Facility

~*WIP*~


Tern awoke in her cubicle, as she has many times before. She glances at the screen mounted on the inner wall provided near her soft bedding, showing images of greenery dancing in the early light and concrete fencing casting shadows at wide angles. She recognizes these as Outside as they were described to her. She gathers that it's just before breakfast- to be dispensed in a little dish on another interior wall. It's... fine, she supposes, though she'd rather have a fresh meal. But those are only for treats because otherwise they might affect the data. So she was told.

She yawns and stretches before ambling over to the dispenser, hearing the little mechanical whir spring to life as the nutritional pellets fall into the awaiting dish, cutting out just after a certain measured amount. Tern wonders how the machine knows how much to give and if she could convince it to give just a liiiiiitle more. She finishes crunching up her morning meal and takes a few gulps of water to wash it down with before moving into the joined adjacent cube. This one has a wire gate to the rest of a much larger room. And there is a tag on it labeling her as an Asset, with a number she can't quite read from here.

Asset is a term that gets used a lot. Lots of things are called Assets. The trees are Assets. The people are Assets. The room is an Asset. What is done in the room is an Asset. And Tern. Tern is an Asset. Tern hasn't been able to figure out what that really means, when she asks she gets a different answer every time. Something special. Something worth a lot of money. What is money? Something important. The dictionary she's allowed to glance at says something about property and military... What does that mean? Tern is often told that it's unimportant, that she doesn't need to be concerned with it. She likes to contemplate its meaning sometimes while waiting for the scientists to appear and open the gate.

She yawns again and looks about the outer room for any signs of activity. The lights are already on, at least half of them- they are on a timer set to go off and on at certain times of the day to simulate the actual day/night cycle or at least to not disrupt sleep. At the far wall is a row of... computers she believes they're called, some connected to other devices and machines with lights and tubes and wires. There's a faint hum she can hear from them but they otherwise appear idle, as if they too are waiting. Along a connecting wall is a large grey door with a large handle with blinking lights and a small window at an angle Tern cannot see. Nearer in the center there's a large table, kept sparse except for a book and a few loose files. On either wall there's cabinets and boxes that have all sorts of other things; one kept locked with mysterious liquids and powders that has an awful smell, most full of boring paper files and books, and one box on the floor full of colorful things- toys. Tern's favorite. There is also a nearby stand with layered branches for perching near this box, for Tern to exercise. It's fine. Opposite this is another, though much much larger set of cubicles like her own, complete with gate also labeled Asset. The home of her friend Sparrow. It's quiet though with no sounds of movement. It would appear he hasn't awoken yet or he's 'Outside', but Tern supposes he's probably still sleeping as that's what he tends to do and it is rather early. She thinks she can glimpse his tail through his gate but gather's he's not up to something either and sits back with a little huff. BORED.

***

Dr. Anya Asari was caught up in the halls by a colleague, something about a formula that wasn't quite working right. Dr. Jennifer Hannah, a blonde woman who towers over Dr. Asari, works with herbivores, Ornithischians primarily. "....and there is concern over a protein deficiency that appears to have observable detrimental effects in long term testing, they don't seem to be able to synthesize and absorb the proper vitamins they should be able to and that's proving difficult to pin down the cause of. It appears to be manageable with proper diet but the current diet plan isn't quite effective at combating it. Do you have any ideas?"

"That's a little out of my wheelhouse but... Have you tried ... checking the weather?"

"....What?"

"Well, until you can figure out why their bodies aren't making what they need to.... which you may need to go all the way back to the beginning....what was used to fill those holes?" Dr. Asari gestures vaguely ".... Check and make sure there isn't anything weather related, their climate parameters might need adjusting. Temps, lights n such." She says pushing her own glasses up.

"Oh right! Yeah. I honestly hadn't considered that that I was so caught up in the genome side of things." She laughs. "Oh! I guess you're running late huh?" Dr. Hannah looks at her watch. "Tern's gonna be upset, give her a treat for me will you?" She laughs again as she waves and goes back down the hall towards her office. Dr. Asari hurries her pace. Before all this she never really thought about the possibility of being chewed out by a dinosaur before.

***

"I'm sorry Tern, I was talking with Dr. Hannah, I didn't mean to be so-" She's cut off by a squawk as a small toothy creature, clad in black iridescent feathers, seemed both happy to see her and clearly agitated about the time spent waiting- not unlike the look a cat would give if you're late about dinner.

"I know, I know. I said I'm sorry. It happens sometimes." The little creature squawks again in admonishment. "Okay okay. Let's get you out. " Dr. Asari could barely get the latch undone before the feathered creature had already found it's way on the table.

"What do you want to do today Tern?" The question was met by a few fast chirrps and whirrs, while the creature sniffs absently at the paper file. "Oh hold on. Let me turn it on." She grabs a small electronic box that kind of resembles a small wireless radio that had been sitting on a charger on the wall and flicks a switch. "There. Can you say that again? What did you want to do?"

Tern chirped again, this time overlaid with an electronic voice. TREAT.

"Now you know you can't just *get* a treat. You have to earn it."

Tern looked up at the doctor and paused for a moment, then the box questioned in that monotone artificial voice. PUZZLE. TREAT.

"We can do that." The doctor grabbed a clear box shaped device from one of the cabinets and laid out a myriad of smaller shaped prisms on the table. It was a rather simple puzzle. The shaped prisms fit into specific shaped holes in the box. The weight of the prisms add up and then causes an internal lever that releases a small treat to flip open and dispense said treat. It's a little similar to the toys given to human toddlers to teach shapes, with extra food motivation. Tern has solved many of these types of puzzles before. This time the challenge is that there's more prisms than there are holes and that these prisms are also in an uncolored clear plastic, something a little more challenging.

Tern got to work, and Dr. Asari got to taking notes.

***
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There's much to be said about the hubris of man. If we believe we can do it, there's a very good chance it will get done. We had the audacity to bottle lightning and shave off just that much of the omnipotent God's power to use for our own. And we keep doing it again and again and once more. There is little wonder if there will be anything of the omnipotent God's power left for us to shave off as we take more and more for ourselves. Of course there's always the famous line from that one documentary about a failed zoo of all things about not stopping to think if we should.

Necromancy is largely considered a sin, a crime against that omnipotent God. But why should it be, after all in their own books their own prophet The Son committed such acts and surely he can do no wrong. Miracles they said. Why must His other children be punished for it? After all it's not all that difficult once we found the map. Humans love maps. We make them for our towns, our countries, our planets, our stars. Of us, of our neighbors, of our kin, as creatures. We love to know our place in the universe. But could what we're doing even be considered necromancy? It's more like a restoration, a recreation. We're not actually reviving the dead, we're creating living facsimiles of the dead.

The fossil is dead. It has become mineralized. There's nothing useful there, it's just rock. So it's physically impossible to reanimate. So how was any of this possible then? The amber trapped insect method? Like sure. Once you drill into and separate the dna of the mosquito from that of the reptile it fed from... then what? You can copy it. Replicating it thousands on thousands of times building upon itself. But you're still working with a fraction, a shard of this unknown creature. There's holes. You can fill those holes but there's an added layer of difficulty in that. The how. How do you fill the holes if you don't even know what you're building in the first place. It's been described as filling in a jigsaw with pieces from another jigsaw (or several) without the box and hoping the resulting image comes out complete. Except it doesn't does it? It's a mix, some sort of aberration of it's original existence.