20 - The Egg Accountant​

Isla Sorna, Embryonics Administration​

Henry Wu was dangerously overextended in 1987.

As the San Diego facility was mothballed, and construction crews relocated from Sorna to Nublar, InGen’s chief geneticist and miracle-worker was having to constantly micromanage his anxious and overbearing boss, Hammond.

He also had to continually liaise with Muldoon, search for candidates for a veterinary position on the staff, oversee the logistics of transporting some of the animals from Sorna to Nublar - all in addition to his original duties at the helm of cloning operations.

Looking to offload at least some of his burdens, he turned to Amanda Weaver.

In her own commentary, Weaver refers to the position Wu assigned her with self-deprecating humour. She claims she became “the egg accountant”, and it seems that the moniker was actually in use with her colleagues after she took the new job.

In reality, Weaver would be in charge of Embryonics Administration. This was, naturally, a purely administrative position, not a scientific one.

This choice says much about Wu’s state of mind, and political calculations, at a time when Jurassic Park was rapidly becoming a reality.

The practice of selecting a potential opponent, and removing them off the board by assigning them a seemingly important but peripheral job, is of course a time-honoured tradition. It is undeniably as old as politics.

But Wu didn’t think of Weaver as a potential rival, at the time. After his victory over Sorkin, he was absolutely unchallenged within InGen. His recent spats with Hammond notwithstanding, Wu had no need to watch his back from anyone in the labs.

He didn’t select Weaver because he aimed to remove her, but because it seemed to him like the least disruptive change to the team on the whole.

Weaver was a junior geneticist, and not among the most brilliant of InGen’s original cadre. She could be spared easily from the labs, with no real negative consequences for the ongoing rush of cloning operations.

Wu estimated, correctly, that InGen needed an administrator more urgently than it needed yet another geneticist rounding up the numbers. He was trying to introduce a much-needed division of labour in Sorna’s Workers Village.

The need for secrecy, of course, made it impossible to look outside InGen’s existing ranks for a talented administrator. Already as it was, Hammond had needed much convincing before accepting that a veterinarian would need to be recruited from outside the company’s ranks.

Hammond was adamant that external headhunting needed to be kept to a minimum, for now. Internal promotions and transfers would need to take precedence most of the time. If that meant Weaver had to change career path from geneticist to administrator, then so be it.

And to Wu’s delight, Weaver took to her new assignment like a Halszkaraptor to water, so to speak. (1)

Wu felt immediately validated in his selection. Weaver was punctilious, hard-working, and a perfectionist. While Wu and his team continued to focus on genome reconstruction, perfecting mistakes and harvesting more DNA, Weaver became responsible for the factory floor of egg fertilisation.

This was very much a multistage process. After all, fertilisation and incubation could go wrong at many different points over a course of several months. Each new birth would need scrupulous documenting, by species and by iteration.

In fact, this was one of Wu’s most significant contributions to this early rationalisation. Now, lab staff were required to keep proper documentation of genomic versioning, and pass them on to Embryonics Administration for cross-reference. (2)

With these tools in hand, Wu and Weaver now had the ability to rapidly and correctly identify which developmental issues affected which iteration of the reconstructed genome. Fixes could be implemented more rapidly, ensuring healthier generations of new offspring.

Hatchlings that successfully made it out of the egg would also need to be monitored for early developmental issues. For this purpose, the old bedroom had been relocated to Embryonics Administration, and greatly expanded into a real nursery, with kennels and monitoring equipment.

It was clear that Weaver had a knack for the animals. This was the other reason why Wu had picked her for this position. Meticulous documentation on fertilisations and births was only the first half of this process.

The other half was closely documenting the physical and behavioural development of the animals. Perhaps, with sufficient efforts, in time InGen could begin to parse a pattern from the scattered data points, and define a baseline for what a healthy hatchling of any given species should look like.

Weaver, for her part, was skillfully dissimulating her own feelings towards her employers.

Already troubled by the treatment reserved to the animals, she was further enraged by the forced relocation of the Tun-Si from Isla Nublar, and the indifference displayed by her colleagues in the lab.

It is unclear how many of her future plans were already brewing. In this, however, her case differs dramatically from Sorkin’s: there is no doubt that Weaver’s disaffection was real.

Her belief that something needed to be done provided her with a motivation to hide her true feelings, and play along with Wu, for now. By gracefully accepting the egg accountant position, she found herself thrust at the very heart of InGen’s operations on Sorna.

Other factors conspired to make this administrative position even more central. At a time when InGen was critically understaffed, and Wu overworked, this led to serious over-reliance towards her book-keeping.

Wu had more urgent problems to think about - and after all, in his view, it was clear that Weaver was both dependable, and harmless.

To be fair to Wu, it is likely that Weaver herself didn’t have a clear idea of how she would use her newfound influence to advance her goals - or for that matter, what her goals even were.

But there is no denying that Wu critically underestimated just to what extent the new position could be leveraged. Every egg fertilisation, every birth, the performance of every patch to the genome - it would all go through Weaver’s ledgers.

And maybe most importantly, given the erratic way in which InGen functioned at the time, her new job granted Weaver personal access to Hammond.

The boss left Nublar for Sorna every time he had the opportunity, seeking to gawk over the newborn animals and trying to get the newborns to imprint upon him. (3) Always eager for a pair of ears to subject to his monologues, Hammond shared much of his vision with Weaver.

And eventually, she would begin to share carefully-selected parts of her own.

Footnotes:

(1) If you don’t know Halszkaraptor, you should - it’s an incredible discovery. It’s a long-necked dromaeosaurid with semi-aquatic, swan-like adaptations. Here is a blog post (in Italian, but Google Translate is your friend) by palaeontologist Andrea Cau, who first described Halzskaraptor in 2017, debating its bone density and likely ecology.

(2) Anyone who’s ever worked in IT will probably look up to the heavens in thanks reading this sentence. Years of undocumented modification and having to work without access to versioning are among the worst banes of the modern human condition.

(3) I don’t remember if the first book had any mention of this, but in the movie, Hammond tries to be present at every birth so the animals imprint on him. This is likely played straight by Spielberg in an attempt to drive home the relationship between Mesozoic dinosaurs and birds, which was a lot more controversial in 1993 than it is now.

However, knowing that non-avian dinosaurs would not necessarily imprint at all, I find it kind of hilarious to picture Hammond staring intensely at a baby sauropod who couldn’t care less about him, thinking to himself, love me, love me! It certainly fits his personality as presented in the story so far.