Everyone entering knew they had one chance. The testing was sound: the world’s first time corridor was live, with timeanchors on either side of the chronal abyss keeping the fantastically complex mathematical construct complete and taut. The plan that day was to send the first scientific equipment through, in order to check atmosphere, photoperiod, gravity, and any other deviations from Here and Now Normal over such a tremendous timespan. That’s when the first reports came through: a previously undetected asteroid had passed through Earth’s orbital defense system and struck not far from the time laboratory. Everyone in the vicinity had about an hour to make a decision to pass through the time corridor or stay for the world-spanning shock wave and subsequent extinction event. Not surprisingly, only a few in the facility decided to stay, and approximately 500 made the jump just in time.
As the last stragglers ran out with whatever supplies they could bring with them, the time corridor flexed and shattered, and all that remained was the original anchor, embedded in a hillside overlooking a wide, low valley. As opposed to the humid forest surrounding the laboratory they had just left, the local flora was scrub and a strange ground cover, all completely unfamiliar. They hurriedly set up camp alongside the timeanchor before the sun set, and the animals that came sniffing around the campfires were just as alien as the plants. The good news was that the local predators were just as averse to fire as dangerous animals in their own time, but the visitors still stood guard with improvised spears and clubs in preparation for anything not dissuaded by smoke and flames.
The next morning was dedicated to a tally of existing resources and a discussion of strategies. There was no going home: the time corridor needed two ends, and the end designated as “home” was now blasted wreckage. Any attempt to build a new time corridor not only fought temporal paradoxes but also a lack of tools and equipment, and even trying to figure out what was needed would take time and effort away from more essential activities. Their available food and water was a limited resource, with the understanding of what local food sources existed taking priority over everything else. This was accentuated by several local herbivores investigating the camp’s activities and demonstrating that “herbivore” and “harmless” were not partners and probably would never be in this strange time. However, one positive to the subsequent damage: the interlopers were absolutely delicious, and their hastily-butchered carcasses gave confirmed edible meat in the camp for several days.
Even with the strangeness, the camp thrived, and started to turn itself into an actual city. The researchers from the time laboratory worked harder than everyone else to rediscover knowledge of stone and glass and metal. Others became scouts in search of ores and water sources, while still others took it upon themselves to experiment with every potential food item in the vicinity, attempting to domesticate every amenable plant and animal. Some, such as the big herbivores from the second day, simply couldn’t be domesticated, so hunters traveled outward, bringing meat back to the city after feasting by themselves. 500 years after the accident, no survivors of the original migration remained alive, but their stories were passed on through both legend and writing, and their descendants were ready to take over once again as the planet’s dominant intelligent lifeform.
What they didn’t know, what they couldn’t have known, was that as nature abhors a vacuum, time abhors an uncorrectable paradox. That paradox was the timeanchor itself: just over 500 years after its original excursion to the present time, a series of coruscating waves of pure temporal energy radiated out from the timeanchor, wiping out the city and the hillside on which it had been built in a microsecond and turning the fragments to dust. A few survivors picked themselves up after the blasts ended, but so few remained that any attempt to reestablish themselves was fated to fail, and the last descendant of the original time refugees died in the crook of a tree about 60 years later, stalked by a carnivore just small enough to climb the tree after the corpse instead of attempting to knock it over.
Eventually, traces not destroyed in the time quake would be discovered, but not by anything the survivors would have expected, fully 65 million years after they had left home. The discovery of the remnants of the city would happen about 200 years later, and wouldn’t THAT be a challenge to existing theories about the origins of intelligence on Earth.
Dimensions (width/height/depth): 12 1/2″ x 13″ x 12 1/2″ (31.75 cm x 33.02 cm x 31.75 cm)
Plant: Cephalotus follicularis “Elizabeth“
Construction: Glass enclosure. polystyrene foam, found items.
Price: Sold
Shirt Price: Sold
