My name is Shane Karosaki and I just wanted to tell you how any penchant for things fantasy quickly leaves your mind when you’re in another world while desperately escaping from a large monster. I ran for my life from a dinosaur-like creature, which barely three breaths behind me, flattened man-sized scrub like a nitro-powered bulldozer. Pause there for a moment, I’m getting ahead of myself. Perhaps for your benefit, I should first tell you how I landed up there in the first place.
Ten years ago, my father mysteriously disappeared, setting changes in motion that permanently affected my life. Mom reported him as a missing person to the police and following a brief investigation they discovered no body, an instrument of death, or signs of foul play. Their final say on the case was that my father probably found happier pastures somewhere else. They dropped the case like a hot potato, no doubt moving on to more challenging cases. We couldn’t even claim his life insurance until he was officially missing after five years. Even then it took a mountain of paperwork to fully convince the insurers to pay it out. The whole episode left my mom emotionally exhausted. She survived the situation, but I think deep inside her she believed that one day he would turn up again just as mysteriously as he left.
I loved my mom, but unlike the fairy tales dad used to tell me so much about when I was younger, I didn’t think fantasy endings were relevant to our world. Many years later when I started working, another significant event changed my life forever.
Only a few years ago I started working as a mechanical engineer for my uncle’s metal recycling yard after graduating with my master’s degree. The prefabricated office I normally worked in, the hub of any comings and goings of activities, stood in the middle of a recycling yard. My job was looking after the metal shearing and crushing equipment used to process various scrap metals and to check the quality of the metals we processed. On the odd occasion something caused the machines to stop working, like planned maintenance or a hydraulic hose bursting oil all over the place. But when our frustrated machine operator, Bill, opened the door he presented a unique problem to me.
“Hey Shane, can you come and look at the machine for a moment? The damn shearer seized up halfway through a job and we can’t find the problem.”
Bill referred to a mechanical metal crunching machine I designed as part of my university master’s degree. My father originally owned the recycling yard, but following my father’s disappearance, my uncle took over management of the facility because I wasn’t old enough to run it myself.
Years later he helped me construct the machine I designed using some of the money left over from dad’s life insurance. Since then, it became my baby to look after, and any operating teething issues left for me to deal with. When I arrived on site to figure out why the large machine stopped, I first checked to see if the machine hadn’t blown a hose or tripped the PLC.
“That’s strange, the PLC tripped the power because the cutting blade caused an overload. My guess is something’s caused it to jam.”
I mumbled to no one in particular. The machine was a two-storey high behemoth. Its cutting blade was the business part of the machine, a massive tungsten bar that cut into the scrap metal like a paper guillotine which reduced the size of tough metal pieces as part of the first cutting stage.
From there, other rollers ripped the metal into finer and finer pieces until it reached the size of confetti you could hold in your hand. My search ended when I tracked down the problem to the tungsten bar but since the machine stopped working mid cycle, I couldn’t inspect it while large chunks of metal blocked my view.
“Bill this is going to take a while, you need to get the scrap metal away from here until you can clear the blade from whatever must have jammed it. Let me know when you found it and I’ll reset the PLC if you need me to.”
Bill looked frustrated because a lot of manual labour waited for him to clear that blade. Bill was a good man in his forties. He was the foreman for the work team and worth his weight in gold and had a long history with our company, he even worked with my father. I had to say it was people like Bill and his vast knowledge that made it possible for my uncle and I to keep the company profitable.
“Ok Shane. I’ll have to manually pump the blade up again to release this scrap.”
I nodded and left him to get on with the job. Although I knew the machine like the back of my hand, getting involved at that stage would only get me in their way. I was more the brains, and they were the brawn and we worked well like that. An hour and a half later Bill’s gloved hands unceremoniously dumped a large shiny metal sphere on my desk with a loud thud.
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“Well, there’s the culprit. I’m not sure what the heck this is, it doesn’t even have a scratch on it. I’ve never seen anything like it before, but it looks like a massive ball bearing. But luckily that’s not my worry, I’ll leave that to you. The PLC’s reset itself so no need to come. I’ll get the machine running again.”
