Two dogs…
Dogs liked to play.
Horatio buckled his seatbelt.
“Does anyone have a grenade?” he said matter-of-factly.
The driver tossed him a grenade. “Pull the pin, let it cook, then toss it.”
Horatio pulled the pin.
“Fetch!” he yelled, tossing the grenade out the window.
The nearest dinosaur hurried off in pursuit, panting like a dog. The tyrannosaurid bent over, clutched the grenade in its teeth—
The explosive detonated, tearing the dinosaur’s jaws apart.
Maybe Horatio had just killed the genetic forebear of the modern chicken. No more cockfights. No more fried chicken.
Somehow he doubted it, though the world would just have to do without chicken if he had.
“Another, please,” Horatio said.
The driver tossed him a second grenade.
Horatio waited until the next tyrannosaurid came in close, then he yanked the pin and threw the grenade at the dinosaur’s face.
The tyrannosaurid eagerly caught the grenade in its mouth, like a dog catching treats from midair. It promptly swallowed the explosive.
A few seconds later the tyrannosaurid’s belly ripped open in a gush of blood and intestinal loops, and the beast dropped.
“This is rather fun,” Horatio said. “I think I’ve found my second profession.”
“What, you’ve moved on from digging up dinosaurs to killing them?” Megan said.
“In so many words, yes.”
The barren terrain became hilly, and Horatio knew they were close to the insertion site now.
He was about to ask for another grenade—when one of the tyrannosaurids hit the Hummer ferociously, and he felt the vehicle lift and begin to flip.
The Hummer, now inverted, smashed down hard to the ground, landing on its roof. Horatio felt his brain slam against his skull as he and Megan dangled upside down from their seatbelts.
Momentum continued to carry the upside-down Hummer forward for a bit, and then the vehicle hit a steep incline, skidding downward.
Finally, the upturned Hummer slid to a halt.
The navy boys in front recovered immediately, and opened their quick-escape bulletproof windows to pile out.
The ground shook—
Horatio heard a sickening thud, and he knew one of the navy boys had been taken down.
Horatio unbuckled his seatbelt, and crashed down onto the ceiling (which was now the floor). He reoriented himself, opened Megan’s seatbelt, and caught her. She had a bloody wound on her head, and was unconscious.
He dragged her from the Hummer.
Amazingly, no jaws clamped around his body.
He hoisted Megan into his arms and ran. He glanced back. The other tyrannosaurids seemed preoccupied with their fresh prey.
For the moment.
Megan moaned quietly in his grasp.
“You’re going to be okay, Megan,” he said.
It was funny. He disliked her intensely, yet now when it came to it, she was the last person he wanted to see harmed.
The world needed people like her. Good people.
The ground shook—
Something rammed him forcibly from behind. It felt like a wrecking ball had slammed into his back. He stumbled forward a few paces, lost his balance, and fell, dropping Megan.
A terrible vise clamped around his left leg. Pain shot through his calf.
He heard heavy breathing behind him, and felt air press against his clothing as massive nostrils exhaled.
He glanced over his shoulder, knowing what he would see. Fearing it.
A tyrannosaurid had pinned him below the knee. Only a baby, though still as big as a small car. It was saving him for the bone-crushing teeth of an adult.
A Hummer zoomed past, and the remaining tyrannosaurids dispersed, chasing after it. They had failed to notice Megan. Or maybe they had seen her, but had dismissed her as inconsequential: no need to restrain someone who’s already unconscious.
The roar-whoops faded around him.
He heard the occasional, distant sound of frantic gunshots. Then a crash—
The sound of the final Hummer being taken out.
Captain Ford had promised that Horatio would get to see living and breathing versions of the fossils he so dearly loved. And now he was living that dream.
Just not in the way he had expected.
Filled with a curious mixture of respect and awe, Horatio stared over his shoulder at the baby tyrannosaurid. Such a beautiful creature. And strangely, he wasn’t all that afraid. He somehow managed to emotionally detach himself from the situation: as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t his leg, but the leg of someone else that was firmly fixed in the mouth of the one-ton predator.
That detachment helped him to think with crystal-clear clarity.
And he thought of a way out.
It was a long shot, but it just might work.
He didn’t have much time now. Not before Daddy came.
He fetched his smartwatch from his pocket. He set the volume to maximum, and then played one of his daughter’s favorite songs, a little ditty by some trendy boy band. He tossed the whining watch at the baby tyrannosaurid.
The dinosaur released his leg and ran away in terror.
Horatio stood up shakily, hoisted Megan into his arms, and then ran, limping heavily, toward the insertion site.
“We’re going to survive this, Megan,” he said. “We’re going to make it.”
Her head flopped lifelessly.
He could see the arena-sized sphere just ahead, its doors left invitingly open.
The way home.
The sporadic sound of gunfire and explosions erupted in the distance behind him. Some of the Travelers were still alive out there. Regrouping, hopefully.
Horatio promised himself he would wait for them as long as he possibly could, once he reached the machine.
Almost there…
An adult tyrannosaurid leaped down from the sphere, landing in front of them with an earth-shaking thud.
