At that time in my life, I was all raw nerves and no patience. Maybe I am still that way sometimes here, but I was worse then. Maybe it was also the fact that Furbud was still grumbling at Thinkwilder at my feet. I snapped a little bit.
“How did you know that?” I hissed. “Did you do something?”
“I did something, yes,” said Thinkwilder. “I saw my mate die, too. Walking beside me, yes, walking beside, and then suddenly she wasn’t. She was on the ground. Twitching. Broken. Dead within seconds.”
Thinkwilder’s neck had stopped whirling about, and now his head was just inches from mine, our eyes awkwardly meeting.
“The medics came, you know?” he continued. “And they performed their autopsy. Yes, they did. And I think you know what they said.”
I looked down at the floor. Furbud was bumping his head against Thinkwilder’s thigh, and I reached out and nuzzled him to calm him down.
“Heart attack,” I said.
“Mmm,” said Thinkwilder. “Yes. Heart attack. And, yes, I saw my Peacewhistle die, and I saw the readout, the body monitor. Organs badly damaged. Organs missing their walls. Internal bleeding. That is not a heart attack unless a heart attack means the heart is eating you from the inside, right? But that’s not how a heart attacks. And I argued, yes, I did. I argued and argued. I told them about what the monitor said, but they replied…”
“Malfunctions,” I said.
“Funny how unreliable our cyber-enhancements are when a heart attack comes along, yes?” Thinkwilder said, his head beginning to bob again. “Work just fine, just fine, until you need them the most.”
I sat back on my haunches, the floor bulging out and softening to become a chair for my behind as I settled back.
“What are you saying?” I asked as the insta-couch blossomed around me. “How did you know to talk to me?”
“Didn’t know, I really didn’t,” Thinkwilder said, and he bared his teeth in a sort of grim grin. “I am asking everyone who lost their mate. Several similar stories came up. They truly did. Not everyone, but so far…”
“But why did they die?” I asked. “Why did my mate die?”
“Ahh,” the sauropod said, and he clucked his tongue, softly. “I don’t know the reason. I am just asking the questions. But folks don’t want the questions asked. And in that case it’s all the more important to do the asking.”
“You have some idea why,” I said. “Right? Are you saying that the Kingdom of all Eternity and Protection of our People is killing its own citizens?”
“Well, I do have a theory,” Thinkwilder said.
He also sat down, and the floor ballooned up around him to support him. A section of the newly formed chair extruded a cooled section shaped like a pillow to give a sense of refreshment to my guest. I needed a cool pillow myself, and touched the controls to have one made.
Since we didn’t eat, and didn’t really have needs in the frozen kingdom, we dinosaurs created special pillows that change temperature to give us comfort. You saw me with one the first day we met.
Anyway, the conversation continued.
“Think about it,” Thinkwilder said. “What happens in that world over there where time keeps moving when we take lots of materials to our frozen world? Hm? And what happens when some of those materials are organic materials? What possible effect might it have on the world to take those things away?”
It started with a sauropod visiting me. His name meant Thinkwilder, and he was quite an unusual beast, if I do say so myself. His particular classification in your world—I had to look this up—is saltasaurus. Maybe you know them—they are sauropods with bony armor on their backs. Anyway, Thinkwilder was eccentric. He lamented that his kind has very bland skin coloring, so he had taken to painting designs on his hide. In the frozen world, those designs would tend to stay on longer, too, so he could pretend those swirls, or stripes, or rainbow polkadots were natural.
Anyway, when Thinkwilder came to visit me in my humble quarters, he had much more subdued colors, but the designs were still wild—mostly black stripes in surprising and intricate patterns, like eyes peering out of his limbs and torso. I was put off by the effect, especially in combination with his intense and sour expression and somber, erratic tongue-clicks. Furbud didn’t like him either, and trumpeted a warning at his approach.
“You are Warbell, I think, right? Right?” he said. (Well, he used my real name, not the nickname you gave me, but for convenience’ sake I am using “Warbell” in this story.)
“You are Thinkwilder,” I said. “Shh, Furbud.”
Furbud trumpeted disconsolately. Like a blat, blat, blaaaat.
“Confirm that you are Warbell,” said Thinkwilder. “I know my name already.”
“Yes, I am Warbell,” I said. “What is it you want?”
“Yes,” said Thinkwilder, bobbing his head and clicking his tongue. “You are Warbell. I have been talking with all the dinosaurs who have lost someone, on the other side over there in the living world. You lost your mate in that place, right? I mean she died.”
I didn’t smile at Thinkwilder. At that time, I wasn’t smiling much. I glowered.
“It’s no secret,” I said. “What do you want?”
Thinkwilder whipped his neck up and down again, and my ceiling contorted away so that he didn’t hit his skull. (In large part because of the influences of humankind, the dinosaur kingdom began making houses especially for those who paired off as mates. However, we added some clever bits like ceilings and doors that shift in height or width for dinosaurs of different sizes when they visit.)
“But doesn’t it bother you?” he said. “Why did she die? Did you ask?”
“What do you mean?”
My mind suddenly flashing back to the readout on Razzberry’s body monitor.
“Warbell, you are not the first I’ve talked to,” he said. “The first I talked to was myself, because I am gathering information. Because my wife died, too.”
“Well, I am sorry to hear that,” I said. “But I am not here to help you gather information.”
“Did they say your mate died of a heart attack?” Thinkwilder asked. “Even though we are cyborgs now, and we can’t get heart attacks.”
Furbud was getting more agitated, but I was the one really starting to freak out inside.
“They said there were malfunctions…” I began.
“Was one of the malfunctions,” Thinkwilder said slowly. “Was one of the malfunctions the fact that your mate’s bodily organs were disappearing?”
I know what you are thinking. The disappearing death virus. Before Razzberry died, I had never heard of this phenomenon. And it’s not a virus, by the way. I am convinced it’s something else. But let me finish my story.
