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End Of An Era

Making dinosaurs is hard. You know that? Hah. Of course they are, everyone knows that. The first cloned animal was a sheep, you know that one? Dolly? Yeah, yeah. A sheep, a little fury bastard they cooked up in a lab after a billion or so tries. Dolly led right here, a little furry cutesy critter to the resurrection of animals that had been dead for sixty five million years. Extinction is forever, they used to say. Money conquers all, even killer asteroids and the spans between eons. Ha. I can't exactly say how they did it, no one who worked on the process or at the preserve can. Patented the whole thing, the animals genomes. Patented them right down to the molecules. Classified down to the red ink the scientists and engineers used to create their dinosaur formula on the back of napkins. It took a long time, I can tell you that. A long fucking time. But eventually, they did it. They made dinosaurs. Fifteen species, mostly from the Late Cretaceous with some specimens of the very, very Late Jurassic. Dinosaurs! Everyone is so apathetic about it now, barely even care we recreated the basis of every child's greatest dream. Anyway, yeah. We cloned them, manufactured them. Altogether we had about two hundred and twenty, two hundred and thirty specimens by the end of the cloning and maturing process. We looked and looked for a place to put them, a wild zone. We talked to South American tribes and American business tycoons and Chinese land-sellers. We went everywhere and anywhere. Some places were utterly gorgeous but we passed em up. Eventually, we managed to buy an incredibly large tract of land from a dying Canadian-American oil baron up in Alberta. Absolutely pristine place, nestled between cliffs and mountains. Clear rivers, misty forests, two entire lakes. Just absolutely fantastic, you'd think God himself had sent us a piece of the Cretaceous itself. So, we set to work. Building massive, ten foot thick black concrete walls and subtle moat-fencing, security systems, animal feeding schedules and platforms. We hired architects from nearly ten different countries, and Christ they weren't cheap. Elevated luxury cabins, lodges inside and outside the preserve, bar outposts near both lakes. Expensive, but worth it. Utterly worth it. Paleontologists and biologists primarily from Europe, America and China signed on, helping us keep the animals happy and healthy. We surely helped a lot of science papers in the time, didn't we? Hah. Who knew they'd ever actually interact with the real thing? But they did. They informed us the best they could on eating habits, behavior, territory construction. We followed them to the letter. By the end of then, another five years of development, we were finished. The animals were released entirely, the architects and engineers and paleontologists went home, the lights turned on. And Christ, what a dream that was! You have no idea, no goddamn idea how amazing it was. The first night it began, when we really were finished. It was unlike anything anyone has ever experienced. Or will ever experience again. Up in the night sky the auroras unfolded, I remember. All sapphire and gem greens, blues. Rich auburns flailing with the untouchable violets. Out in their habitats the dinosaurs sounded, their ancient voices once again upon the air. They sing, not like their birdlike cousins but like whales. They make noises you can actually feel in your chest, feel in your bones and blood. Alien, unearthly. For five years, it was the best time of my life. The animals lived and bred and died, they moved, they ate, they mated. They where alive. The wealthiest of the wealthy came and paid great sums to look at them, to marvel, to drink right there on the balconies of their elevated lodges and watch living dinosaurs. Real life, living dinosaurs! It was amazing, unbelievable. Almost ridiculously awesome in every sense of the biblical awesome, of the utterly grand and titanic awesome. I knew there were people pocking around. Competitors sneaking and searching at what we were doing, studying. We hid ourselves and our work well, more so than on this project than any other. They wanted to know, badly. And eventually, they did. They found us out, our competitive nemesis. Her and her goddamn orbital satellites, eyes in the sky. I look up now and any stars that don't match I flip the bird, hoping her magnified cyclops acolytes will see me from all the way up there. She found out, probably hitting and scratching some low executive when she did. She always liked hitting and scratching, she liked the fear. Hah. Of course she did! But, anyway, I'm getting of track. The witch found us, found us good. She mines up there, you know. Asteroids, comet cores, space debris collection and dispersion runs. All up there in the blue shadow of the earth. And she knew exactly what she was going to do. It was empty that month. November, chilly and all of the leaves such a rich rusty red, rusty yellow. Gorgeous as always. The animals were doing the usual as twilight rose and the sun bowed, golden streamers in the sky mixing with liquid purplish black above and metallic reddish pink below. Thunder clouds off to the west, mighty thunderheads