Texas A&M’s Center for Ancient Life was several miles outside town on a flat, lonely stretch of road that seemed to have been built exclusively for it. Everything was new, including the bronze dinosaurs that adorned the entrance. They’d been cast in active pose—a large predator pounced feet-first on even larger prey—and were installed atop an uneven pile of shale symbolic of geologic strata. Quinn followed the signs to the loading area and backed the delivery van slowly toward the dock, which was larger than any he’d ever seen.
A black man with a long handlebar mustache appeared from a side door at the top of a short staircase. Tall and well-built but with the protruding belly of middle age, he was dressed in dark jeans, a black leather vest, and matching boots and cowboy hat.
“Dr. Washington?” Quinn called as he hopped down from the cab.
“Everyone calls me Shep.” The man held out his hand. “Or Shepard, if you prefer. You must be Agent Quinn. Nice to meet you at last.”
He was as tall as Quinn, which was unusual, and he had a firm grip.
“I’m sorry for showing up on short notice like this,” Quinn said.
“No, no. Thanks for looping me in. I signed up, after all.”
Quinn walked toward the back of the van. “Yeah, well, you might change your mind when we see what we brought you.”
“Your message was pretty cryptic. I assume it isn’t an obsolerid.”
“A what?”
“Obsolerid.” He enunciated the word slowly. “It’s the scientific name for any extinct species resurrected by man.”
“In that case, you’re correct. It’s closer to a fossil, actually.”
“Fossil? Do you need a specimen identified?”
“No, we know what species it is.”
“Valued, then? Some of them are worth millions. There’s an international register, but that doesn’t stop the private collectors.”
Clo walked around from the other side of the van, and Quinn introduced her.
“This is my colleague, Officer Galois of the French National Police.”
They shook hands.
Dr. Washington looked up at the van. “So, what have we got?”
“I think it might be easier if we just showed you.”
“In that case, let’s bring it on in,” he said, stepping up the loading dock.
He rapped on the retractable garage door, and someone opened it from the inside. Three young people—graduate students, by their dress and manner—came out to greet them. As they clustered around, Clo unlatched and lifted the rear door of the van, revealing the cargo inside. The giant rectangular box had been covered in canvas and fixed firmly to the floor with orange vinyl straps.
“I don’t suppose the university has anything that can move something like this?” Quinn asked. “It’s very heavy.”
“Believe it or not, we do.” He turned to one of the graduate students. “Simon, why don’t you all get the forklift and pads.”
The kid nodded and left with the others.
“Trust me,” Dr. Washington said, “you don’t know nervous until you’ve tried moving a 3,000-pound triceratops skull worth $35 million without so much as a scratch.”
“I can imagine.”
Quinn unhooked the straps and pulled the long canvas off the box and tossed it in a corner.
Dr. Washington whistled in amazement and leaned close to the glass. “Jesus. Is that . . .”
He stopped, as if he didn’t believe what his eyes were reporting and didn’t want to commit to anything by saying it aloud.
“A body,” Quinn said.
Under the clear plastic that sealed the vacuum, the kneeling body sat motionless just as Quinn and Ezra had found it. The face was violently contorted, and the right hand reached desperately toward the sky, as if for salvation. The left was clutched close to the body.
“You were right,” Dr. Washington said. “It looks completely mineralized.”
“It is. Digested and replaced.”
“Replaced? What could mineralize tissue this quickly?”
“We’re working on that. We were hoping you could help us figure out who this man was.”
Dr. Washington just stared.
“The material is slightly toxic,” Clo explained. “Hence the containment.”
“Is that going to be a problem?” Quinn asked.
Dr. Washington shook his head. “Shouldn’t be. We can configure the emitters to work around any intervening material. Sorry . . . It’s just, I never thought I’d see a fossilized contemporary. It’s . . .” He raised his eyebrows. “Amazing.”
Clo walked to the back to unlatch the last strap. “Our experience suggests the mineralization process is microscopic and retains at least some internal structure.”
“I see. So you wanna peek inside.”
Something on the far side of the open warehouse bellowed loudly. It sounded like an animal, but the noise was unlike any Quinn or Clo had heard before, and both turned in surprise.
“Pachycephalosaur,” Dr. Washington said. “Probably feeding time.”
“Wait. You have live specimens here?”
“Of course. That’s why we built this place. For rehabilitation and study.”
He stepped across to the dock and started into the warehouse. He stopped when he noticed the others weren’t following him.
“Well, come on. May as well give you the dime tour while the kids mount your specimen.”
On the far side of the loading dock was the housing structure, which was utterly massive. Both Quinn and Clo immediately looked to the ceiling.
“Wow . . .”
“Walls are simple aluminum siding,” Dr. Washington explained. “But the joints and struts are all titanium alloy. Our guests can do some damage, but they’re not getting out. Not even the big ones.”
