Home Base
It was twilight, and crickets had started to sing in the dense jungle of Isla Sorna, alias Site B. The apatosaurs drinking at the island's central lake made their trumpeting calls, as they slowly dropped of to sleep. The smaller herbivores fearfully rushed to their nest sites, preparing to survive a night of predators surrounding them. The velociraptors in the ruins of the worker's village sniffed the air, their forked tongues darting in and out of their toothy mouths. They made soft, cautious noises to each other, finally dashing off at full running speed. They decided that the 'Place of Birth' (which was what they thought the village was) was too dangerous to be at when night fell. All the dinosaurs that frequented the village knew that at night, strange, undefeatable predators would be active there, and also at the river near the village. These predators had even taken down a spinosaurus once, in mere minutes. They would leave the Place of Birth, at least until the sun rose again.
The large weed whackers burst out of the dense jungle surrounding the dilapidated buildings that were once the Site B worker's village. The other vehicles roared into the compound, as dozens of compys, rudely awoken, descended from the trees where they had been about to roost for the night. The diminutive dinosaurs stood in small groups, chirping in annoyance at the intruders. The compys bobbed their heads up and down, hopping around in agitation. The burly workers hopped out of the cars, and started to unload heavy equipment. As they unloaded, they sighted the compys. Shouting and swinging cattle prods in the air, they scared the compys, which still persisted in staying where they were.
Roland, Lee, Felix, and Ludlow stepped out of their vehicles, and witnessed the workmen's futile attempts to drive the compys away from the clearing they were at. Lee squinted in the near-darkness, finally taking out his glasses. Staring at the compys, he looked barely interested.
"What are they?" asked Ludlow, handing Lee a tranquilizer dart gun.
"I think they're Procompsognathus Triassicus. Found by Fraas, in Bavania, in the year 1913. They're presumed to be scavengers, like buzzards or jackals," replied Lee, drawing a bead on one of the compys with the dart gun. He was a decent marksman, having had a lot of practice shooting intruders at the dig sites where he worked. He even filled his guns with birdshot, causing the hapless intruders to be wounded in a dozen places by the birdshot. He had taken particular pleasure in the event where he had sent one fossil-thief running with two shots worth of birdshot lodged in his ass. The thief hadn't sat for a week, he was told by the nearby clinic (the report said that the thief had had 15 separate wounds from the birdshot), 5 miles from his dig site. He pulled the gun's trigger, and the targeted compy dropped unconscious in a drugged sleep.
"Roland, could you shoot one of them? That'll scare them off," said Lee, shouldering the dart gun.
"No problem."
Roland drew his rifle, and fired a shot at one of the compys. The compy fell to the earth as a mangled ball of bloody bones and flesh, the others finally squealing in panic and fleeing into the trees. The workmen resumed their work, while one of them put the tranquilized compy into a heavily-reinforced bird cage.
The loud, rhythmic sound of approaching dinosaurs thundered, close to the compound. The workmen looked around, some with wide, fearful eyes. The trees surrounding the building compound rustled, causing some compys to start chirping in panic, and jump to other trees, where they felt safer. The InGen crew drew into a tight group, as panicked, hushed voices were heard saying something that sounded like, "Lo sa es raptor."
Several workmen who hadn't been that spooked got two large Xenon floodlights erected near the buildings. Switches were flicked, and voltage coursed through the xenon gas inside the floodlights, bathing the edge of the compound in glaringly bright white light. The lights were turned slowly, and suddenly the people saw five large, black-colored dinosaurs, around 15 feet tall, standing motionless in the spotlight. The dinosaurs suddenly, gradually became harder to see, now colored a chalky shade of green, much like the trees behind them that were illuminated by the xenon lights.
Ludlow remembered something from the informative dinosaur brochures back on Isla Nublar, when Hammond had had Jurassic Park up and running. He remembered that in one of the enclosures, there had been a kind of dinosaur which was like a chameleon, but changed its skin colors much faster than any existing chameleon ever could. The visitors had never been happy with that species, because they couldn't see anything in the enclosure. So, this species had survived, after all! He turned to Lee, who was ogling at the five dinosaurs that had started to slowly walk towards them, their skin colors subtly changing to help them blend in with their surroundings.
"What are those?" he asked, "They never had much of a selling point back at Jurassic park."
