work.

“Speaking of which, what a coincidink, that’s the next stop on this tour. If y’all’ll follow me….”

To ensure there wasn’t silence as he led them there, Heyert kept talking: “The truth is that if we were hiring the bare minimum skeleton crew, only about two thirds of you would be here. We didn’t do that for a couple reasons. The first is that we want this place running constantly and y’alls presumably have lives outside of work. The second is that if one of you comes down with something, we want it to not be a big deal for you to not come into work, where you could potentially spread it around. Sick workers are inefficient workers; revolutionary concept, I know.

“Anywho, this is where the magic happens. Lab One. Twice a day, one keg of germs will be brought down here, and the first thing you’ll do to it is to add one cup of colloidal gold,” he gestured at a reused milk half-gallon, a quarter of the way full of some ruby-red substance. “Now if the name didn’t tip you off, colloidal gold is made of gold; in fact, there is comfortably over a hundred grand worth of it[1] in that jug. And now you’re starting to understand the reason for all the security and secrecy. Speaking of which, I know I said the nondisclosure agreements you signed were mainly to keep this place out of the papers, but it would be appreciated if you’d be tight-lipped about this; while I trust our various security systems, there’s no need to give the criminal element of Kepler any ideas if we don’t have to.”

In point of fact, they (from Ludlow on up) were counting on the word getting out; a simple, understandable reason for their secrecy and security would go a long way to quashing rumors. Hence why the whole tour group was being shown this rather than just those few who’d be working here.

“Anyway,” Heyert was saying, “once you’ve poured the gold into the keg, you’ll put the keg into this shaker machine Kepler’s own Zeke Owens made for us, strap it in real good, and turn it on. And then you’re gonna wanna leave the room for the next two hours, because this thing is freaking loud. And diesel powered, I think? I kid; but seriously, it’s loud.

“When you come back and turn it off, you then put it in the spinner; be sure the tap is pointing in when you do so. Spin it for about ten minutes or so, then carefully pour a gallon’s worth of contents from the top of the keg down the drain. Figuratively down the drain, that is; while we’re fairly confident that all the germs are dead at this point, there’s no harm in cooking this slurry before we dump it.

“You will then pour in a gallon of mercury and put it back in the spinner with the tap pointed out this time. After spinning it for another half hour, you will then you put it on the counter, tap down, and let it settle for a bit to account for your jostling it about. Then you draw off the mercury solution.

“‘Solution’ is a word we’ll be using a lot around here, by the way; in this context, it basically means stuff with other stuff in it.

“Anyway, you draw off the mercury solution--there should be twenty-two cups of it, filling this container to this line. Lab Three’s dedicated to cooking up a special lye solution, which I mention at this point because it’s at this point that you add said lye solution to this container, filling it to the high line, before putting the container in this keg-sized frame so it can go back in the shaker. When it’s done, the mercury will only fill the container to the lower line. Spin for another ten minutes to be absolutely sure everything’s separated out, then draw off as much of the lye solution as you can. The mercury, and a couple of ounces of the first keg to make sure you have gotten absolutely every speck of gold, is then brought to Lab Two--” Heyert nodded at a door, “--so that we can reclaim our gold and mercury. Gold’s expensive, after all.

“Anyway, the second lye solution--we call it that so as to not mix it up with the pure stuff--is dumped in this here keg, and most days that’s it. Once you’ve done that for a week, however, the remaining space is filled with pressurized nitrogen--you’ll see the PSI stenciled on the side here, just to make the whole thing idiot-proof--and then cooked overnight at one sixty degrees Fahrenheit. When it comes out of the oven, this special attachment is fitted to the tap, and it’s back on the spinner. The attachment doesn’t have an official name--it was made for us to spec by local artisan Kate Moran in conjunction with Mr. Owens--but I call it the head. This here bauble will be filled about yae high with the actual product--I’m given to understand that the product and the excess will look very different, so you will know. This tubing here is aquarium air hose; replace it between uses. And for God’s sake, double check to make sure the end is clamped shut before you start spinning it! Which is the next step, by the way; putting it back on the spinner.

“Then we detach the head and put it in the only actual piece of science lab equipment we’ve got here; this is called the glove box, ‘cuz it’s a box that has gloves attached to the wall, you see. Science tends to be a very literal thing. Air pressure inside the box is higher than outside to prevent contamination. Once the head has been cleaned in alcohol--inside the glove box--it’s attached to the nitrogen attachment up here--an alteration Mr. Owens provided us with--unspool the tubing from around the neck, and put the end down in the container the stuff’s going to be shipped in. Presumably a beer bottle, because y’all can just bring one in from home--if you clean it thoroughly, of course!

“There ought to be enough of this stuff to fill the beer bottle about yea high, and you want to hold back the final drop to ensure there’s no refuse. If you fail to do so, however, a drop or two of refuse ain’t the end of the world; you’re just gonna have to put some tape around the bottle before you ship it out so that we know not to use it for anything truly important.

“The contents of this bottle is the accumulation of a week of your work and all the money we spent making that happen, so when it comes to making sure it’s clean, we believe paranoia is a virtue. Generally, you use extreme heat or chemicals to sterilize something; we figured, ‘Why not both?’ and so the beer bottle is to be pressure cooked in bleach at two hundred and fifty Fahrenheit before being put in the glove box. Do not open the pressure cooker outside the glove box when its done; for one thing, it’s dangerous. You wait for it to cool, put the whole thing in the glove box, wash it thoroughly, and then open it. At which point you rinse the bottle with purified water and let it dry before filling it.

“Once you have filled it, you will then take an acetylene torch to the neck of the bottle and weld it shut in a very specific way; this being the only step of the operation that requires actual skill, we do expect whoever’s job this is to practice in their off time. To practice welding shut mostly full beer bottles while wearing heavy gloves; bet there’s a requirement y’all’d’ve never thought you’d get from an employer.” Heyert grinned conspiratorially as he added, “Don’t worry; you can drink the beer and refill with water; we’re not animals.

“Anyway, at this point you wait for it to cool, remove the bottle and pressure cooker from the glovebox and put tape on the bottle if you must; that done, it’s time to ship out, and this next bit is a little weird,” Heyert smiled self-deprecatingly. “See, we wanna be very sure this bottle doesn’t break--not because this stuff is dangerous, you understand, but because we went to a lot of trouble creating it--and not incidentally, our paying for your hard work. The cheap, simple, and effective if somewhat undignified way to do this we found was to encase the beer bottle in jello. Man do I not envy the poor son of a bitch whose job it will be to open that particular tupperware container when it gets to the lab, after spending God knows how long in a hot UPS van. Said tupperware is to be duct taped shut, because there is no kill like overkill.

“There’s two of these kegs--” he kicked at the stenciled keg “--that you’ll alternate the use of. There isn’t an official replacement, but I mean, it’s just a keg with a stencil on it; just go into storage and get another keg if it breaks. We also have two heads, but in this case the second is explicitly a replacement for the first, as you’ll have more than plenty of time to clean out the head between uses.” He disassembled the head to demonstrate.

“Now, any questions before we move on to Labs Two and Three?”

____________________

Chapter Text

IS-VI

Glenn Dudley had never heard of Kepler, West Virginia, nor of Hammond International, and had certainly never heard of Southern California Biotechnics. He was a simple apartment building manager, albeit of the Grand Grimaldis, the most high-end apartment building in Greenfield, New Jersey. He held a package in his hands and recalled a strange conversation he’d had a couple weeks ago with the Grand Grimaldis’ owner, a woman he knew as Mrs. Pearson.

“I’m sure you’re wondering what this call is about, Mr. Dudley,” Emma Hammond-Johnson had said. “Especially on account of that nondisclosure agreement you just signed.” There was always a weird sort of graininess to these calls Dudley could never account for, an odd interference.

“Well--I mean--yes, not to put too fine a point on it,” Dudley said.

“There’s been a little corporate espionage going on at the expense of some of my husband’s businesses, I’m afraid.”

“...I don’t know what to say?”

“Relax, I know it’s not you. It couldn’t have possibly been you--it’s why I’m about to ask you to do what I want you to do, in fact.”

“I don’t know what to say to that, either.”

Hammond-Johnson laughed. “Relax! I’m not asking you to investigate it or anything. It’s a small thing, it’s just such a weird thing that I felt I owed you an explanation.

“See, one of the things we’re worried about is spies tampering with our mail, so we’ve decided to send certain packages on a rather circuitous route. Your building seemed perfect--unless you have access to the full list of tenants, who’s to say whether certain people live their or not? And if the spies do find you, your security is good enough to give them pause, at least.” She proceeded to explain to him what she needed him to do. She was right; it was small, but weird, and without the story he’d likely suspect it was something illegal. (And to be fair, it might still be--but now he had plausible deniability, at least.)

This was the third package he had received for Thomas Cope (no such person lived at the Grand Grimaldis); the other two had been from businesses, but this one came from someone named Walter Mellis. Well, it made no difference; he took an x-acto knife and carefully cut away the surface level of cardboard (leaving the corrugated stuff underneath) to remove the identifying information (the name, address, etcetera of the sender and the addressee--which is to say, all the writing on the box), then put those scraps of paper in the ashtray on his desk and burned them. The box he put into a slightly larger box, which would allegedly be from one Alice Austen (who also did not exist) and to one Ben Kly (who he suspected likewise did not exist).

He would never know, but his suspicions were entirely accurate; no such person as Ben Kly lived in Norman Atherton’s apartment building, and when the package arrived Wing was quick to squirrel it away.

She cleaned the tupperware and the beer bottle/makeshift ampoule in her kitchen sink, made a mental note to burn the boxes, and headed off down to the subbasement.

In a glove box, Wing cleaned the bottle more thoroughly with something more caustic than tap water before taking a glass cutter to the melted top of the bottle, then transferred the contents of the bottle to a series of small, screw-cap vials. These vials, as well as little plastic trays to hold them in, had been the contents of another of “Ben Kly’s” packages.

When her task was done, she removed the vials and the remains of the bottle. The bottle she dropped into a glass crusher attached to the wall over an oil drum; given that at the current rate of production it’d take several decades to fill the drum, they weren’t worried about trash

She took some of the vials and put them in one of the trays they came with, then folded a cardstock form (said forms being the contents of the final package for “Ben Kly”) into a box and put the tray inside. It looked like a box of the Taq polymerase being sold by Cetus--not exactly like it, more like what one would expect an off-brand knock off to look like. Perfect.[1]

She didn’t do so with the rest--she could pack them more densely unassembled; she’d just done this one on a whim, really. She packed everything in the briefcase securely, locked it, and left.

That night she visited the Hammonds’ mansion in Los Altos Hills for dinner with the briefcase; their servants had been dismissed for the night. They were to have dinner, then assemble the packages themselves, and then Hammond or Hammond-Johnson or one of their daughters would take them down to Connverse or to the home of an associate of theirs that worked there, and rigorous testing would begin. Between this and the multiple legitimate excuses Wing or Ludlow would have to visit any of those people, it should be impossible to trace Knott’s source back to their building, much less beyond.

“Is that what I think it is?” Hammond-Johnson asked.

“Indeed it is,” Wing said, sipping her wine. “‘Site A’ is operational.”

They made smalltalk as they ate dinner, then assembled the boxes of Knott, before retreating into the soundproofed room to call Atherton.

“So Peter’s coming home, then?” Atherton asked when he’d been caught up.

“Yes,” Wing said.

“Good. I’ve called Rosemary and Dave a time or two since I’ve been here, mainly to check on the primate testing--” they hadn’t intended to begin testing the various fertility-related technologies they’d come up with on apes until Atherton’s Elephant was on the market, but it had occurred to Atherton that these tests might reveal something useful to his off-the-books project out there, and so had greenlit it ahead of schedule and ahead of his departure “--and they appear to be doing a good job as co-leaders in my absence, but...well, what I was thinking when I decided to send away the only person at SCB who knows how to fill out an expense report, I have no idea.”

Of course, the reason was actually quite simple: only a member of the inner circle could be trusted with this secret, and of them the Hammonds and Atherton were likely to become very famous as soon as the Pachyderm Portfolio was completed and Wing, sadly, would be far too noteworthy in the role.

~ ~ ~

It was the day after Ludlow’s return (the night of, he and Wing had understandably wanted to spend privately), and Hammond was reading a report he’d written; it wouldn’t change anything, but Ludlow had written it up, and besides, it was interesting.

“What do you think?”

“Mainly I’m wondering why you didn’t include the value of the gold in your cost assessment.”

“Officially? Because the gold’s not sunk cost; if we ever shut down Site A, we can reclaim it and it won’t have depreciated in value. Unofficially? Because it’s ill-gotten goods.”

“Well by that logic there was no point in writing this in the first place,” Hammond said.

“What?” Ludlow asked.

“Peter, the Maltese Falcon was eighty pounds of twenty-four karat gold, not to mention the various jewels; do you honestly think I managed to burn through four fifths of it in my youth? Most of the liquidation happened three years ago in the wake of the Sarka incident.

“When our investigators found out about Sarka’s old college friend who lives in Langley now, I nearly had a heart attack; if there’s any other way he could have figured out about Kimana other than through his CIA contact, I don’t know what it is. And one hopes that he spent his last favor on that, but of course, one can’t be sure--for that reason, I knew we may one day need a source of truly untraceable funds. And so, in an account a dozen shell companies deep that’s ultimately owned by your mother, we made a number of investments that could prove useful or lucrative in the future. Most had to be liquidated to make up your budget for getting Site A up and running, but the Grand Grimaldis’ profits will easily cover the ongoing costs.”

“...I’m going to need to include a report of the Grimadis’ profits when I show this to Norman, then,” Ludlow said, exasperated.

“Of course; of course,” Hammond said.

“So why didn’t you spend all of the bird in this?” Ludlow asked.

“We spent as much as we felt we needed to. And besides…” Hammond paused, “...it’s always been our safety net, you know. If one of my bold schemes went south and the family ended up penniless, we’d always have something to rely on to get us back up on our feet.”

“But you spent it, anyway.”

“Well, like you said, it’s not exactly sunk cost--and it was that or lose the Grimaldis. Besides, there’s something fitting about it, don’t you think? This whole affair with the bird began because of my father’s death, and now it’s going to be used to create life.”

~ ~ ~

“So Henry, where’re you going to get your doctorate?” Atherton asked.

“Iuno. MIT?” Wu said.

“What about Stanford?”

“Just what are you saying?”

“Part of the deal I have with Lockwood is that this technique we invented belongs to me, and this little company I work with in Palo Alto is going to be using it quite extensively in the future. It would be nice to have the world’s second ranked expert in WGR work for us.” WGR stood for Whole Genome Replacement, unimaginatively enough, and wasn’t even entirely accurate--mitochondrial DNA was left unmolested by it.[2]

“You already do, but I can see why you’d also want the first,” Wu said.

“You little shit,” Atherton said affectionately. Then seriously: “I can probably pull some strings to get you into Stanford.” Surely they wouldn’t still be holding a grudge over the whole hoodwinking them about the nature of my relationship with SCB thing, right? “You school there and work for me--while keeping mum about the fact that we knew each other beforehand--and four years from now you’ll be Dr. Wu. What do you say?”

“Four? I’ll do it in two.”

“You really think you can cram that much schooling in on top of a full-time job? Sounds hectic,” Atherton observed.

“When I was a kid I worked in my parents’ laundry in Manhattan; I can handle ‘hectic,’” Wu said.

“Your funeral,” Atherton said. Cocky little son of a bitch; I like him.

Atherton walked away and up onto deck for some air, where he saw Lockwood staring out to sea contemplatively.

“I thought you’d be ecstatic,” Atherton said. Indeed, he had been ecstatic enough to fly out here and see for himself when he learned of Atherton and Wu’s triumph.

