Notes

Soundtrack suggestions:

Guillaume and Peggy talk while leaving the WDMC:
- Ann and Manny - James Newton Howard, King Kong (complete score).

The Fall of Jurassic World:
- Civil unrest in the Island Kingdom - Bear McCreary, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Season One, Episode Four: Father Figures) (From 0:44 to 01:35)
- Memories of San Francisco - Bear McCreary, Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
- Apocalypse Track 1 - Bear McCreary et Raya Yarbrough, Battlestar Galactica: The Plan and Razor (Up to 01:29).
- Star Bridge - Bear McCreary, Foundation (Starting from 01:28).
- Two Hundred Thousand Books - Dario Marianelli, Agora.
- Camelot in flames - Daniel Pemberton, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.
- The Sacking of Troy - Gabriel Yared, Troy (rejected score) (Starting from 05:07).

The Ghost of Nublar:
- Girion, Lord of Dale - Howard Shore, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (extended edition) (Up to 01:00).

The Grey Guard Insurgency:
- A Thief in the Night - Howard Shore, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (extended edition) (Starting from 03:10).
- Anacreon - Bear McCreary, Foundation.
- I am the Storm - Ramin Djawadi, Game of Thrones: Season 7 (Up to 02:11).

Isla Nublar after the apocalypse:
- Volcano to death - Michael Giacchino, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

Claire Dearing, the fallen:
- White Leaves - Bear McCreary, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Season One) (Up to 00:50).
- Back Hand of God - Abel Korzeniowski, Penny Dreadful: Season 1 (Up to 01:08).

-o-

A few days later, as he left his office to leave the agency and return home, Peggy informed Guillaume about a call she had just received:

"A man named Eli Mills just called us."

"I never heard of him," the director replied.

"He's the manager of the Lockwood Foundation," she said while tidying up her workstation.

She put on her coat, grabbed her bag, and the two being ready to leave, they then headed for the exit. Guillaume was intrigued by the foundation's name.

"Lockwood," he repeated, "like Benjamin Lockwood? InGen's former CEO?"

"Yes, exactly. He called us to inform you that you were invited to a reception at Benjamin Lockwood's manor in Orick, in the northernmost part of the state. It will be held on March the twenty-third and begin at six o'clock."

He paused for a moment, then said:

"This reception would be the opportunity to meet him… You can be sure that InGen's board of directors and the local elite will be there too. It would be wise for me to accept the invitation. I will have to leave earlier that day."

"You'll have to be away the whole day and the next one I'm afraid. From here to Orick, it's a five-hour drive. Six with traffic."

"A six-hour drive...," he sighed. "I forgot that some US states are just as large as France. As an Australian, you must be more used to long drives than I."

"Not really, because I rarely went out of Darwin and Brisbane, where I started my studies. I almost know California better than my own country, of which I've only seen a very small percentage..."

But while she wanted to ask him about the places where he spent his youth, she returned to the initial subject of their conversation:

"Mr. Mills also told me that you could be accommodated at the mansion for free."

"For free? They're very thoughtful…," he said suspiciously. "I prefer to be accommodated outside."

"Very well, but since Orick is a small town, there are only motels, campgrounds and cabins in the area. I'll look for a hotel in Eureka."

Guillaume laughed softly at this suggestion, leaving his assistant surprised while they stepped outside and crossed the agency's parking lot.

"You know… I grew up in a small countryside town and slept in camps in the middle of the African bush or the jungles of South Asia. A night in a motel or a campground won't kill me, Peggy," he reassured her.

"Oh…" her assistant said, surprised. "In this case, I will book a room in one of Orick's establishments. This should be done as soon as possible since this reception is likely to be very crowded."

"Okay, thank you very much Peggy. Let me know when it's done."

Exiting the parking lot by Post Street, they said goodnight and parted ways. While Peggy turned right to walk down Laguna Street to join her bus stop along Geary Boulevard, Guillaume turned left, heading for Buchanan Street and its restaurants.

