Time Has No Memory
by Aeryn Rudel
The Late Cretaceous is hotter than the other periods I’ve visited. My dossier says it’s because of all the volcanic activity. I can’t see any volcanoes from my campsite, which is on the shore of the prehistoric Pacific Ocean, but the air is thick, like a bad smog day in Los Angeles.
I’m queasy from the jump. Time travel is like being shoved through a kaleidoscope made of light, sound, and terror. I’m told it’s so painful because it’s not just time travel. It’s also something like time fracturing. Whenever they send one of us back, it creates a new timeline, a new universe, separate and parallel to our own. I have no reason not to take the techs at their word. All I know is that I end up puking my guts out after each jump. Not exactly the best way to arrive in a world full of monsters.
I ended up in a nice spot, beach-front property in what will be Fresno, California in sixty-six million years. The beach wasn’t empty when I arrived. I share it with a flock of giant birds that look like a cross between a duck and a heron, only they’re the size of harbor seals and sport beaks filled with teeth as long as my finger. My field guide tells me they’re called Hesperornis rossicus, and they should be harmless. I wonder if they taste like chicken.
I set my camp a hundred yards from the water—the Cretaceous oceans are filled with horrors, and placing a football field between me and them seems a sensible precaution. I don’t have much with me, just the essentials: food, weapons, tent, water purification tablets, a compact first aid and surgery kit, a compass, and a small but powerful gas-powered bone saw that will run for hours on a half-liter of ethanol. All that fits neatly into a moderately sized backpack, and not one of these items runs on batteries or includes electronics of any kind. That’s the real motherfucker of time travel—it completely fries anything with electronics. No datapads, no thermal imagers, not even a goddamn flashlight. Finally, I have my mission dossier, which, among other things, tells me all about the prehistoric beast I’m here to hunt and kill.
I’m exhausted, and my mouth still tastes like vomit, so I’ll end here. I hear the Hesperornis on the beach, squawking and hissing. I’ll put my pistol beneath my pillow, just in case they’re wondering if I taste like chicken.
I watched the sun come up over the ocean this morning. Beautiful. I’m not the kind of guy who is particularly moved by sunrises, but, hey, I’ve never been the only human being to witness one.
Of course, the morning wasn’t all sunshine and poetry. While I was choking down a breakfast of instant coffee and an MRE (something the package claimed was scrambled eggs), I was reminded how dangerous the ancient past can be. All was serene until a mosasaur—a forty-foot monster that looks like a cross between a whale and crocodile—burst out of the surf and dragged a Hesperornis to a bloody, watery death while its compatriots scattered, squawking in terror. Reminded me of killer whales doing the same thing to seals in my own time. Nature has been playing from the same deck for a long time.
I guess now is a good time to tell you why I’m writing in the blank spaces of my mission dossier with a stubby golf pencil I smuggled in—RevChem forbids any recording of our little jaunts. I wonder if that’s the real reason we can’t take anything electronic or why we go alone. If what they’re doing got out, especially in something like a live-capture vid, they’d be royally fucked. But I’m jumping ahead. Let me start with this. What am I doing here sixty-six million years in the past?
Money is the simplest answer. RevChem Pharmaceuticals has been mining the past for its riches. Those riches are the organs of long-extinct animals, some of which harbor miracle medical treatments. The brain from a Tyrannosaurus Rex, for example, produces a protein that halts and even reverses the advancement of Alzheimer’s. You can imagine how profitable that is. Thing is, no one is supposed to have time-travel equipment. It’s illegal, and RevChem is covering their asses with a truckload of bogus science. That Alzheimer’s cure? They say it comes from the brains of Andean condors. From what I’ve learned, there are enough similarities to fool some people in the medical community, and, well, the others are turning a blind eye because we’re talking billions of dollars here.
Speaking of money. RevChem pays folks like me—former military special forces and other hard-edged assholes—absurd sums of money because no one else is stupid or tough enough to survive hunting prehistoric monsters for their precious organs. They pay us a lot because it’s dangerous, and they pay us a lot so we keep our mouths shut. I thought I could do that. I thought the seven-figure paydays would curb any guilt I felt going along with RevChem’s secret operation. Unfortunately, I’ve developed a conscience. It’s all because of my mom. Yeah, even hard-edged assholes like me have a mom, and mine was a goddamn superhero.
My dad bailed on us pretty early on. Well, we sort of bailed on him first, I guess. Mom finally got tired of him smacking the shit out of her, and thought he might turn his fists on me. She got the jump on him with my little-league baseball bat, and put his ass in the hospital. We skipped town before he could sufficiently recover and come looking for payback. It was just me and her from then on. She worked two or three jobs to make sure we had enough to eat, that I had clothes for school, and a life that included things like joy and love. When I joined the Army, I tried to return the favor and send money home, so she wouldn’t have to work so much anymore.
