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"Stop, stop," sighed Dr. Ellie Sattler, waving her hands impatiently in the air as she paced back and forth. "Alan, you can't sit in front of a Senate select committee and call someone an 'avaricious, megalomaniacal asshole.' Let's back up for a minute."
From the armchair across the room in which he was lounging, Dr. Ian Malcolm grinned and placed his hands behind his head.
"Well, quite bluntly, that's what Lewis Dodgson was," huffed Dr. Alan Grant, crossing his arms.
"I know," said Ellie gently. "I know. But even if it's true, you really can't use language like that during a congressional hearing, not if you want to make a good impression."
"How the hell did he get through the process unscathed then, huh?" snapped Alan, jerking his head in Ian's direction.
"Uh, well," Ian cut in, "if I may come to my own defense here, I may go through my days customarily peppering my speech with a certain scatalogical flair, but. I do have a few people skills for when I have to deal with, uh, people. Which, I actually do, sometimes, as someone who lives in civilization."
Alan glowered at Ian in a manner that strongly suggested he would rather be back at his isolated dig site than cloistered in the same Washington hotel room as the snarky chaotician on the eve of delivering public testimony.
"Ian? Not helpful." When Alan turned his indignant expression towards Ellie, she shot him a warning look and shook her head very slightly. "Okay, let's try this again. 'Dr. Grant, in light of the systemic ethical failures within the chain of command at Biosyn, what measures would you want to see put in place to ensure that unauthorized, catastrophic bioengineering of this nature does not reoccur?'"
"Does Ramsay really think they'll ask me something like that?" sighed Alan impatiently, rubbing his temples.
"Just his hunch, based on how these things usually work," Ellie shrugged. "He'll get the questions about Biosyn's internal corruption and lack of whistleblower-protection mechanisms; I'll get the questions about modern plant ecology and the future of agricultural GMOs in light of recent events; you'll get the questions about scientific ethics and any questions the Senators feels like bringing in about the dinosaurs themselves; and Ian'll get any questions about ecological collapse and extinction."
"Only the sexiest stuff, in short," Ian added.
"Remind me why I didn't let him fall to his death back in Italy?" Alan muttered loudly to Ellie.
"Speaking of Italy and death, did anyone else wonder why the dinosaurs were functional at all, in the middle of a giant icy mountain range?" Ian asked randomly. "I mean, aren't dinosaurs basically, uh, giant lizards? Cold-blooded, and all? Shouldn't they all have just, uh, fallen asleep? Gone into permanent hibernation, something like that?"
"Henry said that Biosyn demanded the dinosaurs be genetically modified so that they could withstand cold weather and still be fully functional," Ellie explained. "In case Jurassic World ever had to transport them to a colder climate."
"So... not exactly pure specimens, then?" Ian clicked a pen open and closed, his eyebrows raised slightly. "A few, uh, historical inaccuracies, as it were? Or was this just more ill-advised showing off? Since, as we all well know, uh, geneticists will be geneticists; and in this case, as in others, they seem to have been so preoccupied with whether or not they could..."
"They didn't stop to think if they should," Ellie and Alan sighed along in chorus.
"Man, I've missed you guys," grinned Ian.
"Well," grunted Alan, "Giganotosaurus was theorized to be homeothermic, even before Jurassic World brought it back, and Henry said that that hypothesis turned out to be correct."
"Meaning...?" Ian spread his hands, as if Alan's response would fly into them if he held them there long enough.
"Semi-warm-blooded," Ellie clarified. "And see, Alan, that's what you can't do tomorrow. They're politicians, not scientists. You have to define your terms clearly."
"Right, right, I know," Alan grimaced.
Ellie placed a sympathetic hand on Alan's shoulder, then stretched her arms above her head.
"All right, you two, we've got fewer than twelve hours until we're on C-SPAN, and I desperately need some coffee to keep going with prep," she announced, pulling out her phone. "Ian, anything?"
"An Iced Toasted Vanilla Oatmilk Shaken Espresso, with no ice and nutmeg sprinkled on top," replied Ian automatically. When Ellie raised her eyebrows at him, he shrugged. "Chaos, Dr. Sattler. Pure chaos."
