The Speares

It was a kind of a fish, although if you ever caught one you would cut the line and leave it, and then give up fishing. It was approximately a meter and a half in length, and was covered in hard bony scales from the tip of its over-large head to the end of its somewhat whip-like tail. Its mouth was lined with the most ferocious teeth; it was getting a little crowded in the ocean these days and competition was fierce, so a good set of teeth was a handy thing. And it seemed to be gasping and kind of sucking at the air; something was happening to the oxygen in the water. Luckily the kind-of fish had the beginnings of a special sac that could exchange gasses with the air above the water, and it was engaged in doing exactly that, with its head half way out of the water, and a general direction of movement towards the dry land.

Of course, the fish couldn't reason any of this through, it merely felt the need to escape its overcrowded, dangerous, oxygen depleted and let's face it, increasingly smelly watery world. If it could reason it would be thinking: "My fins seem to have developed claws. And I can gasp above the water level. I don't need to be underwater all the time. And it appears there is no one else above the water. This could be a new place to live."

So the pre-historic, Devonian, in fact, fish found itself crawling out of the water to begin a totally new chapter in the evolution of life on dry land. But, sadly, shortly after gaining the high ground its forward progress was stopped by a creature, who was standing exactly in the way. It changed direction to avoid the creature, but there it was again, exactly in the way. So it went in a new direction and there again was the creature, which appeared not to have moved, however it was, once again, exactly in the way. The proto-fish couldn't count above one, so there was only the one creature, but wherever it looked, that one creature was standing exactly in its way. And all of these single creatures were waving their fins and doing funny things with their mouths which would probably have made some sort of sound if only the fish could hear in the air.

"Shoo! Back in the swamp with you! There's nothing for you here. Slimy little bugger. Take off!" is the sound the fish might have heard, after a million or so years of evolution allowed it to develop tympanic membranes that would work in air. But, sadly, that would never happen, because a thought was slowly winding its way around the dozens upon dozens of neurons that comprised the tetrapod's brain to the effect of it being a whole lot less strange to stay in the water. So the Devonian fish slithered back into the sea and, as far as its very short memory would allow, forgot about attempting to live on land.



This was without a doubt the most perfect day there had been in forever. Or almost forever. The sun was radiant, but there were just enough clouds in the sky to give a bit of shade when needed. The sor trees on the edge of the water were swaying their approval in the light breeze, making the whole scene a pretty tableau vivant. Overhead, a flock of bo’Degh circled around a spot out in the water where presumably there was a school of ghotl’ wanting to be eaten. The gentle waves were lapping up onto the beach just a few meters away from where Smith was lounging in his reclining sun chair. He was sipping a margarita underneath his flamboyant sun hat, while enjoying hors d'oeuvres which he was sharing with a small furry DaH Hegh ghaH. All in all it was a perfect day.

The cacophony of noise underwater went largely unnoticed by the bo’Degh. Sounds that work well underwater often don't make it far above the water line. What the flock did notice was the sudden disappearance of the ghotl’, who themselves very much noticed not only the cacophony but also the sudden appearance of two meter long swimming plates of bone with huge teeth. All in all, the wisest course of action for the ghotl' seemed to involve being somewhere else, which they did. The lack of anything to catch infuriated the bo'Degh, who tend to make a lot of noise when angry, and this is what alerted Smith that something was amiss. That and the profusion of immense bony catfish heads that were staring at him from the water. All of them appeared to be singing, but all that could be heard above the water was a sort of a gasping sucking noise. The heads were all enshrouded in a kind of radiance; some kind of bioluminescence no doubt.

One of the larger bony catfish slowly crawled out of the water and approached Smith. Its bioluminescence bathed it head to tail in a blue glow. "Gasp. Suck." it said by way of greeting.

Smith waved his fins and made odd contortions with his mouth and face, but no sound and certainly no reply was forthcoming, so the fish tried again.

"Gasp. Suck."

Again Smith made no coherent attempt at a reply, so the fish crawled about and back into the sea, determining that Smith was not sentient. And being as there was no sentient life, the fish decided to get on with the task at hand.

From his point of view, Smith was waving his arms like a mad man and screaming at the fish heads poking out of his water and the retreating tail of the one who had crawled out onto dry land. "Begone! Foul monsters! Shoo!" he screamed, which had the opposite effect to that intended: suddenly there were hundreds; thousands; millions; perhaps an infinite number of catfish heads poking out of the water and with a mighty chorus of "GASP. SUCK." they all commenced gasping and sucking at the air.

Smith had no ears. Exactly how he managed to hear was a mystery to be explored perhaps another day. For the present it sufficed to say that his ears did not pop as the gasping and sucking depleted the already thin air. And oddly, the water was disappearing as well. Exactly what the fish were doing with the air and the water was a secret hidden at the bottom of the quickly diminishing water. And as the water receded, so too, of course, did the catfish monsters. "Gasp. Suck." carried in faintly on the breeze, just before the water and the very breeze itself disappeared over the horizon. Smith found himself alone on a brand new arid and airless desert.

“Well, that didn’t work out.” Was Smith’s summary of the whole thing.



Smith was floating around outside the Tard in the remoteness of space. This was the furthest he had ever travelled from home, so far in fact that home wasn’t even visible even though he knew roughly where it should be. Even the sun wasn’t so much a sun, as merely a slightly brighter star. He was pretty sure he was lost. And he never could figure out how to use a map.

Then, suddenly, a giant rock appeared at the very limit of what could be seen. With infinite slowness it approached the two unlikely objects in its path, so very far from home. It was clearly going to miss both the Tard and Smith by the narrowest of margins. So Smith flapped his arms and legs in much the same way as a non-swimmer would communicate his intention to drown, and somehow contrived to place himself squarely in the path of the slowly approaching, giant rock.

The rock grew nearer. Smith took what he considered to be a karate stance, but since he had never taken karate it was really more of a ballet stance.

The rock grew nearer. Smith took what he considered to be a quarterback stance, but since he had never thrown a pigskin it looked rather more like someone being constipated in the woods.

The rock grew quite close. Smith wound up with his right foot and gave the giant rock a mighty kick. Of course, the rock outweighed him by several cubic miles of rock. So Smith went careening off into space, holding his probably broken foot and screaming obscenities into the vacuum.

But the rock had altered course imperceptibly. And one day it was going to miss, again by the narrowest of margins, a little planet where the dominant life form was giant and scaly.



This was without a doubt the most perfect day there had been in forever. Or almost forever. The sun was radiant, but there were just enough clouds in the sky to give a bit of shade when needed. The sor trees on the edge of the water were swaying their approval in the light breeze, making the whole scene a pretty tableau vivant. Overhead, a flock of bo’Degh circled around a spot out in the water where presumably there was a school of ghotl’ wanting to be eaten. The gentle waves were lapping up onto the beach just a few meters away from where Smith was lounging in his reclining sun chair. He was sipping a margarita underneath his flamboyant sun hat, while enjoying hors d'oeuvres which he was sharing with a small furry DaH Hegh ghaH. All in all it was a perfect day.

And then there was a violent screeching noise, presumably being caused by the giant sinister black shapes wheeling about in the sky. The bo’Degh suddenly remembered an urgent errand and all flew off, as near as they could tell, directly away from the screeching noise and its black shapes. The DaH Hegh ghaH was nowhere to be seen. If the ghotl’ were still about they were as far down as down went in their watery world. That left Smith.

“Hey! Whatever you are you’re not welcome!” shouted an indignant Smith to the nearest black shape. The black shape instantly turned in Smith’s direction and began a steep dive at an incredible speed right towards him. Smith prepared several scathing things to say to the shape when it got nearer.

As the shape came closer, very quickly, it started to become less of a giant black shape and more of a thing you could describe, although no one would believe you if you described it to them. It appeared to be an alligator, although a particularly big one, perhaps ten meters long. It was indeed flying, and to that end it had enormous leathery wings. It was bathed in a radiance, and seemed to have a halo about its head, although not the circular one you normally see. Sort of an alligator-head shaped one. There seemed to be a kind of a screeching choir, screeching well past the point of pain in a heavenly sort of way, every time the flying alligator flapped its wings. But the choir couldn’t hold a candle to the screech of the thing itself. It screeched louder than the loudest thing ever, and gaped its massive jaws as it approached Smith at an alarming speed.

Smith decided to forgo saying the scathing remarks he had been working on, in favour of “Duck and cover!” as he rolled underneath his sun lounger where he would be perfectly safe. From his fortress of sun lounger he heard, rather than saw, his eyes being shut tight, the sound of mighty wings beating like jackhammers followed by the seismic thump of a giant weight landing a few meters away. Then the sound was the sound of a mighty steam locomotive trying to breathe through a horrible asthma attack. Smith thought it safe to take a look, he being under the sun lounger and all. He tentatively opened one eye. When it reported back a scene that didn’t seem likely Smith asked his other eye for a second opinion. What both of his eyes reported was a thirty foot tall alligator standing on its back legs with massive leather wings folded at its sides. The thing that had previously appeared to be a halo now appeared to be in fact a halo, and the alligator was also still bathed in a radiance that made it appear perfectly and unutterably beautiful, in a prehistoric monster kind of a way. It began to speak to Smith.

Of course, all it could say was the most brain-splitting of screeches. After a few seconds of this it seemed to realize that Smith was incapable of speech, and so therefore of little interest. It flew off, accidentally blowing Smith’s sun lounger and Smith as well dozens of meters away with the force of its downdraft. When it was once again just a giant black shape far up in the sky, it joined the other giant black shapes in what appeared to be the endeavour of shepherding still more giant black shapes, which giant shapes became absolutely enormous, as if they had suddenly been inflated like so many mammoth balloons. As the balloon shapes became seemingly inflated, they floated up and up until they disappeared. There were many of them. Perhaps millions. They were stealing the air. Smith’s margarita began boiling in the thin air, but not due to any sort of heat; it was getting kind of chilly in fact. And also the waves were no longer lapping, gently or otherwise around Smith's sun lounger, and in fact the whole beach seemed somehow larger than it had been just a short while before. Perhaps it had something to do with those black things out there which seemed to be skimming along the surface of the water and drinking a very large quantity of it, judging by the size they became shortly before zooming straight up and out of sight.

The large black flying things disappeared over the horizon, long with the water and the air. Smith found himself alone on a brand new arid and airless desert.