Mom started having problems in her early fifties. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s two days after her fifty-third birthday. Things got worse with each passing year, and eventually I had to come home, accept a private security job, and take care of her. I watched her slowly fade over the next three years, losing more and more of herself to the disease, until, at the end, there was nothing left of the woman who’d been the absolute foundation of my life.
After that, I kind of drifted from one dangerous, likely-to-get-you-killed job to the next. I did a lot of mercenary work all over the world, including Kenya, where I worked for the Kenyan government hunting poachers on the Masai Mara wildlife reserve. That’s where RevChem recruited me.
I didn’t know what I’d be doing at first—RevChem was obviously tight-lipped about it. When I found out, I should have told them to go fuck themselves. Instead, I saw a chance to experience something few people could even dream of. I also thought what better place to hide from the horrors of my past than millions of years before they even happened. The money didn’t hurt either.
Unfortunately, guilt is a powerful force, and it can reach back through time and space and grab hold of you. My guilt was clothed in memories of my mom, and it eventually pushed me to reach out to NewsNow, one of the few unbiased news agencies, and bare my soul. I told them how RevChem was using illegal time travel equipment to pillage the past. I related that one T-Rex brain provides enough genetic material to treat a thousand Alzheimer’s patients, but RevChem offers the treatment to a fraction of that number to drive up the price.
NewsNow is running their article in a few days. I’ll be back before the dam breaks, time enough to collect the money RevChem is paying for this job. I suppose that makes me a hypocrite, but I’m gonna tell myself it’s okay because this journal is the start to a book that’ll blow the cover off everything. I’m gonna tell myself it’ll lead to people like my mom getting treated.
I even sort of believe it.
Spent all day hunting. No dice.
My target is a healthy adult Tyrannosaurus Rex (apparently the brains of juveniles don’t carry that magic protein). An adult T-Rex is a forty-foot-long killing machine with dagger-sized teeth and a bite force registering north of six tons. You’d think an animal that big would be easy to find. You’d be wrong. One thing I learned in Kenya was that predators are adept at remaining unseen, even giant ones like T-Rexes.
If you know anything about hunting predators, you also know hunting them directly rarely pays off. The best tactic is to post up near their favorite food and wait for the lions and tigers and bears to get hungry. This morning, I followed my compass west and trekked inland through pine forests that make the Redwoods look like someone’s backyard. I was searching for T-Rex’s favorite prey. That just happens to be an animal only slightly less terrifying than Rexy himself. Triceratops horridus is thirty feet long, weighs about eight tons, and its head features a bony crest that is both bullet-proof (trust me on this one) and Rex-proof. That monstrous head also sports three massive horns. The two above its eyes are a yard long and anything on the wrong end of them, be it T-Rex or a hapless time-traveler, is shish kebab.
I found a herd of Triceratops, about twenty of them, in a big clearing five clicks from my campsite. They’re dangerous, but, like most herbivores, they’ll leave you alone unless you get too close or mess with their young. I made myself a hunting blind near the tree line, and watched and waited. People often think hunting is some grand adventurous escapade. It’s mostly sitting in the boonies with your thumb up your ass hoping whatever you’re hunting actually shows up. Today, I spent nine hours watching Triceratops eat and shit and then eat some more. It held all the majesty of watching a herd of giant, well-armed cows.
When I was certain that T-Rex wasn’t going to show, I climbed into a nearby tree, and slung my hammock. My dossier says T-Rex doesn’t hunt at night, but I’d rather not sleep on the ground and test the theory. As I lay here with my rifle across my lap and writing in the last rays of the Cretaceous sun, I’m thinking about Mom. Thinking about her last year and how the treatments we could afford did next to nothing. How, at the end, she didn’t even know who I was.
The more I think about Mom, the more I think about all the people RevChem is not helping, and the more I hate myself for getting involved in their shit show to begin with. You take the devil’s money, and you do the devil’s bidding, and, in the end, the devil gets your soul. Well, he’s gonna pay through the fucking nose for mine.
Last note. Night has fallen, but I’m watching the most epic meteor shower. Hundreds of them, lighting up the night like flares. Hell of a show.
Success!
I bagged a T-Rex. Happened first thing this morning. I woke to the Triceratops herd making an ungodly racket. Imagine the honking of a goose mixed with an air-raid siren, and you’ll have some approximation of a Triceratops alarm bleat. A pair of Rexes had cornered one of the Triceratops juveniles, a little ten-footer with no chance of fighting off the monsters who’d come to eat it.
It’s weird; you grow up with pictures of dinosaurs. Artist interpretations, you know?. They show these scaly, lumbering brutes, but the truth is radically different. A T-Rex has a thick, almost barrel-shaped body, and they’ve got feathers and scales. The feathers are drab green and run along their backs, while their legs and bellies are covered in brown, pebble-like scales. Despite their size, they move like birds—fast and fluid—like ostriches bred with dragons. They’re borderline ridiculous, until you get to that massive head and teeth. Nothing ridiculous about those.
