Bringing Back the Dead: Mammoths pt. 4.5- A Side Story

(Author’s note: I got a little to carried away with the fiction preview of my idea, so I decided to make that it’s own blog. This ENTIRE thing is a sci-fi short story hastily written and unedited. If that doesn’t interest you, I’m publishing the final part of my blog, with no fiction, but just as hastily written, tomorrow. Feel free to skip.)

In the distant future.

“Bring specimen number one one eight three out of storage.” The director of G.E.I.P. Corp. issues the order to his head scientist. “The Epicurious Adventure Club has reserved a table, and they have expressed interest in trying several unique dishes from that era.”

“I’ll pull out several of the best specimen.” The head bio-scientist nods. Technically, she is a gastronomical engineer, but bio-scientist sounds more official. “Do we know when they are scheduled?”

“Three years and two days.” The director remarks. “That should give us enough time to make the dishes from scratch.” Us. The way the boss used that word, it was like he would be participating in the process, and cutting through all of the problems to make an accelerated deadline like that happen.

“Of course.” The head scientist nods again. This was just one of the thousands of orders that she would be dealing with in between those deadlines, but a menu ordered ‘from scratch’ was a special occasion. Now she understood why the Director had summoned her. This was a big opportunity to show the value of G.E.I.P. and requests like that were always best made in person. “Do you have any other suggestions of what we should bring out with one one eight three?”

“That’s a better question for the head chef. They will be creating the actual menu. Just make sure that everything is era appropriate, the Epicurious Adventure Club prizes authenticity.” The director suggested, ‘Or you could ask AL.”

She most certainly would not do that. AL had been part of G.E.I.P.’s Specimen preservation system for more than two-hundred years. Recently management had been pushing the staff to expand it’s capabilities. But there was no way that the head chef would let an artificial intelligence without taste buds advise him on a menu. Besides, management really was just looking for a way to cut more people out of the system, so they wouldn’t have to pay them. AI should stay out of the kitchen. “AL doesn’t eat. It can edit genes all day, but let the chef take care of the palette.”

It hadn’t been that long ago when there had still been a 50% human workplace requirement for all gene-editing. But now AL was doing almost all of that work itself. If they gave it too much responsability, everyone might soon be out of a job.

So, her next stop was a walk down the long hallway and into the Head Chef’s office. He was busy supervising several different line cooks, in several of their various restaurants spread across the globe, all at the same time, but when she tapped on his shoulder, he pulled off his Immersion headset, and let his avatar take over. “What is it?” He asked gruffly. “I need to make sure that the other cooks know how to prepare the chickenosaurs you bred for me last week.”

The head scientist recalled that job. They were the new signature dish for all of G.E.I.P.’s Dev-Cuisine locations. She’d remapped a few genomes, and edited chicken DNA to resemble a Mesozoic dinosaur as much as possible. She’d hoped to see the fruits of their labor born out as a pet, or a new zoo animal, but because chickenosaurs were being added as a common menu item, management had only given her the budged for a single enclosed habitat for them to run free, and that was justified by marketing for advertising purposes. Most of the chickenosaurs being served by DEV-Cuisine would go directly from cell to artificial egg and then to maturation pod. They would end up on the kitchen table without having every woken up.

However a request ‘from scratch’ was an entirely different proposition. The Epicurious Adventures Club, and any organization or person with enough money could fund an entire habitat, allowing her to revive a past organism, and a surrounding cast of flora and fauna, so that they could live relatively natural lives until it was time for them to become a high prices meal. If the meal and habitat were a success, they might even be voted in to a sustainable life cycle and provided an ecosystem, allowing the organisms involved to walk the planet again, with a certain number being culled for designer dishes, for as long as people were willing to pay to sustain it.

The head scientists new that some of the previous ‘scratch’ menus had made it to the main tables that were incredibly popular and had resulted with the respective organism getting an ecosystems on Earth, where they could roam the planet again after their untimely extinction. It was a joint effort with the zoos too. If an animal tasted good enough, or was cool enough to hold attention, than they might get to keep roaming the world for decades, or even centuries. (although the latter was much more likely with marine ecosystems, as there was less competition for land space.) The bottlenose dolphins, and hammer head sharks, and the resulting sub tropical coral ecosystem had been going nearly since G.E.I.P.’s inception although a lot of that was owed to the sucess of Dev-Cuisines Sushi shops.

And that’s what G.E.I.P. Corp was all about. Gastronomical Ecological International Preservation Corps. There had never been enough money in preserving the animals humans did have, much less the money needed to bring back the “failures.” At least, not until the technology made it possible to eat them. But now, with peoples apatite for extinct creatures, (and plants) growing, cultured by Dev-Cuisine’s line of restauraunts, and a little bit of help from zoos, and hunting societies, they were able to fund the storage and genetic creation of previously extinct Animals.

