Chapter Text
Audric Delmotte first met Devin Lear in a hotel conference room just outside the Phoenix airport. Already sweating from walking outside in 104 degree heat, Audric hadn't even checked to the hotel before a delegation of corporate suits ushered him into a chair.
"My name is Sebastian Morris," one of the suits said with a plastered smile. "Head of HR. You've already signed the NDA, so you understand this meeting is also confidential?"
"Yeah, I got the impression you guys were big on secrecy," Audric said.
"So what the hell is this about?"
Audric probably shouldn't have been there at all. He should've ignored the enigmatic offer from Retry LLC. They promised a $10,000 bonus just to fly in to Phoenix and hear them out, but they hadn't said anything about what the job was. He'd found absolutely nothing online about the company at all. He had a hunch they were up to something shady.
The reams of legalese and NDA only deepened his suspicions. But Audric had been out of a proper job after the gorilla incident, and he figured the least he could do was just take their money and say no.
"We're looking to open up a world-class zoo right here in Phoenix," Sebastian said. He was middle-aged and balding but had a practiced voice and a practiced handshake.
"Besides the Phoenix zoo?"
"We're interested in hosting a different type of animal."
Wheels were spinning in Audric's head. He suddenly had a lurch seize his stomach. Surely nobody could be that stupid. He stared at Sebastian, whose own smile wavered a little.
Sebastian sighed deeply and steepled his hands with the resignation of someone who'd been here many times before.
"We're interested in dinosaurs," Sebastian said.
Audric stood up in his chair and half-turned to the exit when one of the suits on his left pushed him down.
"Sit down, hear us out," the suit said.
"Hear you out? Are you fucking insane? You're doing it again. You're doing Jurassic fucking Park again."
"We realize the comparison is inevitable," Sebastian said.
"Were the first two times not enough? How many more people have to die doing this shit? This is a sick joke. Jurassic Park is a disgrace to the profession of animal keeping. I won't indulge your-"
"Calm down. Hear us out."
"Fine, whatever. Give me your deranged little spiel."
"Certainly." Sebastian cleared his throat.
"As you may or may not know, Jurassic World was actually very profitable for a decade before the accident that shut it down. And that was with significant financial constraints. It was located on a remote Costa Rican island, meaning that tourists had to book both a plane flight and a ferry to get there. Not to mention the increased costs for shipping and logistics for all park operations."
"And you plan to fix that by putting it outside a major metropolitan city."
"Correct," Sebastian said.
"The dinosaur parks that keep having major containment failures. Outside a major city."
"We're going to solve that problem as well."
"How?"
"This is a job interview, so why don't I turn the table on that question? What would you have done differently if you had been running Jurassic World?"
"Everything," Audric said. "Not having hyperviolent animals that see humans as tasty snacks would be a good start.
"There we agree. We've identified critical flaws in the genetic makeup of Ingen and BioSyn's products, and I assure you the next generation will not be as violent."
"Fine! Even if you succeeded on the genetics, and I'm sure Masrani thought he was succeeding too, these animals are poorly understood. Unpredictable things like dilophosaurs spitting, or the mosasaur being twenty times the size it was supposed to be, it's just- so many problems. And then the power goes out, and your electric fences fail, or there's a hole in your giant paddock wall…"
"How would you design asset containment?"
"You put them in a fucking pit is what you do. Or you have a big ditch. Something that can't fail, that they can't escape from. You don't let your dinosaurs roam freely in a gigantic paddock with a miles-long fence, or spew your failed test subjects all over another island because you don't want to bother containing them. It's just basic zookeeping."
Sebastian nodded like he'd thought of all this already, and Audric's heart sank. They weren't joking.
"Okay, yes, obviously the Jurassic Parks made huge mistakes," Audric said. "But do you really think this time will go any better?"
"I see Jurassic Park and Jurassic World as a nearly unending series of blunders," Sebastian said. "We'd like to hire people who will not do that."
