Notes
Hypothetical casting:
Character introduced in the previous story:
Erik Knudsen as Ivan Preston.
New characters:
Karim Debbache as Karim Depéret
Gilles Stella as Giles
Those two latter choices might surprise those familiar with the Joueur du Grenier's videos and Crossed but I couldn't resist.
Soundtrack suggestions:
Maisie explores the bunker:
- Scared of Sophie – Nathan Barr, Carnival Row.
-o-
"Do we have any news of the missing animals?" Benjamin asked Elijah as they, Iris and Maisie were having lunch.
"I'm afraid we haven't any," he replied. "I'm sorry."
Benjamin put down his cutlery and sank back into his chair.
"Damn…" he swore quietly with a worried look.
A few minutes later, Maisie pushed her plate away, having just finished her slice of cake, a little too hastily for Iris' liking.
"I've finished eating. Can I leave the table?" She asked her grandfather.
"Of course sweetie."
She got up and headed for the door.
"Let us know if you're going for a walk," the housekeeper told her.
"Yes"
Under the benevolent gaze of her grandfather, Maisie left their dining room and turned right, as if heading for the entrance hall and its staircase. Along the way, she passed the guests' dining room and its door being open, she stopped just in front of the doorway, so as to peek inside with a modicum of stealth. At the table opposite the door sat the same trio of thirtyish people which Guillaume had seen during his stay, the one made up of the skinny guy, the neglected-looking woman and the bespectacled man of North African descent. Maisie knew their names: The first was called Giles, the second Nicole and the third Karim. She had the chance to talk to them a few times because they had been living at the manor for more than a year, just like Professor Wu, Maya and the others. They claimed to work for her grandfather's foundation and Maisie often saw Eli talking with them.
Along with Karim, Giles, and Nicole were also Maya Harris, whose back faced Maisie, as well as a rather small man with chestnut hair, a few years younger than Karim: Ivan. Maisie had seen this man a lot in Professor Wu's company and knew they were close. Very close.
Seeing that the group was busy joking while eating, she didn't linger and continued. She emerged into the entrance hall and then turned left, entering the museum. Nobody was there. She continued straight, until the recess at the opposite end. She stopped in front of it, looked behind her, and listened for the slightest sound. Making sure no one was there, she reached for a box on the wall to her right and started hitting the keys on its keyboard.
"Seven…Three…Three…Seven…Hash," she whispered softly, remembering the code she had memorized after spying on Elijah and Professor Wu over the past few months.
The light glowed green and the walls in front of her slid aside, revealing a previously hidden elevator. Torn between excitement and caution, Maisie entered and scanned the buttons. Since the elevator only led to the basement and not to the upper floors, all numbers except zero, which corresponded to the museum and the rest of the manor's ground floor, were preceded by a negative sign. There were four levels in the basement and Maisie only knew the first two. Below the ground floor, there were cellars and maintenance tunnels, and in the second basement, there was the conference room and its adjoining rooms, closed on Elijah's orders due to renovation work. Maisie had never been to the third and fourth basements, but she had heard stories about the bunker her ancestor had built during World War II. Perhaps it was there and became the secret working place of Professor Wu and his colleagues.
After a moment of hesitation, she pressed the button corresponding to the fourth basement. The doors closed and as the elevator descended into the depths, Maisie watched the various buttons light up one after the other. The one in the fourth basement finally lit up and the doors opened, revealing two rows of dark cells on either side of a wide walkway lined with steel beams in a vast room, as big as the museum a few levels above: The bunker.
Maisie looked up and seeing that the vault was high, she knew that the bunker occupied not only the fourth basement but also the third. Although the lighting there was dim, there was enough light to see where one was going and the young girl did not need to take out the small flashlight she had put in her pocket just in case. Cautiously, Maisie ventured out of the elevator, and it closed behind her.