"From the eyes I'd say that they are Carnotaurus Sastrei. The wing-like protrusions above the eyes are the giveaway," replied Lee, "But this proves that some dinosaurs had enhanced chromatophoric functions that released pigments. They are the ancestors of today's chameleons!"
"Will you shut up!" said Roland, who was eyeing the approaching dinosaurs warily, "They're coming closer. How do we stop them?"
Lee thought for a moment, before answering, "I'd presume that they're ambush hunters. Therefore we could turn the lights on and off, which would cause them to be constantly changing their colors. That should chase them off."
"I've got no idea what you mean, but lets try it," said Dice, who had been nervously watching the advancing dinosaurs. He gestured to the workmen nearby to flick the lights on and off, "Carnotaurus were on the list of species that were left on Site B after the Jurassic Park Incident. Looks like they survived Hurricane Clarissa."
As the lights flicked on and off, the Carnotaurus began to act nervous, as they were suddenly white colored in a dark area, then black in a bright area, and finally, stomping their clawed feet, they ran off into the jungle, roaring agitatedly.
"All right, senor. Shall we set up home base here?" asked the Foreman, Ramon.
"Yes. Set up base camp in less than thirty minutes. That's half an hour. Move it!" replied Ludlow, as he, Lee, Roland, Felix, and Dice walked through the doors of the laboratory complex, which sported a broken lock, with burns from an oxygen blowtorch.
They walked into the building, and were greeted with a rotten, termite-eaten wooden receptionist's desk, the top of which was strewn with papers and several mold-covered sofas in the corner. The glass table in front of the sofas had been broken in, with only its metal frame left standing in the glass shards that had once been part of it. The magazine rack in front of the receptionist's desk contained yellowing, rotting magazines that dated back ten years, to 1985. The windows of the lobby had been broken, but were boarded up with 2-inch thick planks that had been nailed to the wall. Plants were growing in water puddles that had formed due to holes in the roof. The lobby even had an earthen smell in it, much like the smell of freshly turned soil. The building felt like a tomb, which had been locked away for years.
John Dice walked towards a broken glass door behind the receptionist's desk, through which a dark corridor was visible, with several broken doors. He stepped through the doorframe, carefully avoiding the vertical glass shards that protruded out of the doorframe. He squinted in the darkness, until a worker handed him a torch light. He shone it around, and saw an intact door with the triple-bladed biohazard symbol on it. The door had a sign mounted above it. He approached the door, and read the sign aloud, "Main Genetics Laboratory: Authorized Personnel Only."
The others ran up to him, and Ludlow attempted to push the door open. He was suddenly thrown backwards, into the wall, by an unseen force. Dice scolded him, "Can't you read? It says here that this door is electrified with 50 volts! We'll have to hack in."
Felix stepped forward, and asked Dice, "If the door is still electrified, then this place has power!"
"It does. Our survey team reported that Site B's geothermal energy plant is still functioning. The system was designed to never need maintenance or replenishing of supplies. After Clarissa, it only powered the lab complex," replied Dice, who was examining the password key pad on the wall next to the door, "You mind dealing with this?"
Felix moved up close to the password key pad, and saw that there were no lead wires that could be used to hack into the security system. He also saw something else on the keypad. Several alphabets and numbers had been scratched into the metal of the keypad. They read:
Lg5
"What the hell is that?" asked Ludlow, who had wet his pants when he received the shock.
"It's a logarithm," replied Felix, "Let's see; the logarithm of 5, with the logarithmic base 10, is 6.990, or, when rounded up, 7."
Turning to the others, he asked, puzzled, "Could the password be seven?"
"Try it," said Roland, who was loading his rifle with bullets.
Felix shrugged, and touched the key labeled as '7'. He heard the hissing of a vacuum seal decompressing, and the door swung open into the lab. He shook his head, frowning. Whoever had designated that password was a real dumb ass. But then again, how many people bothered with memorizing logarithmic tables? He and the others stepped into the lab.
