Chương 17: Indominus Rex (17)

The electric current tore through the Triceratops's heart. Blood spilled from its mouth and nostrils. Its enormous body collapsed, crushing one layer of the electric fence beneath its weight, while the intense heat of the current sent up the faint aroma of scorched meat. It was dead. A fully grown, six-ton Triceratops had died within minutes of entering the enclosure? Absurd! And yet, there it lay. An eerie silence settled over both sides of the fence.

Draped across the electrified barrier, the Triceratops's carcass was a blunt reminder of the humans' own arrogance. They suddenly realized that their arena project might be doomed before it even began. It had one fatal flaw: the "Asset" was intelligent—intelligent enough to use the electric fence to dispose of her opponents. And that was not a flaw human intervention could fix.

"If we build the arena, how are we supposed to keep the dinosaurs from escaping? We'll have no choice but to surround it with an electric fence!"

"But that's the problem. The Asset knows what the fence is and what it does. She even knows how to use it! The other dinosaurs aren't smart enough for that. Their walnut-sized brains could never come up with something like this. The moment they face her, they'll keep falling for the same trick, and she'll eliminate them one after another. What would be the point of the fights then?"

"It wouldn't be another beast killing them. It would be the fence—technology—the power of humanity. Take away the raw collisions and close combat, and the arena loses its greatest attraction." Someone put a finger on the heart of the matter.

"Even what we're doing now has lost all meaning. We sacrificed an adult dinosaur and collected no useful data whatsoever. This experiment has been a complete failure!" Was there any point in sending a second dinosaur into the enclosure? Of course not. If that one also died on the electric fence, the losses would only grow. Humans did not stay in businesses that lost money.

"Still, it wasn't a total loss," one researcher said.

"At the very least, we've confirmed yet again how intelligent the Asset is. Look at her. There's a mountain of fresh meat right in front of her, but she hasn't touched it. She even backed away. That means she understands electrical conduction and electromagnetic fields. She won't even approach the area around the carcass."

"Oh God!" someone cried in exasperation.

"That isn't a discovery! She's so intelligent it gives me chills!" They had come to cause trouble for the Asset. Instead, the Asset had left them with a problem. She refused to touch the Triceratops's body, which meant recovering it was now their job. To remove it from the fence, they would have to shut down power to the old sector. Unfortunately, the old sector's electrical system had been built in the nineties and never modernized. Its critical components were heavily interdependent.

The underground cables all drew power from a centralized source, so cutting electricity to one area meant shutting down an entire section. That could easily trigger cascading failures. If a dinosaur escaped during the confusion, the situation would become extremely difficult to contain. But if they left the carcass where it was, turning the Triceratops into a six-ton resistor, the old sector's entire grid might fail within hours. They had no choice.

They would have to tranquilize the Asset, shut off the power, recover the carcass, and repair the fence. Then another problem arose: they had only prepared enough tranquilizer for the Triceratops. After all, it had looked like the obvious candidate to emerge as the "winner."

"Just our goddamn luck! What a fucking mess—and look at all this extra work!"

"That dose is far too high. It could cause permanent damage to the Asset's brain."

"… Trust me, everyone here would prefer her a little less intelligent." In the end, they used the oversized dose on her anyway. Asset did not dodge. But the instant the dart struck her, she whipped out a claw and sliced it in half with brutal speed. The volume was so great, and the plunger advanced so slowly, that half the dose remained in the broken syringe. What had already entered her bloodstream began circulating at once. Asset staggered several steps before pitching forward and collapsing.

So this was the amount needed to bring down an adult dinosaur? All right. She could not handle it at all… She sank into a dreamless sleep. * When she woke, the electric fence had not been replaced. Apparently deciding the repairs were too much trouble, the humans had simply dismantled the damaged inner fence and removed it along with the Triceratops's carcass. Only the two outer layers remained to contain her. The good news was that removing the inner layer had enlarged her living space.

The bad news was that they had taken away her food. She had been chased, rammed, and tranquilized, yet had not received so much as a single bite of meat for her trouble. She was hungry. Whether the humans had forgotten or were doing it deliberately, they left her waiting until the afternoon before allowing the keepers to feed her. What they delivered was meat from the same unfortunate Triceratops, only now it had been butchered. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Fresh liver accompanied by hind-leg muscle. The taste was acceptable, and the serving was fairly generous. She lowered her head and ate until nothing remained. Once she had finished, however, she smacked her jaws and realized she was still not full. It appeared her appetite had grown again. With that in mind, Asset stationed herself beside the stream to catch fish. She stared down at the only waterway running through the enclosure, motionless as a statue.

A moment later, her jaws snapped open and her head plunged into the stream. When she lifted it again, a mountain mullet thrashed between her teeth. Two quick crunches, and it disappeared down her throat. Fortunately, there were plenty of fish. Nublar Island was surrounded by ocean, and its native species resembled those of Costa Rica, including its freshwater fish. But the island was populated by intellectual laborers, and its cooks possessed little real culinary imagination.

Most of their ingredients were premium products flown in by the company, so no one had any need to forage locally. As a result, the island's freshwater fish went entirely untouched. They grew fat and nutritious—and eventually ended up in Asset's stomach. Occasionally, she even caught a few large snakes drifting downstream. They tasted excellent. After spending several days living off nature's charity, the keepers finally noticed that her appetite had changed.

The next day, they delivered three times as much meat, determined to fill her stomach and ensure she did not lose weight. All things considered, her keepers were decent human beings. After looking after her for so long, they had inevitably grown somewhat attached.

"I've never seen such a well-behaved carnivore. Even when she's hungry, she doesn't attack people."