She looked around the place, which evoked a prison in her eyes. A silent prison she hoped was empty. She noticed that the steel beams supported a mezzanine that overlooked the central aisle, describing a U whose bottom was stuck to the east wall, where the elevator was. Although the distance to reach the mezzanine on the southern side from the northern one or vice versa was not very long, a walkway located only a stone's throw from the elevator connected the two sides directly. At its centre, the mezzanine to Maisie's right, the one on the northern side, was interrupted by a small glass room that jutted out. She saw no one there and looked at the opposite end of the hall, where a large gate was closed. Deeming it unsafe to walk down the aisle until she was sure she was alone in the bunker, Maisie called the elevator back and went up one level.
Thus, she came out at the mezzanine's level and advancing slowly out of the recess before the elevator doors, she looked at the rooms bordered by the mezzanine. To the left, she saw a long room that stretched to the far end, and its large windows gave a glimpse of a state-of-the-art genetics laboratory. The workplace of Wu and his team.
Bingo! Maisie thought.
She noticed that it was deserted.
Phew.
She then looked to the right. The room there, also separated from the mezzanine by bay windows, was about a third of the laboratory's size and was divided in two by a partition. From her position, Maisie saw a large table close to the bay, and near the far end of the table a screen was fixed on the partition. Maisie knew it was probably the geneticist's offices and meeting room. There also seemed to be no one in that part of the bunker.
Phew.
Maisie stepped out of the recess and turned left, heading for the lab. She saw that two doors allowed access from the mezzanine. One was in front of her, and the other further on, halfway between the first door and the spiral staircase at the end of the mezzanine which led down to the cells. She took the nearest door and ended up in some kind of long antechamber which must also have served as a cloakroom, judging by the presence of several hanging lab coats.
Soon enough, she spotted another door that led into the lab proper, but let out a disappointed sigh when she noticed that she couldn't go in, even if she wanted to.
Damn!
Indeed, the door was not only equipped with a lock but also with a box on which one had to slip a magnetic card, but the young girl had neither card nor key. She thought that if she really wanted to get in, she was going to have to be cunning in order to steal one from the geneticists.
Frustrated, she came out of the antechamber and went to the door of the office space. Pushing the handle of its door, she was surprised to discover that it was not locked in any way and she was thus able to enter the room. On her left, she found the large table, the screen and the partition she had seen earlier and in front of her, she saw an open area where there were several desks with computers. Several of them were on and displayed a spinning InGen logo, indicating they were on standby. Beyond that, two desks had been set up apart and noting that they were larger than the others, Maisie deduced that they must be those of important people within the team. Was one of these desks that of Professor Wu? Very likely. To find that out, Maisie moved forward, past the meeting table and started to circle around the group of desks in a clockwise manner, which brought her past a gap in the middle of the partition, which gave her a glimpse of another table, chairs, a kitchenette in the northwest corner of the room and a sofa against the wall in the southwest corner: That was a relaxation room. Maisie gave it a quick glance, then resumed her walk toward the desks at the back.
It was then that she noticed that in the corner right next to the desk farthest from her, an armour was hanging on a display stand. Completely black, it resembled that of a contemporary soldier, although with a slightly more futuristic appearance and instead of being a hemispherical cap covering the top of the skull, the helmet protected the majority of it, obscuring the eyes behind an opaque visor leaving only the mouth uncovered. To someone else, the helmet might have evoked those of Judge Dredd or Robocop, but as Maisie didn't know these fictional characters, this comparison did not occurr to her. Not only did the presence of this armour in a secret office under her house leave her wary, but the girl didn't like its look, thinking it was intimidating.
Thinking it wouldn't make sense for Wu to have such armour near his desk, she deduced that it was the one just to her left. But instead of walking around it and starting to rummage through the drawers or his computer as she originally intended to do, she approached the other desk, intending to find out more information. She walked around it, pushed the chair aside a little, and scanned it. When she saw a frame containing a picture of a dark-haired woman in her forties, a man of the same age, and two teenage boys, all smiling, she knew it was Maya's.
But what is she doing with Wu? And why does she have this armor?
Not far from this frame showing Maya and her family, there was one that showed her crouching at the edge of a pool where a dolphin was watching her attentively, and next to the keyboard there was a pile of books and documents.
