Month: August 2023

By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read the first chapter.

The most striking thing about the frozen world, other than long vistas of immovable everything, was the fact that we did not change in any outward way. We had ceased to grow older. We never got sick. Never hungry. Never short of breath. Indeed, we didn’t need to breathe or eat or drink or even urinate. We just lived in the eternal singular moment.

My killer instinct was mostly gone as well. Sometimes dinosaurs would fight one another, but we quickly learned something else astonishing. That is, no matter how we fought, it was impossible to kill each other. Even terribly wounded, we would just continue living. Even if a dinosaur was torn apart, he would continue to have consciousness, which was quite horrifying when we realized this truth. Let me tell you, a truly severed head nevertheless possessing consciousness is infinitely terrifying.

This deathless life meant we had no need for the usual biological preoccupations of all normal animal kind. We did not need to forage for food or even take a drink, nor mate and have spawn. Our lives had in a sense become empty of everything we had really wanted in our previous existence.

And thus, in that absence, something replaced the previous biological drives. Something replaced the drive for sex and food. Slowly, if the time that exists there can be called slow, intelligence began to increase in all of us. And our scientists have posited a great number of explanations for this phenomenon. It was an adaptation to the truly bizarre world we had found ourselves in. Some argued it was because time was not passing, all memories were constantly immediately retrievable without the degradation of memory over time. Memories accumulated and never were forgotten. Desires shifted. Intelligence emerged.

All of this took time—how much is hard to say. We did not just become conversational in an instant. But because time does not pass there in the frozen kingdom in the same way it does here, we did indeed accomplish everything in an instant. It took us millions of years. It took us less than a moment. Both are true, depending on your perspective.

And we simply had all the time in the world there, to invent things, to build a civilization. One advantage we had over human beings and their long history tromping towards modernity was that we did not go through generations. We were always the same group, the same survivors, remembering everything. And using the resources that had been sucked into this dimension with us, we could develop our own technology at our own pace.

And we needed our own pace. We did not have human hands and so we had to find workarounds to use our claws or lips or other body parts as they were. You would be surprised at what an intelligent and resourceful dinosaur can do even with just their tail or nose given infinite time. As with those in your own world who have lost their limbs, alternative ways to live and thrive are developed. No matter how long it takes. It turns out opposable thumbs are not required for the development of technology.

And the biggest help, the biggest jump forward in technology, was the discovery of the opening to your time stream, the portal to your world.

Clear here to read the next chapter.

By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

I felt fatigued and frustrated as I stood there in the garage, trying to think. But Warbell had said he had left me something. Something that explained everything. Did it explain the criminal activity he had done? What camera had he been talking about?

Then it hit me, and my face must have shifted three shades of red and pale in the space of a minute. The bug I installed! Had he known he was being recorded all this time and he never said anything about it? I had installed a camera in the wall, hidden from view, pointed directly at where Warbell slept. I got out my tools, dismantled that section of the wall, and was stunned to find near my old video camera a journal. On the journal were written the words, “To Wal. Please read as soon as you can find the time. Maybe over a breakfast at Seven Degrees of Bacon. Questions answered!”

I sat down on my couch with the biggest mug of coffee I could find, then flipped open the book and started reading. The handwriting was surprisingly readable—better than mine. It looked like someone was trying hard to write as perfectly as possible.

Dear Wal,

I don’t really think you deserve this explanation given that you have been spying on me secretly for some time, but nevertheless neither am I entirely comfortable with having lied to you from the beginning—or at least having aggressively bent the truth. When I first met you, I told you I had slept from the age of the dinosaurs until your present time. That was not strictly true. It’s actually much more complicated than that.

The true part was that I had come from a different and far away time, and it is difficult to say exactly how far away because of the nature of my world. You see, while dinosaurs died off on the planet earth you know many years ago, they did not completely perish from the world, or at least not the earth as I know it.

This will be rather confusing I am afraid, not least of all because even the mightiest brains amongst the saurian kind have not been able to solve the riddle of what exactly happened. However, suffice to say I and many other dinosaurs who were living on the earth you know many years ago were one day suddenly and inexplicably transported out of your world and into a different world of a different nature.

