Regolith

by Brent Reilly

  Extinct birds: the 10 foot tall phorusrhacoids “terror birds” with meter-long beaks that ran 70 kilometers a hour; the 10 foot tall aepyornis “elephant bird” that laid the largest bird egg ever; argentavis, a vulture with a 24 foot wingspan, twice the size of the modern albatross; the 1000 pound B. planei, the largest carnivore on two legs since the dinosaurs; a giant eagle from New Zealand; and the 50 pound flightless dodo bird, so dumb British sailors could famously induce it to jump right into the cooking pot.

  Others: foot-long cockroaches, a eight-foot scorpion; a spider-like, one-foot long bug called megarachne; a dragonfly-like creature two feet long with six foot long wingspans; six foot long millipede-like bugs; 800 pound Goliath groupers; and megalodon sharks three times bigger than great whites.

  In 2003, paleontologists in Montana broke a femur bone of a T-rex to fit it into the helicopter. The lab then discovered collagen, a fiber protein in bones, and soft tissue, such as blood veins, as if it died hours before instead of 65 million years ago. That meant DNA, necessary for cloning and genome scanning.

  In the early 1990s, expeditions sponsored by the American Museum of National History and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences found fossils in the Gobi desert so well preserved they looked like carcasses that died hours before. The Gobi has since turned into the world’s largest dinosaur find, with literally thousands of fossils.

  Similar finds, but of marsupials, were discovered by the Australian Museum in Sydney in the inaccessible region in Riversleigh, Queensland. These finds were so well preserved they also looked like carcasses just a few weeks old, exquisitely preserved in limestone caves by water rich in calcium carbonate. The Australian Museum now had DNA of the largest marsupial lion, wolf, giant rat-kangaroo, and the giant monitor lizard.

  More recently, paleontologists found in Auca Maheuvo, Argentina, thousands of eggs and embryos of titanosaurs so well preserved that one could discern their skin texture. David and his mother themselves worked on soft-tissue from T-rex fossils at the National Dinosaur Monument in Utah and from the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. Every year, more and more extinct animals were found either frozen in ice, preserved in peat bog or limestone, or mummified in salt or oil deposits.

  But the real soft tissue finds were from 1) Alaska’s North Slope, 2) the Liscomb Quarry in the Arctic Circle, and 3) Antarctica. Northern Alaska was actually even farther north then than today, which begs the question of how 35 foot long dinosaurs survived months of freezing temperatures. Troodons, the raptors from Jurassic Park movies, grew twice as large in Alaska than Texas, so some dinosaurs flourished above the Arctic Circle.

  David thought it fascinating how far continents have moved. Antarctica was once connected to Australia, India, and South America, as were Europe and North America, and England with the European coast. North and South America disconnected around the time the dinosaurs perished, then connected again 2.5 million years ago. India was an island after it separated from Madagascar. A shallow sea once separated the western and eastern United States, as well as northern and southern Europe. The Mediterranean Sea was a lake, and the Straits of Gibraltar a giant waterfall for 10,000 years as the Atlantic poured in.

  Ironically, father and son originally fought over dinosaurs. Jackson taught David about deep sea fish farming, hoping he would take over the family business, then David’s mother hooked him on dinosaurs when the movie Jurassic Park came out.

  It was David’s mother who introduced him to a Chilean professor who spent thirty years reverse engineering dinosaurs by the selective breeding of ratites (ostriches, rheas, cassowaries, kiwis, moa, emus, and elephant birds), the oldest birds on Earth. Birds descended from dinosaurs, so the oldest birds were their closest living relatives. What evolved could re-volve.

  The Chilean professor sold David on using the latest gene sequencing machines to accelerate the selective breeding process. David loved the idea, but insisted on going one crucial step farther because reverse engineering dinosaurs using their closest surviving descendants would take too damn long. David had more money than patience.

  No, David would only get involved if they injected dinosaur DNA into the ratites to create a dozen different species at the same time. The resulting transgenic chimeras produced a half-dinosaur, half-ratite hybrid, and injecting dinosaur DNA into each successive generation made them less bird-like and more dinosaur-like. This got them around the chicken-and-the-egg dilemma since you can’t get dinosaurs without dinosaur eggs that turn on and off millions of proteins at specific times in the embryo’s development.