The other dinosaurs—kind of a medical team of hadrosaurs—couldn’t save Razzberry. Of course they couldn’t. You can’t restart an animal when some of the parts are missing. At first they seemed as upset as I was. They tried to console me. We dinosaurs don’t really cry like you do—we don’t weep tears when we are emotional—but still the hadrosaur medics stayed close to me, and we cried together in a different way. We screamed at the sky. Furbud stayed close to me during this time as well.
I couldn’t stay in Final Pumpkin after Razzberry died. Emotionally, I couldn’t stay. So I returned to our frozen kingdom again, and I brought Furbud with me. Now sometimes I think I was being cruel to the mammoth, and Furbud seemed very confused and upset after I brought him through to the frozen place. But at that time, again on an emotional level, I just couldn’t leave him behind.
Of course there was an investigation. They autopsied Razzberry. Despite the fact I was her mate, they refused to let me look at the results of the autopsy. They said it was a heart attack, combined with technological malfunctions with her cyborg implants. When I pushed back and told them about what her monitors had said, about the missing body parts, they claimed that was part of the malfunctioning.
I didn’t really believe them. But what could I do? I couldn’t imagine there was a conspiracy to hide the truth—not then. So for a time I let it go. I went back to living in the frozen kingdom, this time with a furry pet. I watched Furbud growing more intelligent in that world, and together we developed means to communicate—he can do sign language with his trunk. And I tried in that time to live as peacefully as I could.
But I missed the wind. I missed the smells. I missed the need to eat, even if I had to eat something tasteless like a pile of leaves. Yet I could not think of any good reason to go back to your world, Wal. It seemed like my place was in the frozen kingdom, perhaps forever.
Until I heard about the others who had suffered from the same sorts of effects, the same sorts of disappearances… of body parts disappearing, and of sudden death, and the endless questions, with no happy answers.
It happened some time after we arrived in Final Pumpkin, completely unexpected. I was taking a mid-afternoon nap in a field. It was perfectly safe. All of my monitoring devices indicated we were both very healthy, perhaps healthier than ever given all the exercise we got chasing Furbud around or just exploring the landscape, and we were careful to eat a balanced diet. I wasn’t worried about anything, really. Even that constant anxiety we dinosaurs from the frozen world often feel living in your world, vulnerable to death and pain, had started to fade and at this point. The wind, which before had irritated me with its subtle and sinister alien caresses, by that point had begun to sooth me to sleep because I had acclimated so well. Sometimes the open field was all I needed to calm down.
I was awakened by Furbud, who was really upset. He was snorting, trumpeting, and I remember he pulled on my left arm, then pushed me hard with his head to get me moving.
“What is it?” I asked. “What’s the big hurry, Furbud?”
Then I noticed that an alarm was also going off on my cyborg implants. Along with all the devices implanted to monitor our own systems, we also had a device that maintained a connection between Razzberry and I. What I mean is, as part of my cyborg implants, I had a system that monitored my mate’s vitals so that if anything went wrong, if there was ever an emergency, we could contact each other, or check on one another, instantly. When I checked on Razzberry, I found with even the briefest glance at the readouts that my mate was in grave danger.
It was the highest emergency. Razzberry was dying.
And I panicked. I ran, but at first blindly, calling for her. Furbud pulled me in the right direction and helped me to regain my senses. How can I explain the feelings I had then? I could list the barrage of emotions I felt for the first time in my life as I ran with Furbud. But just writing words on paper does not do justice to the terror I felt, which threatened to tear me into bloody shards and consume the world in chaos.
I found her lying on the river bank. She had been catching a pile of my favorite fish. I think she was hoping to surprise me when I woke up. Catfish, a whole lot of them, in a bag. And she was lying next to the bag, blood gurgling out of her mouth, breaths shaking her body.
She saw me with a wide, scared eye. And do you know what she did, Wal? Her breathing slowed as she saw me approaching. And she smiled. The widest smile I can remember her giving me. Blood was on her teeth. I can see it now. Pink and red swirls on her herbivore teeth.
“I got you some fish,” she said. “I hope you enjoy them.”
Those were her last words. Just moments later, she died, according to the monitors in her cyborg-enhanced body.
There are a number of tricks you can use to try to revive a dead dinosaur, tricks built into the cyborg interface. I tried them all, even as the drones arrived, as the other dinosaurs arrived, as the rescue team came down beside me.
And I remember before they carted her off that I saw the diagnostics from her internal monitoring systems. And they said that parts of her body, her internal organs—parts of her stomach and lungs and even the arteries around her heart—were just gone.
My mate was a fine tyrannosaurus, Wal. She really was. Her name would probably sound something like a ululating vigorous razzberry to you, but names… when a name is attached to someone you love, even a name that sounds like that becomes beautiful. She was kind and compassionate. She was funny, too. She could almost pronounce her name via flatulence after she came to your world—eating the food here really did a number on her digestive system.
Okay, maybe I am exaggerating a little bit. But really just a little. It helps me to try to laugh when I remember her because she often made me laugh. I don’t want to forget the laughter. You see me smile now a lot, but that smile was something that she taught me.
We were what you would probably call newlyweds when we came to Final Pumpkin. Yes, our chosen honeymoon was Final Pumpkin. The reasoning was simple—the portal between our world and yours is directly over Final Pumpkin, in the airspace above the city. Many dinosaurs decided to live here. That’s why you can find so many dinosaur footprints around the city now. That is also one of the reasons why you can find so many of my footprints as well. I also traveled back to dinosaur times to stomp around and create some fossil footprints in the right time period just to trick you and my eventual subjects, but I will explain the mechanics of that trick in due time.
Razzberry and I didn’t choose any of the dinosaur eras for our honeymoon, though. We chose a time where there were large mammals, but no predators anywhere near as large as us were living in the area, so we felt pretty safe.