Lockwood jumped. “Oh! I was. I am. But then I got to thinking about the future, and I realized that I can’t raise her.” He looked back out to sea. “The whole world knows what I’m trying to do out here. If I suddenly have a new ‘ward’ or ‘granddaughter’ with no documentation or explanation, they’ll know what happened. She’ll be the center of a media circus--people will argue about whether or not she’s even human! I...I can’t put a little girl through that.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Proceed as scheduled, with a twist. Screen potential surrogates for parenting skills, home dynamics, and moral character on top of everything else, and get them American citizenship and eight grand a year for raising the child.”

“Why eight grand?”

“It’s enough to keep the foster parents from starving or having to resort to jobs that they’ll hate, but not so much that they’ll be tempted to be lazy.[3]” There was no way in hell Lockwood just knew that off the top of his head; he’d looked into it since this morning, or more likely had called someone on the mainland and had them look into it. “Also, I’m going to have to delay giving you your boat; gotta keep up the appearance that I’m still struggling out here. Thank God you made us sign those nondisclosure agreements.”

Atherton shrugged. “I’m going to need time to decide what renovations I need, anyway.”

“Thanks,” Lockwood said. “Maybe I’ll get back in contact when she turns eighteen,” he added wistfully.

“Thinking we’ll have outgrown such silly superstitions by two thousand two?”

“Hardly, but she’ll be an adult, a legal citizen, with voting rights and everything by then, and it’ll be too late to take any of it back. Like my father always said, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.”

END OF INTERLUDE

____________________

Chapter Text

“[A]t the end of the day, what could InGen possibly be doing in private that’d be more audacious and ambitious than what they’re doing in public?”

--Aaron Ian Sarka

Chapter Text

II-I

“Welcome please, for a first-time engagement, industrialist and venture capitalist John Hammond,” David Letterman said, and Hammond walked out onto the soundstage of Late Night with David Letterman to far more recognition and applause than he would have gotten just one week ago.

Friday, 4 March 1983 wasn’t the beginning of the media campaign to bring news of InGen, Atherton’s Elephant, and SCB’s future plans to the world, nor would it be the end, but it was the peak of the crescendo that was their deliberate efforts; the existence of Atherton’s Elephant had been announced to the world on Monday, and in one short work week they’d made themselves the talk of the science and pop science worlds. And the financial world. Heck, they were even attacking politics from both ends of the spectrum: Atherton and de l’Adrien were touting this as proof of the need for diversity in STEM fields (and were calling for the greater integration of various social liberation movements with one another--both for the strategic advantage of numbers and because, you know, queer Black women exist), while Hammond touted it as a victory for capitalism over communism, arguing that consumer biologicals (a term he’d coined) would revolutionize and invigorate the field of genetics in ways that couldn’t readily be replicated in the communist model.

It had been a wild week.

And by some bizarre coincidence, Letterman had managed to talk about both dinosaurs and the possibility of farming out pregnancy on tonight’s show[1], but Hammond approached the stage with aplomb regardless.

“I must admit, you’re far from our usual fare; care to tell us why you wanted to be on this show?” Letterman asked.

“Naked self-promotion,” Hammond said cheerfully.

“You’re not supposed to admit it,” Letterman mock-scolded. He looked at the birdcage. “Is that what I think it is?”

With a Cheshire Cat grin, Hammond yanked off the covering of the birdcage, revealing a cat-sized elephant in an adorable sweater.

Letterman was awe-struck, but seemed to regain his composure. “I'm so glad you made this instead of wasting your time curing cancer.”

The audience laughed, and Hammond also chuckled a bit.

“Joke’s on you, I’ve got a cancer cure in the works,” Hammond said. “In all seriousness, however, that is a legitimate question I expect to hear a lot of. ‘Why are you making toys instead of medicine?’ And the answer is that just like how the techniques and technologies Henry Ford pioneered to build personal vehicles are now used to build ambulances, we did a lot of science that’s applicable to human health. You ever heard of the Stanford Gestation Project? It advanced our understanding of mammalian growth by a decade at least, and we were a major funder and contributor to that--because without it, we’d never have learned how to do this. The cell reversion technology that researchers around the world are looking into using to clone human organs? Likely wouldn’t have been invented for several decades if our research didn’t take us down strange paths.”

The decision to not enforce their patent against universities (which had been something Atherton had insisted on and Hammond had gone along with in spite of his “better” judgement) had been great not just for the brownie points but because the research coming out of universities was making the corporations positively sit up and salivate.

“We’ve also patented recently several technologies that will revolutionize the field of fertility--in utero pregnancy monitors, uterine replicators, ‘hormone chips’ that improve the process of in vitro fertilization, even improved pregnancy tests. None of this has been approved for human use--yet--but the difference between us and a purely pharmaceutical company, beyond the fact that none of this would have been looked into in the first place if not for our quest to create Atherton’s Elephant, is that Atherton’s Elephant means we’re going to be profiting off this technology even while it’s still in FDA limbo. And we have little fear of the technology being swiped out from under us by corporate espionage because, again, it’s already been patented.

“Going forward, InGen will be even more hand-in-glove in combining profit motivation with science and environmentalism.” InGen and SCB were not the same company, but if any potential investor failed to do enough research to know that, that was hardly Hammond’s fault…or so the investors were supposed to believe was the trick up his sleeve, after doing the most basic research into him possible.

“So you’ve got future plans beyond this, I take it?”

Hammond grinned. “Mr. Letterman, this is only the beginning, a footnote at the tip of an iceberg. My next project will have far-reaching environmental consequences that’ll change the world rapidly and permanently--only, in a good way for once.

“Say you’re trying to save a species that’s been hunted the brink of extinction. What do you do? Well, conventionally the best thing you can do is set aside a preserve for that species, but you’re going to have to guard it constantly against poachers because some rich...so-and-so wants a status symbol, and sadly, the damage that has already been done to the species’ biodiversity can’t be undone. All the dead animals are already dead, after all...but what if you could clone them?

“Now you might be asking who’s going to pay for that? No government’s going to go for such a hairbrained scheme, and companies need a profit motivation. But that’s the beauty of the situation, not only is there a profit motivation, but in pursuing it we’d be attacking the problem at its source.

“See, DNA doesn’t get used up; once you have an animal’s DNA, you can clone it forever. And it would only make sense to make several clones of the same animal, in order to protect yourself against it mutating or miscarrying. So once you’ve released a cloned animal into the wild...what do you do with the spares? Why not sell them? Why not sell a million of them?

“And that is the beauty of it, Mr. Letterman. An animal’s not much of a status symbol if you can buy it in every pet shop in North America! My goal here is to drive the poachers out of business, one endangered species at a time.” Hammond glowed triumphantly, his enthusiasm for this project as obvious as it was sincere.

“So what you’re saying is, you’ve solved environmentalism,” Letterman said.

“Well, poaching; animals going extinct for other reasons can ‘merely’ look forward to a boost in numbers, protection of their genetic diversity, and the ability to resist catastrophic collapse,” Hammond said. “Also, don’t throw me a parade just yet; while the technology definitely exists to do what we intend--whole genome replacement, or WGR--” Hammond spelled it out rather than pronouncing it wager as they’d come to do, for the sake of avoiding confusion “--is yet another of one of Dr. Atherton’s million patents--there’s still a lot of work to do. Adapting the technology for the target species, getting the various legal permissions that’ll be necessary for my plan going forward, convincing investors it’s a good idea--there’s a long road ahead of us. But not an uncharted one.”

“That is an ambitious plan,” Letterman said.

“Yeah, well--” Hammond gestured at the elephant “--we don’t exactly do a whole lot of ‘conventional’ around these parts.”

“Speaking of Atherton’s Elephant….”

Hammond let the elephant out of its cage, and as if on cue it walked up to Letterman and trumpeted adorably; he had deliberately brought the friendliest elephant in batch alpha 1.1.2.

“What’s its name?”

“Horton.”

“You’re going to make an obscene amount of money off of him.”

“Well, not Horton specifically--we’ve got to keep the ‘alpha generation’ on hand so that we can predict any sort of health complications for the ones we do sell--but bidding has already begun on the first of the ‘beta generation’, which’ll be released in two months, one for each of the top twelve bidders.”

When baking a cake, if you want to halve the size of the cake, you halve the resources used in it--one egg instead of two, etcetera. The resources used in this “cake” were cells of various descriptions, and reducing the numbers of them meant shortening the duration they were allowed to grow for--essentially, SCB had created this elephant by speeding up its aging process, and they were naturally concerned that that would have repercussions.

There were other concerns. The adorable little sweater the elephant wore was not cosmetic; shrinking it to such a degree had increased its surface-area-to-mass ratio by more than twelve-fold--as such, it was radiating far more heat than evolution had designed it to. It was also not designed to eat as much relative to its mass as such a small mammal would have to to live, and so it had to be fed a special recipe Katz had come up with, though that at least was not without benefits, as SCB would be able to sell the special food it needed. There would also need to be a handler, specially trained by SCB, that the buyer would need to hire (at their own expense, of course).

Evolution had designed this animal to be big; making it small had made it fragile.

____________________

Chapter Text

II-II

“Pat Robertson had some interesting things to say about you the other day,” Donald Gennaro[1] said the following Monday.

“Did he now?” said Hammond.

“Something about how if InGen pursues uterine replicators they’ll be sinning against God.”

“Excellent,” Hammond said

“Not worried it’ll spook the would-be investors?”

“Of course not. These are businesspeople, Donald, and if there’s one thing businesspeople understand, it’s that there's no such thing as bad publicity. ‘Controversy’ is just another word for ‘free advertising,’ and they know that.”

“What about some terrorist breaking into SCB and planting a pipe bomb?”

“Our security will catch them,” Hammond said. “It’s pretty good these days. Anyway, we’d best set up for our guests.”

When the potential investors entered the boardroom, they found the table lined with newspaper, an unusual but likely wise decoration, given the animal that was standing on it. “I trust you gentlemen will be gentle with Hanno here,” Hammond said, stroking the tiny elephant; “Hanno” and “Horton” were in fact the same damn elephant, 1.1.2 #8. “He’s not accustomed to large crowds. If you like him, though, you can bid on one of his little brothers.”

Coordinating a several month long auction was ambitious, but by taking advantage of every opportunity they had to announce the top bidders on the media, taking out ads in several papers perused by the ultrawealthy announcing who the current top bidders were, calling bidders to inform them when they’ve fallen out of the top twelve (there were twelve elephants up for auction), and even curating their own usenet feed, they managed to keep the competition going.

“Quite an amazing inventor Dr. Atherton is, isn’t he?” Hammond asked rhetorically, once all the introductions and other formalities were done and everyone but him and Gennaro had taken their seats. (He liked to be able to move about a room as he gave a presentation.) “For the elephant, of course, but also for so much more. Between PCR, virotherapy, the various fertility aids invented in pursuit of Hanno here, WGR--and a cure for cancer, because why not?--it’s no exaggeration to say the man has advanced the science of genetics by a century or more.” Someone savvy would have noticed that virotherapy included Atherton’s cancer cure or would have asked what WGR was, but Hammond knew no one here would catch that--he was deliberately throwing jargon at these people. It was a delicate dance, finding the line between impressing them and boring them.

“And on top of all of that, there are some inventions and discoveries I’ve elected not to make public. Ones that concern us here today, as they strongly relate to InGen’s true purpose. Which is why, before I continue, I’m going to have to ask all of you to sign nondisclosure agreements.”

Gennaro passed out the documents.

“Don’t worry, though: InGen is going to do all the things I have been on TV and in magazines claiming we’re going to do,” Hammond said. He grinned conspiratorially at them: “After all, it’ll be excellent practice.”

And with that, the lure was baited. As it turned out, none of the men here could resist it; inside his head, Hammond crowed in triumph as the last of them signed the papers Gennaro had handed out.

“Excellent choice, my friends. In many ways, InGen’s true purpose is the same as its stated goal, only moreso.

“People have been talking about bringing back extinct animals with the power of cloning since the invention of PCR[2]: dodos and passenger pigeons and the like, but also more ambitious targets such as mammoths, saber-tooth cats, dinosaurs...well, no, not dinosaurs, at least not amongst the people who are smart enough to know better. If you ask any expert in the field why not, they will give you a very good reason: we have no way to get dinosaur DNA. After all, what substance could possibly preserve DNA for tens, or even hundreds, of millions of years?” He slammed his hand on the table, and lifted it, revealing a mosquito entombed in a piece of amber.

“Amber is a wondrous material. If you were to look at this mosquito under an electron microscope, you would be able to see perfectly preserved cells. More perfectly preserved than anyone realizes, it turns out, as Dr. Atherton was able to pull viable DNA from amber dating back to the very dawn of the Age of Dinosaurs. This mosquito didn’t feed on a dinosaur--we’ve already confirmed that--but another might have, shortly before it died, and if it did, and if we find it, we can get the dinosaur blood, and well, there you go.

“‘Well okay,’ says our hypothetical expert, ‘but it will still take decades to sequence a dinosaur’s DNA.’ And that would be a very big problem...if we had any intention of doing so.” Hammond paused, and nodded at Gennaro, who began handing out boxes of Knott and booklets explaining its use.

Hammond sighed theatrically. “I’m about to do two things that are very risky for me to do. The first is that I am handing out an unpatented technology for you to take home and have your lab geeks test in any way you see fit, albeit one that Dr. Atherton assures me no one will ever be able to reverse-engineer--not to mention my people at Connverse, whom I’ve had attempting to do exactly that for months. The second is that I’m about to get very technical with my explanation, and risk boring you with the jargon. I do this, against my every instinct as a businessman and a fundraiser, because if you don’t have absolute proof of it, no scientist on Earth will believe that I can do what I’m about to claim I can do. Even with the modern-day Leonardo da Vinci in my corner. It’s that far beyond the state of the art of modern genetics.”

That got their attention, Hammond noted with satisfaction. It wasn't actually going to be all that technical--mainly, he was trying to get them to understand the significance of the breakthrough--but it never hurt to butter up his audience by implying that they’re highly intelligent for understanding what he was going to say.

“It’s too much to hope for that the dinosaur DNA, when we find it, won’t be full of holes, meaning it will be up to us to fix it. There’s only one way to do this that our hypothetical expert knows of: sequence several strands of the dinosaur’s DNA, use supercomputers to find the places where the strands overlap, and just sort of tape these broken strands together like this until you've bootstrapped yourself up a complete and unblemished genome. Such a project would cost billions of dollars’ worth of equipment and manpower and take, well, decades, as I said. Which is why we won’t be doing that.

“What you’re holding is an enzyme Dr. Atherton created that can stitch genomes together. It does in the pitri dish--well, the PCR machine, actually--what our hypothetical expert would have us do in cyberspace, and does it in an hour as opposed to decades. Instructions for use are in the booklet Mr. Gennaro handed out.

“I’m not saying it’s going to be easy--indeed, I expect that several things we’ll need to do to accomplish our goals will be very expensive, hence why you gentlemen are being invited to join in--but we have all the pieces of the puzzle already; it’s just a matter of putting it together.”

Gennaro handed out more papers, which described InGen’s business model.

“Well, there’s one other little problem. You’ll notice the existence of a rather peculiar subsidiary we’ve named the Elektron Consortium,” Elektron being the Greek word for amber. “It exists to solve this problem.” Hammond picked up the amber he’d passed around. “See, I implied that the reason we know this amber has no dinosaur blood in it is that we checked for it, which was something of a fib. While we certainly have the ability to do so--there would still be blood cells stuck to the animal’s mouth parts that you’d be able to see with an electron microscope--it wasn’t necessary in this case, because this is a forgery. At some point, someone drilled a hole in this piece of amber, put the mosquito you see in it, and filled the hole with resin. They did this because amber with inclusions sell better. Furthermore, the person who sold it to me assured me that it was an eighty million year old piece of Dominican amber, in spite of the fact that Dominican amber is only thirty million years old. Such corruption is rife in the amber market, sadly.