"You've heard Ian Malcolm on this though, all the testimony he made to Congress, the inevitability of chaos theory?"
"Yes, I thought it was a stunning argument against the idea of being able to contain animals in zoos," Sebastian said. "I'm glad we abolished those. 'Life finds a way'. Come on, you can't seriously be quoting that washed-up hack."
"Even if you're right, that if they hadn't messed up the parks would have worked, who's going to buy that now? The public will be furious, then they'll be laughing at us. Congress passed laws! You'll never get investors."
"We already have an investor," Sebastian said. "I'd like to introduce you to Devin Lear. Devin?"
Audric looked to the end of the table. He'd been too busy to notice before, but there was a thirty-something sitting there, wearing headphones and staring at a laptop screen. Unlike the suits he was wearing a casual hoodie and jeans. But the moment he glanced over and took off his headphones, everyone in the room visibly shifted towards him until he was the focus.
"This is Devin Lear, our CEO and principal funder," Sebastian said, a slight catch in his voice. "You would be working under him as Chief Operations Officer. Devin?"
"Hire him," Devin said. He looked back down at his screen.
"What is this?" Audric said. "Who is this guy? I'm not taking a job, I still think this is crazy."
"You shot the gorilla," Devin said, glancing up. "The whole internet thinks you did it for no reason, that nobody was ever even threatened. Seventy five seconds from entry to order. Before most people even realized something was happening. And I read your book."
"That would make two people," Audric said. "So what, you want me to shoot dinosaurs for you?"
"I want the kind of guy who's paranoid enough to shoot if he has to, yea. Preferably he's so paranoid he doesn't have to."
"But not paranoid enough to never sign on in the first place?"
"Where others are fearful, be greedy," Devin said. "True, Jurassic Park is done for. Their assets were liquidated at firesale prices. And you're absolutely right by the way, the whole world will be laughing at us when we're building it. But when we open they'll line up for their ticket, which we'll sell at 70% profit margin."
"So your motivation is naked greed."
"Yep. Hammond and Masrani could've given you a spiel about humbling man or the majesty of nature or whatever. Hammond was a liar- he was even greedier than me- but he wasn't half as smart. We're going to build a park, we're going to fill it with dinosaurs and maybe some other mesozoic shit, people are going to pay $700 for a day pass."
"I'm… less than impressed."
"So were the last ten people," Sebastian said. He didn't look pleased with his boss. "I'm sorry, please keep listening, we've put a lot of thought into this and I assure you it's very viable."
Devin stood up and leaned over the table. He gave a boyish grin filled with perfect white teeth and looked Audric directly in the eyes.
"I think you might have it in you. The need to build something, the need to do it right. You saw those clowns run Jurassic Park and World into the ground, and it made you angry. You knew you could do better. You could made it work."
"We're going to build the park, with or without you. But if you don't take the job then you'll never figure out if you could've made it work. And that feeling sucks."
At that meeting, Audric gave a firm but polite no and went home to his New York apartment and his lazy orange cat. He tried not to think about dinosaurs over the next week, while he was doing basic consultancy work for a wildlife rehab center. But then he saw Ian Malcolm's new book in the window of a bookstore, something about how all the works of man were doomed to fail by the nature of chaos.
And then on Sunday he couldn't sleep, so he stayed up all night analyzing the plans for Jurassic World. Poring over the timelines and the casualty logs and basic design errors, listening to old interviews from Masrani and Hammond. Why hadn't they built pits? Because they were on a tropical island, with sinking soil and flooding water levels. Why did they keep breeding the most dangerous carnivores? Because the public wanted to see them.
By Tuesday, he was trying to figure out why a giant flock of pterosaurs would immediately fly free of their containment dome (glass- why glass?) and attack a street full of humans, most of which they couldn't even carry off the ground. And he realized that the original parks had been starving their animals all the time, because it made them more active and thus more visible to guests. And they'd never bothered giving them live prey, to teach the pterosaurs what they could and could not hunt.
