Jurassic Park: Spirits

Prologue

The tremor vibrated through the floor, up through the desk and sent a mesmerising ripple across the surface of the tea, a slight shimmering of light across the pale golden-brown liquid. The silence that followed was loaded with heavy anticipation, a pregnant pause that was almost as painful as a breath held too long. Another tremor followed, and that ripple spread across the tea again, a small but infuriating wave across the calm millpond of the drink.

The workman hammered the vent cover home, a series of further tremors darting across Henry's tea and prompting a contemptuous curl of his lip. Henry sat at his desk, utterly silent and rigidly upright in his chair, watching the workman over the tops of steepled fingers. His office, a reliable oasis of calm, was the current site of further works to the complex, an area rendered upsettingly noisy. He wasn't sure which was worse though, the bangs of the workman's hammer or the occasional snort of phlegm up through the man's considerable nose. Henry's lip curled again, his contempt becoming a bit more difficult to hide.

The man climbed down from his stepladder, his heavy boots making a facial twitch inducing clang on each metal rung, a further stab into Henry's patience. And then, as if to finally shatter what remained of his disrupted tranquillity, the man grunted something in Spanish, folded the ladder with a metallic shriek and trudged out of the open door, leaving a crunching trail of plaster and dirt across the floor. Henry's floor.

He let a breath out through his nose, his eyes hovering on the open doorway, willing it to shut with sheer force of displeasure. One should leave something how one found it. Or others should, at least. Henry considered that ethos slightly beneath him, his very existence predicated on his ability and, as he saw it, his right to alter things. To change. To create something from nothing. But there should always be respect. And that seemed severely lacking in his heavy-handed visitor.

With another sigh he stood and glided over to the door, gently closing it and taking satisfaction as it clicked into place. If not for the plaster crunching under his shoes, his oasis might have been restored. He glanced back at the desk and felt the pull of his work dragging him back, a call he eagerly followed.

He sank back into his chair and allowed himself a measured sip of tea before picking up his pen and continuing his reports. His eyes flicked to the small desk calendar to his right, and he jotted down the date on his next sheet.

December, 3rd. 1992.

His pen made an acceptable hiss as he flicked the nib across the paper, like the perfect opening note in a symphony to begin the long-awaited new concert. Still upright in his chair and without moving his head, he moved his eyes from the paper in front of him to the window, watching the gently swaying tops of the green jungle outside, beyond the fence line. The azure backdrop of the sky created a pleasant meld where it joined the emerald of the island, and Henry allowed himself another small indulgence in the shape of a moments reflection of what lay beyond that window. A world out of time. His world. His creation. His achievement.

His lip curled again, but the contempt was gone. In its place was a self-congratulatory smirk. A private emotion and display, but that made it so much more enjoyable.

He looked about the office, letting his eyes scan along the clean white walls and rest on the shelves of the bookcase on his left. Shelves populated with perfectly ordered volumes of his research, his files and his achievements. Artwork. A gallery of masterpieces contained within the pages. Secrets and revelations committed to the papers that undoubtedly diminished the power of any holy book. And he, the prime mover of it all. The creator.

He checked his watch and bent back to his reports, the words flowing out of him and into the paper. More secrets. More revelations. More genius. The velociraptors had proven a challenge over the last two years, their genomes and DNA sequencing a mystery that seemed to dance just beyond reach. Tantalising. He'd made his breakthroughs of course, as if there had been any doubt. Not by him at least. Sturridge seemed to harbour a lot of the stuff. Useless baggage, doubt. A hinderance and a cancer. To doubt meant to falter, to waver. Doubt put a halt to progress.

As if to accentuate the point of halted progress, three quick knocks rapped at his door. A quick huff escaped Henry's nose.

"Yes," he intoned, continuing to write down on his reports. The door clicked open and a man appeared in the gap, fresh faced and eager eyed, a look of hopeful trepidation etched into his features.

"Dr. Wu,'' the man said, fingers squeezing at the doors edge. Henry felt a stab of aggravation at the smudge of perspiration his hands made on the wood of the door, but he breathed it away, happy at least the visitor had used the respectful address. "I was wondering if you had a moment?"

Henry stared evenly back and offered a hand to the empty chair on the other side of his desk, wordlessly giving the invite. The man slid in through the door and crossed the room, heedlessly scattering plaster across the floor. Henry would have to put a call in to the cleaner about that. The visitor fanned out the tails of his lab coat with a fidget before sitting, looking caught between wanting to relax and wanting to perch on the edge.