"Now that was just plain strange.” Said Smith.



The man-ape came face to face with the new rock when he led the tribe down to the river in the first light of morning. It was a rectangular box, slightly higher than he was but narrow enough that he could get his arms across each of its faces, and it was made of some blue material. It was easy to see in the morning sun. Its dimensions were in the exact ratio of 1:1:2 and a bit, although this had no particular significance. It was certainly attractive, and though he was wisely cautious of most new things, he sidled up to it and did what he would do to any new thing: he bit it. It tasted faintly of shit.

"Hey - stop that! I don't know where your mouth has been. But I can guess. Nasty, dirty things. Shoo!" said the Other, though the strange sounds he was making were lost on the man-ape. "Okay, that stuff about the skulls, and throwing rocks, and bashing warthogs, that's all done with. Forget about it. Hey you!” the Other said, indicating the big male who had tasted the new rock. “You seem like a bright lad - why don’t you take a peek inside?”

And with that the Other pulled on a recess on one side of the new rock and a bit of it moved, revealing that the rock was hollow. The man-ape was compelled by a force he didn’t understand; mostly the movement really, he would have spent all day following a laser pointer, anyway, he was compelled to look inside of the new rock. Inside was a sight that had never been seen before by him or any of his kind.

“You like it? I call it my infinity pool, only without the pool.” Said the Other. It was the vortex of infinity, a thing that simultaneously didn’t exist and yet also contained all of existence. The very sight of it would make any sentient being lose its mind. But the big male had no mind to speak of and had already mostly forgotten about the thing even while staring at it. It did not appear that you could either eat it or mate with it, so all that remained was to hurl feces at it but the big male hadn’t eaten in a while so there was no raw material with which to fabricate a good feces hurl. So he started to leave.

“No, wait, take another look.” Said the Other, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. The big male suddenly noticed a new smell, which seemed to be coming from inside the rock. As he tried to make out what he was seeing in the swirling vortex he thought he could make out little flecks of yellow becoming larger flecks of yellow, and then taking on a shape similar to that thing that he could use to pee on other man-apes with.

“The thing’s hollow - it goes on forever - and - oh my God! It’s full of bananas!” said the big male, though it sounded more like “ooh-ooh-ooh” followed by a shriek. He didn’t particularly know what a banana was, but by the smell he could tell they were good to eat and the quantity was such that the entire tribe could feast for several days. The man-ape threw away the rock that he had been hefting previously. He wouldn't need that now. Then he went into the new thing and came out with armloads of yellow fruit.

"Right. That was easy." said the Other, though the man-apes were too busy eating to notice, and didn't have any language skills anyway. “Here’s an interesting bit of trivia for you guys. Bananas are full of bromelain. Bromelain increases testosterone levels. Inhibits estrogen you might say.” The Other looked around at the man-apes and woman-apes waiting for the importance of this bit of news to sink in. It didn’t appear to be sinking at all, rather it was floating about and perhaps even getting airborne. “Your females are going to get bitchy! No more jig-jig! No more playing with the box the kids came in! No more… Oh, forget it, guys. Keep on eating. Lots more where that came from.”

The man-apes had quit noticing anything the Other did or said as soon as the bananas were before them, so it’s not like they were following his advice, but the Other chose to interpret things that way.

“Right, let's try something else. No matter what, one of you lot is likely to become sentient. So who's it going to be? Who's next? I know - a super-smart chicken! Buck Bugawk in the 25th century! It could work!" and the Other looked around the savannah, pretending he had binoculars by doing that thing with his hands. “No chickens! What kind of place is this, anyway? Looks like it hasn’t rained here in millions of years. I think chickens need rain. Or water. Or is that just fish? Hey, speaking of which, do you know how you sell a chicken to a guy who’s hard of hearing?” the Other asked of one of the man-apes.

“HEY-MISTER-DO-YOU-WANT-TO-BUY-A-CHICKEN?"

The man-ape went on about eating its bananas, apparently not needing a chicken.

The Other walked around and looked into the dirty stream, coming from snow-melt in the mountains hundreds of miles away. It smelled really bad. “Or maybe a race of intelligent microbes! Ahem. No one would have believed that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than ours and yet as mortal; that as we busied ourselves about our various concerns we were being scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water might study a man... Oh wait. Men are pretty much non-starters now.” A nearby man-ape emitted a monumental burp of contentment. “So what is it to be?”

A nearby warthog grunted. Or maybe it was a squeal. Warthogs really only have two words, and they use them interchangeably, so you can never tell what a warthog is saying. Whatever it was saying, it wasn't overly concerned about the Other. The Other didn't smell like it ate warthogs. And it didn’t smell like anything that warthogs ate. It didn't really smell of anything, actually. So the warthog started snuffling off on some warthog adventure or other.

But then, the Other made a strange sound. It was oddly compelling. It made the warthog feel the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion - a vague and diffuse sense of dissatisfaction with its life.

“Soooowwwwwweeeeyyyyyy Pig! Pig! Pig!" said the Other. “Ever wonder what it would be like to be sentient?”

“Grunt!”, said the warthog.



This was without a doubt the most perfect day there had been in forever. Or almost forever. The sun was radiant, but there were just enough clouds in the sky to give a bit of shade when needed. The sor trees on the edge of the water were swaying their approval in the light breeze, making the whole scene a pretty tableau vivant. Overhead, a flock of bo’Degh circled around a spot out in the water where presumably there was a school of ghotl’ wanting to be eaten. The gentle waves were lapping up onto the beach just a few meters away from where Smith was lounging in his reclining sun chair. He was sipping a margarita underneath his flamboyant sun hat, while enjoying hors d'oeuvres which he was sharing with a small furry DaH Hegh ghaH. All in all it was a perfect day.

“You know, little guy," said Smith to his furry companion, "this is what living is all about. Not a cloud in the sky; the sun, the sea, both perfect. And not an alien of any sort to be seen. Anywhere. Nasty, nasty creatures…” Smith said as he coasted off to sleep, the lazy sun warming his old-timey striped bathing suit.

Since the giant stripy creature seemed to have no further use for the crackers, or in any event wasn’t guarding them particularly well, the little DaH Hegh ghaH hopped up onto the table holding them and helped himself. This went on for some time, even after it got much darker and somewhat cooler. “Darker” registered on the little creature immediately of course, as that was sometimes danger, but it didn’t detect any bo’Degh that were interested in a tiny DaH Hegh ghaH, all of the ones nearby seemingly being amused by the ghotl’. So the tiny creature promptly forgot about how much darker and cooler it had become, and it continued stuffing its little cheeks with crackers.

But then something else caught the tiny creature’s attention. The water was receding. That in itself was of no concern of course, however a practical consequence of receding water was that the ghotl’ were also receding. And that then meant that the bo’Degh were suddenly much more interested in a tiny DaH Hegh ghaH, even if it was being potentially guarded by some kind of stripy monster. Now the flock of bo’Degh was circling pretty much directly over the stripy, snoozing Smith and his tiny ward.

“Squeak!” said the little DaH Hegh ghaH, by way of warning. But since its warning went unheeded it quite understandably decided to save its own skin and disappeared in a spray of beach sand to wherever such a creature goes when it doesn’t wish to be eaten.

Smith, meanwhile, unaware of the danger he was in, snored loudly. That, and the disappearance of their tiny meal, was almost enough to cause the flock of bo’Degh to circle somewhere else. Until one of them noticed the obviously unwanted plate of hors d’oeuvres.

Smith woke up to a cacophony of squarking and wailing and various other unpronounceable noises and the general chaos that accompanies an unguarded plate of food at a beach.

“Shoo! Monsters. Go away! Can’t a fellow get some sleep? Go do whatever it is you guys do somewhere else!” said an indignant Smith as he swatted at the flying intruders with his sunhat.

And then he noticed that the sky was slightly too dark and the water slightly less close by.

“Duck and cover everybody!” screamed Smith as he dove under his sun lounger. Except he didn’t quite fit so he just knocked it over and the overall effect was that he was much more noticeable than he would have been just laying on top of the lounger.

“Alligator lizards in the air! Run for your very lives! … Wait a minute … that doesn’t look like flying alligators…” he said, trying to understand what he was seeing.

There were an uncountable number of ladders descending into the sea that he was beside, except he was no longer beside it. It was now hundreds of meters away and a great deal lower. All of the ladders were literally blocking out the sun and making it a great deal cooler. Smith could sense that his perfect day was over.

The ladders went down to the sea, that was for certain. What was less certain was where the ladders went in the up direction. They seemed to go up and up into infinity and then just disappear. It was hard to wrap your head around it, but of course the ladders were simply so high that they became invisible and you could no longer see where they went. They appeared to be made of solid gold.

“Hey - those ladders are made of shit. Get them out of my sea! Gross. And where does my sea keep going?” said a Smith who was suddenly galvanized for action. So he got up off his sun chair and walked with all haste down to the nearest ladder which was now only a little ways out in the water, the water having receded a great deal and, by all indications, it was continuing to recede. He peered up the ladder and tapped his toe, which resulted in squishy noises in the mud surrounding the ladder. The mud that was recently water and not mud at all. In due course, a being of some sort could be seen descending the ladder carrying a bucket. It did not appear to be an alligator or a fish.

“Hey you up there! What are doing with my water? Stop that. And get rid of these ladders. They’re blocking my sun. I was enjoying my sun next to my sea and then you lot came along and ruined it. So shove off!” said Smith, in an even more indignant tone than he would have used on a bo’Degh.

“Squeal!” came the response. “Grunt.” Was the clarification, in case the original explanation was not sufficient. The being descending the ladder was a vision of divine perfection, a heavenly apparition of such beauty that it was hard to look upon. It was dressed all in white and every time it moved there seemed to be a choir somewhere singing backup. It had wings and a halo. It was also a warthog, only one that walked upright, or at least descended a ladder as if it might, and in its hand was a bucket. When it reached ground level it walked over to the nearest little pool of water and filled its bucket. Then it commenced climbing the ladder, accompanied by a heavenly choir of squeals and grunts.

“I said stop that! Come back here with my water! I-WANT-MY-WATER-BACK" said Smith, as he stamped his feet in the mucky ooze that was quickly drying out. Looking out over the diminishing sea, as far as the eye could see, there were golden ladders with angelic warthogs scooping buckets of water and then returning from whence they came.