“That’s what they said about Jurassic Park,” Clo breathed.
In a circle around the large open space at the center, which was irregularly dotted in equipment, were a series of iron-barred paddocks, some of which had open doors leading to enclosed pens outside. Hay was scattered everywhere on the floor, both in the paddocks and out.
“Iguanodon,” Dr. Washington said, motioning to the nearest pen. “Just the one now, but we had a female earlier.”
“I don’t suppose you have any carnotaurs?” Quinn asked.
“Carnotaurs?” Dr. Washington turned, surprised. “That’s interesting.”
“Why’s that?”
“Folks on the tour almost universally ask for T-rex. Or raptors.”
“Is that a no?”
“As a matter of fact, we do.” He pointed across the huge space. “A pair of juveniles. Over there. They were captured in Durango last year. Never did find the breeding pair.”
Quinn walked toward the heavily reinforced pen. “Do they try to eat the others?” he asked on the way.
“Not so much. They’re like the lions at the zoo. Keep them fed and they’re content to avoid the cattle prod.”
“How much does feeding them cost?” Clo asked, following Quinn to the heavy fence. She stopped when she saw the impressive striped carnivores clearly through the bars.
One lifted its head.
“Too damed much.” Dr. Washington smiled at her reaction. “Mean looking suckers, aren’t they?”
Clo nodded.
“Only species we know of with those horn-like ridges over their eyes.”
“Spooky.”
“These are just juveniles. They can get up to—”
“Thirty feet,” Quinn interrupted. He was staring at the listless horned predators on the other side. “Yeah. I know.”
Quinn lingered a moment as Clo followed Dr. Washington in a slow arc around the space.
“In the big pen there along the back are our ceratopsids,” he explained. “We can usually keep all the females together, even of different species, but the bulls are a problem, even more than the carnivores.”
Clo stepped forward to study the creatures impressive headwear as Quinn came up behind. After a moment, Dr. Washington turned to him.
“Is it true you all have access to the Shri-class intelligences?” he asked.
Quinn realized at the end of the question that he had cringed a little. He had expected the professor to ask if it was true that Crimes Division wasn’t allowed to carry firearms. The unexpected change in focus was welcome, and he immediately warmed to the man.
“We do,” he said. “Although the bar is pretty high, as you might expect, and we’ve not had occasion to submit a query yet.”
Dr. Washington nodded in silence and Quinn got the sense there was more to the question.
“Why do you ask?”
Washington shrugged. “Call it professional curiosity.”
“Professional?”
“I’m in the business of extinction, Agent Quinn. Everything I touch is millions of years old. Despite common perceptions, dinosaurs are still extinct. The resurrected specimens we capture have all been modified by man, in some cases quite heavily. Extinction is why I got into paleontology. It’s the fate of all, the natural outcome in 99.99% of cases. I can assure you, it’s not every day that an apex predator gets to have a chat with its replacement.”
“You think they’ll replace us?” Clo asked.
“Something like them will. I am as sure of that as I am that all of the Huanansaurus in China are going to die of fungal infection by winter.”
He pointed to the three bird-shaped creatures in an adjacent paddock. Each was partially feathered, prone, and wheezing.
“We got these from Beijing University. We’re not the only ones with an illegal breeding problem. These are collected for their feathers, which are worth a fat penny on the black market.”
The animals seemed to be in horrible pain.
“Jeez . . .” Quinn breathed. “They look like giant turkeys.”
“They’re in the oviraptor family.”
“What’s wrong with them?” Clo asked.
“In the last 65 million years, mammals weren’t the only things evolving. Fungi were as well.” He nodded toward the unfortunate dinosaurs. “These three have a systemic mycelial infection. Oviraptors and their kind are unable to produce an enzyme all extant chordates can that acts to retard fungal growth. We see that kind of thing a lot, actually. Someone in Romania bred Dracorex and managed three complete generations before they started succumbing to a strain of streptococcus that lives harmlessly on every human’s skin. Dracorex looks like a dragon, you see, but it’s a herbivore.”
“Meaning it’s safe to keep around the kids.”
“As safe as any large animal. Naturally, having paid tens of thousands of dollars—or more—for their exotic pet, the owners want to touch it, not knowing that by doing so, they repeatedly expose it to an otherwise mild pathogen for which it has no natural resistance. One cut or bruise and that’s it. It’s no different than what happened to the natives in America and Australia after being exposed to the Eurasian disease pool for the first time. Smallpox and malaria, unknowingly introduced by the Spaniards, wiped out most of the peoples of the New World long before Jamestown. Popular culture likes to imagine dinosaurs are the threat, that they’re the true ‘lords of the earth.’ But they’re not. And neither are we,” he added quickly. “It has always been the Age of Microorganisms. They were the first. They have the shortest lives but the longest memories. They’re more diverse, more adaptable. It only took the nastier ones a single human lifetime to evolve resistance to every known antibiotic. Every life form on this planet lives only by their good graces—save one.”
