6 - THE FIVE DEATHS

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The Muertes Archipelago, or “The Five Deaths”, as shown in the movie “The Lost World: Jurassic Park”

Early in the year 1983, InGen’s march towards the return of the dinosaurs accelerated rapidly towards feverish speeds.

This presented its own complications. Construction in San Diego increased to stay apace with InGen’s growingly ambitious goals, but real estate was severely limited. Hammond was already planning additional purchases of land - this was literally a barren desert on the city outskirts after all, and the city had few objections - but even then, the park would need every square metre available if it was to accommodate dinosaur enclosures and guest facilities together.

Time and again Wu told Hammond he would deliver the eggs - but he needed Hammond to deliver him enough space to operate in. The next stages of the plan required vast tracts of land, enough to build hatcheries for fertilised eggs, pens for the young individuals that would hopefully hatch, and research facilities to study their metabolism and behaviour. Rearing a T.rex hatchling in Palo Alto’s lab space was unthinkable, but so was doing it in San Diego.

Secrecy - easily ensured at first - also became an ever more pressing concern. The number of patents filed, and the computing power accrued in Palo Alto, could no longer be concealed. Hammond, mercurial as ever, started to pay increasing attention to the question of corporate espionage.

In spite of Hammond’s penchant for paranoia, it’s hard to fault his desire to keep InGen’s true purpose, and progress, under wraps. While not quite a bubble, genetic engineering at the time was drawing considerable attention from the corporate and scientific worlds alike, particularly in California.

What’s more, if InGen already had to watch its back from rivals like BioSyn, (1) the situation would only deteriorate once the construction of new facilities was underway. For now, InGen could attempt to fertilise eggs in its labs in Palo Alto, but what would happen after a breakthrough? InGen would find itself with dozens, potentially hundreds of animals to house and care for as they grew. This would demand ridiculous amounts of space and security, too much to keep a secret from the press, let alone from corporate spies.

What InGen needed was lots of room, somewhere not easily accessible, and where every outsider would be immediately conspicuous. A place with labour cheap enough to bribe into silence about what they were building. A place where construction and cloning could go on in absolute secrecy.

In short, as Hammond concluded during a late-night eureka moment, what InGen truly needed was a remote island. Or perhaps, an entire archipelago. And of course, a country willing to lease it.

Following long deliberation, Hammond eventually settled on Costa Rica as a suitable candidate for the kind of lease he had in mind. For a start, Costa Rica possessed exactly the sort of island chain InGen needed at the time: Las Cinco Muertes, or the Five Deaths, located in the Pacific, on the west coast of the Central American country. (2)

The unfortunate name of the archipelago stemmed from a pre-Columbian myth, which saw a hero figure confront five different methods of execution, one for each island: hanging, crushing, burning, drowning, and decapitation. The myths, and the colourful temples illustrating them, were first reported by German explorers, who collected them in a book titled Die Fünf Todesarten. (3)

The islands’ cursed reputation, and relatively remote geography, kept them off the map of locals and tourists alike. The archipelago was deserted, and had been so since the Spanish conquest of the region. This alone made them ideal candidates for secret development. (4)

But it was the economic and political situation that greatly increased the odds of a favourable deal. Costa Rica at the time was experiencing a severe economic recession, and their traditional sources of income - the export of coffee and bananas - were being challenged by an unfavourable trade situation.

While Costa Rican GDP contraction remained lower than that of its neighbours, the government was on the lookout for ideas, and tourism was still a remote prospect at the time. Political circles soon formulated a strategy to draw tech companies to the country, hoping to reap the returns long-term and help reduce the country’s dependency on agriculture for its prosperity. (5)

What made Costa Rica an even better destination for InGen was a peculiar combination of factors. For a start, the company would only be one among many to open research facilities in the country, which would hopefully help maintain the true objective of their research secret.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Moreover, Costa Rica’s close ties to the United States reduced the political and financial risks involved. In a way, InGen could have its cake and eat it too, benefitting from the secrecy and remoteness of an accommodating developing country, without having to deal with local dictators, or stepping too far outside the US security umbrella.