He shrugged his shoulders and left me sitting there, looking like a fortune teller staring at a glassy ball. It seemed around the size of a ten-pin bowling ball. Hard to believe something like that could seize-up my metal crunching machine. Looking closer at the sphere, I wondered what material it consisted of because there were few things that could beat those tungsten cutters on the machine.
I ran my finger over its surface to feel for any imperfections and found none. I could see what Bill was on about because there wasn’t even a scuff mark on the surface, even after going through the munching machine blade. It consisted of an incredibly hard metal and yet it felt far lighter than iron. I wanted to know more about it and decided to send it on to the metal analysis lab in my old university for them to mull over, professors were always looking for challenging cases for their students. I was about to place the sphere into a wooden courier box when I noticed the reflection of my rugged face on the metal surface, and that I missed shaving that morning.
“What the?”
Suddenly my reflection on the ball was concave and not convex as it should be. It was almost as if I was looking at the inside opposite wall of the metal sphere which was physically impossible. As I touched the ball to see if how the reflection behaved, someone turned off the lights and the world went dark for me.
When I opened my eyes, I looked up at a clear blue sky. I lay naked in a semi-arid desert, wondering where my office went and why bushes surrounded me instead of filing cabinets? The stony ground was uncomfortable to lie on, but there was a missing memory of how I landed up there in the first place. When I couldn’t recall anything, and realising the sun was pickling my skin, I decided to stand up and remove the annoying little stones that were poking me in my softer parts.
Running my hands over my body, I looked for injuries or places someone might have injected me with drugs. I wondered how I managed to lose my clothing and shuddered while thinking of the possibilities. There was no point mulling over a bunch of wild imaginations and since there was no clothes in my immediate vicinity, I shifted my focus to the surroundings.
My father was something of a survivalist. He would always take me on camping trips in the wilderness, take the bare minimum of equipment, then ask me how to survive. It was a frustrating life but on the positive side, I got to know dad pretty well until he disappeared. If there’s something I knew for certain, it was dad didn’t leave because he wanted to. Looking around me, at the unknown wilderness for the first time, I realised it might be more than a possibility he could still be alive.
Thorny looking shrubs about two meters high surrounded me like a maze and I couldn’t see further than ten meters ahead of me. But when I jumped just high enough, I could barely make out the rooftops of some buildings far in the distance. I was relieved. At least I was near civilisation and therefore help and some answers were hopefully not too far away.
My delicate journey through the bushes, avoiding both thorns and stones, stopped when I found something resembling an ostrich nest on the ground, well something like it. It wasn’t ostrich eggs, that much I knew. I once held an ostrich egg in my hand, and it was far more oval than the elongated eggs I saw half buried in the ground. And that was my concern because anything big enough to lay that size egg on the ground came with matching sized teeth or claws. No animal I knew, liked strangers around their nest and usually, mommy or daddy wasn’t far away.
On cue, as if reading my thoughts, a hoarse huffing sound snorted on my side a few meters away. I had just enough time to take one more orientation jump to confirm the houses rooves were in the opposite direction to my impending danger and headed there, full speed ahead, thorns and stones be damned. The huffing noise trailed behind me, closely followed by the bash-bash of flattened thorny bushes trampled down by the large creature chasing me. In what seemed like a frantic minute mile dash a house loomed up in front of me and the huffing noise stopped following me when I reached a clearing between the house and the bushes.
I heaved deep breaths while leaning against the wooden exterior of the house, my eye never leaving the bushes in case I had to run. A cold chill ran down my spine when I looked behind me, only to see a dinosaur-like creature quickly disappearing into the bushes.
With my survival dash behind me, thoughts about my modesty came to the fore. In an embarrassing moment, I realised up to that point the bushes kept my modesty preserved but the moment I stepped out from the most social norms dictated I be dressed to some degree for the occasion. Well thinking about it, how would you expect to be treated if you waltzed naked into a community of people unless it happened to be a nudist colony? I wasn’t betting on the odds of that being the case. Besides, what do you say when you find someone while naked…what’s up?
I carefully hid behind a small disused lean-to with a porch door that had obviously never opened in a long time. Wondering how to approach the next step, a young voice suddenly scared the life out of me. A small boy I hadn’t noticed sat on a small wooden box on the porch. It took me a moment to realise it, but the problem I had was that the boy had flipping cat ears.