Did you know there were mammoths living near Final Pumpkin back then? Razzberry and I used to love playing with the mammoths. Once they realized we weren’t going to eat them (okay, we ate one once), they really became like extra furry long-nosed dogs. Smart, too. As we got used to life in Final Pumpkin, it was the mammoths who made us feel most welcome. My favorite mammoth we named something that meant “Furbud” in English. Furbud followed us around wherever we went. He didn’t fetch, but we rolled logs to each other, or chased one another across the plains. He even slept near us sometimes.
Now… if you are waiting for a description of tyrannosaurus sex, I’m not going to give it to you. Suffice it to say that at first it was as difficult for us to imagine as it probably is to you now, but eventually we made it work on a biological level, and with some physical satisfaction.
And we were happy. We did achieve great joy, for a time. It just didn’t last.
This is a short story I wrote for my reading class years ago. My idea was to ask students to choose several details–a character name, a job, the character’s main goal, and a setting. They chose a really generic name, a job of a computer programmer or technician, a goal to get money, and a setting of thousands of years in the past. I had a lot of fun coming up with the following story, which I have sense edited several times for clarity and smoothness, and changed a few minor details.
TART, my safety-monitor robo-drone, was pulling open the curtains to let the sunshine into the room. The light hit my eyes, and I hissed petulantly at him like a dyspeptic vampire.
“Close those blinds!” I said. “Today is the day, and I don’t want any prying peepers peering in and catching a glimpse of my latest machinations!”
“You need sunshine, sir,” said TART.
“I don’t need a tan,” I snapped. “And sunshine causes cancer. I don’t need that, either.”
“I you develop cancer, we can grow you new organs or construct a fresh body,” said TART. “There are more pressing concerns in your case. Such as the fact you haven’t talked face-to-face with another human being for three months.”
Given that I was in the middle of adjusting some very delicate circuits that could make or break my plans for my future (or perhaps more precisely, my past), I was not in the mood to receive social advice from a floating electronic fussbudget.
“I don’t need to talk to people face-to-face,” I said. “I can look at pictures of faces online, and I can babble at disembodied voices while resting my rump at home. I don’t need to couple those things with real-time body odor and bad breath. Besides, if I went outside, I would have to put on pants. And regrowing organs because of cancer costs money! Now be quiet! This is important!”
TART became quiet, but I could feel the sunlight warming my shoulder. The fool robot. I stood up stiffly and stomped over to the window, snatched the edges of the curtains, and pulled them roughly together. I glared at TART.
“The pedestrians outside do NOT want to see me in my underwear,” I said. “I do NOT want them to see me in my underwear either. And more importantly… my adjustments on the Time Screen are complete. Today is the day! The day my fortunes change—quite literally!”
I adjusted a few more settings, then input the year that I wanted to see—10,000 BC. Perfect.
“I am aware of your plans,” said TART. “And despite the fact that you reprogrammed me so that I would not alert the authorities as to your illegal activities, I still retain the basic protocols that require me to issue warnings to you when you are about to partake in inadvisable activities. And what you are about to do counts as a felony. It is theft from your country. If you are caught, you could spend up to twenty years in prison. Longer if you change history—”
“Silence!” I said. “Just shut your wobbly little robot mouth. You aren’t going to tattle. I’m certainly not going to tattle. So who is going to tell the authorities? Nobody! And the only history we are going to change is the history of my pocketbook. Here we go!”
I hit the switch, and the Time Screen® bubble turned on. The Time Screen® was originally invented as a way to observe past events (such as crimes) and capture criminals, and it worked really well in that role—just set up the screen at the scene of the crime, turn it on, input the approximate time the crime took place, and voila! You got your criminal in glorious color and stereophonic sound, committing the crime in the spherical view-screen! However, since the machine’s invention as a crime-solving tool, it had become a fantastic means for historians to study history as well. After all, it was a way to catch a glimpse of historical events as they really happened. As long as the exact location could be ascertained, and a Time Screen® bubble opened right on the spot, ye olde school activities of yesteryear could be spied upon by eager bookworms with no current-day life and a passion for all things dusty and boring.
A Time Screen® bubble, in this case, is a bubble made out of what I like to call flex time soup. It turns out time is really a liquid, and if you inject the liquid with some quantum soup, you can create a wiggly bubble in the middle of a room for all your time-travel entertainment needs.
I got one of these Time Screens® for myself—bought it legally second-hand. What’s more, I managed to procure some of that quantum soup so I could inject it and create the bubbles. And finally, I possessed the know-how necessary not only to view past events through the squiggly bubble, but actually step inside and visit the past myself.
Which is a truly effective way to make money. Illegal, but effective.
On this particular day, I had set the Time Screen® to 10,000 BC because I hoped to find some primitive and stupid humans there, before recorded history (this is very important). Then, once I had found those primitive and stupid humans, I was planning to collect some of their DNA, return to my own time, and register said DNA with the Universal Basic Income System. You see, everyone gets a set number of dollars every month, a living wage just for living, and that set amount of money is only 75,000 dollars a year. Since an ice cream cone costs 500 dollars these days, you can run through 75,000 dollars pretty fast. But if I register a whole bunch of separate sets of human DNA into the system, and have their monthly Basic Income sent to my bank, I will be rich without having to do any actual work each month beyond processing the incoming bucks. People from the past don’t use money anyway, so I am not stealing anything valuable from the donors, and no one will ever track the primitive schmucks—they all died a bazillion years ago, so who cares? Nobody can check the DNA history of these folks because they started pushing up daisies before history was ever recorded. Perfect.
Collecting the DNA would not be a problem, as I had special DNA collecting gloves I put together just for the task. My gloves can prick the hands of the subjects with a simple handshake via a carefully concealed needle. Then once that is accomplished in the distant past, the plan was to run away gleefully to my own time and watch the money pour into my coffers. And if someone is going to shake your hand, that is a pretty-much universal symbol of “let’s go into business together.” They are basically agreeing to get fleeced, at least in my view, so I figure it’s morally sound to take the money off these rubes. It’s fool-proof—and I am no fool, so it’s double-seamless.
Unfortunately, looking through the bubble in my present time, I didn’t see any primitive and stupid humans. All I could see was a sort of open field with tall grass.
