Eyes still glassy, she gazed at her waist. “Where…?”
“It’s just an old home remedy.” He grinned wistfully. “Courtesy of Grandma Caplan.”
Morgan saw the look in his face. “When she’d die?”
“Almost ten years ago.” He got some fresh water and poured it over the wound. Then he patted it dry and rebandaged it.
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
“About what?”
Tony Morgan’s face flashed before his eyes. “More like who.”
Her warm gaze chilled over. She pulled her tee back over the wound and started to stand up. But Caplan grabbed her shoulders and pushed her firmly back into the seat.
“I need to get out there,” she protested.
“Do you want to start bleeding all over again?” He cocked an eyebrow. “I didn’t think so.”
She crossed her arms. Looked away.
Caplan wanted to tell her about Tony, about how the man had really died. And he needed to apologize for freezing up, for not helping Tony escape those vicious creatures. But he knew it wasn’t the right place or the right time. So, he switched gears. “What happened here?” he asked. “Why are you doing all this?”
She snorted like he was some comedian. Not a great comedian. But still, a comedian. “I don’t know where to begin.”
“At the beginning?
“Always the wise ass.” She exhaled. “The Vallerio Forest, as you probably remember, is a rewilding sanctuary. Over the years, James Corbotch and his minions at the Vallerio Foundation have gathered an array of megafauna — elephants, lions, and others — within its boundaries. Those megafauna roam millions of acres as they please, held back only by the exterior fences.”
Caplan recalled his conversation with Corbotch aboard the helicopter. “Go on.”
“Obviously, rewilding isn’t just some lark. It has a purpose. The last 60,000 years saw thirty-three genera of North American megafauna, keystone species, and apex predators go extinct. At least fifteen of those genera — and possibly more — died out some 11,000 years ago. They left behind a severely damaged food chain. To this day, that food chain continues to unravel, driving countless plant and animal species to extinction.”
“You’re talking about the… the…” He snapped his fingers. “… the Holocene extinction.”
“That’s right. Or the sixth extinction, if you prefer. Theoretically, rewilding will put an end to all the deaths. Patch up the top of the food chain and everything else will fall into line. There’s just one problem.” She took a deep breath. “It doesn’t work.”
Caplan arched an eyebrow.
“Thousands of years ago, American mastodons, Columbian mammoths, woolly mammoths, and imperial mammoths roamed North America. Since those species no longer exist, James tried to fill their place with proxies. For example, he used Asian elephants in place of mammoths. He placed the elephants into open grassland, reminiscent of the landscape occupied by mammoths during the Pleistocene epoch. Then he sat back, and waited for the Vallerio to respond. But the soil didn’t regenerate as expected. The forest continued to spread into non-forest areas. The elephants started to die. And so on. So, he went back to the drawing board.”
“And?”
“And he came to a realization. The elephants were the problem. Simply put, they couldn’t fully fill the gap left behind by mammoths. So, that left him with two options.” Gingerly, she touched her waist and winced. “First, he could wait for the situation to reach a new equilibrium. But his inner circle calculated that could take years. And besides, the elephants were dying too quickly to get a foothold. So, he chose the second option.”
“Which was?”
“He’d forget the proxies and instead, use the real deal.”
“I can see one major flaw in that idea.” Caplan grinned. “In case you forgot, mammoths are dead.”
“That’s why he hired me.” She inhaled a mouthful of air. “To bring them back to life.”
Chapter 39
“Come again?” Caplan held a hand to his ear. “Because it sounded like you said you’d brought dead creatures back to life.”
If she heard the incredulity in his voice, she didn’t let on. “It took years of painstaking work to revive saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths. Since then, things have moved very fast.”
Zombie mammoths was Caplan’s first thought followed by: Someone should really make that into a movie. But he knew that wasn’t what she meant. Morgan and her fellow brainiacs hadn’t raised the dead. Instead, they’d breathed new life into long-extinct species.
“Speechless, huh?” Morgan arched an eyebrow. “That’s a first.”
“I just, well… how come you never told me about this?”
“All Research employees are required to sign strict non-disclosures with stiff penalties for non-compliance.” A hint of a smile crossed her lips. “We always wondered how much the rest of you knew about our work. Didn’t you ever wonder why Hatcher employed so many geneticists and biologists?”
“Not really,” he admitted. “So, that creature in the Lab… that was one of yours?”
She nodded. “It’s an Arctodus simus, or short-faced bear. It’s one of the largest mammalian carnivores to ever walk on land and one of our 2-Gen prototypes. The fossil record is a bit sketchy, but we think the species died out about 11,000 years ago.”
“How’d you do it? How’d you bring the dead back to life?”
“It would take hours to explain the entire process for each animal. But here’s the basic gist for how we created our first woolly mammoth. James, acting through the Foundation, sent teams across the globe in search of frozen soft tissue samples. We used those tissues for a massively parallel genomic study to fully sequence the woolly mammoth’s DNA. Afterward, we extracted the egg cell from a female Asian elephant and replaced its nucleus with one we'd created using our sequence.”
“I see,” Caplan replied thoughtfully. “You induced the cell into dividing and then inserted it back into the elephant. That elephant carried the cell to term and — presto chango — you had yourself a baby woolly mammoth.”
“I wish it were that easy. We tried that method on seven separate eggs, but none of the calves survived birth. Someone — I forget who — finally figured out the problem. We were trying to grow a woolly mammoth inside the fetal environment of an Asian elephant. That’s like trying to grow a Neanderthal baby inside a person.”
“Thanks.” Caplan made a face. “That thought should feed my nightmares for at least a month.”
Her eyes flashed.
“Wait a second,” he said slowly. “Did you actually do that? Did you grow little bundles of Neanderthal joy?”
“Not us, no.” She brushed her hair back. “Anyway we needed a womb that could accommodate the needs of a woolly mammoth. And since nature couldn’t provide one for us, we turned to science.”
“You made your own wombs.” A thought occurred to him. “Those silk pod things?”
“We call them ectogenetic incubators. But yes, those are artificial wombs. Each one is specifically designed to meet the needs of a particular species. It took months of extensive research and planning to build them.” She exhaled. “The one you cut open held a Megalonyx jeffersonii, also known as a giant ground sloth. They once ranged over much of North and Central America. They were largely forgotten until Thomas Jefferson used their fossils to support his completeness of nature theory.”