I am trying to choose my words carefully here, because myself and the others, we did not really leave the earth, though we did not realize what happened at first. We awoke in a very strange, mostly unmoving world, and at first we thought, I suppose, that this was an alien world—insofar as we could process what was going on at all at the time. You see, when the event happened, dinosaurs were not able to talk. That came later. But I am getting ahead of myself.

I remember that time. When my mind was not so developed. The world was frozen, but not with snow and ice. Frozen in time. The plants and animals, lakes and mountains, valleys and fields—all these things remained. But they were frozen, immobile. We could move about, but we could not interact with most of the world around us. Essentially we were caught in a moment of time, with the entire world frozen unmoving mid-moment. We could see plants and animals and more in the world, but they were like immobile statues. If we came across a dinosaur still existing in your time frame, he would be caught in the middle of a movement, sometimes impossibly balanced up on his toes, or paralyzed in the midst of chewing on a delicious leaf, or a million other actions. We could climb on him, bite him, run full-bore into his side, but not cause the slightest change in his posture. These dinosaur statues caught in time did not even have a scent. It was a neutral, sterile world.

But not entirely. Of course we could move and roar and so on. And along with ourselves, large amounts of plants, rock, and water—among other things—had come through into the frozen world as well and could be interacted with. Whatever it was that suddenly transported us into this frozen moment had also transported unfrozen materials as well. However, this state of affairs took us some time to figure out.

Nobody knows what caused it, but many theories have been suggested. Perhaps the impact of a meteorite ripped the very fabric of time. We don’t know.

Thousands of dinosaurs were saved from extinction, but only to awaken in a bizarre world which we could not begin to understand… at first. That changed, however, as our minds began to develop in surprising ways, all because our bodies did not function like they used to, either. While our bodies were not frozen like most of the world around us, there was still…

Well, we were very peculiar dinosaurs indeed.

By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

“Warbell is a criminal?” I asked.

“Who?” said the orange lizard. “Warbell is tyrannosaurus?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” I said. “Warbell is dinosaur, big smile, nice teeth. Come on, tell me what’s going on!”

The newcomer cocked its head, eyes focused on me, the atmosphere taking on a conspiratorial air. I stepped back and sort of hid behind my couch.

“War-bell”—the dinosaur pronounced the name with a sort of click stop between the syllables of his name for some reason—“is criminal. Escape from Kingdom of all Eternity and Perfection of our People and the Future. I come find tyrannosaur. Where? You know?”

“Wait, what did Warbell do?” I asked. “Buddy, you put a big hole in my wall. That makes you a criminal, too!”

The dinosaur glanced at the wall, then back at me, then hissed and rumbled and warbled under its breath.

“Will fix,” it said. “Very important, must move quickly. War-bell murderer. Said research virus on TV, yeah? But really he murderer. He lie. Can’t trust. He kill again future. Capture. Justice.”

I stood staring at the massive orange thingee standing in my room, brushing the ceiling, cracking my floors, and I just felt exhausted. I couldn’t take it all in. Anger blossomed, choked me with its force, and was replaced by a buzzing numbness. Could it really be true? Is that what Warbell was researching? To kill?

It seemed to fit. Warbell was so secretive. He was definitely interested in the disappearing death virus. Maybe he saved that bacon kid because he wanted to study him and use the virus to kill others. And who was I to get in the way of dinosaur justice if this big fellow was actually the dinosaur version of the police?

The orange beast was reaching for me when I snapped out of the haze of confusion. I practically shouted my answer.

“He is going to First Pumpkin,” I said. “To the museum, to see the dinosaur skeleton there. That’s all I know.”

The beast stopped reaching for me. A fire lit behind the its eyes.

“Thank you, and good bye,” it said. “Justice will serve. You did right thing.”

The orange lizard backed out, and suddenly the hole was gone, replaced by the wall and door, which just materialized back in place with a snapping/whipping sound. I ran to look outside, and I saw the dinosaur bound away with surprising agility. I didn’t stick around to watch his orange behind disappear in the distance. Instead, I walked out to the garage, feeling a mix of emotions.

If what this newcomer said was true, then maybe Warbell really was responsible for the deaths of so many, even for the loss of my leg. But how could that even be possible? What kind of technology could do such a thing?

Of course, if it wasn’t true… I might have just sentenced Warbell to prison or worse. Unfortunately, it was done, and I really couldn’t change anything now.

But maybe I could find out what was really going on.

Read the next chapter.