Jurassic Park: De-Extinction

Chapter One: Isla Nublar

INGEN Biogenetics had hovered on the brink of Chapter 11 for many years, ever since the mid 1980's when an ill-fated visit to their Costa Rica facility. Five people had died and the facility had been closed, indefinitely. The company had been on the very brink of going under for the last time, of going extinct. Their CEO Jon Hammond, had fallen badly ill in the mid 90's, leaving control of his company to his nephew, Peter Ludlow. That was when things went very, very, badly wrong.

Ludlow had tried to save the company by salvaging dinosaurs from their Site B facility. They had suffered extremely high causalities and the whole awful debacle had ended when a full grown bull Tyrannosaurus Rex had gone on a rampage in San Diego. Ultimately, Peter Ludlow had been killed and Jon Hammond had set up a restricted biological reserve with the Costa Rican government. But the damage had already been done. INGEN was finished, there was no way they could possibly recover and in the early 2000's Jon Hammond died, putting the final nail in the coffin of INGEN.

The company went under and the Japanese backers took their loses. Or at least, that's what had seemed to happen. In truth, Hammond had left everything to his daughter Susan. Ultimately, she had played everything close to the chest and kept the company running, under a different name of course. Susan Hammond had majored in business and she knew enough to let it seem as though INGEN had gone the way of the dinosaurs, no pun intended. But just as they had managed to reverse extinction, INGEN began to resurrect from the ashes.

It had been a long road to recovery but in the end Susan had brought it back from the dead. One thing she absolutely was certain of was that she didn't want to repeat the problems of the past. Her kids had nearly been killed on her father's island. She had hated him for what he had put her through, put her kids through, but now that she was sitting on the other side of the desk, Susan had to admit that running a company like INGEN was much harder than she had anticipated.

Jon Hammond had forever been toting the idea that they had "spared no expense", but Susan knew full well that had been a lie. In fact, INGEN had cut corners everywhere they could so that they could. That was the only explanation that Susan could come up with as to how a sloppy fat man and a thunderstorm had brought down every security measure they had had on the island. The dinosaurs had escaped and run amok. Susan was sure that if her company was to survive she would have to be certain that she wasn't repeating the mistakes of the past.

"Let's examine the mistakes my father made with his park." Susan said as she looked around the conference room. "First problem, automation. My father believed that taking the human element out of the equation would keep everything safe, but I think that we all know that's not the case. My father hired experts but didn't bother to learn about the subjects that they were experts in. He was CEO of a genetics company but never knew enough about Genetics to know that what he had made were theme park monsters and nothing more. He hired paleontologists and failed to ask the big questions about the dinosaur's behavior. Partly, uncertainty was always going to be a problem, I mean, hell, we're recreating life that hasn't existed on the Earth for 65 million years. We don't know what to expect whenever we develop a new dinosaur, but at least we can make a good guess. Finally, the third and final flaw was paranoia. My father tried to keep everything secret, the direct result being that no one involved in the JP project had any idea what we were doing big picture. Everyone from the graphic designers to the computer systems engineers to the security to the consultants were working in a box, shut off from the rest of the world. Catastrophic failure was really the only option given the circumstances."

Susan straightened and smoothed the wrinkles out of her Armani business suit. Susan was starting to go grey but she was still a handsome woman in her mid-50's. She had rebuilt the board of directors and now she looked around the room she was glad she had. Yes, INGEN had more vice presidents than leaves on a tree, but she knew it was necessary. One to run the park, one to run the zoo, one to manage the dinosaurs and so on. She had appointed eight new vice presidents in all, the bean counters hadn't liked it but Susan had put her foot down. She knew it was absolutely essential that everyone in command of ANYTHING at INGEN know exactly what the company was up to at all times. She knew full well exactly how important it was to keep abreast of what all the arms of the octopus were doing at the same time.

"It's been several years and we've come a long way." Susan said "Ladies and Gentlemen, I believe we have come to a most important crossroads. We are now at the point my father dreamed of. All of the systems are in place, the board is set. What we have to decide now is, do we move forward with the JP project or do we want to keep the animals away from the public, for research purposes only? This is not a question that should be taken lightly, and that is why I called this corrumn today."

