Tag: dinosaur

By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

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.

Parts of her body had just… disappeared.

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By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

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.

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By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

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.

But predictably… we were wrong.

Read the next chapter.

By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

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.

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Written by me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

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.

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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.

By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

My head was still swimming with the nightmarish image of a floating, smiling Cheshire Rex as I bumbled back to my couch. I felt like I was one of those cartoon characters with exclamation points and question marks rocketing out of my skull. And as with any modern (or postmodern) person, I dealt with my anxiety and confusion by sitting on my couch and poking at my phone while looking at mindless, oversimplified memes about complex and controversial topics for a few minutes before moving on to an insultingly stupid television program analyzing recent important national problems with sex jokes and biased commentary.

Which frankly just increased my blood pressure rather than decreased it.

And this time, there was no knock. I heard something outside, and I was just starting to look up when I noticed that my door had been replaced by a very large hole and a dinosaur stuck was sticking its head through and into my house.

And that dinosaur was not Warbell.

Instead, it was another tyrannosaurus, only much, much bigger. Obviously this particular rex needed to crouch down lower than Warbell would have had to in order to stick its head inside. The coloration, too, wasn’t the same as Warbell’s. This one had splotches of black and orange, but the colors were dirty, smudged. Its eyes were also colder, and it had its set of sharp teeth. My skin prickled as it thrust its head inside.

 “You are ambassador for the tyrannosaurus, yes?”

“No,” I said. “I quit. Go talk to Charlie next door. He would appreciate the company.”

I think I would have done about anything to get that thing’s head out of my front door.

But my colorful visitor would not be shaken off so easily. It took another small step forward, the lumpy, expressionless face turning towards me, and the whole in my wall shifting as if by magic to accommodate the dinosaur’s bulk.

“You were,” it said, slurring its words as it tried to work them out with its stiff lips. “You knew that dinosaur.”

It wasn’t very difficult to figure out who the newcomer was talking about.

 “He lived in my garage,” I said. “What did you do to my door?”

“Garage?” the beast swung its bulky head and knocked over my hat stand. I was dismayed to see my nicest straw hat smashed against the floor, but I wasn’t about to move overly close to the strange dinosaur standing in my entry just to save my hat.

“Lived!” I barked. “Past tense! The old lizard isn’t there now! I kicked him out!”

“Kicked?” it said, swinging its head back towards me. “You kicked tyrannosaurus?”

“Yeah, and then he ate my leg,” I said sarcastically, and I showed the orange lizard my prosthesis. I wish I had been videoing because that dinosaur’s reaction was priceless. And put a hole in my ceiling.

“Ate your leg?” it said.

“Not really,” I said. “Look, I asked him impolitely to move somewhere new. To leave. I evicted him. But he didn’t eat my leg. What do you want? Are you going to replace my door? Or fix the hole in the ceiling?”

“I am looking for tyrannosaurus,” said the beast, looking back at me with inscrutable black eyes. “Because criminal.”

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