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Primal Prey: Chapter 1
By Strider_Aragorn
Chapter 1
The tests
Area 52, North America, 1993
Lewis Dodgson received the shaving cream canister by freeze-bag mail. He had heard of its discovery through a contact of his in the Costa Rican government. Apparently the family that had found the can were given one million American dollars to keep their mouths shut.
Dodgson was immediately interested when he heard of the can’s discovery; the report had said that it was found near an island off the coast of Costa Rica, and it was the same brand as the one that Dodgson had given to his associate, Dennis Nedry, to collect DNA samples of the creatures inhabiting the island.
Dodgson smiled as he pulled the can out of the bag in his office. His office was in Central America, in the middle of the desert. Actually, it was a couple of hours out of Roswell, New Mexico. He was in charge of some secret cloning facilities at the place, the military-controlled ‘Area 52’. He had leased it off the military the previous year for testing of his cloning technologies.
Dodgson gingerly held the can as he looked at it. The wrapper was off, but he could see the brand name clearly on the nozzle :Gillette. He screwed open the bottom and his smile widened. Out popped a separate chamber—full of DNA embryos. He scanned the names on the cone-shaped capsules, and he smile widened still more.
He ran outside of his office, onto the yellow dusty sand. He jogged to the main cloning facility, passing by a couple of buildings. The day was hot, and soon Dodgson worked up a sweat. His company, BioSyn Technologies, was nearly all represented here. Area 52, or A52 as it was known, was surrounded by mesas, and a tableland. Essentially, A52 was in a hole in the desert ground.
Dodgson ran past one of the few scrub-like bushes around the place, and made a mental note to get one of his men to get rid of it.
John Wills was working on the structure of a strand of DNA (that is, he was testing to see whether the cloning machines, or cloners, would accept the strand of lizard DNA) when Lewis Dodgson ran in through the door of Cloning Facility One. Dodgson often frequented CF1 for inspections, but this time, John could tell it was different.
Lewis Dodgson was a man of about thirty-five, with receding brown hair and a prominent nose. He looked excited as he came over to John, handed him a small cone-shaped object half filled with yellow liquid and said, “John, I need you to run a DCT scan on this, see if you can get anything”
“Sure,” said John. He read the name on the side of the cone. “This is DNA?”
Dodgson nodded.
“Is this a joke, Mr Dodgson?”
“No,” replied Dodgson. “I assure you that I’m serious. Can you just run a DCT on that, I’m busy, I got a lot to organise”
John nodded, and looked doubtfully at the DNA in his hand, and re-read the label, sighed and shook his head:
Tyrannosaurus
John then exited his testing programme and placed the Tyrannosaurus DNA on the DNA sliding tray and pressed the ‘Close’ button. The screen of his computer flickered, and asked ‘Test Now or Test Later’. John clicked on ‘Test Now’. The screen showed a progress bar, and, when it was finished, the PC asked if John wanted to find an existing match.
John clicked on ‘Find Existing Match’. Another progress bar popped up, this time moving slower. When it was finished, the computer told John that there were no matches known to mankind.
Then it was true, supposed John. It was real dinosaur DNA. Where did Dodgson get it? More likely, how much did he have to pay to get it?
John shook his head, then activated a DCT, or DNA Clonability Test. It simply involved the computer asking itself whether or not the cloning machines of A52 could replicate a living creature from the DNA. So far, the scientists had been unsuccessful with chimpanzees, and gila monsters. Dodgson had told the manufacturers of the cloning machines to make them able to take bird DNA. Maybe, thought John, that was why the chimps and gilas didn’t work out.
With a smart beep, the computer announced its accomplishment: the DNA in the sliding tray labelled Tyrannosaurus could be replicated and made into a living, breathing animal.
1/17/2003 6:09:00 AM
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