  This not only sometimes worked, but sometimes worked very well. And each generation produced better eggs, and thus more genetically-genuine dinosaurs. In effect, they reversed evolution, turning the world’s oldest birds into the world’s newest dinosaurs. All they needed was several more generations to really wow the world.

  The catch, and there is always a catch, is that they were not cloning dinosaurs at this point, but re-creating them. Cloning is making identical copies, while they were reshuffling the deck to see what hands were dealt. Since the creatures grew to breeding age in just three years, they were now on their fourth generation, which were obviously not birds.

  As a teenager obsessed with dinosaurs, it never crossed his mind to clone anything else. But as a researcher spending his father’s cash and patience, what David wished he did was start with something far easier. He could have started with mammals, like those Japanese geneticists who used an elephant to carry the world’s first cloned mammoth. And there was so much to choose from: ancient bears, lions, dogs, apes, kangaroo-rats, mastodons, beavers, wombats, horses, wolves, armadillos, rhinos, peccaries, rodents, deer, ground sloth, pigs, mammoth, and a four-tusked elephant. Except for the dog-size horse, all of these recreations dwarfed today’s versions, and would be in huge demand by the world’s zoos and animal parks. He could make a fortune auctioning them off to zoos and rich eccentrics around the world.

  What still seemed impossible, for lack of DNA, were megalodon sharks and bus-size lizard-like marine reptiles that co-existed with dinosaurs: armored plagiossaurs, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs with teeth like T-rex.

  Now that would be a shark tank!

  David shivered at the knowledge that his best dinosaurs were floating sedated on two cargo ships just south of New Zealand. The most dinosaur-like were a giant sauropod called Sally, three young theropods, several raptors, and a dozen terror birds. The triceratops-to-be sported horns, but was a few generations away from prime time. An armored, rhino-like dino showed promise, if they could get future versions to grow bigger than cows. Two stegosaurs looked good, but behaved like crazy drug addicts. Then there were his two largest T-rex-like theropods, Cain and Able, one of whom was crazy violent and the other rather dopey and confused.

  His life’s work thus far.

  What he really needed was a lot more money, talent, and technical expertise. Which meant he needed his father. So if David’s father needed leverage over Cooper, then he would help get that leverage. Which is why he was remote-operating the three hidden video cameras in front of their house for the best possible views, all while masturbating furiously.

  9

  “Captain? We have a problem.”

  Wilivardo Ramirez, standing at the bow of his ship like Leo DeCaprio in the movie Titanic, stiffened as if an Antarctic breeze blew up his ass. The anxious tone of the vet’s voice said it all:

  The dinosaurs in his cargo holds were waking up.

  The Pitcairn islands were relatively small, so each predator specie needed its own. Fortunately, the animal caretakers had drugged their food right before their arrival, which sped things up. They, too, wanted to survive. The ostrich-like ratites on Sandy Island, with their huge beaks and clawed feet, were easily bagged and dragged with wheeled carts. Wili had never seen birds so damn big. Bad-ass ostriches, that’s what they looked like.

  On Oeno, even after drugging their food, they still sedated the raptors with da
rts shot from the heloplane, which was difficult in the heavily forested island. The three crews with heavy machine guns almost seemed disappointed they didn’t get to shoot them. Dino-steaks were awesome. But no, the dinosaurs stayed drugged out, drooling like any addict or Jonas Brothers fan. The crane lifted the muzzled and handcuffed raptors, some as tall as a man and twice as long, without incident.

  Instead of taking the ship to the third island, Pitcairn, David simply hauled the theropods in his heloplane and dropped them into the cargo hold. Three small T-rex-looking fuckers. Except they had longer arms than a T-rex and three fingers while the T-rex only had two. And pretty frills on the head. Still, except for paleontologists and dino-nuts, they looked like fucking T-rexes. Only playful like teenager gorillas. Wili never imagined seeing anything like a T-rex, much less three handcuffed to his bulkheads.