Twenty minutes later, he arrived at his apartment near Lafayette Park, his keys in one hand and a paper bag in the other, which contained the meal he had ordered on the way at one of Buchanan Street's restaurants. Leaving his keys on top of a cabinet near the entrance, right next to a frame containing a picture of his three children, he went straight to the living room, putting his shoulder bag and his lunch bag there.

Shortly after, he was sitting on his couch, eating his beef ramen while doing further research on Jurassic World's downfall on his laptop, which rested on the coffee table, opposite of a copy of the Time magazine. The latter's cover was a picture of the decapitated head of a John Hammond statue, and the title was The Collapse of a Dream.

Like many, Guillaume had seen all these videos which spread around the world at the very end of December 2017 and at the beginning of 2018, and which showed a stampeding herd of herbivores, who threatened to make a truck fall over a cliff's edge; the city of Burroughs being ravaged by a devastating earthquake; Mount Sibo erupting and spewing ash while its plume gradually plunged Isla Nublar into darkness; a swarm of pterosaurs swooping down on a huge crowd; the island being consumed by fires and shining in the middle of the ocean like a gigantic brazier while a cloud full of lightning hovered over it; the passengers of a boat who had approached the island to observe the eruption being struck by the shock wave which resulted from the slide of an entire section of the volcano; refugees being slaughtered by raptors in a hotel; Simon Masrani, the Indian tycoon who founded Jurassic World, being burned alive on an improvised pyre by the Indominus, an abomination whose mere presence drove men mad with terror and which was dinosaurian only in appearance, as her behaviour evoked more that of a human warlord than a predatory animal; or the Indominus confronting a Tyrannosaurus in the ruins of the park's main avenue in the middle of a storm, a sight worthy of a Kaijū film. But there was another video that had particularly struck the WDMC director, the one that showed a confrontation on a bridge between the Indominus and an armoured person armed with a sword, a mysterious individual who had been nicknamed The Ghost of Nublar. Their identity had been a source of questioning and more than a year later, he wondered if it had been discovered.

He found and read an article titled Who is the Ghost of Nublar?, accompanied by an illustration of this character from the site DeviantArt, and which proposed three theories.

The first was that the Ghost was one of the Slayers because the visored helmet and the gauntlets they wore were the same as those of this troop of soldiers who constituted the elite of InGen Security's forces and carried out all the corporation's black operations, acting in the shadows. Information about them was very rare and they were shrouded by an aura of mystery, reinforced by the terrifying aspect of their visors which imitated monstrous mouths, and the only notable occasion when civilians could have seen them in action was during the pterosaur attack in Burroughs.

The second was that the Ghost was a member of the Grey Guard, which had a garrison of ninety soldiers on Isla Nublar at the time of its fall, and the theory was supported by the fact that the surviving Grey Guards had launched their counterattack while the Indominus was distracted by the Ghost and that the latter was wearing a chest plate and leg protections from their armoury.

The third, the craziest according to the editorial team, was that behind the Ghost, was hiding Claire Dearing, the director of the park. Originally proposed by a YouTuber specialized in conspiracies and occult matters, who supported his claim with pictures, this theory was based on the fact that the ring worn by the Ghost was similar to the one often worn by Claire Dearing, a silver ring adorned with two snakes wrapped around a red gem, as well as the colour of the clothing under the armour pieces, which appeared to be white while the Slayers were dressed in black and the Grey Guards in greenish-grey uniforms. Additionally, she was seen at Nicoya Hospital a few hours later, and a later appearance at a press conference revealed that she had lost a forearm and been disfigured, highly suspicious injuries according to the YouTuber. However, the quality of the rare footage of the Ghost prevented its ring from being correctly distinguished and nothing proved that there was a relationship between the fallen director's injuries and the Ghost, while her reputation was controversial. This theory was generally considered highly improbable, if not ridiculous.

It was also commonly accepted after studying the figure that the Ghost was probably a woman, which none of the three presented theories disproved given that both the Slayers and the Grey Guards had women in their ranks, and in online discussions, some Costa Ricans were proud to now have their own warrior heroine and street artists were passionate about her, as evidenced by some graffiti in the Greater San José Metropolitan Area. Of the three theories discussed, that of Grey Guard's member was the most accepted and probable, as the then relationship between the Grey Guards and the Slayers would have prevented one of the latter from being the Ghost.