Maisie undid it to look at the titles, taking care to memorize the order of the pile so that she could later put things back the way they were and erase as many traces of her passage as possible. There was a book about communication with great apes, another on sign language, and a thick report which cover shown the logos of InGen and Jurassic World. This report was titled Logbook – Project IBRIS and Maisie read the names of its authors: Owen Grady, Nikolaas Lorenz, Barry Sembène. Intrigued by the presence of the logo of Simon Masrani's park, the one she had visited with her grandfather, Iris and Elijah when she was little, Maisie began to leaf through it and her gaze soon lingered on pictures showing Owen in the company of the achillobators when they were still young, no bigger than a fox, and then the latter once they had grown and had almost reached adulthood. Maisie remembered the impression Blue left on her when she went to see the animals soon after they arrived at the estate. She had reminded her of an eagle. Big, beautiful, majestic… but very intimidating, with terrible dark, piercing eyes and dread-inspiring talons. At the other end of the desk, there was also a notebook that Maya had titled Elsa's Diary.
Elsa? Like Elsa from Frozen? It's a pretty name. But who is she?
Maisie opened the notebook and quickly realized that Maya had recorded behavioural observations in it. The latest entries showed significant progress and great potential, and the ex-soldier added that the Board of Directors would be satisfied with these encouraging results for the Giger project, and that the Wagner project may soon be just a bad memory for them. Taken aback by these names, Maisie wondered what these projects consisted of and her curiosity only increased, so much that she decided to sat in the chair and wake the computer from its sleep mode.
Maya Harris' name popped up and of course a password was requested. Maisie thought for a moment then entered "Elsa" and to her satisfaction, she was granted access. Then she widened her eyes in surprise when she saw the desktop wallpaper. It was a photograph, showing a baby dinosaur in the middle of its toys, an image that would have been very endearing if the animal had been a dinosaur that could have appeared in the books Maisie owned.
All black, it had long arms and clawed feet with sickle-like claws, similar to those of raptors, but unlike Blue and much like some of the raptors appearing in the Project IBRIS logbook, its skin was featherless. It had a rather oddly large head, with a snout topped with a rounded smooth-looking frontal prominence, making the head look more like that of a False Killer Whale or other toothed whale than that of a dromaeosaurid dinosaur. Maisie knew that in killer whales, belugas, dolphins and co, the forehead was mostly occupied by the melon, an organ used for echolocation. It gave the dinosaur a really strange look, like if it was malformed, and its hands were strange too, with not three fingers each like most predatory dinosaurs but five, with an opposable thumb, like primates. The dinosaur was looking at the camera with small red eyes which seemed to sparkle with curiosity and intelligence. Maisie didn't know what to make of it and she knew that something was wrong with this dinosaur. Was it a mutant? Did it suffer from a birth defect? Or was it the fruit of Henry Wu's latest experiments? It didn't look natural anyway.
Looking away for a moment, her eyes were drawn to the armour again, and she was suddenly struck by the similarity between its large visor and the dinosaur's bizarre forehead. Both were black, rounded and rather bulky. It was as if the first was an imitation of the second.
Is Maya pretending to be her mother by putting on this armor? A bit like those people who hand-raise young cranes to release them into the wild, disguising themselves as adult cranes so that the young don't imprint on humans?
But Maisie knew that Maya and Wu weren't planning to release the black dinosaur into the wild, and that it was probably unique, and when she saw a folder named "Training Sessions" on the desktop, she knew they were training the dinosaur.
Trained for what?
She clicked on the folder, opened one of the most recent video files, and it started playing. A large empty room, all long and rather high, appeared and from the angle and height of the camera that had taken the images, Maisie realized that it must be halfway up the wall in one of the corners. Daylight entered this unfamiliar room through several sets of panes on the roof, which had a strange, jagged shape.
A jagged roof? Could it be the old factory, which grandfather transformed into a gymnasium for mom? It looks like it anyway.
