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For once in his life, Egbert Pandabell, pronounced egg-bear to the delight of his old friends and new acquaintances, had drawn the short straw and was pleased about it. There is only room for one in the small metal canister, but three candidates on the team for the machine’s inaugural voyage. The others hadn’t raised protest. Fair is fair. If the run was successful they would each get their turn. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if the run was not successful. He decided that happy thoughts would see him through. Egbert was as well-trained as anyone they could have hired off the street, and in his opinion, more capable of handling things on the fly. If their calculations were all correct, which had been verified in the simulation, he would most certainly not be torn to pieces at a subatomic level and scattered between the ends of time. The banana had survived, anyway.
He pulled his glasses off to polish them on his shirt. When he put them back on, he noticed he had accidentally moved a couple of the virtual windows displayed on them. He took a second to take inventory of his augmented reality desktop. He wasn’t quite used to the new device. It occurred to him he wasn't listening with his full attention to his teammate, but they already covered everything she was telling him, probably five hundred times. He was to start recording at t minus twenty minutes, state personal info, identify the project, state the test number, enter the pod, and wait for the count down to be sent back in time. Don't move when visiting the past, just wait for the routine to finish and it would return him to the present time. He was ready to get it over with and be rich and famous already. He might have won the privilege of guinea pig, but that meant someone else got to choose the time period. If it has been up to him he would have gone to the future.
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Was the lecture hall fuller than it had been since he'd started? There were only as many people as he could count on his interns' fingers, but he could have sworn there had been fewer people to begin with. For what felt like the thousandth time, and to audiences roughly as sparse as this one, he said, “We don't want to speculate the theoretical physics of it, but we do have a top-down theory about what’s happening.” He changed the slide to a picture of silhouettes standing on an arrow, each representing a predator species, organized from smallest to largest. The silhouettes polarized at the ends, leaving a big gap in the middle.
“We know now that certain predatory ecological niches were filled by the young of larger carnivores. With such a large part of the ecology taken up by just one species, we couldn't be sure if what we were finding was merely a fluke. The artifacts - the time stream pollution as we like to refer to the phenomenon - are being found primarily in the remains of one species in particular.” He shuffled the papers on the podium, detached the corded mic from the stand and started walking on the stage. With some effort he continued, “We started to suspect a connection. Can someone, anyone in the audience, tell me what dinosaur you were originally interested in as a child? Which one grabbed your attention the most?”