In parallel to the eruption of Mount Sibo and the Indominus' rampage, Isla Nublar was also affected by an armed conflict between the Grey Guard and the troops of InGen Security.

The casus belli was the organization of the massacre of a Grey Guard platoon by the Slayers, who used the Indominus as a proxy, as well as the murders of three survivors of the massacre. According to several of the Grey Guards, their comrades had been murdered because they had discovered that the platoon's massacre was an experiment ordered by InGen to prove the effectiveness of the Indominus as a new kind of biological weapon, something which Susan Lynton categorically denied when questioned about it in the press.

Guillaume Vuillier and most people did not know what had happened to the Slayers, but the latter, as well as the mercenaries with them, had never left the jungle of Isla Nublar and the forest fires had erased all traces of their probable slaughter by the insurgent Grey Guards.

However, it was only a part of the Guard that had risen up and Marshal Helmut Störmer, the leader of the organization, had formally condemned it and ordered the expeditionary force sent to the island to arrest the Nublar garrison's officer which had sparked the insurgency, the French Gilbert Brunet, a former mercenary who committed various crimes and encouraged atrocities in Central Africa and Libya in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The insurrection had aroused strong reactions, especially in the United States where the president and part of the political sphere were quick to call the insurgent guards terrorists while a caricature published shortly after in a newspaper had depicted the insurgents, led by Brunet mounted on a monstrous black horse, like a barbarian horde which evoked the Vikings and the Mongols, brandishing a black standard which shown a crescent of five human skulls and a roaring dragon, and seeming about to sack what remained of the park.

The insurgency had ended on the morning of December 25th, when Gilbert Brunet was shot by his own right-hand woman, and the other guards owed their salvation to the intervention of the officer in charge of the expeditionary force as well as that of the Costa Rican state and several members of the United Nations Security Council. Otherwise, the US soldiers sent to Isla Nublar would have arrested them and imprisoned them in one of their Central American bases, which would have caused a diplomatic incident. Subsequently, the Costa Rican Public Force preferred to deploy police officers in a preventive manner in front of both the Grey Guard's mainland office near Juan Santamaria airport and InGen Security's base in Alajuela in order to deter any attempt at reprisals from each of the two antagonistic factions.

Given the cold war situation that had subsequently developed between InGen and the Grey Guard, the latter did not take part in InGen's Operation Fallen Kingdom, organized in a hurry and whose purpose was to bring on the mainland the animals which survived the park's fall.

Guillaume entered "Operation Fallen Kingdom Isla Nublar" into a search engine and he saw keepers and veterinarians looking after the animals that had been captured but also mercenaries guarding a camp and military vehicles driving through a post-apocalyptic landscape, while others showed a convoy of transport trucks driving on a Costa Rican road. The few photos of the island after the disaster showed lava fields, charred forests, polluted rivers, meadows greyed by ashes, scavengers feasting on the corpses of large animals… These were haunting visions and were not without evoking the artistic depictions of the Cretaceous-Paleogene Crisis which had seen the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs approximately sixty-six million years ago.

During his research on the operation, Guillaume found an article from a Costa Rican newspaper which reported the words of an anonymous source. The latter, an InGen employee who was fired after the animals were taken to the mainland, claimed that strange attacks had occurred during the operation, perpetrated by a mysterious species of small nocturnal and troglodytic carnivorous dinosaur with a venomous bite. After being chased from the surface by InGen Security troops in the early 2000s, they apparently survived all these years in the depths of the island, feeding on fish, bats or even their own kin, fuelling the local urban legend which said that the island's underground was inhabited, and that the eruption cleared a path to the surface for them.

However, many considered this a hoax, and the deaths that occurred during the operation could be entirely attributable to other species, especially since Jurassic World hosted a few venomous species such like Dilophosaurus or Moschorhinus, a therocephalian.