“Even if that wasn’t the case, simply buying up an amber stockpile would be problematic. We could certainly sell off again the amber that doesn’t have inclusions in it, but it’d still be a massive waste of time and resources to sift through it ourselves. But what if we could make the amber market do it for us?

“That’s where Elektron comes in. The Elektron Consortium is a vertical conglomerate--a structure you have no reason to have ever heard of, because from a ‘bottom line’ perspective it is pure madness. If what you’re looking for is control of an entire industry, however, it is an innovative, cheap, and efficient way to achieve exactly that....” Hammond continued to explain how the Elektron Consortium worked.

And then he spun them the yarn of Jurassic Park (working title), a magical place that tourists would gladly pay ten or twenty thousand dollars a day to visit--and that was only the beginning, for it would be merely the crown jewel of InGen's massive economic empire. There was merchandise, of course, but also media: can you imagine how many eyes a documentary about real live dinosaurs would draw to it? It would be a never-ending font of free advertising for InGen, as every time one of their animals did something they hadn’t of done before, it’d be a groundbreaking moment in the history of science that would spawn endless debate in the halls of paleontology. And, if they found a dinosaur that was sufficiently docile (or at least small and cageable), even pets. Not to mention the possibilities raised by the existence of an animal that could be patented--or maybe, if their lawyers were sufficiently evil, copyrighted. He had them eating out of his hand so much that they didn't even flinch when he implied that InGen wouldn't be in the black until well into the nineties. (He actually had no idea when it would be in the black, because he had no idea when Jurassic Park would open.)

When they left, they were smiling, and Hammond knew he had them. Oh, not yet--these men were smart enough to have their lawyers look into these contracts and InGen and to thoroughly test “Knott polymerase” (he loved that pun) and confirm it could do everything he claimed it could before signing on--but he also knew the results would be exactly what he wanted them to be. Victory was sweet.

____________________

Chapter Text

II-III

Hammond gave a very similar speech two weeks later, only this time not everyone left. A forty-year-old Indian man continued to sit at the table, actually reading the proposal; Hammond’s stomach sank, for he’d learned long ago not to underestimate the cunning of the Masrani family.

John Rezi, president-at-large of Rezi-Masrani, had once been asked what his job at Rezi-Masrani actually was, and had responded with “Sanjay [Masrani, his CEO and brother-in-law] has his fingers in many pies; I’m the guy who finds him pies,” and that was, as far as Hammond could tell, precisely accurate.

“So, how much of this technology is owned by InGen and how much is owned by SCB?”

“The technologies developed by SCB are owned by SCB and the technologies developed by InGen are owned by InGen.”

“So if you should fail to find dinosaur blood and file for bankruptcy, you’ll still own all the technology that makes the bird and reptile project possible and be able to restart that under a different name, while InGen’s investors will be left holding onto a whole lot of useless infrastructure, including a ‘vertical conglomerate’ that looks something like an upside-down pyramid scheme and a lab that’s obscenely expensive to run.”

Hammond was disconcerted not by the fact that he had figured it out--the investors were supposed to, after all--but by the fact that he’d figured it out without having to wait to have his lawyers spell it out for him.

“Hey, maybe we’ll find that we can transfer DNA between crocodile and bird ova with gay abandon with no negative consequences, in which case you won’t even get the lab.”

Rezi chuckled at the wry joke.

“Seriously, though: we’re investing a lot of our own money and labor into this,” Hammond said.

“Of course you are. But that’s all you’ll lose if InGen fails. And that’s assuming you don’t do a buyback of your own stock; seems like that’d be the easiest way to trigger bankruptcy in the first place.”

“And immediately get arrested for insider trading.”

“A valid point, but it might be worth it,” Rezi said.

Hammond shrugged. “Depending on what the law looks like in, oh, let’s say ’93? Possibly. Assuming the country hasn’t gone full socialist in backlash against Reagan by then.”

“Do you really think that could happen?” Gennaro asked. He was a fairly solid Reagan supporter.

“Not as certain as I was when he got elected,” Hammond admitted to him. Turning back to Rezi: “Anyway, assuming everything falls into place in a fortuitous manner, it might be worth it, yes, but that’s obviously not exactly plan A.”

“Come to think of it, would it even be illegal for a CEO to simply announce that he has no faith in a company and intended to sell his stock in it and step down?”

“There doesn’t appear to be any precedent,” Hammond said.

“So you’ve looked into it,” Rezi grinned wolfishly.

“Well, yes. But consider what it’ll do to my reputation!”

Neither of them mentioned the fact that Hammond was an old man, and wasn’t likely to have to live with a tarnished reputation for long.

“Oh, no, you clearly have a lot riding on this; just not as much as it would appear to a casual observer,” Rezi said. “What concerns me, though, is what you intend to do if you succeed.”

“...Run the company?” Hammond asked rhetorically.

“Don’t be cute. If there’s one thing you can’t stand, Mr. Hammond--can I call you John?”

“Of course, John.”

“If there’s one thing you can’t stand, John, it’s being answerable to people who don’t share your vision. I can sympathize; Rezi-Masrani wouldn’t be the beloved institution it is today if we had to listen to shareholders yelling at us to bust unions or slash worker pay. And whatever it is you’re going to do, we want in.”

“Shouldn’t you talk to Sanjay about this first?”

“He trusts me implicitly.”

“My wife trusts me implicitly, but if one of us were thinking about making an investment this large, we’d consult each other first. To keep our planning up to date, if nothing else.”

“Well, it’s not a decision either of us has to make right now.”

“Fair enough,” Hammond said. “So what, exactly, do you bring to the table?”

“First, you know we’re not going to attempt a hostile takeover. There’s no point when InGen doesn’t actually own the key technologies, and besides, our priorities are such that we wouldn’t be able to dedicate enough resources to the task if we wanted to.

“Second, I’m guessing that at least part of it--be it ‘plan A’ or ‘step one’--is to buy as much ‘in house’ from your own companies with stock as possible. If you consider Rezi-Masrani another ‘house,’ that not only gives InGen more potential resources to work with but helps muddy the waters, making his job easier.” Rezi nodded at Gennaro.

“Who says I’m involved in this?” Gennaro asked defensively.

“The fact that John didn’t send you out of the room as soon as I started with this conspiracy talk.”

“Conversely, it could be because you’re talking nonsense,” Hammond pointed out.

Rezi chuckled. “In that case, I guess I’m not going to get called back.”

“Is there a ‘third’?” Hammond asked.

Rezi nodded. “Third, it of course means that InGen will benefit from my own, ah, unique services and insights.” He looked back at the packet. “For instance, you got any idea where you’re going to build this ‘Site B’ of yours?”

“Yes. But I’m always open to suggestions.”

“Well, since you’re already going to buy an island for Jurassic Park, why not a second island?”

“And instantly double the expenses I’ll be putting down on infrastructure. Brilliant,” Hammond said sarcastically.

“Perhaps, but nothing you’re going to be doing for this project will be cheap in the first place, and it has the distinct advantage that you can honestly say you’re sending equipment to ‘your lab in the Andaman Islands’ and people will just assume it’s on the island they know about.” Rezi grinned. “You can have that one for free. Consider my offer,” he added as he left.

The door closed, and Hammond snorted.“Did you notice how casually he suggested building Jurassic Park in the Andamans?” he observed dryly to Gennaro.

“Does Rezi-Masrani own property there?” Gennaro said.

“Didn’t last time I checked, but it doesn’t really make a difference. The Masranis’ greatest strength and greatest weakness is that they’re patriots first and business people second. Rezi-Masrani’s mission statement is to make India a superpower by the twenty-first century. A noble goal, but I’m not sure how realistic it is.

“I suspect that’s also the reason they won’t be able to dedicate the sort of resources to a takeover that they’d need; sure, owning Jurassic Park would line their pockets nicely, but in the meantime they could be doing so much more good with the money and resources they’d need to accomplish it. But it also limits the resources they can dedicate to InGen, period, on account of them being pretty much the same resources.”

Gennaro grunted in acknowledgement.

“...You know, he might be onto something with the island thing,” Hammond said. “Building infrastructure will be a pain, but pretty much every national branch of Hammond International has at least one construction company under its aegis, and it makes for an excellent excuse to sell myself more stock.”

“So, are we going to cut them in?”

“That’s not a decision either of us can make on our own--you have senior partners to report to, and I have my family--but it seems like we’re going to have to; as big of fans of Henry Ford as John Rezi and Sanjay Masrani are, it’s only a matter of time before they happen to guess what my true plan for seizing control of this company is. When that happens, I’d rather have them, ah, ‘inside the tent pissing out’ than vice versa.”

Chapter Text

II-IV

Juanito Rostagno[1] walked into the offices of Cowan, Swain and Ross, where he was swiftly directed to one of their many conference rooms by a secretary.

“Juanito Rostagno?” a man in a suit asked.

“I am he.” He shook the man’s hand.

“Donald Gennaro. Before we begin, I would like you to sign this nondisclosure agreement.”

Rostagno raised an eyebrow, but Gennaro just sat with folded hands and waited. It was clear this would go nowhere until Rostagno signed. After a moment’s consideration, he decided he didn’t want to leave without knowing what this was all about and, upon confirming that the document didn’t require him to do anything but keep mum about what was discussed here, signed.

Gennaro hit the call button on the phone at the center of the table. “Send Mrs. Hammond in, please.” He turned to Rostagno. “We need you to do a job, and it cannot get out that you’re doing it, let alone who you’re doing it for.” He clearly saw the look on Rostagno’s face, because he quickly added. “It’s not illegal. Mostly it's a question of raising too many questions. It’s also largely the fact that if people realized just how valuable the resource we’re looking to acquire is to us, that would undoubtedly affect the price of it. And then there’s the fact that a large part of why it’s not illegal is that in normal circumstances no one would attempt this; when people learn of this--which they will, but hopefully not before its proper time--there’s a small but present risk that it could become illegal.”

“I'm curious, and a little scared,” Rostagno admitted.

“That’s probably the correct attitude,” an elderly woman said, entering the room. She held out her hand for a handshake. “Emma Hammond-Johnson.”

“Juanito Rostagno.” He shook her hand.

“I should bloody well hope so, or else we went to a lot of trouble to schedule a meeting with the wrong person,” Hammond-Johnson said.

Something about the light but wry humor reminded Rostagno of someone he saw on Letterman one month before (to the day, in fact). “Any connection to John Hammond?”

“And here we were hoping to avoid my husband's newfound fame by sending me instead,” Hammond-Johnson said dryly.

It had been more a guess then a deduction, but Rostagno kept his mouth closed.

“Now, then,” she continued. “See, we have a problem. There is a resource we need. In its basic form, it's relatively common but the, uh, quality control we require does not exist. Has no reason to exist, for most practical purposes. Buying up all the resource that exists on the market in the hopes that one piece in a million or a billion meets our standards simply is not cost-effective, and so we've elected to attempt an alternative method.

“Mr. Rostagno, any profits the Elektron Consortium--which I hope you'll agree to become president of--makes will be entirely incidental to its purpose. It's purpose is to impose this quality control onto a worldwide industry.”

“...How?”

“We call the model a vertical conglomerate: if Elektron buys a controlling interest in company A, which buys a controlling interest in company B, which buys a controlling interest in company C....”

Soon enough the proportion of the profits that get back to the original investor would drop to practically nothing: even if every dollar a company made from stock it held was used to pay dividends on its own stock, if each company in this structure owned 60% of the next company down the line, then 60% of 60% of 60% of 60% of 60% was less than eight cents of every dollar paid in dividends getting back to the original investor.

But as she said, she wasn’t interested in the bottom line here--she was interested in control. And while there would be significant upfront costs, they should drop precipitously after that--theoretically, if he had an infinite time frame and no other expenses to worry about, a single investment would be all it took.

It dawned on Rostagno that with this job no one was going to protest him prioritizing the needs of the workers over the desires of the shareholders or C suite[2] here, or complain when he drove production so high that it caused market prices to dip--in fact, the people he was working for were the buyers, and so if anything would consider the latter a good thing. He wondered how Hammond-Johnson had found him, because this was absolutely something he was interested in.

“I admit, my interest is piqued. So, what is this resource you want to control the world’s supply of?”

“Amber.”

Hammond-Johnson went on to explain exactly what she needed Rostagno to do, and suddenly it clicked.

“You’re cloning a dinosaur!”

She went stonefaced. “What leads you to that conclusion?”

“The fact that your husband is famously trying to invent cloning and you're going through a lot of trouble to get your hands on a blood sample from tens of millions of years ago,” Rostagno said.

“Yeesh. Fame really is a double-edged sword, isn't it?” Hammond-Johnson muttered. “This, of course, is still covered by NDA you signed, you understand.”

“No need to threaten me--I'm in. Come on, who’s going to say no to being in on the ground floor on this action?” Rostagno asked rhetorically, grinning from ear to ear.

“I'm glad to hear it,” Hammond-Johnson said.

“I have one more question,” Rostagno said. “How on Earth did you find me? I mean, this is extremely relevant to my interests.”

Hammond-Johnson didn’t quite smirk, but her grin was rather smirk-y. “The qualities that make someone a good shepherd for Elektron are so far removed from the ones that would make one a good shepherd for any other business that we simply asked our potential investors if they’d ever fired anyone or rejected a candidate from a management position for...various things. From there it was only a matter of routine background check, choosing our favorite candidates, and very thorough background check.”

~ ~ ~

“Look, I'm a doctor, not a CEO, but even I can see that InGen is squandering a golden opportunity here,” Dodgson said to Sarka, sipping some marvelously bad office coffee out of a styrofoam cup. “With the hype Hammond created, they could name their own price for their stock, and yet it isn't being sold on the open market--instead, Hammond gives some top secret spiel to a select group of millionaires and billionaires, and the only thing we know for sure is that he makes them sign a nondisclosure agreement first.

Now, you know more about Hammond than I do,” Dodgson continued, “but I got the distinct impression that, as someone whose been in the corporate world for his entire adult life, he could hardly be unaware of this fact.”

“Have you considered that maybe he knows something you don’t?” Sarka asked.

“If there’s a legitimate reason why Hammond’s current strategy is better than what I proposed, please enlighten me, Obi-wan Kenobi, because the only advantage I see is that it makes it easier for him to keep secrets.”

“I appreciate your enthusiasm, Lew, but I doubt there’s any sort of conspiracy. I admit this is weird, but at the end of the day, what could InGen possibly be doing in private that’d be more audacious and ambitious than what they’re doing in public?”

“I don't know. All I know is that what Hammond's doing looks idiotic, and Hammond doesn't strike me as an idiot, and so....”

“...and if the puzzle doesn't make sense, it means you don't have all the pieces,” Sarka finished. “You do make an excellent point. I shall have to think on this.”

“That's all I ask,” Dodgson said.

____________________

Chapter Text

II-V

The Hammonds had given him what they described as “cursory reports” they’d commissioned on their own recognisance over the previous three years; that may well be what they’d been intended to be, but given that they had three years and barely-contained enthusiasm for the project, it was enough not only for Rostagno to decide on a Canada-first strategy but to delay setting up a nerve center in favor of flying directly to Canada and see about starting things up on his own. Besides, having a success under his belt would likely give him more leeway for that than he would otherwise have….

He stepped out of the airport and took a deep breath of the chill Edmonton air. Well, chill for him; the locals would no doubt consider forty-two Farenheit to be light sweater weather, but he was a creature of warmer climes: Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Texas, etcetera. Trying not to freeze in the process, he hailed a cab.

The logic behind Elektron’s Canada first strategy was clear: For various reasons, the Canadian amber market was underdeveloped in spite of having an appreciable amount of the stuff; close economic ties to the US made it an excellent launching off point for American operations; and of course, the most famous dinosaurs in the world--your tyranosaurs, your stegosaurs, your triceratopses, your brontosaurs--were North American animals.