“AI,” Clo said.
“The machines aren’t going to outlive us because they’re smarter, although I’m sure that doesn’t hurt. They’ll do it because they’ve transcended the limitations of biology. They know it, even if they won’t say.”
Quinn squinted at the large, colorful, turkey-like dinosaurs wheezing painfully in their pen. It was hard to watch.
As Dr. Washington approached the paddock, his face turned sad. “We’re not trying to be cruel by keeping them alive. We know so little about these species, every single case teaches us something new. Even death is a chance to learn: to document the course of illness, to test new treatments, to advance our understanding of their biochemistry. Two of my graduate students are trying to develop veterinary procedures with funding from the USDA. That’s where the center came from. Because of its history in husbandry, A&M has robust large-animal research experience. The Center for Ancient Life was a natural fit. Little outside my expertise, however. When I came up, if you wanted to study dinosaurs, you became a geologist.”
He looked around wistfully at the animals in their pens. “It’s a tragedy what we’re doing to these creatures. Still . . . that doesn’t stop me from coming here every morning, just to sit and look. Something else, aren’t they?”
Quinn nodded. “You can say that again.”
Clo caught a whiff of the Huanansaurus and covered her nose and mouth with the crook of her elbow.
“Can’t say I’m a fan of the smell, though,” Quinn added.
The entire hall reeked. Pure excitement had overwhelmed the stench at first, but the closer they stood to the paddocks, the harder it became to stomach.
Dr. Washington laughed. “You get used to it.” He started walking. “But come on. They should have the specimen mounted soon.”
They exited to a covered walkway that led to the administration building.
“The specimen lab’s all the way on the other side.” Dr. Washington pointed. “While we have a moment, I wanted to formally thank your agency for finally taking the illegal breeding problem seriously.”
“Is that why you registered to be a consultant?” Quinn asked.
Dr. Washington nodded. “It’s been difficult getting anyone, especially the general public, to see past the novelty of dinosaurs to the cruelty and ecological danger of modifying and reintroducing them. All people see are those Brontoburger commercials and the zoo tour they did a few years back.”
“So, you don’t object to the STCA?” Clo asked.
“Well, I wouldn’t say that. The potential for abuse is real,” he said, glancing to them gravely. “But I accept the issue is not as simple as it’s been portrayed.”
“That hasn’t been the typical response from your colleagues in academia.”
Dr. Washington made a disgusted face. “Hypocrites. They don’t object to regulation. They all micromanage every single aspect of their fields. What’s allowed to be studied, what isn’t, and by whom. And they dole out wicked punishment to dissenters. No, what they really resent is someone doing the same to them.”
He held the doors open for the others, who stepped into a modest but well-kept lab spotted in fossils of various size. Quinn saw several stone teeth, a printed 3D replica of a fully articulated leg, and the skull of a lizard approximately the size of a dog’s.
One of the graduate students from earlier was tapping at a computer in the corner.
“It’s running, Dr. Shep,” she said.
Dr. Washington and his guests stopped before a long window that revealed a side chamber lined in heavy concrete slabs. In the middle was a large white device. Two circles holding small emitters spun forward and back as they also slid left and right over the box Quinn and Clo had brought, dousing every inch of it in high-energy particles. Sensitive detectors fixed at regular intervals around the room read the scatter and fed it to an array of servers, which slowly constructed a complete three-dimensional render of the mineralized corpse. Flat screens above the window depicted the progress, which was slow.
“You invented this, right?” Quinn asked.
“I did. Back in the day, the only way to see inside a fossil was to break it down piece by piece. Destroy it, basically. CT scans and MRI machines helped us avoid that, but they were made for living tissue. Entropic resonance spectroscopy gives us excellent detail—around 0.3-0.5 microns per voxel—without destroying the sample.”
Quinn made a face. “I know someone who works for something called the Science Control Agency ought to know this, but . . . micron.”
“Think the width of a bacterium.”
“Gotcha. I’m sure that was in the primer somewhere.”
“That raises an interesting question, actually. How does it work up there?” Dr. Washington looked between Quinn and Clo. “You both strike me as law enforcement.”
“We are. We’re in the process of increasing our bench strength on the rest. It’s kind of a debate right now whether we want Crimes Division to be something closer to traditional law enforcement or something more like the IRS.”
“Technically,” Clo said, “we were supposed to ask to see everyone’s licenses when we first arrived.”
“Hmm.” Dr. Washington scowled. “I would think something with the word crimes in the title would be closer to law enforcement.”
Quinn laughed once. “You and me both.”