Someone passed under the camera and walked towards the heart of the room, carrying dummies under their arms towards the opposite end. Maisie noticed that the person was wearing a dark armour similar to the one standing a few feet away from her. Maya. The video then sped up, showing Maya walking back and forth between the two ends of the room, until a group of dummies stood at the back. Then, Maya disappeared from the view of the camera but suddenly, Maisie jumped when she heard the elevator start to move. She looked at her watch. It was only one o'clock and yet someone was coming down. Surprised, Maisie froze for a moment, not knowing what to do. She thought she was going to be able to go down to the lab, explore it and come back up without anyone noticing anything before one-thirty, the time when the geneticists usually came down to work. She had to act, and fast. Luckily she had left the door ajar because otherwise she would have probably been caught in the act.
While the video showed a grenade falling among the dummies releasing reddish smoke and a large, dark, sinister shape prowling at the edge of the camera's field of vision, Maisie turned off the computer, reconstructed the pile of books and reports as best she could in her haste, and, as the elevator doors had just opened, she had no choice but to go into the relaxation room and hide behind the partition which separated her from the offices' space while a male voice, that of Karim, was humming in French:
"Le Dimanche à Bamako, c'est le jour du mariage…"
When they got to the door, they were surprised to see it was ajar.
"Hey, someone didn't close it correctly." Nicole remarked.
"Oh, maybe it's one of us," Giles said.
Without worrying more about that, they entered the room and went to their respective desks, which were adjoining, with Giles's facing the door, Nicole's to his left and Karim's to his right.
"Come one. Here we go!" the latter said, rubbing his hands. "We have to finish this fucking presentation before tomorrow evening. Do you have any smokes on you, Giles?"
"Yeah."
"Well, get them out!" Nicole told him. "I want one too."
From his pockets, Giles took a pack of cigarettes and a lighter and placed them on his desk. They passed them, each lighting a cigarette, and set to work, occasionally putting their cigarettes in their mouths.
"Mills really is a jerk!" Nicole exclaimed. "He gave us four days to make a presentation while we've got other fish to fry."
"Upshot, we have to slog like madmen," Karim added. "I have the impression of working at Bugisoft! Mia has a good nose! I too could have claimed that my mother was sick and that I had to take care of her. She will return only after the storm."
"And Henry didn't do anything about it," Giles said reproachfully.
"He's got his hands tied, though," Nicole pointed out, "and if he's pissing off Mills and the board, I think they could kick him out, throw him to the authorities and the scandal sheets before replacing him with Ivan or even Kajal."
"No, not Kajal," Karim said. "She's too busy in San Diego and she ignore what we're doing. We would have to explain everything to her. If she doesn't run off after learning that we did some illegal stuff. To say that there are a whole bunch of Jurassic World former employees who found a job elsewhere in the meantime…"
"Yeah, take Michael for example," Nicole said.
"Michael?"
"Yeah, Michael Lang, from engineering. No, but you know... The one who couldn't bear Siffredi, the guy in charge of the Depths."
"Oh yeah, him..."
"Now he works for a high-tech company specialized in robotics. It has a Greek name if I recall."
"I bet that the bastard is working on sexbots right now…" Giles chuckled.
"A cushy job," Karim added. "With no risk of being mauled or killed by his work's result."
"Or Kurtzmann from human resources," Giles added. "He went back to his old job in Europe."
Nicole tapped her cigarette above an ashtray near her keyboard.
"To think that I quit smoking as soon as I got my doctorate," she said.
"Well, that's decadence…" Giles said.
"Stop it, I feel like I've been living like trash since the Fall," Karim added. "How did your parents react when they learned that you worked on Masrani's Bane?"
"They gave me one hell of a sermon…" Giles replied. "But I told them they were anti-science assholes."
"Ah, the irrefutable argument!" Nicole exclaimed. "It's like saying that anyone who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite."
"Anyway, I'll never work in a spider-infested abandoned cabin again," Karim said. "Fortunately, we slept at the hotel. Henry and Ivan weren't so lucky."
