“Ready?” he asked and checked his watch.
Three minutes before midnight.
Perfect.
Jori nodded, bouncing a bit on the balls of his feet.
Cutter hauled open the door to another world—the next world.
He led his son onto the landing outside the hatch. Overhead a light misty drizzle fell out of the sky and down into the depths of the massive sinkhole before him. Their overlook jutted fifteen feet below the lip of that cylindrical hole. A corkscrewing wide ledge ran along the sinkhole’s inside walls, skimming from the plateau summit all the way to the base of the tepui. The hole was massive, three hundred meters across, but it was still a third smaller than its cousin, the giant sinkhole at the Sarisariñama tepui in Venezuela.
Still, this smaller confined ecosystem served his purposes beautifully.
The hole acted as an island within an island.
It was these same tepuis that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write The Lost World, populating these islands among the clouds with the living remnants of a prehistoric past, a violent world of dinosaurs and pterodactyls. To Cutter, the reality was more thrilling than any Victorian fantasy. For him, each tabletop was a Galápagos in the sky, an evolutionary pressure cooker, where each species struggled to survive in unique ways.
He stepped to the wall, festooned with a riotous growth of vegetation, dripping with dampness, soaked in mists. He gently pointed to a small flower with white petals. Its tendril-like leaves were covered by tiny stalks, each tipped with a glistening sticky drop.
“Can you name this one, Jori?”
He sighed. “That’s easy, Papa. That’s a sundew. Dro . . . dro . . .”
Cutter smiled and finished for the boy. “Drosera.”
He nodded vigorously. “They catch ants and bugs and eat them.”
“That’s right.”
Such plants were the foot soldiers in an evolutionary war up here, evolving distinctive survival strategies to compensate for the lack of nutrients and scarce soil found atop these tepuis, becoming carnivorous in order to live. And it wasn’t just sundews, but also bladderworts, pitcher plants, even some bromeliad species had developed a taste for insects on this island in the sky.
“Nature is the ultimate innovator,” he mumbled.
But sometimes nature needs a hand.
As midnight struck, a soft phosphorescence bloomed along the walls, flowing from the top toward the dark bottom.
Jori clapped his hands. This is what his son had come to see.
Cutter had engineered the glowing gene of a jellyfish into the DNA of a ubiquitous species of orchid that grew upon this tepui, including instilling a circadian rhythm to its glow cycle. Besides the pure beauty of it, the design offered illumination at night for the workers who tended to this unnatural garden.
Not that my creations need much nurturing at this point.
“Look, Papa! A frog!”
Jori went to touch the black-skinned amphibian as it clung to a vine.
“No, no . . .” Cutter warned and pulled the boy’s hand back.
He could understand his son mistaking this sinkhole denizen for its common cousin up top, a frog unique to this tepui. The native species found above, Oreophrynella, could not hop or swim, but had developed opposable toes for a better grip on the slippery rock surfaces.
But the specimen here was not native.
“Remember,” Cutter warned his son, “down here, we must be careful.”
This frog had a potent neurotoxin engineered into the glandular structure of its skin. He had culled the sequence of genes from the Australian stonefish, the most venomous species in the world. One touch and a painful death would soon follow.
The frog had few enemies—at least in the natural world.
Disturbed by their voices, it skittered farther up the vine. The motion drew the attention of another predator. From under a leaf, diaphanous wings spread to the width of an open hand. The leaf fluttered free of its hold on the stem, revealing its clever bit of mimicry.
It was part of the Phylliidae family, sometimes called walking leaves.
Only this creation didn’t walk.
Its wings fluttered through the mists, its tiny legs scrabbling at the air as it fell silently toward the frog.
“Papa, stop it!” Jori must have sensed what was about to happen. His son had a boyish affinity for frogs. He even kept a large terrarium in his bedroom, holding a collection of several species.
Jori moved to swat at the gently fluttering wings, but Cutter caught his wrist—not that the modified insect would do anything worse than sting the boy, but here was another teachable moment.
“Jori, what did we learn about the Law of the Jungle, about prey and predator? What’s that called?”
He hung his head and mumbled to his toes. “Survival of the fittest.”
He smiled and gave his son’s hair a tussle. “Good boy.”
Landing on the frog’s back, the insect sank its sharp legs through the toxic skin and began to feed. As son and father watched, those pale outstretched wings slowly turned rosy with fresh blood.
“It’s pretty,” Jori said.
No, it’s nature.
Beauty was simply another way Mother Nature survived, whether it be the sweet-smelling flower that drew the bee, or the wings of a butterfly that confused a hunter. All of the natural world had one goal: to survive, to pass its genes on to the next generation.
Cutter stepped to the edge of the landing and stared down that mile-long drop to the bottom. Every tens of meters the ecosystem changed. Near the top of the sinkhole, it was clammy and cold; down at the bottom, hot and tropical. The gradient in between allowed for the creation of test zones, unique ecological niches, to challenge his works in progress. Each level was color coded, running from lighter shades above to darker below, each separated by biological and physical barriers.
Black was the deepest and most deadly.
Even under the glow of the orchids, he could barely make out the dark humid jungle that grew along the bottom, its loam enriched by the detritus that rained down from above. That patch of isolated rain forest made a perfect hothouse furnace—where his greatest creations took shelter, growing stronger, learning to survive on their own.
The native tribes of this region feared these mist-shrouded tepuis, claiming dangerous spirits lurked here.
How true that was now.
Only these new spirits were his creations, designed for what was to come. He stood at the edge, looking across the expanse of the sinkhole.
Here was a new Galápagos for a new world.
One beyond the tyranny of humankind.
THIRD
HELLSCAPE