  The entire voyage was surreal, from learning it would rain space boulders, to learning that Jackson’s son was a fucking Frankenstein secretly bioengineering monsters. One day Wili believes that dinosaurs died 65 million years ago. The next David Jackson flies in and offers him a million bucks to carry some special cargo. Plus triple wages and a bonus for the crew. And all they had to do was hold some dangerous animals, then return them after the asteroid passes.

  He watched dumbfounded as David Jackson anguished over which ones to save. Wili thought he was going to cry. For example, he decided to save three fourth-generation teenage sisters, but not two third-gen adult theropods. The best ended up in Wili’s three largest cargo holds, while the rest were put into shoebox-shaped amorphous metal shelters and air-lifted to Valley Ridge, the summit of Pitcairn at 1109 feet above sea level. The shelters were strong enough to withstand even huge waves, and heavily secured so they couldn’t be displaced. Whatever farm animals survived the waves were going to wake up tomorrow to find T-rex-like theropods, Jurassic Park-like raptors, and ten feet tall ostrich-like ratite birds looking at them and seeing breakfast.

  The captain did not look forward to going back.

  Once loaded with the extinct animals and thousands of dino-ratite eggs, they sped south at maximum speed to join their sister ship in 6000 meter deep water between New Zealand’s Campbell Island and the Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica. 25,000 Pacific islands would hopefully disrupt any tsunamis coming from the north, particularly the northern and southern islands of New Zealand. Even the Challenger and Campbell underwater plateaus around New Zealand would help. The more landmasses between them and an impact, the more walls the waves would have to flow over.

  The deeper the water, the more a wave would flow under them, rather than over them. And even distance helped, since the water pushed by an impact would spread out and slow down over time. So an impact in the Caribbean would have to travel several thousand nautical miles before it reached them. If a big space rock hit, say, south of Australia, well, then they were fucked.

  As captain, all Wili could do was point the bow of the ship directly at any wave, above or below water. Getting sideswiped would flip his ship over like in the Poseidon movie. The problem was that multiple rocks could start multiple waves, which meant he may need to quickly turn the ship. He couldn’t even use storm anchors because tsunamis would come in the form of a giant swell that his ship needed to float over.

  The best place far north was in the Bering Sea above the line of Aleutian Islands in the Pacific or north of Iceland in the Atlantic. Thousands of ships sought shelter in the huge Hudson Bay in Canada or in the Great Lakes. Most European vessels were trying their luck in the Mediterranean. The Strait of Gibraltar narrowed to only 14 kilometers and was relatively shallow. Whatever volume of water that got through the Strait would disperse as the Mediterranean widened. Asia, however, had few good options. The Chinese were belatedly putting everything afloat either upriver or into the Bohai Gulf near Beijing which is partly protected by the Liaodong and Shandong Peninsulas.

  With his ship flying over the ocean’s surface at maximum speed, the captain welcomed the cold salty air pelting his weathered face. Such a beautiful day. And, possibly, his last.

  The vet coughed impatiently.

  Wili’s current dilemma was they could not sedate the damn beasts forever. It’s not like they could hook up an IV to feed them nutrients while they slept. Sooner or later, their hunger would wake them up. Sure, he put cattle, pigs, and chicken with them so they didn’t eat his crew, but he preferred they stayed unconscious. He only needed another day to return to Pitcairn.

  Except the dinosaurs may not wait that long.

  Wili suddenly lowered his binoculars.

  “There!” he shouted over the freezing wind. He turned around to beam at the vet, who clearly didn’t care. She was the same age as his daughter, but otherwise a different species of female. Probably all those fancy gringo schools. He liked looking at her, however. He couldn’t comprehend how someone could be so fucking sexy without being hot or beautiful. Maybe the bulky clothes were to blame. She just had one of those engaging smiles and delightful personalities that shined through even when she casually handled multi-ton monsters. She treated them like her children, but they sure as hell didn’t look at her like their mother. The granddaughter of the geneticist who hooked David a dozen years ago, she basically grew up with dinosaurs and bad-ass birds. She worked for the Jacksons for as long as he and yet until a few days ago he never knew she existed.

  Not unlike the dinosaurs she raised.

