Abstraction ➳ Owen Grady

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AT 6:30 A.M. the loathsome blaring beeps from the alarm clock startled Ally to the point where she nearly fell off the queen-sized mattress. Shutting off the noisy contraption, she stood from the bed and stretched before setting off for a shower and then a long first day as an official scientist and researcher of Jurassic World.

By 7:30 a.m. she was boarding the monorail before park guests could scramble onto it and pack the seats. Several other employees were within the same railcar, but none of them seemed to care about the unfamiliar face among them. They departed from the monorail at three different stops in what must have been their own humdrum routine.

The fifth stop would be her point of departure. Ally heaved her backpack onto her shoulders and stepped back into the humid Central American climate at the Gyrosphere Valley.

Once, the thought of walking at the side of a six-ton triceratops would have unnerved her, but now, actually doing so it was different, peaceful almost. A hundred feet or so to her left was a heard of grazing hadrosaurids. The duck-billed dinosaurs had stopped and watched her pass them by with a sharp acuity, it took about a minute for them to accept that she wasn't a threat and they continued eating the leaves off low branches of trees.

Ally found a tree with low hanging branches and scaled it until she came to spot where enough leaves were missing and smaller branches were broken. That tree would become her perch and lookout, where some days she sat taking pictures and scribbling down notes in a small yellow book from dawn to dusk, rain or shine.

And so like the dozen others who had their own monotonous routine at 7:30 a.m., Alysanne Sattler became one of them. But even if the morning routine was the same, she rarely saw a repeat of anything in the field and that was the way she liked it, even if it meant that her research would go more slowly than predicted.

After a solid two months of field research, she got a call from Claire, which to say the least, was random and unexpected. Claire had been rather busy as of late, claiming that park attendance was down to record lows and she needed to meet with investors who would support a new attraction to boost revenue again. The lead park manager sounded out of breath on the other end of the line, and it wasn't from excitement, "There are two Apatosaurus eggs that are set to hatch tonight."

"I'll be there," Ally replied and as the sun was lowering itself on the horizon, she finished up a couple more observations and closed the half-filled field notebook before scaling back down her favored tree and venturing back to the nearest monorail loading station.

The Innovation Center was quite dull at the later hour, not yet closed for the day, but most had already fled back to the resort. A hologram of a Velociraptor was running-in-place at the center of the large room. Ally glanced around at the interactive displays and constructed dig sites, they were laughable compared to the real thing.

Claire was standing next to a bronze statue of John Hammond in front of what had fondly been labeled as the creation lab. Her shoulder length red hair was straightened with not even a single bang out of place. A polished grey pencil skirt matched a deep navy blazer and crisp white shirt. Ally didn't understand how she always managed to look so put together.

Clods of caked and dried mud fell off Alysanne's hiking boots with every step. The lab had emptied out for the day, except two people, one of who Ally recognized immediately as Henry Wu. Claire made a gesture to the geneticist and then to her friend. "Ally, I'd like to formally introduce you to Dr. Wu, our chief geneticist."

Ally extended her hand and Wu gave a firm handshake. "I've heard so much about you, Dr. Wu." Good and bad, she added in her head. Ellie never seemed overly fond of him from her stories and Alan, on the other hand, was still impressed that he had found a way to create living dinosaurs, even if they weren't necessarily accurate.

The doctor had a surprised look about him. "Really?" he asked. Ally nodded, "My aunt is Ellie Sattler," she explained and then a smile broke out across Wu's face. Alysanne bore what must have been a family resemblance, for now, he could place who he felt she had looked like.

"I remember her well, she had an impatient air about her, like nothing in life ever happened fast enough." That summed up Ellie with a startling amount of accuracy. Being stuck sixty-five million years ago tended to have that effect on people, nothing ever happened quick enough. Ally tittered, "family gatherings are something else."

When the introductions passed, one of the assistants waved the three of them over to a separate room, the hatchery. "Come, they're just about to hatch." She said. Several pedestals held up different eggs, each belonging to a different species. Among them were Iguanodons, Protoceratops, Hadrosaurus, Apatosauruses, and Compsognathus. Each nest was fitted with a robotic arm that rotated the eggs periodically. Claire quickly excused herself, leaving Ally hovering over the two Apatosaurus eggs like an expecting mother.

✹✹✹

"We meet again," came Owen Grady's announcement as he slid into the empty barstool on her right.

"Owen," she greeted, not looking up from the sloppy field notes that she was typing up into a report. He looked over her shoulder, trying to decipher the terrible penmanship that in some places had smudged and in others where rain had caused the ink to bleed. Despite the intrusion, she continued to type away on her laptop, the lid of which had been covered in stickers from schools, conferences, and national parks.

He shrugged, uninterested. "Looks boring." It was a pretty boring task, but there were worse things than creating a simple report. "Better than writing a dissertation," Ally quipped. She looked down at her lap at the book and glanced back up at the screen, continuing on with a deep sigh. Dr. Alysanne Sattler was exhausted, between staying up till one in the morning and the raging storm that followed to working a full day in the valley.

"You look like you need a drink," Owen said after a few more minutes of nonstop typing on her part, she glared at him, shaking her head, it needed to be finished before midnight and at this rate, her detailed observations were just becoming extraneous. "Write drunk and edit sober, isn't that what they say?" He asked, a crooked grin lighting up his face.

She almost laughed, that had been her motto as an undergrad, but that kind of work ethic didn't get you into graduate programs or get papers published. "It's a tempting proposition but I don't need Claire on my ass again about punctuality." He could get behind that reasoning as most of the time he was late turning in paperwork and that always got him an earful from Claire Dearings. Owen lifted his hands in defeat. "Fine, fine," he said, reaching for the bottle of Corona that had been placed down in front of him, but that seemed to be the final straw for her. Staring at the screen would make her eyes go cross before too much longer and her fingers were stiff, aching even.

"Oh fuck it," Ally finally said, rubbing her eyes before closing down the documents and shutting off the computer. Owen beamed, "I do love it when someone hits 'fuck it,'" he said whilst waving over the bartender. She ordered her usual, an incommunicado with extra whipped cream.

By her third drink, the effects of the alcohol and sleep deprivation were beginning to show in her giddiness and childish excitement when Owen began talking about the four raptors he so fondly referred to as 'his girls.' Soon she confessed her interest in doing her own research with the feared predators of the Cretaceous period. Even Dr. Grant's stories couldn't frighten her away from them.

Owen, remembering that tomorrow started the weekend, finished off his beer and turned on his stool, "you should come to the paddock tomorrow, me and Barry will be there." Ally stood, gathering up her things and nodded, saying she'd be over sometime around lunch, that'd give her time to finish and submit her write up (even though it would now be late), and catch up on lost hours of sleep.