Susan directed a look at Dr. Laura Sorkin, vice president of genetic research. Sorkin had been part of the INGEN genetic team for years. Years back she had been one of the top genetists in her day and had been commissioned to develop the dinosaurs for the JP project but had ultimately been turned down as lead on the project in favor of Henry Wu. Sorkin had been kept on as a genetics consultant but her research had been slowly but consistently shunted to the side and she had ended up in a dead end corner of the company bound up tight with non-disclosure agreements. Susan had approached her early on and with a little persuasion and a lot of patients, Sorkin had agreed to become the new head of INGEN genetics.

"Well, the dinos are finally ready for show case." Dr. Sorkin comment non-commitally.

In truth, Dr. Sorkin always had more tweaks she'd like to apply to the animals. Like any creator, she was always the biggest critic of her work, a trait that had appealed to Susan's business sense. Still, none the less, they had finally worked the animals around to a point where they were both satisfied. It had taken the better part of two decades to undue the mess that Henry Wu had created. All the frog-dinos had been destroyed and replaced with the new stock. They had fixed the problems with the dinosaurs and though they might not be what people thought dinosaurs should look like but they were more close to true than ever before.

Ed Regis, the Jurassic Park PR Manager, beamed and leaned back in his chair putting his hands behind his head. Susan turned to him with a raised eyebrow. She had made him VP of Park relations but in truth she didn't like Regis very much. He was excellent at what he did but there was no doubt that he had what her father would have called "a deplorable excess of personality". He was like a cruise director on steroids.

"Well the park is ready at waiting!" he chirped happily.

Regis had been in charge of building the theme park part of Jurassic Park and he had come through in spades. Where they sat now, the board members could see the tops of the rides in the park over the tree tops. This had been step one of the plan. Susan had recognized that part of her father's downfall was that he had tried to be Walt Disney, without doing the work needed to make it play out right. Before you could make Disney World, you had to make Disney Land and before that Disney Studios. John Hammond had gone straight to the full blown park with all the bells and whistles, no waiting. But Susan and Regis saw the real road and now they had built the park first, keeping the animals separate, gaging how they behave, the requirements for their containment, all the while building and dealing with the requirements for a regular theme park.

They had opened Jurassic Park as a dinosaur theme park only eight years ago but already it was doing tremendously well. Most of the company's prime investors were Japanese and the Japanese devoured theme parks. So far, everything was running as planned, the rides all worked, the entertainment went off without a hitch and the guests left happy. Susan truly had "spared no expense" this time. The park was netting between 10 and 15 thousand guests a day and was currently rated as one of the top tourist destinations in the world. Everything had to be right with the theme park aspect of Jurasssic park, because the truth was that the ordinary average everyday theme park was the bread and butter of INGEN. The dinosaurs, their genetic research, were all just icing on the cake. Hammond had never realized that it was the Park and not the Jurassic that would be the money maker for Jurassic Park, he had been so obsessed with the dinosaurs that he had been blind to the opportunities that a theme park offered.

The theme of Jurassic Park was the dinosaurs of course, but the guests had no idea that while they were riding the spinning Dino eggs or the Terror-Soar roller coaster that INGEN had REAL dinosaurs under wraps on their Site B facility. They all oooed and ahhhed at their animatronic dinosaurs and stared in wonder at what might be behind the big gates with "Jurassic Park" written across the top that lead to the north part of the island. They had no idea that what the company was building behind that gate was something the likes of which no one had ever guessed.

It wasn't as though there hadn't been hints though. Three years ago Jurassic Park had debuted the Mesozoic Menagerie, a full on zoo and aquarium of living relics, animals older than the dinosaurs that were still alive in the world today. They had made headlines around the world for the resurrection of the baiji dolphin. These bizarre river dolphins had been declared extinct in 2013, INGEN had started a program to resurrect the baiji dolphin. It was a great publicity routine, and drew the eye of the world to the small island park off of Costa Rica. And honestly, after cloning dinosaurs from millions of years old bugs, resurrecting a recently extinct aquatic mammal was a breeze. It looked good in the papers and more important, it had prepared the world for things to come.