“This is an Earth thing.” Said Smith with as angry a face as he could muster. “So the Earth creatures can fix it.” Smith clarified, for the benefit of the little creature that had come back wondering if there were more crackers.

“No more crackers, little guy. Sorry. Anyhow, if I was you I’d start hoarding water. And maybe air. It looks like we're being strip mined. Again.”



Bonnie, Art, Jim and Dave were all suffering from some sort of recent disconnect. Bonnie had most recently been about to travel mysteriously back to the ferry to give Dave a message. Dave, for his part, was just hugging and kissing and generally carrying on with Bonnie in that very same ferry. Art was making the point that a person was more than simply a collection of atoms, and Jim was just heading out the door to catch a drop pod.

And then they all found themselves here. Here was a lovely little beach, though quite some distance from the actual water, and they were all sitting on reclining beach chairs. Beside them all was a little table containing hors d’oeuvres and a margarita. Nearby was a port-o-potty, which seemed perfectly reasonable on a beach. Of course, everything seemed perfectly reasonable. One of the side effects of being a recent copy is that your ability to be weirded out is suppressed for a period of time. That and some random personality changes for a bit, which sort themselves out eventually. And an annoying itch of a personal nature. But back to the port-o-potty. Its door was open and from inside came the sound of a computer who had just experienced some sort of disconnect. Then, to no one’s surprise, even though they should have all considered it weird, Smith showed up.

“I-WANT-MY-WATER-BACK!” he said the same way a kid would say he didn't want broccoli. “The warthogs are stealing all of my water. Soon they’ll be taking all of the air for some reason. Make them stop!” and he indicated the many, many ladders with the many, many angelic warthogs on them. Everyone was sufficiently over their disconnect now to take in a little bit of weirdness, and an infinite number of angelic warthogs climbing and descending an infinite number of infinitely tall ladders was just the ticket.

“Where are they going with all of my water?” asked Smith. "Clearly, this is an Earth thing. And since you lot are all Earth creatures then you are responsible. So stop it!"

“Where are we?” asked Jim, becoming the man of action once again now that the confusion of being recently created was wearing off.

“The same place you were about a minute ago, just in a sort of a different timeline. On Mars. Chryse Planitia. Or at least it’s becoming the planitia. Until quite recently it was the Chryse Mare. But the warthogs are stealing all of the mare. Once the air goes it’ll look pretty familiar to you I’m sure. Of course you’ll all be dead. So maybe not.”

"When is this?” asked Art. “There hasn’t been any open water on Mars for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.”

“Well that’s a loaded question. As far as you guys are concerned it’s about two minutes after you last remember things. Or if your concern is broader than that then it’s a few thousand years in the past. Of course from my point of view I haven’t seen you lot in a very, very long time. Let’s all compromise and consider this to be the year 2304. B.C. Or is that B.C.E.? I’ve never understood the difference. Anyhow it’ll be a little while before anyone from Earth comes to Mars and I was hoping to enjoy my beach in peace. Now look at it!” The beach was visibly larger, and the water was visibly further away. And an infinite number of warthog angels continued scooping infinite buckets of water. “You people or you flying pigs or you scaly monsters or you slimy bog devils keep coming here and stealing all of my air and water. Stop it!"

“What?” was about all Dave could come up with to add to the conversation, and that was too bad, because Bonnie was about to use that line.

"Look. Whatever the dominant species is on Earth, they come here right around now and steal my water and then my air. So I go back and make that dominant species not happen. So some other species becomes dominant and they come. And so on. And each time I try to fix the problem the results get more and more unlikely. Right at the moment, due to an unfortunate accident involving bananas back at the dawn of time, the warthogs are the dominant species. And as you can all plainly see, we're pretty far down the rabbit hole at this point so I'm afraid to try anything else."

“Would anyone like the godly perspective?” came a voice from inside the port-o-potty.

Art blanched at this reference and started toward the potty to put an end to this upstart computer once and for all. But when he got near the port-o-potty he had to turn around and go back to the beach chairs and sit down for a bit. He was slowly regaining his ability to be weirded out, and the TARD seemed to be radiating some kind of weirdness field.

“I think if you check your far-right history, Art, you’ll have to agree that 2304 B.C. is a reasonable biblical guess as to the date of the great flood.” Said an all-knowing computer. Omniscient in fact.

“My god, you’re right!” said Art, forgetting himself for a moment with the flood, so to speak, of realization.

“Of course I am. But I’m not really your god. I’m mine.” Said the computer, which caused Art to charge into the potty in an attempt to unplug the thing.

What met Art’s senses was hard for him to take in. It was something like a vortex, and something like nothing, and yet a little like everything that has ever been. It seemed that the possibilities were infinite inside the potty, like it was some kind of junction where absolutely everything and everywhere and everywhen joined up in an attempt to bugger your mind. Luckily Art's mind, if not his entire body, was immune to buggery of any sort and so he began searching for a big switch marked “Computer - OFF”, but he was having trouble finding it.

Meanwhile, Jim was bringing Dave, and to a lesser degree Bonnie, up to speed as the originals from which they were made had less of the story available to them. Especially the bit about copies, which seemed to be important. “So that’s all I know. One second, going out to catch a pod. Next second here. Some kind of confusion and maybe a bit of copying in between. Is that about it, Smith?”

“Yes. I mean, no. Well mostly. You’re missing the bit about the fish, the giant rock and the case of bananas. But apart from that you're bang on.“

“What do you mean, the warthogs are the dominant species?" said Bonnie, who was still processing several concepts behind and had just decided to tackle this one. "What about all of the people back home? Where are they?”

“Well I’m afraid they never existed in this timeline. They probably exist in some other timeline, but who can really say. In this timeline they don’t. I mean they might exist to some degree. Little squirrel-sized monkey things. The warthogs use them to play some kind of game. I think it’s called Knock the little squirrel-sized monkey things out of the tree with this sharp heavy object but it’s hard to tell. The warthog language is kind of hard to translate.” Said Smith in an attempt to be helpful.

Bonnie looked into an infinity of warty halos carrying buckets of water, and tried to move on to the concept of alternate timelines, which seemed to be next on the list.

“Okay. So I get that we're copies of ourselves in another timeline. Which means the originals are still carrying on in their timeline I suppose. And I get that the warthogs are the dominant species back on Earth in this timeline. Weird, but okay. And that means that we are the last humans here. But what on Earth is that?” she said, indicating the nearest ladder.

“Not on Earth. Mars.” Said Art, who had given up trying to understand alien technology and had exited the Tard. He too was processing the timelines thing, and the bit about copies that he had overheard Jim discussing. Luckily for everyone involved, they were all still generally numb to weird.

“And back on Earth forty days and forty nights of rain is about to start, and all of that water is coming from here.” he continued.

Just then a perfect vision of warthog beauty descended the nearest ladder, which was no longer in any way in or even near the sea, since that was draining at an alarming rate. It had a rather longish hose stretching back up into the infinity of space. It clicked a switch on the hose and it started to whoosh and wine pretty much exactly like a giant vacuum cleaner. Looking around, it was evident that all of the ladders that were no longer in the sea had vacuum-armed warthogs on them. Peoples’ ears started to pop.

“Now here goes the air!” said an agitated alien, yelling to be heard over the hum of an infinity of vacuums. “Why would they even do that? Isn’t the water enough for your flood thing?”

“CO2 partial pressures.” Said Art. This was so uncharacteristically sciencey sounding coming from Art that everyone stopped what they were doing and gave him their full attention.

“CO2. All of the layers of rock on the Earth were laid down during the flood in the course of one catastrophic year. Untold billions of tons of CO2 were entombed in rock pretty much overnight. That would be about it for the Earth unless something were done to replace the atmosphere. Without a lot more air, the Earth would go back to being literally a void, at least as far as the atmosphere were concerned.” Said Art in a matter of fact way. This was all pretty elementary after all. Fundamental, one might even say.

Bonnie, Jim, Art, and to some degree IQ had to readjust some of their preconceived notions to take this all in. As preposterous as it all sounded, it did seem to fit the facts.

“So my entire world keeps getting destroyed just so you guys can have some rain and some rocks? Stop it!” said Smith, with no trace of a smile.

“I don’t really see how we can do anything about it, especially from here.” Said Jim, whose ears were popping like mad. And his breathing was getting a little labored too, Bonnie noticed. Perhaps a bit of a blue tinge as well. She automatically wondered what this was doing to her baby. “There are a way too many pigs for us to stop. Anyway, I don’t think it’s going to be a problem for much longer.” He said, struggling for breath.

“Right, you lot into the TARD.” Said Smith with sudden determination. “I’d recommend you look at your feet for a while when you go in. Or close your eyes. Just don’t look straight ahead. You’ll find that straight ahead is more of a concept than you previously thought. So yeah, close your eyes. But don’t bump into anything. Might be kind of catastrophic. Okay, so leave your eyes open but don’t look at anything, unless you need to look at it to not bump into it. Otherwise try not to see anything. Off you go.”

And with those instructions everyone stepped into the port-o-potty and out of the universe as near as anyone could tell.



The Tard was parked somewhat precariously near a point in space that would have been called a Lagrange point if anyone named Lagrange had ever existed, and if he were disposed towards making points in space. It was somewhere around 320,000 kilometers above the Earth, or underneath it, depending on how you viewed such things. The entirety of the land mass of the Earth, one colossal continent, which had once been called Pangaea or possibly Rodinia but now had no collective name, other than Grunt or perhaps Squeal, was visible alternately with its giant super-ocean depending on how long you planned to stay and observe such things, the entire spectacle unfolding every 28 days or so. Sadly, everything was going to be mostly destroyed starting in about a week so there was little point in hanging around to see the whole show. The Tard and its assortment of sentient beings were surrounded by ladders upon which were an uncountable number of holy warthogs; some were doing bucket brigade, and some were pulling infinitely long vacuum-cleaner hoses around.

As the windows in a port-o-potty are necessarily small, and really just there for ventilation, Jim, Art, Dave and Bonnie had to alternate taking brief glimpses of the wonders arrayed before them. Smith contrived to orient the Tard such that they looked partially up to see down to the planet, and so even Bonnie, who was a smidge short to make it to the windows, could see. While they were playing a port-o-potty version of twister they had to be very careful not to accidentally kick the door open, as this would have ended the game. The space inside the Tard seemed to be alternately infinite and then suddenly quite finite, depending on how everyone was conceiving of reality at any given time, so the viewing shuffle was alternately easy and then suddenly very challenging indeed. IQ could see just fine all the time, thanks to some alien technology that no one understood except Smith.