“First, I need to purchase a local newspaper; second, a restaurant,” he told the cabbie.

Over lunch, he scanned the adds, looking for an apartment or house.

“Hey, what can you tell me about this Oliver neighborhood?” he asked his waitress, pointing at the apartment in the paper. He ultimately decided it’d do and tipped her generously.

After lunch, he hailed another cab and drove to the apartment. Looking around the sterile, empty rooms, he wrote a check for the first month’s rent and the deposit on the spot. “Does anyone in this building have a truck I can hire for the afternoon? I’ll need help moving in,” he asked as he pulled a tailored suit out of his bag to hang in the closet, tossing the rest of it in a random corner. The landlords pointed him towards likely volunteers and he was on his way to buy furniture.

But he stopped at a payphone, along the way, and called the University of Alberta. “Hello? I’d like to schedule a meeting with Dr. Nath at his earliest convenience for Mr. Juanito Rostagno. Or to be more specific, a consultation lasting a couple hours.” Rostagno snagged a meeting for the next day, and then continued on about today’s business.

He bought a few essentials: in no particular order, a bed and covers, a TV and couch, a table and chairs, an Apple IIe[1] with various peripherals and a phone, a computer desk and TV stand, a radio, a gun safe, a refrigerator, a microwave, and a stove. This all took several trips, partially because they were at different stores but mostly because there was only so much room in the truck, but by the end of the day Rostagno had furnished his apartment (and canceled a hotel room he’d reserved before making the trip) and treated his helpers to dinner at a local restaurant to celebrate.

When he returned home that night, he set up the Apple IIe with its special modem--not that the phone line was on yet--pulled the container of cassette tapes the Hammonds had given him out of his bag and locked them in the safe, made his bed, and crashed for the night.

~ ~ ~

The next day was Saturday, April ninth, and Rostagno found Dr. Marcus Nath, who turned out to be a middle-aged man of Indian extraction, grading some papers. He put them aside, greeted his guest, and they got down to business, which mainly consisted of confirming what he’d already read.

“The tailings piles are comprised of portions of two of the uppermost coal seams within the Taber Coal Zone, and some of the shale beds adjacent to these seams. Because amber nodules behave as resistant clasts within the tailings and possess a specific gravity relatively close to that of water, they’re concentrated on the surface each time it rains,” Nath said.

“So the amber comes out of the piles because it’s only slightly heavier than the rain,” Rostagno clarified for himself.

“That’s what I said, yes,” Nath said. “The amber is typically dark yellow in color with brown drying lines, and tends to be coated with a weathering rind or a carbonaceous matrix.”

“Huh?”

“They’re hard to see. But bright sunlight elicits a mild green fluorescence from fractured surfaces on the amber node, which helps.”

“Ah.”

Eventually Rostagno thanked Nath for his time and left. He had learned some things, and confirmed a lot, and while he didn’t have a solid plan yet, he knew what his next step must be. If Canadian amber was associated with coal mines, he had to look into Canadian coal mining.

~ ~ ~

It had taken a little doing to get himself a private tour of the pit mine (he claimed to be a potential investor--not technically a lie) and as he left the processing plant[2], he was almost in a daze. For it had come to him. It was so obvious. Amber wasn’t--quite--dense enough to float in water. Adding salt to water increased its density. Add enough salt to water, and eventually the amber will float in it. He pictured a sluice or aquaduct with a conveyer belt in it, or something along the lines of the tumblers he had seen in the plant. Would it go at the beginning of the line, intercepting the coal ore before it could go into the plant, or at the end, and just deal with the tailings?

Well, whatever; he didn’t need to have every aspect of the device figured out just now--the important thing was, he had a plan of action. And that meant that it was time to call the Hammonds.

When he returned home he out the box of cassettes and fired up the Apple IIe. He loaded toe program cassette, but didn’t bother with interference for the moment; he was just trying to page them, after all.

That done, he left the computer on and went to see what was on TV. A while later, the phone rang, and before answering it he checked the computer.

INSERT CASSETTE C SIDE 2

Y/N

Rostagno did as the computer bid, hit the “Y” button and then enter, and waited for it to give him the green light before picking up the phone and explaining what he was doing. (Annoyingly, the phone didn’t stop ringing during this process.)

“Rostagno here. Hey, the phone kept ringing the entire time I was doing the business with the cassettes, which was quite annoying. You ever going to fix that?”

“Once the program’s installed you can pick up the receiver, just don’t say anything until the interference is running,” Hammond said.

“Good to know.” He then gave a report of his progress and concluded with his plans going forward.

“...So my strategy is basically to buy mining companies and make them set up this device I’ve devised. I even have a target in mind: according to my preliminary research, Taber Mining already owns nine of the mines in our area of interest,” Rostagno said.[3]

“Out of how many?” Hammond asked

“Fifteen,” Rostagno said. “Assuming I do go forward with this, I’m thinking I’m going to save the proxies you’ve provided me with for a rainy day--there’d be nothing particularly eyebrow-raising about a company like Elektron buying a company like Taber, especially since most people would make the wrong assumption about what that name means. And it won’t exactly be out of character for a company like Taber to buy six more mines in the neighborhood.”

“You’re not wrong. And an operation like Taber sounds like it’d have a market cap[4] of...what? Two...four...six hundred million dollars?”

“I don’t have the numbers on me at the moment.”

“Well, your plan seems like it’d work, but I’m not an engineer, so I’m going to ask that you have a functional device before you spend that kind of money.”

“Naturally.”

“Keep whomever you hired to look into Taber on it, though.”

“I’m hurt to hear you suggest I wouldn’t.”

“It needed to be said aloud.”

“Yeah, I know; anyway, I’ve already got a meeting scheduled where I plan to commission a deep dive.”

“Good man,” Hammond said.

____________________

Chapter Text

II-VI

Alya Nette, co-owner of Nette & Nette Engineering, greeted Rostagno with a handshake and then showed him around the shop.

“Sorry my father’s not here; he’s out gathering test material and running late.

“Speaking of which, here they are, the devices we’re testing today. We’ll be judging them on several metrics--electricity usage, water wastage, and just how efficiently they sorts amber from the matrix.

“The major thing on our minds was making sure nothing got stuck under something heavier. In this model, we spread the tailings--” their instincts were that whatever benefit, if any, there would be to attaching this at the front of the line would be negligible and that it’d be infinitely less disruptive to mine operation to monkey with the tailings (that is to say, the waste) than the ore “--out in a more uniform pattern by feeding them through this...well, it’s a plinko board, let’s be honest. The tailings are then sprayed into this tank of water. This one’s normal water; its for separating out light materials, mainly wood. The flow of water pushes the wood over here, where this--” she pointed at something that looked like a window screen attached to an axel “--scoops it out of the water and onto this conveyor for waste products.

“There’s also a conveyor at the bottom of the tank, which pulls the heavier stuff out over here. This pump draws water from the top of scoop end and outputs it at the bottom of the conveyor end, thus creating the flow. Second round’s same as the first, only now the water’s the same approximate salinity as the Dead Sea. This time the amber floats and its the conveyor that removes garbage, dumping it on the detritus conveyor.

“That’s my Dad’s design; over here we have mine:

“Here there’s a conveyor at the bottom of a trough, and the tailings are agitated by this archimedes screw type thing; the trough is deep enough to prevent the screw from agitating the entire column of water, which is good because this also uses the water flow being opposite that of the conveyor to separate the light stuff from the heavy. Honestly, I’m thinking we can forego the conveyer entirely, have the screw be an archimedes screw in truth, but let’s see if the concept is fundamentally sound first. I made the trough out of wood and pool lining, because why fix what ain’t broken?

“By the time the conveyor reaches the end, it’s out of the water, and then we transfer it to the remaining tailings to the other section. Once again, the first time uses fresh water--well, unsalinated; it’s not going to be very ‘fresh’ with all this gunk in it--and the second we use super-salty water. The second one’s facing the other direction, of course, so the rock debris gets dumped on the same conveyor as the wood debris, and goes off to wherever the tailings are being dumped.

“You know, that plinko board’s a nice touch, actually. I think I’ll incorporate it into my next design. Lengthen the troughs and put the feed closer to the center; ’couse, that means this parallel design is now impractical and the new one will have a larger footprint--”

“Wait; you didn’t know he was using a plinko board?” Rostagno asked.

“Oh, no; on ‘creative’ projects like this we like to divide into teams in order to prevent groupthink. Though I suppose it’s not surprising that we think a lot alike, anyway. Like with the--”

They heard a vehicle pull in.

“That’ll be my father returning with the test material,” Alya said, and sure enough Adrien’s old pickup truck pulled in.

The Nettes and their workers quickly began shoveling Earth into a hopper. Rostagno approved; he liked bosses that got their hands dirty. In fact…

Rostagno grabbed a shovel. “Room for one more?” he asked before joining in.

“Sure thing,” Alya said.

“So where’d you get this?” Rostagno asked.

“Outskirts of town. There’s exposed lignite[1],” Adrien said in his mildly Quebecois-flavored accent.

So it ought to resemble what’d come into a processing plant. “Ah.”

~ ~ ~

“Christ, I’m nervous,” Rostagno said.

“That’s understandable,” Hammond said over the phone.

“Listen,” Hammond-Johnson added. “It may seem like we just walked into your life one day, but the vetting process was insane. You don’t even want to know the things from your past our investigators dredged up.”

“Um...and your point is?” Rostagno said uncertainty.

“What I’m saying is, you wouldn’t be there if you weren’t as perfect a candidate for the position you’re in as we were capable of finding.”

“Ah; thanks. I guess.” Rostagno looked at the clock. “Well, I’d better start preparing to meet him.”

“Just one last thing,” Hammond said.

“Yes?”

“I know how men like him think, so trust me when I say this is going to work.”

“Thanks for the pep talk. Bye.” They said their goodbyes and Rostagno hung up, turned off the computer, rewound and removed the cassette, and put it with the others in the gun safe. He crossed his sparse living room; first order of business was to shower off all this nervousness sweat.

It was a very risky thing that he was doing today--that he had proposed doing, and the Hammonds had endorsed enthusiastically. If it went right, he’d acquire Taber Mining in record time with a minimum of fuss and with most of his expenditure going into the company itself (where it could be reinvested in the other six coal mines he was after)...and if it went wrong, he’d have tipped his hand to the fact that he was attempting a hostile takeover and given the C-suite plenty of time to mount a defense.

Rostagno dressed in a tailored suit--not the one he brought, but one he’d gotten during his time here--and drove down to the Victoria Golf Course Clubhouse, to the table he’d reserved, and waited, nerves thoroughly clamped down. He’d actually gotten a membership specifically to facilitate this meeting.

“I hope you weren’t waiting long,” Jules Rose, CEO of Taber Mining, said when he showed up to their meeting.

“Not at all,” Rostagno informed him politely. He could have been waiting for three hours, and his response would have been the same. He recommended an item a waiter had recommended to him when he’d asked, and Rose seemed suitably impressed by Rostagno’s apparent familiarity with the place. The Hammonds had warned him of various conversational pitfalls, and Rostagno was sure he could convincingly play someone who was accustomed to wealth no matter how long this conversation took. But an opportunity to get to the point soon presented itself.

“Allow me to cut to the chase,” Rostagno said. “You have, I trust, received our offer?”

Rose nodded. “Nineteen dollars a share to issue enough new shares for you to become majority owner.” Taber mining was currently valued at eighteen dollars a share; a difference that didn’t seem like much, but when multiplied by a couple hundred million shares….

“I trust you understand that we’re deliberately overvaluing your shares, and why.” Refusing the offer would sow the seeds for hostile takeover via proxy fight. “But we’re not here to discuss the stick; we’re here to discuss the carrot. Tell me, Mr. Rose: what can I do for you to ease your mind, regarding this transaction?”

Rose understood that he was being offered a bribe. “I just have one question, first. Considering the money you’d be spending on this, it’d almost certainly be cheaper to buy up shares existing on the market already.”

“It would, and that is certainly option C, but my employers consider it suboptimal. If we buy shares from third parties, that money is gone; if we buy shares directly from Taber Mining, that money can be used to expand Taber Mining’s operations--which, not incidentally, increases our own profits from the venture.”

“Option C? What’s option B?”

“Come, now, Mr. Rose; you know what option B is. It’s what you came here hoping to prevent,” Rostagno said.

“Proxy fight,” Rose said. He knew that failure to make this deal would put ammo in the quiver of Rostagno’s propagandists when they went around to seduce his investors, who would see the loss of money but may not even care about the loss of control when their control was a few steps removed and filtered through the quasi-democracy of the annual shareholders’ meeting.

“Indeed. But you can take some comfort in knowing that we’d also like to avoid that. I’d much rather keep the people who know how Taber Coal operates running the show rather than having to bring in a bunch of green newcomers to replace the entire C-suite. I’d much rather have you as a friend than have to get rid of you.”

“You people really are hellbent on acquiring us, aren’t you?”

“Suffice it to say, we have big plans for Taber mining--with or without the current management intact,” Rostagno said. “Speaking of keeping the current management intact, that brings us back to the topic at hand….”

____________________

Chapter Text

II-VII

“So how much did we make on the auction?” Atherton asked.

“Assuming no one flakes out, and subtracting the costs we ran up running it? Four hundred and twenty million,” Hammond said.

“Nice,” Atherton said. “We can invest three hundred of that in InGen right off the bat, pay off all out debts, give everyone at SCB a nice bonus, and still have enough left over for a nice cushion against future expenses.”

“Heh; funny thing: that puts us close to fifty percent ownership, no dirty tricks required,” Hammond said. And right on time, too--Rostagno was going to need quite a bit of that money after the deal he’d made yesterday.

“Yeah, but you’re not done fundraising yet, are you?”

“Oh heck no!” He laughed. “Any news on your end?”

“Everything nominal; barring some unforeseen catastrophe, we’re three weeks away from hatching the world’s first cloned crocodiles,” Atherton said. Orinoco crocodiles, to be precise.

“Campins’[1] people will be pleased.”

“Ugh; why was it so much easier to get the Venezuelans to agree to commission clones than it is to get the American government to allow us to sell the spares?”

“They’re just worried about it being some sort of scam-slash-illicit smuggling ring, I suspect,” Hammond said.

“That...okay, I can see why they’d be concerned about that,” Atherton admitted. “In other news, I have predictably failed to grow a viable organism from putting ostrich DNA into a crocodile cell. It got a decent ways before it crapped out, though.”

“So I guess that means we’ll have to go with the whole mutation thing.” The problem, so far as Hammond understood it, was that there were factors inside the cell that worked hand-in-glove with the genetic information to make things happen, like an instruction manual that assumes you have specific tools at your disposal. Atherton’s solution was a brute force one: fling random bits of the target DNA at the doner cells to mutate them, select the cell lines that survive the longest, revert them to fertilized ova, rinse and repeat until viability happens.

“I prefer to call it ‘unnatural selection’; it’s more mad science-y that way.”

Hammond chuckled. “Like it needed any help in that department.”

~ ~ ~

“A pleasure to see you again, Mr. Rose,” Rostagno lied. It wasn’t anything Rose had done, per se; simply that Rostagno’s instincts were that of a working man, and he was mistrustful of those who wielded wealth and power (never mind that he was the one who was wielding wealth and power in this relationship).

Small talk quickly gave way to what they were there fore. “My employers have a list of mines they wish for you to acquire. I have some preliminary files on the targets in my briefcase, but I suspect the files you may already have on them could be more detailed.” He handed over the list.

Rose read, and raised his eyebrow. “It’s a good thing we’ve recently had a large infusion of capital.”

“We don’t expect Rome to be built in a day, and if you need anything from us, I’ll always be willing to talk.”

“And shall we, ah, do unto them as you did onto us?”

