8 - LONG LIVE THE QUEEN

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A baby Tyrannosaurus, also by Julius Csotony. Based on the remains of fossilised embryos belonging to other Tyrannosaur species. (1)

My name would live on forever. (2)

As I sat in the swivelling chair, contemplating the newly-born hatchling before me, a half-smile tugged at the corner of my lips. It had to be Henry Wu, of all people, to gift me this moment.

I could never quite figure out if I admired him, or resented him.

But…

I’d been here. I’d seen the egg hatch.

I was the first human - the very first in the history of the world - to see a dinosaur with her own eyes. Me, Amanda Weaver! A bookish student from the MidWest who never made it into an Ivy League institution.

When InGen had snapped me up, not just as an intern but legitimately as a junior geneticist, it seemed too good to be true. But now…

Amanda fucking Weaver. Straight into the history books, don’t pass go. No matter what else came my way in the future, no one could take this away from me.

I’d been half-asleep when the first crack came from the eggshell, loud as a gunshot. It jolted me awake. Just thinking about it still gave me fits of hysterical giggles. I’d welcomed this creature, this masterpiece of evolution, back into the world.

We had a T.rex!

Now, we were alone in the room, her and I. Before me was the crude rectangular container we’d used to host her egg in the final stages of development, its bottom layered with hay and branches.

We had robotic arms manipulating and turning the eggs with precision no human could match, making sure the temperature was correct for the embryos developing inside - well, what we assumed was correct anyway.

The arms were retracted now, and all eggs had been moved to other containers. Roberta was alone, resting on her left side over the hay bed, looking up at me.

Wu and the others on site - all of them senior to me, of course - had already transitioned from wonder to anxiety. They were in the conference room, trying to determine what the hell we were supposed to do next.

They might as well have been on another planet, as far as I was concerned.

I was four months into what was supposed to be a three-month stint on Sorna, sleep-deprived from the heat and gruelling shifts, spending Christmas away from family, contending with mosquito bites and crappy canned food. But all of that fatigue was now gone.

My eyes were wide open, my heart thundered in my chest, and my hands shook with excitement, or maybe fear.

I didn’t know the first thing about looking after an animal, let alone an extinct one. I’d never even had a pet!

Breathless with the weight of history on my shoulders, I stared into Roberta’s eyes.

She stared into mine.

I will remember that look for as long as I live. Roberta’s eyes were a lake of liquid gold, a deep amber iris framing a pearl-black pupil. Maybe I was projecting, but as she fixed me with her gaze, I felt like I was being scrutinised. Like she was trying to figure out who and what I was, what role I would play in her life.

This animal was at once so new, and so ancient. Her cognitive functions were a mystery. I followed her gaze, as if that could give me some insight into what she was thinking. This connection… was it all in my head, or was there something, an odd mutual understanding between us?

I’d never had a professional or personal interest in animals all my life. But in that moment, I felt like simply being there with Roberta, witnessing the first moments of her life, was making me a different person.

Roberta was skinny, about the size of a small chicken, with wide eyes that darted this way and that, examining every corner of the lab. The fuzz covering her body was bright and colourful, in a striped orange that made me think of tigers.

She wasn’t sluggish and helpless like a newborn chicken, though. Roberta was alert. She hadn’t moved of her own volition yet, but she was trying - flexing her slender hind limbs beneath her.

“Come on,” I gently urged her, as she strained to stand up for the first time. Her legs trembled underneath her, but with a couple of stumbles, eventually she stood in the container, looking curiously at the hay beneath her feet.

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Tentatively, I reached out and flipped a lever, lowering the walls to the container. My hands almost inched towards Roberta, eager to touch her, lift her up and place her on the floor - but I held back. A precocious hatchling had to defend itself to survive, and I had no intention of getting my hand bitten.

Roberta took tentative steps, uncertain and ungainly, leaving the container behind. She marched to the edge of the large table the container was resting on, and looked down, at the floor below.

Then, she lifted her head, and vocalised repeatedly in my direction, emitting a long series of small chirps.

“Welcome to the world,” I said, in a rapt whisper. And then, rather absurdly, I gestured at the lab around me. “So… what do you want to do?”

***

The door to the lab opened with perfect timing.

In the hours since her birth, Roberta had gained a surprising level of mobility, hopping and skipping and jumping with uncontained enthusiasm around the lab. Gave me a heart attack on more than a few occasions - I was terrified she was going to stumble and break her neck.

I soon learned not to worry, and trust that she could look after herself. I’d prepared a makeshift water bowl, and cleared sensitive or fragile equipment away, but beyond that I’d simply sat back and marvelled.

I hadn’t been fully alone all this time, of course. Even when they had other tasks to carry out, people literally couldn’t help themselves. They stopped by the lab, and gawked.