"And I'll go for a plain old double Americano," Ellie added as she selected their orders. "Alan?"
"Uh." Alan raised and dropped one shoulder. "Just, a coffee?"
"Um, right, see that?" chuckled Ian. "Most modern people get as little from that, as you would get from someone asking you to identify 'just, a dinosaur.'"
"It's coffee," huffed Alan. "How complicated can it really be?"
Ian's eyebrows edged conspicuously upwards as Alan scrolled through the options on Ellie's phone, first scowling, then mouthing, "Nitro?" to himself silently.
"Well, let's see," Ian began. "There are hot drinks and cold drinks; and coffees and other beverages that the general populace has, sheep-like, begun to expect coffee shops to serve; and pour-overs and cold brews and lattes; and this doesn't even begin to cover the marvelous world of teas and tisanes." The chaotician shrugged. "I'm just saying, if you're planning to emerge from the depths of the desert for Ellie's sake, you're gonna have to get used to all of it, at some point."
"Here." Ellie took pity on Alan and scrolled to the top of the menu. "Okay, these are all normal coffees; all you have to do is select the type of bean."
"No," said Alan slowly, glancing across the room at Ian. "I really hate to admit it, but he's right. I'll need to learn all of this, one day, if I'm really gonna, ah, be part of modern civilization, I guess."
Ellie smiled and draped a supportive arm around Alan's shoulders.
"Okay," she said, leaning the side of her head against his. "So, then. Um. Actually, let's go back to what Ian just said, about how you simplify coffee the way some people simplify dinosaurs. What if we have you think about coffee with the complexity with which you think about dinosaurs?"
Alan moved his head back and stared at Ellie in bewilderment.
"I'm serious," she laughed. "Let's make a coffee taxonomy, to help you make sense of all the options. So, like Ian said, you can start at the most basic level of the menu, which is to categorize things into caffeinated drinks or non-caffeinated drinks..."
"Now, see, this is the essence of modernity," Ian riffed, leaning forward in his chair as his friends began categorizing drinks into something akin to kingdoms and phyla and classes. "We live in a world so filled with corporate bloat that we require taxonomies for the very drinks we order. Modern humans in prosperous countries demonstrate status through the ability to recognize and purchase particular types of overpriced coffees that are far fancier than they need to be, consumed in grotesque amounts by workers squandering their lives in a caffeine-fueled frenzy as they grasp desperately for increasingly higher incomes so that they can continue to purchase their fancy beverages. A fiendishly clever cycle of capitalistic self-dependence, one might say, and one that even I, despite my acute self-awareness of the extreme irony, cannot escape entirely." Upon noticing that both Ellie and Alan were ignoring him completely, he added, "And, once again, here I am, speaking to myself. Chaos, indeed."
Alan poked at his selection in Ellie's phone, then handed it back to her with a sigh of grim satisfaction.
"Welcome to the Anthropocene era, Dr. Grant," Ian grinned.
"I'm going to trust you two to behave yourselves while I go downstairs to pick these up," Ellie told them, pushing herself off the edge of the hotel bed and grabbing her purse. "Against my better judgement, I should add; but, by this point in my career, I'm kinda used to going downstairs to reboot things that have lost a perilous amount of energy."
The two men watched as Ellie grabbed a card key off the top of the dresser before she headed out the door of the room. Then Alan sighed and glanced once again at the list of potential questions that Ramsay had drafted.
"Little fun fact I learned, the last time I did this," Ian said, uncrossing his long legs and crossing them again in the other direction. "Apparently, they call this whole congressional hearing-prep process 'murderboarding.' This might indicate that American politicians have a sense of humor; or, paradoxically, the exact opposite."
"Yeah, well, murder might be kinder than televised public humiliation," Alan grunted in reply. "Any useful suggestions?"
"Just tell them the truth," shrugged Ian. "Politely, like Ellie said, but emphatically. And remember, you've survived plenty of encounters with dinosaurs far worse than these ones. You'll be fine out there tomorrow."
One corner of Alan's mouth twitched into a fleeting smile.
"Ah, see? Sometimes, you remember why you didn't let me fall to my death in Italy."