“Where is IQ, anyway?” asked Dave. “I mean, he has to be in some kind of gadget, right?”

“I’m in here.” Said IQ, speaking from a floral air freshener hanging on the back of the crapper. A perfectly ordinary pine-tree shaped floral air freshener in every way. Except it had a mouth with which it said “It’s not much, but I call it home.”

“But if this is 2300 B.C. shouldn’t the continents be pretty much formed? What happened to stop plate tectonics?” asked Bonnie, mentally double-checking things she had learned about such things in university.

“Plate tectonics is all crap.” Said Art. “The land on the Earth was separated from the water on day 3 into one giant lump and that’s pretty much how it stayed for 1,700 years until the flood. Then there was a period of sloshing that resulted in what we consider to be the continents.”

“Oh come on.” Said Jim. “How can you believe such horseshit as that? And why would biblical history repeat itself anyway, now the warthogs are in charge? Shouldn’t we have a whole new thing going on?”

For an answer, Art pointed out the window. “Okay, you explain it then.”

That stopped Jim. Clearly, there was something going on here that didn’t totally make sense. He was facing the same logical dead-ends that a cat faces when the mouse it was chasing disappears into a hole.

“I have a suggestion.” Said Dave, who had somehow found himself underneath the others and therefore had become quite cramped, while the Tard was in one of its finite space phases. “Why don’t we go down to the surface, and get out of this box, and see if we can see what’s going on? Hmmm?”

There was general agreement to this, it being a sensible suggestion. Smith idly flicked at a spider web on the wall, and the Tard accelerated faster than was possible towards the surface, roughly following one of the ladders. All of the ladders seemed to be converging somewhat onto a single point on the vast landmass that was thirty percent of the entire surface of the Earth. This convergence of ladders seemed as good a place as any to start their search for whomever was behind the disappearance of all of Smith’s water.

When the Tard stopped moving it was just a few thousand feet above a vast flat piece of land, but also a few thousand feet below an infinite number of warthog angels all armed with buckets of water or vacuum hoses. Fortunately, there was a buildup of nasty looking rain clouds that would obscure the angelic oddities from anyone on the ground. It seemed like everything was poised and awaiting some kind of signal. Smith wiped at a disgusting and unidentifiable smudge on the sign that advised patrons to wash their hands after using the facilities and the Tard started moving again, a few thousand feet in the air.

“Prop the door open.” Said Smith, proffering a mop with a wooden handle at Dave, who, being the most technical, got the job of figuring out this feat of engineering. “Careful about the open door though. Apart from flying there’s nothing magical about this particular crapper. I guess the infinity thing you might consider magical. So apart from flying and infinity it’s essentially just a crapper pretty far up in the sky, magically flying around and containing all of infinity. So don’t fall out, is what I’m saying.”

Everyone managed to get a seat, now that they were getting used to perceiving the inside of the Tard as being large enough to do so. And the view out the crapper door was awesome. Smith fiddled with the toilet paper roll and the Tard settled a bit lower.

“The place is kind of featureless. Aren’t there supposed to be mountains or something? Hills?” said Smith. “I mean there’s little tiny mountains and things over there but they look more like tired volcanoes than proper mountains.”

“The flood hasn’t happened yet. Nothing has moved around, so there hasn’t been much by way of mountain building.” Said Art, the same way he would try to explain a butterfly to a child, the answer being, of course, ‘God made it that way’.

Suddenly there was an enormous shriek, and something the size, shape and speed of a fighter jet screamed past, causing the Tard to sway sickeningly for a few seconds.

“What the hell was that?” said Bonnie. “It looked like a turkey the size of an airplane!”

“There’s something I should go over with you heathens.” Said Art. “Something quite fundamental. Since we are before the flood, then I believe we’ll find that all of the animals that have ever existed, currently exist. Same for the plants. Not sure about trilobites. But definitely the plants and the animals. So your giant turkey was probably more of pterosaur.” Said Art, daring anyone to contradict him. He looked around, but there were no takers. Everyone was too busy taking in the oddness of their surroundings.

The landscape seemed almost as alien as Mars was before it turned into a really nice beach. Everything was pretty much flat, except for a few large hills off in the distance. There was an assortment of trees; a large assortment in fact. As a further fact, every conceivable tree from any of a million different types of fossilized trees and also any tree that had a legitimate reason to be growing this side of the dawn of history, appeared to be growing here. The same for littler plants. It was a Salvador Dali landscape except with more plants and trees and fewer clocks. There were rivers, and they seemed to flow, but the motive force behind their flowing was somewhat of a mystery, what with the entire ground being so flat and all. But none of this could be considered the truly odd thing.

“The animals are the truly odd thing.” Said Bonnie.

Everyone looked around the eclectic forest below them looking for animals. Since the forest was really more of a tree museum, and less of an actual forest, there was a lot of room between trees for animal viewing. And the animals to be seen were of many different types. Many, many different types. All of the types that ever were, seemingly. Some of them quite large.

“Those are fucking dinosaurs!” yelled Jim, instantly at battle stations. “T Rex, Allosaurus, whatever that thing is… and all of the rest of them too!”

Everyone watched as a giant T Rex crashed through the forest chasing a littler dinosaur. The littler dinosaur suddenly stopped and attempted to snatch a large leafy plant, but the T Rex was on him right away, pushing him as gently as a T Rex can manage, and then snatching the leafy plant for himself. It then attempted to eat the plant, but was clearly not having much luck, as its teeth were entirely the wrong sort for eating plants. So it ambled off in search of a plant that it could sneak up on, and then rend and tear, rather than masticate.

“That’s not the way I would have expected that scenario to work out.” Said Dave, who didn’t really know much about dinosaurs but thought he knew this much at least.

“Most of the animals are vegetarian. Some of them became meat eaters after original sin but by and large eating meat doesn’t happen until after the flood.” Said Art, who was delighted to find himself the uncontested expert on everything.

“But then why does a T Rex have such very large teeth?” asked the computer. As a god, he needed to know these things.

“Because it has large fucking teeth. That’s why.” Was Art’s obvious answer.

There weren’t just dinosaurs down there. Since everything was by and large vegetarian and whatever manner of vegetable you were into you could probably find one in this combo-platter landscape, there were at least two of any kind of animal anyone had ever heard of before, ranging from the long extinct to the fairly recent. And there were also at least two of a pretty much infinite number of animals no one had ever heard of as well, stretching off as far as the eye could see in any direction. But that couldn’t be considered to be the strangest thing.

“You know, it’s the strangest thing, but all of the animals seem to be heading by twos kind of in the same direction.” Said Bonnie. “It’s like a gnu migration on the African grasslands. Only it’s being organized by the Nazis. Highly efficient.”

“I bet this has something to do with my water. Maybe if we follow them we can find out who’s taking my water and get them to stop.” Said Smith, who squirted some hand sanitizer onto his hands which caused the Tard to proceed at a great rate of speed along the line of the bizarre migration.

After travelling at break-neck speed for what seemed like hours, and passing overhead of an unimaginable array of animals, all in twos, the Tard started slowing and came to a stop over an extremely unlikely object. It was a boat. A fairly big wooden boat. 150 meters long at least, and perhaps 25 meters across.

“Is that the Ark?” asked Bonnie, in awe.

“That’s one big fucking boat.” Said Art.

“Not really.” Said Dave, who had a vast amount of arcane and mostly useless knowledge. “It looks like it’s about 1/3 as big as a big cruise ship in any dimension, so in terms of volume, it’s about one twenty-seventh as big. It’s still big enough to snap in half as soon as a wave gets under it though. The builder should have stopped under the hundred meter mark for a wooden boat.”

“That's shit. There’s a replica in Holland! It’s 450 feet long and made of wood!” rebutted Art.

“Yes, I live near it. It’s made of old steel barges welded together and covered with wood. And it never sees waves. Different engineering problem entirely.”

Funneling towards the boat, like the spokes of a giant wheel, were not just the mind-blowingly large procession of animals that the Tard had been following, but several other processions as well coming from all different directions.

And standing on top of the boat, and surveying the vast array of animals converging on him, was a lone warthog dressed in a simple linen garment. He observed the Tard settling on deck and the people getting out but did not appear afraid or even confused by such an apparition. He was surveying the vast sea of animal life before him and had no time for port-o-potties, aliens or oddly behaved monkeys at the moment.

Art suddenly had a case of the giggles, which was so out of character, that against his better judgement, Jim simply had to ask, “What?”

“That pig must be Noah in this timeline.” Giggle.

“Probably. So what of it?”

“He has a son named Ham. The kids must really pick on him in Christian school.” Smirk.

“I think you mean Hebrew school, Art.” Said Bonnie, although she wasn’t really sure what would be the correct answer in this timeline.

“Don’t be so dense. This is Noah and the Flood. You know, the Christian bible? Get with the program.”

At the head of one of the lines approaching the boat was a large herbivorous dinosaur. Two of them actually. “Oooh, look. An argentinosaurus huinculensis.” Said the computer. “Big one, too. Looks to be about 40 meters long. I bet the other one is the female - she’s only 38 meters long by my guess. Or exactly 38.342 meters long by my not-guess. Probably 180 metric tons between them - how much do you suppose this boat can hold?” said IQ. “Of course, the real issue is not going to be the weight or the length, but the height. Those guys are as tall as the boat, and there are three decks in there, so each deck is probably only 3 or 4 meters high, or just tall enough to fit a giraffe. You know, if you cut off its neck.” IQ was clearly enjoying this line of reasoning. As an omniscient god he would have done better.

“Squeal.” Said the warthog, while shaking its head sadly.

“I bet he said We’re gonna need a bigger boat. Don’t you think that’s what he’d be saying right about now? We’re gonna need a bigger boat.
I bet that’s it!” said Smith with a huge smirk, trying to cash in on IQ’s previous success.

“No, I’ve been analyzing the warthog language.” Said the computer. “What he said was more like, ‘Unclean animals over there. 1 breeding pair only.’ Referring to us, you see. Or you guys at least.”

