Acacius Blum was a real estate developer for Iuxta-C. More appropriately, he was the real estate developer for Iuxta-C; he’d bought the entire planet.
Mr. Blum purchased the prospect of owning the world when he was just a young man with a dream in his eye and a trillion in the bank. Now, he was an old man, with bigger dreams in cloudier eyes and a few quadrillion dollars more.
The seismology team had done a good job of optimizing conditions for producing water from Iuxta-C’s upper mantle. A few quakes later, and the world had oceans. More importantly for Acacius Blum, it had three continents: Acacia, Blumia, and Continental McLincolnface. (Never let an internet poll name your dream.)
Ten years after that, some of the plants had finally started to take. Now, the time was right for the Arks.
Ark A was sent to Acacia, which was to be the new home for dinosaurs and other long extinct creatures. Thousands of embryos were created from recovered DNA and what the geneticists determined to be “best guesses.” It would be at least 25 years before we’d get to see a full-sized t-rex; Acacius Blum hoped to live so long.
Ark B was sent to Blumia, the home of Chimeras. 1,004 scientists each competed to create their own version of the perfect animal to be unleashed upon the continent. A new food chain was to determine the eventual “winner.”
Ark C was a prison ship to be sent to Continental McLincolnface.