  The only thing that scared her were the health of her “kids”. Not space mountains, falling boulders, giant tsunamis, mad genetic experiments, or even an unknown disease that resembled a cross between bird-flu and swine flu. The vet called it dino-flu. Not very comforting. Not that she needed comforting. Lord knows he tried to comfort her. For a girl who spent a lot of time alone, she certainly didn’t seem lonely. He commanded a crew of twenty and was lonely all the time. No matter what whore slept in his cabin.

  No, according to the other caretakers, the only sex she was interested in was with the theropods sisters. When they met, she told him she was trying to impregnate the dinosaurs, so he volunteered: “I’ve never fucked a dinosaur before. Tie one down and I won’t be a minute!” Wrong answer. Their relationship had not improved since.

  “Look!,” he told her, passing the binoculars.

  “I see a dot.”

  “Your brother is on our sister ship, the Lorena. She’s carrying the herbivores.”

  At least, those not left to die on Henderson, the largest of the five Pitcairn islands. The vet told him that David put the remaining sedated herbivores inside several amorphous hangers near the inland pond so they wouldn’t be displaced by large waves. They were finally making progress on creatures that resembled the bony-plated stegosaurus, neck-frilled protoceratops, armored ankylosaurs, the three horned triceratops, the rhino-like centrosaurus, and the head-butting pachycephalosaurus. And of course the huge sauropods.

  “Captain!” The lovely vet looked pissed. She was used to being taken seriously. Well, she was in charge of raising T-fucking-rexes, so she should be used to being taken seriously. “One of the dinosaurs is missing.”

  “What?” His sweet buzz died like a swatted fly. “But they’re chained to the bulkheads! We have manacles on their arms and legs. You said they can’t even stand up!”

  “One of the eggs hatched. At least one hatched.”

  “Are you sure?” which was a stupid question.

  “Well, we found a lot of egg shells and an assistant cook has been partially eaten. In the kitchen. I’m assuming he was trying to boil the egg and the egg fought back.”

  “Which one did it kill? The Guatemalan, the Costa Rican, or the Nicaraguan?”

  She was a vet, not a detective. And from Chile.

  “I’m guessing the dumb one.”

  Wili raised his fists in rage. That fucking Guatemalan! Sometimes the cheapest workers are the most expensive employees.

  “Please don’t tell me it’s not a fucking T-rex.”

&
nbsp; “Oh, no. It’s probably a raptor. It’s hard to tell from the size, shape, and color of the egg shells since we had to put all the eggs together in the walk-in fridge. We used to have them carefully organized. It could be anything, really.”

  “Maybe it’s a herbivore,” Wili hoped.

  “Oh, no. My brother handles all of the herbivores. Ever since the accident. No, all the eggs I have are from predators.”

  Meaning the few thousand eggs on his ship were all predators-to-be. For the first time, he supported abortion.

  “It’s the size of a chicken. How bad can it be?”

  The vet glared at him. She had seen her kids melt many a macho man, and had no patience for it. Or them.

  “Why don’t you ask the Guatemalan?”

  10

  David and Monique lost their virginities to each other when she was 15 and he just 13. It all started when Monique discovered her dead mother’s diary, and the details of one glorious summer when her mother and David’s father fucked like rabbits. Every sordid detail was described at length, like a good romance novel without the romance. And so when Monique became her mother’s age when she fucked Henry Jackson, Monique decided to repeat the conquest with the son, while they were still virgins. He was so tall, athletic, and good looking that she also needed to act quickly before he lost his virginity to another. And so just as her mother carefully planned the seduction of the father, so too did she plan the seduction of the son. And everything that her mother did, she planned on doing. Although she had no idea how much anal hurt, even with tons of liquor and lubricant. Pot, she found out just in time, helped the most. She even bought nine inch “stripper” high heels, which she called her “anal shoes”.

  And they had been friends and lovers ever since.

  Going from boyfriend to husband to father to widow while still a teenager in a doctorate program was just too much for David when he lost his teenage wife to leukemia. An overwhelmed David was forever grateful to Monique for taking care of him when he needed it the most. She was incredibly busy herself with her modeling career, but she dropped it all without hesitation.