(Male, mid 40’s) I was a member of a scientific field study, the first to go into an area over run with a strange new creature. This area was an old abandoned amusement park. As part of the initial de-briefing, we were shown a home movie. In the movie, a family is riding on a train that traverses a large open plain. Roaming across this plain are life-size dinosaur robots that are skeletal dinosaurs. They move quite gracefully and effortlessly and are programmed to have interactions like real creatures. It’s sort of like a marionette show with self-directed marionettes that are larger than a house. There are also other kinds of animals living on this plain to make it feel like a real place — jackals, gorillas, etc. Then all of a sudden in this movie, a high school kid jumps out of the train and goes running out into the plain. The lead investigator stops the home movie and comments: He was never seen again. And furthermore, he was her brother. He had been depressed and her family had gone to this amusement park during spring break to cheer him up. This was nine years ago. The scandal had forced the park to close but it had been impossible to close down the plains fully because the dinosaur robots ran on solar powered batteries and they still roamed the area. Plus the living creatures were supported by a self-sustaining ecosphere. We were being sent in to see what was up, I think half expecting that everything would be dead.
…Roaming across this plain are life-size dinosaur robots that are skeletal dinosaurs…
Clearly that wasn’t the case. There were about a half dozen of us and none of us carried weapons, just scientific gear, pens, paper… I was a little concerned that we watched the de-briefing movie while we were inside the plain because it gave the resident creatures plenty of time to come over and size us up. There were jackals roaming around behind us but everyone’s attention was drawn to these gorillas. There were four or five of them. Some had heads with albino hair on bodies of chocolate brown and some that the exactly reversed pattern. For some reason we took that to mean they had been assembled from parts, that these were mechanical. Perhaps the boy who ran away had assembled them. The creatures kept getting closer and closer to the team and everyone just kept standing around taking notes. Finally a gorilla stood up and hammered on his chest threateningly. We realized the danger we were in and started running off down the track toward the amusement park’s offices.