A Tyrannotitan.
It stood between Horatio and the only way home.
Well, he’d tried his best.
“I’m sorry, Megan,” he said to the unconscious woman, as the giant lumbered forth for the kill. “I guess we’re not going to make it after all.”
* * *
McMillan Motabu, assistant to the Adjunct Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of National History, was hard at work on the latest find. His lead, Horatio, had been curiously absent for some weeks now, and McMillan was continuing the excavation of the specimen.
At this moment, he was working on the same section of the fossil Horatio himself had been focusing on before his disappearance. McMillan had removed enough of the outer rock by now to realize that this was not bone he was uncovering in this area, but rather some unknown material. Maybe a resin of some kind? But if so, it was no resin he had ever encountered before. The pieces were thin, rod-like. Similar to tent poles. Yes, that was the best description.
It was all very curious.
He would have to have a fragment sent for testing later.
He received a call on his smartwatch, and set aside his tools to plug in his earbuds. He could work while on speakerphone, but then everyone would hear, and he would also make mistakes. Besides, the call was from his wife, and she demanded his full attention.
He had the habit of pacing when he talked on the phone, and by the time he hung up he’d walked halfway across the work hall.
One of his students was just entering. Sasha. A pleasant girl.
McMillan removed his earbuds to greet her, but she spoke first.
“McMillan,” Sasha said, her mouth dropping. She pointed at the sedimentary rock behind him.
He glanced at it.
Odd.
He hadn’t noticed before, but from this angle the rods he had uncovered this morning seemed to form actual letters.
What were the chances?
/>
No, of course it was random.
McMillan heard footsteps behind him.
Some kind of military man entered the hall. Dressed in a blue service uniform with a suit and tie, the hard-faced visitor seemed like a man McMillan wouldn’t want to cross.
“I’m putting together a team,” the man said.
McMillan glanced once more at the fossilized letters behind him:
S.O.S.
A Word from Isaac Hooke
“The Laurasians” was inspired by a Choose Your Own Adventure book I read as a child, in which the main character was a time traveler. In Choose Your Own Adventure books, you can make different choices, and depending on those choices, you influence the outcome of the book. For example: If you want to hide from the animal, turn to page 8. If you want to confront the animal, turn to page 22.
Anyway, one of the “bad” paths led to the hero dying in the belly of a dinosaur, and one hundred million years later, a paleontologist digs up the dinosaur, and finds the hero’s bones.
In the first draft of the Laurasians, Horatio returned to the present and, while pondering whether he would ever return to the past again, discovered a bone in the belly of the fossil he was excavating. He recognized that bone, because of the steel graft attached to the tibia—he had a similar graft on his own tibia, because of the surgery he’d undergone to repair his leg from the tyrannosaurid attack. I changed the ending because I wanted Horatio’s fate to be left up to the imagination of the reader.
There is no such thing as a Matryoshka wormhole (yet), though the time travel machine was based on the concept of the “traversable wormhole,” which utilizes a similar “nesting of spheres” idea. The Casimir effect is also real.
About the Author
Isaac Hooke is the author of the military science fiction novel ATLAS. His experimental genre-bending action novel The Forever Gate was an Amazon #1 bestseller in both the science fiction and fantasy categories for a (very) short time when it was released in May 2013.
When Isaac isn’t writing, publishing, and blogging, he’s busy cycling and taking pictures in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
He’s been writing since 1997, and he has a degree in Engineering Physics.
You can follow Isaac on Twitter @IsaacHooke and his website IsaacHooke.com. Sign up to be notified of his new releases here: http://bit.ly/atlaslist
The First Cut
Edward W. Robertson
I graduated to the Cutting Room fourth in my class—of four. Maybe it’s not as bad as it sounds; there were twenty-two dropouts. It was the best day of my life and I was allowed to tell no one. After the ceremony—a crisp, no-frills affair on the top floor of Central, with a speech from Davies himself—they stuck us in a tube and popped us off to our new home.
In an ideal world, we would never have had a single case. But not even Primetime is perfect.
I was assigned to Mara Riesling. Senior agent, though not much older than me, and pretty, which mattered to me at the time.
“What now?” I said.
“Now, you practice.”
“Then what was the Academy?”
“A test for the real test. A school for the school. Do you understand what’s at stake?”
“The futures of billions,” I said. “And?”
She smiled. “Why were you fourth?”
She took me to the Pods. The room was as clean as you’d expect but much simpler. White hemispheres big enough to camp under. She nodded me inside one.
I poked my head from under its canted lip. “Going to bother to tell me where I’m going?”
“It will tell you everything you need.”
“Then let’s go save some worlds.”
“The only world you’re going to is a virtual one. Deep immersion. Indistinguishable from the real thing.”
“But without the ability to ruin any fragile causalities.”
“Bingo. See you in a week.”
She spoke a command, and the Pod closed me in.