Make people interested, give them something to eat, and an animal once gone coule be brought back to life. The head chef shared the bio-scientists goal: Bring back as many animals as possible. And so he was on board with her game plan. “Woolly Mammoth, huh? We need to make sure that this doesn’t go as badly as the attempt to bring back the northern white rhino.” People had complained about the white rhino dishes, and after a short stent in a single habitat, the menu had never been widely circulated, and the animal had been shelved, until more people may become interested in it. “The three year timeframe should help. It would be best if you can get me a generic sample of the meat as soon as possible, so I can start to understand the flavor profile, and the moment you are able to get me an adult, I would appreciate it.”

“They will be Juvenile, and pod raised, but I can get you one in a year.” The head scientist notes. “But that won’t give you the environmental factors.”

The head chef waved dismissively. “They are grazers, right? Meaning they eat grass. Just get the botanist to send me a list of the flora you end up preparing for them and I can compensate.” He shrugged. “It cant be that much different from the elephant can it?” The African Elephant dishes, and subsequently their ecosystem on earth, had been going strong for the last three decades. in a small portion of the Sahara which had been converted into grassland.

“Actually, they are genetically more similar to Asian elephants.” The head scientist replied. “I’ll probably be using them for my base genome.” Asian elephants hadn’t been in circulation for at least 150 years, according to the records, and the Mammoth’s similarity to them was likely to keep them out of circulation for the foreseeable future, but sacrifices like that had to be made to get any of the organisms in G.E.I.P’s databank of 5,000 and counting extinct organisms. “I hope that they don’t become so popular that they push the African Elephants out of circulation.”

'“I’ll make certain that the dishes I make for the mammoths have a distinctive flavor profile, and while the fur will make butchering more problematic, send a sample over to the fashion department. It might be an unexpected boon. And don’t forget the hunters.” The head chef suggested. The Head Scientist had already been planning to contact the hunters, but the fashion department was a useful idea. “Now, lets talk about what else to bring back with them.”

Despite her best wishes, they ended up using AL’s help to narrow down the list of possible plants and animals to bring back alongside the mammoth from the Pleistocene. After the mistake with the rhinos, Elasmotherium was out. Besides, an early attempt ad de-evolving woolly rhinos had shown that they were incredibly tricky to incubate in artificial wombs. The technology had gotten better since then, (that attempt had been made back when DE-evolution companies were hemorrhaging money,) But the risk and effort just weren’t worth it, except for the signature Dish.

But the Head scientist walked out of the Head Chef’s office with a list of suitable organisms, some which would have to be complete redesigns, and a few which could get by with only minor editing. There were even a few which could be taken directly from DNA samples.

There was a databank of more than five thousand recently extinct species (and counting) which G.E.I.P.’s head scientist was responsible for curating. That included all of the animals for which they had complete genomes. Some of those organisms had never been brought back to life. Others, like the white rhino, or the jaguar, had only enjoyed a few stints of freedom before their genes were shelved. (mostly due to taste issues.) The vast majority of those which had been de-extincted were mammals, birds, or fish. The reptiles amphibians and insects which made the cut only ever made it if an entire ecosystem was brought back.

Which is why the Mammoth order was so exciting. If the Epicurious Adventure Club reviewed the Mammoth cuisine highly enough, then it might become a popular enough dish to warrant an ecosystem. Then they could bring a whole world of animals, and plants off of the shelves, enough to sustain several herds.

It was time to get to work. “Ok. Al, let’s bring back the mammoth. Again.”

For recently extinct Animals like the Dolphin, or the Gorilla, it was as simple as bringing back the animal using cloning.

But there was an entire other database of organisms. The hybrids. These were the creatures which had never existed alongside humans for their intact DNA to be collected. For these organisms a suitable base genome had to be selected and then edited based upon the desired traits of the extinct organism. for the Chickenosaurs, this had meant editing Chicken DNA so that they more resembled Dinosaurs.

But for Mammoths there was a more elegant sollution. They had the entire sequence of mammoth DNA, and using that, AL could edit thier samples of Asian Elephant DNA, and create an Asian Elephant which more resembled a Woolly Mammoth. Then it was just a matter of working on the other animals, coordinating with the botany department, and then setting up a habitat.

From there, they would individualize the mammoth using various sequences, cultivate embryos for forty to fifty of the animals from cell to Birth, and raise enough for a full heard in the artificial wombs. Specimen number 118. The last time Woolly Mammoths had been cloned, in an attempt to save an environment long lost. She would use it as a frame of reference, she would do better. Back then they had edited roughly one hundred and eighteen genetic sequences. She aimed to edit hundreds of thousands.

With any luck, Woolly Mammoths would be walking the earth soon, and if they tasted alright, they might be on Earth for a long long time.