I don't own Jurassic Park; novels or films, though I do wonder if Michael Crichton's points about dinosaur clones in the 20th century were right, like not having access to the teachings of their ancestors - the Raptors' society in the Lost World novel were hinted to be unnatural, chaotic. But who am I to argue?
Anyway, I always wondered about Henry Wu's character and if he was truly as one-dimensional as he was portrayed in the movies. What if he had a different purpose?
Enjoy!
I am trying to make things better.
Henry Wu walked into his apartment, stiff with frustration and weariness. He had spent the last few days going from one inquiry to the next, but luckily his part in the current crisis was minimum even if his part was more crucial than most. He had, after all, been invested in the Indoraptor project just like he had been with the Indominus Rex, but like before the courts were more interested in those actively responsible.
Why was it he was always blamed when people who hired him to do a job creating a genetically engineered life form and said genetically engineered life form turned around and started killing people?
It was not his fault the idiots in Jurassic World had believed the Indominus Rex should have just been isolated with nothing but her own sister to keep her company.
It had not been his fault when those fools saw the animal as a bank people would come to see.
It had not been his fault those idiots like Masrani and ClaireDearing refused to see the Indominus as an asset. Yes, he had recommended that the two Indominus Rexes who were born should be isolated, but he had stressed they should be moved out as soon as they were large and mature enough to live in a much larger paddock. What did they do, they kept it in the same isolated area without a thought, not seeing that the might go mad and kill its own sibling and start seeing the paddock as its own personal cell.
InGen had made the mistake of expecting too much and not bothering to think that things could spiral out of control until it was too late, but luckily the original Jurassic Park was still a long way to go before the resort opened.
Jurassic World on the other hand….
Henry had often wondered why John Hammond had signed over what was left of InGen to Simon Masrani, but he had later learnt there were groups of people out there who wanted to use the dinosaurs anyway, and he felt the best way of protecting them was to give over Isle Nublar to the Masrani Corporation, though how that protected them in the long run, Henry had no idea.
He didn't care now. It was academic.
Simon Masrani had spent years trying to make sure the new resort did not fail the same way Hammond's resort had, and that had meant not making the same mistakes like depending on automation. Henry had been delighted to once more have a chance to work with dinosaurs again, not because he liked them, but what they represented.
A key to developing a future for a genetically engineered human race.
Why did everyone on Earth not see that in order to survive they would need to turn over to genetic engineering to become a totally different race?
Years ago, when the first dinosaur embryo had been created when enough genetic material had been retrieved from mosquitos trapped in amber, John Hammond and his friend Benjamin Lockwood had celebrated their success, and then they had fallen out. Even Henry had not known why in the early days when Hammond had brought him and a number of other geneticists to create enough viable embryos to create the animals Jurassic Park needed; when he had found out the truth, he could still remember being unsure of whether to laugh or to weep at the hypocrisy Hammond had shown towards his friend.
Hammond had just wanted to create a glorified theme park zoo, complete with rides, restaurants, and gifts.
Lockwood merely wanted his precious daughter back, and he managed to get her back by using his daughter's DNA to create a clone and pass it off as his granddaughter.
And Hammond and Lockwood had fallen out over it. It was ironic when you looked at it from a certain perspective, because at heart the two men weren't that different, why Hammond couldn't see or refused to see that he was doing much what Lockwood wanted to do, clone an organism and show it to the outside world, Henry didn't know and frankly didn't care. Both men were dead now and their reasonings were lost to time.
Seriously, did Hammond not see the benefits genetics could provide? Sure, even Henry could understand the argument Hammond must surely have had with his best friend. Some parents would desperately want their child back if they had died young, but many of them would say if presented with the opportunity to have them back again that they should rest in peace.
But cloning dead children and giving them a second chance to live was only a small part of what Henry wanted to do with genetics. When Henry had been younger, he had been a fan of the Daleks from Doctor Who, and he remembered two stories that stood out. Genesis of the Daleks and Revelations of the Daleks. Both of them featured the creator Davros who used genetic engineering to alter his own race. But he also remembered the Cybermen; true, cybernetics was not his field but the basic concept of using a specific science to alter a species, give them a purpose, and make them greater than they had been before….. It had inspired Henry to try to find a way to create a human race that was better than the current one.
Lockwood had wanted to bring his daughter back, but the basic fact was Lockwood was looking to humanity whereas Hammond was just looking to make a quick buck.
Henry wanted to make the human race greater than it was, he genuinely did. He wanted to make things better. Idiots like Ian Malcolm may have described his work as wrong, and that he shouldn't be surprised if something happened, but Henry didn't care because other scientists were trying to introduce traits from different animals into human DNA, or they were experimenting with genetics to cure diseases.