"It's the flip side of fame," Nicole replied. "Henry may get all the glory from our collective work, but on the other hand, he's harassed if the fruit of that same work turns out to be harmful, while we can go out and walk peacefully in the street without being bothered by anyone. I tell you, anonymity is good sometimes."
"Still, we really screwed up this time, the beast is really crappy!" Karim exclaimed while typing on his keyboard.
"He's above all stupid!" Nicole added.
"Yeah, as much as that non-binary half-Lebanese guy I once met."
"Yes, or like Regis the gorilla."
"The one your friend works with?" Giles asked Nicole. "I thought he could communicate with sign language."
"That's the case! But the only thing he's communicating is shit unfortunately."
"It could be worse for us, a lot worse," Karim sighed. "Remember the competition for the best hybrid concept. I believe you were the one who submitted those stupid raptors-moles. Excavaraptors if I recall," he told Giles.
"Oh it's alright, we all make mistakes. I'm not like that crazy Canuck and her garbage Stegoceratops. She really annoyed us with it!"
"And let's not talk about the Ankylodocus and its inbred bovine look," Nicole scoffed. "In the end, the Spinoraptor won. It's true it wasn't too bad."
"Well it's Kajal Dua behind it. It's respectable work," Karim declared.
"You say that because you have a crush on her," she said.
"Bullshit," he retorted.
"You big liar…" Giles told him.
He then noticed that his colleague was smoking too close to a stuffed animal placed at the junction between their desks. The size of a cat, the plush depicted an Ornitholestes and with its grey body with white stripes and its crest of black feathers streaked with white, it was faithful to the individuals cloned by InGen. A label stamped with the Jurassic World logo indicated that it had indeed been made to be sold in the park's gift shops. Giles reached out to grab it and pull it away from the smoke.
"Watch out for Hermann," he told his colleague as he dusted the stuffed animal.
"Yeah, you have to be nice to him," Nicole added.
Giles then began to caress Hermann, as if that relaxed him.
"We're lucky we don't have a cat or a pet compy here… It'll just do one stupid thing after the other. So, did you find some music to accompany the presentation?" Karim asked his colleague.
"I was thinking of putting on some Metal Gear's soundtrack," Nicole replied.
"But we're going to have trouble with Hideo Kojima. That jerk could sue us," he half-joked.
"Like if he is going to know that we used the music from one of his games for a top-secret presentation..."
"A Kojima lawsuit is worrying you the most? I'm scared of a surprise Fed raid," Giles said. "Copyright issues are the least of our worries."
"Why do you think we were sent here? Searching the old man's house won't cross their minds for a while, believe me. And since the search at HQ yielded nothing concrete, I think the case is more or less buried," Nicole pointed out to him.
"I remember when the FBI people found John's and William's drawings," Karim remembered. "You know, the ones with the dino-human hybrids and those kind of raptormen cyborgs. That was close. They could have thought it was for one of our projects even though it was actually the result of their hobby. I really hope this place is as safe as Mills pretends because if someone snitches, we're good for jail."
"I wouldn't last a week in jail," Giles said.
"You'll have to be very careful with the soap when showering, gentlemen. You better avoid making it fall, things could happen to you...," their colleague teased.
"Stop it," Karim said, shivering.
"Do you want some coffee?" she asked them. "I'm going to have one."
"Yeah, please," they replied.
Nicole got up from her chair and headed for the kitchenette. When she passed the partition between the offices and the relaxation room, Maisie was gone. Actually, the young girl had gone to hide in the sink cabinet, against the north wall and therefore out of sight of the trio of geneticists. Maisie was sitting with her legs bent against her body, breathing very softly, in order to not be heard.
While preparing the coffees, Nicole began to hum a song she had recently heard in a film.
…
Don't worry about hell
No harm will come to your soul
We're not a Pentecostal
And everybody's got an a...
Luckily for Maisie's innocent ears, Nicole's voice grew quieter as she poured coffee into three mugs. First she took her mug to her desk, then brought those of Karim and Giles, who thanked her. Before starting to drink, they put their cigarettes in the ashtray, joined their hands and began to chant some sort of mantra:
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
The hands acquire shakes,
The shakes become a warning.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
That's when Mills walked into the room.
