Sinking into the haze, like a diver beneath the surface waves of a great and immeasurable bay, you push through murk until at last your enhanced optics perceive the silt at the bottom. During the plunge, you perceive the phantom overlay of the great dark between the stars, and the burning fireflies of the stars themselves warping past around you. You see the remnants of the big bang pulsating through the membranes of existence on a subatomic level, sparkling like fairy glitter. The upwelling of silt from this cosmic bay floor obscures your senses for a while, and when it settles, you see where you have landed. The fog is thinner here, the eye of the storm. The AI that interfaces with your robotic body recognizes this place from the immense databanks of the central supercomputer, and its compilations on every biome imaginable, past and present. Rolling savannah grass stretches out far into the horizon, where a fiery sun hugs the cusp where the sky and background meet. Everything is still muddled by thin traces of the fog though, and the sun itself glows dimly behind that white filter, muted and ominous. You hear the cracking of a trunk splitting in two, and as you flutter through the ether, you identify the cause. A titanic mass has broken an acacia-like tree at the base, and rears back with its massive paws poised ready to strike. The behemoth stands erect and is coated in dense brown fur that hangs in matted thickets. It almost resembles a bear, but a closer look at the posture and the shape of the massive paws and their curved claw digits says otherwise. As your recording eyes adjust to the glare through the fog, you see that before you stands Megatherium - the long-extinct giant ground sloth, a massive mammalian relic of the Pleistocene epoch. Its slobbery snout gives it a stupid look sharply offset by its alert, intensely-focused eyes. As its thick carpet of a tail drags behind it, you see the beast stand to its full height, those massive claws spreading out as if ready to slash a hapless target to ribbons.
A moment later you understand why, as a bloodcurdling jaguar shriek cuts the atmosphere, and a crouched, rippling feline shape lunges free of the downed treetop. You record and interpret what the creature is in nanoseconds - Smilodon - a saber tooth tiger. The prehistoric wildcat’s bulky form is all fur and dense muscle hugging a razor-sharp skeleton frame of bone and sinew, and its form cuts through the battlefield like its claws through flesh. The tiger circles the ground sloth at high speed, working to disorient and intimidate its prey as it scouts a weak point to target. Swiping claw strikes at the sloth’s ankles and heels to recoil the lumbering brute, the cat jumps and climbs up the sloth’s back, biting mouthfuls of fur and loose-fitting flesh as it works its way up to bite at the back of the neck, or through the top of the skull with those massive icepick canines for which it earned its namesake. The sloth howls angrily and in clear pain, but this is no modern day helpless sloth. It falls onto its back, soundly crushing the tiger under its bulk, the weight of the blow signaled by the tiger’s pained yelp. Even under the immense pressure though, the tiger is still kicking, and forces itself out from under the beast. Now that the sloth is upon its back, it should present easy targets. The sabretooth leaps astride the sloth’s belly, raking at it with huge retracting talons, and lunges for the throat. The sloth fights through the bloody streaks being pulled in its torso and sits up again, then rushes to stand as the cat attempts another deadly climb, this time up the sloth’s front. Shaking wildly, the sloth whiplashes the cat, despite its valiant efforts to keep its hooks in tight, free of its hide, flinging it hard to the ground.
If you were a person, this would be an epic spectacle of jaw-dropping proportions, a mortal combat of a lost world only accessible by fossil records and picture books, now brought to life in flesh and blood for you to see. But you are not a person, you are a device, and you only quietly continue to monitor the data. As the battle rages, the sabretooth tiger makes a high leap for the now-hunched sloth’s face. A fatal miscalculation. The sloth winds its tree trunk arm back, its open paw again heavily resembling that of an enraged grizzly bear, claws and all, and swings it forward instantly, displacing a rush of wind that blows leaves from the branches of the fallen tree. The tiger is struck soundly out of the air with a bone-breaking blow, and a grazing slash that easily rips through the abdomen of the big cat in one stroke the same way the cat had always expected to do to its prey. It lands back-first on a protruding jagged rock, breaking its spinal column for good measure. The sabretooth tiger is dead instantly.
The victorious sloth looks up toward the sun. No, not the sun, past it, up and through the swirling fog. You follow its gaze. Up above is a transparent filmy vision of modern city streets, and crowded high-rises. You know what the sloth is looking into - it’s the world you came from, through the fog. The boundary of the fog bank represents a schism in the natural order of things, not of life or of earthbound nature, but of the universal laws themselves. In a shower of vapor somewhere between pure matter and energy, yet wholly belonging to neither state, a wedge from the past has begun to breach into the present, like an upwelling of a struggling tectonic plate fighting to push aside the crust and establish itself. This time it was merely a well into a distant but understood period of prehistory, likely within the same timeline as the prime Earth in which you were manufactured, but it could just as easily have been a floating island in a bottomless sky, or a twisted industrial complex spewing toxic smog into an atmosphere-eroded sky patrolled by mechanical cephalopods, or a cursed bog of the darkened fey woods, from which endless droves of mud-plastered undead rise in an eternal march on a far-off pristine castle, to meet knights in shining armor on a great stretch of green field as dragons roar in the distance.