Rostagno considered, but not the things Rose assumed he was considering, for he hadn’t of intended on suggesting that yet. He had an excuse prepared for how that could possibly be a good idea for Elektron--immediate profits outweighing greater expense--but didn’t want to seem like he immediately came to that conclusion. “I’ll run that suggestion by some people. See if they think that more immediate profits outweighs greater immediate cost. So...don’t rule it out yet.”

Rose nodded.

“While I have your attention, though, there’s this little side project I’ve been kicking around, and acquiring Taber presents a golden opportunity to test it.”

“Oh?”

“Did you know that there is amber associated with coal from Alberta and Saskatchewan? Amber is currently valued at up to fifty six cents a carat.[2] And people just dig for it in the tailings of old mines. Well, when I learned that we would be acquiring Taber mining, I commissioned research into ways of separating amber out of mine tailings. I’ll also be giving you that file, and the folks at Nette and Nette will be expecting your people’s call.”

“I see. Anything else?”

“Not at the moment; I think we put enough on your plate for now.”

~ ~ ~

“A pleasure to see you again, Mr. Rostagno.”

“Same to you, Dr. Nath.”

“Do you have more questions?”

“No. In fact, I must confess, it was no mere idle curiosity that led me to you in the first place.”

“Oh?”

“I was trying to decide if there would be any point or profit in trying to commercialize Canadian amber, and came to the conclusion of maybe. I then used my clout as a representative of a group of Taber Mining’s shareholders to have them commision a device to separate amber out of the tailings.

“It’s gone well; our trial run at the Sheerness mine has already produced thirty pounds of amber, and it’s only been a week.”

“I see. I don’t suppose I can see it?”

Rostagno grinned. “That is the exact thing I came to talk to you about. See, there’s a way we can help each other. I’m thinking we can allow you to ‘borrow’ the amber. You can study it--non-intrusively!--categorize it, classify it, and in return we...well, we get our amber categorized and classified for free.” And done far more scientifically than a jeweler would, likely. “It’s a win-win scenario, I reckon.”

“I think we can make an arrangement,” Nath said

~ ~ ~

“Even though Canadian amber is generally low-quality and we’ve only sold amber without inclusions so far--Dr. Nath has only found a single inclusion so far, a mosquito[3]--our little extensions to the line are making more money than they’re costing to run, so I doubt I’m going to get any complaints out of Rose. Including R&D is another story, but that’s likely to change as soon as we can start selling inclusions. The brunt of R&D was done before Taber became financially responsible for it, but Nette & Nette has set up shop at some abandoned mines to sift through old tailings, with the justification of refining their designs.

“I’ve further instructed Mr. Rose to take credit for the idea and he has scheduled an interview accordingly. My goal with this is that in the future I can point to where in the article he talks about the partnership with the University of Alberta and say ‘Why aren’t we doing this?’”

“Yes, that ought to make it less likely that anyone will find it weird that a whole bunch of companies are suddenly doing that,” Hammond said thoughtfully. “What excuse did you give him for it?”

Rostagno shrugged. “Free propaganda. After all, we can’t exactly patent the idea of going to a scientist, and word’s going to get out eventually, so we might as well sop up the credit for it while we can.” He grinned: “Besides, it’s not like Elektron’s interested in going into the amber business in any major way, so this is probably the most we’ll profit from it.”

Hammond chuckled. “Nice.”

“It’s kind of bad luck that Dr. Nath found a mosquito so quickly; I bought it myself, claiming sentimentality for the first truly valuable rock my little brainchild produced, but I need to set this system up ASAP, before this happens again. I intend to tell Rose not to sell any amber with inclusions on the grounds that I’m negotiating a contract for it, then attempt to set up the lab as quickly as possible. At this point I favor having a single lab somewhere in that whole San Fran area where you live, because the fewer people who know what we’re looking for the better. Also, spectronomy labs--”

“Spectography.”

“--are expensive.

“We also need to get the nerve center running ASAP. This lab is going to be examining--hopefully--dozens of amber pieces a day when the entire North American operation has gone off, and don’t need to be reading hundreds of reports to see which ones they want, especially since you really only need to skim them for certain words and phrases.”

“Actually, we do have an idea for making that process simpler over here. The William Johnson Foundation has recently launched Project Alexandria which seeks to digitize university research in a format compliant with the new TCP/IP[4]. What we do is scan the papers and have people type the papers up from the scans--with redundancy so that we catch typos and the like, of course. It’s actually surprisingly cheap, because the computers don’t exactly have to be advanced and the people don’t have to be in America or able to speak English...and dear God; I’m becoming as bad as Norman with all this lecturing. Point is, these papers will now be downloadable via network and keyword searchable via computer. We can’t exactly start with the paleontology department of a random Canadian university, of course, but it’s not like you’re going to get up to those numbers overnight, either, and for now the lab can perview Nath’s reports on its own.”

“Very well. I suppose I’ll fly down to California and focus on the lab for now, but I do want to get the nerve center up and running ASAP, regardless. To that end I have a suggestion, but...just remember that five minutes ago this situation was looking direr than it is now.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense, man.”

“Sorry. I don’t want to appear self-serving.” Rostagno breathed deeply. “I focus on setting up the lab, and acquiring a jeweler to sell its cast-offs through, and in the meantime...there are people who can do much of the work of setting up the nerve center for me--the low-level work, such as renting of the office space and hiring the security and secretaries and janitors and whatnot--who happen to live in a place where being fluent in both English and Spanish is common. Who I can trust implicitly and who will be willing to do things on a ‘because I said so’ basis until they can be sworn in.”

“You’re talking about family, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I can wire money to my brother in Caguas and he can do the non-confidential work, and more once he’s sworn to secrecy.”

“I see,” Hammond said. “Can I call you back?”

“Of course, sir.” Rostagno had never called Hammond “sir” before.

A nerve-racking half hour later, the phone rang. Rostagno went to the computer, but didn’t see a command to insert a cassette.

YOU HAVE ONE (1) MESSAGE FROM [HEADQUARTERS]:

SEND HIM THE MONEY--EHJ

____________________

Chapter Text

II-VIII

The morning of Thursday, June 23rd found Lori Ruso[1] sitting in the kitchen of her Knoxville, Tennessee, apartment, doing the morning crossword and contemplating the fact that her career was fucking over. She’d been made a scapegoat, cashiered, and had her reputation tarnished--and she somehow doubted that her getting most of the flak had nothing to do with her being the only woman on the team. What truly galled her, though, more than being abandoned by her colleagues, more even than the blatant sexism of it all, was that they hadn’t even failed. They’d been on the verge of success, but then some reporter had somehow gotten in and started taking pictures of “freak eggs” and the headless, limbless chickens kept in some horrid semblance of life by various tubes and wires. The papers went berserk, the higher ups panicked, and now Millipore Agronomics[2] was circling the drain due to self-inflicted wounds--she heard the new owners were selling its assets off for scrap--and Ruso was out of a job.

There came a knock on the door.

“Dr. Atherton?” Ruso said in shock when she opened it.

“Might I come in, Dr. Ruso?” Atherton asked.

She gestured and he did so.

“How did you find me?”

“By looking at the employee records at Millipore.”

“And how did you manage that?”

“Oh, the company that bought Millipore is an InGen shell that’ll quietly shut down after all your research and experiments have been spirited away to California and all the assets and intellectual property that doesn’t interest us sold off.”

Ruso considered. “Alright, I’m in.”

“In on what?”

“Come on. You wouldn’t have flown out here to talk to me face-to-face and tell me all this if you didn’t want me to come work for you.”

Atherton chuckled. “I always liked that about you, Ruso: you have a way of getting to the heart of the issue. That is the likely outcome of this meeting, but first I need something. Describe for me the nature of your project in your own words. What were you doing, and why?”

Ruso nodded. Was she going to have to defend herself to Dr. Norman Atherton, of all people?

“The egg thing’s straightforward enough. We were trying to make the egg of one animal resemble the egg of another, physically and chemically. Such a thing would allow Millipore to sell the eggs of exotic animals on the open market--but that would have been only the beginning. Mainly, we were doing it as proof of concept; if you can turn the egg of one animal into an approximation of that of a completely different animal, changing its flavor or color is relative childsplay. Imagine having brands of eggs--trademarked, copyrighted, and patented. It appears the world isn’t ready for that, alas.

“As for the ‘frankenchickens,’ the official reasoning for that, that I gave in my grant request, is productivity--it takes less feed per egg if you remove nutrition sinks like the head and limbs of the bird. The heart and the enteric system can go about their business just fine without a brain provided they’re kept in nutrition and oxygen,[3] and a bird’s unique one-way respiratory system[4] means that it’s in some ways easier to keep the airflow going than with a human; I just tap into the posterior, thoracic, and abdominal air sacs[5], and then a simple air pump’s all that’s needed. Add a feeding tube and urethral and rectal catheters to remove the waste, and you have a far more efficient egg-laying machine than a live bird.”

“Yes, I did get all that from the files, not to mention the newspapers,” Atherton said with a slight grin. More seriously: “Forgive me for playing devil’s advocate, but it’s easy to see why said papers would react the way they have to this.”

“Because they’re fools,” Ruso said. “‘Cruel’ is it? I’ll tell you what’s cruel: forcing a chicken to live in a box barely larger than it is, in unsanitary conditions, stacked one on top of the other like crates on a container ship, with their beaks cut off so that they don’t try to kill themselves or each other, for years. I euthanize the chickens; the animal is dead the moment I cut its head off--all that remains alive is cells and organs. I’m trying to make the world a little less cruel.”

“I take it that’s the ‘unofficial’ impetus for the project, if efficiency is the ‘official’ one?” Atherton asked.

Ruso nodded.

“You know, honestly we were mainly interested in the eggs, but that could be useful, as well,” Atherton mused. “With the failure rate we’re looking at, anything that saves resources would be welcome, and we may not have a whole lot of acreage to dedicate to it, and given John’s whole deal with cruelty to animals….uh, pretend you didn’t hear me say any of that until you’ve signed the proper nondisclosure agreements.”

“Nondisclosure agreements and shell companies? What happened to make y’alls so paranoid?”

“There was an incident after you left SCB...well, that’s a story for another time.”

“So you want to be able to create any sort of egg you want, which implies that you’re trying something where you can’t just get the proper egg. Hmm, I wonder….”

“I don’t know if you’ve seen any of our press, but our work is to clone endangered animals. It’s easy to imagine a scenario where getting our hands on a living animal would be impolitic, if not outright illegal,” Atherton attempted to stamp out that train of thought.

“Oh, so you’re not trying to clone a dodo, then?” Ruso asked, disappointed.

“Not exactly,” Atherton said bemusedly.

“Aw.”

“Don’t worry; if you sign the papers, I’m sure you’ll find what we’re doing to be plenty ambitious.”

Ruso grinned. “Well, if you’re going to lay down bait like that, how can I refuse?”

~ ~ ~

After going through the extensive rigamarole involved, John Raymond “Ray” Arnold[6] answered the phone. “Hello?”

“Mr. Arnold? It’s John Rezi. I don’t believe that we’ve been formally introduced, but you’re the one who’ll ultimately decide where we build the park, yes?”

“Yes, Mr. Rezi.”

“Great. See, I was...working on something unrelated, and I think I’ve found the perfect location for Site B. At least, from a paperwork angle. See, it’s owned by this German noble, but not exactly; you know how the British Crown Estate works?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well, see, the British crown owns a lot of land but isn’t responsible for and doesn’t profit off of it, because in exchange for a fixed income and debt forgiveness Edward III sold ‘the powers of ownership’ to parliament.

“Well, the noble who owned the island we’re talking about entered a similar deal with his bank, presumably to avoid the embarrassment of having to sell his lands. The bank went on to have hard times during World War One and even harder times during the Depression, but even so the then CEO was passionately anti-Nazi--so when they took over, he relocated the company’s headquarters to London and moves every asset out of the country that he can.

“Oh, here’s a direct quote explaining his reasoning: ‘When a country allows filth such as this to rise to its highest offices, it will rot. Not only that, but it will deserve to rot. I have no intention of being around when the rot finally strangles Germany.’”

“Nice,” Arnold said.

“Yeah; I suppose I didn’t really need to quote him, I just thought thought it was metal as hell,” Rezi admitted. “As an aside, he goes on to invest every last penny in war bonds when the war begins; it leaves him living hand-to-mouth for a while, but he ends up making a killing when they pay through.

“But that’s in the future; in the, uh, ‘present,’ his shareholders are still largely German, and in Germany, and don’t want to be associated with such a firebrand--Nazis don’t take too kindly to dissent, after all--and they oust him, replacing him with someone more...neutral. But the bank was already fucked, being divided between several states that would imminently be at war with one another as it was.

“The new CEO was trapped in England when the fighting started, cut off from many of the bank’s assets and many more when the Nazis conquered France. He made do as best he could, but in the end, to pay his bills, he just straight up issued more stock. A lot of it, for very cheap. A British company sees the golden opportunity that this is and buys it up. It then replaces him as CEO.”

“With the old guy?”

“No; it’s highly doubtful they were aware of the bank’s recent history.”

“Drat.”

“Point being, I had to travel to three different countries to figure this out; as far as the Costa Ricans are concerned the island is part of a noble estate in West Germany, while as far as the West Germans are concerned the powers of ownership of said noble’s estate belong to a bank in London, which itself has since been devoured by yet another company--this last being the only entity in this web that needs to change hands; no one’s ever going to trace this island back to us, at least not from this angle.

“Speaking of Costa Rica, there are several buyable islands down here and the country’s economy is geared towards ecotourism anyway, so how about you come down here and see if Isla Sorna is as perfect from your perspective as it is from mine?”

____________________

Chapter Text

II-IX

Arnold wished he could smoke in the helicopter. Since he couldn’t, he concentrated on the details of the island below him.

It looked vaguely like Santorini, or at least how he imagined Santorini might look if the sea level of the Mediterranean were to drop enough for it to connect to Therasia, Aspronisi, and the other islands in its caldera[1]. Like Santorini it had lost a great deal of itself in an ancient eruption, but most of the resulting caldera was above sea level, with more of a rim wall; in fact, there was only one narrow break in the rim wall along the west side of the island, which was enough to let in the sea and create a modest harbor. That much looked very good indeed; the fact that part of the northern quarter of the island appeared to be on fire, not so much.

“What’s that?” Arnold asked the pilot in Spanish, pointing at the column of smoke. (He’d learned Spanish on the streets of Miami, and was told that he sounded Cuban.)

“Nothing much to worry about, sir[2]; it’s been that way since the eruption of ‘79.”

Said eruption obviously wasn’t the one responsible for the crater; for one thing, the caldera was ancient even to Arnold’s inexpert eye, and for another, he was pretty sure he’d have heard about it if the apocalypse happened.

“Looks like it’s still erupting,” Arnold said.

The pilot shrugged. “It’s just been like that.”

“Wonderful,” Arnold said dryly, giving a meaningful look to one of the helicopter’s other occupants.

“No hablo Español,” Rezi said: I don’t speak Spanish.

“That pillar of smoke’s a permanent feature,” Arnold translated.

“How stable is it?”

Arnold translated the question.

“You’ll have to ask the scientists when you see them,” the pilot said.

“There are people living on the island?” Arnold asked.

“Not so much anymore, sir,” the pilot said. “There used to be a town of fishers and farmers--the island’s privately owned, yes, but the owners weren’t doing anything with it after the gold mine shut down and the townsfolk would pay rent, so they just let it be--but that was before the eruption. Everyone got evacuated and the owners won’t let anyone back in because they’re afraid of getting sued, so now it’s just some scientists in a camp in the north of the island.”

Arnold turned to the final passenger. “And why aren’t you the one telling us this?” he asked their guide.

“I grew up on the island and know it like the back of my hand, but I haven’t been back here for four years,” said the man he knew only as Dieguito[3].

Arnold explained the situation to Rezi and looked out the window again, where he could clearly see the ruins of a town in the harbor as the helicopter descended.