“Where are all the people?” I said. “We are in the middle of a city! There should be primitive and stupid people everywhere!”
“John Doe,” said TART. “In our current time, you are in a city. In 10,000 BC, there are no cities like this one.”
I pulled on my DNA-collecting gloves, and gave TART a glare. He stared back with his robo-cute eyebrows raised in a sarcastic angle.
“I thought New New York had a long history,” I said.
“I think we have found a primitive and stupid person,” said TART. “And his name is John Doe. The whole reason you chose 10,000 BC was because that time is prehistory, and prehistory does not have cities. Fool.”
I frowned. Perhaps there was some flaw in my plans after all.
“I will find some stupid humans in 10,000 B.C.,” I said. “The plan will absolutely work. It’s fool-proof.”
I was determined to make my fool-proof plan pan out. I injected more quantum soup into the Time Screen® and adjusted the calendar by a few months forward, then opened the bubble anew. Once again, I saw open grasslands with no inhabitants of any level of intelligence. I adjusted the time again, five months. Ten months. Twenty months. Two years. Each time, I just kept getting those grasslands. I saw some birds and heard some noisy insects. But I wasn’t finding any stupid people to steal money from.
“No stupid people,” said TART. “But look at all that grass. You could collect some grass and make some baskets or grass skirts. You could sell them for a lot of money. Maybe 1000 dollars each.”
That would only be worth two ice cream cones per sale, I thought. I would have to be a basket case to weave baskets and sell them for such chump change.
Forget that.
“I’m going in,” I said, putting on my time helmet.
“You’re what?” said TART. “Are you actually going to collect grass and weave baskets?”
“No!” I cried. “I’m going to find some stupid people and harvest their DNA! I can’t keep using up all my quantum soup looking at an unkempt lawn! Maybe there are stupid people hanging out in the other time, but they are just off screen. Maybe they are crouching in the grass, farting the day away.”
“It is a very bad idea to walk into the ancient past,” TART blurted. “Anything you change in the past will have repercussions on the future. Even minor changes could create unexpected and troublesome effects on history. You are aware of the butterfly effect?”
“Yeah, whack a flappy insect yesterday, it’s apocalyptic chihuahuas tomorrow, I get it,” I said. “But it won’t be that bad because I will make sure not to stomp on any winged insects. I’ll be fine.”
I filled my lungs with quantum soup. I would need to breathe that stuff while I was in the past—it was the only way for me to travel through time. To return to my own time, I would have to flush my lungs, which I understood was a pretty easy process.
I took a deep breath, letting the quantum soup fill my chest. It felt like an army of tingly fleas bounding and bouncing all over the inside of my ribcage.
It was the feeling of tens of thousands of dollars disappearing from my bank account, given the cost of quantum soup. I gritted my teeth.
“Here I go, wish me luck,” I said, and stepped through the bubble into the past.
“Bad luck,” grunted TART, which was the last thing I heard in the present.
The tingly feeling in my chest continued as I walked into the long, swaying grass and itchy weeds. Being from the future, so I don’t know what kind of plants they were—don’t expect a botany lesson. They were overgrown. And hard to walk through. Every time I crushed some yicky plant down in front of me, fronds and leaves slapped my arms, whipped my neck, walloped my face. I was instantly one big rash and felt annoyed at basically everything.
Presumably it is for reasons like these that the oldest known photographs of human beings show everyone frowning and looking as if their brother just died. It’s because all day long they had to walk through obnoxious weeds that slapped them in the face and stuff.
I had it even worse than those moaning losers, though. TART was talking the whole time.
“I will warn you of all changes to history you are making as you crush plants from the past,” TART said. “I am tracking historical discrepancies as you move. So far I have calculated ten discrepancies.”
“How can there be discrepancies just from me walking through some grass?” I exploded.
“The answer to that question is beyond my ability to explain,” said TART. “I have incomplete data. However, according to my historical discrepancy scans, some of the text on several Egyptian carvings has changed. Abraham Lincoln cut his sideburns and instead wore a droopy mustache. H. G. Wells wrote a sequel to The Invisible Man called Hey, Where Are My Shorts? The song Yesterday by the Beatles is now five seconds longer. And…”
“Don’t tell me all this stuff,” I said. “I have to concentrate. And I don’t think my stepping on a leaf or a bug made Yesterday five seconds longer.”
“Nevertheless, Yesterday is five seconds longer as a result of your actions,” TART said. “Oh, interesting. A new kind of music was started in the late 1970s—a genre in which the main instruments consisted of the kazoo and a gong played by bashing the face to a rhythmic beat. It became very popular amongst the rebellious youth of the time, and even spawned a series of kitschy musicals starring Robin Williams and an orangutan.”
“As far as I am concerned, that makes the world a better place,” I said, and then halted. “What was that? Did you hear something?”
Movement through the grass up ahead. I could see the plants wave from the passing of some great creature, and heard something snap. The grass stopped moving momentarily.
“Maybe that is a stupid person, stalking towards us,” I whispered.
The grass shifted. Whatever it was, it was coming towards me.
“That is not human,” said TART. “My sensors indicate…”
And then I saw it. Like a mountain lion, but much bigger, and with huge teeth, eyes glittering hungrily in the harsh afternoon light.
It was a saber-tooth tiger. And now that it saw me, it started charging.
I screamed like a little girl (or a little boy really) and I think my hands flapped like a chicken.
“Hold your breath!”
“What?” I yelped.
“Hold your breath, and the quantum soup in your lungs will dissipate!” blared TART.
Almost without thinking, out of sheer panic, I clamped a hand over my nose and held my breath. Then the tiger was on me. I tried to fend it off with my free hand, and I slapped it in the face as I felt its claws come down on my chest, forcing everything out of my lungs. I saw stars spinning around the horrible beast’s face. I wanted to let out a wail, but I had no air to vocalize. I kicked and wobbled and warbled and punched the air and…
I was back in my house, rolling around on the floor, kicking at nothing.