Returning to the images category of the search engine results, Guillaume saw a photo taken on the sly which showed the Indominus' carcass being hoisted out of the lagoon by a flying crane and others showing it and the corpses of other large animals such as sauropods or the mosasaur being incinerated with flamethrowers by InGen men while soldiers and officers of the United States army as well as envoys from the Public Force and the Government of Costa Rica observed the scene from a respectable distance, in the company of those in charge of the operation.

The WDMC director then searched about the current fate of Isla Nublar and on YouTube, he found videos taken by raiders and urban explorers, showing the dead city of Burroughs and its Lagoon, whose level had risen so much that the lowest areas of the city, including the water park, the beach south of the Lagoon, its overwater bungalows and the ground floor of the Cascades Hotel, were flooded or even submerged under water, reinforcing the image of modern-day Atlantis that now stuck to Jurassic World.

To date, Isla Nublar had still not been reclaimed by the Costa Rican state, which cited the geographical remoteness of the island and the low profits gained from a reclaiming (some local politicians even lamented that InGen and Masrani Global had turned it into a hellhole), while the US navy ships that had monitored the island during Operation Fallen Kingdom had left, their task being over.

Despite its sinister reputation, the island was still frequented and the family and recreational tourism linked to Jurassic World had recently been replaced by another form of tourism, black tourism. The park had become like a new Chernobyl, minus radioactivity, and some more or less legal tour operators saw this as an economic windfall.

When he finished his meal, Guillaume got up to go to the kitchen and returned with a beer. He uncapped it and noticed that he had just received a notification about the receipt of an email from a sender named CCSurvivaurs. The subject was "Something you would like to know…", which left the WDMC director wary. Intending to have a look at it later, he resumed his reflections and research, swallowing a sip of beer from time to time.

He thought back to all those disturbing rumours about the Indominus, Henry Wu, and other InGen executives, and wanted to know more. Of course, no employee of the corporation was going to provide him with information that could jeopardize its already tarnished image. He had to ask someone who had once been quite high-ranked within it, and the only person he could think of who could give him answers was none other than Claire Dearing. Guillaume wondered what had become of her after her hospitalization and while searching, he found a video dating from March 2018, taken when she had agreed to meet with journalists to expose her point of view and answer certain questions.

A red-haired woman in her mid-thirties appeared on the screen. A sporty figure, fair-skinned, an elegant and well-defined jawline, noble features, she was a beautiful woman. A white half-mask covered the left half of her face, hiding most of the wound that disfigured her and leaving only a bit of scar between the corner of her mouth and her chin while a bionic prosthesis had replaced her lost right forearm.

As she answered reporters' questions, a tall, well-built man of a similar age stood nearby with his arms folded, eyeing the reporters with wary eyes, like a bodyguard. With his long brown hair and athletic figure, Guillaume thought he looked like Conan the Barbarian or Tarzan. Having read that the boyfriend of the former director of Jurassic World was one of the park keepers, he knew it had to be him.

While the first questions were general, they became more and more insidious and uncomfortable for Claire. Her jaw clenched, her deep voice tightened and her emerald eyes looked away momentarily but she remained dignified and answered as best she could to questions, not failing to accuse InGen of having favoured and profited from the crisis. She had lost everything or almost, was probably deeply broken, but nevertheless, she showed strength and Guillaume Vuillier began to be fascinated by her. When she ended the interview soon after, her boyfriend escorted her away from the reporters, laying a hand on her back and looking behind them to make sure they weren't following them.

This was Claire Dearing's last public appearance because although she was talked about whenever the subject of the fall of Jurassic World was brought up, she had simply kept a low profile and also retired from social networks after having suffered numerous harassments. For the majority, she was either a coward who abandoned her responsibilities when things went south, or an opportunist who had taken advantage of the Grey Guards' insurgency to reclaim power and who did not hesitate to threaten her own subordinates when they were reluctant to obey her, and the various statements of Susan Lynton, Alistair Iger and Henry Wu were in line with this, making her one of the most controversial woman in the United States.
Some claimed to have seen her last September in the maternity ward of a hospital in the Sierra Nevada, but the latter refused to comment and some paparazzi had subsequently tried to find her, but in vain. It was as if she had vanished into thin air.