"Exactly. No wonder Susan calls her a 'good girl.' She has a gentler temperament than some herbivores. Remember that Allosaurus in the western sector? I didn't realize its appetite had increased, so it went without a full meal for two days. It howled in the western sector until midnight. Creepy as hell…" The keepers considered her mild-mannered. Asset knew nothing of their assessment. Even if she had, she would probably have snorted at them for overthinking it.

She refrained from attacking humans because the situation had never grown desperate enough to justify it. Trapped in an enclosure, she was perfectly capable of distinguishing between one full meal and a lifetime of regular feeding. Afterward, she resumed her "peaceful" life in the old sector. Apart from routine examinations, the researchers no longer ventured into the area. Her feeding program also returned to its original design.

The laboratory revived its basic hunting trials and began delivering animals collected from across the world into her enclosure. Thus, on days without storms, when dinosaur meat was unavailable, Asset lived the "delightful" life of wrestling snout-to-snout with a sixteen-foot saltwater crocodile, grappling with a two-ton hippopotamus, and getting kicked in the rear by a twenty-three-foot giraffe…

It was not until a rhinoceros nearly gored her belly open that she realized just how dangerous large horned animals could be. Compared with the captive Triceratops, the wild rhinoceros was an absolute monster in combat. Had it not been unfamiliar with the terrain and dazed itself by charging headfirst into a tree, she might not have managed to kill it at all. Having learned her lesson, Asset classified everything "with horns" as a formidable opponent and everything "without horns" as food.

Reality slapped her in the face almost immediately. It turned out that the hornless creatures included true monsters of their own. One encounter was all it took to teach her how malicious nature could be. Her next opponent was a giant man-eating tigress from the forests of southern India. Before its capture, it was said to have devoured more than two hundred people. It measured 9. 8 feet in length and weighed nearly a thousand pounds.

Its limbs were thick, its steel-strong tail powerful, and the striped hide stretched over its raised back clearly outlined the muscles beneath. Its gaze was vicious, and its entire body radiated killing intent. Even among the largest cats, it was enormous. When it faced Asset, it showed no fear and immediately attacked with reckless ferocity. The reason was simple animal instinct. The tigress had eaten far too many humans. Asset was roughly its size, yet something in her eyes felt strangely human.

And what were humans? Food. By that same logic, Asset was food as well. Having labeled its opponent prey at first sight, what reason did the tigress have to be afraid? It unleashed the full combat prowess of a great cat, forcing Asset onto the defensive from the instant the fight began. The thick pads on its paws might have looked soft, but every swipe landed with crushing force. One blow nearly knocked Asset's brains out through her nostrils. But she was no easy target.

With jaws far larger than the tiger's, she seized every opening to bite back, though she ended up with a mouthful of fur. Then the tigress leaped onto her back and drove its fangs into her neck. It tried to sever her spine, but Asset's claws pierced its throat first… She gained a great deal from that fight to the death. Perhaps because the meal had been so hard-won, she ate it slowly, savoring every bite, until only the filthiest and least edible scraps remained.

She also peeled away what was left of the tiger's hide, licked it clean, and spread it beneath the broad leaves as bedding. It was her trophy. After sleeping on the tiger skin for long enough, she developed a taste for collecting things. From then on, after every hunt, she stripped something from her prey and carried it back to her "nest"—sometimes claws and teeth, sometimes shinbones, sometimes fur or hide. Unfortunately, none of them kept well.

Within a month, the tiger skin was crawling with maggots and reeked beyond endurance. The bones she collected were not strong enough, either. One careless step when she rose was all it took to crush them into fragments. Nothing seemed to last forever… But if she was going to remain here for a long time, she wanted to fill the place with things that would not rot—things worth keeping. So what should she collect? Stones? In the end, she abandoned the "nest" and left her collaborators to clean up the mess.

* Jurassic Park opened and closed, then reopened and closed again. After two such cycles, another year had passed. In the distance, crowds roared with activity. Nearby, the vegetation remained deep and still. Full and content, Asset lay by the water, yawning idly as she wondered how to spend the afternoon. Then screams rose from somewhere far away. Something appeared to have gone wrong. Whatever happened to the humans had nothing to do with her. She was locked in a cage. Their problems were not hers to solve.

So while the humans worked themselves into a frenzy, she slept soundly. While they handled the aftermath, she ate heartily. She ate when it was time to eat and drank when it was time to drink. Once they finished dealing with the crisis, Susan would naturally find time to visit the old sector and bring her the news. As expected, Susan trusted no one but did trust a dinosaur incapable of speech. In the old sector, Susan kept no secrets, because Asset was the only truly secure vault.

"A terrible accident happened this Wednesday. One of the researchers was dragged into the water and eaten by the Mosasaurus."

"Do you know what a Mosasaurus is? It's an enormous carnivorous dinosaur that lives in the water, an apex predator of the sea. Anything that enters its waters becomes prey."

"We always thought it couldn't leave the water, but we were wrong. It can launch itself onto land to hunt. When a Mosasaurus is nearby, even the shore isn't safe. That researcher was standing at the water's edge. He never imagined he would become bait…"

"That Mosasaurus was born a year before you. It's already thirty feet long, and once it reaches adulthood, it will grow to at least sixty-five feet."

"Good girl, remember this. If you ever gain your freedom, stay away from deep water."

"No land animal should venture into a place like that carelessly." But after listening to Susan, only one thought occupied Asset's mind: Dinosaurs could live in water? Then why couldn't she? Was she incapable of it? Had she not trained hard enough?

After subjecting herself to those three soul-searching questions, Asset—well acquainted with life's harsh lessons and possessed of an exceptionally strong survival instinct—turned away without another word, plunged her head beneath the surface, and began practicing how to hold her breath. She believed she could do it. She, too, could learn to live in the water.