Chương 4: Indominus Rex (4)

Perhaps her reaction to seeing a snake for the first time had been excessive. Or perhaps the way she had lost control and savaged her prey had been too brutal. Either way, the humans fed her nothing but snakes for days, testing her stability, probing for her true nature—and hoping to witness another magnificent display of slaughter from their genetic creation. Yes. To them, her cruelty was a kind of perfection. There was no mistaking the admiration in their eyes.

They looked at her as though she were some peerless weapon worthy of their finest efforts. It was almost funny. She had grasped the meaning of "perfection" before she even understood what a "peerless weapon" was. And their idea of perfection was her standing drenched in blood atop a corpse, a length of spine still crunching between her teeth. Her instincts told her there was nothing frightening or shameful about it. They urged her to go further, to abandon every limit she had.

Yet for some reason, the soul beneath her hide seemed to burn in helpless agony, mourning every mouthful of raw flesh and blood. Suddenly, she understood. She did not want to be this way. Even if she had no choice but to live as a beast, she refused to become a mindless monster. And so, humanity's expectations of her were destined to be disappointed. Life always found a way forward. It also possessed a formidable ability to adapt, especially when that life belonged to an apex predator.

Once an "opponent" entered her diet, it ceased to be an opponent at all. It became food. She remembered their taste and their weaknesses, and every subsequent kill became cleaner. With the humans watching, she calmly slipped aside the instant the rat snake struck. Her hind legs kicked up wet earth as she twisted her entire body sideways. She knew a snake could not attack continuously. Its strike followed a straight line.

Fast as it was, the section of its body that shot forward could not retract at once, much less turn immediately to attack again. That opening was all she needed. Her jaws closed over a vital point. She raked one claw toward its head and cut straight into its neck. One hard twist severed the head completely. She crushed it beneath one foot, then dragged the thrashing body into the broad-leafed undergrowth. Before long, gruesome chewing sounds emerged from the foliage. A bloodied snakeskin came sailing out.

The recording ended. Several researchers exchanged looks. They had finally realized how quickly this Asset was improving. After eating only three snakes, she had already developed a method. She killed with elegance and ate with discernment. She would even rather endure hunger than swallow one without skinning it first.

"Does the other one do this too?"

"No." The researchers answered with the solemn certainty of people citing hard data.

"When the other Asset encounters live prey, it swallows the animal whole whenever possible. If it takes two bites, that's only because it has already bitten the prey in half."

"Then why is this one's feeding behavior so strange?"

"Maybe her digestive system is weak," someone suggested.

"The doctor did say her constitution was inferior to the other one's." He cracked a joke.

"Smart people get stomach problems. Maybe smart dinosaurs do too. This lab goes through more antacids than coffee. You know how it is." They laughed, but they did not forget the work at hand. Nonvenomous snakes were promptly removed from her diet and replaced with venomous ones.

"Let's move on to phase two. I wonder how resistant she is to venom." * Venomous snakes were far more troublesome. Without venom to rely on, constrictors killed mainly by sealing their prey's mouth and nose, coiling around it, crushing bone, and squeezing the life from its body. As long as she avoided their coils, they posed no mortal danger. Venomous snakes were different. Most depended on their fangs. One successful strike allowed them to retreat and wait for their prey to die.

They did not need to wrestle or exhaust themselves. They needed only to hide, strike, and withdraw. Their attacks were faster and their recovery shorter, making them assassins in the dark—and exceptionally difficult opponents. On the first day, she evaded a viper's lightning strike. On the second, she survived a black mamba's relentless assault. On the third, however, she fell victim to the king cobra's ultimate weapon. She had never imagined that venom could be delivered without fangs.

The cobra sprayed it straight into her eyes. It caught her completely off guard. Blinded by pain, she screamed. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Her ferocity erupted. In the darkness, some unknown faculty inside her awakened—and suddenly she could "see" the king cobra's heat. She did not yet know what thermal imaging was. She only knew that she could see again. Driven mad by pain, she lunged.

The cobra wound itself around her and squeezed with all its strength; her claws and teeth tore through its body. In the end, she killed it at the cost of being poisoned. She crushed its skull and devoured its venom glands. The habitat was opened at once. A tranquilizer dart dropped her where she stood. The humans bound her jaws, strapped her spread-eagled to an examination table, flushed her eyes with milk, and injected antivenom.

"This is insane. She's only twenty-nine inches long, and you put a sixty-five-inch king cobra in there? Fine—maybe I'm the insane one. She actually killed it!"

"Has her taste changed? She ate the gallbladder and venom glands this time."

"Snake venom is just high-quality protein unless it enters the bloodstream. Her instincts would never let a delicacy like that go to waste. Wild animals know far more about enjoying food than humans do." They drew blood, scanned her body, and scheduled a course of deworming treatment. After all, every snake they released into her habitat had been captured in the wild. They came from remote corners all over the world and carried an unknown variety of parasites.