They stepped into the lab, finding themselves on a wall-hugging, rusted metal platform that was two stories above the floor of the lab. There were rusted stairs going down to the lab's lower levels on the right side of the platform. Below the platform, on the ground, were many computer stations and stainless steel boxes, some of which had fallen over and burst open to reveal convoluted plastic tubing as their innards. The room had several of what looked like derelict conveyor belts, with four at ground level and four at the same height as the platform. Alongside the elevated conveyor belts, large, complex-looking robotic arms hung, their bases bolted to the ceiling. The robotic arms were also supported by three slender, straight legs, which were fixed to the ground. Several ovoid shapes were visible on the grime-covered conveyor belts. There were also numerous glass, seemingly liquid-filled cylinders on the floor, on the far side of the room.
Dice turned to the group, who was now escorted by six workers.
"The robotic arms you see are Komera swing arms, from Japan. We used them to insert embryo into the eggs, which are the ovoid shaped things that you can see on the conveyor belts. The arms also were used to insert vaccines, hormones, etcetera into the eggs. The steel boxes are Nishihara gene sequencers and DNA synthesizers, and there should be forty eight of them (gene sequencers) in here. The tanks contain dinosaur stillbirths in formaldehyde solution, for preservation and study. The computers are what we came to see, because they should still be up and running," he said, as they walked down the creaking stairway.
"By the way, John?" said Ludlow.
"Yes?"
"No need to be a bloody tour guide on this."
"That's my job."
They walked up to the nearest computer station, which had several papers scattered all over it. The monitor was partially obscured by Post-it memos. Dice picked up the papers, and read them one-by-one. They read:
Lab Memo-
From: H. Wu
To: All lab personnel
-All gender control procedures are to be immediately halted as per Mr. Hammond's orders. Orgs will be made breeding-incapable by injections of chem. compound Krata-709. RANA fragments are not to be used as far as possible due to long term problems with dinos breeding.
"So, Hammond did know about the frog DNA," said Ludlow, his brow wrinkling in thought.
Dice turned flipped through the next few sheets, which was a list of Deinonychus Anthirrophus' nucleotide sequence. Page after page of letters C, G, T, and A arranged in hundreds of lines, seemingly without any comprehensible pattern.
The next sheet read:
Lab Memo-
From: L. Ruso
To: H. Wu, J. Venn, J. Chang
-New sp. has been ID as Therizinosaurus Cheloniformes. Org. successfully obtained after death of 397 embryos. Problems with gestation period of croc. ova?
"Doesn't make sense," said Dice, looking at the last sheet, which was partially covered in what looked like mathematical calculations. It read:
Comp. Stats. For Site B.
Fields: 3 Mega
Memory/ Org: 10 Giga bytes
Total memory used: 42 Giga Bytes
"It's the list of computer statistics," said Felix, looking over Dice's shoulder, "They had 3 billion fields, used 10 Gigabytes of optical disk space per species, and in total used up almost one Terabyte of disk space for all the species they cloned."
"Why would they need so much space?" asked Roland, who barely knew nuts about computers.
"They obviously were storing the DNA fragment sequences on softcopy, to be used when needed. The DNA synthesizers would assimilate the sequence data, and create the DNA strand using whatever sequence they provided it with," said Felix, who was trying to turn on the computer, unsuccessfully.
"For a techno geek you sure know a lot about cloning animals," said Ludlow, sounding suspicious, "How is this so?"
Felix shrugged, "I studied at MIT, but was only a certified programmer after three years of work. In my 'interning', as my lecturer called it, I worked with InGen in its fledgling years when Dennis Nedry was chief programmer. I might have come to Site B before, but I can't recall that."
"That sounds like total bullshit," retorted Lee, who was on the far side of the room, looking at the deformed fetus of a dinosaur which was in a tank of formaldehyde. The specimen was labeled as 'Herrerasaurus Ischigualastensis'.
Felix ignored him, as he was busy trying to hack into the Site B computer network through a computer that he had managed to turn on. The screen showed a list of strange words. It read:
A
Allosaurus Ferox
Amargasaurus Cazaui
Ankylosaurus Magniventris
Apatosaurus Yahnahpin
B
Baryonyx Walkeri
Brachiosaurus Branchai
C
Carnotaurus Sastrei
Coelophysis Bauri
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"Ladies and gentlemen, we've hit the big KAHUNA!" shouted Felix, jumping up from the computer and dancing around happily.
Ignoring him, Ludlow called over some workers, "Get Ramon down here. Make sure home base is set up and the capture crews are ready. We're ready for the dinosaur hunt."