craggy like mountains and illuminated within by the occasional strike of Olympian lightning. I was there, in my own private lodge on a nearby mountainside. I could see the whole park, from end to end and side to side. Nestled between the mountain cliffs, a slice of prehistory right here in our world. The fireplace crackled and roared, music playing softly. I remember the stupid and ignorant smile on my face, magnifying the interactive systems on my park-facing glass window to see the various dinosaurs moving across the land. I watched, unaware. It came like the thunder out west but so much louder, so much more furious and hateful. A blinding star tearing out and down from above me, down toward the reserve. It seemed so painfully slow when I saw it, so unreal. I looked dumbly, frozen. I knew in the depths of me already, already knew what was happening and why and how. I stood frozen, slamming open the glass door to reach my balcony and look out, terror overcame by defeat within myself. I watched. It was a horrendously pretty sight as the golden-white-blue light of the asteroid came lower and lower. It cast unearthly shadows across the landscape and the dinosaurs upon it, the light of their doom, of their end catching their eyes as it neared its journeys end. It came to rest at the end of the Preserve, the base of a large mountain face many kilometers away. The light was blinding, so painful that it continued to taunt and dance even after I had shut my eyes closed. Dancing in the black ocean of fear and crumpling defeat within me. For moments it was painfully silent as an enormous, nightmarish blossom of reddish black light built and expanded from the vaporizing mountain. Fires many hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of meters in size sprang upward and then were cast forward by the disturbing breath of impact. Vaporized mountain rock, contorted screaming air, fire all mixing and pushing outward at supersonic speed from the epicenter which now glowed a furious, infernal molten red. The shockwave was visible, a shattering presence which bent and broke trees as it passed forward, throwing every single auburn colored leaf into beautiful, terrible storms. Autumn in a single second. The lakes were thrown forward and out of their bases. When it reached me, every pane of glass was shattered and I felt cuts across my body, a horrifically booming sound in my ears not even a fraction of what must have resounded down there in the valley. I crumpled forward, still watching as tears and blood ran down my cheeks, watching that vaporizing cloud gain more and more and more ground. Wildfires danced and grew, lightning strikes emanating from within the cloud. Within moments, less, the entire horrific holocaust was over. The unstoppable cloud of death swept over everything in its path, finally slamming into the base of the mountain below me and redoubling back upon itself. Within I could see dancing fire and molten ground, already rapidly cooling to an ashen and glassy mix. The animals were gone, the Preserve gone. Every last bit of it gone. I was evacuated soon after, rising up above the hellscape and away. It was contained by the mountains and valley crooks surrounding the impact, largely burned out within several weeks. When I returned, I was greeted by a husk. The forests were practically nonexistent, anything still standing barely a charcoal black skeletal sketch rained with ashen obsidian stone. Lodges and cabins had been completely annihilated, buried beneath that oncoming wall of oblivion. No living things remained. The dinosaurs were lost, entombed and exterminated once again. We looked for months, searching every cranny and nook and crag. Nothing. I still return there, sometimes. That hallowed ground. It is silent, not even the wind wishes to speak over this grave. I breath in the air, leaning against a stone. It is silent.

Old Earth

The land beneath my feet is wet, and solid, and old. Trees that loom upwards into the forever, into crystalline blue skies, rimmed by bruised bellied thunderstorms. Lightning cracks. Earthy smells ripen the air in the humidity of the summer. A thousand thousand trackways traverse this frequented soil, countless directions picked and chosen, every footfall a traveler on their own sojourn. Rich scents mark warm air. Disembodied orchestras play their notes among shadowy undergrowth; rumbling and creaking and chattering and howling. Sounds big and sounds small. Endless variety. The wind ruffles conifer branches, sequoia spires creaking comfortably.

Excerpt from the Intergalactic: Unrest on the Frontier

In an interview with the Intergalactic, David Randal (photographed above in his Exo-Multiplatform Unit, or EMU) expressed the viewpoints common amongst spacers in these trying times. “It’s hard work, work that can kill or maim with even the greatest in safety tech. And out here, on the frontier? We’re undersupplied, practically forgotten about. Now rumors of war, whispers of aggressive aliens? The Company has practically abandoned us to the Deep Black.”

Tensions continue to mount as protests Galaxywide have spread to nearly five hundred systems now. We reached out to Haven-Uros-Iln Industries for commentary, and respectfully received none.