A final consideration went into the climate. At the time, InGen was operating on the (outdated, erroneous) notion that the whole of the Mesozoic was tropical, warm, and humid. Equatorial Costa Rica therefore seemed to offer an environment that would suit all prehistoric beings InGen could choose to create. (6)

Confident in these considerations, InGen proposed - and swiftly obtained - a 99-year-long lease on the Muertes archipelago. The Costa Rican government proved exceedingly amenable. Local officials didn’t really know what InGen planned to do on the islands, beyond the vague notion that it was biological research aimed at civilian and commercial applications. This suited them just fine: after all, their plan had precisely been to draw Big Tech to their country, and it was working as intended, so there was no reason to look too closely. (7)

Shortly after the lease, InGen turned to local construction firms, which pressed underpaid labourers into work on the islands - much to the chagrin of the minority who genuinely believed that the archipelago was cursed.

But for the majority of the workers, this represented an unexpected opportunity for social mobility, as it increased demand for their labour. InGen’s extraordinary appetite pushed the contracted firms into a recruiting frenzy, giving youths an opportunity to leave agriculture behind. And so what if they had to sign stringent NDAs about what they were doing?

These attitudes would gradually shift towards subtle disquiet, particularly as the facilities came together. Why would anyone need multiple kilometres of electrified steel fences? What about the barbed wire, or the sturdy concrete hatcheries, or the moats running with water six metres deep?

This unease expressed itself in murmurs and questions, but little else. Naturally, the labourers cared only to a point about what they were building. The money was good by local standards, and while accidents happened in the workplace, there was nothing out of the ordinary about their nature, or numbers. All in all, that was good enough. (8)

Thirteen months into construction on Sorna, the largest of the five islands, Henry Wu judged the main facility - dubbed the Workers Village - to be sufficiently ready to host his work. He relocated to Sorna, bringing a good chunk of InGen’s geneticists with him - but leaving Sorkin behind.

For the next two years, he and his staff worked day and night on egg fertilisation, leaving for the mainland on sporadic occasions. The turns were gruelling, and exhaustion ran bone-deep in the company’s Sorna contingent at the time - but the results were showing. Every new fertilisation inched closer to a viable embryo.

And on 30th January 1986, finally, Wu delivered Hammond’s miracle, and the entire staff’s prayers were answered. An egg hatched, and Roberta was born, the first Tyrannosaurus to do so in 66 million years.

And from that moment, the world would never be the same again. (8)

Footnotes:

(1) Whose corporate espionage operation accidentally triggered the catastrophic sequence of events that brought down the park, in the first book/movie. Needless to say, that won’t be happening in this timeline. Rival corporate entities will factor in, but in a… subtler way, down the line.

(2) The islands are fictional, existing only in the JP franchise.

(3) Information pretty much 100% pulled from the canon.

(4) Which had cataclysmic consequences for the native population, so it isn’t too far fetched to imagine the islands being depopulated and then simply left to their own devices.

(5) These two paragraphs are pretty much OTL, and Costa Rica did successfully attract Microsoft and other tech giants. Tourism has also been booming for a number of years now, the pandemic notwithstanding.

(6) In my estimation, it would suit almost none. While the Mesozoic was warmer than the present on average, it underwent as many shifts in climate as you would expect for a period encompassing 160 million years and multiple changes to the configuration of Earth’s landmass. Dinosaurs from Cretaceous Alaska and Anctartica-Australia would have definitely experienced prevailing snows and long stretches of the year spent in darkness, just to make but one example. What is even more supremely ironic is that tropical jungles are a terrible depositional environment, due to myriad factors relating to soil acidity, water movement, and sedimentation. The vast majority of jungle fauna simply does not fossilise. It is exceedingly unlikely that any of the dinosaurs InGen could clone would have lived in an environment comparable to the Amazon rainforest.

(7) I’m not sure if Michael Crichton, the author of the original book, chose Costa Rica for similar reasons, but it does seem to make an eminent amount of sense to me.

(8) For now.

(9) We’re all caught up with the prologue! In the next section, From The Ashes, the animals will take centre stage.