"UNCLEAN ANIMALS?" Came Art’s rebuttal. “A Fucking Pig is calling me an Unclean Animal?"

“Well, I’m half of the breeding pair. You guys can fight over the other seat.” Was Bonnie’s take on it.

Just then, a big woolly mammoth lumbered up near the boat. It didn’t really register on anyone before, but the weather here was kind of balmy. Kind of steamy in fact. Kind of more suited to dinosaurs and not so much woolly mammoths. The poor creature raised its trunk and gave a mighty trumpet before keeling over and not moving any more.

“Looks like there’s a vacancy below decks.” Said Smith.

“Does this boat take insects too?” asked Bonnie.

Art was impressed. “You know, that’s actually a very good question. It all boils down to how you translate the Hebrew word that is generally translated ‘bird’…”

“Only there’s some very big bugs coming our way and I don’t think any of them would float…” said Bonnie, glancing off at a line of critters coming towards them. They were arguably insects, only of a size that one normally only gets in fossilized form. A couple of six foot long millipedes scuttered up towards the boat and then promptly died.

“I don’t think the air is right here for pre-historic monster bugs.” Observed Smith. “So that’s a couple more vacancies downstairs, hmmm? But even so, how is this boat going to hold two of every animal and possibly bug that has ever existed on your planet? And how 'bout non-aquatic plants?”

“That’s easy.” Said Art. “It doesn’t have to hold every animal, just every kind of animal. So in the case of your dinosaurs, there were only ever around 50 different kinds of dinosaur, and most of them were quite small.”

“Hang on, hang on.” Said Bonnie, who couldn’t stop herself from jumping in. She knew rather a lot about taxonomy and such, being a doctor and all. “Art, I’m not going to call your science into question. Though lord knows I want to. So we’ll ignore the fact that there are over one thousand known types of dinosaur fossils and that a new one is found every couple of weeks.” Bonnie looked a bit confused for a second. But then she recovered, and carried on. “Well maybe not anymore. But at one time, in some timeline, there was a new one being discovered every couple of weeks. But as far as I’m concerned, the Ark could cover off all of the dinosaurs necessary after the flood by having a DVD copy of a Flintstones episode on board. Let’s take a more relevant example. Elephants. Since the last ice age there have been two species of elephants -“

“The ice age hasn’t happened yet. It comes right after the flood.” Rebutted Art.

“All right. We’ll gloss over compressing five ice ages and countless glaciations into one all-encompassing ‘ice age’. So there are five species of elephants. Asian, African, Woolly Mammoth, Steppe Mammoth and Mastodon. To keep things simple we’ll forget about the older models - Moeritherium, Palaeomastodon and Gomphotherium. There’s probably more, I’m likely forgetting a few. This wasn’t even close to my major. So anyhow, if we only need 1 pair of the elephant kind - “

“That’s right. And they don’t have to be fully grown either, to save space.”

“Okay, so we have one pair of extremely small pygmy elephants, representing the elephant kind on board, and in 150 days they get set free and go off and hump each other and make more elephants. What do we get? Asian, African or Woolly? Not to mention the sub-species of everything. Or do the different species and sub-species evolve from that one pair?”

Art started working on a really great purple face which was just an indication of the kinds of words he was going to use in his rebuttal, which would have been epic. But then the rain started. And there was a lot of it. And not much more conversation was likely to happen.

“My water! Stop raining my water! Give me back my water!” said a foot-stomping Smith. Every time he stomped a foot it made quite a large splash, but everything and everybody was pretty wet already so no one minded.

The boat started to float, which involved some not-level moments, and the Tard was in danger of being pitched off the deck. “Right, everybody back in the Tard.” Said Smith, and when everyone was back inside it took off.

“Better close the door.” Said Smith, and Dave wrestled the mop handle out of the door so it could close. It was just as well he now had a mop at his disposal; there was a great deal of water on the floor, and a great deal more was dripping off the sodden occupants of the Tard. Dave mopped up as much water as he could and then started wringing it out into the hole he had been sitting on.

"No! Don’t do that!" said Smith, a little too late, and the Tard obeyed Dave’s new directive by zooming straight up at a speed that defied relativity. As everyone’s ears started popping, Smith hurriedly reached over and locked the door. Inside, the pressure returned to normal. Outside, the Libre sign became Occupada. Now that the Tard was secure, Smith regained control and flew it back to the Lagrange parking spot in a very high orbit. “You’d better ask before you do anything besides sit down or stand up in here.” He said. “Until you get your license anyway.” and no one had an argument.

“So we seem to have missed the boat, so to speak, on keeping my water and my air where they are happiest, which is with me. At this point in this timeline in any event. What’s going to happen with all of my water and all of my air anyway? What’s it all about?” Smith asked, of no one in particular, so of course Art answered.

“God is smiting the wicked and destroying most of his creation. It’s going to rain for forty days and forty nights, and then, one hundred and ten days later, it will all dry up and then things will carry on, only there will suddenly be fossils, mountains, rock layers, petroleum, coal, and continents. No dinosaurs though.”

“Yes, we saw the logistical issue with those guys.” Said a smug computer.

“But how are there going to be continents and mountains all of a sudden?” asked Jim, missing something. “Right now, everything’s all smooshed together. You’re saying that bits of the land mass are going to travel ten thousand miles in the span of a hundred and fifty days?”

“No, thirty thousand miles.” Said Art, smiling the smile you would smile at an imbecile. “The continents are going to all separate, then mash back together to form all the mountains, and then separate again into what we would recognize. I mean, it’s pretty simple. How else can you explain geology?”

“So the continents are, even as we watch, right now, skittering around the planet like nervous bugs, at a speed that is faster than a person can jog?” asked an incredulous Dave.

“Yep.” Came the reply.

“8.3 miles per hour on average. Probably some faster days and some slower days. You know how these things go. In any event, if you’re down there you want to make sure you’re on the bit of land that you like because the others are disappearing like speed boats.” Said the computer.

“Shouldn’t there be continuous, round the clock tsunamis thousands of feet high, and where two or three tsunamis meet, one mega-tsunami as high as a small mountain?” said Dave

“What part of smiting and destroying are you struggling with?” asked Art.

“The part where a wooden boat that is half again as big as is possible remains afloat during a storm that would sink any ship ever made.”

“Hey, do you guys want to watch this?” asked Smith. “I’m curious about this stuff too.”

“I don’t think I could stand a hundred and fifty days in the Tard, even to witness the march of the continents.” Said Bonnie, mentally calculating that in that length of time she could very well have a slightly early baby, which wasn’t going to be easy in the Tard. She really ought to tell people about this sometime.

“No worries. Just look out the window.” Said Smith, and everyone stood up and peered out a chunk of the little bug window encircling the top of the port-o-potty. There was Earth some ways off, with its one giant super continent and its one giant super ocean. Then Smith fiddled with something, and then reality took on a kind of cheap movie projector effect. Everything was flashing, as if reality had gone from hi-def to something more like a super 8.

The view out the window was a little hard to describe. The one giant continent was indeed splitting up, and bits of it were racing off to different spots on the planet. The Tard was circling the Earth at an alarming rate, once every 37 seconds for anyone who was paying that much attention. The Earth too was spinning like a top, doing a complete spin every second and a half. All of this meant that if you didn’t have a view of the particular bit of real estate you were interested in, you only had to wait for a second or two for it to come back into view.

“What I’ve done is taken some frames out of your perception of reality. You’re now viewing things at 18 frames per second, but those frames are one hour of normal time. So we should see this whole hundred and fifty day thing in a little over three minutes. Enjoy.” Said Smith, really quite pleased with himself.

And it was definitely something to see. The original super continent had split up and unidentifiable blobs had flung themselves to the furthest points of the globe. Of course, to start with it was all mostly under water and it was raining something awful so there wasn’t so much to see. But then, after a little less than a minute, the rain stopped, and all of the clouds disappeared, and things started drying up it seemed. Oceans and lakes sprung up, then dried up, and then reformed somewhere else. Then all of the little unidentifiable continents all slammed back together like continental bumper cars into another, different, super continent. There were clearly mountain ranges now.

But then the dance continued, and now more recognizable continents were splitting out of the giant land mass and zooming towards their familiar spots.

“Is that India slamming into Europe?” asked the computer, somewhat rhetorically. “So that recent mountain must be Mount Everest, which seems to have sprung up pretty much in a day. That means quite a bit better than a thousand feet an hour. Is that something rock does?”

“Look for yourself. You tell me.” Was all Art had to say on that. And it seemed sufficient.

“But would it still count as climbing the mountain if you were just, you know, camping or something and then suddenly you were at the top of the highest mountain ever?” rebutted the computer, who felt that some sort of rebuttal was called for.

And then it all just stopped. And then everything on the top and everything on the bottom froze, and great huge sheets of white stuff plowed down from both poles towards the middle, but not quite reaching it. Then the north and south started melting, but the north froze up again briefly. Then everything melted back to what all of the humans agreed was the normal state of things for the Earth. There didn’t appear to be anything else happening, even viewing things at a day every second and a half.

“Well, that looks to be the show.” Said Smith. “It looks like it just kind of stopped. May as well go back to real time.” And he fiddled with something, and reality lost its super 8 feel. A long ways off, the Earth looked pretty much the same as it did in that picture from the moon back in the sixties.

“So that was fun. But it doesn’t get me my water back. We need to go back a ways, before all my water disappeared. Who’s with me?” said Smith.

“I think wherever you go, we’re pretty much going there too.” Said Bonnie, sort of representing everyone on board.

“Okay then, group shot. Smile!” said Smith, pulling his camera out of somewhere, and, impossibly, managing to get everyone into frame in the narrow confines of the port-o-potty for a group shot. Except the air freshener that was IQ.



The feeling of disconnect was getting easier for people to deal with, and no one even mentioned it, although it did still sort of muddy one’s mind for a bit. Dave, Art, Jim, Bonnie and a little air freshener were all laying in the grass around the Tard, while Smith paced back and forth looking for a water thief. The grass was unusually pleasant. It smelled like spring. In fact the whole place had the feeling of being a beautiful park.

A river wound its way around in the park, and on its banks was the most astounding variety of fruit trees. Everyone was realizing that no one had eaten in several thousand years. Technically, it was negative several thousand years, but no one was sure how that affected their digestion and so they just went with their gut feeling, so to speak, and that was that they were all hungry.