Dr. Washington leaned to look at a computer screen at a nearby desk. “We should have the first pass shortly. Just takes a bit. The amount of information we get at full res is staggering, especially for a sample this large. It takes some time to gather and process. Of course . . .” Dr. Washington smiled at Quinn. “If we dialed up one of the Shri machines, they could do it in a few seconds.”
“I’m pretty sure they’re busy plotting our demise.”
Dr. Washington chuckled. “I have to admit, though. This is clever.”
“What is?”
“Using my machine like this. You can conduct a complete virtual autopsy on a mineralized corpse. Everything an ME could do to a real body, you’ll be able to do digitally to this one. Minus the chemical analysis.”
“That was the idea.”
The machine chimed.
“Here we go.”
“Is it done? Already?”
“Not even close. But we have a surface render at the micrometer scale. The rest will take . . .” He looked up at the screens. “Approximately 14 hours.”
“Can you get fingerprints?” Clo asked.
“If they’re still there. Ridges of the human finger are well within the resolution. Let me see if I can isolate the fingertips.”
“And a facial scan,” she added.
“That should be easy enough.” Dr. Washington typed at a keyboard. “Just give me a minute.”
After some brief data conversion, he sent image sets to Clo’s mobile, which had direct secure access to the Crimes Division servers, and she uploaded them.
“That’s strange,” Clo told Quinn a minute later.
“What is?”
“We got a hit off AFIS. But the fingerprint record is restricted.”
“What do you mean? Restricted by who?”
“It doesn’t say. It just says ‘Record Not Available.’ Which means there is one.”
Quinn scowled at his own phone. She was right. That was strange. “What about facial rec?”
“Coming up now.” Clo tapped her screen. “One hit on a corporate website.”
“One?”
“Our guy doesn’t appear to have any social media or networking accounts. Photo is a head shot on an employee page. Posted two years ago, according to the metadata, but it could be older. Caption says Robert Xavier Pilchhorn, PhD.”
“That’s a mouthful.”
“You can use one of the big screens.” Dr. Washington pointed. “Here, I’ll remove the passcode. Hold on.”
Clo connected her device to the screen and cast the photo from the website.
Quinn read the company name and cursed.
“Problem?”
“Quest.”
“Friend of yours?”
“Dr. Q has tried every possible trick to avoid having to license his lab. Forgive me. It’s not a lab. It’s an ‘idea factory.’” He made quotes in the air.
“Dr. Quest? As in the guy on TV?” Dr. Washington asked. “Holistic biohacking and all that?”
“That’s him.”
Quinn studied the head shot. The man on the screen had a thick beard, whereas the man underneath him in the concrete room did not. The man on the screen also looked quite a bit heavier.
“You sure that’s the same guy?” Dr. Washington asked.
“Facial biometrics are an 84% match,” Clo told him. “Not perfect, but nothing else is even close.”
“We’ll need a full rundown,” Quinn said. “Including last known address, if only to rule him out.”
“Already on it.”
“Quest will fight this. We’re gonna have to get Legal involved.”
Quinn’s phone rang, but he didn’t recognize the number, and he slipped it back into this pocket. When he looked up, Dr. Washington was smiling.
“Exciting stuff,” he said.
“Is it?” Quinn asked.
“To me. I’ve never seen a murder investigation. Except on TV.”
“It’s not all that.”
“Still. Keep me in the loop?”
“You signed all the papers and passed the background check. I imagine I can do that.”
“Who’s gonna do the autopsy?”
“I dunno.” Quinn sighed. “That’s tomorrow’s problem.” Then he looked up suddenly. “Why? You know someone?”
Dr. Washington nodded. “I might. Former undergraduate of mine. She washed out of med school, but not for the reasons you might think. She’s brilliant, but she has a . . .” He looked at the ceiling in search of the word. “Condition, I guess you could say.”
“Condition?”
“She has a lot of trouble talking to the living. But she’s an absolute whiz with any kind of organic remains. She’s working a crap job now to make ends meet. I’m sure we could work it where you wouldn’t have to pay unless you were happy with the results.”
Clo’s phone rang, and she stepped to the side to take it.
“What about a lab?”
Dr. Washington raised his hands. “She can use mine. We’re already vetted, right? Just leave the specimen here. We’ll keep it in the vault. We have a thirty-million-dollar triceratops skull in there, among others. Everything’s insured. Climate controlled. I imagine it’ll make the bean counters happy.”
Quinn thought for a moment. Director Ogada wouldn’t like it. That was practically reason enough.
“Alright,” he said. “Send her name along.”
He turned back to the concrete chamber, where the pair of emitters continued to spin and slide, detailing the depths of the mineralized corpse at near-macromolecular scales.
“Boss!” Clo called. She had her phone to her ears. She looked worried. “You need to check your voicemail. It’s about your friend.”