Covenant: Exodus

Chapter 3

The curtain behind Erich began to pull back as the crowd held their collective breath. The scene before them was nothing that they could have imagined, and even though the entire exhibit was designed by Erich, he still found himself in awe when he viewed it. The sheer size of the display was astonishing. The Ark stood directly in the center of the exhibit, and Erich knew that no one sitting in the audience was ready for what they were about to see. He still remembered the shock that he felt when he first laid eyes on the Ark in the jungle eighteen months ago.

For hundreds of years, artists have shown their interpretation of the Ark, and many of them were the same. The Ark had been imagined as a large barge-like boat, not meant for sailing but meant for surviving. Nothing could have prepared the people for the beauty of the real thing. The Ark was styled more like the great Phoenician boats of ancient history with high prows, a tall mast, and oars that were worked from inside the vessel. The prow of the boat was the elaborately carved head of a lion apparently in mid-roar. The Ark stood over one hundred feet tall, twelve hundred feet long and two hundred eighty feet wide in its center, narrowing at the prow and stern. There was surprisingly little damage done to the Ark, save the main mast which had snapped, and a gaping hole in the starboard side that was apparently from its final collision when it came to rest.

It was obvious that this boat had been meant to sail, to navigate, not just to float around at the mercy of the wind and tides. The Ark Exhibit, which the members of the construction team had taken to calling the boat house, was almost as impressive as the Ark itself. When the Ark had been discovered, Erich and Jim had gone through several different ideas for how they would display the boat. Jim's first thought was to try and move the Ark to the U.S. and build a huge attraction there; although, once he saw the Ark he knew this would never work. After a few calls to the Indonesian government, and a few well-placed bribes, Jim had obtained the rights to purchase the land that the Ark sat on and began to look into ways to build domes around the existing structures and rainforest. This proved to be a difficult and expensive task, made even more expensive by Jim's insistence that the project was completed within two years from start to finish, and by Erich's insistence that great care was taken when constructing the domes to do as little damage to the surrounding rainforest as possible.

The entire project was done in the utmost secrecy, Jim using his newfound connections in the government to restrict the airspace over the construction site so the media was kept at bay. He also hired locals to guard the perimeter of the site twenty-four hours a day, which was quite a job because the site stretched over three miles on each side. By the time the project was done, the museum was housed in a series of connected glass domes. When viewed from above it was quite a breathtaking site, the largest of the domes, the one the Ark was housed in, sat in the center of six smaller domes. At its peak the "boat house" was over six hundred feet tall, the other exhibits were smaller, although each was still well over two hundred feet tall to accommodate the emergent trees breaking through the canopy of the forest. It was, in all effect, a giant terrarium, the largest indoor living rainforest ever created.

Lining the walkways, where people would now be able to get a closer look at the Ark were animal exhibits that housed everything from jaguars to giraffes. The exhibits were specifically designed to minimize the appearance of fences and to maximize the natural elements of the animals' homes. The hole in the Ark allowed visitors a look inside the massive structure, which was separated into four floors. The bottom two were divided into what appeared to be stables, animal housing and storage, and the top two floors were comprised of living quarters for the crew of the boat. There were animatronic animals living in the stables, appearing to eat and walk around their small enclosures. Through the hole, it was evident that there were several living quarters, although Erich knew there to be over three hundred separate living quarters on the Ark, each capable of housing four people comfortably.