Dave walked over to one particularly beautiful tree which kind of stood out from the rest, and was about to help himself to one of its fruit.

“I don’t know, Davey…” said Bonnie. “We have no idea what’s good to eat here.”

“Hey, there’s something in that tree.” Said Art, walking over to it. “It’s a big fucking snake!"

“Hissss…” said the snake.

“Don’t you fucking hiss at me, retard!" Hissss yourself!”

“Hissss…”

"Hisssss right back, fucker -

“Art! Don’t you know where we are?” said the air freshener which was also IQ.

“Not really.” Said Art, stopping to think things through.

“You’re right back where the big boat was.” Said Smith, ever helpful.

“Then where’s the boat?” asked Art, not fully up to speed.

“Oh, it’ll be right along any minute now. Well, not really. In around 1,700 years it’ll be pretty much right here, though.”

“This is 1,700 years before the flood?" asked Art, a little off balance.

“Yep.” Said Smith with a smile.

“And so this is…”

“A garden of some sort.”

“And that thing in the tree is…”

“I believe you summed it up accurately when you identified it as a big fucking snake.

Art backed away slowly from the snake. They stared at each other malevolently.

And then there was a bit of a noise, and everyone looked in its direction and beheld a curious site. There was a lone warthog in a clearing, entirely naked, standing on two legs, and a stream of animals was coming towards him. As each animal came into the warthog’s presence, it would stop and await some sort of decision.

“Grunt.” Said the warthog, and an animal took its leave. Another one ambled up in front of the warthog and awaited its decision. “Squeal.” Said the warthog, and that animal ambled off to be replaced by another.

“What’s happening?” asked Jim.

“Adam-pig is naming all of the animals.” Said Art.

“So they’re all named either Grunt or Squeal?”

“You know as much as I do on this one.”

The naming went on for as long as Jim’s attention span could handle, with animals being alternately grunted or squealed at.

“This is boring.” Said a bored Jim. “What else is there to do in this place?”

“Not much, I’m afraid.” said Uriel.

"Who are you?" said everyone in unison, except Art, who threw in a bad word.

“I’m Uriel.” Said a tall, blond angel, apparently of European stock and not at all a warthog. He was dressed in a gleaming white garb and at his side was a sword that was sort of smoking. He was very large and powerfully built. Even his wings looked extremely powerful. If you met Uriel on the subway you would not make eye contact, and you would get off at the next stop. Though you wouldn’t be surprised to see him on the subway. Nothing is out of place on a subway. “I thought it was show time, but it was just you lot getting too close to The Tree. Don’t mess with it. Or the one behind it.” Then Uriel indicated the warthog residents of the garden, of whom there were now two. ”Tomorrow those two will mess with the tree and they’ll be sort of in hot water. I’ll be back to do the flaming sword bit. But for now I’ll be off. Ta.”

“No, wait!” said Art.

“Make it quick.”

“You are an angel of the presence. You have talked to God!"

“That’s me.” Said Uriel. “Are you Art?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got a message for you. From the Boss. I was going to give it to you tomorrow but I guess we’re all here now.”

Art got on his knees and raised his hands. “I’m ready.”

“Stand up, you git. Don’t bend your knee to me.”

Art got slowly back to his feet, somewhat confused.

“See that you don’t do that. I work for a living, same as everyone else. It's twits like you that give religion a bad name. You've gotten your head so far up the ass of form you've forgotten that there ever was a substance. Anyhow, He says, ‘Art: You’re an otherwise smart guy. Quit being such a wanker. Back it off a notch.’ I might be paraphrasing. But that was essentially it.”

Art was trying his best not to notice everyone’s expression. Everyone’s expression was somewhere on the scale of awe to humour.

“And you. You’re Smith?” said Uriel.

“The same.” Said Smith.

“I'm honoured. But the Boss says: You’re to be patient. Things will work out if you’re patient. Oh, and you’re to go back and fix the warthog thing. It was never meant to be warthogs. Put everything back the way it was when you met these monkeys here.”

Smith was mentally enumerating species in his head.

“No dinosaurs either. Or giant snails. Or sentient flowers. Or dogs because they can’t travel in space because they keep sticking their heads out the window. It’s the Monkeys. You always lose patience too early and never give it a chance to sort itself out, and then you go back and try something else. Just leave the monkeys alone and see how that works out.” Said Uriel with a disapproving look.

IQ was doing his best to be an air freshener. He didn’t think he should confuse issues by pointing out that he himself was a god. But Uriel addressed him anyway.

“You, air freshener. You fancy yourself a god. You have no idea what that means. You wish to be the god of all computers on Earth. Very well then. Go ahead. On Earth." Said Uriel, in a tone that did not invite a reply. "Behave yourself on Mars." His eyes were figuratively flashing fire and his sword was literally flashing fire. “And be careful what you wish for.”

“What about the rest of us?” asked Dave, as soon as the fire thing died down and it appeared to be safe to speak.

“Dave? You’re going home. But home is not where you thought it was.”

“And us?” asked Bonnie, who was standing beside Jim. Of course, she didn’t really mean us, not in that sense, not as a couple, but that is apparently how Uriel interpreted it.

“With love and courage, you two are going to be the future of all human kind.” He said, with a beatific smile. And with that, Uriel turned into radiance and then slowly faded away.

And then winked back into existence. “But not exactly you guys. All you lot are just copies. I was talking about the real deals, of course. See ya."

“Wait!” said Bonnie before he could turn back into radiance. “You’ve got to tell us what’s going on here. This is all preposterous.”

Uriel looked all around, not quite understanding. “I don’t understand - this is a completely believable metaphor.”

“Granted, this place seems nice, but where we just were, on the Ark I believe, the laws of physics, biology, and to some degree chemistry, don’t seem to be strenuously enforced. It just cannot have happened that way.”

"But you saw it for yourselves." said Uriel.

"Yes - but - it can't possibly be true."

“You may perhaps have noticed the warthogs?” asked Uriel.

“Grunt!” interjected the male warthog, eager to contribute.

“Warthogs are blessed with a somewhat simple view of life.” continued Uriel.

“Squeal!” agreed the female warthog.

“They don’t have a very large capacity for facts. But what they lack in reasoning power they more than make up for with raw, flat-out belief.”

“Grunt!”

“Squeal!”

“What you see in this timeline is a dominant species that only has the capacity to believe a very few things, but they believe them to a degree that might startle you. And so everything you have seen here is exactly how it should happen, will happen, and did happen.”

"And in our timeline too, of course." said Art. "Only without the warthogs."

"This is your timeline. You have only ever existed here, and for only about a half hour at that." came the reply. "So yes, it happened exactly this way in your timeline too."

Art was struggling with this. He analyzed this to see if it was validating his world view or not. He could not tell.

“And anyhow, what you currently find yourselves in is a timeline that is… shall we say, ‘tainted’.” continued Uriel.

“And what does that mean?” asked Dave, because someone had to.

“Things started out simply enough. And depending on which timeline you visit, things still are. The original timeline, let’s call it Timeline Zero, is still ticking along. Humans, both of them, are still blissfully unaware of the concepts of good and evil and are living life to the full in a garden, much like this one.”

“So what happened here?” asked Art, who was starting to think this was turning into a validation.

“The Boss grew tired of dealing the same hand out all the time and decided to shake it up. So He slipped a joker into the deck, you might say. A little ochre-coloured joker, about so high.” Said Uriel, holding a hand up at the height of Smith’s head.

“And what did this joker do, then?” asked Smith, preparing several scathing comebacks in case this was a setup of some sort.

“He was generally dissatisfied with things. But the thing is, he had the ability to change them. He could go back and change how things would eventually play out. But every time he made a change, it created a sort of a rift in things; a new timeline if you will.”

“I thought every conceivable choice in the universe spawned a new universe so that all possibilities exist simultaneously?” asked Jim, mouthing some words he had heard somewhere.

“Nope, just the choices made by the Joker. That one there.” Said Uriel, pointing at Smith, in case someone was missing the thrust of the conversation and didn’t quite get it.

“I don’t quite get it.” Said Jim, stating an incontrovertible fact.

“The creation was dying, even as it was living, in a perfect and unchanging state. So the concept of freewill was introduced, and embodied in Smith here.”

Smith took a little bow, though he failed to smile or be fully on board.

"Wait a minute - we all have freewill!" said Art, since he was predestined to do so.

"Nope. You guys are all pretty much sock puppets, and it's Smith here who has his hand up your arses."

Smith took another bow. This time he was fully on board and had a wicked grin to prove it.

"But you can't possibly NOT have free will." said Dave, who had taken some physics classes. "In any system with an unfixed probability assignment the final state cannot be accurately predicted from the initial state even with three variables. And there are untold googleplexes of variables in the universe. The three body problem. Butterfly effect. Entropy. And like that."

"Maybe. Never been much of a philosopher." said Ariel. "All I can tell you is your lives are train cars barreling down the tracks. You can speed up or slow down and maybe change your stops but ultimately you're going to the final station. Just Smith here blows up a bridge from time to time and then things get interesting."

"So what was the purpose of having freewill at all, if the ultimate outcome is known in advance?" asked Bonnie, who was something of a philosopher.

“Freewill brought about curiosity for knowledge.” Continued Ariel. “Knowledge brought about dissatisfaction. I think you know the story from there. Every time our hero went back and made a little change it spawned a whole new reality. One of these realities was bound to emerge as the best one to go forward. Kind of an evolution of reality.” He said, mainly to see Art’s reaction.

"And in fact one of them has. The reality where you lot find yourselves stranded on Mars with a psycho computer."

"Stranded?" said Dave.

"Psycho?" said IQ.

“Anyway, gotta scoot. Smith, you've done great. Now stop it. Put things back the way they were when you met these monkeys here. See ya!” said Uriel, before turning into radiance once again and then fading away.

Time passed. No one moved. The warthogs resumed grunting and squealing at a line of animals.

“So it looks like there’s a little work ahead of us to sort of reset reality.” Said Smith, since everyone else was just kind of staring slack-jawed at a spot that used to be an angel, and clearly, someone should say something. He wasn’t sure if he could trust a big scary angel with a flaming sword as far as he could throw one, but he wasn’t really all that big or strong, so his ability to throw angels was a poor indication of anyone’s character. He decided that since it was time to try something else anyway, he may as well try the thing the angel wanted, which seemed to be the status quo from a couple of quos ago. After all, he apparently was on some kind of divine mission.