Wednesday he just spent marveling at the stupidity of the Indominus Rex. A gigantic predator with camouflage cloaking and immune to small arms fire. Raised for a military purpose that had become immediately obsolete in the age of drone warfare. And their operational security was so incredibly bad that they'd opened the gate and just let it out.
On Thursday morning he couldn't take it anymore and called Sebastian back.
"About the job," Audric said.
"Damn it, why is Devin always right?"
"What?"
"He said you'd call. Don't worry, it's still open. None of the other candidates were crazy enough. Welcome to the team."
Phoenix wasn't a bad place to build the new park, whose informal name so far was "Attempt #3." It had miles of cheap open space they could redevelop and a hot climate that dinosaurs could cope with. Yet they could still be close enough to a major city that they wouldn't need on-site housing, on-site hotels, or their own utility grid.
The downside was also being next to a major city. Sooner or later, the public would find out that "Attempt #3" was in their backyard. Protests and lawsuits would start. Devin thought he had good enough legal connections to weather the storm, but Audric was skeptical. Devin had made billions selling some kind of crypto-AI startup that Audric still didn't understand, and he seemed to approach legal challenges with the laissez-faire "sin now, repent later" attitude of Silicon Valley. Would that actually fly in Washington? He didn't know.
For the moment, Audric's job was to get as much of the park groundwork as possible in place before the reckoning. Devin had assured him that the dinosaur side was being "figured out", with a genetics wing already working on churning out a new batch of genetic horrors in time for an opening date three years from now.
It was an insanely ambitious target. Just three years to build a functional park in the desert, ready to receive dinosaurs and guests. Audric was immediately beginning to understand why the original park designers had cut so many corners.
"It's not something we can just rush," he said over another late-night teleconference. "We need paddocks, we need structural reinforcement, we have to figure out a park layout, we're going to need plenty of air conditioned buildings for people to duck into, we need to widen the water main from the city, and…"
All these things ate up his days and his nights. He spent a lot of time yelling at contractors and subcontractors and shipping managers as his schedule loomed closer by the day. Audric was worked to the bone, but he made absolutely certain that the paddocks were done right.
The basic design was based off deep pits, as Devin had assured him none of the first batch of animals would be able to climb. Just big dinosaurs in ten meter pits. The desert soil was good for digging, but it still took time and the paddocks came out relatively small, especially compared to the giant free-roam spaces of Jurassic World. Devin said that was fine- the dinosaurs were being genetically bred for low space requirements.
Audric should've known that was bullshit. He should've realized Devin was full of vague reassurances that turned into "sorry whoops"es. Long before the park was ready to open, their very first pit was already housing its very first test subject, a stegosaur named 'Sammy'.
Sammy looked fine visually, but he was one of InGen's minor failures. Apart from spontaneously switching gender (when male, his plates were firey red and when female a disappointing beige), Sammy consistently puked up half of whatever ferns they tried to give her.
The good news was that she was among the stupidest animals to ever walk the planet, and he hardly seemed to notice or care that she was completely alone in a cramped little pit. His pit was two squares joined together through a narrow corridor.
When workers needed access to one side of the pit, they lured Sammy to the other side with food and lowered a gate down to block the pit corridor. Then they could simply climb ladders down to carry out their work, usually cleaning up vomit and dung or putting in more of the concrete blocks reinforcing the walls. If Sammy ever needed to visit one of the industrial sized veterinary machines now sitting in a hastily erected warehouse, he was tranquilized and then lifted out by crane.
This was to be the basic design for every enclosure in the park. It had advantages. It was relatively cheap, as despite Audric's protests about drainage they mostly were just big holes. It would naturally give guests an elevated position to view the animals from. And most importantly, there was no way it could fail to contain dinosaurs unless the pit walls caved in in a specific way, which was unlikely but possible.