Now every one of those snakes had ended up inside the Asset. Because the Asset's intestinal flora differed from that of modern animals, most parasites could not survive inside her. The majority were digested; the rest were expelled. Under normal circumstances, they posed little threat to her health. But the Asset was still very young. She had not even passed the period when genetic disorders were most likely to emerge. As a precaution, the researchers decided that deworming was necessary.

There were injections, medicated food, and one indignity after another. The parasites caused her no trouble. The humans, on the other hand, made her miserable. She suffered diarrhea for three full days. A beast might have no dignity and no concept of an embarrassing past, yet even she developed the urge to slaughter every living person in the laboratory. Fortunately, the humiliation did not last. Somewhere in the process, an unknown variable triggered a qualitative change.

What should have been the onset of genetic disease became a period of physical mutation instead. Half a month later, she discovered that her body had developed resistance to venom. She could now withstand certain toxins. The venom of elapids, especially cobras, could no longer do much harm to her, though the hemotoxic venom of vipers could still injure her. More astonishingly, she had gained a second pair of "eyes."

They existed somewhere she could not touch, yet whenever she wished, she could close her physical eyes and still perceive everything around her. She sensed the heat of animals and plants. No living creature could enter her territory without revealing itself. It was a gift made for hunting—a predator's cheat. Most importantly, the humans could detect her venom resistance, but they could not discover her second sight. The feeling of possessing a secret advantage was strange and exhilarating.

It meant— She had begun to slip beyond their control. Sooner or later, they would find themselves helpless against her. * Ten pages disappeared from the calendar. Perhaps her mind had expanded along with her body, because she began to take an interest in the square boxes the researchers used—the computers. Thanks to her exceptional eyesight, she could clearly read the letters on their screens even from a distance.

And after spending every day fighting snakes, the frantic dance of the researchers' fingers appeared almost slow to her. Consciously or otherwise, she began memorizing the shapes of the letters. Whenever she watched them work, one toe on a hind foot would rise. Without thinking, she would scratch lines into the dirt, then imitate the researchers tapping their keyboards, clicking her claw against the ground—tap, tap, tap. Soon she had scratched over the entire floor of the habitat.

Far from finding the mess unpleasant, she thought, Yes. That looks much better. Before long, a researcher discovered the marks while cleaning the enclosure. She expected to be dragged onto the examination table at once. Instead, they paid the markings little attention, apparently considering them normal behavior. Normal? Of course it was normal. No one knew better than Dr. Wu which genes he had used to create the hybrids.

"She's started tapping the ground?" Henry smiled.

"Then her brain is developing nicely. The social behavior inherited from the velociraptor genome is beginning to emerge." Indeed, he had included velociraptor DNA in their design.

"Velociraptors were highly intelligent. They lived in groups and hunted cooperatively. Tapping the ground with their toes was one means of communication, as well as an auditory lure for prey. As for scratching the earth, that is mainly territorial marking." Henry was a leading authority on genetics and dinosaur behavior. Whenever he spoke within his field of expertise, the entire laboratory fell silent.

"Perhaps she's ready to make friends," he said.

"Velociraptors use this behavior to call their packmates."

"Then should we house the two Assets together, Doctor?"

"Not yet. The experiments on this one aren't finished." Henry waved the suggestion aside.

"The company needs data on both hybrids, and the new implantable tracker is still under development."

"An implantable tracker?"

"They won't remain in the laboratory forever," Henry said.

"Before they reach adolescence, they'll be released onto the island. The company intends to relaunch Jurassic Park, so it is time we settled on a name for them." A name? A scientific name for the two hybrid dinosaurs...

"Doctor, how large will they grow?"

"Larger than a Tyrannosaurus, I imagine." Henry rubbed his chin.

"We combined DNA from Tyrannosaurus rex, Velociraptor, Giganotosaurus... At maturity, they should weigh around twenty tons." Twenty tons? Perhaps some things truly were ordained. Fate arranged its pieces in interlocking circles. The researchers remembered the savagery of the first Asset and the ruthless killings of the second. In their minds, the faces of the two hatchlings overlapped and merged, weaving themselves into the image of a demon. A chill passed through the room.

"A savage killing machine..." someone murmured.

"Savage... violent..." Another researcher spoke the forbidden name that had surfaced in all their minds at once.

"Indominus rex?" If words possessed power, then at that moment they had unknowingly called the demon by its true name. Unfortunately, most scientists were atheists, and their reason smothered the warning whispered by instinct. Henry smiled in satisfaction.

"That's a good name. We'll use it as the species designation." * Indominus rex—the Untamable King, the Tyrant Emperor—was the name humanity gave her. It also foreshadowed the place she would one day claim at the very summit of the food chain. For now, however, she was neither untamable nor a king. Her name was Asset. At that moment, she was circling the latest prey released into her enclosure, utterly unsure what to do with it. It was a tortoise.

The moment it withdrew into its shell, Asset knew she would probably be going hungry that day.