I don't own Jurassic Park.
Please let me know what you think.
The Hypocrisy of John Hammond.
"Have you heard?" Nick's voice boomed over the phone - Ian winced at the volume as it blared over the phone which he had put on Speakerphone so he and Sarah and Kelly could hear the message after Nick had requested he put it on speaker when he discovered Sarah and Kelly, two people who had been on Isla Sorna, and he wondered to himself if he had accidentally cranked up the volume on the fucking smartphone his wife Sarah had bought him for his last birthday - and he had to wait a moment before he could mentally translate what Nick was saying.
"Nick, what are you talking about?" Kelly demanded. Ian glanced at his daughter. Kelly was a fully grown woman now, and she had become a gymnastics instructor and yoga teacher in addition to being an animal rights activist but she was now working in a realtor firm. Ian wasn't completely sure if he was proud of that, but he was glad his daughter was doing something she had found a passion in, in addition to her other hobbies.
"John Hammond's dead, Kel."
"What?" Sarah gasped, but she didn't sound completely surprised while Ian himself was taken by surprise at the unexpected news; Hammond had been an old man already at the time he had taken Ian, Grant, Ellie, and the kids to Jurassic Park before they discovered how much of a truly bad idea cloning dinosaurs and sticking them in a theme park were.
For four years after the incident, Hammond seemed to have learnt from his mistakes, which surprised Ian and Grant, who had believed one of the first things the industrialist hustler would do would be to send in a specialised team and restore the Park to his original vision. But he didn't. For four years Hammond had taken a back seat while InGen had gone out of its way to make fools out of Grant and Malcolm when they had both tried to reveal what had happened.
Looking back on the whole incident, Malcolm realised he had made a truly bad mistake in going against InGen. He had just been furious with the way InGen were going about their business, brushing everything under the carpet. The end result was they trashed his reputation and made it hard for him to work, and even the university he worked with wanted him gone despite knowing how he wasn't the type of mathematician to fantasise. In truth, Malcolm had no idea what Hammond was doing during that time besides make sure InGen didn't go after the dinosaurs on Isla Nublar or Isla Sorna.
It wasn't until that British family on a yacht cruise stumbled across Sorna, and a little girl was attacked by Compys the rest of the InGen board managed to take control of the company from Hammond, which led to the disastrous expedition to Isla Sorna where events culminated in a live rampaging through San Diego.
But Hammond had not been a physically and medically well man at the time, despite using his fortune to ensure he had a good diet and he had the facilities to keep himself fit and agile. Somehow he had managed to regain some of his former health and vitality, and he had appeared on live television and spent over an hour telling people to leave the islands with the dinosaurs alone.
For another four years, nobody had gone near the islands despite repeated pleas from scientists to go to the islands under heavy guard for protection so they could study the dinosaurs in a new environment, but aside from that mess involving Grant and the Kirby's who'd foolishly allowed their son to travel there paragliding with a friend, that desire had not waned.
"I'm not surprised; he was hardly a spring chicken," Malcolm commented.
"You haven't heard the punchline yet," Nick went on (Malcolm already knew this was not going to be good; it had been a while since he had met Nick Owen, but on Isla Sorna, he had been impressed by the man's actual responsible mindset and attitude and whenever he was worried he usually had good reason for it). "You ever hear of a Simon Masrani?"
Ian tensed. "The owner of the Masrani Corporation? I know he and Hammond are friends, even though Masrani has shown signs he wants to buy out InGen. What's happened?"
"This is the part you're truly not going to like, Ian. Hammond has apparently given Masrani Isla Nublar, and according to my sources, Hammond made Masrani swear on his death bed to fulfil the Jurassic Park dream."
"What?" Kelly whispered, stunned while Sarah was shaking her head.
"No, no, they can't do that; the animals have adapted to their environments; turning the island into a zoo would completely throw them off for good," she said.
"I don't think they care about that, Sarah, but I take your point; that's one of the reasons why scientists have been clamouring for expeditions to Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna for years now. They want to study the dinosaurs in an unaffected environment for so long, they want to see if they have evolved some kind of behaviour after InGen cloned them," Ian interrupted his wife softly.
His explanation intrigued Nick. "What do you mean, that stuff about behaviour?"
"When the dinosaurs existed 65 million years ago, they had their own behaviours; palaeontologists have found signs of egg clutches by several species and they've come up with theories of how dinosaurs then were nurturing parents. The dinosaurs of both Sorna and Nublar have been pretty much isolated from the rest of the world for years, and scientists aren't entirely sure if the behaviour is genetic or if they've come up with a set of different behaviours. But some palaeontologists have a full list of things they want to study on the islands," Ian explained. "Hammond, after the San Diego incident, told the world the dinosaurs needed our absence to survive, not our help. Ever since then, the dinosaurs have been allowed to flourish, virtually undisturbed with new generations coming and going, and likely evolving new behaviours as time went on."
"And if Masrani builds a new Park on one of the islands-," Nick's voice trailed off as they realised the implications of the mathematicians' statement.
"Their behaviours could be thrown off," Kelly finished.
"Not thrown off, ruined beyond repair," Sarah sighed and then she shook her head in irritated frustration. "Why would Hammond do or want this after having such an enlightened policy of leaving the place alone?"
"Profit," Ian said angrily.
He didn't even need to think about the reply. Profit was one of the biggest reasons why Jurassic Park was set up in the first place. The genetic experiments which extracted the dinosaur blood out of the mosquitos had not been cheap any more than the research needed to refine the process.
On Isla Nublar, the process which created the embryos looked like the extraction and analysis of blood from the mosquitos happened neatly and perfectly between rooms.
Malcolm had never bought it. He had known there would be issues with the technology and in any case, how would they be able to get viable embryos all the time? This type of genetic engineering was brand new, and it was bound to be risky every time.
Where were the stillbirths?
Why didn't the eggs fail?
Why was none of the hatchlings deformed?
The whole process required a much bigger factory floor. However, it wasn't until he had seen the factory floor on Sorna, which was confirmed by Hammond himself, Ian had gotten confirmation of one of his biggest theories. The genetic process of extracting the blood from the mosquitos was one thing, refining it and creating a viable embryo was actually incredibly hard. There was a chance the embryos would die, and as a result, it likely took many days for the scientists working for Hammond and InGen to create just one embryo. But the whole Jurassic Park project cost millions, and InGen had needed to find something, some way of getting their money back. So they created Jurassic Park, hoping the millions they got back would be able to complete their research and earn more money.
"So he never really meant what he'd said before, about the dinosaurs needing us to leave them alone? He was lying the whole time," Kelly breathed as she rubbed her cheek in consternation.
"But then why would he go to all the trouble of urging the UN to just avoid the two islands in the first place?" Nick asked.
"Maybe he felt as he grew older that his old dream of a theme park with dinosaurs in the centre of it all would still be viable, and he had the right paperwork which would make it possible," Sarah said, but her voice was full of dark disappointment. She had lost a lot of her liking for Hammond after the loss of Eddie and the sight of so so many people, to say nothing of the damage that had done to San Diego, and she liked him even less now although she had approved of him locking the dinosaurs away.
Ian liked that idea. "Hammond never could let go of his dreams and desires," he observed, remembering all the times he had met the old man who came up with one delusion after another, "but either way, this proves he's nothing more than a hypocrite."
"What're we gonna do, dad?" Kelly asked.
Ian sighed. "Nothing. We let life find a way, it always does."