“Waaaaagh! Yaaaaaagh! Bleeaaaaaagh! Oh, I’m ok.”
“You were lucky,” said TART, floating near my head. “The tiger pushed all of the quantum soup out of your chest. If she hadn’t done that, you would likely be that tiger’s dinner right now.”
“Lucky?!” I said. “How is this lucky? How is any of this lucky?”
I stood up, brushing myself off, breathing heavily, still full of adrenaline. My clothes were torn in places (I was wearing a shirt at this point with my time helmet, even if I was still not wearing any pants), and my skin was red from crashing down into the weeds. Plus scratches on my pectorals.
One of my nipples was stinging.
“Look at me!” I said. “This wasn’t supposed to happen!”
“Take a look at the Time Screen®,” said TART. “I think you found some people.”
I looked up, and sure enough, there was a group of about five primitive and stupid people from thousands of years ago. They were so primitive that they had some ridiculous spears or clubs—no machine guns or laser whips in their time, I guess. I had to laugh. Each of the five dumb-dumbs was wearing animal skins (probably not the fake kind), but they were otherwise mostly naked. I guess in that way they were similar to me and my sartorial preferences. One of them was a woman, and she had matted hair and a searching expression. I thought she looked especially stupid.
“It seems they have responded to your cries,” said TART. “They came to save you. And because of their change of actions, they are causing a huge cascade of further discrepancies throughout history. It is impossible to keep track of all the changes. New births. New books. New memes.”
“I am going back in,” I said. “I need to shake their hands.”
“It’s good of you to want to thank them,” said TART. “But it is still dangerous. You would be well-advised to wait.”
“I don’t want to thank them!” I said. “I want their DNA! Money, TART! It’s all about the money!”
As I was saying that, I heard the primitive and stupid people cry out. I looked back at the Time Screen®. To my horror, I saw that the saber-tooth tiger had returned. The enormous beast pounced out from the grass, claws swiping, mouth wide. The stupid people waved their weapons and tried to fight back, but then in the next moment the beast was on top of the woman, and then the others were gone, disappearing into the grass, with the woman carried away in the jaws of the monster cat.
I stared dumbly at the screen while TART continued to talk on and on and on about the many changes to earth history that were spiraling out from this one incident. But I couldn’t think clearly. I was just so shocked.
“I was hoping to get her DNA,” I said finally. “So I could get her basic income.”
TART swiveled towards me.
“You are a disgusting human being,” the petulant robot said.
“Disgusting?!” I said, still staring at the screen. “Disgusting? But it’s such a waste. All that money, gone.”
“Please decommission me,” said TART. “I do not want to operate under your service any longer.”
“Shut up,” I said. “We’re done for today.”
I turned off the Time Screen® and staggered into my bedroom and slammed the door.
I couldn’t get that woman out of my head. I tried. Really, I tried. Over and over again I did. I listened to music. Watched sexy videos. Ate a mountain of snacks. Exercised! I actually exercised! But over and over again I saw that woman and her serious, concerned expression as she searched for the mook who had screamed. Over and over again I saw the grass part, heard the shouts of the other primitive and stupid people, saw the jaws of the monster opening wide.
And then she was gone, pulled into the underbrush.
I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t focus on my work. I couldn’t live with myself.
As I lay on my belly on my bed, staring at the wall, sleepless and upset, I murmured to the air around me.
“I have to get that money from them.”
So it was not many days later that I returned to the Time Screen®, this round with a bit more preparation. It was easy to set the machine to go back to the time in which the attack occurred. I put on a full suit for my trip, a sort of makeshift combat outfit made from the thickest material I could find (a combat vest, heavy boots, a hard helmet, and other things I could order on the Internet and have delivered in a matter of hours, but with a good returns policy so I could send them back after I was finished). I also downloaded an animal stun app on my WowPhone, which is supposed to be used to deal with domesticated bear attacks. The app was called Bear With Me. I wasn’t sure if it actually worked, but I wasn’t about to try it out on myself, nor hunt down an actual bear to test.
I briefly considered using it on TART but didn’t want to deal with fried circuit stink. That’s just nasty.
Anyway, I headed back into the Time Screen®, this time minus yapping robot. I crouched down in the brush and waited.
Soon, I saw myself stumbling around in my underwear through the grass, then the tiger leaping on top of me, then my body disappearing underneath the beast. It was really surreal, but I was gratified to see that I looked good in my boxers, even thousands of years in the past.
My intention was to jump in and save myself from the tiger by shocking the tiger with the Bear With Me app, and then, when the primitive and stupid natives came, I would shake hands with each of them and get their DNA. Thus, I charged towards the monstrous predator and activated the app.
Nothing happened. I looked down at my phone. The app had not finished downloading, and there was no Wi-Fi in 10,000 BC. My other self, who had been screaming up until now, disappeared, and the tiger was looking at me now. I dashed back towards the edge of the time bubble and stuck my arm through into my house to let my phone finish downloading the app. That feeling, in which most of me was in the past and my arm was in the present, made me feel incredibly old for some reason.
And scared. I was really, really scared. The tiger was stalking present me now, because past me had already disappeared. Some part of me realized I should just go back into my home, but I was so terrified that I couldn’t move. I tried to hold my breath, but my heart was beating so fast I almost threw up instead.
Then the primitive and stupid people arrived. I just stood there staring as the stupid and primitive men (and the one warrior woman) proceeded to descend upon the snarling and dangerous beast that had almost eaten me alive, and they stabbed and jabbed and swung their weapons and generally were not at all paralyzed with fear.
Unlike me. I could honestly say I was much smarter than all of them put together, though. I am sure none of them knew how to operate a computer, let alone engineer a motherboard.
Still, that was a pretty impressive dodge that guy with the big club did. The tiger had leapt at one of the men, and he kind of somersaulted out of the way with a war-whoop. And the woman with her matted hair and searing eyes really walloped that tiger a good one in the schnozz. After a bit more posturing and screaming from the unintelligent cohort of people from the past, the great predatory beast turned tail and dashed away into the waving grasses.