"I was wondering if you'd had a chance to look over my proposal?" said the man. Henry pursed his lips and considered the man before very carefully putting down his pen. The moment, it was turning out, was looking like it would stretch into two. Henry carefully rocked back in his seat and opened a drawer, pulling out a file and sliding it across the desk towards the man.

Those eager eyes hungrily devoured the sight of the file as the owners hands pulled the document closer, flicking open the cover and scanning towards the bottom. The moment became quite still just then as a frown developed on the man's face, his sandy blonde hair falling loose across his forehead as he shook his head slightly in disbelief. His eyes glanced up, the eagerness washed away and replaced with hurt, maybe even a touch of anger. Hate maybe, in fact. A common bed mate of the ambitious.

"Rejected?" breathed the man. "I…don't understand."

"I would have thought it was fairly straight forward," said Henry, steepling his fingers for the second time that morning.

"But, why? This is a good proposal! A new direction for what we do!" The man'

s voice carried a wheedling tone, but Henry could still hear the anger. It appeared to have travelled from his eyes to his voice.

"Your direction is not appropriate for what we do here," said Henry, leaving out that the we was a trivial extension of himself. A group effort to serve the mind of one. "What we do is provide the means to bring our employers dream to life." Of course, that happened to serve his own dreams nicely. "What we do here is make futures."

"But you have to see that that is not sustainable. The applications for this discovery we have made are countless." The we grated on Henry a little bit more there. "My proposal could offer more. More experiments, more solutions. Other ways of marketing this power and making more profit. More money!"

"Your proposals are incomplete, Dr. Wilson,'' said Henry, waving a hand as if to swat the man's idea away. "The British put a halt to this idea before you had even conceived it. Before you were even born. Most of the fossils of your subject were destroyed when they bombed Munich in nineteen forty-four. You do not have enough hard data to go on. We need more than just patchy DNA."

"But we have the means to get around that," said Dr. Wilson. "Our breakthroughs and our technology. We can fill the gaps." Henry used a frown of his own.

"I take issue with your arrogance in that regard, especially when paired with your proposed application. We are here to create life, not be the means to destroy it. We do not make weapons."

"But these animals,'' urged Dr. Wilson. "This animal! It could be whatever we wanted it to be. Not some zoo exhibit. It could…" Henry had held his hand up. Dr. Wilson snapped his mouth shut with an audible clonk.

"I have said no, Dr. Wilson. That is final. I admire your ambition, and your creativity, but your proposal is not acceptable for the direction InGen is going. I suggest you return to your work. You have had your moment."

Henry sniffed very quietly and picked his pen back up, very carefully. Very deliberately. He continued to write. Dr. Wilson sat there, frozen in a state of disbelief it seemed before visibly sagging, dragging the file with him and slightly crumpling its edges. Henry could see his knuckles were white. Anger was good. Anger drove people on. Perhaps the man would use this defeat to pursue work better suited to the companies goals.

The door thudded shut, and Henry found himself back in his oasis. His calm and peace restored, and his mind drawn back to his report, and the building excitement of the possibilities with the velociraptors. Their development had been fascinating, and the scope to further explore their genetic make-up was intoxicating.

Henry had got about halfway down the page when he stopped writing again, his eyes flicking back to the door. He watched it for a moment before setting down his pen again and opening another drawer, the runners making not the slightest noise as they glided on their precise wheels and fixings.

With careful fingers, Dr. Henry Wu, Chief Geneticist of InGen and the soon to be wonder Jurassic Park, pulled out an identical file to the one Dr. Wilson had just left with. Only this one didn't have the blood red rejection stamp on it, or his signature of authority.

This one was clean. And neatly ordered within the files binder. A dizzying approach to genetics inside, all underpinned with the purpose to clone a creature unlike anything seen before. Something to stagger audiences, shock them even. Something to impress. Something that, with the right tinkering, would have no rival. Something worthy of his talents.

He ran a forefinger over the words at the top. S. Aegyptiacus. It almost sent a shiver of excitement through him. He pushed the feeling down, mastering himself. Now was not the time for this. The Park was months, maybe years, away from completion, and the work here was forever changing, forever evolving. This project would need to be handled discreetly. Delicately. Nurtured and crafted away from the main teams.

Once the Park was established and Hammond satisfied with his latest venture, he could look towards this endeavour. Stolen it may be, but this required someone with brilliance to do correctly. Someone like him, and most definitely not Dr. Adam Wilson.

This required daring, calculation and looking at the bigger picture. The much bigger picture. This required looking to the future.