"Hey, things are going the way you want? What's that working method?" he asked them sternly, thinking that they were clowning around instead of working. "Do you think you're at grandma's? I dare to hope that this presentation progresses."
"Yes yes... it's progressing, boss," Karim replied.
"Show me," Mills ordered.
He passed behind the three geneticists to look at their work, starting with Nicole. While looking at his work, he couldn't help repeating "Yeah, yeah." with a half-convinced tone.
"That way of presenting the skins is interesting but could you make it more… dynamic…?" the businessman asked after reaching Karim. "And more visually appealing?"
The geneticist turned to look him in the eye.
"I remind you that we are geneticists, not some fags from art school," he said firmly.
Mills said nothing and just frowned. He then looked at the three geneticists.
"You better finish all that before tomorrow evening. If you fail to meet the deadlines, I will personally inform Mrs. Lynton. Anyway, get serious and at least look busy because I'll be bringing a visitor here in a few minutes."
"Who?" Karim asked.
"Mr Eversol."
"Never heard of him."
"He's none of your concern. Besides, it would be nice if you could change, Karim."
"Why?" the latter asked.
Mills stared at the T-shirt he was wearing. On it, the characters MIGA were written, subtitled with the sentence "Make InGen Great Again".
"Let's say that Mr. Eversol looks a bit, from a physical point of view, like the current tenant of the White House...," the manager of the Lockwood Foundation replied.
"It would be funny indeed...," Nicole commented with a mocking grin.
"Oh, but wait…," Karim said. "Wasn't that the little blond man you were with at the reception? The one with a pedophile face?"
Mills sighed.
"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear anything..."
"Because pedophiles have a particular face, Karim? You're doing facial discrimination? Bravo..," Nicole told him while clapping mockingly.
The businessman then rolled his eyes and inhaled softly to keep his patience, like a teacher who had stayed too long in the company of unruly students.
"You better be calm when he gets here," he warned them. "The ones caught clowning around will be locked in the Dungeon for an hour or two, lights off."
"Oh no, not the Dungeon!" Giles whined. "This place reeks of rape!"
"Then calm down. And ventilate, it stinks of cigarettes! You could have triggered the fire alarm! To say that the future of InGen is in your hands..."
Then he left, heading back to the elevator.
Giles stood up, approached the door, and watched Mills disappear behind the elevator doors. He heard it go up.
"That's it, he's gone?" Nicole asked.
"Yup."
Karim got up and went to stand next to Giles. He then gave the elevator a double middle finger.
"Take that, faggot!"
Copying his example, Giles gave a double middle finger while waddling.
"Just fuck the crone and stop being an annoying asshole," he said.
They went back to their posts, Karim went to the antechamber to get a blouse and take off his T-shirt, and a minute or two later, an alarm went off on Nicole's phone.
"Ah, it's time to take some samples on the retard," she said. "You're coming with me?"
"Yup."
"It's three doses?"
"Yeah, three doses," Karim confirmed.
The trio put the cigarette butts in the ashtrays, got up, left the room, and once they had moved away enough, Maisie got out of the sink cabinet. Gradually advancing towards the door, remaining hidden behind a partition or a piece of furniture for a moment before moving on to the next hiding place, she looked in the direction of the laboratory. She saw Karim, Nicole and Giles enter, take a sample kit from a cabinet and then descend to the cells by the spiral staircase.
Approaching the bay window, Maisie saw them open a metal door to the right of the stairs and close it behind them.
This is my chance!
She rushed out of the room without even glancing at the computer screens of the geneticists. She had no time. She had to leave the bunker before Eli and this Mr. Eversol arrived. But just as she had just entered the mezzanine, she heard the elevator begin to descend. Aware that he was going to bring its users at any moment, she rushed to the antechamber serving as a cloakroom and had just enough time to hide behind lab coats when Eli and his visitor advanced on the mezzanine. Seeing her grandfather's aide guide this Eversol to the offices and not the lab, Maisie sighed in relief.