Greig Beck
Primordia 3: The Lost World—Re-Evolution
“Time is like a road with infinite intersections and our travels along it are influenced by events, choice and luck. Some of these roads run parallel and others diverge greatly, and if we were to go back and choose another, then our lives, and perhaps millions of others, would be changed forever.”
PROLOGUE
The changes were so small at first that most people didn’t even notice.
The brilliant red northern cardinal was quite common and could be found from southern Canada, through the eastern United States from Maine to Texas, and all the way down south through Mexico. With the male’s brilliant red plumage, head crest, and black mask, plus its distinctive song, it was no wonder it once made such a prized pet.
And then one morning there was a blackout, only for the blink of an eye, like something had briefly moved across the sun. Then afterward, the cardinals were gone. All of them.
It wasn’t like the ground was littered with dead birds, or they’d all migrated to somewhere more interesting. It was more like they never existed.
Books made no mention of them. No pictures existed. And they didn’t just fade from memories; they were erased. All that remained was a nagging sense of… wrongness.
That was the first occurrence. And there was more, and worse, to come.
PART 1 — Laramidia and Appalachia — the lands before time
“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
CHAPTER 01
Andy carefully lowered the sail, an inch at a time. He had to be careful and quiet — several times his boat was investigated by creatures that glided beneath him in the warm, soupy water, rolling to look up from the depths with one large eye and regard him with interest or disdain, but thankfully, not hunger.
It had taken him months to hop up along the coastline, trying to stay far enough out to avoid the big crocs, but also not so far that he went over the edge of the shelf into the deep blue-black water, and ended up in mosasaur territory.
Luckiest man in the world, he had thought. Only man in the world, he corrected.
At a long spit extending out into the sea, Andy allowed the small boat to drift in toward the marshy shoreline, and felt the bow slide in on the bank’s mud and stick fast. He lowered himself down below the gunwale, just letting his eyes rise to the top edge and moving them over the landscape.
The heat beat down on his neck and shoulders and he sniffed, smelling the warming silt, bringing with it the odors of brine, sulfur, rotting vegetation, and also something sweet that might have been animal decomposition.
“Gluck.”
“Shush.” Andy grabbed the small pterosaur’s beak with a hand missing the two small fingers and held it for a moment. He gave it a stern look for a few seconds, and then released it.
The tiny creature cocked its head, and briefly turned one ruby eye on him, before hopping closer.
Andy shook his hand and flexed the remaining fingers; it still hurt even though it had been over a year since he lost the digits. He opened the hand to look at it. That’s what happens when you doze in a boat while leaving one hand dangling over the side, he thought. He was lucky that whatever creature had traveled up from the depths and grabbed his hand was small, and its teeth razor sharp — otherwise, he might have lost more than his pride and a few fingers.
He sighed and turned back to the bank. The ground looked muddy but not bog-like, and he had pulled up in the mouth of an estuary. There was a river further in, and huge tree limbs grew over its top, making it look like a giant, mysterious green cave. Either side of the jungle was thick, and though it didn’t look impenetrable, it would be harder going than trying to navigate the waterway.
But, he’d have to keep the sail drawn in. It didn’t matter much as there didn’t look to be a breath of wind in there, and for sure he’d get snagged on the lower branches.
“Anyone home?” he whispered, and then chuckled. He was impatient to jump out and stretch his legs. But if the years had taught him one thing, it was that the creatures that lived in this time were masters of camouflage and ambush. Caution and patience had kept him alive so far, and that’s how he wanted to keep it.
The scream that pierced the air made him cringe down low for a moment. Even the small reptile flattened itself to the bottom of the boat. Andy looked up, and then higher. There was a solitary tree close to the waterline that stood about 70 feet tall and had all the branches on one side wind-blasted off. In its few remaining spiny-looking branches, medium-sized pterosaurs jostled and argued amongst themselves for a moment before settling down again. And then they turned to watch Andy with gimlet eyes and pointed, toothed beaks.
“Friends of yours?” he asked, but his little buddy said nothing, probably spooked by the bad language used by his bigger cousins.
Andy also desperately wanted to see his country, long, long before it actually became a country. He wanted to stand on hills, or in valleys, or on raw coastlines, seeing them in their infancy, and then picture what they would be like in the future.
He wanted to visit fossil bone beds, and other places where he had found prehistoric remains, with the hope of perhaps seeing those very beasts when they were alive. How cool would that be? Impossibly cool, he thought.
His determination was proving a challenge to logic and reality, but he was still alive, and had only had to pay with a few fingers so far — a small price.
“Are we there yet?”
“Huh?” Andy turned to look down at the small creature that just cocked its head staring up at him. He shook it away. He knew it was his imagination wanting to fill the void of loneliness with an imaginary friend. I’m not insane yet, he thought, and then he grinned. Not fully anyway.
The small bird-like reptile climbed on his leg, and he gently stroked its leathery skin. “Yeah, we’re here.”
Andy smiled down at his tiny friend. He had found the baby creature when it had been abandoned after its hatching. One wing was permanently stunted, and at first, he thought he’d simply eat it.
But then he wondered about the studies that queried dinosaur intelligence — were they smart? Could they ever be trained? He wanted to find out, so he kept it, and it had quickly bonded to him. And, ridiculously, he to it.
What started as a scientific experiment had yielded his only friend in the world. And a few years back, he began talking to it, and then one day, it talked back.
No, it didn’t, he reminded himself. He was a scientist and knew enough about people being alone to recognize a psychosis. Deep down, he knew that the words were really coming from somewhere in his own mind. The problem was, he didn’t really care that much.
And though he might not have admitted it, talking to someone, or some thing, was important to maintain his motivation, and remaining sanity. He thought he wouldn’t mind being alone. But he did. So it was kinda nice to be able to share his thoughts about this place with another being.
Gluck rested its long, beaked head on his thigh as it nestled on his sun-warmed leg. He guessed the tiny pterosaur wanted to be off the boat as much as he did.