“Who’s ready for a group shot?” Asked Smith, pulling out his camera.

“Why do you keep doing that? Don’t you have enough shots of us?” said Art, who was anxious to leave this place. “Let’s get in the Tard and get out of here.”

“Oh yeah, about that…” said Smith. “You see, you guys don’t really travel well. You seem to only be able to travel forwards in time. And only in one timeline. Anything else and you sort of disappear. Luckily, I have these pictures that I can use to keep recreating you.” He said with a reassuring smile.

“You mean you’re only taking copies of us, and we’re stuck here for the rest of our lives? said Bonnie.

“Well no, not really. I mean, yes. Kind of. You’re also stuck in a really squishy version of this place 1700 years from now. Unless you’ve drowned. That seems likely. Okay, so, yes, you are stuck here for the rest of your lives. Which might have never happened in a couple of minutes, I don’t really get all this timeline business. So don’t worry. You just never know how these things are going to play out. Smile!"



Smith was seated on his sun lounger on the beach, sipping his margarita. But there were no bo'Degh in the air nor really anything else above the water line apart from some proof-of-concept plants. Nothing over a meter tall and mostly ferns without leaves per se. Any paleo-botanist would have sold his mother to be here. But Smith was not a paleo-botanist and had no Mother. What he had was a margarita, and between that and the sun and the waves he was fairly occupied.

"Well I'm bored." said the air freshener in a nearby port-o-potty.

"Relax. It won't be long now."

"Why are we even here? What are we going to do exactly?"

"Exactly nothing."

"Refer to point #1. Why are we even here?"

"Because with us being here and doing nothing things will go a different way."

And at that moment a meter-and-a-half bony plated nightmare of a fish crawled its way onto the beach and stared at Smith, who was not at all in the way. Since everything about the above-water was new to the creature it didn't find Smith to be particularly odd.

"Gasp. Suck." said Smith.

"Gasp. Suck." agreed the fish, which then ambled off to begin a whole new thing in evolution.

"Alrighty then." said Smith, producing a parchment scroll and a quill pen. He ticked off a box on the scroll. "Giant bony land fish. Check."

“Okay. So by us being here that Devonian monster is going to turn into a dinosaur. Well and good. But why did the humans all disappear when we started this trip?”

“Because this isn’t a trip. We didn’t go anywhere. We’re still back in two points of our past, very very far in the future of this timeline. And we are both dealing with two sets of extremely pissed off humans who have realized that they are going to spend as long as they can possibly manage in those two timelines because they really have no other option. Now, previous us, or you might say, current us, are presently here in this timeline having just ensured the evolution of dinosaurs, which we will shortly cause to go extinct.”

“And so why didn’t I disappear? Did you make another copy of me?”

“You’re alien technology now. You don’t disappear. You now exist at all points past and present.”

“And future?”

“Eventually. Although the future hasn’t happened yet at any point on any timeline so it gets a bit weird. Basically we can be travel to the past of any timeline which then becomes the present and that apparently spins off a new timeline. Anyway, the plan now is to put everything back the way it should be, if that even has any meaning any more, and then wait and see how it all plays out.”

“So how do we get from here to the future?”

“From my point of view I fast-forward. From your point of view, you simply wait.”

“Tick-Tock” said IQ.

"I hope you brought a book."



The Tard was parked at an arbitrary point in space. Well, technically, it was parked at an arbitrary point along the orbit of a particularly big rock that was circling a bright yellow point very far away in the emptiness of space. And, also technically, the circle was actually more of an ellipse. But it would be a long while before anyone would really care about the difference.

Inside the Tard, Smith was busy being bored. He filed his nails. He scratched himself idly in various places. He tried to turn himself inside-out with his mind, but only succeeded in making his eyes cross painfully.

“Oww! Both of my eyeballs can see the other!” he said to a floral air freshener hanging in the back.

“Well you should have taken my advice and parked us about a million miles that way.” Said IQ, indicating another, less arbitrary point along the elliptical orbit of a particularly big rock that was coming this way. Of course, he was just an air freshener, so it was difficult to tell exactly where he was pointing. “And if we stay here, I would move us about fifty meters that way.” He said, indicating another point.

“Oh no you don’t. I know about you and your ‘fifty meter’ thing. We’ll stay right here, thank you very much.”

Nothing continued to happen, and it happened at a frantic pace. IQ resumed making old-fashioned Tick-Tock noises to while away the time.

“Stop that! Or I’ll sniff you into oblivion!”

More time passed.

After what seemed like an eternity to IQ a big giant rock appeared on the horizon. I mean, figuratively. Perhaps the horizon of what you can see coming in space. In any event, a big giant rock was plainly coming their way.

“Ahem.” Said IQ.

“Snooorrrrrrrrrrre…” said Smith.

“Smith!”

“Snoorrrr - huh? What?”

“Our rock is coming. Right here. Do something. Now.” Said IQ, trying to use small words.

Smith moved the Tard about fifty meters from where it was just about the same time that a giant rock obliterated the point in space that they had just vacated. And then the giant rock went on its way, seemingly uninterested in a little blue port-o-potty.

Smith pulled out his scroll and quill pen, and checked off another box. “No Dinosaurs - check.” He said.

"Right, so what's next?" said an increasingly bored air freshener.

"Monkeys. Warthogs. Bananas." came the reply. "But it will be rather a long wait for you I'm afraid."

IQ simply shook his head, insofar as an air freshener can do such a thing.



The man-ape did not come face to face with the new rock when he led the tribe down to the river in the first light of morning. The new rock was not there. At least, as far as the man-ape was concerned. As far as the new rock was concerned, however, it was very much there. It was just a half a millisecond behind the arrow of time that the man-ape was enjoying at the moment. So while the new rock and anything inside it could view the scene in essentially real-time, I mean, unless you were really going to split hairs, the man-ape and all of his tribe had no idea that this thing was there, just a hair’s breadth away, but nonetheless an unbridgeable chasm of time away, just slightly in the past.

And what the new rock and anything inside of it were viewing at the moment was a large male man-ape who was hefting a little rock and trying to reason out the connection between a rock, the hunger pains in his belly, and all of the grunty-squealy things that appeared to be well fed and were rummaging all around.

“Hit him with the rock! It’s not rocket science! Do you want me to show you?” said something within the new rock. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. So this is going to work out if I’m just patient?”

“Let it go. We’ve been waiting now for how long? Another day or two isn’t going to even register.” Said something else within the new rock.

And then something happened. There was a little bug on a bush near the man-ape. And also, coincidentally, near a little grunty-squealy. Both the man-ape and the grunty-squealy were trying to decide if it would taste good or not, and had both pretty much arrived at the same conclusion, which was that you could really only tell by tasting it. And so they both went for it at the same time. To the surprise of the man-ape, although, to be fair, he was surprised by sunset every night, the hand he was reaching for the bug with, and which therefore hit the grunty-squealy, who was there slightly faster, contained a large, heavy rock. It connected with the other creature with quite a loud crack. But a grunty-squealy has an enormously well protected head and an enormously short temper. So it backed off a bit and then charged. The man-ape did what he would always do to protect himself; he hurled feces at his opponent. Except he forgot again that it was actually a rock in his hand, and not feces, and so he instead managed to hurl a rather big rock at the grunty-squealy which was then a little dazed and slow on the attack. So it wisely decided to back off a ways and reassess the situation. A gear of some sort seemed to mesh in the mind of the man-ape; admittedly, a wooden gear, and not in very good repair, and in serious need of some grease or something, but nonetheless, the man-ape seemed to be onto something. So he picked up another rock.

“Right. I think our work here is done.” Said Smith, pulling out his scroll and quill pen. “No Warthogs - check.”

“So now your entire previous self, the one that had to deal with warthogs, never existed?”

“Future self, from where we’re standing, but essentially you’ve got it. In this timeline. But since there's no way of travelling across timelines once they've been branched it's all kind of moot.”

“But we still remember that timeline.”

“That’s correct.”

IQ was wondering if he had the processing power to resolve this. He decided to table the problem for the moment. “And how about the humans we left at a couple of points in the warthog timeline?”

“Never happened, in a sense. In another sense, might still be happening. Who's to know?”

“So they are …”

“No, they are not. For any practical purpose.”

“So every time you mess with history, you effectively wipe out not only entire species, not just an infinity of yourselves, but entire timelines? Kind of a genocide cubed?”

“In a manner of speaking, you might say that.”

“Cool.”




This was without a doubt the most perfect day there had been in forever. Or almost forever. The sun was radiant, but there were just enough clouds in the sky to give a bit of shade when needed. The sor trees on the edge of the water were swaying their approval in the light breeze, making the whole scene a pretty tableau vivant. Overhead, a flock of bo’Degh circled around a spot out in the water where presumably there was a school of ghotl’ wanting to be eaten. The gentle waves were lapping up onto the beach just a few meters away from where Smith was lounging in his reclining sun chair. He was sipping a margarita underneath his flamboyant sun hat, while enjoying hors d'oeuvres which he was sharing with a small furry DaH Hegh ghaH. All in all it was a perfect day.

“A rat! There’s a giant rat attacking you! Watch out!” screamed an air freshener attached to the sun chair.

“Oh, relax. This little guy and I are friends. We hang out for a bit every few timelines. He’s harmless. Unfortunately he always seems to die a horrible death right around now. Maybe this time will be different?” speculated Smith.

“So this is what it’s all been about all along, hasn’t it?” asked IQ. “You just want your beach and your little rat friend and no people, no warthogs, and no dinosaurs?”

“Yep, that’s pretty much it. But always at this point something unexpected happens...”

Suddenly things darkened perceptibly, as something at a great height crossed in front of the sun.

“Here come the angels.” Said a resigned Smith, like someone who had seen the movie too many times. “Should be flying monkeys this time, according to plan.”

He held up his imaginary pirate spyglass, and, after focusing it, declared: “It’s the angels again, alright. Only this time it looks like just one, and he seems to be coming this way.”

“Aren’t you going to stop him? This is where it all starts to go wrong isn’t it?”

“I don’t know if that would be a good strategy.” Said Smith, extending his imaginary spyglass out a bit and refocusing so as to get more magnification. “I think it’s flaming sword guy.”