It could be any of these things, or it could be none of them. The Institute doesn’t understand how or why. That’s why you, and others of your model, are being deployed to investigate and record data in the first place. To learn. To tell the established order what they’re up against, and what alien things might be seeping into the narrow slice of normality they call civilized life. Before you can report most of your findings though, you’re summarily swatted away by a brush with the sloth that never noticed you, merely shoved fatally into you by an opposing force ramming it from behind. An Entelodont - a monstrous carnivorous ancestor of modern pigs, most closely visually compared to an especially bestial-looking razorback hog with pronounced canines and incisors, and a mohawk-like ridge of bristly fur across the top of its spine - has done by opportunity attack what the sabretooth failed to do by direct assault - take down the giant ground sloth. The gigantic swine sank its vicious teeth into the small of the sloth’s back with massively-opened jaws closing down like an ivory vice, severing the spinal cord in one shot.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Survival of the fittest, and winner takes all. The pig is misplaced by appropriate era and landscape, but the anachronism no longer concerns you. Twice you lived - once as an insect, and once as a robot - and now twice you have died. Your story ends.
And as it does, a greater story begins, one that the survivors who bear witness to it will find macrocosmic in scope far beyond the mere triviality of a prehistoric animal battle for supremacy.
-
“Both ferals have been eliminated by a third foreign body!” the bobcut woman announced.
“Another feral?” the director asks.
The cybernetic-outfitted women scrutinize the screen and the input feed from their virtual reality sensory-integrated goggles.
“Yes, and a persistent one! He’s going for the exit, and coming in hot!” the long-haired woman says.
“Can you identify type?”
“Negative, Telescope Dragonfly has been destroyed. Sensors indicate large mass and an aggressively predatory aura.” bobcut said.
“We can’t have you breach, my friend.” the director muses.
-
A hellish red-lit tunnel constricts around you as you bound through its twists and turns, sprinting like a maddened bull with all your might to make it across the threshold between your worlds. You don’t know what drives you - one moment you were savoring a fresh kill and the plentiful meal it brought, the next you were compelled to throw yourself into the strange alien world leaking into your era through the disorienting fog. At your cloven hooves, you feel power surge through the ground beneath your feet, and taste the metallic flavor of evolution in the air, somewhere very close, just at the end of this tunnel. You pant madly.
That is the perspective of the average wild beast warped, partially by happenstance and partially by malign mutation of animal instinct, through the Ether Fog spill, obsessively eager to break free clear through the barrier, into the other side. There is promise on the other side.
-
“Put a tracer on it.” the director said.
“Roger that.” longhair said.
-
Hot. You feel very, unbearably hot. A ring of red fire loops around your waist and squeezes mercilessly, constraining and burning you as it spreads itself out into two, then four, then six, then at last twelve identical evenly-spaced red rings. Their fire bites into your flesh and bones, and you roar in furious agony. No matter. You will outrun the fire, and douse it in the light of the new world when you emerge. You will become king of the beasts there.
But it’s just a fleeting dream. The power this supreme comingling of worlds promises is not intended to you, a lowly swine. Only those worthy may harvest the power of gods.
The rings encircle you, then become a single tube of fire that seals itself off at both ends.
-
“Tracer locked, 100%!” bobcut said.
“Sir, we’ve detected another foreign body in the vicinity of the feral.” longhair said.
“How big?” the director asked.
“Small, very small.” bobcut said.
“Then it’s of no concern. Focus on the large feral. If the tracer’s locked, then just follow the standard protocol and throw the switch.” the director said, pitilessly.
“Affirmative.” the twins said in unison.
They hit the virtual red button on the screen, the one that only assembles itself out of pixels into their view when a tracer has sealed a target successfully.
-
What none of the other parties involved accounted for - not the Institute, not the breaching ferals, and certainly not the currently-clueless Richie - was that the confluence of dimensional tunnels admitted more than just wild rampaging beasts. A diminutive figure of four feet in a green cloak stumbled into the stampede path of the bound pig. The hooded boy, blond curls falling unhelpfully into his eyes, raised his hands to ward off the impact.
“Woah Nelly!” his squeaky voice had only time to whistle out.
The flame shroud about the hog skyrocketed in heat and intensity, glowing white hot like a star now, and the primitive quadruped within felt its first and last inkling of self-conscious thought, so near the boundary.
So very nearly… free… the Entelodont laments as its body is vaporized, and the fire construct explodes to annihilate the residue, as thorough in its purification as the flames of Hell.
The unfortunate boy in the vicinity of the explosion finds himself tossed up and out of the metaphysical intersection by the blast.
…