Rezi pointed at a water tower. “They had running water here.”

“Do you happen to know where the water came from?” Arnold asked Dieguito.

“Oh, yeah; there’s a spring halfway up the central spire.”

“Hot spring?”

“Cold spring.”

Interesting. But Arnold wasn’t a geologist, and didn’t know the significance of that if any, so he quickly put the matter out of his head.

The helicopter landed.

“What are the odds that any of this stuff is still useable?” Rezi asked, looking at the town.

“After four years of neglect? I have half a mind to tear the whole place down, just to prevent anyone wandering in and getting hurt.”

“I wasn’t suggesting we move people in or anything. But reclaimed wood, piping, vehicle parts, perhaps even working vehicles...it makes for quite a convenient resource stockpile.”

Arnold grunted noncommittally. Given the direction of his plans he doubted this material would factor in, but he didn’t want to listen to Rezi continue to push it. He didn’t know why Rezi was here, exactly--he did have a background in engineering, and his remit insofar as Arnold understood it was just whatever, but that didn’t change the fact that this stunk of corporate politics.

“You mentioned scientists being on this island? Where would they be at?” Arnold asked the pilot.

“Their camp is at the foot of the spire, on the north side,” the pilot said.

“So far from the volcano? Probably so they can take advantage of the spring,” Dieguito supposed.

“Or they think it’s dangerous as hell,” Arnold muttered darkly.

The party minus the pilot headed towards the spire. On the way, Arnold spotted a feral pig in the woods. “Well that’s not native,” he commented.

“This is not exactly a lost world,” Dieguito commented. “Isla Sorna, Isla Nublar, and the Seven Sisters[4] have all suffered massive ecological contamination due to their histories of human habitation, sadly. There’s been farmers and fishers and whatnot living here for generations, and their animals escape into the wild sometimes. It’s part of what inspired the creation of the Isla del Caño-[5] and Las Cinco Muertes Biological Preserves.”

“Shouldn’t it be ‘The Four Deaths’ since it doesn’t include Sorna?” Arnold knew enough about the island going in to know that much.

“My God; you are the first wit to ever make that observation.” Dieguito sarcastically and emphatically emoted wildly. “The name of the place is Las Cinco Muertes, jackass...um, sir.”

But Arnold laughed. “Fair enough.”

He then translated what’d been happening for Rezi.

“So basically there’s no way we can scew this island up worse,” Rezi commented, and he did have a point. “Also, I can’t help but wonder how many people would just assume that all of Las Cinco Muertes are part of the Las Cinco Muertes Biological preserve, assuming we can keep our presence discreet enough.

Eventually they spotted tents, and then people. “Hail, friends?” Arnold said in Spanish.

“Quick, get the Spanish to English dictionary,” one of them said to another.

“I speak English,” Arnold said in English.

“Oh. Um, hi. I don’t think there’s supposed to be anyone else on the island.”

“We’re surveyors,” Arnold said. “Who’re you?”

“Scientists, studying the volcano.”

“We’d heard you might be here and came looking for you, because honestly, as a surveyor, that--” he gestured in the vague direction of the column of smoke “--has me concerned. What are the odds of another erruption?”

“Well technically speaking it’s erupting right now, and has been continuously since ‘79.”

“Wonderful,” Arnold said dryly.

“What do you mean, ‘technically’?” Rezi asked.

“Well...you wanna see something cool?”

Arnold and Rezi looked at each other. “...Sure.”

“Follow me.” The scientist picked up a bag of trash and lead them towards the column of smoke, which it turned out was emanating from a fissure in the ground.

“Watch this,” the scientist said, and in spite of the oven-like heat Rezi and Arnold approached the lip of the fissure. The scientist tossed the bag, which fell a couple hundred feet to the floor below--and then broke through it; the lava rippled and the dark and relatively cool surface of it cracked and was subsumed into it. “This is the world’s smallest standing lava lake.”

“Standing lava lake,” Arnold said, as though mesmerised. “And it’s...stable?”

“We’ve been studying it since the eruption in ’79, and...so far, it’s been pretty stable. A few minor tremors here and there, of course, but nothing that’s not par for the course in the Ring of Fire.”

“How long do these things last?” Arnold asked.

“I mean, there aren’t a whole lot of these, you understand, and most are far larger than this, but the ones we’ve seen usually last a few decades.”

“Interesting. I’m told there’s a spring on the mountain; is the water safe?”

“Huh? Yeah; we’ve been drinking it. The spring has nothing to do with the volcano; the top of the mountain has a lot of fractured stone and collects rainwater, which filters through the fractures until it emerges at the spring. The taste of the water reminds me of Machu Pichu...which I suppose is logical, as it’s fed by an identical sort of spring.”

“Tell me everything you know about this island.” And the scientist did so on their way back to the camp.

“What are you thinking?” Rezi asked quietly, having noticed Arnold’s dramatic shift in attitude.

“I wanna tap it,” Arnold whispered back.

“Pardon?”

“The lava. I want to cap that fissure and use it for power.”

Rezi’s eyes widened with shock, but then he grinned. “Oh, I like you!”

____________________

Chapter Text

Remember how I said I've been kicking around Sorna for a long time? Well, here's some work I did on it waaay back in March...of 2017.

Specifically, this is supposed to be employee housing. Eighty 600 square foot apartments (not including the stairwell) in the space of a city block--with each having its own little yard, too.

I then realized was told that the apartments should mirror so that they could share as much plumbing as possible, and figured I might as well flip the bathroom and bedroom locations to take maximum advantage of that, resulting in the below:

(Which doesn't include a key or a description of what these rooms are supposed to be, hence why the first image needed to be included here at all.)

Of course, I have since moved on from this concept, hence why I'm posting it today.

Chapter Text

II-X

“Oh, I like you!” Rezi said, grinning. “That being said, I probably shouldn’t accompany you while you check out the other islands. Can’t have it look like I’m trying to influence your decision.”

“And why is that?” Arnold asked.

“Mainly because that’s exactly what I came here to do,” Rezi admitted. “I can tell by that look in your eye that’s unnecessary now, though.”

“Why do you care about the island?”

Rezi waved him off. “Corporate politics stuff. Do you really care?”

“Not particularly,” Arnold admitted.

“Alright, then.”

~ ~ ~

InGen, it turned out, was renting space in the old SCB building for its labs, so Ruso was trodding familiar halls, or at least adjacent to them. It had taken much of the first week to get her lab set up, and the following Monday happened to be the Fourth of July, so there was something of a mixer after work.

“So how’s it feel to no longer be on the cutting edge?” Wu ribbed de l’Adrien.

“Do you have any idea what we’re working on right now, you little punk? The zygote regeneration protocol--you know, that new technology that’s poised to save countless lives by allowing us to literally grow new organs?--involves the use of a telomere lengthener, which itself is something we’re working on turning into an anti-aging treatment which could extend life expectancy by twenty years or more,” de l’Adrien said.

“Are you allowed to tell us that?” Ruso interjected.

De l’Adrien shrugged. “The hows and whats are a secret, but I mean, it’s kind of obvious that that’s a path we’d go down, to anyone who knows anything about telomeres.”

“Anyway, that’s still stuff you just had lying around thanks to Atherton; we’re creating new things,” Wu said.

“Yeah, well, someone’s got to stick around to do the real science once the mad science has run its course,” de l’Adrien returned.

They continued ribbing each other for a while, then de l’Adrien broke off to talk to a pregnant woman who didn’t look like she worked here.

“I’ve been wondering how exactly we intend to get whole strands of you-know-what DNA,” Ruso said, now that they were relatively alone.

Wu lead them to a quiet corner of the room. “Knott polymerase.”

“What isn’t polymerase?”

“No, ‘Knott’ K-N-O-T-T. Though it’s also not….” Wu suddenly slapped his forehead and groaned. “Oh my God. I just got that pun!

“Anyway, it’s like this: Atherton has created an artificial enzyme. First, it grabs a DNA fragment. Then it grabs other DNA fragments and compares them one by one for overlapping bases. If a fifteen base long or longer segment of DNA matches the other strand, then it knows that they belong together, because the odds of two sequences just coincidentally having that in common are--”

“One in one billion, seventy-three million, seven hundred forty-one thousand, eight hundred twenty-four.”

“Did you seriously just do that calculation right off the top of your head?”

“Of course.”

Wu pulled out a pocket calculator and checked her math. “Show-off,” he concluded, before taking a swig of his beer.

“Anyway, the odds of a false match like that happening are one in four to the fifteenth, as you said, so the Knott can be pretty sure anything that matches is supposed to go together,” he continued. “So one is used as a road map to repairing the other, and assuming the fragments don’t both end at the same exact places, the strands get more complete as a result. A few billion iterations down the line, and it pieces together a complete DNA strand. Assuming the damage was random, at any rate.”

“That is fucking witchcraft,” Ruso said.

“I know, right?”

“What about the telomeres? Those are all identical repeating base sequences. How does the Knott avoid getting fooled by that?” Ruso asked.

“Strips ‘em out at the beginning, adds ‘em back in at the end,” Wu said. “It’s how he came up with that stuff de l’Adrien’s working on now, in fact.”

Ruso shook her head. “How the fuck does the man come up with all this bullshit superscience?”

Wu shrugged. “Fucking alchemy. Idunno.”

~ ~ ~

Rostagno walked the streets of Caguas, Puerto Rico, for the first time in years, awash in a feeling of nostalgia. So much was the same, so much had changed, and so much hadn’t changed, but was different now that he was looking at it through adult eyes. There were advantages to a Puerto Rico headquarters; the North American phase of the operation required crunching a lot of information about the geology, law, and business environments of America and Mexico, so it was logical to set up shop in a place with a large number of bilingual people. The fact that it meant he could hire family was an added bonus; that was nepotism, perhaps, but there was a lot of sensitive information being gathered here and he needed people he knew he could trust.

Another great thing about hiring family was how quick it was to find applicants and screen them. Elektron Consulting (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Elektron Consortium...this one was more for tax purposes than any attempt at stealth) opened for business two weeks to the day after the call in which Rostagno told Hammond it was time to begin working on the greater North American phase of the operation, which just so happened to be the fourth of July; Rostagno pretended to himself that the fireworks that night were congratulatory.

Today, Friday, was the eighth.

Rostagno walked into the office space he was renting, and waved at his uncle, Manny Rostagno. “Any news?” he asked in Spanish.

Manny Rostagno was a retired science teacher from the José Gautier Benítez School; his years of experience grading papers made him ideally suited to the task of pouring over reams of data and regurgitating it in a comprehensible form.

“Completed the geological and amber maps of the United States yesterday; moving on to Mexico,” Manny said. “What do you want me to do after that?”

Rostagno shrugged. “Canada, I suppose,” he was pretty confident he was nailing Canada, but it never hurt to have a second opinion. “Or maybe Greenland, for the sake of the completionist in me. That can change, though.”

“Duly noted.”

Rostagno retreated to his office, and found the maps Manny had prepared for him. Areas of the country were color-coded according to the age and quantity of the amber that could be found there, and labeled with the serial numbers of files he could look at for more detail. He went to the filing cabinets, gathered some files regarding some of the more promising-looking locations, and read about how amber was mined and/or gathered at these locations at his desk. Interesting reads; whelp, it was time to go make the business and legal departments work for a living….

After a long day of reviewing other people’s work, Rostagno decided to visit his sister and her family. She had a son who was turning twelve in two months; when he saw him, Rostagno had an idea. “Hey, there, sport; what are your favorite dinosaurs?”

Chapter Text

II-XI

Rezi rapped on the frame of the open door to the space Atherton was currently using as an ersatz office. “So. How’s it going down here?”

“In what way?”

“I don’t know; tell me a little about what you’re currently working on.”

“What do you know about genetics?” Atherton asked gruffly. All the same, he gestured at a chair, indicating that Rezi should sit.

“Basically nothing,” Rezi admitted as he took the seat.

“Then what are you actually trying to learn here?”

“Timetables, expenses, logistics...you know, administrative stuff. Anything where I can help--or failing that, anything that’d effect my own duties here. You’re the goose that’s laying the golden egg, doc; the rest of us are here to see to it that you get everything you need to do that.”

Atherton snorted. “Damn straight you are. Well, with the Unnatural Selection Protocol, the difficulty isn’t in figuring out what to do--flinging scraps of DNA at cells to see what happens isn’t all that hard in and of itself--but in automating the process and miniaturizing it. We’re coordinating with Lockwood’s people on that.”

“Why are you--?” and then it clicked. “That’s what you intend to do with Lockwood’s boat, isn’t it?”

“Convert every square inch of it to a dedicated USP facility, yes.”

“That’s why you insisted on Site B having ‘a harbor, or at the very least a dock,’” Rezi, who had read the minimal spec Atherton had provided Arnold with, realized. “And the reason for all that power too, I assume.”

“One of the world’s largest cargo ships, crammed to bursting full of active machinery? I imagine that’d take a bit of juice to run, yes.”

“So if I recall correctly, once you know what you need that refit will happen on Lockwood’s dime. That ought to save us some money. But that’s not all you need. What’s the deal with the chicken farm?”

“Spare parts,” Atherton said.

“What?”

“Alright, you need to know what we’re doing.

“Step one: Replace the DNA in a yellow-billed cuckoo ovum--we’ll get to why that bird specifically in a bit--with the target DNA, grow it, and see what stage it craps out at.

Step two: slice target DNA into thousand-base long strands and bombard some fertilized ova in them--let’s go with a nice, round number of one million ova. Let them grow until they produce their own ova, then harvest the ova--yellow-billed cuckoos have a nice, short gestation period of eleven days, you see, and this won’t take the entire gestation period.

“Step three: repeat step one; step four: pick the cell line that survived the longest, replace the DNA with that of the bird you harvested it from at the end of step two, then repeat step two. Step five: repeat steps three and four until a dinosaur happens.”

Rezi focused on the fact he could understand. “One million eggs?”

“I see you’ve cottoned to the relevant fact. Yes, one million eggs per round. Where do these eggs come from? And here’s the thing, even chickens, which have been domesticated for the explicit purpose of producing eggs, produce less than one egg per day. Now, at Millipore Dr. Ruso had managed to get that number up to one large or extra-large egg per day, and in combination with their egg customization--which requires her frankenchickens, regardless[1]--we can get that up to six cuckoo-equivalent eggs a day by sacrificing a few nonessentials like proper shell calcification, due to the fact that cuckoo eggs are much smaller than chicken eggs.

“In short, if we have twenty-four thousand birds, that’s enough where it only takes us a week to begin a round. A farmed chicken’s egg production begins to decline after one to two years, at which point it’s considered to be ‘spent’ and gets slaughtered. Let’s say we’re replacing sixty-six of the fleshy bits of our machines per day; while I suspect the ‘lifespan’ of our ‘birds’ will be on the high end due to the lack of stress hormones running through the flesh, I’m also not accounting for the time it takes the bird to grow or making allowances for ‘shit happens,’ so it ought to even out somewhat.

“So we’re sacrificing sixty-six birds per day. That means sixty-six birds being born per day--or a hundred and seventy-two, if you don’t control for gender. So of course we will and just have sixty-six frankenchickens dedicated to the task of producing a lot of clone birds, because that’s just easier for us. I mean, that’s still twelve thousand birds--actual living birds--running around, when you multiply sixty-six per day by the six months it takes them to start laying eggs. A hundred fifty-one acres, if we’re going with free range birds, which if we can why not?

“Turning a chicken into an egg machine takes half an hour[2], with two surgeons and a nurse. Factor in prep and give them a moment to catch their breath every now and then, let’s call it sixteen frankenchickens per twelve-hour day per three-person team--that’s fifteen to reach quota. The rest of the system should be fully automated by the time the final design is settled on, but you still need people to maintain it and make sure it’s running correctly, not to mention loading the various hoppers and shit--five thousand pounds of chicken feed per day have to be fed into this system, not to mention relatively trivial amounts of other stuff for the actual procedure. Let’s say another five people for all that, bringing the ‘crew’ to an even twenty. Not to mention the people taking care of the chickens.

