9 - Nativity Of Kings

Detail of Mark Witton’s 2017 Tyrannosaurus rex reconstruction. This detail focuses on two juvenile individuals.​

Many of the parties involved have tried to describe the events that took place on Sorna during the first week of February, in 1986.

Costa Rican officials were puzzled, but delighted, at the sudden influx of high-profile financial brokers visiting the country, and its remote Sorna location no less.

Wu frequently recounts it as the most stressful week of his life, trying to balance so many competing needs: monitoring Roberta’s health and development, making sure the enthusiastic onsite staff didn’t “forget” about their NDAs (1), and preparing for Hammond’s grand visit.

Sorkin - who, it must be noted out of intellectual honesty, wasn’t there - paints the picture of a corporate extravaganza, a decadent occasion for Hammond to grandstand his Japanese investors and harangue his employees: the miracle of de-extinction, reduced to a bewitching spectacle for rich, old men.

Weaver herself - who was present, working in the background - has touched upon the momentous visit herself, on multiple occasions. Her characterisation is consistent, and has been so every time she’s been faced with the question.

Considering her public record, it is no surprise that she has chosen to present the event in a quasi-religious, vaguely messianic light. And yet, it must be conceded that the parallels she drew are compelling.

Wealthy, powerful men from the four corners of the world had travelled to Sorna, this remote and underdeveloped backwater, to witness a miraculous birth. The word Weaver uses is, typically, nativity. One can see how it fits.

The atmosphere was certainly unique. The staff did feel like they’d pulled off a miracle, and they were only getting started. Indeed, by the time the last of the stakeholders arrived on the island, a further eight eggs had hatched.

Sorna was now home to no less than nine soft, chirping, overexcited specimens of Tyrannosaurus rex.

While the scientists expected - correctly - that not all nine individuals would survive (2), it’s fair to understand why the Sorna staff felt invincible, right there and then. The sheer adrenaline of their achievement hadn’t rubbed off yet.

Perhaps more importantly, the almost mystical nature of the birth further reinforced Weaver’s beliefs that these animals deserved more than what InGen had in store for them. (3)

The big suits present, in the meantime, went through their own roller-coaster of emotions. Surprise and wonder, excitement and greed. Curiosity at how fast the animals would grow, (4) how many species could be cloned, how many parks could be opened. What the animals could be taught to perform, and how they could put on a show.

The promise of wealth beyond measure soon had the stakeholders in quite the self-congratulatory mood, patting each other on the back at spotting, and backing, the right investment - even when the risk seemed almost astoundingly foolish.

Hammond himself hopped from one foot to the other, “like a kid in a candy store”, in Wu’s words. Drinks flowed freely, and the sober wonder that had heralded the visit was soon replaced by frolicking and celebrations.

One of the recent arrivals, however, stood clearly apart from the others.

Robert Muldoon was Hammond’s gamekeeper, back at Animal Kingdom, in Kenya. A Briton who’d spent a good many years in Africa, his resume prior to InGen included military experience, hunting for wild game across Africa, and later on becoming a gamekeeper - and the terror of poachers wherever he was posted.

Among his peers, Muldoon had a reputation for arch-pragmatism, quick thinking, and calculating ruthlessness. By the late 1970s, however, he was looking for a quieter posting.

Conveniently, Hammond had a fat cheque on offer. But if Muldoon thought Animal Kingdom would prove to be an easy glide towards well-paid retirement, he was wrong. He knew InGen was up to something very secretive, but hadn’t learned the details until literally upon landing on Sorna.

Now, he faced a truly daunting task.

Jurassic Park would need years of development to be even remotely ready for the public. But attractions and tourist facilities could wait. The animals themselves could not.

The park needed a ranger. Someone who knew how to handle the animals, and how to transmit that knowledge to other rangers, zookeepers, and handlers.

It is no exaggeration to say that there wasn’t a human alive on Earth, at that point, with the necessary qualifications for the job. Muldoon would have to invent it from scratch.

And so, while InGen’s board members and investors partied and made wild plans, Muldoon simply stayed quiet. He entered the bedroom, as InGen’s staff had jokingly called it - an improvised nursery carved out of an unused wing of the main facility - and spent the entirety of his sojourn with the newborn Tyrannosaurs.

He watched them eat, hunt, play, and sleep. He tested their reactions to various stimuli - noises, movements, which objects would rouse their playful interests and which would leave them indifferent.

Above all, he observed.

The few interactions he had with the onsite staff revolved around the animals as well. What was known of them from the fossil record, how big they would grow, how many species InGen expected to clone.

By the time the visiting party was ready to leave Sorna and its new nativity of kings behind, Muldoon quietly handed Hammond a procurement list, in his own writing. It included the material required for long perimetres of electric fencing, sketches for water-filled moats, and enough non-lethal and lethal military-grade weaponry to equip a small mercenary company.

Hammond was too taken aback to respond right away, and took the list with him - although it would become the subject of much discussion between the two in the coming years. For the moment, Muldoon had no time for Hammond’s long-winded rants. He was the one employee who didn’t see the need to kowtow to his employer. (5)

Directly to the point, Muldoon asked Wu for accommodations in the workers’ village. Arrangements were made to send over his personal belongings from Africa, and for a trusted figure to replace him at the preserve.

Henceforth, Muldoon would have to spend every day with the animals.

There was a lot of work to do.

Footnotes:

(1) “Yes, Mum, work was great! We uh… did this thing that… sorry, I gotta go.”

(2) Canon has it that InGen cloned seven Tyrannosaurs on Sorna. I will have it be nine cloned, and seven surviving past the first few weeks. This is already incredibly generous to InGen. Birds have high infant mortality, but of course that indication can only take us so far: modern birds are usually born inept, whereas Tyrannosaurus hatchlings would be precocious. Infant mortality was extremely high for them too, but for different reasons. Sources of mortality for a newborn T.rex would primarily be predation, disease, or injury. Most of these aren’t a factor in the safety of the lab.

(3) In the original JP book, and movie, the park fell due to a disgruntled IT contractor trying to get rich by performing corporate espionage for rival firm Biosyn, and messing everything up, getting himself killed and park security shut down in the process. While “pay your employees!” isn’t a bad message to carry at the heart of a story, I needed something else entirely for my purposes. So, you get to watch as Weaver embarks on an increasingly more messianic path. But never mind. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.

(4) Nowhere near fast enough. As already established, Mesozoic dinosaurs spent the vast majority of their life as subadults. Even with her feverish rate of growth, Roberta has a while to go. Being born in 1986, it won’t be until 2001 that she reaches sexual maturity. By then she would already be a multi-ton predator, but to see her at peak size you’d probably have to wait until 2006. This will, naturally, have repercussions on how InGen goes about things. This bit is side-stepped in the movie canon with implications that the animals underwent accelerated growth, but this is completely nonsensical for such a variety of reasons that I didn’t even entertain the idea for B&A.

(5) Muldoon is a universally popular character in the fandom, in both his novel and movie depictions, which are quite close (but not entirely identical). In the book in particular, he was a bit of a Cassandra, consistently stating that the park was under equipped to deal with its animals. As you know by now, I have no intention of simply retelling the original story, so he won’t get to heroically drive around the collapsing park trying to save a bunch of kids from hungry theropods. But the importance entailed by his position - the first of its kind in this timeline’s history - is worthy of narrative attention all of its own, and guarantees that he’ll have a part to play.