It also had plenty of disadvantages too. Accessing the pit through ladders was bound to have somebody slip and fall and sue the company eventually. Or they could forget to remove the ladder itself when they were done, which dinosaurs could hardly climb up but might dislodge and hurt themselves with. And given the general incompetence that seemed to plague workers in previous parks, Audric was nervous that somebody would manage to mess up the simple gate-down enter-pit-without-dinosaur system. He was determined to stretch out "time to first death" beyond the thirty seven day record of Jurassic World.
Plus, whatever railings they put up, whatever safety nets they used, there would someday come a guest stupid enough to fall into the pit. And then they might have to shoot their own dinosaur to save the life of some stupid kid.
That was where Audric made his first real demand to Devin. They couldn't cut corners on the paddocks. The pits would need to be fully enclosed in glass barriers, and they needed to install elevators that wouldn't permit operator error. The lifts would refuse to lower while the dinosaur was inside, and the gate connecting the pits wouldn't raise unless both elevators were up.
Operators could use a special override switch to get around this system. But it had to be intentional, and every usage would trigger an investigation. That was the culture Audric needed to build at this park from day one. Strict safety checklists. Processes that failed safely. Doors that failed closed.
To his credit, Devin approved all of his requests.
"John Hammond was a cheapskate and look where that got him," Devin said. "Anyway, I owe you one after dumping Sammy on you. I bought him at this guy's estate sale, but then there was a breakout and she escaped. They only caught her like a year ago, and the government took her to this holding camp or something. And the old administration super did not want to give him back, but she was legally mine, so, what could they do except delay? But by then I'd sold my pad in Napa which was where he was supposed to go, and I figured you had the pit basically ready, so."
"I didn't want or need to know any of that," Audric said. "What I do need to know is when you're going to be dumping more surprises like that on me. For a couple reasons. First off, now that we have actual dinosaurs here people are going to realize what we're doing sooner rather than later."
"Oh, Sebastian didn't tell you?" Devin said. "Marketing has that covered, we're announcing on Monday."
"What."
"Don't worry about it."
"I- am-"
"So, let me tell you about politics," Devin said. "We've got a bunch of these dinosaurs running around everywhere right? People are sick of that. 'Allosaurus eats family of four again'. The government's been holding all these dinosaurs and it's been a cost sink for them. So we are, that's right, the humane solution."
That was the first time Audric tried to punch Devin in the face. But Devin seemed to have a lot of experience with being punched in the face, so he only landed a glancing blow that sent Devin staggering back into a plush leather armchair.
"You motherfucker. You lied to me. We're not getting new dinosaurs, we're getting the same carnival rejects that fucked up the last two parks and we're putting them in smaller cages."
"Yeah, yeah, I deserve that," Devin said. "It's just some though, okay? I don't get to do this that often, so let me play the bighearted humanitarian for a moment. These poor animals, nobody wants to care for them, the government was just going to euthanize, don't we have a heart?"
"We're trying to build a park that doesn't breach containment, not run a rescue shelter."
"The herbivores are not that bad," Devin said. "Hammond made them practically zombies. Some of them don't even fight back while they're being eaten."
"And the carnivores?"
"That's where our genetics team is focusing their first efforts. And yeah, they're the most popular part of any park. Listen, I'm not supposed to tell you this and you never heard it, but we've got a promising batch of fresh eggs hatching soon. They will be role-model zoo animals."
"But?"
"But we have a suchomimus and a T-rex we bought off BioSyn's bankruptcy. The Italian government was very insistent. The rex is-"
"I know Rexy. She broke out of the original Jurassic Park. And Jurassic World. And wrecked the BioSyn building."
"She's practically geriatric," Devin said. "This is her retirement home."
"We won't have the facilities to feed and house her for at least six months."
"We've got four before delivery," Devin said. "You got this, champ."
The second time Audric tried to punch Devin in the face, Devin had already started sprinting out of the room.