He was only trying to take it a few steps further and he had good reason to make humanity better. Contrary to what many people thought about him, many seeing him as nothing more than an egotistical madman who was determined to ruin the world with genetic monsters, Henry Wu wanted to make things better, he wanted to improve things. For instance, there were dozens of diseases that crippled human beings. Wouldn't it better if their bodies were engineered to treat diseases like cancer like the common cold, able to resist them after a short amount of time? Wouldn't it be amazing if there was no such thing as blindness (he had watched Star Trek the Next Generation and had seen the episodes where Geordi LaForge's blindness actually had benefits, so he had needed to tailor the ideas) as humans knew it? What about intelligence, wouldn't it be amazing if there was no longer any such thing as children who had learning defects though they still retained their original abilities? Henry was not stupid, nor was he blind - he was more than aware that beneath the surface, a child who was born with next to no ability in something like mathematics may have an amazing talent in something like music or may have been an outstanding poet. He had no reason to deny humanity something like that, nor would he. Henry was better than that, but when he looked at the narrow short-sightedness of his own race, how they fought and squabbled over things that in the long term would mean nothing anyway, he wondered if the human race could do with a little reshuffling of its genome.
They were still having problems going under the sea, diving down in submersibles to explore what was beneath the surface of the oceans.
Why worry about lack of oxygen when you could simply have your body adjusted, giving your bones and muscles more density to withstand the pressures of the deep much in the same manner as a deep-diving Sperm Whale, or even a giant squid, while possessing either the lung capacity of a whale, or the gills of a fish to derive oxygen from the sea while having enhanced senses to let them know what was down there? Those were the kind of things that were beneficial in the long term, no more need to spend millions of dollars on researching the best means to build submarines and furthering the research of making more efficient diving equipment.
For years, humans had been spending time building more and more machines and yet they hadn't really bothered to turn inward and see what they could do. Henry Wu had seen it during the entirety of his adult life and during his career. He had been frustrated by so many people - Dr Malcolm amongst them, and that was one of the reasons why Henry had refused to tell the other man about his dreams of changing the human race because he knew the man would give him some self-righteous spiel about chaos theory.
The human race's survival was more important to him than something like chaos theory. Sooner or later, either because of Man's interference or something natural, the Earth could undergo a mass extinction event, or some other cataclysm could wipe out most of the human race, and many more would suffer and die in the aftermath because no-one would be prepared for it.
Without genetics, the human race could die out, but despite knowing all they did, there was still so much they didn't know. Many thought that thanks to the groundbreaking work he had made on the dinosaurs in the original park, they knew more about genetics and what it could do and what it could bring, but there was so much more.
That was one of the reasons he had worked on the Indominus Rex. He had known he could create a new kind of dinosaur, making it "exciting" for the crowd even if he considered the research shortsighted. He had created the hybrid using DNA from various animals, including non-dinosaur species, and despite the inevitable outcome because of the shortsighted stupidity of the Masrani corporation, Henry had considered it to be a great experiment. He had learnt a great deal from the experiment, and he had gathered al to more information from the Indominus Rex bone that had been recovered from its sunken resting place on Isla Nublar.
The loss of the Indoraptor was a blow, and once more he cursed Eli Mills for being so greedy. Why couldn't the stupid man have kept his mind on the dinosaurs he had already? He had had access to other dinosaurs that could be used like tanks or battering rams, but instead, he had decided to take the project Henry had been working on and tried to sell it. The Indominus Rex had been Henry's first experiment in creating new life, but the Indoraptor had been the first real and practical experiment in creating another species out of the first's DNA. From that, he could've learnt of the best means to radically alter a subject's genetic profile, but now the Indoraptor was dead there was little chance of that happening until he could gain access to a facility strong enough to keep one captive again. The Indoraptor was perfect, but it was not entirely perfect. Henry still had much to do to make his designs greater. But what did Eli Mills do, he pushed the Indoraptor out into the hall where that auction was being held; Henry had no problem with the auction of dinosaurs. The time of having them run around in theme parks and zoos was over. Besides, Mills and he had made a deal, he would get some cash to help him make his experiments and researches easier to carry out.
But no. There was no money. The only concession he had was he had two of the Indoraptor's teeth in his possession without anyone knowing about it. Soon he would have the perfect means to make humanity better than it was already.
In the end, he was merely trying to make things better.
Author Notes.
Genesis of the Daleks is one of my favourite Doctor Who stories; not only does it go into more detail about the origin of the Daleks, the first appearance of Davros, and the spark that blew into the Last Great Time War, but it also showed a race that was trying to survive.
The Cybermen from the Doctor Who franchise - particularly those episodes that showed the Cybermen convert humans into their kind, and how in the audio story Spare Parts they were created on Mondas and how they gave up emotions because they had to. In Rise of the Cybermen - The Age of Steel, we learn John Lumic is a man who turned to machines in order to survive.
Henry Wu was fascinated by the pair of them, and they inspired him to change humanity for the better.
Geordi LaForge has come across a deaf man in a diplomat, but they are both unique. In one of the later seasons, in the story The Masterpiece Society the crew of the Enterprise meets a society of humans who genetically engineer themselves, choosing personalities and attributes and they act like programmed machines. But Henry Wu has no intention of removing the special elements of what makes someone unique, no he wants to change the world for the better.