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Outside Context Problem
Mister Truth puts one wet grey webbed foot on the warm surface of the marbled rock. His tail flicks lazilly between his legs and the wide base of his fluke fans his skin as it slowly dries.
"I have traced it back to this point. This struggle." he chitters into the labyrinth in my inner ear through a combination of equilibroception and biosonar; beaming his thoughts directly into the liquid at the front of my brain and putting me slightly off-balance.
The bastard hadn't thought to bring me here with any clothing and already I can feel the burn across my shoulders from the harsh Precambrian sun through an ionosphere severely lacking in any protective qualities. No plant life at this point in time means that the gases that would normally have been funneling out and into the atmosphere have yet to be appear. Still, he's out of his element too; standing on rock doesn't come naturally for a cetacean.
At the water's edge I watch as a flat and wide armor-plated trilobite crawls through crystal waters towards the surface. The slick water, devoid of algae and other fragments of animal detritus parts like mineral oil and the creature drags itself up onto the rock.
"This one" announces Mister Truth and waggles his snout towards the trilobite. "Does it not feel truly magical to witness this?"
I am getting a headache from receiving his thoughts and rub my brow. I really couldn't care less about witnessing the birth of my species, it really just feels like he's rubbing it in that the cetaceans have managed to develop time travel before we did.
"I imagined something more epic, and with a decent soundtrack" I tell him, using my mouth so that he has to process and understand before he can respond. "Maybe some Strauss, or something with a backbeat. Slow edits and pace and eventually a big build up as..."
"Hush" Mister Truth says hard enough to make my skull pound.
The trilobite is not alone, it has been followed by a creature I've never seen before, a sort of translucent lizard with pink organs showing through. The lizard slopes out of the water and tracks the trilobite across the surface of the rock, following the contours and remaining almost completely invisible. The trilobite has evolved a carapace that will protect it from the sun and maintain its skeletal integrity, but this lizard oozes and dribbles its way like a jellyfish.
The lizard catches up to the trilobite and envelopes it, knocking them both onto the trilobite's shell with a slick pseudopod. I watch, fascinated as they struggle. The trilobite's legs claw furiously at the air and it twists and wriggles as best as its segmented body will allow.
"Ancestor of yours?" I ask Mister Truth, this time using the crude but effective method of humming my words into the forefront of my mind for him to detect and respond.
"Of course not. We evolved from the same mammals that you did. The trilobite is as much your ancestor as it is mine," there is a snort of derision from his blowhole. "You do not wish to see the creatures that would evolve in our place should the opponent win this fight"
The lizard is smothering and crushing the trilobite at the same time, but to do so has reduced its thickness to be as thin as paper. There is a shriek and a gurgle as the sharp tips of the trilobite's legs pierce the thin film in a hundred places at once. The lizard is slowly and methodically shredded, with gobs of wet see-through flesh tossed away. The trilobite rests on its back, the struggle over.
"Should we..." I start to say but stop and purse my lips, humming inside my head instead; "should we flip him back onto his front?"
Mister Truth looks down at the trilobite as it wriggles and squirms in an attempt to right itself. It balls itself up.
"Oh... um... I don't know. I don't think we can interfere, we might change the entire course of evolution."
We stood there, a human and a cetacean, on part of a continent that would one day be China, if we could just work out whether flipping this damn bug back onto its feet was the path to evolution or mass extinction for us.
Aug. 9.2007