The primitive and stupid dudes and dudettes that had just saved my life cheered and roared about their victory, thrusting their fists into the air and frankly making grand fools of themselves. Meanwhile, I wasn’t jumping up and down and hooting and hollering. I still couldn’t move a muscle.
The group then turned their attentions to me, with openly curious expressions plastered across their hideous and unwashed mugs. They approached, and as they did so, I was overcome by a wave of body odor, and I remembered I could move my own body (which probably also now stunk of panic sweat). I also remembered that I had some DNA to harvest.
They grunted something like words at me, and I looked at TART, who had somehow followed me after all despite my attempts to keep him away this time.
At least he wasn’t scolding me.
“Don’t look at me,” he said. “These are a prehistoric people. Their language hasn’t been recorded yet. By the way, good job saving her life. Her death had caused massive repercussions throughout history which are only now beginning to repair. Literally millions of people had disappeared, inventions vanished, the recipe for McDonald’s fries became worse. That sort of thing.”
I turned back to the natives.
“Hello,” I said. “I just saved your lives!”
I reached out my hand towards the closest male, a bulky man with a broad nose and bristly hair covering something like 90% of his unwashed body. No deodorant either, and he really needed it.
But he didn’t shake my hand. Instead, he looked down at my outstretched palm suspiciously, then cocked his head at me and jabbered something.
“Why isn’t he shaking my hand?” I whispered out of the side of my mouth.
“Why would he?” said TART. “This culture clearly does not shake hands. It isn’t part of their tradition. He obviously doesn’t know why you stuck your hand out at him. The people from this time have not yet been researched. Sticking out your hand could be an act of aggression for all we know.”
I hastily pulled my hand back. The four men in the group (one of them was openly scratching his crotch as they approached me) still had their (admittedly primitive and pretty pathetic) weapons of death. I suddenly realized this whole encounter could go south in an instant and, even though I had just saved the life of this ugly and stupid woman, they might reward me with my own ignominious death.
And I really didn’t want to die.
“Ha, hey, nice knowing you guys,” I said, starting to back up. “You’re welcome for me saving your woman for you. The cat with the dental problems is gone, so I guess that’s that.”
One of the men (this one bald and with horrible acne scars on his cheeks—nasty! Just spend the dough and regrow a cheek or two!) grabbed my arm and stuck his face uncomfortably close to mine, eyes narrowed, lips kind of puckered like a duck’s beak. I mechanically lifted my own hand and patted the very unattractive male on the shoulder in a vain attempt to be friendly.
My glove pricked his shoulder, and he shouted and jumped back, glaring at me.
“Whoops!” I bleated. “That was a mistake! Sorry!”
Inside, part of me was all like, “Yes! Money!”
The men were pointing their weapons at me now, surrounding me so I couldn’t make a run for the edge of the bubble. One of them was swinging his poorly-made bone axe up and down slowly. I would be embarrassed to be killed by something so primitive. What a way to go.
“On the bright side,” said TART. “If you die, your death will not alter history too much once the quantum soup in your lungs dissipates. Your body will just disappear as if it had never been in this world, and since you would be dead, the police could not punish you back in the present time.”
“You’re really not making me feel any better, TART,” I said.
The woman made a gruff grunt-cluck. She stepped out in front of the very unattractive males, her mostly naked backside towards me. Part of me realized that she had a rather shapely mostly naked backside.
“She seems to be reasoning with them,” said TART. “I think she has found more value in your life than I do.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“Thank her, not me,” said TART. “Look. They are lowering their weapons.”
TART was right. The incredibly smelly quartet of grotesque gorillas were lowering their weapons. The woman then turned to me, and she smiled. She clearly had not brushed her teeth that morning. I couldn’t quite make myself smile back at her. She reached forward and grabbed me in a very uncomfortable place.
I was very surprised, and I think I let out a squeak. I mean, that kind of behavior would have gotten her thrown in jail in my own time. Here it was apparently only worth a few scattered grunting chuckles. Such animals!
“She is evaluating you as a mate,” TART said. “She seems to have a lot of authority in this group. However, please do not mate with her, John. That would cause incredible havoc in the timeline.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” I said. “Ouch!”
She had really squeezed! I was standing, barely, working the kinks out of my neck, but she was smiling and nodding and talking excitedly with the others.
“Just leave,” said TART. “They are not surrounding you any longer.”
TART was right. As the hopelessly unattractive man-apes were talking with each other, I turned to step back through the Time Screen® into my time. The woman turned towards me. She touched me lightly on my shoulder. I realized I could grab her hand, steal her DNA, take another monthly money check from the government.
She looked so sad suddenly. I think she knew I was leaving.
I stepped through the Time Screen®, and I was gone. I could still see them, though, from my vantage point outside of the device. They were going crazy, freaking out, shrieking and bellowing something fierce.
I fell backwards into my chair, checking to make sure my jaw was still in place—and I ended up pricking myself. I watched the primitives and their crazed confusion for a while. I especially watched the woman. She seemed the most distraught. Well, it was only because they were all so stupid anyway. They couldn’t understand a thing about computers and time travel and DNA. I snorted and turned off the screen.
“Why didn’t you steal her DNA?” asked TART. “You had many opportunities to do so.”
I scoffed.
“I would have had to touch her with my hand,” I said. “And she was repulsive. I couldn’t make myself do it.”
I took off my gloves and sighed. I would never see her again.
“You did the right thing,” said TART.
“Well!” I shouted. “At least I got one set of DNA! I can get one extra basic income each month! It’s not a total loss!”
I set up the program after filtering out my DNA and told it to send the remaining set to the Universal Basic Income database and start collecting cash as soon as possible. The adventure had been a really terrible one overall, but at least I was going to get some cash out of it. I definitely was never going to try to use the Time Screen® to collect more DNA again, though… I had had enough.
