The Mesozoic Emporium
The year is 8021 when two wandering souls meet in the fluorescent lit backrooms of hyperspace.
“So what’s your story” the first soul, embodied by an armor-clad brain, asks.
“Brother, have you really got the time?” the second soul, embodied by a large rodent, replies.
The brain gestures to the infinite abyss and shrugs.
“When I was first born, the Creator spoke to me,” says the rodent, “and he laid out the ground rules. Adam and Eve weren’t allowed to eat apples or something. My friend Mortachai, he wasn’t allowed to touch turquoise. For me, it was dancing. I was forbidden from dancing.”
“Right” says the brain, “no dancing.”
“No dancing,” replies the rodent, “my first life, I was a Trilobite in a little ocean off the coast of Paleosiberia. Nice place.”
“I was scuttling around, and all of a sudden this warm current hits, and I feel myself sorta wiggling, couldn’t help it. This was too close for the creator’s comfort. You know what he did? He boiled the whole damn ocean.”
“After that little hiccup, I floated in purgatory for an eon or two. Then I came back as one of those giant sloths.”
“I was doing fine, but I slipped up, swayed my hips the wrong way while reaching for a fern, and boom, a tornado barrels through the savannah and tears my skull right out of my flesh.”
“I reincarnated as a Glyptodon the next day. That was nice for a bit. But then I heard some birds chirping, and started, you know, bobbing around. Just like that, a meteorite comes crashing from the heavens right through my peanut brain.”
“And it kept happening! I’d be some overgrown marsupial thing, I’d shake my hips the wrong way, and the creator would wallop me. An australopithecus would chop my head off with a jagged rock, or a dire wolf would eat me alive. One time, the whole damn island I was on exploded. Remember Krakatoa?”
“Could be worse” says the brain.
“Oh?” says the rodent.
“At least you’re not dancing.”
The Permo-Triassic Extinction
From deep within his cell, a goblin soothsayer begins his allegory:
Whatever-billion years ago, the universe forms from the aether. A horrifically tedious amount of time later, the earth forms too. Several billion years after that, once the unfortunate forebears of life have had a chance to dip their toes and conquer this briefly hospitable rock, a smaller, prickly little rock collides with our planet. The skies darken with debris, the sun disappears, the biosphere collapses, and just about every tragic little soul in existence dies out.
Meanwhile, on the scorched forest floors of Pangaea, a scaly little shrew-like creature senses danger. Our hero, the thrinaxodon, lacks the brainpower to worry, So instead, like many of us, he burrows. He digs as deep as he can and readies himself for the end. He enters a state of aestivation, pausing his life indefinitely.
Soon after, in the sullied, boiled rivers of Pangea, a slimy little salamander-like creature senses warmth beneath the forest floor. Our hero, a wounded Broomistega, limps onto land.
His ribs are broken and his proto-lungs are charred. His primordial rat brain lacks the capacity to worry, but deep down, some rogue synapse senses the end is nigh. He sniffs out a burrow up ahead and digs in for the long night. Here, at the tail-end of the burrow, our two protagonists meet.
The salamander waddles up to the sleeping shrew and nestles in beside him. For the first time in his cruel, tired life, he has company. Warmed by his new companion, the Broomistega falls into a deep slumber.
As it so often happens in our godless universe, without cause or reason, a flash flood strikes, and the two unlikely roommates are drowned abruptly in the ensuing flurry of muck and debris.
When the flood subsides, the corpses remain, suspended in sediment and fossilized just so; preserving this brief moment of tenderness in stone for all eternity.
And thus concludes the Permo-Triassic extinction.
4492
The year is 1492, and the air is unusually brisk for an autumnal evening in the Caribbean. Here, off the shores of Watling Island, a moldy ship carrying a cargo of illiterate, syphilis-ridden sailors drops its anchor. An ancient shrew from before the time of man is the first to spot its sails. Somewhere deep inside this creature’s little brain there is a subtle shift in consciousness.
The year is 4492, and the biosphere has been scorched to a crisp. Here, in the boiling seas of the Caribbean, we find ourselves at the brink of yet another seminal event in mammalian history. The weather satellite known as God, in his infinite wisdom and magnanimity, decides to upload all remaining species into hyperspace.
God’s primitive coding implementation of this ark-like exodus results in a peculiar glitch. All language, across all species and sentiences, is flattened, so to speak, into a singular, universal tongue. Chirps, barks, whispers and caws are unified as one, and all living creatures may now communicate freely through the cloud.
The shrew is the first to raise his voice.
Lake Turkana
The year is 3178. The temperature is a balmy 158° Fahrenheit. The coordinates are 3.6268° N, 36.0023°, and the protagonist, of course, is a goblin of portly stature, miserable intellect, and moderate archeological clout.
Surveying the scorched crater where Lake Turkana once pooled, the goblin spots his first clue. A coiled up skeleton, chalky and weathered, but still very much in tact. The goblin archeologist calls over his minion, a groveling pack mule only half his size, and begins his sermon.
“You see, dear Nico” says the goblin to his minion, “this dead fellow before us was a hominid; of what family I cannot say.”
“As a species they were quite wretched” adds the goblin, “bipedal, boil-ridden monkey men milling about the planet, hardly evolving from one epoch to the next. Whether he was a Austrolapithecus, a Homo Sapiens, or one of those smarmy little Paranthropuses, I haven’t the patience to speculate.”
“Iz yuh gun zu” the minion adds, slurring his words.
“Truly, though, there is something rather bemusing about their cosmology” adds the goblin. “Why, dear Nico, they thought that God was a weather satellite!”
“Hyuck hyuck hyuck” the minion replies.
“Yes, they held many beliefs most peculiar” adds the goblin.
“Most of them, from our inferences, ate rocks until their teeth were pulverized, and then, presumably, starved. Others seemed fond of self immolation, hurling toasters into their own tubs, likely so that they could commune with their weather God sooner. The records indicate that one or two of them even learnt to split the atom, though most could hardly fashion a fire.”
Wiping the drool from his mouth, the minion mumbles a string of incoherent syllables.
“Extinct, Nico?” says the goblin. “No, they are still here, in a sense, aestivating in hyperspace until our world cools again.”
“Wuzzuh zat” asks the minion.
“A story for another time,” says the goblin.