Vertigo tilted every neuron in my brain. I emerged in another world. Another time. My tablet had all the details, downloaded from my Pod: Early Information Age; the island known in most worlds as Manhattan. What was known was that, in the original timestream, Leslie Larsen had died of heart failure at the age of eighty-three. Yet in seven days, she would die of heavy metal poisoning, at the age of twenty-eight.
Simple case. Yet seven days later, when the Pod opened and I was back in the white room of the CR, I hadn’t found the trespasser.
“You failed,” Mara said.
I rubbed my eyes. Felt swimmy from the transfer. “Did seven days pass here, too? Or just simulated?”
“Full. We want everything to be real except your screw-ups. What happened?”
“I couldn’t get close enough. The net profiles were no good. They were so thin it made everyone look like a trespasser.”
“That didn’t seem to trouble Jackson.” She pointed to the front of the room. A broad whiteboard listed our four names, handwritten: Jackson Propher, Wella Nunez, Ben Wilhelmsen, Blake Din. Jackson had a “1” under his name. Wella and Ben had no results yet. Mara strode to the board and traced a circle through the air. An enormous “0” appeared on the board below my name.
“Guess that’s why he was tops in class,” I said.
“It was the doorman. Okay? The doorman.”
“Shit,” I said. “How was I supposed to know that?”
“His teeth? The buttons on his jacket? His haircut?” She stared at me, head tilted. “You hung back, Blake. You can’t be afraid to dive in.”
“I thought that was the prime directive. Any intrusion, no matter how slight, causes damage.”
“The question is whether it’s worse than the death you’re there to stop. Passive surveillance and collation isn’t working? Time to hit the streets.”
After that I had two weeks off from the Pods. Not as punishment, but because your head can get Untethered if you spend too much time away from Primetime. Not to say it was a vacation, either. Quite the opposite. Drudgework, theory. I couldn’t wait to get back to the Pods. When I did, the board had been updated: Wella had a 1, and Ben had joined me with a 0.
“You can’t always get it,” Mara said. “No one whose career has lasted more than twenty cases has come out batting above .500. But at least try to fail well.”
The Pod closed. The case was another murder. Another young woman. They tend to be: those trespassing from Primetime with the intention of doing violence are usually in it for thrills, revenge, power plays. They target the weak (children, the elderly) or those who made them feel powerless (women, overwhelmingly so). I knew the theory inside and out, yet when my seven days were up, I wound up on the heels of the wrong man when the bullet entered the woman’s skull.
“Why not send us back with nine thousand flycams?” I groused, climbing from the Pod. “Or just have the Pods watch the whole goddamn thing themselves?”
Mara just stared. “If that’s a serious question, you’re further behind than I thought.”
“And if you thought it was serious, your opinion of me is lower than I thought.”
“Indulge me.”
“Dropping future tech into a world can disrupt it far worse than any murder. The very act of observing changes the observed. We get one chance. Pure, clean. A footprint like a cat on the ice.”
She nodded, mollified. At least she didn’t insult me by asking why we only got one shot. “What went wrong?”
“Not much in the way of digital resources. Which seems to be a running theme of these tests. I pinned down the guy who was supposed to meet her at the time of death—but she was killed hours before the police report stated.”
“You trusted a police report?” Mara cackled. “From the twentieth century?”
“Pardon me for having professional respect.”
“These places don’t have Pods. The reports are educated guesses—at best. Build your case from the ground up. No assumptions.”
&
nbsp; On the board, Jackson’s score had climbed to 2. Wella whiffed, but Ben had tied her at 1. Mine remained a round empty nothing.
I had two weeks to dwell on it. Studying old Cutting Room cases. Things we never had access to at the Academy. Fascinating, but I wasn’t in the mood. My weekly assessments began to suffer, too.
Don’t even ask about the third case. When the Pod opened on me, Mara’s eyes could have popped me and served me at the movies. “You stayed with the victim.”
“I saved her.”
“You’re not supposed to speak to the victim. You kept her in a hotel room all week!”
“And saved her.”
“Who gives a shit?” Mara stalked a circle around me, jabbing at me with her index finger. “All that means is the trespasser gets spooked and comes back after you’ve left the timestream. And you’ve blown your chance!”
“The victim’s already dead,” I said. “If we don’t execute, we can be damn sure they’ll stay dead. If I save them and spook off the killer? There’s no guarantee he’ll be back.”
“So you traded that possibility in exchange for massive damage to the stream?”
“I told her we had a credible threat from an ex-boyfriend. I thought I was being creative.”
She closed her eyes, holding up her hand for silence, letting the anger dissipate from her face. “These are sims. Training. That’s the point. This is the last time you break the rules like that.”
The scores updated. A neat countdown: 3, 2, 1, 0. Mara’s steps departed from the room. A second set replaced hers. Jackson, smiling, the tips of his canines peeping from beneath his upper lip.
“Planning to join us at some point?” he said, towering over me.
“Do you think this is a competition?”
“The way you’re playing? Not in the slightest.”
I whirled, grabbed his collar, slung him against the whiteboard. He went for a low kick, but I arrested it by jamming my knee into his. I buried my elbow in his throat. “Pray they wash me out.”
Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel Page 27