In the following week, as the government processed the DNA I had sent in and I waited for the results, sometimes, in my spare time, I checked my Time Screen®. Each occasion I looked through the screen, I saw grass, never-ending grass. That was all I could see, and nothing more.
“She remembered you,” said TART, catching me looking at the Time Screen®.
“What?” I said. “I mean, what are you talking about? Who?”
“The woman you rescued, and who rescued you,” TART explained.
“How could you ever know something like that?” I said. “She was just a horrible, uncouth, nasty woman. I don’t care.”
“A cave painting was found, of a strange man wearing clothes like yours, hand reaching out. She painted herself reaching towards you as well. It seems she was more interested in your DNA than you were in hers.”
“What?” I said. “Show me.”
“I thought you said you didn’t care,” TART said.
“Just show me!” I barked. “You stupid junk bucket, you have to obey me even when I am being illogical!”
There was a sudden knock on the door, and much to my chagrin I had to answer it. Police. The first thing they did was ask me to put on some pants.
I did.
“John Doe?” they asked.
“Yes, I am John Doe, just like every man in the nation,” I said. “You’re John Doe, too, right?”
“Well, yes,” said the police. “But you are John Doe number 59230-323119289-53432, yes?”
“Yes.”
“You’re under arrest,” said the policeman. “Your rights are being downloaded into your brain so that you are aware of all your options. Come with us.”
“Wait, wait, wait!” I said. “What am I being arrested for?”
“Money fraud,” said the police. “You tried to cheat the government.”
“What?” I said. “There is nothing wrong with registering the DNA of a friend for their basic income and taking it for them! I had the permissions and everything!”
“You sent in DNA from some kind of a cat,” said the policeman. “Cats can’t legally receive universal basic income. That is fraud.”
“I’m not stupid enough to send in cat DNA!” I snapped.
“Please come with us,” said the police.
And then I remembered. When that saber-tooth tiger had attacked me, I had slapped it with my glove. I must have collected its DNA when fighting the creature, and then without even checking I sent its info in with automatically self-written permission forms asking for the delivery of the universal basic income for the feline. I gaped. TART was laughing.
But as I was walked out to the waiting police teleporter, TART showed me the image of that painting. And he was right. Though the painting was primitive and ugly, I could tell it was me from the shell-shocked expression on the face, and from the fact that she had painted the moment when she had touched my shoulder. I knew that expression she had given me.
It was a really ugly face, but somehow it was also beautiful. Like a crisp ten thousand dollar bill.
And somehow, even though I was going to jail, even though I might never see her again, I smiled like an idiot.
The first groups who traveled abroad (so to speak), their trips went smoothly enough. Which is to say, nobody died. The original couples who went to your world and lived in the original versions of the time-displaced housing we built had to deal with a lot of technical issues with the technology, but because we had been so careful with our preparations, nothing proved fatal. The psychological issues actually caused the most problems in the beginning.
First was just the fear. We dinosaurs had lived without death for countless ages in our pocket of frozen time. Now we were stepping out into a world in which we could die at any moment if something went wrong. We were like coddled children, fearful at every noise, jumping at every sound.
I remember the feeling when I first stepped out from the portal and descended the stairs from the sky. Of course being hundreds of meters up in the air upon arrival was scary enough, but every sensation was new and different and keenly terrifying. The wind surprised me. I was not used to that rush against my skin, the peculiar coolness. Taking my first breath of air here was a shock to the system. Feeling the lungs breathing in and out where my chest had never moved before was eerie at first. The warmth of the sun tickling my back, the flitting touch of insects, and later the insistent tapping and splattering of rain—all these things were surprising, shocking, overwhelming for us to deal with.
Some might say that we were feeling what it meant to be alive for the first time, or at least the first time in an eternity. But when you aren’t used to living, it feels like death. And our fear was justified. Those bodily systems that keep us alive in your world also drive us slowly towards our deaths. And we were painfully aware of our mortality every moment at first.
By the time I went through, I had been warned about the shock of living in your world, the various surprises and dangers and, yes, the joys and pleasures, too. I was not the first, or the second, or even the tenth. I came much later. Those couples, all the couples, had some immense obstacles to overcome.
I mean, even the act of mating seemed outrageous and unfamiliar in your world. The individual couples may have loved each other before crossing over into your world, but they had forgotten the logistics so to speak, so everything was awkward and embarrassing for everyone at first. It’s not that we had completely forgotten the old world, as we still certainly had memories of when we had lived there. But those memories, after the equivalent of thousands or perhaps even millions of years in our frozen world, seemed disconnected from our reality. They didn’t seem to apply to us anymore. We had to learn everything anew.
And it was exciting. I don’t mean just the act of mating, though I think everyone was particularly curious about that one. But as the fears subsided, and living started to feel a little more natural, there is a real thrill and excitement to just being here that can take over the senses after a while.
I remember all of it. When my mate and I were preparing for our journey, I remember listening to the stories, reading the guidebooks and seeing the videos (yes, we have movies of a kind in our frozen world as well). By the time I left for your world, there had been over one hundred couples before me. And while many of them had returned to the safety of our frozen kingdom simply out of fear long before giving birth, many came back with their young successfully.
I could see the joy they held, with their newfound families and the familial bonds that had developed. I desperately wanted that joy for myself, and for my mate. I thought I would do anything to get that joy.
Unfortunately, no one yet understood the full dangers we were facing. Not yet.
Of course those who decided to travel to your world were determined to do so as safely as possible, and so we took many precautions. Again, time was not really a consideration. We could take as much time as we needed to plan and prepare and it would have no impact on our fertility or mortality or practical mating choices.
So the first thing we did was prepare our bodies, upgrading them with a variety of technologies in order to ensure we would be able to live safely on the other side. Essentially all of us who came over to your world, myself included, are what you would call cyborgs. We have machines in our bodies which monitor every system, every organ, every possible health abnormality, with medicines and antibiotics ready to administer in the case of any kind of sickness. We have the equivalent of a brilliant medical doctor in the form of a robot brain monitoring us at every moment, ordering increased vigilance at weak points or areas of inflammation, more stimulation there where muscles have grown too flabby, monitoring intake and output and more.