Not so Henry Wu, and most of the senior geneticists. From what I could gather while being in here with the rex, they’d been swamped by one long-distance phone call after another - with Hammond, with Japan, with anyone who had an even remote stake in this.

The storm hampered communications just enough that several calls had to be repeated. Hammond was so anxious he called on six separate occasions, demanding that Wu personally update him on how Roberta was doing.

I stretched in the chair, yawning. For once, I was perfectly content with being a little worker bee, far beneath the notice of the big suits.

Eventually, Wu must have managed to break free of Hammond’s hold. He must have marched his senior subordinates back to the lab, to take a look at the animal for himself.

And I couldn’t have timed things better if I’d wanted to.

As the door sprang open, Roberta was crouching on the floor, her long legs folding beneath her body, the tail held rigid behind her. Her amber eyes were pointed upwards.

With a soft chirp, she leapt into the air.

The clumsiness of a newborn was already gone. Roberta was no jump specialist, of course, but she was small, light, and agile. There was a predatory elegance to the way she sprang upwards, her clawed feet splayed beneath her, her jaws stretched open to unveil neat rows of tiny, pointed teeth.

She was jumping right towards Wu, and I burst out in hysterical laughter at the sight of a bunch of grown men stumbling backwards and falling bum-first to the ground at the sight of this fuzzy ball leaping at them.

Roberta didn’t even register her presence. Her jaws snapped in mid-air, closing around an unfortunate mosquito.

She lost some of her grace as she landed, tumbling and rolling to the ground - but she was back up in a heartbeat, gulping the mosquito down. Again, I’m sure I was projecting, but she looked quite satisfied with herself. As well she should be - it was the third mosquito kill in a row.

I smiled as my laughter subsided. With her around eating the bugs, maybe we’d be getting some real sleep at night soon!

Only then did Roberta seem to notice that the door was open. She fixed the threshold with one long, appraising look - and then darted past the geneticists, racing into the hallway beyond.

Wu climbed to his feet, pointing and shouting. “Keep an eye on her! Make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid!”

As people around him scrambled to obey, he turned to face me. “Were you watching her? Is she okay?”

I couldn’t contain my smile.

“You can relax,” I told him. “Right now, she’s the happiest individual in this lab.”

He seemed a bit taken aback by my comment, but composed himself nonetheless.

“Good,” he muttered. He was about to add something - but the ring of the phones once more filled the lab. “Not again,” he muttered.

It was the fourth call in a row, and with each new call, the tones had shifted more and more away from wonder, and towards - anxiety, maybe? It was getting a little exasperating.

Shaking my head, I went into the hallway, but there was no trace of Roberta. I sniggered at the idea of her running rampant across the facility. Luckily, I didn’t need to take personal responsibility for watching her - she had most of the facility scrambling in her wake at this point.

Behind me, Wu was talking on the phone.

Curiosity got the better of me, and I stuck around, listening to his side of the conversation.

“What?” He was saying, bewildered. “How am I supposed to know if it can be taught tricks?!”

I frowned, craning my neck to listen more closely. The voice on the other side of the line was clearly Hammond’s, but I could only catch glimpses of the conversation. I distinctly heard “... want to know how long before full size” and “some kind of stadium exhibit”, and “feeding show.”

“John, we’ll figure it all out,” Wu said, a pleading tone in his voice. “Nobody knows anything about these animals yet.”

What followed was a long monologue by Hammond, of which I could grasp very little. “Yes,” Wu said, and then again, “yes”. Eventually, he hung up the phone, and turned to me, running a hand through his hair.

“We need to make sure everything is perfect, Amanda, ok? Hammond is on his way here, he wants to see her. Muldoon too. And a delegation of investors from Japan.”

At that moment, I remembered - on an emotional level, not an intellectual one - why we were here, why Roberta was here. All the magic I’d just felt, the bubbly enthusiasm and joy that follows a new life coming into the world, suddenly seemed so far away.

Roberta was mere hours old, and already the big suits were on their way to see their literal golden-egg goose. To figure out whether she represented a return on their investment, and whether she could fulfil the true purpose of her existence: make them money. Obscene quantities of money.

“Amanda? You with me?”

“Sure,” I told Wu, with a strange and vague, but powerful determination blooming inside me.

Wu had been many things to me - an overbearing supervisor, a visionary genius, a petty and manipulative tyrant, a victim of Hammond’s outbursts. Now, I was staring at him as if I was truly seeing him for the first time, seeing him for what he really was. Smart, ambitious, ruthless, yes.

But also a puppet in the hands of older, richer, far more powerful people who had no interest in the details of our work here, or in the best interest of the living, breathing animals we were now bringing to life.

My eyes narrowed.

And inside me, my resolve hardened.

Footnotes:

(1) More information about the findings here.

(2) This chapter is written from the POV of Amanda Weaver, the employee left to care after newborn Roberta on Isla Sorna; in the story, this is an excerpt from her personal diary, that later saw publication.