“And then there’s the other facility we need to build, the one we will produce dinosaur eggs in. Note that precise phrasing--specifically, that I didn’t necessarily say that that’s what it’s for. Follow me.”

Atherton lead Rezi to an incubator and pulled out an egg, nearly eight inches long and six in diameter; a rectangular section of shell had been replaced with plexiglass, allowing visual examination of the organism growing inside.

“I put a crocodile embryo in this ostrich egg in order to see what happens. It could well be that the crocodile will develop perfectly normally with minimal of fuss, or it could be that some unknown factor in the egg itself puts a wrench in things. This is entirely separate to the issue from the one of the host ova cell infrastructure being incompatible with the recovered DNA that USP is being designed to solve.

“If this little crocodile croaks, we have to consider the possibility that a dinosaur might also croak in this egg. In order to prevent that, we have to try to recreate dinosaur eggs as exactly as we possibly can--again, with Millipore’s egg customization technology. And that makes things ever more complicated, because we can’t know whether the embryo died because of bad cellular structure or from being in a bad environment. And must test for everything.”

Rezi’s suddenly weak knees made him wish he was still sitting down. “I’m beginning to seriously doubt if we can even do this.”

Atherton snorted. “You should have seen the challenges we faced creating the elephant.

“But I am working on pulling something out of my ass to make this whole thing a lot simpler. To put it simply: combine target DNA with cuckoo DNA and destroy the bits that don’t line up to reveal the DNA the strands have in common, then combine the common DNA with the target DNA and fill the gaps with something that isn’t DNA--either RNA or a synthetic molecule like this PNA stuff Henry’s really excited about[3], which...well, it’s not important; the important thing is that with the code transcribed to non-DNA you can now destroy the DNA and then transcribe the code to DNA to get just the genes that the target and the cuckoo don’t have in common. For one thing, it’ll make the process as a whole an order of magnitude or three less tedious, and for another, if we end up having a choice of multiple potential targets and one of them has considerably less unique DNA than the others, it makes the choice of where to start rather obvious.”

“So what I’m getting is that things are still in flux down here,” Rezi said, as much for his own sake as anything else.

“Things could get incredibly better, incredibly worse, or both in ways that maybe cancel each other out workload-wise, sort of,” Atherton said. “So yes.”

“And it relies on that boat, which we won’t even get until...December, was it?”

“Yes. Am I screwing up your plans or something?”

Rezi grinned. “Hey, just so long as I’m not the one responsible for delaying things, I’m happy.”

____________________

Chapter Text

II-XII

“I wish we could meet in person, but we have to keep your connection to InGen secret,” Rezi said after introductions were made.

“Yes, sure,” Rostagno said. “Why did you wish to talk to me, anyway.”

“Mainly I want to know how you’re doing for funds.”

Rostagno snorted. “At this point, Elektron is completely self-sufficient.”

“Really?”

“Let me tell you, as soon as Jurassic Park goes public I am moving this company offshore, because this thing I’m doing ought to be illegal. It’s basically a Ponzi scheme in reverse.”

“...Could you elaborate?”

“So it’s like this. I strong-arm Taber Coal, the first company we bought, into selling us three hundred million dollars worth of shares. We didn’t buy from the shareholders, you understand, but directly from the company, which issued the stock just so we could buy it. We now own sixty percent of the company, and the company controls the three hundred mil. Because hey, there’s a concept that works, we then have them use the exact same tactic on the other companies operating in the Taber Coal Zone...er, no relation...to consolidate them into Taber. And then we kept doing that. The original money we invested in this scheme is still in play, plus the assets of those companies I now control. We haven’t been able to pull this trick off every time, so our growth has been a bit less than totally off-the-charts exponential, but every time I do, the pile of assets I control grows.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Well, I mean, it’s not like I can cut myself a check out of these resources or anything, but if anything that just increases the feeling that I’m not even playing with real money anymore. My entire business model is making a mockery of the very concept of capitalism. Seriously, this is like a shell game; I’m basically laundering capital through these companies as a way of seizing control of them, at which point their capital gets added to the pool, and get this: on paper, these companies look stronger afterwards, because they now own all these assets they didn’t before. Left unchecked, we could conquer the free world like this.

“Actually, I can on occasion funnel money back into InGen,” Rostagno reconsidered; “if one of InGen’s investors is also an investor in a company I wish to acquire, I can just go up to them and...okay, I don’t literally say ‘I’ll buy these stock for more than what they’re worth if you reinvest that money back into InGen’ or anything like that, but between their foreknowledge of what’s going to happen to the stock price in the interim and what’s going to happen to dividends after the takeover...they’re generally thankful for the heads up.”

“That’s literally insider trading.”

Rostagno shrugged, even though Rezi couldn’t see it over the phone. “I know. But imagine how pissed off the investors would be if we started fucking over their other investments? It’s illegal and immoral, but I don’t think we can afford having them make a stink and my whole job is to do questionably ethical things in the name of acquiring dinosaur DNA, so...yeah.

“I have been able to assuage my conscience a little bit by having all these coal companies I own quietly pull out of lobbying organizations in wake of that study Hammond commissioned that ‘proved’ lobbying is a waste of money, however.”

Rezi knew of the study Rostagno spoke of; it was full of fuzzy math and baseless assumptions, but was argued with enough confidence and complicated words that even some companies Hammond wasn’t the de facto owner of were taking heed. “Was that your idea or the Hammonds?”

“My mind was already going down that path, but theirs did it quicker and they ended up contacting me about it first.

“So all four of us independently came to the conclusion of ‘fuck these particular lobbyists specifically?’” Rezi asked bemusedly.

“Yeah, I guess.

“It’s scary, the amount of power we have,” Rostagno said. “Like, imagine if I were a Soviet agent provocateur and decided to use it to decimate the US economy.”

“...Well, at least it’s in the hands of someone who finds it scary,” Rezi said, uncertainly. He changed the subject: “Anyway. What about operating expenses?”

“Oh, Elektron Consulting can easily operate out of the dividends paid out by Taber Coal, even when including my salary, with a lot of room to spare.”

“Right, right. How are you for shell companies?”

“Effectively, I’ve got nothing but shell companies. We’re currently operating in three countries, buying whichever target company is currently weakest with whatever funds happen to be on hand at the moment; my org chart is a rat’s nest and I’m fairly certain that anyone trying to trace ownership of any of the outer layers back to me will die of an aneurysm,” Rostagno said.

“Speaking of which, how do you keep track of it?”

“In cyberspace; Dr. Atherton donated an old Cray-1 supercomputer to us. And I can’t say I’m certain it wasn’t legitimately necessary.”

“I see. You mentioned three countries--Canada, the United States, and Mexico?”

“Correct. I’m also looking into Denmark.”

“What’s in Denmark?”

“Greenland, legally speaking.” Rostagno shrugged. “I’m something of a completionist.”

“Does that mean that from there you’ll move on to Europe?”

“Perhaps.”

“Britain?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Look. I don’t have the power to order you to do anything, and even if I did I’d still want you to wait for the go-ahead from Hammond before attempting anything, but I’d like you to look into acquiring a company called the Avalon Consortium , and just keep in the back of your mind the fact that that’s something you might be called upon to do.”

“I’m sure I could manage that.”

“Okay, but here’s the kicker. See, what you’re doing is going to become public one day--er, minus the insider trading. The fact that we own this property...we’d rather it didn’t. Whatever you invest in it is going to be out of play, and I fear we’re talking about a big chunk even of the money you’re currently playing with. Possibly more than you have right now.”

“You don’t ask for much, do you?” Rostagno commented dryly.

“Hey, maybe Hammond will put a kibosh on my plans and you won’t have to make this obscene expense. Just keep in mind the fact that this might happen and plan for the contingency.”

“In other words, grow this reverse-Ponzi scheme as aggressively as I can while I have the chance, so that maybe I’ll survive the pruning.”

“Exactly.”

Chapter Text

II-XIII

Jonah Forrester was a man accustomed to success--groomed for it, in fact. If asked, he’d have claimed that he worked for everything he’d gotten, and while that was technically true he had done so with every opportunity to succeed and with outright failure being very hard to accomplish. If in the very expensive private school he’d attended his grade had ever fallen below an A- his parents would hire a tutor. His acts of teenage rebellion never resulted in a criminal record. Upon graduation from college, he was slotted into position at his father’s company and fast-tracked for promotion--he still had to work for it, of course, but it would be a foolhardy superior who made unreasonable demands of him or be unsympathetic when he struggled with a task. Short of being caught embezzling funds or trying to hide a dead body, it was hard to imagine a scenario in which he’d be fired.

All this is to say that when he walked into that meeting that day with the feeling that he was about to get the proverbial pink slip, it was a unique experience for him.

To call what had happened the previous week a hostile takeover would be incorrect, in that that would imply some sort of resistance had been put up on his part, which would imply that they hadn’t been completely blindsided. Six entities had been acquiring stock more aggressively than his company’s current stock prices and dividends would justify, but hadn’t seemed to be coordinating with each other--until the annual shareholder meeting, at which point their representatives, representing 56% of shares outstanding, voted in lockstep to replace the entire board of directors.

Prior to this event Forrester had been the Chairman and CEO of Carbondale Coal--now he was “merely” CEO. Not much of a demotion, admittedly--certainly not in terms of his salary--but he’d had his hands burned, and it stung to know that he now had bosses to report to when ten days prior he’d been his own man.

He took a deep breath and entered the boardroom for his first meeting with the new board. Strangers, all of them--and one was even newer than the rest. The face Forrester absolutely did not remember from the briefing walked up to him and shook his hand. “Greetings. My name is Juanito Rostagno, and I work for the company that owns the companies that now possess a majority claim in your company. It was my job to coordinate their actions, and also yours now that you’ve entered the fold.”

“You’re not going to try to oust me, then?” Forrester asked.

If Forrester had ever met a used car salesman, he’d have recognized Rostagno’s smile in that moment. “Don’t misunderstand, we’re not afraid of your little golden parachute[1] if things come to that, but I see no reason at this juncture why they have to. Reorganizing your board was not a reflection on your competence or skill; rather, to put it bluntly, we have certain standards at Elektron, and while I’m sure your brother, your cousin, your father-in-law, yourself, and all the other people we ousted are fine people, it’s simply not good policy to stack the board with your friends. Or good for shareholder confidence--at least, not when we’re the shareholder. As for Mr. Quinncannon, I know the NYSE rules only specify that the audit committee include a financial expert, but a retired banker simply does not have the expertise required to track down fraud. Our actions last week were taken out of necessity; we actually prefer a rather hands-off approach and dislike disruption. Which in turn is why we don’t want to oust you as CEO; cutting off the head of the company is bad for stability. We will if we have to, of course, but I would much rather have you as a friend then have to replace you.”

“Alright. So why did I have to sign an NDA to take this meeting?”

“We also like to be very discreet at Elektron, for various reasons. Such as the edge it gave us in acquiring your lovely company. The purpose of this meeting is for you and I to establish our relationship. My job, as I said, is to coordinate activity across Elektron’s empire; think of me as your manager. For the most part, you’ll be left to your own devices and Carbondale Coal will operate as independently as they ever have--but sometimes I will call you and ask you to ‘mine here’ or ‘acquire company X’ or ‘sell to company Y.’ Don’t worry if it doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense on paper--if the order is coming from me, these men will back your move.”

Forrester nodded. “Yeah...I think I can live with that.”

~ ~ ~

“There are a number of reasons we think Costa Rica would be an ideal location for the park, such as Costa Rica gearing its economy to eco-tourism--but honestly, the real draw is Isla Sorna, which is absurdly perfect for Site B,” Arnold was saying. “Sorna has a large central caldera that will hide our presence from view yet is easily accessible, enough land area to support a truly large number of animals, and a...geothermal feature that I believe would be simple--” Arnold deliberately used that word rather than easy “--to tap and would produce a very large amount of power if we did. Also, Mr. Rezi assures me that no spy’s going to trace it back to us unless we do something to draw attention to it.”

Hammond looked at Rezi. “And just what is your involvement in all of this?”

“I discovered Sorna while researching something unrelated to InGen, and you know, it’s story--”

“What unrelated thing, exactly?” Hammond demanded with unusual curtness.

Rezi grinned, as though to say Aw, shucks; you caught me. “The Avalon Consortium.”

“That’s who owns Sorna? Why not just ask me to buy out the Rockefellers while you’re at it?”

“It’s not quite that bad; Mr. Rostagno assures me that he will shortly have the funds on hand to buy Avalon, though it does mean delaying the European phase of his operation, at least unless he gets another infusion of capital.”

“That...is rather impressive, actually. But what’s your interest in Avalon?”

“I’ve got a guy on the inside who’s convinced that the future is in India; if I can make him CEO….”

“So you want to enable a partnership between Rezi-Masrani and Avalon, and want InGen to foot the bill.”

“I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t got quite a bit to gain from this, but that doesn’t change anything Ray said. It also doesn’t change the fact that the ‘absurdly perfect’ Isla Sorna also conveniently exists at the bottom of an international maze of unorthodox legal privileges and ownership that simultaneously has a simple, obvious, and wrong answer. This is a gift from the gods, John.”

“Hmm.”

“Furthermore, quite frankly, InGen is a tough investment to justify, given Rezi-Masrani’s mission statement. You helping me get Dirk--that’s the guy I was talking about--into the number one spot over at Avalon would retroactively justify it ten times over and allow us to justify further investments.”

Hammond snorted. “Only you could make ‘I’ll buy stock in your incredibly successful company’ sound like you’re doing me a favor.”

“Hey, your company isn’t successful yet,” Rezi pointed out. “Look, I could have tried to be sneaky about this[2] but I didn’t. I don’t think I need to, because the deal is good. Sorna is perfect for Site B, doing this shores up support at Rezi-Masrani, and that in turn allows us to invest more of our resources in InGen. It inconveniences Elektron momentarily, but they’ll recover; Avalon’s a major expense, but it is a corporation and will produce profits sooner or later, after all. Hell, we can even make them foot the bill for Sorna’s infrastructure.”

“I distinctly remember you being the one to suggest an island for Site B in the first place,” Hammond said.

“Because you already had the idea to build Jurassic Park on an island! If I had this up my sleeve the entire time, why would I have pushed so hard to get you to build it in India? I’m showing you all my cards, asking you to back my move on this, John.”

Hammond pursed his lips, not speaking. Damn this young man was a persuasive orator when he wanted to be; Hollywood lost a damn fine actor when John Rezi went into business...or rather, Bollywood did, he supposed.

Hammond turned to Arnold. “Are these islands--Nublar and Sorna--really so perfect?”

“I wouldn’t call Nublar ‘perfect,’ but that’s largely because I have Sorna to compare it too,” Arnold said. “Sorry if that sounds hyperbolic, but the fact is that its flaws are generally trivial or the stuff we’d probably have to work around no matter what if we intend to build on an uninhabited island--never mind two of them. Nublar’s greatest flaw is the lack of a harbor, or really any real protection for boats docked nearby.”

Hammond sat in silence for a moment. “If you manage to convince me, and to convince Emma later, that this is a good idea, one of us is going to have to meet with your man, after Cowan, Swain and Ross has thoroughly vetted him. If after all that we decide we have no objection to any particular of this, then we can discuss what price Rezi-Masrani will pay to have this golden opportunity thrust upon them.”

“I’d expect nothing less,” Rezi said amiably.

“Very well, then. Convince me.”

____________________

Chapter Text

II-XIV

“Dr. Atherton, you apparently are a competent engineer on top of everything else--I was hoping you could settle a dispute between me and this amateur,” Arnold said.

“Hey, I may not use it much these days, but I do have an engineering degree,” Rezi said.