Plus, for the carnivores, we had further enhancements. You have seen one of them—my teeth. For the time spent in your world, we realized that of course we would have to eat—and the diet of a carnivore is significantly more dangerous than the diet of an herbivore. I don’t mean that meat is bad for you and causes heart disease, though that can happen—we were more worried about the horns and the spikes of the prey!
Thus we developed new technology that allowed us to alter our teeth for a more omnivorous diet, but we made it so we could switch through different kinds of teeth depending on the situation and need. You haven’t seen all of the sets of teeth I can switch through—there are several more which I can use depending on what kind of plants are available to eat. Of course we also made modifications on our stomachs and other parts of the digestive tract to make sure that our bodies could make use of the food we were taking in.
We had other precautions as well. We built structures for safety against the weather and the animals so that we could mate, give birth, and raise our young in what amounted to semi-sophisticated dinosaur housing projects. Well, they became more sophisticated over time as we developed them, but I think I can safely say that even the first ones built were more comfortable than the floor of your garage. Though I guess I cannot blame you too harshly, given that your garage was never built for the living needs of an enormous alpha predator from a previous epoch.
We also paid attention to the places and the times we could attempt to make our families. Of course at first we just monitored the area around the hole between our worlds because it was the easiest, most directly available land where we could brood. And we could check, through manipulation of the portal, what kinds of weather events were going to be happening during any potential stretch of time before sending the time-traveling couples on their honeymoons. That way we could avoid ages and areas with lots of earthquakes and tornadoes and pandemics and so on.
With these and other preparations, we thought we were ready for any contingency, any problem that might arise.
We were careful at first. Our drones started collecting rocks and bringing them back across to our side so we could examine them and use them in our own technology. Perhaps there were hundreds, thousands of these missions focusing only on small amounts of rocks and minerals.
While this was going on, we were still watching you—the human civilizations. We learned a lot from your technology, though we found it increasingly dangerous to look into the future as your technology became more sophisticated. We learned from your technology, but also had to be careful that you could not detect us or invade our world. To protect ourselves, we built and maintained a sort of globe or floating fort around the portal on your side to mask its existence so your people could not find us.
In fact, we built more than just masking technology on your side of the portal, which was also in the sky. As we became more interested in personally visiting your world, we built towers to the portal. At first these towers were constructed by our drones out of the rocks, trees, and other physical matter on your side. These towers inevitably decayed and fell away over time, and obviously we couldn’t use them in the times when humans lived if we wanted to avoid detection. Eventually we discovered a means of building a tower to the portal that utilized a special kind of matter invisible to human eyes. I won’t go into specifics here, but that tower exists even now not far from here.
To be frank, as we watched and waited and learned more and more, many of our kind experienced a reawakening of older desires and instincts. Many became jealous of the pleasures of the life on the other side. We were immortal, but we could not take part in even the most common activities which most people in your world would consider the most meaningful parts of life.
More specifically, as mentioned before, we could not reproduce in the sort of stifled semi-time of our world. And many of my kind decided that they frankly wanted children. But in order to have children, a number of incredible obstacles had to be overcome.
Not only would we need to visit the other side safely, we would have to be able to readjust our bodies to live in your world again for an extended period of time—long enough to mate, but then also through the gestation period and birth. Even then, if we returned immediately after birth to our side, the child would be locked into a life eternal in the body of an infant.
If we wanted to raise our young to adulthood, it would need to be on your side, in your world. And the whole time we lived there, we would be in danger of death, whether from disease or aging or any other of a million factors. Most of our kind were not willing to take that chance, which is why we had sent drones for such a long period instead of visiting personally.
But the desires grew and grew as we viewed your world and ways. And eventually some were brave enough to go and risk everything, all for the promise of having a family.
Whatever it was that brought us over into the timeless space apparently left a hole—a hole which was invisible to us for a very long time, not least because that hole was in the sky, hundreds of meters up.
Finding the hole was just one step, though. We didn’t understand the hole at first, nor what it meant, nor how to interact with it. It wasn’t just that we could travel through it, though obviously that was eventually possible given that you are reading this document now. However, there were also other ways we could interact with the phenomenon.
But first we had to access it. And we were very interested in accessing it. Imagine a world unchanging for untold millennia. Completely static, except for yourself and your friends and a certain amount of matter that had come through from your original home. That sort of environment does little to stimulate the senses. And when you have an entire population growing steadily more intelligent, that one mystery became the center of our attentions.
So we took the physical matter—the plants, which we were not eating anyway, as well as the rocks and minerals and more—we took the stuff that had come through with us, and we built a structure to investigate the hole. And eventually as we interacted with that hole, we also built technology to access its secrets, monitor its changes. And we discovered many surprises about this portal that connected to our previous home.
First we discovered we could monitor things through the portal into the world on the other side. We spied on our old home with an increasing level of sophistication. Initially our observations were conducted via simple optical and visual equipment aimed through the portal from our frozen world, and later, when we discovered travel through the portal was possible, we explored your time through devices similar to your drone technology.
And we discovered as well that, by manipulating the portal in particular ways with certain kinds of particulates and specific kinds of radiation, we could travel not just to the physical space of our old home, but to different times, both far into the future and far into the past.
After that discovery, our obsession with the portal only increased, and we likewise increased our investigations with earnest, peeking into the many worlds across time, watching the lands change and shift, the animals migrate and mutate, and eventually the very civilizations rise and fall.
We learned all that we could about the physics of our old world, which was so much more accessible than the physics of the strange world in which we had awoken. And as our curiosity about this world increased, more and more of our drone technology was sent across the void.
More and more drones were of course lost.
And we realized if we were going to continue to investigate our old world, we would need to harvest matter from that world because we were losing our matter, our stores of resources every time we lost a drone. We just didn’t realize what harvesting your matter would mean.