The adult Triceratops managed to drive off one of the Rexes, but not before the second one went in for the kill. That’s when I took my shot. Like I said, no high-tech gear, but even though I can’t pack the latest gauss carbine, I’m not exactly sporting Davy Crockett’s bear rifle. My Simpson M105 fires .50 caliber, explosive-tipped rounds that can put soccer-ball sized holes in two feet of concrete. I shot my Rex just as he opened those jaws of death to turn the juvenile Triceratops into dino-chow. I hit him just behind his two dinky arms, obliterating heart and lungs in a spray of blood. The Rex staggered to the side, eyes wide and goggling, then keeled over. The gunshot scattered the herd of Triceratops, and in a few minutes the glade was empty and quiet.
I left my hunting blind, made my way across the clearing to the T-Rex corpse, and fired up my bone saw. It’s messy cutting through skin, meat, and a half-inch of bone, but there’s no other way to do it. T-Rex’s brain is located in the back of its skull, and it’s surprisingly small for such a big animal, about half the size of a human brain. Once I cut it out, I put the brain in a special vacuum sealed bag and started hoofing it back to my camp.
That’s really the most dangerous part of this whole thing. Stinking like carrion and trekking back through five miles of monster-infested forest. I had to sling my rifle to carry the brain, and, yeah, sure, I could probably get to my pistol if another T-Rex showed up, but that’d be like shooting a mountain with a slingshot.
I made it back to camp, burned my blood-soaked fatigues, and changed into a fresh pair. Luckily, the vacuum seal around the specimen blocks any odor, so I shouldn’t attract any unwanted attention tonight.
I’m supposed to snap back to the present at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow. That’s how it works. You’re on a timer. The techs give you a certain number of days to do the job, and when that time expires, the machinery yanks you back. It’s worse than the journey to get here. Like being squeezed through a hole a little too small for you to fit.
There was another meteor shower tonight. Even brighter than last night. Scared the shit out of the Hesperornis, and they all flocked into the sea, leaving me alone on my little stretch of beach. Fine by me. Tomorrow I go home, get paid, and this will be the last time I visit the past. That’s a little bittersweet, to be honest. I mean, how many people get to see the things I’ve seen? The consolation prize is RevChem will be exposed, and I’ll have done something approaching worthwhile with my life. Still feels like I got a lot more to answer for, but it’s a start.
It’s 10:00 a.m. as I write this, and I’m still in the Cretaceous. The techs have been a little off before, but only by a few minutes. An hour is definitely out of the ordinary. Of course, it could be just a technical malfunction. I mean, we’re talking about time travel, right?
It’s noon and technical difficulties seem a lot less likely. I’m a cynical bastard, and I’m starting to think RevChem got wind of my little story at NewsNow and figured it would be a lot worse if I came back to corroborate all that ooey-gooey evidence. No need to hire a hitman to remove someone if you can arrange for them to slowly die sixty-six million years in the past, right?
I wonder how long I can survive. I have a finite amount of ammunition, and I don’t fancy hunting dinosaurs with sharp sticks. Seems pointless to even try, but there’s a part of me that can’t go quietly. I’ll stick it out for as long as I can.
Seems silly to keep writing this down, but I like doing it. It’s calming. Cathartic.
It’s midnight, and I am struck by a line I wrote in a previous entry. I’m definitely gonna get to see some shit no one has ever seen before. For starters, I was treated to the biggest meteor shower of all time. Thousands of shooting stars, some so big they made it all the way to the surface. I heard impacts from multiple directions, and I can already smell the fires to the east.
Then the big one came. When the K-T asteroid passed overhead, it was like someone hurled that sun at me. The light from the thing was like noon on a summer day.
That was twenty minutes ago. I felt the impact, even thousands of miles away, and a fiery glow bloomed on the horizon. The shockwave will hit soon.
RevChem couldn’t just leave me to die in the past. They needed to make a statement. It’s a little over the top, but I gotta hand it to them. The calculations they had to pull off to put me right here, right now must have cost millions. I’m honestly flattered they went to all this trouble.
I’m sorry as hell I won’t be able to help more folks like my mom. If there’s something beyond all this, maybe I’ve done enough to see her again. That’s a nice thought, and I’m going to hold it close, sit on the beach, and wait for the world to end.
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Aeryn Rudel is a speculative fiction author living in Tacoma, Washington. He’s sold over 100 short stories in markets such as Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Pseudopod, Factor Four Magazine, and On Spec. He is the author of the short story collection Night Walk & Other Dark Paths, the baseball horror novella Effectively Wild, as well as the three Acts of War novels. In addition, his blog Rejectomancy, which focuses on the perils and pitfalls of writing and publishing, has been in operation since 2015.