“I dabble,” Atherton said at the same time.

“Alright, well, we have very different ideas about how to harness the volcano’s power. My idea is to suspend graphite or perhaps quartz piping filled with molten salt a few feet above the lava and use that salt to drive a turbine,” Arnold said.

“Do you know how to do that?” Atherton asked.

“I have a mentor who worked on the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment[1] in the sixties; I doubt he’ll tell me about the nuclear stuff, but that’s not the part I’m interested in in the first place. This design is modular, can be set up with relative quickness, and is scalable to our exact needs.”

“It also has a lot of moving parts that can fail,” Rezi argued.

“Yes, but a single generator failing won’t be the end of the world, unlike with your monstrosity,” Arnold said.

“My idea is simpler--though admittedly will take more upfront effort. Suspend a ceiling over the lava, box it in with walls, pressurize, and attach to a steam engine,” Rezi said. “Far more efficient than Arnold’s plan and with fewer moving parts.”

“That’d provide way more power than we could ever possibly use and if any part of it does blow, we’re fucked,” Arnold countered.

“That pressurized box would be twelve hundred celsius, wouldn’t it?” Atherton asked.

“And make for a great excuse for Rezi-Masrani to practice making space shuttle-style tiles for when the Indian space program starts having manned missions.”

“The ISRO doesn’t currently have any plans for that, last I checked,” Atherton observed.

Rezi looked off to the middle distance, making a fist. “One day they will.”

“...K,” Atherton said. “Anyway, John, John is right when…” he trailed off, and made a face. “Fuck it, you guys are on last name basis from here on out. Rezi, Arnold is right when he says this is overkill and subject to single-point failure. Also, what do we know about the rock you’d be building this on? Can it handle the pressures you intend to subject it to? I don’t want to take that risk. And Arnold, my main problem with your idea is...well, say one of the lines breaks, over the lava. How exactly do you intend to fix it?”

“Remove it from the pit, patch or replace anything that needs it, put it back in the pit.”

“Yeah, see, that sounds like something that’s easier said than done. Am I correct in assuming that when you people say you’re going to ‘suspend’ things over the lava, you mean like a suspension bridge?”

“Like a bridge span, yes.”

“And that you’ll be doing it short-ways across the rift...er, rather than along it, I guess? Fuck, what am I saying? Of course you are; you’ve got at least two neurons to rub together. I have to imagine you’re going to run the piping along the whole breadth of the pit, because you can--I mean, that’s what I would do--but the rift is a hundred and thirty five meters across at its widest. Fishing a hundred and thirty five meters of piping out of a hole is going to be tricky. Especially since you can’t just send in some workers.”

“So what do you suggest?” Arnold asked.

Atherton found a chair to sit in, closed his eyes, and pondered for a minute. Just as Rezi and Arnold were beginning to think he’d fallen asleep, he stood up and opened his eyes. “Alright. Rezi. What are the dimensions you’re planning on this hotbox of yours to be?”

“One forty by five twenty meters,” Rezi said. “Or the nearest Imperial unit, I suppose.”

“No curve or angles or anything?”

“Nah; the rift is pretty straight.”

“Excellent. Alright, you suspend a roof over the pit--though you want the suspension towers to be back a ways, for maximum safety. You wall off the long sides--but not the short ones. And the roof? It’s angled. And at the high end, you put a turbine. Actually, several, so that some can be shut down and have maintenance done to them without affecting power output overmuch, but you get my meaning,” Atherton said.

“Are you talking about some sort of solar updraft tower[2] type of design?” Arnold asked.

“Something like that.”

“A properly sized tower would be visible from a long way away,” Arnold pointed out, knowing how they didn’t want to bring attention to this island.

“So don’t build a properly sized tower. It’ll be less efficient, but again, volcano. The temperature gradient will be extreme either way.”

“It’s still a single large structure,” Rezi pointed out.

“Indeed it is, but the internal pressure won’t be such that a breach is a realistic concern. Earthquake damage is still a concern, but there are ways to minimize that, and should it happen the consequences will be much less dire and easier to fix.”

“That...could work,” Arnold allowed.

“Look, ultimately it’s up to you; you’re the chief engineer, Rezi and I are just busybodies with opinions. But you did ask my opinion and I gave it; do with it as you will.”

____________________

Chapter Text

II-XV

Atherton looked at the brown walnut-sized stone on his desk; such a small thing, and yet it retroactively justified all the expense and care that had gone into the Elektron Consortium, for it proved that that byzantine mess worked; of all the amber Rostagno’s impressive efforts had mined out of the ground so far, that without inclusions had been sorted out, and then the amber whose inclusions didn’t include biting arthropods, and then those biting insects had been examined and those without blood around their mouth parts had likewise been sorted out, leaving behind this: the first piece of what was known in-house as blooded amber.

The first thing to do was to examine the blood under electron microscope--Rostagno’s operation made no distinction between nucleated and anucleated blood; while InGen wasn’t interested in mammals yet, the key word in that sentence was “yet”. There was no telling what the future might hold, once Jurassic Park was go.

I wonder if I’ll live to see it, a quiet voice in the back of Atherton’s mind pondered. He quieted the voice; Foolish sentimentality--I will or I won’t, and there’s no use agonizing over it. Life comes at you one day at a time, so rejoice in the challenges of the day.

And today he had a good one. Examining the blood around the mosquito’s mouth parts revealed it to be nucleated--it wasn’t a mammal. Of course, that didn’t rule out anything else technically speaking, but if Cretaceous mosquitos were anything like those of today, they fed preferentially on warm-blooded prey, so chances were good that this was a bird...or something like a bird.

Atherton pocketed the amber, momentarily bemused at the near blasphemy of treating something so significant so casually, and cursed the fact that the proper labs weren’t set up yet. It had been a logical enough thing in planning--no need to waste resources on something that wasn’t needed yet when you never knew what advancements that’d make the whole thing cheaper, easier, or better were around the corner--but now that he was looking the prospect of having to sit on this amber for a while before examining it down the barrel, he wondered what the hell he’d been thinking. What am I supposed to do with this rock for the next week? Keep it under my bed?

Atherton threw himself into other aspects of his work and the time flew by--but the entire time, an eighty-five million year old rock from New Jersey was burning a hole in his pocket. And then, at long last, it was time.

Atherton was now in a brand new laboratory. He held the amber up to the light one last time, and could see the cloudy form of the mosquito in the murky rock. The moment of truth approached; at the moment, the mosquito and its precious contents were sealed away from natural forces. He had to get it out of the amber without exposing it to the outside world. Would that it were as simple as smashing it with a hammer, or drilling a hole, but outside contaminants weren’t the only thing he was worried about--inside the amber there would be all sorts of microorganisms and pollen and such, and them getting into the sample would be just as bad as whatever was carried on his breath.

But he had a plan.

Atherton was dressed in scrubs, a face mask, and latex gloves; this phase didn’t require too much in the way of protection. He grabbed a jeweler’s drill--the sort of tool used by people who make amber ornaments, in fact--with a small circular saw on the end. Slowly and methodically, he cut around the circumference of the amber nugget, careful to stop short of the mosquito itself. The goal was to be able to break the amber in half later without allowing contamination to get in now.

Now he grabbed a bottle of alcohol and washed the nugget liberally.It was important to get rid of any dust or grime--and especially any DNA-containing material--before he was to crack the amber open.

In this lab is one of Atherton’s favorite tools, a plexiglass glove box. He turned off the UV light that was inside, which turned on the camera--which was included because he wished to document this, and was on the circuit so as to idiot proof this thing as much as possible. Seeing that the record light was on, Atherton put the nugget inside the box, positive airflow preventing other contaminants.

Atherton then opened a container of liquid nitrogen that was inside the box and dipped the amber in it with a pair of tongs, making it more brittle. Next he grabbed surgical forceps--he could crack the amber open by hand at this point, but the risk of tearing his gloves, while slight, was unacceptable.

And just like that, the mosquito was free from its eighty-five million year imprisonment. (And broken in half. But that was far from the end of the trauma it would face this day.) Such a simple action, and yet so nerve-racking, for this was the moment when Atherton truly crossed the Rubicon. What he just did could not be undone, and there was nothing for it but to go forward. Now he had to work, lest all the processes of decay and decomposition begin again after eighty-five million years.

Though blood would only be found on the mouth parts and in the esophagus, Atherton wanted to preserve as much of the mosquito as possible--to avoid, as much as possible, compounding his scientific sins. This is no easy task, for amber is hard and flesh is soft, and the mosquito’s delicate legs and wings are thoroughly embedded in the amber. And yet, with the deft skill of a man who had practiced this maneuver thousands of times on mosquitoes encased in modern resins, Atherton removed it. Piece by piece. Every leg, or bit of skin, or fragment of wing went in its own, numbered test tube. (These he had an ample supply of.)

When the job was done, Atherton pulled back from the low-powered binocular microscope he’d been using for the task. He cracked his neck, wiped the sweat from the indentation the machine had made against his forehead, and shook his head vigorously to clear it. Finally, he double-checked to make sure the seals were tight on the test tubes and the containers the amber halves were in--the latter were very unlikely to be revisited, but it was the principle of the thing--and retrieved them from the glove box.

In a different part of the building was a freezer built like a safe, or rather a bank vault. Here Atherton put his prizes, and called it a day.

The next day Atherton returned, and grabbed those test tubes that contained mouth or esophagus. These he took to a very different lab from the one he’d occupied the day before. The tubes were cleaned, put in a glove box, and cleaned again before being opened. Under a more powerful microscope, Atherton hunted out the individual red blood cells of the animal. After a long day of not particularly healthy work--for in his excitement he had come in first thing in the morning, neglected to eat, and had not left for home until late in the evening--he had gathered 134 individual cells. These went in a new test tube, which in the freezer was kept slightly apart from the others.

Third day, third new lab. In this lab the room itself had positive airflow and UV lights, which were on all the time except when Atherton was working, and he wore a mask with a respirator. Again the double-cleaning, and then onto work. Here the erythrocytes themselves were dissected: the nucleus was removed from the cell, then the nucleolus from the nucleus. This was, perhaps, not strictly necessary from a coldly objective-oriented point of view, but Atherton did not want to destroy anything of value--besides, he was unwilling to lose out on his chance to clone a dinosaur because he hadn’t anticipated that the mitochondria interacted with the cell in some weird way, or some such nonsense.

Now for the most dangerous part. The reason for the extra precaution. It was time to separate the DNA from the cellular detritus.

Atherton grabbed the nucleus tube; the others he wanted to preserve unless necessary. Into it he added what was essentially soap to disrupt the membranes, with an enzyme that degrades the proteins resultant mess before they have a chance to chew up the DNA (hopefully).

At this point the mixture contained all kinds of stuff, not just DNA. The next addition to this wicked brew was phenol, an organic solvent. Phenol is not altogether a nice thing to use--it’s smelly, burns the skin, and can cause liver cancer--but it’s wonderful at separating the DNA out from the rest of the soup.

Atherton shook the test tube vigorously for a couple minutes to make sure the cocktail was thoroughly mixed, then put it in a centrifuge to separate out the components, like oil and vinegar in a salad dressing that’s been left out to stand.

Normally there would now be three layers: water on top, a milky layer of proteins in the middle, phenol at the bottom. There appeared to the naked eye to be two this time, but that was because of how minuscule the original sample was, cells in the low triple digits and not even complete cells at that.

Removing the water layer, which contained the DNA, was simplicity itself, though harrowing; no procedure was perfect, and Atherton was worried sick that he was leaving behind some critical gene sequence or taking up a protein that’d damage the DNA in some way--if this failed, he would spend the rest of his days wondering if he had somehow caused it to fail at this stage. Atherton was not a man much inclined to useless fretting and worrying, but the idea that something invaluable was lost due to his recklessness, due to him being so preoccupied with whether or not he could do this that he hadn’t stopped to consider whether or not he should ….it’d worry him into an early grave, inasmuch as any grave could be said to be early when one was already seventy one. With how small the sample was, there was no telling what minor bit of damage would spell the difference between success and failure.

For all this, though, his hand was deft and the deed was done, sucking up as much of the water into a pipette as he could without getting the rest. In a new test tube, he combined this water with ethanol and salt, which he then centrifuged. Then he dumped the contents of the tube out. The DNA which was gathered at the bottom of the tube was invisible, but he proceeded regardless.

While he waited for the tube to dry, he sealed away the tools he’d used and waste products he’d created so far; if he failed here today, he wanted everything to be preserved for future generations with better technology, so that they might fix his mistakes.

When the test tube was dry, he added a single drop of distilled water mixed with a little something of his own creation, something that’d prevent the Knott from latching onto the telomeres, like the little plastic sheaths on the ends of shoelaces--but which would be moved when the Knott came at it from down the “track” of the DNA molecule itself. It was only very recently that he’d perfected this, but thank fuck he’d done it in time, and not had to resort to removing them entirely.

Then he added a specially prepared brew of chemicals--more of the as-of-yet-nameless creation, Knott, and assorted DNA bases, and stuck this into the PCR machine--a hotplate with a timer that raised and lowered the temperature every few minutes. Atherton turned the machine on and gathered his preserved materials, knowing as he left that from here on out it was in the hands of whatever gods may exist.

While Atherton attempted to make up for the previous day’s lack of meals all in one go, in the lab the machine did its work. It heated the DNA until the double helixes split in twain, then cooled, allowing the Knott to get to work.

Knott enzymes latched onto DNA fragments randomly, then latched onto second DNA fragments also randomly, then searched for overlapping segments. If it failed to find them, it let one go and proceded to act like a normal polymerase. If it found them, however, it zipped the two pieces together. Sometimes pure rotten luck meant that it had grabbed the other half of the fragment this had been part of before the PCR machine cleft this in twain or a clone thereof, in which case no particular gain was made--but other times they were not, the Knott had grabbed two fragments that were not the same but did overlap, and so could do its real job; the Knott stitched together the fragments until it reached the point where one or the other ended, at which point it began adding bases to the shorter strand that mirrored the longer one, almost as though it were a real polymerase. In this way, two fragments became one slightly longer fragment.

As the process continued, the average length of DNA fragments grew, and pure statistical chance meant that any given longer strand was more likely to be grabbed than any given shorter strand simply because it had more surface area to grab onto; of course, there was no shortage of Knott to do the grabbing, but such statistics still determined how the strands would pair up, and as the average length grew the odds that any given strand an original fragment was paired with would contain overlapping segments, or even its whole sequence from a previous absorption, also grew, and it eventually reached the point where the number of original fragments in the soup actually began to decrease; this was the beginning of the end, as smaller sequences were absorbed by larger ones. It was only a matter of time, of cycles of heating and cooling, before every strand reached its maximum possible length.

Whether that maximum length was a whole, unblemished chromosome remained to be seen. If there was a place where the genetic sequence was broken in every cell Atherton had retrieved, the Knott would have no way to repair that. The chance of a break appearing randomly in the same spot 268 times (or rather 536 times, in order to make it impossible to replace the dead chromosome with its counterpart) was, of course, extremely low, but if you rolled the dice enough times you’d eventually end up with some quite impressive runs of sixes (not to mention the fact that the more damaged the strands became, the greater the chances that this break would be in the same place as another break) and pure bad luck was never as rare as humans like to think--also, there was always the harrowing possibility that it would not be random, that some parts of the gene sequence were just naturally weaker than others and would break more easily.

PCR normally took an hour or two; Atherton let the process run overnight--statistical processes take time, and besides, the very fact that Knott was capable of doing things other than taking one strand of DNA and turning it into two (always a minority of the time, of course, but quite a statistically significant minority towards the end) meant that it was technically less efficient than Taq polymerase.

It would take time and testing to determine whether these chromosomes were whole or not, but when Atherton examined it and didn’t see any free-floating sequences, he took it as a good sign. For the moment, at least, it looked like success.

He wondered if it would always be this nerve-wracking.