If you were to ask a pettifogging scientist if time travel were possible, they would tell you something along the lines of “yes, you’re doing it right now,” but living through the inevitable passage of time is not what anyone means by that question. Perhaps there are moments when the passage of time may feel as though it moves at different rates, but thats not something we really have control over, more something we notice as it is happening. What any rational person means when they talk about time travel, is if it is possible to instantaneously jump into the future or the past. Now this may seem like something only possible in science fiction, but what if I told you time travel were possible, and in fact predates humanity by about 70 million years. This is a story about the worlds first time traveler, an abnormally perceptive Troodon living in a place that would one day be known as Alaska.

During this Troodon’s life there was an abundant supply of small mammals and lizards within their hunting grounds. Due to this large supply of food the Troodon was able to do what no being had done before, contemplate the world around them. Of course, the troodon was not the first being to use their mind, because every living thing for all of existence has in some capacity thought about eating, shitting and fucking, precisely in that order; however, the Troodon was able to think beyond these basic natural instincts. The first thing that the Troodon thought about was the night sky. They were able to observe that some nights were brighter than others. This was an important observation since the Troodon was not only a nocturnal hunter, but lived in a place that was predominantly night most of the year. By avoiding tedious hunts on nights which were darker than most, the Troodon was soon able to preserve their energy becoming the dominant hunter in their small corner of the world. Additionally, this allowed more time and energy for the Troodon to think.

The next thing that the Troodon noticed was that the nights got progressively brighter until the brightest night (which we would call the full moon), and then progressively dimmer until the darkest night (which we would call the new moon; on a side note, why is this the term for a night where there is no moon in the sky? First of all, there is no “new moon,” because its the same fucking moon. Second of all, even if there was a “new moon” that came into being every few weeks, its not out yet, because on those nights, there is no fucking moon... but anyway back to the story). The Troodon always chose to rest on the darkest night, for on those nights they always exasperated more energy chasing and searching for animals than the hunt itself was worth. Not to say the Troodon had any ideas regarding caloric intake, but they knew their own body well enough to jump to the logical conclusion that they were better off doing nothing on those nights. It was on one of these darkest of nights that the Troodon had an idea, one that would allow them to rid themselves of this self-imposed fast. All they had to do was skip the darkest of nights all together, allowing them to hunt and fill their belly lavishly on all the other nights.

From that night onward the Troodon began a ritual that took place regularly on the darkest of nights. The Troodon would lay in their cave, concentrate on the passage of time, and attempt to expedite the rise of the moon so that they may begin their next hunt. At first this was a pointless endeavor; however, due to the Troodon not yet having reached sexual maturity they had nothing better to do with their time and continued this exercise in futility. Having no concept of time beyond their own reasonings, it was hard for the Troodon to tell how successful they were with their ritual. Perhaps there were some nights that seemed to end more quickly than others, but this may have just been some prehistoric placebo effect, and not any form of meaningful time travel.

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If the Troodon were any less tenacious in the practice of their ritual, they probably would have given up, followed the path of many of the other troodons their age and used their keen skills of observation to pursue a ritual more sexual in nature. However, the adamant nature of this Troodon drove them towards success, and finally their efforts bore fruit. During the first successful iteration of their ritual, the Troodon gained the tittle of World’s First Time Traveler, and here is how it happened.

The Troodon laid in their cave and began the usual ritual which they performed on the darkest of nights. The Troodon began concentrating on the passage of time and their ideal hunting conditions, being that of the brightest of nights, until they were able to reach a meditative state. Not to say that this dinosaur was in any way a Bodhisattva, because it was their desire for food which had brought them to such a state. It was usually at this point in their ritual, that the Troodon began to perceive the passage of time at a quicker rate, but this time was different. Instead the Troodon felt a strange sensation, or perhaps that is a poor way of phrasing it, because the feeling itself was that of nothing.

The warm dirt in which the Troodon lay began to disappear, not literally, but only from what they could perceive. The nerve endings which were in contact with the dirt had lost contact with the Troodon’s brain, for their mind was elsewhere. But the Troodon did not even notice the absence of all feeling, or even the disappearance of the world around them, for they were so engrossed with their ritual. It was now that the Troodon had pierced the veil of reality and transcended linear time. The cool damp atmosphere of the cave which had always encased them grew to be cold and empty, the various sounds that normally rang into the cave became silent, and the pungent sells of the Cretaceous Period disappeared completely; this the Troodon did notice, for not only had they skipped the darkest of nights, but half the lunar cycle as well.

Unfortunately for the Troodon, they knew nothing of the world outside of their hunting grounds. They did not know that their cave lay on a small portion of a world that spun, and it was this spin in conjunction with the orbit of the moon which caused the various bright and dark nights they had become all too familiar with. They did not know that they inhabited one of many celestial bodies that orbited the Sun, or that that the Earth took approximately 365 nights to complete its lap around the Sun. Nor did they know that the Sun was one of many stars that made up a Galaxy which we call the Milky Way. The Troodon especially did not know the nomadic nature of our solar system, and that Sun along with their world and the rest of the celestial bodies traveled at 514,000 miles per hour through the Milky Way. Perhaps if the Troodon had concerned themselves with such matters they could have reached some conclusions similar to these, but they did not. Instead the Troodon was obsessed with time, and in an instant they transported from the darkest of nights to the brightest of nights, completing a 14 night time skip. Regrettably the Troodon did not know of Einsteins Theory of Special Relativity and that space-time are two sides of the same coin. While the Troodon was able to do the improbable and instantaneously transport 336 hours into the future to the night of their ideal hunting conditions, their place in space remained the same. And it was there, in some desolate part of space, some 173 million miles from the hunting grounds where they spent most of their life, that the Troodon found themselves swollen, frozen, and dead.