"Sometimes, you stop rambling complete nonsense for long enough to give me reason to remember." Alan paused. "And besides, I owed you. You've gotten a hell of a lot better at luring hungry theropods away from frightened prey, Malcolm."
"Practice makes perfect?" Ian smiled somewhat grimly. "Besides, spearing the thing in the mouth was the only elegant solution, since there wasn't an outhouse in sight."
Alan let out an appreciative huff of laughter. Gallows humor. A monosyllabic threnody to Donald Gennaro, and to Ray Arnold, and to Robert Muldoon. The sort of thing over which Alan could bleakly chuckle in front of only Ellie and Ian, who knew that any levity to be found in the situation was due solely to whatever freakish luck had kept them all alive from Isla Nublar onwards.
"So, uh." Ian glanced towards the hotel room door, a smile flickering about his face. "Things going well between you two? Enough to pull you away from all that incredibly intriguing sand out there in the badlands?"
Alan tried and failed to suppress a smile.
"Yeah," he said simply.
"Hey," Ian grinned, "better three decades late than never, right? Well, I wish you two all the happiness you deserve. I will, however, reserve the right to continue to slip into Dr. Sattler's DMs. And, since I assume you don't know what Twitter is, I promise you that that's actually not nearly as naughty as it sounds. Definitely not trying to make her the next ex-Mrs. Malcolm or anything like that. Just means you haven't seen the last of my eternally charming and opinionated self..."
"Good," Alan heard himself say, and he meant it.
Because when Ellie had reappeared at his dusty dig site, however many weeks ago, it was like Alan had suddenly regained the use of a limb he'd forgotten he'd lost. He'd seen her now and then, of course, in the time since those months after Isla Nublar, when they had clung together in wordless solidarity over the unending terror of their respective nightmares, trembling at things that no one else could understand (the tap of a dog's nails on a tile floor, the slow turning of a door handle, tremors shivering across the surface of a glass of water when large trucks trundled by). Alan hadn't exactly blamed Ellie, when she decided that she had to try to move on from it all, left behind the pick-axes and dynamite in favor of creating the stable family she'd always wanted. He had stayed behind in the trenches, grateful and resentful when they called him back into battle alone, increasingly keeping to the company of skeletal creatures over 65 million years dead, as his faith in humanity slowly dwindled.
Ellie's reappearance, her quiet invitation to return with her to that private war against scientific hubris they'd begun all those years ago, had suddenly made Alan's world feel right again. But it wasn't until they'd reached Biosyn, and Ian Malcolm's sardonic smile had reappeared in Alan's life, that Alan truly felt that everything in his world had clicked back into place. Alan knew acutely that he was all facts and analysis and hard logic; Ellie, by contrast, was the patience and rationality and optimistic planning for the future that Alan needed. They were an excellent team. But the two of them alone lacked the spark of mad genius that only Ian could provide, the type of quirky insouciance that could propel Ellie into explaining coffee orders using taxonomy. Ian, infuriating as he could be, was the one who would always push Alan outside his comfort zone, with Ellie there to make sure he got through it all right. And if they all would have to adapt to the future that awaited them—Alan to the modern world, humanity to the dinosaurs, everything to the changing climate—then Alan knew he'd rather face that evolutionary process with both of the people who meant the most to him.
"I mean," he added to Ian, "we've gotten pretty damn good at surviving together, the three of us. Might as well stick with what's worked well historically. So, if I'm going to put in the effort of rejoining civilization, don't you go and disappear on us after tomorrow. Ellie would be equally furious with you. And thirty years is far too long a time to be out of touch."
Ian grinned at Alan, and Alan quirked his half-smile back, and that was how Ellie found them when she opened the door of the hotel room, balancing their drinks in a coffee carrier in one hand.
"Making any progress, you two?" she asked.
"Something like that." Ian took and raised his cup. "Well, uh, okay, back to the murderboarding in a second, but before that, here's to Alan's joining modernity. And to being able to still outrun a T. rex, even at this later stage in our lives. And to friends. And to life. As well as to somehow finding a way, chaos notwithstanding."
Ellie and Alan raised their own cups in return. And when Alan took a sip of the frothy, sugary iced blended beverage he had ordered on a whim, he was pleasantly surprised to find that he didn't hate it nearly as much as he'd assumed he would.