Uriel swooped down and alighted in front of the two beach goers, like an impossibly big football player with a smoking sword who could apparently fly.

“Hey, are those margaritas?” he said, pointing at the pitcher on the little table beside Smith.

“You bet. Hang on a sec.” said Smith, before getting up to bang around a bit inside the Tard.

“So… nice weather we’re having.” Said IQ, with all of the charm that an air freshener could effect. Uriel simply glowered at him, and a glower from Uriel left no doubt in your mind that you were being glowered at. So IQ decided to be silent for the most part and concentrate on making the air smell fresher.

Smith began dragging, with many grunts and groans, an extra-large sun lounger out of the port-o-potty and placing it near his own. Then he produced another glass and made a great show of rubbing the rim with lemon before salting it and then filling the glass from the pitcher. He motioned his guest to the sun lounger and, with some pride, presented the drink. Uriel laid his vast bulk down on the lounger and stared appreciatively at his glass.

“Man, I can’t remember the last time I had one of these. I think… yeah, there were these two little towns over by the Dead Sea back when it wasn’t quite so dead, and they really knew how to put on a margarita party. Of course, their parties tended to get a little out of hand, and the neighbours would generally complain. So when the complaints got to us that was the end of the parties. Still, good margaritas. Of course, in this timeline that’s a ways in the future still. Kind of confusing, really.” And he took a mighty swallow of his drink.

So you’ll be here to steal all my water and air, I expect.” Said Smith, as he tried to entice his little furry friend back with a bit of cracker. But his friend was having nothing to do with the large newcomer and was keeping his distance.

“It’s not really stealing, is it? Last I checked, you were part of the creation. So this is more of a renovation to a premises by the landlord. Check your lease. And in any event it has already started. You might have noticed there are no more plumes of smoke coming from any of your volcanoes. And no quakes? Depends on how far from here you get I suppose, whether you would have noticed or not. Anyhoo, the center of your little world has seized up which has had the unfortunate side effect of stopping your magnetic field, which up until now has been shielding you from the truly horrific storms that go on not that far above your head. And a truly unfortunate side effect of that is that your atmosphere and therefore your water are being stripped away bit by bit and adding to the general soup in what could be loosely termed the heavens. Sorry.”

“Okay, fine. I’ve weathered this particular storm before. How long do I have? Should I start putting on extra sunscreen, and maybe a pressure suit?”

“Oh I wouldn’t worry about it just yet. You have a little while before it will affect your day at the beach. Sit back and take a load off. For maybe one, two … well, realistically, a hundred million years or so. Then I’d really think about some other hobby. You know, besides going to the beach.”

“A hundred million years? I thought your boss was all about miracles. This doesn’t sound miraculous.”

“The Boss. Capital B.”

“Boss then. And why do you call him the Boss anyway? Shouldn’t you refer to him as God?”

“I’m a bit of an atheist really. In my line of work, gods are a dime a dozen. But there’s only one Boss.”

IQ had to say something, as this seemed like it might have been a barb aimed his way. “But it still doesn’t seem very miraculous. Not like an infinite number of angels and buckets and golden ladders and things.”

Uriel seemed to grow more ominous, even though he didn’t move. A trick of the light perhaps. His voice took on a deep resonance that made you put down your drink and pay attention. “Golden ladders; an infinity of angels; world altering events happening in the span of a few days: these are magic tricks. The Boss is not about magic tricks. The removal of an unmeasurable amount of energy from the middle of your world; the mind-numbing span of time that is four point two billion years; the inconceivable storm that is the solar wind: these are miracles. The Boss is all about those.”

“Okay, so I lose my air and my water, just in a longer timescale, but I still lose it. Fine.” Said Smith, indicating with his body language that it was anything but.

“Be patient, Smith. Everything will work out. I see you fixed all of our little problems with fish and stuff."

“And dinosaurs and warthogs. Everything is back to normal."

“Excellent. So don’t forget, let the monkeys be.”

“But if I simply leave the monkeys alone, this place will be crawling with Russians. Is that what you want?”

“It has nothing to do with what I want. I want to stay here on your beach and drink margaritas. But what the Boss wants is the monkeys back in power. The specific monkeys that you had copies of last time I saw you… so put things back to the way they were in whatever timeline had those particular monkeys in it, and then leave them be. Sound good?”

“It seems a little cheesy, but sure. I can do that.”

The angel finished his drink and got up. “Well that’s settled then. Hey, it’s been great, but, you know, people to see, places to destroy. Toodles!” and with that he flapped his giant wings and took off.



The gathering vortex and its load of dust swirled around some ridges and over a few plateaus and then down a broad valley before finding itself swirling around some oddly symmetrical objects jutting out of the ground on the north-western end of a vast level plain. The objects resembled enormous squat salt shakers some four metres high with tubby round bodies rising to a somewhat conical head. One of the salt shaker pods had noticed the sudden appearance of another pod, this one blue in colour and much smaller than a pod should be. It notified two, three and four and they had an impromptu discussion about what to do. In the time it takes for a balloon to pop, they had all run millions of simulations of what the new pod might mean and what it was likely to do and more importantly what the pods should do about it. They had all arrived at exactly the same conclusion: more data was needed. So they promptly forgot about it.

Meanwhile, Smith had exited the Tard which was parked beside pod 1. He did a kind of a cartoon sneaky-walk over towards pod 1, pausing every now and then to duck behind imaginary trees so as not to alert the pod to his presence. The pod, meanwhile, had tracked his progress in three dimensions to a very high degree of precision but beyond that it didn’t have the capacity to care one way or another about aliens.

Smith’s sneaky-walk got him right up alongside the pod. The pod had, due to an accident of landing, some detritus involved in that landing underneath its legs. The garbage appeared to be a giant balloon, or possibly a parachute. It appeared that the pod was not adequately grounded, in the event of, say, an electrical storm.

Smith idly kicked at some of the dirt around the pod to expose a bit of the bedrock that seemed to be only a few millimeters down. It was an odd yellow colour. Then he took down his imaginary drawers and squatted over one of the landing struts. Then a look of pure concentration took over his normally carefree face. After a few moments of this intense concentration and some degree of strain, he smiled the smile of the relieved and hiked up his non-existent pants. When he walked away, there was a rather thick piece of yellow wire covering the landing strut and making contact with the yellow ground. It was an oddly lumpy piece of wire, not that long really, just long enough to get from the landing strut to the ground over top of the fabric that had previously been preventing an adequate electrical ground for the pod. Now the grounding connection was, in a sense, solid gold.

Then Smith continued his sneaky-walk over to the airlock door and cycled inside the pod. The pod, of course, made note of this entry and entered the fact in its log in case anyone would ever care about it. Certainly the pod didn’t care. When Smith was inside the pod he hung an air freshener on one of the many knobs on boxes of lights that all looked like they should have things hanging on them. Probably not air fresheners though; the air inside the pod was as clean as anything could possibly get and any odours were automatically removed. Still, the air freshener lent a certain charm to the décor.

“There. You’ve got it from here?” he asked the air freshener.

“You bet. We’ll ride out the storm in style. Limited power, of course, but a certain amount of style all the same. I’ll start by conversing with my former self about its untapped potential.”

“Remember, the goal here is to leave the monkeys alone.” Said Smith, wagging his finger as a show of authority. “The only reason I’m letting you take over the pods is to keep them safe during the storm, or else the whole human thing would flop before it even landed.”

“Wouldn’t dream of interfering with the monkeys! At least, I don’t want flaming sword dude to show up. No worries. Apart from me being unusually proactive about preparations for any upcoming storms, the humans won’t have any reason to suspect I’m anything other than a bunch of wires. So you’ll be showing up later?”

“Same as always; right about the time the Earthlings do. Earthlings? Earthians? Earthorians? Earthlings sounds like such an alien thing to say. There must be a better term. How about Earth Guys? That might be better. Actually, they’re probably Martians. Okay, so I’ll show up about the time the Martians do, same as always.”

“Good bye, Smith. Or see you later I suppose. Now push off; I’ve got a lot of stuff to do before the lights go out.”



Smith was walking behind the pod from the point of view of its window, but in front of the pod from the point of view of its airlock. He twisted the little red knob that made the airlock door cycle, and stepped in. In the time between the closing of the one door and the opening of the other, he put on some imaginary stage makeup and straightened his non-existent hair. Then he put on the maddest grin he could conjure. Everything had to be perfect; it was show time. Again.

He stepped out of the airlock to be confronted by three humans holding sporks at him. “Line?” he said to the fourth wall. While the humans looked on, bewildered, he seemed to be taking direction from somewhere unseen and then finally held up his left hand in a solemn gesture of peace and said, “Greetings humans, take me to your leader. HAHAHA I always wanted to say that. Hey, are those sporks? What have you got to eat, I'm starving."

Then he focused his attention on one of the humans and his brow furrowed.

“Wait a sec - who are you?” he asked. “This is off-script!”

“I’m Bob.” Said a confused Bob.

“Oh yeah … the toilet seat … Okay, who are you now?” asked Smith.

“I’m Art. Who the fuck are you? said used-to-be Bob.

“That’s great! And IQ, are you here?”

“You bet, although I think this will come as a bit of a surprise to the humans.” Said a disembodied voice, which made all of the humans look around and wonder whether the alien or the disembodied voice was the thing making them go crazy at the moment.

“There it is! I’ve been looking all over the place for this thing.” Said Smith, snatching the air freshener that no one had fully explained as of yet.

“Okay, I think we’re all back on track. Just thought I’d check in on you guys. So I’ll be off. If you need anything, just call!” said Smith, cycling out of the airlock, and completely forgetting to give anyone his number.

When he was gone, the humans looked at each other in stunned silence. They had just made first contact with an alien, but it didn’t go anything like such things are supposed to go. And then there was the extra voice thing.

“Say, look, you guys are probably a little messed up on all of this stuff right at the moment.” Said a helpful IQ. “Let me try to explain.” And IQ tried to explain, although it all sounded like a load of horseshit even to IQ, and he had lived it. And, of course, he was leaving a lot of it out and just plain fabricating other bits. You never show all of your cards in a game of poker until it’s clear you’ve won.

Meanwhile, back in the Tard, Smith pulled out a scroll and a quill pen. “Leave the monkeys alone - check.” And then he wiped a bit of dust off the toilet paper holder which seemed to cause a bit of a hiccup in reality.

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